Flour Babies - Anne Fine [51]
‘That’s how the trap works/he explained to the flour baby. “That’s how it gets you. First you know nothing. Then it’s far too late.’
He paused.
‘Unless you’re a tall ship.’
A tall ship…
His father…
Simon sat down on the bin bag, which bulged voluptuously beneath his weight, and formed a snug nest around him. He was thinking hard.
His father.
Experimentally, he rolled the words out, considering them in a new way.
‘My father. My father. My father.’
Who?
Who?
‘Who?’
The live echo was Robin, sent to track him down, and bring him back for a roasting.
‘Exactly!’ said Simon. ‘Who?’
But Robin was in no mood for riddles. He was on a mission.
‘Out of that bag, Sime. Time to get back to base. Old Carthorse is smouldering in his socks.’
‘You see,’ explained Simon, ignoring him totally, ‘I don’t know who he is. And he doesn’t know who I am. And so what Mum and Gran say is quite right. The fact that he walked out is really nothing to do with me.’
‘Out of the bag, Sime! Time’s up!’
‘I’m not saying what he did was right,’ Simon went on. ‘Sailing off like that and leaving my mum to look after me for ever and ever.’ He poked the flour baby. ‘Though after lugging this thing about for three weeks, I can understand how it happened. I’m just saying that it shouldn’t – doesn’t – matter to me any longer.’
‘Yes, Sime. Now out of the bag, please.’
‘You see, I’m finished with him,’ Simon persisted. ‘In fact, in a way, we never even started. He’s really nothing at all to do with me. And out there in the world there are millions and millions of people who have nothing to do with me, who don’t even know me. They all get on perfectly well without me. And I get on perfectly well without them.’
But Robin’s patience had run out.
‘Sime, I’m not getting in trouble for you. I’m going back now. I’m going to tell Old Carthorse I found you but you wouldn’t come. You were too busy sitting in a flour bag, spouting about your family.’
It was as if Simon didn’t even hear him.
‘And what I’ve realized is that my father is just one more person on the planet who doesn’t know who I am. That’s all he is. And only the people who know you really count.’
‘I’m counting, Sime.’
‘And so my mother counts. And Gran. And Sue.’
‘One…’
‘But not him. He doesn’t count.’
‘Two…’
‘Not that I’m blaming him. But he doesn’t count.’
‘Three!’
Despairing of forcing Simon to see sense, Robin turned to go back to the classroom. And as he reached the bend in the corridor, he could still hear faintly, from behind, the sound of Simon holding forth to his flour baby.
‘I feel a lot better now, really I do. I don’t think I knew how much the whole business has been bothering me. But I feel different now. I feel free.’
The flour baby stared back out of her sympathetic, long-lashed eyes.
‘You do see, don’t you?’
The look on her face never altered.
‘You understand?’
The flour baby watched him impassively.
And slowly, inexorably, Simon came back to his senses. What was he doing, sitting in a school corridor in a nice, comfy bin bag, chatting to a lump of flour? Was he cracked?
Simon leaped to his feet as if he’d been scalded. Flour baby! She wasn’t a flour baby. She was a silly, lifeless bag of flour. She wasn’t even a she. She was an it. What was the matter with him? For nearly three weeks now, he’d been discussing his life with a flour sack. Was he unhinged? This thing he was holding was nothing more than part of some boring school project. She wasn’t real. None of them were real.
Grasping the corners of the bin bag, he upended it forcibly. Flour sacks spilled far and wide. That’s all they were. Flour sacks! Sacks of flour!
Picking one up, he hurled it at the ceiling. It split, showering flour all over. Simon didn’t care. He felt the most extraordinary relief, as if he’d suddenly been let out of gaol; as if, swimming hopelessly round and round after a shipwreck, he’d spotted lights on land; as if the doctor and the vicar and the teacher had come to tell him they were wrong, just a mistake, he wasn’t going to have to be a parent