How to Talk to Girls at Parties (eBook Original) Read Online Free PDF Page B

pushed the kitchen door, went in. I liked the kitchen door. It swung both ways, in and out, so servants sixty years ago would be able to walk in or out with their arms laden with dishes empty or full.
    “Dad? Where’s the car?”
    “In the drive.”
    “No, it isn’t.”
    “What?”
    The telephone rang, and my father went out into the hall, where the phone was, to answer it. I heard him talking to someone.
    The toast began to smoke under the grill.
    I got up on a chair and turned the grill off.
    “That was the police,” my father said. “Someone’s reported seeing our car abandoned at the bottom of the lane. I said I hadn’t even reported it stolen yet. Right. We can head down now, meet them there. Toast!”
    He pulled the pan out from beneath the grill. The toast was smoking and blackened on one side.
    “Is my comic there? Or did they steal it?”
    “I don’t know. The police didn’t mention your comic.”
    My father put peanut butter on the burnt side of each piece of toast, replaced his dressing gown with a coat worn over his pajamas, put on a pair of shoes, and we walked down the lane together. He munched his toast as we walked. I held my toast, and did not eat it.
    We had walked for perhaps five minutes down the narrow lane which ran through fields on each side, when a police car came up behind us. It slowed, and the driver greeted my father by name.
    I hid my piece of burnt toast behind my back while my father talked to the policeman. I wished my family would buy normal sliced white bread, the kind that went into toasters, like every other family I knew. My father had found a local baker’s shop where they made thick loaves of heavy brown bread, and he insisted on buying them. He said they tasted better, which was, to my mind, nonsense. Proper bread was white, and pre-sliced, and tasted like almost nothing: that was the point.
    The driver of the police car got out, opened the passenger door, told me to get in. My father rode up front beside the driver.
    The police car went slowly down the lane. The whole lane was unpaved back then, just wide enough for one car at a time, a puddly, precipitous, bumpy way, with flints sticking up from it, the whole thing rutted by farm equipment and rain and time.
    “These kids,” said the policeman. “They think it’s funny. Steal a car, drive it around, abandon it. They’ll be locals.”
    “I’m just glad it was found so fast,” said my father.
    Past Caraway Farm, where a small girl with hair so blonde it was almost white, and red, red cheeks, stared at us as we went past. I held my piece of burnt toast on my lap.
    “Funny them leaving it down here, though,” said the policeman, “because it’s a long walk back to anywhere from here.”
    We passed a bend in the lane and saw the white Mini over on the side, in front of a gate leading into a field, tires sunk deep in the brown mud. We drove past it, parked on the grass verge. The policeman let me out, and the three of us walked over to the Mini, while the policeman told my dad about crime in this area, and why it was obviously the local kids had done it, then my dad was opening the passenger side door with his spare key.
    He said, “Someone left something on the back seat.” My father reached back and pulled the blue blanket away, that covered the thing in the back seat, even as the policeman was telling him that he shouldn’t do that, and I was staring at the back seat because that was where my comic was, so I saw it.
    It was an it, the thing I was looking at, not a him.
    Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I’d read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of