Rocks in the Belly by Jon Bauer Read Free Book Online Page B

finished his dinner he starts on mine and even holds my good hand so I can’t stop him. I love it when we get the giggles.
    From where we’re parked I can see the chemical plant chimney lights winking through the steamed up car windows. You can always see birds flying around in the light at night, ‘getting high on the chimney fumes,’ Dad says. I’m scared of the fumes but Mum says it’s just steam.
    He lets me change gear in the front all the way home and I only crunch once but that’s because he says Robert might be with us for quite a while and ‘maybe you’d like to start trying to get used to that.’
    He hits my hand off the gearstick because I try to put it inreverse instead of third and probably take a few teeth off the gearbox. Maybe it’ll need braces now too. He shouts at me. I climb out the business end and lie in the back. I’m full of food but empty, my fingers up close over my face and they smell of salt and vinegar or bedwetting.
    By the time we get home Dad has already forgiven me. He always forgives me really quickly and says that when it comes to me he’s like a forgetful goldfish.
    We get in the front door and there’s the smell of food in the oven and the table laid nicely and Dad hides the scrunched up fish and chip paper behind his back and she’s ‘gone to all this trouble for nothing.’
    Her and Dad go out and sit in the car and Mum’s behind the wheel and Robert and me spy from the upstairs window and watch their mouths moving really fast like they’re in a silent film.
    It’s already Tuesday and Mum’s turn to take me to see Jaws. Her and Dad haven’t spoken since last time I went. Dad says it’s another Cold War.
    Mum’s late and has to quickly stop off and do a hundred things on the way. I wait in the car and my tummy is snakier than last week.
    We’re running later now and she gets us lost and expects me to find it from going last week but I’d been singing and changing gear plus Dad knows his way round town from the days when he was a boy and helped out the milkman in return for milk.
    Whenever we go round town he can tell me what some of the buildings used to be or what was there before that building was there even. Or he’ll pretend to look dreamy and say, ‘I remember when all this was just fields.’
    He especially likes saying that when we’re way out of town and there are just fields.
    Mum is from a big city up north but Dad’s always lived here and says he always will. Mum makes a face when he’s sentimental about where we live. She calls our town Snoresville.
    It’s raining and I’m sitting in the back and Mum won’t look at me in the mirror but her face is stiffer. People always look more serious or sad when they think nobody’s looking, but tougher when they think they’re being looked at but are pretending they don’t know. A spy knows these things.
    Mum is talking and I’m watching the raindrops going horizontal on my window. The faster the car goes the faster and more backwards the raindrops go, except sometimes the wind blows and they sort of go flat and wriggle against the glass and don’t move.
    I’m sniffing the plastic cover over my bandaged scarred for life hand and Mum asks me why I think we’re going to the psychologist. I used to have a plastic cover over my mattress too when I was young and bedwetted.
    I shrug.
    â€˜Did Dad have a chat to you on the way to Mr Gale last week?’
    â€˜Not really.’
    She goes quiet for a minute.
    â€˜He didn’t say anything about me and Robert?’
    â€˜No.’
    More quietness. Then she’s going on about how Mr Gale is a special man who can help me because I upset them when I burnt myself like that, and that they can’t have a son who hurts himself, not with all the pain already in the world. ‘What would the world come to if little boys went