Flour Babies - Anne Fine [3]
Mr Cartright sighed.
‘So am I, lad. So am I.’
There was a pause. Then Mr Cartright said:
‘Well? What are you waiting for? Pack your book bag. Off you go.’
Martin Simon looked up in astonishment.
‘Go where, sir?’
‘Anywhere. I should think a lad like you could take your pick. You could try Mr King’s class. Or Mr Henderson’s. I bet either of them would be happy to have you.’
‘But why?’
Mr Cartright settled his huge rear end companion-ably on Martin Simon’s desk. For an intelligent lad, he thought, he wasn’t acting too bright.
‘Look at it this way,’ he told him. ‘You can’t stay here. For one thing, you can read. You’ll be right out of place here from that alone. Then there’s the other problem. You read French.’
He waved a hand airily round the room, to draw in the others who were sitting there staring.
‘I expect there’ll be quite a lot of language in this classroom,’ he explained. ‘I, for one, have a temper. Then there’s the colourful patois of our local housing scheme to be contended with. And Tariq here, I’m told,swears in three separate sub-continental dialects. But no one speaks French.’
He shifted on the desk.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go.’
A thought struck him.
‘With all those science exams you passed, you could even try Dr Feltham. He might have you.’
At last Martin Simon seemed to grasp the point. Rising to his feet, he started shovelling the few possessions he’d unpacked back into his book bag.
Mr Cartright caught the rather regretful expression on the boy’s face.
‘I’m sorry about it too, lad,’ he said. ‘But, believe me, it’s for the best. You wouldn’t fit in here. There’s been some mistake.’
Martin Simon nodded.
‘Ask at the office,’ Mr Cartright advised, walking him to the door. ‘Tell them they’ve got it all wrong, and you can’t come back here. I won’t have you. You don’t belong.’
He saw him off on the long trek down the green corridor.
‘Goodbye, lad,’ he called out wistfully after him. ‘Good luck!’
He swung the door closed and turned to face the rest with iron determination.
‘Right!’ he said. ‘Put that scarf away, Sajid. Are you eating, Luis Pereira? Spit it out in the bin. Look how much time we’ve wasted. I warn you, I’m getting this finished before the bell rings.’
With any other class, he might have managed it. But what with two of the tellers he chose not being all that good at counting, and the constant delays as people
criticized each way of tallying (‘You can’t count Rick’s vote, sir! He’s never here!’), there wasn’t time to do it properly. Even before the third recount was complete, Robin Foster and Wayne Driscoll were eyeing him with their imaginary stop-watches raised, and lips pursed round their non-existent whistles.
It was almost Time…
Mr Cartright slid his vast bulk off the desk on to his feet. Not for nothing was he called Old Carthorse behind his back.
‘Hush up!’ he bellowed, cutting directly through all the layers of noise at once. ‘That’s it! I’ve had enough! The bell’s about to ring, and we’re wrapping this up one way or another. I warn you, 4C, the very next boy responsible for any noise in this room – any noise at all – will have to dip his hand in this tub and take out a voting slip, and whatever it says on that goes.’
The silence was instant and total. High fliers they might not be, but every one of them was bright enough not to fancy the idea of being blamed by all the rest for three solid weeks of work on some project cruelly designed by Dr Feltham to bring out the latent interest of things like sewing or cooking or housekeeping.
It seemed no one dared breathe. Mr Cartright could even hear the warble of a songbird outside on the guttering.
Then, without warning, the spell broke.
The other side of the classroom door suddenly suffered the most tremendous thud. The door knob rattled and the panels shook.
In walked a clumsy young giant.
A roar of approval greeted the newcomer’s entrance.
‘Hi, nit-face!’
‘Last one in class gets maimed!’
‘Sime! Saved a place for you!’
‘Found us at last, have you, you great fishcake!