5.3: The den

Although, in the past, she has wasted many a day irritatingly kicking her football against the wall of the shed or even moping in her bed staring into space, Lottie decides that a whole day stuck in, or near, the Potting Shed is an impossibly, unbearably boring prospect. So, taking her football for cover, she tells Hannah that she will be just outside and won’t venture further, but then heads immediately off into the woods. Today, she decides, she’ll investigate pTavis and Masongill’s secret den about which she has known for months. Stupid den! 

Despite her normal chutzpah, Lottie is a little taken aback on finally entering it. It seems such a vigorous expression of youthful, manly, vitality. There are posters for Joy Division’s Closer and the Cure’s Faith albums. Isn’t that one for Herzog’s 1979 reworking of Nosferatu? And that’s one for Camus’ novel The Stranger (but in French!). pTravis seems to have stolen Froggie’s pipe (not that he’s actually smoking it so much as waving it around, vigorously, looking intense). And Masongill has a boxing magazine on his lap with a cover picture of a muscular chap just in shorts (not that Masongill’s reading it). Chalked on the wall is Zhou Enlai’s breath-takingly paradoxical response to the French Revolution. Heavens! 

But then she forgets all that nonsense when she sees a casket. “What on earth are you doing with that old thing?” she asks, with her full, normal, dismissive scorn of anyone older than herself.