because she was told to do so on her first day, and she just remembers that and doesn’t want to get a bad report. So I decided that I would just have to fight the hunger, after all I wasn’t starving like those poor children on the BBC news. No, I would just sit and wait.
At 6pm the work experience girl told me over the reception desk that she had to lock up, so I pulled on my trench and thanked her for her polite manner, then left. I felt disappointed, but not despondent. After all they had very little information to go on, just a name and a picture.
I was standing outside the university, looking up at the seagulls circling the big white buildings, calling after one another, and sometimes swooping down to pick up food, when the work experience girl came and stood next to me. “Sorry that we couldn’t do anything for you today, but maybe tomorrow we’ll
come across something for you? You never know.” Well I was shocked that she wanted to speak to me and so thanked her for her
politeness; after all I had been in her peripheral vision all day - surely she was sick of the site of me by now? But then she continued - “So where are you staying tonight?” I was quite taken aback by this remark, thinking she was very intrusive into my
business. Then I looked at her egg face, and her quiet mouth, and realised that she was just enquiring, being polite. I then thought to myself and realised that I hadn’t planned this far ahead and I had nowhere to go, so I concluded that I’d seek the nearest reasonable hotel, when the girl on work experience opened her small pale lips, “If you have nowhere to go there is a spare room, with a spare bed in my house. I share with another girl but she’s travelling at the moment, and actually since she left it’s been a bit quiet around the house, I could do with the company, what do you think?” Well I dithered and dathered for a while, stumbling over my own words. I
wondered what this work experience girl was doing living with a friend, not with her parents, and anyway it would be terrible to bother the young girl with my problems, and besides I’d only briefly met her today and I didn’t even know her name. “My name is Leanne,” she said, “and I know it must seem a bit funny, but
honestly, I’d love the company and you’ll save money on a hotel, and it’s not that bad a place.”
Well the look in her eyes, staring up at me like my cat when he’s been without
food whilst I was working a double shift on the ward, I couldn’t but agree, on the condition that I was to take her out for a meal. A wind picked up and blew leaves over my shoes and her trousers. She smiled and that was that.
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