Part One
Nothing in Your Hands
Eight games that need no equipment at all. Not a coin, not a pencil, not a scrap of paper. Only your eyes, your voice and whoever is standing beside you. These are the games to reach for when your hands are full of shopping, when your pockets are empty, when you are holding a sleeping child, or when you simply cannot be bothered to look for anything.
CHAPTER ONE
The number nine to Telaga Rest ran four times a day and was late three of them. On the afternoon I want to tell you about, it was late by forty minutes, and my grandmother and I were the only two people under the shelter, and we had just come from a funeral.
I was eight. I did not know what to do with my face. I had spent the whole morning arranging it into what I believed was the correct expression, and by the time we reached the bus stop my cheeks ached from holding it. My grandmother sat down on the metal bench, put her handbag between her feet, and let out a long breath that had been waiting since breakfast.
Then she said: “Do you see that blue gate?”
I said I did.
“I am thinking of something. It is nearer than the blue gate.”
I remember being annoyed. I remember thinking that this was not a suitable thing to say on such a day, and that adults were unreliable. I remember asking, in the flattest voice an eight year old can produce, whether it was nearer than the drain.
