Where Everything Seems Double, Penny Freedman [best inspirational books txt] 📗

on that even though Granny had said not to because it would cost a fortune, but Mum and Ben would be asleep and it would give them an awful shock. She heard her grandmother go into the bathroom and start the taps running for ‘a long bath’. An idea seized her and would not be ignored. Pulling on her sweater and pocketing her phone, she slipped out of her room and exited through the big bedroom, leaving the door on the latch. She sped down the stairs, through the empty lobby, and out into the windy darkness. She took a deep breath. This felt like a scary thing to be doing but it wasn’t really, she told herself. She was just going to the car park. Where was the harm in that?

The car park was across the road from the hotel, further along the lake. There were no streetlights out here, but there was some light thrown onto the road by some fancy lamps at the entrance to the hotel. The car park, though, was in deep darkness and she felt that she could walk slap into something without warning. She got her phone out and clicked it into life. The blueish glow was comforting but there were no bars indicating any kind of signal. The far corner of the car park, Milo had said. She shone her phone around, trying to orient herself and then moved on in what she thought was the right direction, watching her screen for signs of a signal. One bar. Should she try with one bar? She typed quickly:

‘Cant say much because its dark in the car park but we are ok xx’ and she pressed send and waited. And waited. Then came the message:

‘Message could not be sent. Try again later’

She wanted to cry with frustration but she wasn’t giving up now. By this time her eyes were adjusting to the dark and she could see the perimeter of the car park. She would walk round it until she got a better signal. Groping her way between the cars and keeping her eyes on the screen, she was rewarded eventually by a second tentative bar. She pressed the send icon again, and this time her phone gave its little chirp to tell her the message had gone. Elated, she turned and dodged her way as fast as she could between the rows of cars, back to the light of the road. Mum would get the message as soon as she woke in the morning – or maybe she had heard it arrive. Freda imagined her picking up her phone, smiling and going back to sleep. It had been the right thing to do.

This was what she was thinking as she came out onto the road and bumped straight into a dark figure coming the other way. She couldn’t help giving a squeal of fright, but he just grunted and dashed past her. Feeling shaky, she raced across to the hotel and upstairs to their room. She hesitated at the door. Had she been ages? How long was a long bath? She edged the door open and waited for a voice to call out. Nothing. She ventured in, her mind whirling with excuses, but the room was empty and the bathroom door was closed. She was safe.

Back in her own room, she sat on the bed and thought. She was pretty sure that the person she had bumped into was Dumitru, Granny’s pet waiter. She had glimpsed his face in the light from the hotel lamps. He was carrying something – something that she had bumped into. A bundle, like a bundle of clothes. But the way he was carrying them made her think that it could have been a person he was carrying. Or a body.

He is so nice

Chapter Seven DEMETRIUS IS A WORTHY GENTLEMAN

Friday

Freda is rather quiet this morning and a bit lacklustre about breakfast. I think she is still worrying about the phone call home, but when I suggest that we go out to the car park straight after we have eaten, she says she has rung already and is evasive about when and how. I suspect that she has used the hotel phone although I was mean about paying hotel rates, but I say nothing. Something has upset her and there is a danger that I could end up getting the blame.

After breakfast we go back to our rooms and I settle down by the window with the news section of the paper and Freda has a go at the speedy crossword, though she still seems edgy and jumps visibly when I break our silence to say that I am meeting Dumitru later. She gets up, says she is going to do some sketching out on the jetty and disappears with her sketchpad. Something going on among the young, I think, and decide not to wade in unless I think she is out of her depth.

Dumitru and I meet in the garden again, though it is not as balmy a morning as yesterday and we huddle over the table, warming our hands on our mugs (no iced tea this morning but a large cappuccino). I return his homework to him, appropriately amended with a red pen I found in the bottom of my bag. His main problem is spelling. His grammar is mostly all right, though tenses are a bit random, he sometimes forgets the third person ‘s’ and articles are hit and miss. He has a pretty good vocabulary too, but his language learning has obviously depended on conversation and, I guess, films and TV. I can understand that he might not read books but screens would do just as well, provided that he can tell when he has strayed into the lands of the illiterate.

‘How much do you read?’ I ask.

He gives me an apologetic waggle of the head which says, Read? What’s that? and I become bossy.

‘Do you have a laptop? A tablet?’

‘My