Dear Nobody Read Online Free PDF Page B

Helen slept. She didn’t look at me once, I thought. I’ve been out with her for four whole hours and she hasn’t looked me in the face once. What is it, Nell?
    When I got home my dad was in the cellar. He came up, wiping his hands on his boiler suit. He was carrying a mug that he’d made. ‘Don’t you think this is a lovely design, Chris?’ he asked.
    I hardly looked at it. ‘Marvellous,’ I said.
    My dad looked disappointed. ‘It’s not that bad. What’s bugging you?’
    â€˜Nothing.’ I dug my hands in my pockets and found my mother’s letter there, as cold and shocking now to my touch as a handful of melting ice-cubes. ‘I’ve got an essay to do for tomorrow.’ I ran upstairs and sat on my bed to re-read the letter. Helen was right. My mother had taken four weeks to answer and hadn’t even asked me how I was. She hadn’t bothered to make contact with me for eight years; birthday and Christmas presents had come as money paid into my father’s bank account. She’d made a point of telling me how busy she was, how full and successful her life was, how much she had in common with her natty bloke, as if I cared. I wished I hadn’t written to her. She didn’t need me, that wasquite obvious. What a fool I would have felt if I had decided to go to her house. What on earth would we have said to each other?
    â€˜Hello, Mum. Hello, Joan, I mean. I’m Christopher.’ I tried it out loud. I tried to sound casual and pleased. I tried to sound like Tom, deepening my voice. I did a falsetto bit for my mother. ‘ “My, you’ve grown. Look Christopher, these are my new crampons. This is my zoom lens.” “They’re nice, Joan.” “This is Don.” “Hello Don. Hi, Don. How d’you do? You’ve got a lot of hair on top! What a lot of books, Don!” ’
    I screwed up the letter and chucked it in the waste paper basket. Well, if she didn’t need me, I didn’t need her.
    I kept trying to ring Helen. She never seemed to be around. Her mother always said, ‘She’s working, Chris,’ as if she was trying to make me feel guilty for disturbing her. She does work hard, though. Both her parents have always seen to that. I think they have ambitions for her; I think she has for herself, too. I wondered what my mother expected me to do with my life. I don’t suppose she even thought about it.
    The next few days brought gales, worse than any I could remember. When we were watching television the carpet kept lifting up in the middle as if it was riding on the waves of the sea. The cat watched its breathing centre, tail twitching, back arched to pounce. During the night we had to drag Guy’s mattress into my room because his bedroom window came bursting away from its hinges, even though we’d tried sticking it down with Sellotape and Blu-tack. I quite enjoyed having Guy in my room again. We sat up in bed till all hours talking. Guy was excited about the gales.
    â€˜You know what’s brought this lot on, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s the greenhouse effect. We can conquer space and invent computer chips and now we’re affecting the climate too! We’re proving how powerful we are.’
    â€˜Don’t talk rot, brat,’ I told him. ‘You don’t know anything. We’re proving how powerless we are. Our planet is set on self-destruct, and we haven’t got the power to stop it happening. Everything’s controlled by fate. It’s all been planned.’
    â€˜Like a computer program?’
    We settled down for sleep, listening to the wind moaninglike a lurking beast round the houses in the street. During the night the top of our chimney toppled off and crashed down the roof tiles and on to the road. I woke up sweating. I realized that I’d been dreaming about Helen and that when the crash had come she had just rolled away