LERNERT ENGELBERTS Real Bad People - De Harmonie

the police. How did he think he could get away with just taking my sister for a ride onthe back of his bike like that?His tattoo was a coloured thing twisting around his upper arm. You had tomake a real effort to recognise it as anything. It made me think of one of our most funactivities at school last year, when Mr Garland had asked us to draw a realisticanimal, not fantasy creatures with three eyes or multi-coloured fur or anything likethat. We all started sketching away at our desks.‘What are you doing? Why are you still at your desks? I said realistic animals,didn’t I? Come on, let’s go outside,’ said Mr Garland and he told us to look in the areaaround the school for an animal that we could draw. Almost everyone went toexamine a cat sitting in a window and another group stood around a goat in a field. Ichose a squashed pigeon by the side of the road, which was lying nice and still, so itwas much easier to draw. But that’s not the point. What I wanted to say is that whenwe were finished, Mr Garland showed us a drawing by Rembrandt, of a lion, and itwas rubbish. Mr Garland told us that in the seventeenth century they didn’t have zoosall over the place full of exotic animals or DVDs of The Lion King to show them whata lion looked like, so Rembrandt had to make it up off the top of his head. Then MrGarland showed us a drawing that Rembrandt had done years later of another lion,some time after a lion had visited Amsterdam and Rembrandt had seen for the firsttime what its claws and paws really looked like and where the tail was attached to itsbum – and all I want to say is that the man who put that tattoo on Phil’s arm hadnever seen a real snake in his entire life, because what Phil had winding around hisarm looked more like an overgrown worm.Claire got off the motorbike and took her ice cream, but there was no icecream left in the cone and she looked as though she was about to throw a tempertantrum.