Flour Babies - Anne Fine [27]
His eyes shone with the vision that had sustained him through eleven days.
‘It’s the explosion, you see,’ he explained. ‘It’s going to be brilliant. Amazing! Like one of those things in the Bible – you know – blood rivers and plagues of frogs and locusts and first-borns, and such. I promise you, it’s going to be one hundred pounds of sifted white flour exploding all over our classroom!’
‘Foster’s didn’t explode when he booted it,’ George pointed out sourly. ‘Foster’s just sank.’
Fired with the iron conviction of the religious fanatic, Simon had no trouble at all coming up with a reason to dismiss this rather inconvenient observation.
‘Foster couldn’t have booted it hard enough.’
Here was a challenge indeed. The little gang of them eyed one another, weakening.
Wayne was the first to crack. After all, he’d poured scorn on Robin Foster often enough in games over the last three years. And facts were facts. Robin could barely kick a ball out of a paper bag.
And it was true that, after eleven miserable days spent shackled to a flour baby, one brief booting of the thing into the canal did not match the glorious vision Simon kept holding out to them. Wayne wouldn’t put money on anyone else’s flour baby exploding over the water, anyway. Gwyn’s goal kick was worse than Foster’s. And George’s was no better. Their sacks of flour would probably sink, just like Robin’s, without trace. His own would explode, all right. No doubt about that. He wasn’t on the football team for nothing. But even then the flour would simply blow away over the water. There wouldn’t be a good and lasting mess.
No. Whichever way you looked at it, one hefty kick over the canal would not make up for eleven ruined days.
‘All right,’ said Wayne. ‘You win. We’ll wait.’
But there was still an unbeliever in their midst.
‘Why?’ George Spalder suddenly demanded. ‘Why should we wait? Just because Sime here keeps going on and on about his wonderful explosion? You’re crazy if you believe him. He must be wrong. Old Carthorse has taught in that classroom for four hundred years. He isn’t going to let anyone kick a hundred pounds of flour about in there. He’d have to be out of his mind. No. It’ll never happen. Sime must have got it all wrong.’
Simon’s voice rang with honest conviction.
‘It’s what he said,’ he insisted. ‘I heard him. Don’t forget I was earwigging right outside the staffroom door! “Over a hundred pounds of sifted white flour exploding in my classroom.” That’s what he said. His exact words.’
Now Wayne was torn between sense and desire.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, scuffing the side of his shoe against a clump of grass on the tow path. ‘It sounds pretty unlikely. But maybe Sime is right. After all –’ His voice rose as the rigour of his thinking was suddenly overwhelmed by the strength of his feelings. ‘After all, why else would we be forced to look after these floppy, useless, pathetic things for three whole weeks, with people snooping to make sure we do it right, if not to get us all so boiled up mad, we kick the stupid things to bits?’
He glowered round, demanding an answer.
‘We were told why,’ George Spalder reminded him. ‘It’s to learn about ourselves, and how we feel about the job of being a parent. That was the point.’
‘Then it didn’t matter me booting mine into the canal,’ Robin said cheerfully. ‘Because I didn’t learn anything from mine. Not one single tiny thing. I dragged that stupid bag of flour round for eleven whole days, and all I learned is that I never, ever want a baby in my whole life unless someone else offers to look after it at least half the day, and there’s a free creche next door!’
Everyone fell silent.
‘It seems to me,’ said Wayne, ‘that if people had the faintest idea what a bother they were, no one would ever have a baby.’
‘And,’ added Robin, ‘if they happened to fetch up with one by accident, anyone with any sense would run away.’
He looked to Simon for agreement. But Simon turned his back.
Then Robin realized.
With a guilty glance at the others, he reached