Various Pets Alive and Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

drift away, he notices a woman in a yellow jacket staring straight at the window where they’re sitting. Maroushka! What’s she doing out on the loose?
    ‘
And
someone should take her aside and tell her she’s too old for pink leggings!’

CLARA: Hamlet, Fizzy
     
    The new head teacher at Greenhills is called Mr Gorst. Mr Alan Gorst. He looks too young for a head, with round pink cheeks and black spiked-up hair. When he took over the headship at the end of last term, he announced that the traditional summer sports day (too many losers) would be replaced with an autumn Community Day (everybody a winner), to welcome new parents and encourage involvement between the school and the community. The way he said it, with a dark twinkle in his eye, made the staff (especially the female staff) feel as though they’d made a supremely fulfilling career choice.
    Not everyone was pleased.
    ‘They’re already involved with the police and the Benefits Agency,’ grumbled fag-deprived Mr Kenny. ‘What more chuffin’ involvement do they need?’
    But Clara supports his approach. ‘A Greener Greenhills’ is her chosen theme for 6F’s Community Day stall. If she can only get the kids to cherish their own immediate environment, it will make them more aware of the beauty and fragility of our planet, she tells a twinkling Mr Gorst. (Dare she call him Alan? It seems too intimate.) Mr Gorst/Alan says it’s inspirational.
    Their stall will feature potted tree seedlings – rowan, poplar, hawthorn and cherry – from which the streets of the estate are named. The parents will plant them in front of their houses, hopefully in the appropriate streets (otherwise there could be confusion in twenty years’ time). There will also be petitions to save dolphins, cut carbon emissions and ban kids from playing football on Rowan Green (this suggestion came from Mrs Salmon, whose mother lives nearby). There will be a paper recycling bin and plastic recycling crates where parents can put their used plastic bottles. Kids from 6F wearing wellies will jump up and down on them (Miss! Please! Me! Miss! Me! Me!). At the end of the day, it will all be collected for recycling by a local firm called Syrec (South Yorkshire Recycling) based out at Askern. This is the tricky part.
    It took her two hours of dialling through the Yellow Pages to find a firm willing to collect the waste. The man at Syrec, when she got through to him, sounded like a nineteen-year-old on speed or a call-centre salesman flogging a dodgy mortgage. He agreed to take it all away for twenty quid, and she wasn’t in a position to argue, but she’s not managed to contact him since to confirm, and according to Mr Kenny, whose wife works in the Council, they’ve just been awarded a big regional development grant, so maybe that’s why.
    In the corridor after lunch she bumps into Miss Historical Postlethwaite hauling two big display boards towards the hall. She’s wearing Roman centurion-type sandals with high wedge heels, a cowgirl blouse and a medieval-style chain belt around her middle. (Really, you can take history too far.)
    ‘Hello, Heidi. Is that your Community Day display?’
    ‘I’m giving the folks on the estate a little peek into their history,’ she breathes, jingling her faux-Victorian ear-danglers. ‘They’re so deprived of any connection with the past.’
    Clara looks at the boards, covered with neatly mounted photocopies of black and white photographs and spidery handwritten memoirs. According to Historical Heidi’s display, the Greenhills Estate was built in the 1930s, to replace the slums of red-brick terraces that sprawled around Doncaster, and they named the streets after trees to give it the feel of a little corner of rural England.
    ‘Fascinating!’
    She and 6F spend the afternoon mounting their own idealised version of the estate, the kids’ wonky drawings of their streets and homes floating on a leafy crêpe-paper sea. After they’ve gone, she tidies up her