Flour Babies - Anne Fine [42]
Mr Cartright pointed at Simon.
‘You – You –’
For quite a while, he couldn’t get it out.
‘You told them they would be allowed to kick one hundred pounds of sifted white flour around in my classroom!’
He fished in his jacket pocket and drew out his huge spotted handkerchief. He wiped his streaming eyes.
‘And they believed you!’
Still laughing fit to burst, he fell off his desk and landed on the floor. The boards shook. The desk careered over backwards, snapping the steel-tipped wooden blackboard rule in two, trapping one half beneath, and sending the other flying up at the ceiling where it hit the central light fitting.
BANG!!!!!!
There was a glorious explosion. Showers of sparks and splintered glass rained down on them, and their gasps of astonishment and delight were drowned by the hissing and spitting of ancient and overstressed electrical wiring.
The silence that followed was palpable. Then,
‘See?’ Robin said loyally. ‘Simon was right.’
Loyally, too, he went off with his friend, to fetch the broom and the dustpan. Together they swept the shards of glass into a neat pile behind the door, and set Mr Cartright’s desk back on its legs.
Mr Cartright set the scales down.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Joke over.’
He pointed at Russ, as the nearest.
‘Hand over your flour baby.’
Not knowing what else to do, Russ passed his flour baby to Mr Cartright, who dumped it on the scale.
‘Not bad, Russ. It’s only lost a tiny bit of weight, and, apart from the cat hairs, it looks almost presentable. Well done!’
Mr Cartright dropped the flour baby into the huge double-duty black bin bag he’d been keeping in his desk for the occasion.
‘One!’ he said, cheering visibly.
He pointed again.
‘Gwyn.’
Gwyn glanced at Sajid who, shrugging, reached in the pram cr che to pull out Gwyn’s little sack of flour.
‘We’ll settle up now, shall we?’ Sajid asked sweetly, deliberately holding Gwyn’s flour baby over the muddy upturned spikes of Philip Brewster’s running shoes.
Business was business, after all.
Scowling, Gwyn dipped his hands deep in his pockets and pulled out enough cash to redeem his flour baby.
‘There you are,’ he said sourly, handing it to Mr Cartright.
Mr Cartright dumped the flour bag unceremoniously on his scales.
‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Spot on!’ And tossed it merrily into the bin bag.
‘Next?’
Before it was too late, Sajid decided to seize the chance to force public payment on some of his most persistent defaulters. He reached in the pram creche, and dug out Luis Pereira’s flour baby. Accepting defeat as graciously as he could, Luis paid up, and took the flour sack to Mr Cartright, who weighed it.
‘This one’s gained a bit of weight,’ he said. And then he noticed the sandwiches Luis’s mother had carefully pinned to its bottom.
‘No,’ he corrected himself, prising them off and putting the flour sack on the scales again. ‘Just within limits. Just.’
A weak cheer greeted this announcement. By now the general disappointment had begun to fade as, one by one, the members of 4C came to realize that, even if they didn’t get to kick the flour babies about, there was consolation to be found in using Simon as a substitute. All around, his classmates had begun to take advan-tage of Simon’s frozen misery to indulge in a barrage of hisses and jeers.
‘Glorious Explosion, eh, Sime?’
‘Wait till break-time!’
‘We’ll gloriously explode you!’
Mr Cartright kept on with his weighing, trying to ignore the cross-currents of disaffection and malevolence slewing about him. Not even having most of them in such a bad mood could stop his own spirits rising. As he called out each name, and dumped each flour sack in the shiny black bin bag, out of sight, he felt a weight dropping from him.