Pants on Fire by Sue Limb

Author:Sue Limb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

She threw Ben’s jacket and shorts down to him. He caught them. Fred’s eyes flared with sudden understanding.

‘Ah, so they were your shorts Jess was wearing this morning,’ he said.

Ben grinned and shrugged but somehow failed to find the necessary words to continue the conversation.

‘Ben rescued me from a ghastly mud crisis on the school field,’ said Jess. ‘He happened to be passing as I wallowed in slime and offered his football shorts as a temporary solution.’

‘I thought you looked very dashing in them,’ said Fred. ‘You should wear shorts more often. As an ironic fashion statement, of course.’ There was a bitter look on his face.

‘Isn’t it funny how shorts go up and down?’ pondered Granny, oblivious to the tension in the hall. ‘I remember when I was a child, football players all wore shorts down to their knees. Then the fashion changed and the shorts became so short, it made your eyes water to look at them. Now they’ve gone long again – whatever next?’

There was a brief silence as they all pondered the uncomfortable subject of football shorts.

‘Well, Fred, I’ll get your jacket,’ said Jess, and scuttled back to her bedroom. Fred’s grey jacket was lying on her bed. She had set Rasputin the bear to guard it, and he looked reproachfully at her as she picked it up. For an instant she buried her face in it, and breathed in the wonderful, sunshiny and grassy smell of Fred. Anguish flooded through her heart.

She was tempted never to leave her room again, nay, to lock herself in and wrap Fred’s jacket round her head for ever, but she simply had to get back downstairs where Ben and Fred and Granny might be having a disastrous and tactless conversation full of misunderstandings. But when she got to the stairs, the hall was empty.

Granny had gone back to her murder mystery, and the murmur of voices from the kitchen suggested that Ben and Fred had gone in there. As Jess arrived, Fred looked up.

‘Ben’s just been kind enough to offer me a glass of Coke,’ he said, with a hint of hidden outrage.

Jess knew how he felt. It should be Fred offering Ben a Coke if anything. The debris of their snack lay all over the table, somehow embarrassing, like scattered underwear.

‘However, I’m on a very restricted diet at the moment,’ Fred went on. ‘Dust and ashes, with just a dash of brackish water from the Pool of Despond. So you must excuse me this time. Gotta go – on the stroke of ten I turn into a tube of fungicide.’ He backed away towards the door, kind of nodding and shifting about in his adorable embarrassed Fred kind of way.

‘Shame . . .’ said Ben. Shut up, Jones, don’t say another word, thought Jess. Or if you say anything, say you’ve got to go, too. ‘Jess was telling me you, uh, won’t be able to be in her show at Christmas because of, urm, Twelfth Night.’

‘Seems not,’ said Fred, pulling a strange face which expressed some kind of pain and regret.

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