Tabitha Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the gentle patter of the
pouring rain. Meanwhile, up in the study, the dandelion seed was moving. It had
long since floated down when Tabitha blew on it, and now it bobbed along the
carpet to a damp mouldy corner of the room. Tabitha hadn’t noticed how silvery
the seed looked. She hadn’t seen its tiny legs, no bigger than a mite’s,
wriggling for something to root in. The seed burrowed down into the damp carpet
in the corner. With the quietest electronic chirrup , a tiny grey shoot
sprouted from the floor. The sound was just enough to wake Mog, ears raised. As
he jumped down from Tabitha's stomach she woke up with a gentle grunt.
    All afternoon
the metallic shoot took in the sunlight that emerged from the grey clouds. It
produced pulsing little lights on tiny fibrous branches. Its presence being
neither intriguing nor frustrating to Mog, it had been sniffed and left
unharmed. Tabitha didn’t see it; she was too busy trying to write her blog. She
didn’t notice its rapid alien growth in the back corner of the room. She tried
her best never to look in that corner. It was a useless cobwebbed space where
the angled ceiling sloped in, too damp and mouldy to leave a box or a bag
there. Too disgusting to clean. If she never looked there, she’d never feel
guilty enough to clean it. She sipped fresh tea and watched the sunlight sprawl
over the ocean; a grey-brown eternity beyond the road outside her window. The
computer speakers gushed shameless pop into the room, making Tabitha tap her
toes to the beat. A seagull flew by outside with a whooping call, laughing at
Tabitha’s joblessness. She slouched there all afternoon, staring at the bright
glow of her blank-paged computer screen. Typing. Deleting. Repeating.
    A house spider,
meanwhile, spent all afternoon in the bathroom. It was scaling the inside of
the grand old bathtub by frantically picking out, with trial and much error,
the rougher patches of the worn enamel surface. By sundown its legs tapped
against the rim of the bath.

A seagull sat on the weathered old metal railing on the seafront. Behind it,
across the road, a light in the top window of a town house glowed warmly in the
gathering dusk. Inside, a crazy-haired lady sat at her computer with her head
in her hands. She heard a couple on the street below, fighting and screaming,
probably drunk. She lost her train of thought. Thankfully they went on down the
street, giving Tabitha back her beloved silence. In the musty bathroom Mog
stared momentarily at a fresh hairball, and pawed the spider as it scuttled
across the rim of the bath. The spider fell to the floor, and quickly curled up
to receive a cat-batting around the lino. Caught and briefly mangled in the
dribbling depth of Mog’s mouth, the spider was coughed out to die in a corner.
    Up the second
staircase in her study, Tabitha suddenly sat up and tapped away at her
computer:
     
    The true value of films lies in
     
    Hesitating, she
slumped back in her chair with a huff of defeat. Futility draped itself around
her shoulders, as cold and comfortless as a damp shawl with a charity-shop
smell. Mog wandered into the room unnoticed. He puffed up in fright at the
thing in the back corner and made a swift exit. Where a small grey shoot had
sprung up from the carpet this morning there was now an alien plant, two feet
across, sitting spidery and silver in the shadowed corner of the room. Opening
its mouth parts, out slid a sinewy, synthetic snake of a tongue. Tabitha was
checking her messages, unaware. The tongue stretched out silently across the
room. It edged towards the back of Tabitha’s head while she sat staring at her
screen. A big bony needle on the tip was filling with venom for the kill.
Slouching in her chair, Tabitha typed something and then deleted it again. The
tongue stretched and swayed behind her, serpentine, aiming for the top of her
neck. It tensed up, coiled back, and shot out silently. Tabitha kicked the
chair back and walked out in search of