Flour Babies - Anne Fine [21]
Then to warm up, perhaps, the drama of the pencil. Its noisy and argumentative borrowing, followed, in natural order, by its sharpening, its dropping with a clatter, its ostentatious chasing across the floor and its resharpening, then the flicking of its broken point at one of the window panes. Hearing the ping, Miss Arnott would be expected to raise her head in time to watch the pencil finally being used – as a drumstick for the tattoo on the desk top.
Unless, today, he chose to stage one of her favourite entertainments: the Bloodied Tongue. Last time she supervised Simon Martin, he had gone to some trouble and effort to suck enough ink out of his pen cartridge to stain his tongue bright red. He’d let this gory-looking monstrosity hang out of his mouth for the whole of the rest of the detention, quite putting her off her sandwich but amusing her mightily. Miss Arnott secretly hoped she might be treated to the Bloodied Tongue again today.
Though what she liked most of all was his Rip Van Winkle.
She found that tremendously soothing. Simon would sprawl over the desk, give a few gargantuan yawns, and then appear to fall into a sleep so deep no one could wake him for a hundred years. From time to time (whenever he feared that she’d forgotten him), he’d snore: a gentle faraway ripple that swelled ever richer and deeper, until each lungful of air that he released was reverberant enough to set the window frames rattling. Just as she began to fear for the structure of the building, he’d let out a giant snort and pretend that he’d woken himself. He’d stare around blankly, smacking his lips like an old man. And then he’d settle back down on the desk, and replay the whole performance from start to finish.
Yes. Rip Van Winkle was her favourite. The act she didn’t like was Gibbering Idiot. She’d seen it too often and was bored with it. He’d sit at his desk, making grotesque faces. Every now and again he’d erupt into fits of maniacal laughter or frantic bursts of muttering.Sometimes he drooled. She hoped it wasn’t going to be the Gibbering Idiot. But, just in case, Miss Arnott reached in her bag, to check that she still had her aspirins.
And her hand froze. Before her eyes – was she dreaming? was this really happening? – young Simon Martin crossed the room, ignoring Hooper totally. He drew out the chair behind the desk furthest away from the three other malefactors she was watching, pulled his flour baby, a pad of paper and a pen from his book bag, and, without making any fuss, propped the flour baby up on the desk top, patted her head affectionately once or twice, then settled straight down to work.
Miss Arnott blinked.
‘Simon?’ she whispered. ‘Simon, are you all right?’
He looked up.
‘Excuse me?’
It sounded almost like a mild rebuke, as if she’d interrupted him in an important train of thought.
‘I was just wondering if you were all right.’
He stared at her.
‘Yes. I’m all right. Why?’
She shook her head.
‘No reason.’
And for the life of her, she couldn’t think of any. Except that it wasn’t normal. Well, it was normal, of course. But that was exactly what was wrong. With Simon Martin, acting normal wasn’t normal.
Maybe the lad was sick – feverish, perhaps. Or maybe he was in shock. It’s possible he’d just heard his mother had been knocked down by a lorry, or electrocuted changing a plug, or drowned in a canal, or –
Miss Arnott tried to pull herself together and dismiss the lurid flow of her imagination. Surely a pupil should be able to sit down quietly and get on with a bit of written work without one of his teachers presuming he needed an ambulance, or his mother was already inside one!
She tried to go back to her marking. But it was impossible. She couldn’t concentrate at all. She kept having to raise her eyes from the books, and check on Simon Martin. What was he writing so industriously? He seemed to be covering whole sheets of paper. She’d taught him English for two whole years, and in all that time she never