be cross, but walking into the road without looking is a good reason, one of the best! Polar bears, sea eagles, Galápagos iguanas. Itâs such a good reason it means he can be very angry and quite happy at exactly the same time! Excellent!
But sadly it is not excellent for me. For me it is horrid.
I kick out at the road and I miss and hit his shin.
â Ow! Billy! What theâ?
He pushes me with a stiff arm across the road and through the railings into the park which is empty except for a man and a dog. In the war they cut down lots of railings to kill people with, but they put these ones back up. The dog has three legs, two at the front and one at the back. If it is a male it wonât have to cock a leg to wee but half of the time it will have to turn around to aim at the tree. Girls have to sit down. I donât know what to say about kicking Dadâs shin apart from sorry and I canât say that because sorry sticks in your throat when you try to say it. Try for yourself. Sorry is exactly like a fish-bone.
Luckily just then Dadâs phone goes off in his pocket again.
He pulls it out and glares at me and says, â Donât go far, to me and, â Yes, to it.
I do as he says this time. Itâs relatively easy because heâs not on me anymore. Heâs concentrating at something else. Whatever the else is I canât tell you exactly but I can tell you this: whoever Dad is speaking to has something to do with his work and is saying annoying things.
â And thereâs really no chance of changing their minds? he says.
I go a few steps farther away to the roundabout thing and get on it and go round half a turn and get off the other side. Thank you, roundabout.
â Thatâs what they said, word for word? Itâs final?
Dadâs job is called communications projects. He does it on his own except when he does it with other people. He used to have a different job in a big building where there was a man in charge of him but now he can do his own communications projects for clients at home in his study-office which is in fact a sediment of his and Mumâs bedroom. Shortest possible commute, Son. Laptop, phone, know-how, and low cunning. When Dad speaks to people on his phone to do with work his voice sounds different, sort of hopeful and disappointed all at once. If you know him well like me because we are connected, Son, you can tell that he is saying one thing but really heâd like to say something else much crosser. The man in charge at his old office was just called the man.
Now Dad is using a voice which sounds like the one you might use if you got a present you didnât really want at Christmas, so that although what you really want is to say no, no, no thatâs not the right thing, youâve got it all wrong, you canât, because if youâre ungrateful for one present you might not get another one ever again, so you say thank you anyway, but it comes out like a mouse peeping from a hole, gray and small and ducking back in again quickly.
â Well thanks very much for all your efforts. Next time, perhaps.
This sounds like the end but it isnât because now heâs got his eyes tight shut like he needs to answer a really hard question or perhaps even pluck up the courage to ask to go to the toilet in the middle of Miss Hartâs storytime, and the knuckles of his good hand have gone pointy yellow like teeth, and heâs carrying on.
This is bad so I walk farther away toward the goals.
Â
The Year Threes from school play football here. They wear boots. Strangely their boots are not boots, though, but instead they are shoes with little teeth knuckles of their own called studs. And hereâs the evidence: hundreds of tiny holes. I kneel down on the mud and put my fingers into the dents which are slug-size. Sixty million years ago the earth was teething with fossils like this. Yes I am excellent at spotting them in the modern world