Every so often, his bed would shake as a lorry went by.
But today he wasn’t trying to get to sleep anyway. He was too angry. And he knew that, if he went to sleep, by tomorrow the argument would all be forgotten about, and he didn’t want that. He had meant it. In his anger, he had come to a deep and important realisation: his parents just weren’t very good parents. It made him sad to have this thought – his tummy fell as the words appeared in his mind, like it sometimes did when he was scared – but another part of him felt brave: like he was facing up to something.
“I wish I had better parents…” he whispered. He could feel, as he said it, a tiny tear squeeze out of his left eye. It blurred his vision, making the damp patch look less like a map of Russia and more like a smear of poo. This got in the way of his train of thought a little. It was very distracting, the idea of someone somehow getting their bottom on the ceiling to plop upside down, and so, to get back into the moment, he repeated, slightly more loudly: “I wish I had better parents.”
Then, from underneath his pillow, he grabbed the list he’d secretly written down of all the things that made his mum and dad a bit rubbish at their basic job of being his mum and dad. He held it up above his face and said, a third time, the loudest so far: “I wish I had better parents!”
And then suddenly the entire room started to shake.
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Also by David Baddiel
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