They went off to the fishing spot. They stood and waited silently for bites. You’re supposed to be quiet when you fish, otherwise you scare them away. But Sven couldn’t be quiet for long.
He tried to lighten the gloomy mood with a few jokes.
“What did the baker do when robbers turned up?”
“Battered them,” yawned Ella, because she’d read that joke on an ice cream stick.
“Who doesn’t move a whisker the whole holidays?”
Ella knew that joke too, because she’d read it on another ice cream stick.
“The barber!”
Dani thought they were very bad jokes.
And then Paddy appeared.
“Come on, Sven,” he said, “you can test-drive my motorboat.”
Sven was overjoyed and disappeared with Ella’s extra father. Dani watched them with relief.
She liked her cousin a lot, but he could be a bit dense. He didn’t know how it felt for her not to be everything to her dad.
It was probably because Sven didn’t have a father himself. Only a mother and a grandmother and grandfather. And a parakeet called Tiger.