The Day the Screens Went Blank Danny Wallace (best summer reads .TXT) 📖

which makes the man jump, and then she bursts out laughing in shock.

‘Now, Stella!’ yells Dad and he KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCKS his door, so I do the same.

BANG BANG BANG!

‘Aaaargh!’ screams Mum, still laughing. ‘Bye!’

Now we’re all running for the car, and I’m starting to laugh with relief, but Dad trips over and goes head first into a bush because that just seems to be his life now.

As he gets up, the door of his house opens and he stands up and waves at them.

‘I’m just looking at this lovely bush!’ he shouts, dusting mud off his shoulders.

‘Ruuun!’ yells Mum, and Dad laughs as he runs, and he shouts, ‘Start the car!’

Dad’s letting Mum drive?!

She leaps into the driver’s seat and starts trying to crank the weird old gearstick thing, as I do Teddy’s seatbelt. Dad dives in through the window.

The tyres spin as Mum hits the gas and we all laugh as the people outside their houses scratch their heads and wonder who on earth this weird family is, and before we know it Dad is shouting, ‘No!’ as Mum makes a sharp turn and we bounce up on to the motorway that no one’s allowed to use.

Mum cranks up the music on the radio and we zoom down the middle lane of the empty motorway in a purple Rolls-Royce which has old-fashioned dials and no screens so I can see clear as day that we’re going a hundred miles an hour and now all you can hear is us cheering.

‘Well, here we are then,’ says Mum, who seems to have got quite good at driving a posh car like this. ‘Rendlesham. I bet everyone is ready to stretch their legs, eh?’

I don’t know why, but I feel nervous. Well, I do know why. I want this to go well for Dad. And so does Mum because she’s holding his hand. I am sure things become very complicated when you’re a grown-up, especially when you can’t just use an emoji to explain how you feel.

After I’ve said hello to Grandma and had a Nesquik or something, I’ll take Teddy out into the maze. Or into the orchard, where we can find the Story Tree and the fairy glade. Maybe I’ll dress him up in a suit of armour or something.

Mum puts the indicator on – it’s so loud! – and we turn into a short road that leads into the forest. At the end is a small cottage. It’s got a little wooden bench outside and two square windows. What is this place?

‘What are we doing here?’ I ask.

‘This is Grandma’s house,’ says Dad, like I’m being silly. ‘You probably don’t recognize it without the Skype ring noise.’

I look at it again. What does he mean? I don’t recognize it at all.

Where are the turrets? Where’s the pond?

We get out and Mum says she hopes Grandma is in because this would have been ‘a hell of a journey otherwise’ (’scuse her language). Dad peers through the window and he spots something.

‘The teapot,’ he says. ‘It’s steaming. She’s in.’

So he takes a deep breath and knocks on the door.

Wait.

We all look at each other.

We smile.

Should we?

‘Blinkin’ kids!’ yells Grandma at the top of her lungs when she opens the door and there’s no one to be seen. ‘That’s the third time this week!’

‘Surprise!’ we all yell, jumping out from behind the tree.

‘Oh my days!’ shouts Grandma, and now she’s laughing and a bit shaky, and me and Teddy hug her hard.

‘We were worried about you!’ I say. ‘And we couldn’t remember your phone number and we didn’t have it written down and we couldn’t email you or text you or call you on Skype and we wanted to make sure you were okay and Dad committed a crime and fell in a pond and smelled really bad for a really long time and we lit a fire in a field!’

There was a lot I wanted to say, okay?

‘Oh, welcome!’ she says, and then she looks up at Mum and Dad.

And there’s a moment where her and Dad just look at each other. Then she stretches her arms out wide and Dad falls into them and he almost completely swallows her in a giant hug and I think that everything they wanted to say was said in that hug and never needed to be said again.

‘You came to rescue me!’ says Grandma as she brings out my Nesquik to the back garden.

‘We were worried about you,’ I say. ‘In case you needed help.’

‘Oh, I’ve got my vegetable patches,’ she says. ‘I’ve got my tins.’

Grandma’s added whipped cream and about four million marshmallows to my mug. She says she always made sure she had enough in her cupboard just in case I ever made it round.

‘People my age know how to be ready for anything!’ she says.

Her back garden is quite tiny. I remember it being the size of a football pitch.

‘Do you remember the maze?’ she says, and of course I do! But where is it? ‘We used to put out cardboard boxes everywhere and build them together for hours. Wearing our tinfoil suits of armour.’

Cardboard boxes? Tinfoil?

‘And the Story Tree?’ Grandma says. ‘Do you remember the Story Tree?’

I do, but I can’t see it…

She points at the big green garden umbrella in the corner.

‘We used to sit under that and make up our own stories, before we got the paddling pool out and then jumped in the—’

‘The pond!’ I say, remembering.

All these memories I have – of being little and stomping through big marshes and hiding in forests and building dens and finding fairy houses – Grandma gave them all to me and made them real.

‘There’s nothing like playing,’ she says. ‘You can do anything and be anyone. You can make the world your own!’

It’s nice to have some memories that could never, ever have actually happened the way I thought.