The Most Boring Summer Ever

Zara had been in the city for eleven days and had not done a single interesting thing.

This was not entirely her fault. Her mother had taken a job in the city for the summer and had brought Zara along, which had sounded exciting in June but had turned out to mean long days alone in a small flat on the fourth floor of a building on a street with no garden, no park nearby, and neighbours who all seemed to work from home and got annoyed if you made too much noise in the stairwell.

Zara was eleven years old and used to a house with a garden and a bicycle and friends she had known since she was five. The flat had none of these things. It had a window that looked out onto another building, a small television, and approximately four hundred books that belonged to whoever had rented the flat before them.

She had read nine of the books. She had watched everything interesting on the television. She had reorganised her room twice, which was not something she had ever done at home and which she hoped never to do again.

On the twelfth day her mother said: "Zara, you have got to go outside."

Zara said: "There is nowhere to go."

Her mother pointed out of the window at the city, which stretched in every direction as far as you could see, full of buildings and streets and people and things. She did not say anything. She just pointed.

Zara took the point.

She went downstairs and out through the heavy front door and stood on the pavement in the morning sun. The street was busy. People walked past with coffee cups and headphones. A van was making a delivery to the shop on the corner. A pigeon sat on a windowsill across the road and looked at Zara with the blank confidence that pigeons always have.

She had no idea which way to go. She turned left because left felt slightly more interesting than right and started walking.

She had been walking for about ten minutes, not really looking at anything in particular, when she nearly tripped over the old woman sitting on the steps of a narrow building tucked between a kebab shop and a laundrette.

The old woman was small and wore a very large orange coat even though it was August. She had bright black eyes and white hair pulled back loosely and she was eating a sandwich with great concentration. She looked up when Zara stumbled and said: "Careful. These steps are uneven."

"Sorry," Zara said. "I was not looking."

"No," the old woman said. "You were not." She looked at Zara for a moment with her head tilted slightly to one side. "Are you lost?"

"No," Zara said.

The old woman raised one eyebrow.

"Well," Zara said. "Not lost exactly. I just do not know where I am going."

The old woman nodded slowly as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. She folded up the rest of her sandwich in its paper wrapping and tucked it into her coat pocket. Then she stood up, which took a moment, and said: "I am going to show you something. Come on."

Zara, who had been told many times not to go anywhere with strangers, stood very still.

The old woman looked at her. "I am eighty one years old and I am five feet tall," she said. "I have a bad knee and I take the bus everywhere. I think you can manage."

Zara thought about the flat with its four hundred books and its window looking at another building.

"Alright," she said.