Flour Babies - Anne Fine [32]
Mr Cartright ignored him.
‘Shall we move on?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Let’s have Sajid Mahmoud on Day 14.’
Sajid stared round the room proudly, inviting admiration. A few of them took the trouble to scowl, but most pretended that they hadn’t noticed him.
‘ “By today, I should have made well over a hundred pounds, but what with six people not putting their flour babies in my creche, and Tullis forever being off, and me not thinking to start till Day 4, and some people not coughing up what they owe me in spite of having Henry and Luis set on them, I only have half of that so far. Still –” ’
Mr Cartright stopped on the upbeat, and waited for everyone to guess the end.
‘That’s business!’ roared everyone, in unison.
Mr Cartright took time out to run his eyes over Sajid’s work a second time.
‘There’s only two sentences here,’ he warned.
Over and above Sajid’s prolonged and furious disputation with Mr Cartright about the exact nature and role of the comma, some serious accusations could be heard from the others.
‘… robbing us blind!’
‘… chiselled me out of four weeks’ pocket money already!’
‘… never get round to paying for next door’s coal bin at this rate
‘Good as thieving, frankly…’
Mr Cartright shifted uncomfortably on the desk. Waving Sajid into silence, he reminded the others:
‘Nobody forced you to put your flour babies in his creche.’
Then, hastily, he picked up another sheet of paper.
‘Here’s Simon,’ he told them. ‘Simon on Day 12. “I was really upset by Foster booting his flour baby in the canal like that. I never thought of Foster as a hard nugget before. In fact, he’s a really good friend of mine. I expect that his problem is what Miss Arnott’s always saying. He’s rather immature.” ’
Mr Cartright raised his head from the paper in order to interrupt himself and say to Simon:
‘I hope you realize that reading all this out so smoothly and evenly is a real triumph of the decipherer’s art.’
Not really grasping the full force of Mr Cartright’s insult, Simon contented himself with a sour grunt, which Mr Cartright chose to take as permission to carry on reading.
‘ “My mum kept sticking up for Robin too. She said you can’t go round giving people The Black Spot just because they do something daft, or I’d still be marked down for a bad lot for throwing that cactus at Hyacinth Spicer, or giving Tullis’s alsatian my gran’s wig to chew, and one or two other things I don’t really want to write about in this diary.”‘
Unfortunately for Simon, George Spalder did not seem to share his very acute sense of privacy.
‘I think he means the time he flushed his geography project away, and flooded all the lavatories,’ he confided to everyone.
‘No,’ said Tariq. ‘He means the time he fed Miss Arnott’s aspirins to the gerbil, and the poor thing fetched up in a coma.’
He looked round, to check no one had misunderstood.
‘Not Miss Arnott,’ he said, just in case doubt was lingering in anyone’s mind. ‘The gerbil.’
‘No, no, no.’ Impatiently, Wayne brushed Tariq’s theory aside. ‘He means the time he used that big red DANGER sign as a leg-up to get over the wire fence, and got caught leaning against that huge gas cylinder, having a quiet cigarette.’
By now, Mr Cartright was eyeing Simon with a new respect. A huge hunk of a lad, yes. And strong. But what he’d never realized before was what a swathe of mayhem the boy left behind, as he shambled through his life.
Then, suddenly noticing everyone looking at him expectantly, Mr Cartright felt obliged to come up with some suitably pedagogic response.
‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ he scolded Simon. ‘You might stunt your growth.’
And he went on to Philip Brewster, Day 10.
‘ “Bad times! I thought my flour baby was the pits, but next door have a real one and it’s a yowler. On and on and on. I hear it through the wall. As I told Trish my goldfish, if it were mine, I’d tie its neck in a reef knot.” ’
Fascinated, Mr Cartright shuffled through the pages till he found