The Stolen (Paperback)

The teacher introduced Meredith to us and we all said hello and that we were pleased to see her - though if she hadn't turned up we probably wouldn't have been that bothered because, as my dad says, what you've never had you don't miss.

Anyway, I sat and I watched Meredith for awhile as the lesson wore on, and I started to wonder if maybe she couldn't be the best friend I had been waiting for. There were things about her which just made her seen right, really. I mean, she didn't have freckles, not like I had, but all the same she seemed a bit apart from everyone else, the way I feel sometimes. Maybe everyone fells like that but nobody talks about it. And if nobody ever talks about something, how do you know?

Well, at break-time a lot of people made an effort to be friendly to Meredith, and they tried to have a chat with her, or they invited her to join in a game. But although she was equally polite and friendly back, she didn't join in anything.

'Thank you very much for asking,' I heard her say. 'That's very kind of you. But I think I'll decline for the moment, if that's all right. I'd prefer to read my book.'

And so Rona Gusket, who had asked Meredith if she wanted to play hopscotch, and Dave Hobbs, who had asked her if she wanted to do some mud wrestling, both edged away, giving her funny looks, maybe feeling a little bit rebuffed and rejected.

Yet she hadn't been rude. It was just one of those firm refusals.

But there was something odd about the way she had spoken. 'I think I'll decline for the moment.' It didn’t sound like something you'd usually say. It sounded - I don't know - somehow too old. Too old for Meredith, that was. I mean, if her granny had said something like 'I think I'll decline,' you'd have thought that it was something that was just granny-speak. But maybe Meredith had heard her granny use that expression once and it had rubbed off on her. Maybe that was it.

So break-time went on. People tried to be friendly with Meredith and they just as quickly gave up on her. If she wanted to be left alone, that was her business. If she wanted to join in, she was welcome to. If she didn't, well, nobody was going to ask her twice, or feel obliged to persuade her.

I don't know if Meredith knew that I was watching her from the far corner of the playground that day. I suspect - knowing what I do now - that she was, that the whole thing was planned in advance, that she had her eye out for a lonely, sort of solitary, sort of freckly girl. Maybe not. Maybe that's just me being wise after the event.

But let's face it, I wasn't very wise before it.

As I watched Meredith that morning, I realised what it was that separated her from all the other children. It wasn't her height - although she was fairly tall, not the tallest in the playground, but taller than most of us - and it wasn't her face (she was pretty), or her complexion (fair), or her hair (brown) or her clothes (nice enough) or anything at all like that. It was something else. She just looked so utterly and completely bored, and every few minutes she would look from her book to her wrist-watch, glance at the time and sigh heavily as if to say 'Is that all the time that's passed since I last looked?', before going back to her book again.

Now I get bored sometimes. Everyone does. But it's lessons I get bored with, not playtime. But Meredith's boredom seemed to run deeper even than lessons or playtime or long car journeys or wet summer holidays when there's nothing to do. Her boredom ran deeper than traffic jams and deeper than your mum's conversations with people in the supermarket who she hasn't seen for years. Meredith just seemed totally bored with everything. She looked around the playground, at the games of football, hopscotch and all the rest, and her lip seemed to curl with disdain at such trivial activities. She just simply didn’t have the time for it. 'How could you!' her expression seemed to say. 'How tedious it all is.'

And then she looked at her watch again and sighed - the way I imagine a prisoner locked in a cell might sigh, a prisoner with a long, long sentence to serve, who shudders at the thought of all the time that has yet to pass before she can be free. She shudders and wishes it could all be over, in the blink of an eye. --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.