The Yoghurt Plot Read Online Free PDF

cut me off?’ asks Dilan as we go down the corridor.
    â€˜Because we mustn’t tell anyone that Mum and Dad have disappeared. They’ll send the social services, and take us away, and then we’ll never be able to get Mum and Dad back.’
    Dilan looks at me. ‘Do you really think  …  ?’
    â€˜I do,’ I say.
    Dilan sighs, gloomily. ‘I reckon you’re wrong,’ he says, scratching his head. ‘Anyway – you never know, they might be back already.’
    I sit in maths calculating the age that Mum and Dad would be now, if they got stuck in 1974 and by some miracle Dad didn’t meet himself. I think that Dad would be eighty-six and Mum would be seventy-five. Where would they live? How would they live? Would they even know that they’d travelled in time or would they think everyone had suddenly got rid of all the cars and knocked down the housing estate?
    â€˜Bugg – in this equation – what is the
n
th term?’
    I stare blankly at the board and feel sick. I’m losing touch with reality.
    English is agony. We’re doing
Macbeth
. I start to worry about Mum and Dad going back to Shakespeare’s time. Or even the Stone Age. They’d never survive. Mum has to have a cup of tea with fresh milk every day, and Dad can’t move before he’s read the newspaper, and they’d never understand what anyone was saying to them. All those grunts.
    In geography we all set out into the town with clipboards. For the first time I notice just how dismal the seafront is. It’s all battered plywood and skanky posters, broken palm trees with piles of windblown sand clustered around their roots. It’s as if Henderson’s car showroom is so big and so shiny it’s sucked all the life out of everything around it. The pier itself is a set of posts stuck with seaweed near the shore, and the faintest frame of rusted metal further out at sea. I can still make out the bottoms of the flag poles, but otherwise it’s just Henderson’s overflow car park full of gleaming cars.
    At the end of the day I go to drama club. Miss Swanson asks us all to trust each other. We take it in turns to blunder around with our eyes closed, trusting and crashing into radiators. My partner is an irritatingly bouncy girl called Lorna, who’s only recently moved into my class and whose mum runs the shop. The same shop we saw in 1974. She was at another school, but I reckon they moved her because she’s so irritating. She just does stuff – like saying things when people shouldn’t, and asking teachers things that would be better left alone. Last week she told the dinner ladies that the dinners were disgusting and that they shouldn’t overcook everything. She’s right, everything is overcooked, but you shouldn’t say anything about it. It’s just the way it is. The
worst thing is that I think she likes me: she keeps appearing at my elbow, even though I never hear her coming and it makes me jump.
    I’m supposed to be nice to her, because Mum says we need to be nice to her. This is not really a sufficient reason, but I try not to guide her into the wall.
    But I’m not really concentrating on the drama class. I’m worrying about Granddad getting peckish, helping himself to a yoghurt and going back to the Second World War, when Shabbiton was covered in barbed wire and anti-aircraft guns.
    It would finish him off.
    Lorna leads me into the radiator for the third time. ‘Ow!’ I say, as I bang my knee.
    â€˜Whoops – sorree,’ she says. ‘Wasn’t thinking.’
    I don’t think she’s actually deliberately stupid, but it doesn’t make me want to be her partner.
    â€˜Blindfolds off!’ calls Miss Swanson.
    I rub my eyes and glance up at the clock. Four o’clock. That means Mum should be picking me up any minute.
    â€˜Now, everyone, before the end of the session, can we try the