To the Lighthouse, Gerda reads, with cynicism.
Then she leans back and closes her eyes. She’s on the plane, she’s off to New York, she’s got her mother’s stupid book …
Time for a little self-congratulation.
1. She has escaped her terrible school without being spotted.
2. She has replied, in a masterly fashion, by email, to the increasingly urgent phone messages the head has been leaving for her mother. ‘Gerda is now safe with her parents. We are removing her from your school because you have failed to deal with Bullying. Gerda as you know is a gifted child …’ Gerda had fun for another paragraph or two before ending, ‘Yours Truely, Professor Angela Lamb.’ No-one would guess it was from her! (Normally, Mum never used the ‘Professor’, but this was a moment when it might be useful.)
3. She is finally about to read a book by her mother’s new girlfriend, so soon she will know how crap she is, from the point of view of a Genius (Gerda), and she will enjoy telling Mum that, and it will be great, in any case, to sit on a plane reading a book and eating airplane food, which is superdelicious compared to the nutritious rubbish school served up. Or dry cereal, which she’s been living off (much too busy to go to the shop.)
To the Lighthouse. Gerda unfastens her seat belt, looks at the book jacket and considers. As a title, it’s a bit shit, which is what she had hoped and expected to find.
To the Nuthouse, she re-titles it.
But then she remembers Wikipedia said that Virginia Woolf had gone mad in real life, and she remembers the Bullies, at school, who gave her a ticket to the Mental Hospital, and starts to feel a bit ashamed.
Maybe she should give the book a chance. Soon, after all, she’ll be back with Mum, and everything will be all right. She imagines the first enormous hug.
To the Mother, she thinks. To Mummy. To Mum. To New York and my defective mummy. She slips off her shoes, smiles out of the window at bright blue air, and sneers joyfully down at her pages.
Within twenty minutes Gerda is gripped.