Dead Ball by Tom Palmer

Author:Tom Palmer [Palmer, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ages 8 and up
ISBN: 9780141931135
Publisher: PUFFIN BOOKS
Published: 2009-08-06T07:00:00+00:00

A DIFFERENT KIND OF PARTY

This was not the kind of party Danny was used to. Nothing like the one he had been to two days earlier in England. There were no champagne fountains there. No waiters dressed head to foot in white. No skinned, dead animal being roasted over an open fire.

And – added to that – Danny could not get his head round the fact that he was standing with the England football team in a huge room with a ceiling painted with figures and animals. A room that was more like a church than a house. It felt like a dream. That was the only way Danny could find to describe to himself how he felt.

He stood back from the crowd and began to film. This would impress Charlotte. He made sure he got in a couple of players. Ones even Charlotte would recognize. Peter Day. She’d know him. Tall. Always smiling. Everybody liked Peter Day.

The more Danny looked, the more amazing the room seemed.

Long gold curtains hung from the ceiling, draped across the room like the sails of ships.

A table over thirty metres long offered hundreds of dishes. Fish. Meats. Vegetables. And dozens of small pastry shapes.

As well as champagne, you could drink any one of hundreds of selections at the bar. Beers. Wines. Spirits. Cocktails.

Danny stopped filming and asked the waitress if she could find him a Coke. She was not much older than he was. She smiled.

‘I try,’ she said.

She came back two minutes later with a glass of Coke on a silver tray.

‘Spasiba,’ Danny said.

The waitress smiled again, then left Danny to gaze around the room.

There were statues of bulls and people banging tambourines. Some of them naked. And oil paintings of people eating grapes. It was a strange place. A very strange place.

Danny finished his film, turned his back and sent it off to Charlotte.

Five minutes later a man got up to speak on a platform at the front of the hall. His audience turned to stare at him immediately.

Danny noticed a pair of men watching the people as the man stood, their hands clasped together at the front, wires coiling down from their ears into their shirts. They wore matching suits.

This was clearly the man who’d put the reception on. One of the richest men in the world. This was Dmitri Tupolev, the Russian oligarch.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the man said in what seemed like perfect English to Danny. ‘I welcome you humbly to my home.’

He was about fifty years old. But he could have passed for forty. He was tall and fit. His skin was bronzed. His hair black. And his clothes – a suit and a pink tie – were so smart Danny assumed they must have been made to fit him. He wondered if he was one of those rich people he’d heard about who only ever wore clothes once before replacing them.

Danny observed as the men in suits began to applaud. The applause spread – and continued for a minute.

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