There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [94]
History Of Education Part 2: There are six days left, after this day today, of Easter holiday LITTLE PIECE OF it is okay. It is still quite a lot of days.
(Wendy Slater was writing out project stuff with her Hello Kitty pen. The Hello Kitty pen was a very short fat silver-coloured one with a little Hello Kitty head on a chain fixed to its top, but because it was such a funny shape and a bit difficult to hold, because it made you wrap your whole hand round it, it was making Wendy Slater’s writing look retarded. She’s writing with a vibrator, Jack Shadworth said. Chloe and Emily laughed like mad. Brooke thought up a good rhyme. Wendy Slater writes with a vibrator. But she didn’t say it because it would make everybody say it, and that would end up with a lot of everybody being cruel to Wendy Slater and because rhyme makes you not forget things easily people would remember to be cruel for longer. You don’t know what a vibrator is, Josh Banham said to Wendy. Yes she does, Brooke said. No I don’t, Wendy said. More boys gathered round, Daniel and Thomas, and Megan and Jessica came over from the library shelves too. You don’t know either, Josh said to Brooke. Duh, obviously I know what a vibrator is, Brooke said. She turned away from the laughing, back to the book about Flight and the page about the Montgolfier Brothers, who believed they had invented a new gas whereas the fact was, they had just discovered heated-up air. She was no good at drawing hearts. She could cut very straight with scissors, but not snap her fingers. She didn’t have a Facebook page. She had a weird accent. She didn’t talk like or sound like the other girls, any of them. Everybody knew she didn’t even have an ordinary mobile, never mind just a phone that wasn’t an iPhone. Wendy Slater was still asking everybody what a vibrator was when Mr. Warburton came back into the room. He heard Wendy and then pretended he hadn’t. He winked at the boys and then at the girls like Simon Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent when he gives the person on the stage in the theatre a wink if he’s liked them and they’re going to get through to the next round. Brooke saw his glance go round the class and allow everybody not to like her. She looked hard at the picture of the first Montgolfier balloon, blown about by the wind high above the crowds in the streets in France. Everybody in the room knew, though nobody would ever have dared say it, about Mr. Warburton not liking Brooke. She looked at the wildly blowing-about balloon in the picture. Last year a plane going from Brazil to France just fell into the sea by itself in a storm, just right there into the sea, and all the people on it drowned. In the paper a Science Correspondent said that modern jets should be able to withstand any storm.
The fact is, Brooke stood in her parents’ bedroom at 5am in the morning, with the light coming under the blind. She had not been able to sleep. She had got out of her own bed and come through. Their door had been a little open. It did not creak. Her mother was lying on her side, facing away from her father. Her father was lying on his back. Her mother’s arm was flung over her father’s stomach and side. Her mother’s breathing was steady and quiet. She couldn’t hear her father’s breathing, but could see his chest moving under the cover so he was definitely not dead. They looked really happy