Flour Babies - Anne Fine [49]
Now what would make an interesting display?
First, Simon pulled his own flour baby out from under his jumper and set her in the middle of the table. Then he put all the others in a circle round her.
Good.
He took a label from a nearby table and turned it over to the blank side.
‘Queen Flour Baby and her Courtiers’, he wrote, then looked at it critically. Even if people could make out what it said, they wouldn’t find it interesting.
He tried again. This time he divided the flour babies into pairs, and tried to set them in the sorts of positions that suggested a Saturday night party.
He stole the card from another table. Crossing out the neatly printed words Measuring the Wavelength of Laser Light, he turned it over and tried to write:
Orgy.
Only four letters, and yet he suspected that at least two of them were wrong, or badly out of place. And, anyway, it didn’t look a very interesting party. He tried to liven it up a bit by moving the flour babies into more interesting positions. But somehow they still managed to persist in looking disappointingly like eighteen little sacks of flour, just lying in a jumble on the table.
Giving up, Simon tried something different. This time he set them out in strict rows and wrote Dr Feltham’s Class ofEar’oles on yet another card.
Not very interesting.
His next idea was the best. Taking the card belonging to Hocking’s Zero Gravity Project, he wrote on the back: Simon Martin’s Greatest Goal Ever. And then he set to recreating it with the help of the flour babies and a chocolate bar wrapper he found on the floor and crumpled up for a football.
First he put the front three players into place. Then the middle four, and then the back three. Then he put in the other team. He’d played deep in defence, that glorious day. But when the time came, he’d dribbled the ball up the wing in an astonishing spurt of speed, swerving to miss one defender after another. He’d reached the edge of the penalty area, and let fly such a kick that the ball shot straight in the corner of the net. The goalie didn’t even see it, and Simon didn’t have the time to swing away from the inevitable collision with their beefy, cross-eyed sweeper.
Taken up with the memory, he ran through the last moves of play, propelling the flour babies.
‘Baroom! Baroom! Pow!’
As the two sacks collided, flour puffed out and showered all over.
Out of the way the table might have been. Invisible it wasn’t. Mr Higham had stormed over within seconds.
‘Flour! You’re getting flour over everything! What’s the matter with you, Simon Martin? Why are you acting even more like a half-wit than usual?’
Simon was nettled. He had, after all, only been doing his best to follow orders.
Mr Higham spun round like a frenzied top.
‘Look!’ he was shouting. ‘Look at all this flour! It’s settling on Bernstein’s Pressurized Cylinders! And Butterworth’s Speech Synthesis machine! You can take a detention for this, Simon Martin.’
‘Friday’s my earliest,’ Simon informed him in a voice that was icy with resentment.
‘Friday, then! And don’t think I won’t be in to check on you. I’ll –’
Mr Higham broke off.
‘My God! Now it’s drifting down into Tugwell’s Purified Water apparatus!’
He turned to Simon.
‘Get those things out of here!’
‘But –’
‘Get them out!’
Mr Higham was in such a fury that Simon didn’t argue. Hastily, he shovelled all the flour babies, including his own, into the bin bag.
‘Hurry up! Quick! Get them out of here! Take them away!’
Still scowling, Simon dragged the bin bag towards the door.
‘But where shall I –?’
Mr Higham was in no mood to solve Simon’s problem.
‘Just get them out! Take them away! I don’t care if you kick the damn things to bits. Just get them out of