Flour Babies - Anne Fine [31]
7
On Day 16, Mr Cartright couldn’t do a thing with them. Philip Brewster fell off his chair, arguing that the Chinese were the tallest people on earth. Luis Pereira kept pushing his desk out of line, over and over, till Mr Cartright realized Henry had convinced him that the spider on the ceiling just above his head was deadly poisonous, and also dribbling. Bill Simmons wouldn’t stop adding rather unpleasant flourishes to the huge bluebottle tattoo he’d inked on his forearm. And even Robin Foster, who usually wasn’t much trouble, kept flicking bits of his rubber dropping collection at the petunia on the window sill.
‘Right!’ said Mr Cartright. ‘I know what we’ll do. We’ll have a few snippets from the diaries.’
He waited for the groaning to peak.
‘Or –’ he threatened. ‘We could just have a second go at yesterday’s disastrous test.’
Everyone settled down hastily to listen to the diaries. Gwyn Phillips laid his head gently on his flour baby, as though it were a pillow on the desk. His eyes closed, and his thumb crept in his mouth. Nobody scoffed. It was as if they took it for a signal that today was time out. It was back to the nursery.
Within moments, everyone had spread themselves as comfortably as possible. Some of them even copied Simon by propping their flour babies on the desk tops, as if they were listening too.
Mr Cartright began.
‘I’ll start with Henry,’ he told them. ‘Henry on Day 9.’
Henry’s arm punched the air.
Mr Cartright began.
‘ “I hate my flour baby. I hate it worse than anything else on earth. It weighs about a ton. I asked my Dad how much I weighed when I was born, and he said he might have got me mixed up with our Jim or our Laura, but he thinks I weighed eight pounds. Eight pounds! That’s another two on top of Fatso here! I asked Dad how much that was in kilos, and he went all snitty and said he cooked my supper and fixed my bike, I couldn’t expect him to do my homework as well.” ’
Mr Cartright broke off.
A faint roar of approval came from those members of 4C who had both stayed awake and listened till the end.
‘Now we’ll have Tullis’s,’ said Mr Cartright. ‘Since he’s not here. This is Day 8. I should warn you Days 2 to 7 and 9 to 13 are unaccountably missing.’
He waited for the laughter to subside before reading out, with an expression of distaste:
‘ “My flour baby has a bogey down her front. I’m not flicking it off. It’s not mine, so why should I?” ’
He stopped.
‘That’s it.’
A cheer rose to greet this announcement. Encouraged, Mr Cartright picked up Rick Tullis’s effort for Day 14.
‘ “If I’ve been off a lot, you can blame the flour baby. I’m not saying I would have bothered to come much anyway. But what with that thing, I’m definitely staying away again tomorrow.” ’
Mr Cartright lifted his head to gaze round the class room.
‘He’s taken to numbering his sentences,’ he informed them. ‘In case he should make the terrible mistake of writing more than three.’
He rooted through the pile of diary entries.
‘Here’s something interesting,’ he told them. ‘Two exactly the same.’
He read the first aloud. It was by Wayne Driscoll.
‘ “My mum says when I was born, we were so poor we practically lived in a bucket and ate coal. This was because my grandpa said I looked like a goblin. Mum stopped speaking to him, so he wouldn’t lend her any money. Mum thinks he was fed up because I’m black and he isn’t. Not that he’s my dad, just my grandad, so what’s it to him? I reckon my dad would have been a whole lot worse than fed up if I’d come out all white! Mum says she’s no patience with either of them and wishes everyone in the world was green.” ’
Picking up another, scruffier, piece of paper, Mr Cartright read the whole sorry tale out over again, word for word.
One by one, they all raised their heads to look at Gwyn Phillips.
‘What’s the matter?’ Gwyn demanded. ‘Why are you all staring at me?’
‘You can’t just copy anything,’Robin Foster explained kindly. ‘It has to make sense for you. And you’re not black.’
Gwyn took to muttering. Very little was audible, except to his nearest neighbours.