Read Online The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan - Free Book Online

morning passed, he began to feel rather different. His words began to haunt him. Had he really said them? He became aware of the crumpled figure of Barry Tamerlane in front of him. Peter leaned forwards and tapped him on the back with a ruler. But Barry shook his head and would not turn. Peter winced as he remembered more of what he had said. He tried to remind himself of how awful Barry had been. Peter tried to concentrate on his victory, but he no longer felt good about it. He had mocked Barry for being fat and having a brace and a teddy and for helping his mum. He had wanted to defend him- self and teach Barry a lesson, but he had ended up making him an object of scorn and contempt for the whole school. His words had hurt far more than a straight punch to the nose. He had crushed Barry. Who was the bully now?
    On his way out to lunch Peter dropped a note on Barry’s desk. It read, ‘Do you want to play soccer? PS. I’ve got a teddy too and I have to help with the dishes. Peter.’

    Barry had been dreading facing everyone at the next play- time so he gladly accepted. The two boys got up a game and made a point of being on the same team. They helped each other score goals, and walked off at the end arm in arm. It didn’t make sense for anyone to go on jeering at Barry. He and Peter became friends, not close friends exactly, but friends all the same. Barry pinned Peter’s note to the wall above his desk in his bedroom, and the bully, like all bad dreams, was soon forgotten.

Chapter Five

The Burglar
    All the neighbours were talking about the burglar. Months ago he had broken into a house at the bottom of the street. He had wriggled in through a back window in the full light of a sunny mid-afternoon when the house was empty. He had made off with knives and forks and a painting. Now he was working his way up the street, a house on one side, then a house on the other.
    What a nerve! people kept saying. He’s bound to get caught. Last night he did number eight, next week it will be number nine.

    But no, he would wait for three weeks, or four, and he would leapfrog to number eleven. Then he would come the very next day and rob number twelve. He stole televisions, video machines, computers, statues, jewels. He knew how to pick locks, scale up drainpipes, silence burglar alarms, slide back window catches, make friends with the angry dogs, and how to stroll away with his loot in the middle of the day without being seen. He was a magician, a maestro of theft. He was invisible, silent and weightless. He left no footprints in the garden beds, or fingerprints on door handles.
    The police were baffled. Two plain-clothes men were sent to watch over the street in an unmarked car. Everyone knew who they were. They sat doing crosswords and eating sand- wiches until they were called away to more important work. Half an hour later, the burglar struck again, and carried off a box of expensive perfumed soap and a silver-topped walking- stick from the home of Mrs Goodgame, a rich old lady with protruding yellow teeth who lived alone. The stick had belonged to her great-grandfather, a famously fierce missionary. He used it to beat African children when they didn’t study their Bible lessons.
    ‘It was of great sentimental value!’ Mrs Goodgame wailed when she came round to tell the news to Peter’s mother. ‘It travelled round the world three times in the nineteenth century. And my soap, my precious soap!’
    ‘I’m glad he took that stinking stick,’ Peter said to Kate after Mrs Goodgame had left. ‘I hope that burglar breaks it over his knee.’

    Kate nodded fiercely. ‘I wish he had taken her teeth!’ The fact was that Mrs Goodgame, even though she had a name that made her sound fun, was not liked by the children in the street. She was one of those rare unhappy grown-ups who are profoundly irritated by the fact that children exist. When they played out, she shouted at them from her front window for ‘gathering outside my