Arjun and the Friend at the Door

The doorbell went at eleven o'clock and it was Ravi, holding his shoes in his hand for some reason, the way Ravi often is.

"Arjun! Your friend's here!" called Mum.

"Coming," said Arjun, who was not coming. He was on the sofa, in the dent, halfway through a level.

Ravi came in and sat next to him and watched for a bit. Then he got bored of watching, because watching somebody else play a game is roughly as interesting as watching somebody else eat a biscuit.

There were three cardboard boxes in the hall from the new washing machine. Big ones. The kind you could get inside.

Ravi found them.

Arjun heard the noises before he saw anything: a scrape, a thump, the long tearing sound of packing tape being pulled off a roll. Then Ravi went past the doorway carrying a box on his head like an enormous square hat.

Arjun kept playing. But he glanced up.

A minute later there was another thump and Ravi shouted, to nobody in particular, "It has got a DOOR!"

Arjun glanced up again. He missed a jump and had to start the level over, which normally would have annoyed him a lot, and this time only annoyed him a bit.

He told himself he would only go and look.

That is how these things usually start, and it is a perfectly good way to start them. Arjun put the iPad on the arm of the sofa — not off, just down — and went into the hall.

The box did have a door. Ravi had cut it with the safety scissors and it opened and everything.

"It's a rocket," said Ravi. "But it's rubbish so far."

Arjun looked at it for about four seconds, and then the building part of his brain switched on, which is the part that is always waiting for something like this.

"It needs a nose," he said. "And if we put that box on top of that box, it can have two floors. And the little one can be the bit where the dinosaurs sit."

"Why are there dinosaurs on a rocket?"

"Because they're the crew," said Arjun, in the voice of someone stating the obvious.

They worked until lunch and then they worked after lunch as well.

The rocket ended up with two floors, a door that opened, a control panel made of bottle tops, a nose cone that fell off eleven times, and a crew of six plastic dinosaurs in order of size.

Dad wrote ARJUN AND RAVI: BUILDERS on the side in marker pen, which Arjun thought was excellent, and then he took a photo of them both inside it with only their heads showing.

At half past four, when Ravi's mum came, Arjun went to find the iPad to show Ravi something.

It was still on the arm of the sofa, exactly where he had put it down. The screen had gone black. The battery was still more than half full, because it had not been doing anything at all.

Arjun looked at it for a second, and could not actually remember what level he had been on.

"Same tomorrow?" said Ravi from the door, with his shoes in his hand again.

"We need more boxes," said Arjun.