Flour Babies - Anne Fine [13]
Spying on him would be chicken-feed. It would be nothing to a mother like her. She’d take it in her stride.
He couldn’t trust her. No, he couldn’t trust her.
Sighing, Simon lifted his flour baby off the table and wrapped her carefully in his Tottenham Hotspur towel, so just her eyes were peeking out.
‘Right,’ he said. “Off we go. Your first football practice. I hope I’m not going to have to remind you how to behave. And I suppose that, on the way, I’m going to have to explain all the rules.’
Mrs Martin moved to the window to watch her son striding down the path, explaining the rules of football to a small flour sack with a bonnet and eyes, wrapped up in a Tottenham Hotspur bath towel. She wasn’t the only one paying attention, she noticed. Next door’s curtains were twitching. Mrs Spicer was watching too.
And Simon saw. Turning at the gate, he spotted next door’s golden brushed-velour curtains shivering in the still air. He broke off his explanation of how an indirect free kick differs from a corner, and, leaning closer to his flour baby, whispered in the pointy bit he took to be her ear:
‘You can’t trust anyone, you know. No. Not round here.’
4
Boot… Boot… Boot… Boot…
Mr Fuller’s bellow reached Simon across the length of the football pitch.
‘Don’t boot it, lad! Tickle it.’
It was Simon’s third and last circuit. He was quite fortunate, really. Last year, any member of the team who showed up so late had to do fifty press-ups. Compared with that, dribbling the ball three times round the pitch was a doddle. Old Fuller must be going soft.
Boot… Boot… Boot… Boot…
‘Are you going cloth-eared, boy? You’re not practising goal kicks! Chase the ball gently! Keep it under control. I want to be able to see the elastic holding it to your feet.’
It wasn’t his fault he’d been late. He blamed Wayne. If Wayne hadn’t dragged him off through the empty classrooms, rooting through desks to find that bottle of Tippex…
Good laugh, though. Pity he wasn’t back in the changing rooms with the rest to see Froggie’s face when he picked up his tin of foot powder and read what it said on the side now:
Kills Athletes
Brilliant.
It was Wayne’s idea to paint out the word Foot. But it was Simon who guessed the comma thing in Athlete’s ought to go too. He wasn’t sure. It was just a hunch. But hunches were sometimes right. What about the time he’d been fetched out to stand beside Miss Arnott’s desk for mucking about in English? She’d been marking some essay of Gwyn Phillips’s called ‘My Summer Holiday’, and muttering to herself under her breath. Then, raising her voice, she’d asked irritably:
‘What is this rubbish you’ve written, Gwyn? “The Italians are all retarded and fiendish”?’
Gwyn Phillips had looked baffled. How would he know? He hadn’t been on holiday at all. He’d copied the whole thing from Bill Simmons, without thinking. But Simon, peering over Miss Arnott’s glorious golden summer holiday arm, had taken a stab at it differently.
‘I think it says “The Italians are all relaxed and friendly”, Miss.’
Terrific. Goal! He’d earned a flash of Miss Arnott’s wonderful smile, and been sent back to his desk in a riot of applause, weighed down by his gleaming halo.
Yes, hunches could work. It was just a pity that, tonight, they’d lost those precious minutes going back to blot out that comma thing. And Wayne hadn’t speeded matters up by doing his Hunchback of Notre Dame both ways down the corridor. But what took the most time, and landed Simon with his punishment circuits, was finding somewhere safe to put the flour babies.
Wayne was for shoving them behind the cistern pipes.
‘No one will see them here,’ he’d called down from where he was perched, on a lavatory stall partition.
‘Throw them up, Sime.’
Furtively, Simon unwrapped Wayne’s flour baby