I keep looking through the books and then I spot something I know will get Teddy’s attention. ‘Look,’ I say to him. ‘A book of aeroplanes!’
Now he’s interested, and he comes and sits with me. We flick through all the pictures of aeroplanes.
‘That one’s an Airbus A380,’ I say, like I know and haven’t just read it at the bottom of the picture. ‘And wow – that’s a Russian military jet.’
Teddy takes the book off me and, while he stares at the pictures, I rub his back.
He’s really calm and I feel myself relax too.
The lady in the drifty dress comes over to us and I’m worried it’s because we’ve done something wrong, but then she gives me a big smile.
‘Have you found anything you like?’ she asks.
‘This is my brother – he loves planes,’ I say. ‘We’re on a bit of a car journey and we don’t have any screens, so I thought we’d pop in.’
She smiles, like people popping in is a nice surprise.
‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ she says. ‘Do you have a library card?’
Oh yeah. You have to be a member to borrow a book. I forgot that. In my head it was like having a giant Kindle or something and you could just take stuff. But I guess once you take a book out of a library, you’ve got the only copy they have.
See, that’s another reason I like libraries. Most of the time, you get THE copy of the book. And you get to see its history, and who took it out and when, and you feel lucky because ONLY YOU have it now.
‘Teddy, we’d better put that back,’ I say, and then I smile at the lady. ‘We don’t live here. Sorry.’
And then the doors FLY OPEN and bang against the walls.
‘STELLA! TEDDY?!’
‘Don’t walk away from us ever again,’ says Dad, and I’m in proper trouble.
It’s not that naughty trouble you get into, like when you won’t eat breakfast or you’ve broken a thing they specifically told you they would prefer you not to break. It’s that trouble when you’ve really panicked someone. It’s love trouble, where they show you just how much they love you by making you feel like a really awful person.
‘I’m sorry, I just got excited when I saw the library.’
‘It’s okay,’ says Mum. ‘But we don’t have phones, and one second you were there and the next you weren’t. Just tell us next time. There’s no built-in app on a child. We can’t press a button marked Find My Kids.’
I should feel really bad.
But just look at Teddy.
As we were leaving, the lady waited for Dad to stop telling us off before quietly sneaking me the aeroplanes book when he wasn’t looking.
So now Teddy has 1000 Planes and isn’t bored any more, and none of us have to listen to him shouting, ‘BORED!’ all the time.
Dad is driving again instead of Mum. He keeps saying we shouldn’t have stopped as all this stopping and starting will affect our fuel efficiency. The village clock shows it’s after three in the afternoon, and I figure Dad is getting ratty because he usually has a Snickers Mini and a cup of coffee around now. At this rate, he says, we’ll be driving ’till midnight.
After about half an hour of silence, Dad starts loudly complaining again that you just can’t get a map any more. It’s obvious that’s all he’s been thinking about.
‘We should have got one at the library cos they had a whole map section!’ I say. I’m just trying to be helpful, so I don’t know why Dad immediately starts screaming and hitting the steering wheel.
I will never understand grown-ups.
Teddy is asleep in minutes, and I pull his jacket over his legs to keep him warm. Mum and Dad are mumbling to one another so that I can’t hear. So I decide to just join in anyway.
‘Can you tell me what’s going on?’ I say. ‘Shouldn’t we be listening to the news or something?’
Usually when there’s a crisis they will have the news on all the time. It gets really boring. Not only do they have the news on, but then they’ll listen to normal people ringing up radio stations, saying what they think about the news. I find that a little obsessive.
‘We just don’t want to put it on,’ says Mum. ‘We don’t want you guys to get all worried.’
‘Teddy’s asleep,’ I say. ‘And I am unusually mature for my age.’
She laughs. Er, rude?
‘Well, what does Dad think?’ she says, and he waits a moment, then shrugs.
So Mum turns the radio on.
Now, I’d always been under the impression that grown-ups thought too much screen time was bad. But it turns out that no screen time whatsoever is not much good either.
The news says that having no screens has been bringing out the worst in people. Because what if it just keeps going? Some people are realizing they’re going to have trouble making money, and others are realizing they’re going to have trouble spending money. Some people can’t do their work already, and other people now have too much work. Everybody wants to know where the internet has gone. Everybody wants to know how they’re supposed to run their business. The newspapers didn’t come out today because no one’s got anything to type on. Doctors can’t find their records. People have started marching outside 10 Downing Street, and there’s even been more crime. In some places, people have started stealing things, just because they know they can’t be caught.
‘Hey, Dad, that’s like you!’ I say, but he just gives me a
