Читать онлайн «Friday on My Mind»

1

Kitty was five years old and she was cross. The queue for the Crown Jewels had been long and they weren’t so special anyway. The queue for Madame Tussauds had been longer, and she didn’t even recognize most of the waxworks, and she couldn’t see them properly with all the crowds. And it had been drizzling. And she hated the Underground. When she stood on the platform and heard the rumble of an approaching train, it felt like something terrible coming out of the darkness.

But when they got on the boat she became a little less cross. The river was so big that it felt almost like the ocean, heaving with the currents and the tide. A plastic bottle floated past.

‘Where’s it going?’ said Kitty.

‘To the sea,’ said her mum. ‘All the way to the sea. ’

‘The Thames Barrier will stop it,’ said her dad.

‘No, it won’t,’ said her mum. ‘It’s not a real barrier. ’

As the boat pulled away from the Embankment, Kitty ran from one side of the boat to the other. If she was seeing something interesting on one bank of the river, that meant she was missing what was interesting on the other or in front.

‘Calm down, Kitty,’ said her mum. ‘Why don’t you write a list in your book of everything you see?’

So Kitty got out her new notebook, the one with the elephant on the cover. And her new pen. She opened the notebook at a fresh page and wrote a number one and drew a heart-shaped circle around it.

‘Which big thing?’

‘That one. ’

‘The Eye. ’

So that was number one.

The boat was almost empty. It was a Friday and it had only just stopped raining. Kitty’s parents drank coffee and Kitty, whose school was closed for a training day and who had been looking forward to this trip for weeks, frowned over her notebook while a voice on the Tannoy said that the River Thames was a pageant of history. It was from here, said the voice, that Francis Drake had set off to circle the globe. And it was here that he returned with a ship full of treasure and became Sir Francis Drake.

Kitty was so busy that she was almost irritated when her dad sat down beside her.

‘We’ve stopped,’ he said, ‘so we can look at the Thames and at London Bridge. ’

‘I know,’ said Kitty.

‘Do you know “London Bridge Is Falling Down”?’

‘We done that at school. ’

‘Did it. ’

Kitty ignored this and carried on writing.

‘So what have you seen?’

Kitty finished the word she was writing, the tip of her tongue protruding from the side of her mouth. Then she held up the notebook. ‘Five things,’ she said.