Bella and the Wandering House by Meg McKinlay Page A

out the door on time.
    Grandad called Bella a dreamer too but it was different when he said it. He spoke softly, as if he liked the feel of the words on his tongue. As if he was happy to let them sit there and didn’t want to turn them into something else, something quick and sensible.
    My little dreamer.
    â€˜Oh,’ she said, because hearing Grandad’svoice in her head had reminded her. That today was Tuesday and that meant something special. It meant that instead of getting picked up from school, Bella walked to Grandad’s house and spent the afternoon there.
    It meant she got to sit at the table in his little backyard and eat crackers and fruit and a sticky pastry in a paper bag from the shop around the corner. She got to watch him potter about at his workbench, whittling or sanding a piece of wood, fiddling with a spring or a funny little mirror for his latest project.
    It meant today was the best possible day to have woken up to something strange. Because Grandad loved strange. He wouldn’t sigh and click his tongue and hurry Bella from where she was to somewhere else. He would sit at the table and listen. He would lick his sticky fingers and nod.
    Who knows? Maybe he might even have an idea.

Two
    Grandad licked vanilla slice from his fingers and nodded.
    â€˜Are you sure it wasn’t just the bricks moving in the path? Paving can do that sometimes.’
    Bella shook her head. She told him about the tree.
    Grandad frowned and leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, that’s no good. A girl needs a tree in her window.’
    Bella popped the last bite of doughnut into her mouth and chewed slowly.
    â€˜I wonder what would cause such a thing?’ Grandad looked around his tiny yard as if theanswer might be hidden there somewhere.
    The thought made Bella smile. She couldn’t imagine finding anything out here. From the front, Grandad’s place looked exactly like the other little houses around it. But the backyard was a different story altogether.
    Instead of a tidy garden with bright flowers and little statues, perhaps a birdbath or a small pond, he had piles of wood and boxes overflowing with metal pipes and old machine parts – odds and ends of all shapes and sizes he had salvaged here and there.
    Mum and Dad were always offering to help clean up, to
get rid of some of the old junk
. But Grandad said he didn’t want to throw anything out. You never knew when something might come in handy.
    He was right, too. He was always using bits and pieces for his projects. Last week he had been working on a periscope. It was a long tube with funny bends in it and mirrors inside. He said it helped you see around corners – orat least it would once he got the mirrors in the right spot. When Bella had looked inside, all she saw was a daddy-long-legs spidering its way up the tube.
    Grandad followed Bella’s gaze to his workbench. ‘Ah. My periscope. Did I tell you I got it working?’ Before she could reply, he pushed his chair back and began picking his way to his workbench between the piles of odds and ends. ‘See?’
    It was longer now. He had added extra sections here and there; they twisted out from each other like crooked elbows.
    â€˜It’s what they use on submarines, you know. So they can see what’s happening on the surface while they’re underwater, when they’re all the way out there in the middle of the ocean, in the …’ He trailed off with a heavy sigh, staring over Bella’s shoulder. Even without turning, she knew what he was looking at. On the wall just inside was a framed photo of his old boat, of the three ofthem – him, Bella and Grandma – standing on the deck waving.

    They used to go out sailing all the time but after Grandma died, Grandad said it was too hard without her. And when he moved to this squeezy little house, he had nowhere to keep the boat anyway. He was getting older, he said. It was time to let it