Flour Babies - Anne Fine [16]
Froggie would kick her hardest. She’d be destroyed.
Distracted, Simon missed the ball entirely.
The bellow came over the pitch on cue.
‘Are you trying to be funny, Simon Martin? You certainly aren’t amusing me!’
He nearly missed again. This was unreal. These weren’t even proper kicks. He was only dribbling. And yet he couldn’t concentrate at all. How were you supposed to get your feet going in the right directions when your brain was totally cluttered up with horror-show visions of what might be happening to your flour baby? It was a pity Mr Fuller was watching him so closely, or he could spin round, dancing on his toes, and take a proper look at the bush. The flour baby was bound to be in there still, all safely bundled up. It’s just he could concentrate better if he was sure.
Unwilling to bring the wrath of Mr Fuller down on his head again, Simon didn’t turn. He kept his face forward and ran, as one ghastly vision after another swam through his brain. His flour baby floating, face down, in one of the scummy sinks, then gradually sinking as the water soaked through her thin sacking! Froggie borrowing a felt pen and, with their unauthorized alterations to his tin of foot powder in mind, taking sweet revenge on her face with some artwork: a nose, a gappy smile, two cauliflower ears – worse! And, most disastrous of all, Jimmy Holdcroft drawing back his foot as she lay so vulnerably on the changing-room floor, about to demonstrate his vicious and spectacular goal kick.
Simon hurled himself onwards. Is this, he asked himself, what people go through every time they leave a baby sitting in a pram outside a shop? No wonder they always looked so grim, pushing and shoving in their hurry to get out again. No wonder you kept crashing into them, on escalators and in doorways, determinedly hauling pushchairs where pushchairs obviously couldn’t go.
His foot missed the ball again, and it rolled past.
‘I’m watching you like a hawk, Simon Martin! Keep up this performance and you’ll be doing press-ups afterwards!’
Ten yards to the corner. And then, at last, he would be able to swivel his head and see the bush out of the corner of his eye. One thing he’d learned, it was ridiculous trying to practise football and watch a flour baby. No one can do two things properly at the same time. Weren’t they always saying that? ‘You can’t be concentrating on your work if you’re staring out of that window!’ And, ‘No one can talk and listen simultaneously. If you’re talking, you’re not listening.’ It was one of their regular, all-purpose naggings.
And his mum was exactly the same. ‘You can’t do your homework properly with that radio blaring, Simon.’ Or, ‘Make toast or play with the dog – one or the other, but not both. That’s the fourth slice of bread that’s gone up in flames!’ She knew he couldn’t do two things at once. None of this would have happened if she’d offered to look after the flour baby for him. She’d brought him up all by herself, after all. She must know what it was like. She must have realized that his football practice would turn into total disaster. Had she forgotten all those evenings she took him with her to the club while she played badminton? They were wretched enough. He still remembered peeling the back of his legs off those horrible plastic bucket seats again and again, in order to drape himself over the balcony, and call down:
‘Can we go home now, please?’
Over and over, the same answer floated up from the court.
‘Be patient, Simon. We’re nearly finished.’
He’d sit there for what seemed another fifteen hours, bored out of his skull, and