Flour Babies - Anne Fine [10]
‘Well?’ he asked, somewhat unnerved. ‘Any questions?’
Simon picked up his flour baby and lifted her frock. No knickers, unless you counted sacking bag. Already she had black smudges on her bum where he’d sat her on the pen runnel of the double desk along which Robin Foster’s rubber dropping collection had recently overflowed.
‘Now look at that,’ he complained to Robin. ‘She’s already dirty, and it’s your fault, Foster. You’re going to have to keep this desk a whole lot cleaner in future.’
Robin stared down at the little heaps of filthy rubbing-out scurf, assiduously kept so he and Simon would always have raw material for flicking pellets. Then he glanced at Simon, trying to work out if he had been joking. Finally, from the quiver of possible responses, he chose the sharpest arrow: ridicule.
‘Sir! Sir!’ he’d yelled, his fist punching the air as he called for the whole room’s attention. ‘You’ve got to move me, sir. I can’t stay here. It’s not safe. Sime Martin’s turning into my mother!’
They kept the joke up for the rest of the day. By the time the last bell rang, Simon was absolutely sick of having to prop his flour baby carefully on top of his book bag, then go after whoever it was who’d last called him Old Mrs Martin, or Mother Sime, and bash their head hard against the wall. By the time he shambled out of the back gate at half past three, his knuckles were burning and his wrist badly grazed. He only stopped himself wiping the blood off on the flour baby’s frock because, through some miracle, he heard the echo of his mother’s voice ring out of nowhere in his ears: ‘Oh, no, Simon! Not blood! It’s the worst!’ He wiped his hand clean down his shirt instead.
And now here was his mother in the flesh, spooning out more free advice.
‘You ought to put it in a plastic bag. Keep it clean.’
‘Is that what you did with me?’
His mother laughed as she dumped his supper down in front of him. Egg and beans.
‘I wish I’d had the sense.’
She was joking, he supposed. But still, it was a thought. Having him must have made all the difference. He’d come along, a whole other person to be taken into account. Real, too. Not just something like a flour baby that could be shoved in a plastic bag to be kept clean, without fetching up on some murder charge. When had she realized how much trouble he was going to be? Some pennies took time to drop. He himself could still remember the day, not that long ago, when he’d first realized he was a person.
He’d been having it out with a turkey. Behind the caravan park where Simon and his mother went on holiday there was a farm, and one of the larger turkeys had pushed its bad-tempered, gobbling way through the fence and was giving Simon the eye – well, first one eye then the other – and stopping him getting to the lavatories.
Simon got his own back the simplest way he could.
‘Christmas!’ he jeered. ‘Din-dins!’
The turkey gobbled off. But Simon had to sit on the lavatory steps for a moment. He’d suddenly realized that by Christmas Day the turkey would really be dead on a plate, but (barring the sort of daft accidents his mother was always going on about), he, Simon, would still be alive.
And somehow that set him thinking. He pulled the flesh on the back of his hand up into a miniature tent, and then let go. The skin sprang back instantly, keeping him in shape. His shape. It struck Simon for the first time in his life that he was totally unique. In the whole history of the universe, there had never been one of him before. There would never be another.
‘Not a very nice place to sit,’
Someone was stepping over him to get to the urinals. But Simon, off on another tack, scarcely heard. Once, only a few years ago, Simon wasn’t – didn’t exist at all. And one day, like that turkey, he wouldn’t exist again. Ever.
‘Can’t you find somewhere a bit more salubrious to park yourself?’
The same fellow again, on his way out. Simon paid no attention, his mind on other things. Hadn’t he just discovered himself – him – the one and only Sime Martin, alive, and (unlike