Flour Babies - Anne Fine [15]
Worth the risk, anyway.
Simon lounged against the wall, waiting. And that was how he came to see Dr Feltham and his retinue of willing helpers (‘crawlers’ to Simon) coming round the bend in the corridor. Piled in their arms were all the complicated and unwieldy bits of equipment without which it seemed Dr Feltham couldn’t get through a single forty-minute period in the last weeks before his great Science Fair.
Simon doubled up in a fake coughing fit. Dr Feltham and his retinue swept past. And Simon stopped coughing just in time to catch Dr Feltham’s remark as he strode past his colleague, still parked on the radiator.
‘Starting the term with a real bang, I see, Eric’
Mr Cartright dealt Dr Feltham one of his poisonous looks, but Simon’s doubts were banished and his worries fled away. After all, Dr Feltham was famous for his extraordinary detonations. His exploding custard tins were the envy of all. If someone with his credentials could admire in advance any big bang of Mr Cartright’s, then that had to settle it once and for all. The experiment was going to be glorious.
Simon’s smile widened into rapture then. And now, as he booted the football across the circle to Wayne, it was widening again. It was, thought Simon, a bit like one of those promises God used to make to those people he’d been spatting with in the Old Testament… a covenant! They’d done a whole module on them in first year. Rainbows, floods, dead babies – that sort of thing. Well, Dr Feltham coming down the corridor and saying what he did just as Simon happened to be standing there was a sort of covenant in itself. A private promise between The Explosion and Simon…
Mr Fuller materialized beneath his left elbow.
‘I see we’re in blinkers today,’ he started pleasantly enough as Simon, startled, bungled the next pass. ‘Not wearing a watch, though, were we?’
No point in saying anything, thought Simon. All that would happen is that Mr Fuller would pitch into some fresh complaint about him leaving his underwear trailed over the local greenery. And then the flour baby might catch it.
Simon pawed the ground apologetically with his boot, and said nothing. Fortunately, just at that moment Froggie Hines and Saul Epstein collided with one another, and rolled over and over, inextricably tangled.
Mr Fuller sentenced Simon on the trot.
‘Three full circuits at the end, please. And tickling the ball, not booting it!’
He turned his foghorn voice on to the other two.
‘Hines! Get your foot out of his ear’ole! Get up, boy! Fetch that ball!’
Simon took off for the safety of the back line while the going was good. He’d escaped press-ups, at least. And the rest of the practice wasn’t too bad, what with one short break while Fruzzy Woods was seriously bawled out for waving through the hedge at his girlfriend Lucinda, and another a few minutes later when Mr Fuller caught sight of Lucinda for a second time, and held up the next throw-in while he gave her an earful.
So having to stay and dribble the ball three times round the pitch after everyone else had gone back to the changing rooms shouldn’t have been too much of a pain. Of course he was missing a good laugh: Froggie’s look of sheer wonder when he picked up his tin of foot powder, and, egged on by Wayne, read its vastly inflated claim. But Simon could easily imagine his face. And Wayne would fill him in on details later. So why was he making such a hash of the circuits? Why weren’t his feet under his control?
Boot… Boot… Boot… Boot…
‘What are you thinking about, lad? Don’t hammer it! Treat it gentle as a baby!’
Mr Fuller’s talk of babies made it worse. Rattled, Simon