Flour Babies - Anne Fine [44]
He picked up a stump of chalk and started scratching away on the blackboard. Hastily, Simon stuffed the flour baby up his jumper and turned back to face the class. No one seemed to have noticed his sleight of hand and foot. Good. They were all still glaring at him, certainly. But as he stumbled back to his seat, no one reached out and poked or grabbed at the tell-tale bulge in his sweater. For the moment, she was safe.
Simon collapsed on to his chair, and tried to pay attention to Mr Cartright.
‘I’m writing names up here,’ he was telling them sternly. ‘The names of everyone who still has days missing from his flour baby diary. I don’t care if you find them, rewrite them, or make them up. But everyone is to hand in enough for eighteen days.’
Not surprisingly, given its length, the list took some time to chalk up on the blackboard. While his classmates were busy watching out for their names, and, by extension, the chance for a noisy and protracted wrangle about the precise number of entries that were actually missing, Simon managed to smuggle his flour baby, completely unnoticed, out from under his sweater into the safe haven of his desk.
Mr Cartright wrote the last name – Rick Tullis – up very neatly in the top left-hand corner, well out of the way, since the chances were high it would stay there.
Then he turned round.
‘Anyone who finishes,’ he consoled them, ‘may go off to the library and do some private study.’
The general aura of resentment cleared a little at this announcement. One or two of them even cheered up enough to punch their fists in the air. For most of the members of 4C, the words ‘private study’ were generally taken to be synonymous with ‘have a good laugh’.
Only George Spalder still seemed dissatisfied.
‘But what about the snoopers?’
‘Snoopers?’
‘Yes, sir. Surely you’re going to tell us who the snoopers were.’
‘Snoopers…’
A feeling of unease crept over Mr Cartright. Snoopers… Picking up Dr Feltham’s huge Science Fair memorandum, he turned to the page of rules in order to refresh his memory, and his eye fell on the one claiming that certain people – parents, pupils, staff, or even members of the public – would secretly be checking on the flour babies.
He wasn’t supposed to have done anything about that, was he?
Mr Cartright turned over a page and saw the number in the top corner – 84. He turned back a page. Number 81. Not the sort of error Dr Feltham would make. A man who could spin round the school not only correcting the mistakes in everyone else’s mental arithmetic, but also pointing out how they came to make the error in the first place, must know how to number pages correctly. Why, even Mr Cartright could count.
Gently, carefully, fearfully, Mr Cartright picked at the uncommonly thick page in question to find that, as he suspected, the hidden pages numbered 82 and 83 peeled apart, revealing detailed instructions for the teacher on the recruitment and supervision of out-of-class observers.
Snapping the memorandum shut, Mr Cartright said firmly to George:
‘Oh, I don’t think we need worry our heads about the snoopers.’
George couldn’t have disagreed more strongly.
‘You have to tell us who they were,’ he insisted. ‘So we can go out and bash them.’
It seemed that, on this issue at least, the whole class was in accord.
‘Yes! Punch their lights out!’
‘Rearrange their faces!’
‘Give them a knuckle sandwich!’
Mr Cartright was reduced to cunning.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You make a list of everyone you think was snooping on you, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.’
They fell to the task with a will. And Mr Cartright was astonished to find each and every one of them labouring to write a list of a dozen or more badly-spelled names, to the accompaniment of a barrage of offensive remarks.
‘I’m putting her down first. Nosy bat!’
‘Prying old busybody! I don’t think she took her beady eyes off me for a moment!’
‘ “Had your eyeful?” I asked him. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about”, he said. But I knew.