The Good Girl by Fiona Neill Read Free Book Online

put them down it looked as though he was wearing red-rimmed glasses. He carefully wrote this down in one of his many notebooks.
    I should probably say right now that Ben has some non-specific developmental issues that can’t be parcelled up in a tidy title like dyslexia or dyspraxia. At least this is what I have heard my parents say to other adults. Basically he’s a bit weird. Instead of labels I prefer descriptions. Ben keeps every bus, train and tube ticket that has ever been bought for him and sticks each one on his bedroom wall in a predetermined pattern. Once Luke removed a train ticket and replaced it with one of his own and Ben noticed immediately. He hoards food. Mum has found packets of crisps at the back of his wardrobe and we got mice at our old home because he had taken up a floorboard to hide biscuits. He also loves manuals and keeps box files of them in his bedroom: instructions for Lego, mobile phones, computers. He isn’t choosy. He mostly beats us all at Cluedo, which is his current favourite obsession.
    Sometimes I think that if Dad wasn’t an expert in the adolescent brain Ben might just have been allowed to be the family eccentric instead of being sent off to special
ists. Actually, this is what my grandfather said, but I tend to agree with him. Dad said Grandpa resisted labels because he used to be an alcoholic.
    ‘I am a question with no answer,’ Ben once declared over dinner after an autism expert decided that he didn’t fit the criteria. But Dad is a scientist and believes there is an explanation for everything if you try hard enough to find it. I think that sometimes you just have to accept that there isn’t. ‘Shit happens, and you just have to deal with it,’ as my Aunt Rachel is so fond of saying. Our family has a lot of sayings but they all tend to contradict each other.
    I was so distracted by the drumming and Dad’s reaction to it that I missed the moment when Jay walked into the garden for the first time.
    ‘Two boys,’ declared Ben, squinting through his binoculars again. ‘Bish, bash, bosh.’
    Later I asked Ben why he said that. Was it because he once had a Bish Bash Bosh train as part of his Thomas the Tank Engine set? Was it something recorded in his notebook on the page reserved for favourite phrases? Or did he see Jay and Marley shove each other? Did they jostle to see who could get through the gate first? Ben couldn’t remember. He consulted his notebook for clues. But on the page dedicated to the first day the Fairports moved in next door there was nothing but a rough pencil drawing of a huge fire. A vital clue had been lost.
    The four of them came together to stand in an arc, looking up at their new home. Just as they were still, the
sun came out from behind a cloud, bathing them in a blinding arc of light. A ray bounced off our window and the Fairports all turned towards us at the same time, shielding their eyes from the glare. Jay pointed directly at me. His hair was thick and curly and hid his eyes so I couldn’t see where he was looking. We all ducked down, even Dad, and giggled manically.
    ‘What on earth are you all doing?’ asked Mum. We were so involved in what was going on in the Fairports’ garden that we hadn’t heard her coming in through the front door. She noisily piled bags of shopping on the table to make us feel guilty and came over to the window.
    ‘Good day?’ asked Dad, tickling Ben until he pleaded for mercy.
    ‘The deputy head pastoral, as she insists on being called, needs managing,’ said Mum. ‘Someone with a deep sense of irony put her in that post. But the head of Biology is a great appointment. Even if I say so myself. What are you hiding from? A family of wooden giraffes?’
    We looked out of the window. The Fairports had disappeared into their new home. But one of them had righted the giraffes so that they now stared at us. In part it was nervous laughter because we had been caught doing something faintly illicit. We all laughed