Read Online Two Weeks with the Queen by Morris Gleitzman - Free Book Online Page B

I’ll be back before they are and I’ll put the lock back on and they’ll never know.’
    Alistair had stopped yelling and was just breathing heavily.
    â€˜Anyway,’ he said, ‘you can’t take it off if you haven’t got a screwdriver, can you?’
    Colin went to the kitchen drawer and took out a knife.
    â€˜No,’ yelled Alistair, ‘that’s one of Mum’s dinner knives. She’ll kill us.’
    Colin knelt at the back door. He looked closely at the lock. No signs of rust. In fact the whole thing looked pretty new. Must have been a recent purchase from the Biggest Do-It-Yourself Hardware Centre In Greater London.
    He put the blade of the knife into the groove in one of the screws and started turning.
    â€˜You can’t do that,’ yelled Alistair.
    Colin could and he did.
    The hospital looked exactly like Colin had hoped it would. It was big, almost as big as Buckingham Palace, and built out of great stone blocks.
    Colin looked up at it, standing massive and calm while all around it the roaring London traffic tried to choke it with carbon monoxide and above it the pigeons bombarded it with ribbons of poo.
    It didn’t look worried at all.
    Few exhaust fumes and a bit of pigeon poo doesn’t worry me, it seemed to be saying. I’ve got the best doctor in the world in here.
    Colin felt a weight being lifted off him.
    He walked towards the main entrance, through a car-park filled with the newest and shiniest Jags he’d ever seen.
    Inside it was even better.
    The ceiling was at least twice as high as the hospital in Sydney, and on the corridor walls were real oil paintings of important-looking men with beards and stethoscopes.
    Famous doctors, thought Colin. The geniuses who gave us Modern Medicine and all its wondrous technology. The operating theatre and the X-ray machine and the Band-aid that doesn’t leave a sticky black outline when you pull it off.
    He moved down the corridor, peeking into rooms. Most of them had big dark wooden desks in them and ancient leather armchairs. Others were full of gleaming, modern equipment.
    Colin was impressed. You didn’t often come across blokes with those sorts of desks and those sorts of armchairs who knew how to operate that sort of equipment.
    â€˜You lost?’
    Colin spun round. Looking at him was a nurse, her eyebrows raised.
    â€˜No, I’m right, thanks,’ said Colin.
    She nodded and gave him a kind smile.
    â€˜Looked as though you were lost.’
    â€˜I was just checking that this is the best cancer hospital in London,’ said Colin.
    The nurse grinned and leant towards him.
    â€˜Best in London?’ she said. ‘It’s the best in the world. People come in here, their relatives have already started squabbling over their furniture. When they leave, some of them, they go round to their Aunty Maud’s, get their sideboard back and carry it home by themselves.’
    She grinned again and walked off.
    Colin grinned too. He had a vision of Luke, cured and laughing, staggering home from Bayliss’s Department Store carrying the bunk bed with the built-in cubby house that had been number two on his Chrissie list.
    Colin hurried along the corridor. At the end he turned left and found himself in a huge ward full of bustling nurses and rows of beds with patients in them.
    Then he saw him, standing next to a bed, surrounded by student doctors.
    The Best Doctor In The World.
    He looked exactly like Colin had imagined he would. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a wise, important face and thick grey hair just like the Dad in Dynasty.
    â€˜Accessibility is paramount,’ he said to the student doctors.
    Colin’s chest thumped with excitement.
    He even spoke important.
    â€˜In other words,’ said the doctor, ‘the patient must always feel that he can speak to you, that you’ve got time for him.’
    The student doctors scribbled furiously on their notepads, then