Abstract:
'Why don't you phone Karen and walk to school with her?' Dad said.
He peeled the skin back from a banana, sliced it into slanting rounds on the breadboard. 'You know I'd take you but your mother wants a couple of fresh nighties brought up to her.'
But I didn't want to walk with Karen that Wednesday morning. Karen was my best friend. She lived around the crescent from us and although her mother and mine didn't have much to do with each other they were both in hospital together, but in different wards. My mother was having problems.
Dad overlapped the slices of banana on buttered bread, tapped the edge of a teaspoon to sprinkle brown sugar. We'd both slept in this morning. It was only Mum phoning from the hospital that had woken us. We'd stayed up late watching re-runs of the lift-off of Apollo Eleven and then when it was really late we had put on our ski jackets and taken mugs of cocoa down to the garden to sit on the swing seat by the orchid house and look up into the sky.
