Free Squiggle by B.B. Wurge Page A

suspected they were being watched from above by a monkey!
    She got to a kind of platform that was very high up above the ground. It was the first level of the Eiffel Tower, and it was crowded with people and shops and a little cafe where you could sit and drink things and look out over the railing at the city lights. She decided to take a break to rest her hands, which were beginning to hurt from hanging onto all that rough iron. She sat down on the flat top of a girder and leaned back against another girder, stretched out her legs, got comfortable and . . . suddenly leaped to her feet again!
    She peered into the cafe. Two people were seated across from each other at a little table near the railing. They were so close to her that she could have jumped onto their heads. They didn’t look very happy; they weren’t talking to each other and they weren’t looking over the railing at the nice view. Instead, they were slumped over their coffee cups. They looked familiar, but Squiggle couldn’t quite see their faces in the dim light. Something about them made her strangely excited and she began to tremble. Finally one of them looked at his watch, as if he were bored and depressed and wanted to know if it was time to go home yet. As he turned his head Squiggle got a good look at his face and she nearly fell off the girder in astonishment. She caught herself just in time. The man was her father! And the woman sitting across from him was her mother. Squiggle had found her parents.
    And what unhappy parents they seemed to be! Her heart went out to them for the first time in her life. Were they always that way and she just hadn’t noticed? She tried to remember, but Lobelia had spent so much time in a darkened bedroom, with her eyes glued to the TV set, that she had never really noticed the expression on her parents’ faces.
    The amazing truth—this may be difficult to believe—is that Mr. and Mrs. Squagg actually missed their daughter. For the first few days of their vacation, they thought they were having a good time. This is because they had all the fuss and confusion of making travel plans, and finding a nice place in Paris to stay, and figuring out where the local shops and restaurants were, and where Mrs. Squagg could get her hair done.
    Then after a while Mr. Squagg began to notice a strange, wistful look on his wife’s face. She seemed to be looking far away—not at distant buildings in the city, but at something much more distant than that. One morning when Mr. Squagg was shaving in front of a mirror, he realized that he had the same wistful look on his face too.
    Neither of them said anything to each other, but they both understood each other, as married couples sometimes do. They missed their daughter. Even though Lobelia had been ugly and fat and a terrible nuisance, and even though Mrs. Squagg still had a bandage on the bridge of her nose from an alarm clock that Lobelia had thrown at her, and even though Mr. Squagg still had long red scratches running down his arm from the shoulder to the wrist, still, Lobelia was their only daughter. And if she was a pest, maybe it wasn’t really her fault, but partly the fault of her parents? Maybe they shouldn’t have bought her such a large TV and put it directly on her bed? Maybe they should have spent the time to teach her how to ice skate, and play chess, and go apple picking?
    They called their lawyer back in America and asked him to sell their house, because they could not imagine going back and looking at Lobelia’s old bedroom. It would be too sad!
    They took in a stray cat and made a big fuss over it. They cooked it special goose livers and gave it goat’s milk and let it sleep in bed with them. But the cat wasn’t actually a stray. It thought that it had been kidnapped. It liked the goose livers very much; but one day it saw its chance, ran for the door, and escaped back to its real owners.
    A steady gloom settled over