‘Wait, who brought the lunch?’ Seph asks.
‘What do you mean?’ Dad replies.
‘Daddy, the lunch we packed for everyone – it was on the bus,’ she replies. ‘Where is it?’
‘Who was supposed to bring it?’ Ethan asks.
‘What do you mean?’ Seph replies, cocking her head.
‘Whose job was it, to carry the lunch?’ I add. ‘How was it supposed to get here?’
Seph just stares at me.
Oh my God. Seriously, do this lot even know how to function without someone wiping their arse for them?
‘Who did you ask to carry it, darling?’ Bea checks.
‘No one, Mummy,’ she admits. ‘I… I just assumed…’
‘No food?’ Chester’s dad says. ‘Because my blood sugar…’
‘I’m sorry,’ Seph says, emotion building in her voice.
‘It’s okay, darling, it’s just that everyone is so terribly hungry, from the walk,’ Bea tells her. ‘It was a lovely thought, and we can eat it when we get back to the bus.’
‘We have been walking for over an hour,’ Dad says, in hushed tones, of course we can all hear it.
‘It’s okay, I think I have a solution,’ Ethan says with a smile as he plonks his backpack down on the floor.
He unzips it and opens it widely to reveal that it is absolutely stuffed full of Tim Tam biscuits.
‘Why do you have a bag full of biscuits?’ Seph asks him, her face scrunched up in confusion and – I think – mild disgust.
‘I lived here, when I was a kid, and I was obsessed with these,’ Ethan says, ignoring her tone. ‘I haven’t had one in years so, when we stopped at that shop on the way, I bought pretty much every pack they had.’
‘That’s so silly,’ Bea points out, siding with her daughter.
‘Maybe it is,’ he says. A smile slowly creeps across his lips. ‘But no one else has any food so it doesn’t seem so silly now, does it?’
‘Tim Tams for everyone,’ Chester declares. ‘Nice work, EPJ, you’ve saved the day.’
‘None for me,’ Seph says, holding up her hands. ‘I won’t fit into my dress, if I start eating biscuits.’
‘Biscuits will only make mine look better,’ I tell Ethan as I take a pack. ‘Thank you.’
‘Anytime,’ he tells me with a smile.
Everyone takes a pack – I even notice Seph nibbling one of Chester’s biscuits when she thinks no one is looking – and takes a moment to rest before the walk back.
‘I just knew, when I bought them, that I wouldn’t regret it,’ Ethan says, now that it’s just the two of us.
‘Yeah, I mean, if I had seen you buying so many I definitely would have asked you what you were doing,’ I reply.
‘It was the food on the boat,’ he says. ‘Everything was so tiny. I ate all the things I liked, the bits I didn’t like, and I was still hungry so I didn’t think it would hurt to keep a pile of biscuits in the room – I’m going to have to replenish the reserves now.’
I laugh.
‘I’ll buy you more biscuits, I feel like I owe you,’ I say. ‘You’ve saved the day.’
