Read Online Catcall by Linda Newbery - Free Book Online

electrodes, brain scans or impossible tests? I could do that! I’m good at studying, and after all, no stranger could study Jamie better than I could. I’ve known him all his life. I share a bedroom with him. I know all his habits: how funny he can be, how annoying, what he likes and doesn’t like to eat, what makes him laugh.
    It seemed ages since I’d heard that funny hiccuppy laugh of his. I missed it. Mr Bean hadn’t managed to make him laugh, but maybe
I
could.
    So I tried. I went down to the front room, and found him sitting on the sofa looking at the television, though it wasn’t even switched on. I’d give him something better than TV to look at. I told jokes, I did silly walks. I tried to walk on my hands, and nose-dived to the carpet.
    Jamie stared, like I’d gone mental. Like
I’d
gone mental.
    ‘Oh, come on!’ I told him. ‘You could
try
joining in!’
    Running out of things to do, I picked up three satsumas from the fruit bowl and started trying to juggle. It was harder than I thought. The satsumas were bashed and dented from rolling all over the floor by the time Mike came in and saw what I was doing.
    ‘No, Josh, no,’ he went, and I thought he was telling me off for wasting satsumas. But instead he collected them up, and said, ‘You don’t pass from one hand to the other. Juggling’s all about
throwing.’
And off he went.
    How was I to know Mike was a secret juggler? He was good, even when I threw in an apple. Then he nodded for me to chuck in a banana as well, and they all went whirling round like an airborne fruit salad.
    Course, Jamie couldn’t sit watching this without wanting a go himself. He wasn’t even as good as me, which wasn’t saying much, and soon Splodge got fed up with having to dodge flying fruit every few seconds and went to hide behind the TV cabinet, but the important thing was that Jamie was looking like Jamie. He was even doing a few
hic-hic-hics,
not exactly laughing, but sort of revving-up towards laughing, with all the effort of concentrating. We did this until Mum came down and asked Jamie if he wanted to help bath Jennie and put her to bed. It turned out that Mum didn’t know Mike could juggle either, so he had to do more demonstrating, and then she had a go. When they were all tired of juggling except me–if Mike could keep five things in the air, surely I could manage
three
–Jamie went upstairs with her quite willingly to see to Jennie.
    I knew what she was doing, with all this
help me with Jennie
stuff. It was a way of making Jamie feel important and responsible. I helped out too, but I’m older and don’t need such special treatment. Anyway, I was already interested. To me, Jennie was a baby animal, so she was nearly as fascinating as a baby gorilla would be, or a tiger cub. The thing about animals is, from the moment they’re born, or even before that, they’ve got all this stuff programmed into them. What to do. What to eat. What to be frightened of.
    Compared with most baby animals, humans are quite backward. A foal can run with the herd within hours of being born, and a duckling or a cygnet knows how to swim. But all a baby like Jennie can do is lie in her pram, and drink milk, and wee and poo, and cry and sleep. She’s pretty helpless really. A baby orang-utan or a chimpanzee would have been a lot more fun, or my first choice, a mountain gorilla
(gorilla gorilla beringei),
but since I wasn’t likely to get any of those, I’d make do with Jennie. I liked seeing how things changed from week to week. For instance, when she was first born she didn’t even know how to look at people’s faces. Now she could do that. And if you put your finger near her hand, she’d curl her tiny fingers round it. Actually, I know a lot about babies, from reading Mum’s books. Like, just before ours was born, I thought Mum ought to know that Jennie had hair about two inches long and her fingernails already needed clipping. Mum said the baby would have to wait till