Flour Babies - Anne Fine [5]
They’d left him no choice, really.
They couldn’t expect him to sit there all day doing nothing.
When the next teacher came out, he’d give it a go.
The next teacher to come out was Mr Dupasque. As the door swung behind him, Simon Martin surreptitiously shifted one of his quite enormous feet a couple of inches backwards and used his heel to stop the door from closing properly.
It was their own fault. If they didn’t want someone who had already been picked on in Assembly for no reason at all getting so bored he ended up listening to what they were saying, they should have left him alone while he was peacefully whistling and tapping and clicking.
Simon settled in for a good eavesdrop. In fact, if he turned his head to the right as if he were gazing down the corridor, he could even see a thin slice of staffroom out of the corner of his eye. Across it, Old Carthorse was reeling, making one of his giant great fusses.
‘I don’t believe this,’ Mr Cartright was bellowing. ‘I cannot believe my ears. Are you seriously trying to tell me that these child development project things of yours are literally six pounds of plain white flour sewn into a sacking bag? And you intend to give one of these things to each of the maniacs in my class?’
‘Not give, Eric. Lend.’
‘Give. Lend.’ Simon caught a brief glimpse of a slice of Mr Cartright’s arms, thrown up in a gesture of despair. ‘With that pack of sociopaths, what difference does it make? No one in 4C could take care of a stone without cracking it. You can’t expect six-pound bags of flour to survive!’
Through the gap, Simon saw a strip of Dr Feltham’s anxious face.
‘Not six pounds, Eric. Three kilos. Now do try to set an example. Think in grammes.’
‘I’ll think how I damn well want, thank you,’ Simon overheard Mr Cartright growl. ‘And, frankly, I think you must be off your trolley. There are nineteen boys in 4C this term, you know. Nineteen times six is one hundred and twenty-three!’
‘One hundred and fourteen,’ Dr Feltham couldn’t help correcting.
‘What?’
Dr Feltham mistook Mr Cartright’s mixture of impatience and outrage for a sincere quest for mathematical enlightenment.
‘I think you must have multiplied the nine by seven by mistake,’ he said. ‘It’s the only rational explanation for that particular error.’
What with all this fancy talk of numbers, Simon’s attention was flagging. He was about to slide his foot forward and let the door close again, when another slice of Mr Cartright reeled into view, and he heard his class teacher howl.
‘Hundred and this! Hundred and that! What does it matter? It’s still over a hundred pounds of sifted white flour exploding in my classroom!’
Outside in the corridor, a look of sheer rapture spread over young Simon Martin’s face. Could he be hearing right? One hundred pounds of sifted white flour? Exploding? In the classroom? Oh, bliss and joy! Worth coming back to school. Worth all the miserable hours spent scraping his massive knees under the dolly desks, being moaned at by teachers, and shrivelling with boredom.
One hundred pounds of sifted white flour.
BANG!!!!!
Oh, he could see it now. Drifts of it! Mountains of it! Clouds of it! The room would be knee-deep in flour. It would rain flour. Flour would puff out of the windows, track from the door.
The vision was so beguiling, so white and perfect, so absolutely beautiful, that Simon’s ears were temporarily blocked by the ballooning magic force of his imagination, and he completely missed Dr Feltham’s attempt to explain the experiment to his colleague.
‘You’ve got it all wrong,