The Missing Link Read Online Free Page B

were only messing.’
    ‘They weren’t,’ said Tina. ‘I hate them.’
    ‘Oh. Don’t hate them,’ said Oggy.
    ‘I hate everybody,’ said Tina, staring into space. ‘Everybody except you.’
    Oggy licked her face then looked back towards the street and sniffed the air. The smell of frying was drifting around them from an early morning café somewhere nearby.
    ‘What do you do for breakfast round here?’ said Oggy.
    ‘Breakfast?’ said Tina. ‘What breakfast?’
    ‘Pity about you,’ said Oggy, and set off at a trot along the street.

2
    DESPITE HIS DELIGHT at being on the bus, Danny was exhausted from battling with the sedative, and went out like a light as soon as we started to move. He was slumped against the window and every time we went over a bump his head rattled against it. I managed to drag a bit of his
banky
out of his clutches and stuff it under his head. It didn’t make any difference to him but it did, at least, stop people from staring.
    I was too hot in my jacket but I couldn’t take it off because of Darling, who also seemed to have gone to sleep. Now that the excitement of the moment had passed I was beginning to get frightened again. What would Mom and Maurice do when they found we were missing? Would they go searching the fields behind our street and the woods beyond? Would they think something awful had happened? Would they call in the police?
    And the thoughts that came after that were even more scary. Because what was happening couldn’t be real. I was in a bus with my loopy stepbrother, heading towards some unknown place where his mother might, or might not, be waiting for us. I tried to remember what I knew about her, but it wasn’t much. She was rich, Maurice said, as well as mad. She had come into some colossal inheritance from some American relation and she and Maurice had set up home in Scotland, where they worked together on some kind of research. But then it was confused. Something had happened to Danny. Maurice had taken him away from his mother and gone back to live in Ireland. What was it Maurice had said? Her crazy dreams mattered more to her than what was real.
    The words spooked me. Because now, here on this trundling bus, real was becoming dreams. There was a talking starling in my pocket. The impossible was happening. If I wasn’t mad then the world was, and I didn’t know which was worse.

3
    OGGY, MEANWHILE, HAD found a little shop doing a strong trade in morning papers. He sat at the door as though he were waiting for his owner, and if anyone noticed him they said things like, ‘Ah, how sweet’ and ‘What a good dog’.
    It was the ideal shop for Oggy. The bread was near the door on a tall, narrow set of shelves. It was only a question of being patient and picking his moment. It came when a bit of a queue developed at the counter and there was no one near the door. Oggy was in and out like a flash, and he didn’t wait around to find out if he had been seen.
    ‘You’re a star,’ said Tina, as they shared the loaf. ‘I thought you’d run out on me.’
    Oggy’s mouth was full and he didn’t reply. Besides, there were people around now, and it was too risky.
    ‘Not talking to me, eh?’ said Tina. Oggy gave her face a crumb-sticky lick.
    ‘Eeugh!’ said Tina. ‘Gerrroff!’
    A man with a suit came up to the door with a bunch of keys.
    ‘Clear off, now,’ he said. ‘We’re opening for business.’
    ‘I’ll set my dog on you,’ said Tina.
    ‘Will you?’ said the man. ‘I’ll set the police on you, so.’
    Tina packed up the last of the loaf and moved a couple of feet away from the door. Then she rummaged around in her big, cloth bag and pulled out a large piece of rain-softened cardboard. It had been torn unevenly from a box, and on one side was printed ‘Kello Ri Kri’. On the other side, Tina had written: ‘I Am Homeless Please Help’. As Oggy watched, she found a stubby pencil, crossed out ‘I Am’ and scratched in ‘We