The Shell House by Linda Newbery Read Free Book Online

prompted. ‘Try using words if it’s not too much effort.’
    ‘Got this note.’
    ‘What’s your name?’
    ‘Dean.’ The boy’s tone implied that everyone ought to know.
    ‘Dean what?’
    ‘Dean Brampton.’ Again, the
What’s it to you?
inflexion. The boy’s gaze fell on Greg. Still chewing, he raised his chin and managed by a small adjustment of his features to give a look of contempt.
    Dean. Dean woz ere
.
    There were lots of boys called Dean . . .
    ‘Well, Dean Brampton, you can come back here at break-time and we’ll have a little discussion about manners and why they’re rather important. And you can explain why you’re still chewing gum when I just told you to get rid of it. Off you go.’ Only now did Mr O’Donnell look down at the note he’d been given. He passed it, still folded, across the desk. ‘Jordan, for you.’
    Jordan read it. He didn’t let Greg see, but Greg saw the expression on his face. Immediately Jordan got his things together, zipped his pencil case, folded his papers and stuffed them into his rucksack. Everyone looked at him. ‘Got to go,’ he said, pushing his chair back. He didn’t ask politely, but this time Mr O’Donnell didn’t pursue his crusade for good manners. He just looked at the open door with an anxious expression as Jordan’s footsteps retreated down the corridor.
    ‘What’s that about?’ Bonnie asked, aggrieved. ‘Can we all go?’

At Jazz’s
    Greg’s mental photograph: a packed room. The
camera is held at head height, rather shakily. The
shot is out-of-focus, as if seen through an
alcoholic haze. There are figures, male and female:
spiked hair, bare shoulders, one head aggressively
bald. A girl’s head is caught in mid-turn, long
hair flying as if in a wind machine. Someone is
raising two fingers at the camera, and someone
else holding up a joint and grinning inanely. The
air is blue with smoke.
    With the new digital camera his parents had bought him for his birthday, Greg could download his pictures straight to the computer, bypassing the bother and expense of developing, then tinker with them using Photoshop. Last night he had downloaded his shots of Graveney Hall, and had cropped and enlarged and experimented. Finally he had printed out three, intending to show them to Jordan: the house from the dip in the driveway, then a view through the open doorway on the garden side, and the DEAN WOZ ERE rubbish and graffiti. In the common room at break he took out the three prints and looked at them, beginning to see how he could develop a sequence. From certain angles and in certain lights, you could easily think the house was still intact and inhabited; only at closer range did you see ruin and decay. If his photographs gradually closed in on the vandals’ territorial marking, it would give a sense of—what was that word Mr O’Donnell had used the other day?—bathos, that was it. Grand and imposing from some views, derelict and litter-strewn from others.
    Greg took out a slip of paper from his pencil case and re-read it.
In photography everything is so ordinary; it
takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.
David Bailey
, it said, in Jordan’s small, firm handwriting. Jordan had read it in a magazine and copied it for Greg, knowing of his ambition to be a photographer. They both liked the idea of
learning to see
. It was, Greg thought, more important than learning about apertures and exposures.
    Where was Jordan now? Greg looked up at the doorway. He would have had Geography before break if he’d got back from wherever he’d been summoned. Madeleine, coming in, caught his eye and came over, with Bonnie trailing.
    ‘Why did Jordan have to rush off like that?’
    Quickly, Greg put his photographs away in their folder. ‘Don’t know—he didn’t say.’
    ‘Is he in trouble?’ Bonnie asked eagerly.
    Greg gave her a withering look. ‘Yeah, caught dealing crack behind the bike sheds, I bet.’
    ‘I expect it’s to do with his