Flour Babies - Anne Fine [38]
‘No, I won’t,’ Simon said confidently. Then, slightly less sure, he took another look. Maybe he would. No doubt about it, his flour baby was a mess. How had it happened? How did she get so mucky so quickly? One moment Simon was Star of the Project, with teachers he barely knew nodding affectionately at him in the corridors. The next, he was carrying about a manky leaking sack of flour with two smudged eyes and chewed corners. What went wrong?
‘You should never have let Hooper and Phillips use her as a goal marker,’ Wayne was telling him.
Simon defended himself as best he could.
‘That didn’t make much difference. What got her so torn was using her to tease Hyacinth Spicer’s cat.’
‘I don’t think that the rips look nearly as bad as the chewed bits,’ Wayne observed dispassionately.
‘I blame Macpherson,’ Simon said gloomily. ‘He’s had it in for my flour baby since the very first day.’
‘What about those black smudges?’
‘Fell in the grate, didn’t she?’
‘And the nasty charred bits?’
‘Oh, those are my fault,’ Simon admitted. ‘I left her on the grill while I made toast.’
‘What about all this stuff stuck to her bum?’
Simon upturned her, and inspected her.
‘Glue,’ he said. ‘Lump of toffee. Mud. Macpherson’s dried dribble. Chicken korma soup –’
There was enough to keep the litany up for quite a while. But, hastily, Wayne interrupted him.
‘Come on, Sime. Time to go.’
And confident that, at the very least, he wouldn’t come off worst at the morning inspection, Wayne pulled Simon with him along the road. As they reached the roundabout, Simon took to explaining the problem he had with the flour baby.
‘I’m not the type, you see. I thought I was, at first. But it turned out that I was wrong. Some people are good at looking after things. Some people aren’t. I reckon I’m out of the second box. More like my dad.’
Wayne shot him a curious look, making Simon realize it must be the very first time his friend had ever heard him bring up the subject of his father. But he pressed on anyway.
‘He couldn’t handle it either, that’s obvious. Maybe some people can’t. Maybe they’re just like that, and you can’t blame them.’
As usual, he stepped out fearlessly into the stream of cars slowing unwillingly for the roundabout.
‘He just wasn’t the sort to settle and dandle his babies,’ he yelled, over the roar of the traffic.
As usual, Wayne scurried in his wake, nodding apologetically to all the drivers Simon had just brought screeching to a halt.
‘Wasn’t the sort to what?’
But Simon was over the road now, and striding purposefully across the grass towards the school buildings. There was one last thing he wanted to find out, one last clue to the mystery of his father’s disappearance. One thing he still needed to know.
‘Miss Arnott! Miss Arnott!’
She turned as soon as she heard him.
‘What is it, Simon?’
To her astonishment, he started to sing at her in the rich, robust, unembarrassed tenor voice she’d heard often enough in Assembly, and never realized belonged to him.
‘Unfurl the sail, lads, and let the winds find me –’
‘Simon?’
‘Breasting the soft, sunny, blue rising main –’
Was he giving her a bit of cheek?
‘I’m in a hurry, Simon,’ she told him, as a warning. But he kept pace with her along the path, still singing heartily.
Toss all my burdens and woes clear behind me –’
‘Is this a joke, Simon? A bet? A sponsored sing?’
‘Vow I’ll not carry those cargoes again.’
Impatient, she turned away, along the narrower path that led to the staff door. Totally ignoring the strict school rule, and the sign on the little wooden post: Staff only beyond this point, Simon charged along beside her, still singing his powerful heart out.
‘Sail for a sunrise that burns with new maybes,
Farewell, my loved ones –’
Miss Arnott stopped in her tracks. She’d never faced this problem with Simon before. Moody and awkward he could be. And downright troublesome on some occasions. But she had to admit that, in all her experience of the boy, she’d never known him truly disobedient. What should she do? Tackle him? Or ignore it? First things first, thought