Where Everything Seems Double by Penny Freedman (good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT) 📗

Flies apparently, and she shuts herself in her room to engage with the boys’ final savagery. Will she get the irony of the ending, the way the naval officer – a representative of Her Majesty’s armed forces and fresh off a warship – condemns the boys for fighting and killing? I would like to discuss it with her afterwards – I think she would have interesting things to say – but if I try she will turn me down. I am too much like a teacher; I am on the wrong side.

Chapter Twelve IF NOT DUFFERS

Monday

David was leaving. At breakfast Granny looked pissed-off, but he looked like he was already gone – back to work, back to London. All the time he was eating he was alternately looking at his watch, checking his phone and looking out of the window for his taxi. It was a toss-up, Freda thought, as to whether the taxi would arrive before Granny exploded. And then, suddenly, Granny said, ‘I’m thinking I could come with you in the taxi. I want to go into the town and one can get tired of the ferry. The taxi can drop me off on the way back. Do you want to come, Freda?’

Freda was too taken aback to say anything but, ‘OK.’ She really did need something else to read, and Granny might be in the mood for clothes shopping as well as books, though all Freda had spotted in the way of clothes on their walk through the town on Saturday was window after window of pretty gross hill-walking-in-wet-weather gear.

‘Good,’ Granny said. ‘Outside in five minutes then.’

And breathless with surprise and haste, there Freda was five minutes later, with a taxi drawing up to the hotel entrance. Her grandmother, Freda observed, was a transformed person – brushed and lipsticked and perfumed, and wearing the smart jacket she had travelled in. When the taxi driver opened the doors for them, she told Freda, commandingly, to get in the front as she and David had things to talk about, and then, as they drove away, she ordered the radio to be put on. ‘Choose your channel,’ she told the driver, ‘we don’t mind,’ and Freda could see that she just wanted the noise to cover her conversation with David. She felt awkward sitting there in the front, and it seemed rude not to be talking to the driver, but he didn’t say anything to her and she didn’t know how to start. And then text messages started pinging in on her phone as they left the communications blackspot around the hotel. Mum didn’t say much – only that they had arrived safely and everyone sent their love and she hoped Freda was having a fun time and they were all looking forward to seeing her. ‘Fun doesn’t begin to describe it’, she wrote, and was pleased with herself for being so neatly ambiguous. Then arrividerci and con amore. She waited to make sure that it had gone before she put her phone away, and then glanced over her shoulder at David and her grandmother, who had their heads together in whispered conversation. Please don’t let them start kissing, she prayed, and then began to worry about what was going to happen at the station. Please let David just get out of the car and go, she thought, envisaging the horror of sitting there while Granny and he hugged and kissed. Hoodie moment, she thought, and wished that she had brought hers with her.

As it turned out, David did just get out. He tapped Freda on the shoulder and said, ‘Enjoy Italy,’ and then he went, without turning back. And Granny seemed quite happy with that. She just said, ‘Come and join me in the back, Freda,’ and then started talking about shopping.

As soon as they were dropped off in the town square, Granny said, ‘We need to collar someone and ask where the bookshop is,’ and when Freda pointed to a W.H. Smith just across from them she said, ‘A proper bookshop, Freda.’ After two failed attempts, when people just shrugged at them, they were sent off in the direction of the bus station. The shop front was so narrow that they passed it without noticing on their first attempt and had to retrace their steps. It was on a corner, completely overshadowed by the big building society next to it, and it looked like a little house front, except that the door was propped open and the small front window was crammed with books. It was tiny inside too, with shelves going up to the ceiling and two little stepladders to reach the top. It smelt, she thought, of books that had been there for a long time.

Freda was disappointed. She was used to Waterstones at home, where books were laid out on tables in categories, and you could browse for ages. Here she supposed there must be some kind of logic to the arrangement but she couldn’t immediately see what it was, and she looked around hopelessly. Granny, though, was like a toddler in a playground, dashing from one set of shelves to another, clambering up the ladders and including the rather grumpy-looking shopkeeper in her happy smile and squeaks of delight. As Freda mooched about, not sure what she was looking for, her eye was caught by a shelf of historical fiction – all about different royal women, as far as she could see, with glamorous-looking young women in velvet dresses on their covers. As soon as she started to look through them, though, she was summoned by an imperious cry from her grandmother, poised aloft on one of the ladders. ‘Over here, Freda. Classic fiction!’ She picked one of the velvet-clad women at random and went reluctantly to join her.

‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Granny said. ‘Have you read it?’

Freda had not, but she had seen it in the book cupboard at school when she had been helping with an end of term clear-up, so she