her father. He hadn’t given her advice or pep talks. But he’d wait outside for her, often with a telescope in the car, a bottle of wine in the boot and sleeping bags for the beach. He showed her over and over again that her past didn’t mean a future without happiness.
Chapter 7
They were crossing the immense Yukon River, frozen over during winter, the bridge held up by concrete pillars, but in the blackness you couldn’t see the bottom of the drop. Adeeb knew that there were dinosaur footprints along the banks of the Yukon, preserved and fossilised in the mud. He found it easier to imagine prehistoric creatures roaming unseen below them, than any living animals.
Behind them, the damselfish headlights had fallen a little further back.
I don’t want Mum to hear something on the radio again or on Mr Azizi’s CB and for me not to know what’s happening till later. So I’m going to use ‘Speech Magic’. That’s what it’s called, like ‘Hey presto! I can hear and speak! Ta-da!’ It’s this programme I have on my laptop that turns someone’s mouth-voice into typed words on my screen. That’s the magic part. And because the screen is lit up it’s my secret weapon to hear even in the dark. Though it’s not always convenient to be carrying a laptop around. And it doesn’t work if there are lots of voices, because it scrambles them all up together. But if there’s just one person you’re OK, so I can just imagine me on a dark night with a boy wanting to whisper lovey-dovey things to me, and I make him wait while I pull my laptop out of my enormous handbag. That’s a joke! I don’t have a handbag, And I don’t have a boyfriend. I AM TEN and I think it’s really silly that people in Year Six have boyfriends or handbags.
The not-magic part is that it turns my typing into a machine-voice. I like it much more if someone reads my type so I’d only use the machine voice if it was a big emergency. When I got it, I had to choose the voice I wanted, like Mum did when she got her satnav – so your language and then whether you want American or UK English, then man or woman, then young or older (which Mum doesn’t have on her satnav). I knew that boys’ voices get deep when they get older, but I thought girls stayed the same. Dad told me that a young voice sounds clear and a little tinkly, like tapping a metal kettle with a teaspoon. Years make your voice sound heavier, but an old person’s voice sounds fragile and brittle, like it’s made from very thin china. The Voice-Magic people don’t do a very old voice because they must think nobody wants to sound like a thin piece of china, but I think it might be coolio, if you sound like a Ming vase.
When I was choosing I thought it would be funny to have my voice as an American man. As it’s not my voice, I thought it would sort of point that out too , but Mum looked really upset when she heard it, which I didn’t mean to do at all. So I changed it to ‘UK English girl’.
I’ve known Jimmy since we were babies and he learned a lot of sign without even realising he was doing it. Anyway, me and Jimmy, when we were friends, had favourite words, like ‘tortoise’ - weird word. And we’d just say ‘tortoise’ to each other and then we’d laugh so much that Jimmy would fart and we called it fart-funny. One day our word was ‘vacuous’. We spent all day saying everything was vacuous – people, bananas, loo rolls, pencil sharpeners. He said the word ‘vacuous’ came from the inside of a vacuum cleaner, which is full of bits of fluff. I knew from Mum that it was because of the word ‘vacuum’, meaning nothing there at all so sucking everything in, but I liked Jimmy’s fluff-bag more. That was the same week I chose the UK English girl voice and Jimmy who was the ONLY person I let listen to it, apart from Mum and Dad, said the girl sounded vacuous. So whenever I use this machine I know I sound like a fluffy vacuum bag.
But I want to thank Mr Azizi for
Chapter 7
They were crossing the immense Yukon River, frozen over during winter, the bridge held up by concrete pillars, but in the blackness you couldn’t see the bottom of the drop. Adeeb knew that there were dinosaur footprints along the banks of the Yukon, preserved and fossilised in the mud. He found it easier to imagine prehistoric creatures roaming unseen below them, than any living animals.
Behind them, the damselfish headlights had fallen a little further back.
I don’t want Mum to hear something on the radio again or on Mr Azizi’s CB and for me not to know what’s happening till later. So I’m going to use ‘Speech Magic’. That’s what it’s called, like ‘Hey presto! I can hear and speak! Ta-da!’ It’s this programme I have on my laptop that turns someone’s mouth-voice into typed words on my screen. That’s the magic part. And because the screen is lit up it’s my secret weapon to hear even in the dark. Though it’s not always convenient to be carrying a laptop around. And it doesn’t work if there are lots of voices, because it scrambles them all up together. But if there’s just one person you’re OK, so I can just imagine me on a dark night with a boy wanting to whisper lovey-dovey things to me, and I make him wait while I pull my laptop out of my enormous handbag. That’s a joke! I don’t have a handbag, And I don’t have a boyfriend. I AM TEN and I think it’s really silly that people in Year Six have boyfriends or handbags.
The not-magic part is that it turns my typing into a machine-voice. I like it much more if someone reads my type so I’d only use the machine voice if it was a big emergency. When I got it, I had to choose the voice I wanted, like Mum did when she got her satnav – so your language and then whether you want American or UK English, then man or woman, then young or older (which Mum doesn’t have on her satnav). I knew that boys’ voices get deep when they get older, but I thought girls stayed the same. Dad told me that a young voice sounds clear and a little tinkly, like tapping a metal kettle with a teaspoon. Years make your voice sound heavier, but an old person’s voice sounds fragile and brittle, like it’s made from very thin china. The Voice-Magic people don’t do a very old voice because they must think nobody wants to sound like a thin piece of china, but I think it might be coolio, if you sound like a Ming vase.
When I was choosing I thought it would be funny to have my voice as an American man. As it’s not my voice, I thought it would sort of point that out too , but Mum looked really upset when she heard it, which I didn’t mean to do at all. So I changed it to ‘UK English girl’.
I’ve known Jimmy since we were babies and he learned a lot of sign without even realising he was doing it. Anyway, me and Jimmy, when we were friends, had favourite words, like ‘tortoise’ - weird word. And we’d just say ‘tortoise’ to each other and then we’d laugh so much that Jimmy would fart and we called it fart-funny. One day our word was ‘vacuous’. We spent all day saying everything was vacuous – people, bananas, loo rolls, pencil sharpeners. He said the word ‘vacuous’ came from the inside of a vacuum cleaner, which is full of bits of fluff. I knew from Mum that it was because of the word ‘vacuum’, meaning nothing there at all so sucking everything in, but I liked Jimmy’s fluff-bag more. That was the same week I chose the UK English girl voice and Jimmy who was the ONLY person I let listen to it, apart from Mum and Dad, said the girl sounded vacuous. So whenever I use this machine I know I sound like a fluffy vacuum bag.
But I want to thank Mr Azizi for
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