LERNERT ENGELBERTS Real Bad People - De Harmonie

I dashed round to the back garden. Dad was standing in front of the school,inspecting the wall with a little hammer. His jeans were soaked through right up to theknees. He looked like a miner who’d been working underground for a week. Thebuilding was still vibrating, so Kevin was probably down there all by himself in thedark cellar with the drilling machine.Claire wanted to come into town with me. That really was a miracle, because shenever wanted to do anything when she was in one of her bad moods. I’d had enoughof sanding and thought it was about time to start painting the board.‘Buy just one pot to start with,’ said Mum, ‘and we’ll see how you get on.’ Ididn’t know how much paint I was going to need.‘I’ll only go into town with you if we can have an ice cream,’ Claire said. ‘Wehave to go for an ice cream or I’m not coming.’She had dietary rules that she was supposed to follow, but she just ignoredthem. She always found someone to give her sweets or other sugary things. I thoughtit was a bit too risky to have an ice cream and then get the paint, because I didn’tknow if I’d have enough money left from the five pounds that Mum had given me, butthat’s what Claire wanted.Don’t go thinking that our town’s anything special. It was actually more like onelong street, and the closer you got to the sea, the more the houses clumped together.There wasn’t a CD shop in the centre, for example, just one shelf in Costcutters withCDs by pop singers that I for one had never heard of. If you wanted an ice cream,you had to go down to the boulevard, where there was an Italian ice-cream van whenthe weather was good.We chained our bikes to a tree where someone had just been sick. You couldstill see the lumps of fish and chips in it, and Claire was furious with me for leaving