Flour Babies - Anne Fine [18]
And then Mum didn’t come. He knew she might not, because, when she begged Mrs Spicer to walk him to school that morning, she was already unsteady on her feet, and coughing horribly. Her eyes were streaming. But through the morning he must have managed to convince himself that she would get there somehow, ill or not, because when the moment came, and Miss Ness pushed him out on to the stage, the first thing he’d done was peer along the rows of faces, desperate to find her.
‘I’ll be right beside the door if I make it,’ she’d promised him.
And there was Sue. Funny – he’d never realized before that Mum must have dragged herself downstairs to phone Sue at the last minute. And Sue must have dropped everything – taken a whole afternoon off work and rushed across town – just to be sitting where Mum told her, right beside the door, trying to be someone for him.
It wasn’t the same, though. And during the short break between the scenes, Miss Ness, struggling with Hyacinth’s huge foil star, forgot for an instant.
‘Never mind,’ she’d said. ‘Is your dad there?’
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she realized her mistake. But it was too late. He was in floods of tears. She pulled him on her knee and patted him. But it was no good. The tears were rolling and they wouldn’t stop. In the end, too many minutes had gone by. The interval couldn’t last for ever. So Simon had to let her unpin his glorious scarlet cloak and wrap it round Hamid, who had been boasting about knowing everyone’s lines from the very first day they had started.
Boot!
He gave the ball a savage kick.
‘There you go, Dad,’ he panted. ‘That one’s for not being there.’
He kicked even harder.
‘Ever!’
Boot! Boot! Boot!
He could hear Mr Fuller thundering up behind him, but he couldn’t care.
Boot! Boot!
‘That’s it, Simon Martin! I’ve had enough.’
BOOT!
Reaching the last stretch, Simon drew back his foot and gave the ball such an almighty kick that it went flying over the roof of the changing rooms.
‘That one’s for you, Dad,’ he shouted. ‘Thanks for nothing!
He realized afterwards that he was grateful for the punishment. After all, he was more than fit enough to add on fifty press-ups. The extra effort even dulled the pain. But, best of all, they took a bit of time. Not much more than two or three minutes, even taking them steadily and doing them properly. But long enough – almost exactly long enough – to give the fierce glittering in his eyes time to subside.
5
‘Is this really the sort of thing you had in mind?’ Ambushed on his way out of the staff lavatories, Dr Feltham flicked through the sheaf of pages Mr Cartright had thrust in his hand.
‘Go on,’ urged Mr Cartright. ‘Read one.’
Dr Feltham glanced, puzzled, at the name scrawled across the grubby sheet of paper on the top.
‘Simon Martin? Isn’t he one of mine?’
‘No, he isn’t,’ snapped Mr Cartright. ‘The one you have is called Martin Simon. You must know the boy – passes exams, reads Baudelaire – that sort of thing. This one is Simon Martin. One of mine. Spends half his time skulking in the lavatories, and the other half shuffling round acting a stick short of the full bundle.’
Dr Feltham couldn’t help rebuking his colleague for his unprofessional way of speaking.
‘I think you mean, Eric, that he’s not yet living up to his full academic potential.’
‘Just what I said,’ insisted Mr Cartright. ‘Goes about behaving like a halfwit.’
Less than three feet away, behind the door of the boys’ lavatories, Simon Martin sank on his heels and buried his head in his hands as Dr Feltham ploughed through the joint obstacles of crabbed writing and pitiful spelling, to read aloud the first page of his flour baby diary.
DAY 1
I think the whole idea