Flour Babies - Anne Fine [30]
He bent his head closer.
‘Not one of the baby’s legs/he explained. ‘One of the cot’s.’
Glad to have made that clear, he pressed on.
‘And Sue claims she gets so ratty if she doesn’t get a full eight hours uninterrupted sleep every night that it’s a good thing she never had a family because, if she did, she’d murder all of them within a week.’
He pulled the flour baby on to his knee.
‘And Mum went camping with Sue once, for only two nights, and came back saying she believed it.’
He poked her gently where her tummy would be.
‘And look at Robin,’ he said. ‘He’s usually easygoing enough. Puts up with Old Carthorse picking on him about keeping his rubber dropping collection in his desk, and puts up with all Wayne’s jokes about him having two left feet. It’s not like Robin to go totally ape like that.’
He stared over the flour baby’s head, into the dark flowing water. It wasn’t even, he thought, as if anything very special had happened to drive Robin wild. Certainly nothing to explain him seeing red like that, and getting in such a frenzy. All that had happened was that Gwyn had asked to borrow somebody’s workbook.
‘Why?’
‘To copy out yesterday’s homework.’
‘You don’t want mine, then,’ Wayne had said. ‘I got the whole lot wrong.’
‘You don’t want mine either,’ George assured him. ‘Carthorse told me a brain-dead troll could have made a better stab at it.’
To Gwyn, the actual quality of the work on offer was clearly a matter of total indifference.
‘All Carthorse said was that I had to do it,’ he explained. ‘He didn’t say anything about getting it right.’
‘You can borrow mine if you like,’ Robin offered. ‘He never said it was rubbish so I think he must have liked it.’
‘Right, then,’ said Gwyn. ‘I’ll take yours.’ And he stood by while Robin dug in his bag, pushing aside his maths textbook and the new French picture dictionary Mr Dupasque had insisted on giving him only that morning. In search of the homework, he dug too deeply too fast, and his flour baby fell out on the muddy path.
‘Oh, shoot!’
Picking it up, he brushed the worst of the mud and gravel off, and tossed it to Gwyn for safe-keeping.
True to form, Gywn dropped it.
It fell in the mud again. This time, Robin picked it up and stuck it firmly in a bush beside the path, before digging deeper in the bag. Above his own furious scrabblings, he didn’t hear the soft ripping noise of the flour baby behind him. It was only when the little sacking bag had torn sufficiently to drop back in the mud with a soft floury splat that he even realized what was happening.
And that was the moment at which he lost his temper.
‘Stupid!’ he yelled. ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!’
Gwyn stepped back nervously. Was he being blamed? But no. It was the flour baby that had put Robin in a rage. Picking it off the ground, he’d shaken it till flour spilled.
‘Stupid! Stupid!’ he yelled again, punching it hard.
Flour puffed out in clouds.
Robin went berserk.
‘Take care of your flour baby!’ he screamed, in mimicry of all the adults who had been nagging him for days. ‘Don’t forget! Take it here! Take it there! Make sure you strap it safely on your bike! Don’t lose it! Keep it out of the mud!’
For every order he shouted, he gave the flour baby a hard punch.
‘Don’t let it get wet! Don’t dirty it! Make sure it doesn’t fall! Don’t forget to pretend it’s a real baby!’
Now he was shaking it so fiercely the rip widened, and flour spilled on the path.
‘Pretend you’re real? Fine! I’ll pretend you’re real! And if you were real, if you were mine, I’d kick you in the canal!’
And then, before their very eyes, he’d drawn back his foot, let go of the flour sack, and done it.
Thwack!
Simon sat quietly on the bank, remembering how, just as the damaged sack had sunk at once, the flour along the path had blown away in an instant. In less than a minute there was nothing to see except a few sad, rising bubbles.
He hugged his own flour baby tightly to his chest.
‘I don’t know much,’ he told her. ‘But I do know this. I’d never do that to you. Never, never, never.’
And, at that moment, he believed himself.