Flour Babies - Anne Fine [45]
Mr Cartright ambled round the class, watching in amazement as their lists of suspects grew longer and longer and their mutterings more and more baleful. It was extraordinary, he thought. And something to tell Dr Feltham. It was a waste of time recruiting real snoopers. There was clearly no need for that at all.
He walked past Tariq just as the boy was complaining venomously:
‘Of course, they claimed they were just taking an interest. Anyone else would call it meddling.’
And the point was borne out in Bill Simmons’s last diary entry.
Day 18
Good thing it’s the last day because I couldn’t stand any more prying and nagging. People with real babies must be totally soft targets if even flour babies make people you’ve never even met before come up and pretty well order you about. ‘I shouldn’t leave it there, dear. It might get muddy.’ ‘Don’t you think you ought to bleh-bleh-bleh.’ ‘Shouldn’t you bleh-bleh-bleh-bleh-bl–
Mr Cartright reached down and lifted Bill Simmons’s pen off the last bleh.
‘Stuck in a groove?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Allow me to help you.’
Ignoring Bill’s poisonous look, he moved on to read Philip Brewster’s last effort. Here again, the subject of snoopers was well to the fore.
What got me most about the flour babies was how sneaky people are. They go round pretending they’re just being friendly and chatting to you, but really they’re telling you you ought to be doing things differently. ‘I’ll tell you how I coped with mine,’ they say, smiling creepily. Or, ‘What I found worked best was this.’ And you’re supposed to smile back, and pretend you’re so thick you haven’t realized that they’re telling you off.
And Sajid, as usual, cogently summed up the whole issue.
I’ll tell you what I can’t understand. You can hardly open the newspaper without reading about someone who’s been arrested for bashing a baby, and it’s never the first time they did it. I don’t understand that, really I don’t. I only had to give my flour baby a look, and my whole family was practically queuing up to phone the police and tell on me. So where do all these baby bashers live? Don’t they have any family? Don’t they have any neighbours? Don’t they have anyfr -
Sajid raised his head.
‘How do you spell “friends”?’ he asked of the room at large.
No reason not to try mending a fence or two, Simon thought, and spoke up.
‘I think it’s f–r–e–i–n–d–s. I wrote it that way a few minutes ago, and it looked quite all right to me.’
Dutifully, Mr Cartright strolled over the room to correct Simon’s pitiful spelling. But before reaching down to despoil the last diary entry with his mark ing pen, he stood quietly behind the desk for a few moments, practising the skilled decoder’s art.
Day 18. Over & Out.
So I was all wrong about the Glorious Explosion and getting to kick the flour babies to bits at the end. Who cares? I was planning on cheating anyway. I was going to hide mine, and join in battering everyone else’s. I might be in 4C but I’m not absolutely stupid. ,’ worked out days ago that I wouldn’t be able to hurt mine, not any more, not now I’ve grown to like her. (And especially not now, when everyone hates me and I have no fr –
Mr Cartright was just leaning over, pen uncapped, to rearrange the next two vowels, when both of them disappeared before his eyes, dissolving in a miniature blue pool.
A teardrop. No doubt about it. And just like everything else about the boy, it was enormous. Hastily, before more could fall, Mr Cartright dug in his jacket pocket, fished out the huge spotted handkerchief, and thrust it into Simon’s hand.
Simon stared down at the large blue blur on his work. No doubt about it. It was a teardrop. What was the matter with him? If he didn’t get a grip, the others might notice. Come break-time, he would be destroyed.
Gratefully he took the handkerchief he was offered. And while Mr Cartright heaved his massive back end up on Simon’s desk, deliberately shielding him from everyone’s view, he tried to pull himself together.
When Mr Cartright felt the damp handkerchief pushed back in his hand,