To Be Someone Read Online Free PDF

now!” The finger wagged accusingly, and the tone became quite stern.
    “Would you like a thweetie?” I ventured.
    Pathetically, I was by now quite enjoying the distraction from my project. It was much harder work than I’d imagined, writing with only one eye to mediate between brain and paper. In slow motion I reached for the tin of travel sweets my mother had forgotten on her last visit. (Very insensitive of her, too, I thought. My jaw was still very tender, and I was enduring meals whose consistency my current visitor had probably outgrown at five months of age.)
    Mutely, the hand stretched out.
    “Well, come on, then, I won’t bite … although the chanth would be a fine thing.”
    She sidled out, eyes downcast. Apart from the chubby red face clashing with her pink and purple coat, she was pretty cute. Skinny little curls sprouted vertically from her head, and her teary eyes held worldly-wise blue depths.
    I handed her a wrapped sweet.
    “Tankoo,” she said politely.
    “You’re welcome.”
    She had just crinkled off the paper and popped it into her mouth when my least-favorite nurse, Catriona, knocked and stuck her head round the door.
    “Oh, thank heavens, there she is!” she said crossly. “Ruby, your daddy’s been looking everywhere for you!”
    Catriona retreated and returned almost immediately with a blond curly-haired man, gray around the eyes with exhaustion and what looked like abject misery. They marched into the room, ignoring me completely.
    “What am I, chopped liver?” I said to no one in particular. I was still kneeling on the floor in my nightie, suddenly vulnerable.
    “Ruby Middleton, what have I told you about wandering off?” said the man, halfheartedly.
    “Daddy! My daddy!” came the ecstatic reply as Ruby hurled herself at her father’s kneecaps. Suddenly we all heard a very strange noise emanating from the depths of the fur coat, a kind of gurgling, hawking sound. Alarmed, the man prised her away from his knees and peered into her puce face.
    “Oh my God, she’s choking!” he yelled. “Nurse!”
    Catriona, who had just left the room, hurried back in and grabbed Ruby. Inverting her briskly, she slapped her lengthily and enthusiastically between the shoulder blades.
    A small green boiled sweet dislodged itself from Ruby’s windpipe and flew across the room, bouncing against the far wall and finally coming to rest under my bed. Ruby, howling, was turned back up the right way, and clung to her father. We all looked silently in the direction of the offending travel sweet, until Catriona spoke.
    “Well, for heaven’s sake! Who on earth was daft enough to give a boiled sweet to a toddler?! Some people have absolutely no sense. I mean, really!”
    At that moment she and Ruby’s dad simultaneously spotted the tin of sweets on my nightstand.
    “Thorry,” I muttered, climbing back into bed, furious with myself for feeling so guilty.
    Catriona sniffed and left the room, and I was alone with the man and Ruby. I waited for him to give me a piece of his mind, and was preparing to tell him to sling his hook and leave me in peace, when he suddenly grinned at me. I was totally disarmed.
    “I really am thorry,” I said again, more genuinely this time. I felt confused—what was the correct etiquette for receiving unintentionally visiting strangers in hospital?
    The man looked as though the same thought had just passed through his own head.
    “No, I’m sorry,” he said, “on behalf of Trouble here. It’s terrible of us to barge in when you’re trying to recover in peace and quiet. We’ll get out of your hair now.”
    All of a sudden I didn’t want them to leave. Apart from Mum arriving from the U.S., hideous Geoff Hadleigh, and a quick embarrassed fly-past from my production team at New World, I hadn’t had any visitors. Justin had sent flowers but hadn’t shown his (unblemished) face, which really upset me, and the other band members were all in the States, too. I was