I jump and turn around. Mrs Ewens is looking at me weird.

‘Yes, miss . . . I was just . . .’ My brain scrambles back to this world.

Mrs Ewens taps the table.

‘Felix,’ she says. ‘Your granddad is here.’

The Pink Car

James King says a lot of things – some of them are funny, most of them are nasty. Luckily, because he’s two years above me, I don’t get to hear everything he says, but unfortunately for me the things he says about my granddad are true. No, he’s not weird, but he really has got a pink car and he’s just picked me up from school in it. My grandma used to pick me up from primary school, but when she got ill, Granddad took over, and he kept going even after she died. I thought he would stop this year when I got to secondary, but he kept turning up. I told Mum that it was embarrassing, but she said it gives Granddad something to do, a routine and company. I go to his house for tea each evening too, but that’s only temporary while Mum does double shifts at work. I think Granddad does enjoy picking me up, but not when I get sent home early, because he misses his favourite programmes on TV.

‘You must concentrate, Felix!’ he shouts over the crashing of the gears. ‘You can’t be getting sent home from school all the time!’

‘It’s not all the time, Granddad,’ I say. ‘It’s only twice this week.’

‘And that’s twice too many!’ Granddad looks at me sternly. ‘Maybe they should think of tying you to a chair.’

‘Bit drastic, Granddad,’ I say brightly, trying to cheer him up.

Granddad shakes his head slowly then looks ahead at the road.

I hug my bag as he drives on. I do love my granddad loads, but I wish he didn’t have a pink car. People can see it for miles. Even Jake says it looks like an ice-cream van. Granddad doesn’t even like pink. Sometimes I wonder if he bought it because he’s so short-sighted, but I know he got it because it was my grandma’s favourite colour. One day I woke up, looked out of my bedroom window and saw it parked across the square outside their house. Grandma loved it and drove it everywhere – to the shops, to the bowls club, to rumba classes, to the cinema when she took me there for a treat once a month. After she died, Granddad put an advert in the local paper and a for sale sticker in the back window of the car. But nobody telephoned him and the only people who stopped by were those that stopped to let their dogs pee on the wheels. But I don’t think he wanted to sell the car anyway, because after four days he took the sticker down and sold his blue Ford Fiesta instead.