Small Blue Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

uniforms, we were able to watch the younger kids on the coach with an indulgent eye, occasionally wincing when we realised that we used to behave in exactly the same way.
    My elder brother, Josh, at eighteen, was in his final year of school and had managed to spend most of the last six years ignoring me completely on the coach. But that too had changed in the last few months as he and some of his friends had got more interested in my friends, and very occasionally they acknowledged our existence.
    The coach arrived, and there was time for some uninterrupted chat with Grace. I was about to tell her all about the whole thing when one of our friends dropped into the seat in front and started quizzing Grace about Jack: the grapevine had clearly been working overtime. It would wait, I decided. We had all day to talk on our day trip to London.
    The school trip had been organised for those of us in the Art Club, an optional lunchtime activity. Most of us in the group were OK at art but didn’t have the talent or the dedication needed to sit the exams, and membership of the club allowed us to have a bit of fun. The project for the term was to look at art in public buildings, and that day we were off to St Paul’s Cathedral. My special interest was in the carvings of people and faces, and havingdone lots of research on the Internet I was planning to draw the figures adorning the tomb of the Duke of Wellington, the famous soldier. Unfortunately I hadn’t done quite enough research before I submitted my plans, and found that all the angels were perched on the very top of the enormous monument. I was going to get a very hard lesson in foreshortening.
    We were driven up into London in the school minibus by one of our art teachers. It was a subdued group as we had all been out celebrating the night before, and a few of the girls had been up really late. Unfortunately, Mrs Bell was a surprisingly aggressive driver, and some of us didn’t look good as the minibus tore around the one-way system south of the river. At one point I was sure that Melissa was going to heave. She went very pale and someone quietly handed her an empty carrier bag and opened a window. No one dared to ask Mrs Bell to slow down.
    We finally made it to the city, where the great dome of the cathedral still managed to dominate the much larger corporate buildings nearby. The huge white stone edifice, recently cleaned of hundreds of years of London grime, seemed to glow gently in the sunshine. The two large towers that flanked the western entrance were dwarfed by the pale grey dome which sat at the centre of the building. As we drove up Ludgate Hill, I could see the sunlight glinting off the gilding on the tops of each of the towers, and catching the railings on the Golden Gallery at the top of the dome.
    I loved coming to St Paul’s. As a kid I had come here regularly: Mum and Dad raved about the view out across London and every foreign visitor we had was made to come and admire it. From the top, looking to the east, you could see the Tower of London and Tower Bridge nestling between the tall smooth buildings of the city. The hills of Hampstead and Highgate rearedup to the north, and if the weather was good enough, you could see Richmond Park in the far south-west. It was a long walk up to the Golden Gallery, the highest point you could get to: hundreds of steps, but worth it. I had always been fascinated by the construction of the dome, with the latticework of the internal wooden structure through which the stairs climbed to the top. I just had to be careful not to look down too often, as some of the drops were dizzyingly precipitous. Worst of all was the glass peephole at the top that let you look down at the tiny people hundreds of metres directly below your feet. It always made me feel queasy thinking about that drop, wondering if they could see me hundreds of feet above them, looking down at what they were doing.
    But today I wasn’t going to have the chance to