Sleeping with the Blackbirds by Pearl Alex

Author:Pearl, Alex [Pearl, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

The Uninvited Customer

Since the episode with the geese, Roy’s life at school had become rather more pleasant. Harry Hodges, for a start, hadn’t so much as smirked at him for some days now. Come to think of it, Roy hadn’t even noticed him. And as for Brian and Colin, they seemed to be keeping their distance.

The bombardment of the gardening hut had certainly been a remarkable incident to have witnessed. Though the school caretaker probably wouldn’t have seen it in quite the same way. Apparently, it took the poor man an entire afternoon to clean up the considerable mess, for which he had to employ an industrial jet spray and wear special protective clothing.

Roy had made several visits in his spare time to the local library to find out as much as he could about the habits of Canada geese on the computer. But his efforts trawled very little other than a letter posted on a community website in Vancouver, Canada, that dealt with what the author called ‘the terrible nuisance of these infernal birds.’ It had been written by a retired gentleman whose garden lawn had been targeted by Canada geese on a regular basis. And as a result, he wanted the Canadian government to allow him to seek revenge on the birds with his twelve-bore rifle. From this Roy could only assume that while the incident concerning the gardening hut may have seemed highly unusual to most people, it would not have surprised the man with the ruined lawn one little bit. So on this basis, Roy put an end to his research, accepting that Canada geese can and do occasionally go on spectacular bombing raids.

Life may have become easier for him at school but as far as the Nuttersley household was concerned, he wished he could have said the same. The sad truth, of course, was that things had become significantly worse on the domestic front. For a start, there was a distinct lack of birdsong from the small garden each morning. It was a small detail perhaps, but such small and enchanting details count for a lot when you are a shy, ungainly eleven-year-old boy with a sensitive nature and very few friends in the world to speak of. Then there was his parents’ relationship, which now seemed to be going from bad to worse. In fact, there was hardly any china left in the cupboard, since most of it, including a 60 piece dinner service that had been a wedding present, had now been thrown by Mrs Nuttersley at her husband. This meant that breakfasts and suppers were now eaten from plastic picnic ware which, to be perfectly honest, had seen better days. Even the delivery of the small brown parcel with Roy’s name on it the previous day had failed to fire him with much enthusiasm.

“Come on boy. It’s not every day that you get sent a parcel with your name on it,” his mother had yelled at him from the bottom of the stairs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.