LITMIR.BIZ

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he saw us looking, he raised a hand and smiled again. O! My! God! I nearly died. My cheeks were like a blast furnace.

      Katie tossed her head and said, “Well.” I was too busy being incinerated to say anything at all. If my cheeks had got any hotter I might have actually burst into flames. You read about people doing that. One minute they’re there, the next they’re a pile of ashes. Something to do with their electrical systems shorting out. Which was what I felt mine were about to do.

      “How about that?” said Katie. She sounded almost triumphant. I looked at her, rather anxiously. I did hope she wasn’t deluding herself, thinking she was the one he had smiled at. Cos she wasn’t, it was me! I was the one he’d seen first. Maybe if she’d been the one…thing is, I’m trying to be fair. I’m not saying I’m any better-looking than she is. We both have our strong points—and our weak ones.

      On the plus side, I am quite tall and reasonably slim and have nice eyes (or so I have been told). I also have long blondish hair, which I have a nervous habit of hooking over my ears when I am embarrassed or can’t think of anything to say. On the minus side—well, I have to admit that I am not very pretty. My face is rather long, as is my nose. But I am not ugly!

      Neither is Katie. She is probably a bit prettier than I am actually, with this little round face and rosebuddy mouth. Her hair is a sort of brown colour and curly, and cut quite short. Those are her pluses. Her really big minus is her bum. She says herself it is like two pumpkins in a bag, and that her legs are like tree trunks. On the other hand, she looks kind of cute in our rather yucky school uniform and I do envy her nose. I would swap my nose for hers any day!

      Katie chattered excitedly all the way up the road. “I bet he’s foreign! He looks foreign. Maybe he’s Irish. Jimmy Doohan’s Irish. Lots of Irish guys come over here and work on the buildings. Jimmy Doohan’s dad is a builder. Did you know that? Jimmy Doohan—”

      Oh, dear! She really did believe he had smiled at her. At least it gave me the chance to cool down and stop myself combusting. But in the end I had to say something, cos I just couldn’t bear it any longer.

      “Why d’you suppose it’s OK to smile but not to wink?”

      “Interesting,” said Katie.

      “I mean, it is,” I said, “isn’t it?”

      “Yeah…I guess.”

      “So what’s the difference?”

      “Winking is rude,” said Katie. “Smiling is…”

      “What?”

      “Smiling is friendly!”

      I was so glad that the Jimmy Doohan boy had smiled and not winked.

      We got home to find Ellie arguing with Mum in the kitchen. Ellie is my little sister—well, half-sister, to be accurate. She has a tendency to argue. She is one of those people who can’t take no for an answer. In this case, no to going up to London with her boyfriend.

      Boyfriend, for heaven’s sake! She was only ten years old. If I’d have been Mum I would have asked her, “What are you talking about, boyfriend?” But that wasn’t what was bothering Mum. She just didn’t like the idea of them going up to London on their own.

      “What would you do there?”

      Ellie, virtuously, said they wouldn’t do anything.

      “So what would be the point of going? If you weren’t going to do anything?”

      Ellie said, “We just want to be there. Just look around.”

      “Like you haven’t already been there about a thousand times!”

      “That’s different,” said Ellie. “That’s with you and Dad. I want to go with Obi.”

      What kind of a name is Obi?

      “Pleeeeze, Mum…pleeeeeze let me!” She did this thing that she does, this girly thing, clasping her hands to her chest and making her eyes go all big. “We’ll just jump on the tube and sit there good as gold till we get to Leicester Square.”

      “Then what?” said Mum. I could tell that she was weakening; so could Ellie. Mum is so predictable. And Ellie knows just how to play her. Brightly she said, “Then we’ll get out! Then we’ll walk up Charing Cross Road and we’ll walk along Shaftesbury Avenue and we’ll watch out for the traffic and we won’t speak to anybody and then we’ll gaze at all the theatres and I’ll-imagine-how-it-will-be-when-my-name-is-up-in-lights!”

      She gabbled this last bit in a kind of ecstasy. It made Mum laugh, just as Ellie had known it would. Mum is such a soft touch where Ellie is concerned.

      “Have you asked Obi’s mum about this?” she said.

      Ellie smiled one of her cute little girly smiles. People just can’t resist her when she does that. “I thought I’d try asking you first.”

      “Because Obi’s mum would say no. I’ll tell you what I’m prepared to do…I’m not having you roam around London by yourselves, but—but—” Mum held up a hand as Ellie opened her mouth to protest—“I’ll take you both to a matinée of Guys And Dolls, if you like. That was the one you wanted to see, wasn’t it?”

      Ellie gave a loud shriek. “Mum! Can you get tickets?”

      “I think I could wangle it,” said Mum. “Then we could go backstage afterwards. How about that?”

      “Oh, Mum, thank you! Thank you, thank you!” Now we had the kissy huggy bit, with Ellie launching herself at Mum across the kitchen and nearly throttling her. “Dearest, darlingest, sweetest, bestest Mum of all time!”

      Yuck, yuck, triple yuck.

      “You’d better go and check with Obi’s mum and see if it’s OK with her.”

      “It will be, it will be!”

      “Well, go and make sure. Katie, Tamsin! Are you OK, girls? I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

      But with Ellie around she generally does. It’s not her fault; Ellie has one of those personalities that just swamps everything. I guess she can’t help it, any more than I can help being…well! A bit inward-looking, I suppose you would say. Like on one of those scales of introversion and extroversion, me and Ellie would be at totally opposite ends.

      “Are you going to eat tea down here with us?” said Mum. “Or do you want to take it up to your room?”

      I said we’d take it up to my room.

      “So they can have secrets,” said Ellie.

      “That’s all right,” said Mum. “It’s allowed.”

      “Don’t know what they’ve got to have secrets about.”

      I said, “No, because it’s secret. Moron!”

      Ellie stuck her tongue out. Really quite pathetic. One minute she’s trying to be just so sophisticated, wanting to go up to town with her boyfriend. The next she’s behaving like a five-year-old.

      “C’mon!” I snatched up a packet of biscuits and a couple of cartons of juice and headed for the door. “We’ll be down later. What time’s Dad getting back?”

      Mum said, “Your guess is as good as mine. You know what these things are like.”

      I explained to Katie as we went upstairs that Dad was appearing in a beer commercial.

      “Sometimes they just go on shooting for ever. When he did the drink-drive thing it went on till nearly midnight.”

      “That’s mad,” said Katie. “When you think it all ends up as just a few seconds on the screen.”

      I said, “Yes, I know, the whole business

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