Flour Babies - Anne Fine [7]
Simon sucked air in sharply between his teeth. He didn’t, on the whole, pay much attention to teachers.But he did recognize their cunning in all its common forms.
‘Old Smoothy-chops!’ he muttered bitterly to his neighbour at the next desk, Robin Foster. ‘He’s just trying to wriggle out of the flour babies because they’re the best,’
Out of sheer habit, Robin passed this intelligence on. So did his neighbour. So did his. The whisper swept round the room so fast that by the time Mr Cartright beamed brightly and asked,
‘Now, who’d prefer textiles?’
they were ranked up and ready with their own form of sabotage.
‘Sewing and stuff! Great! You watch out, Foster! I owe you a good stabbing with the unpicker, back from first year.’
‘Bet I can stick fifty pins in my face, and keep them there the whole lesson!’
‘Bet Tariq can make the sewing machine go so fast it busts.’
‘Can I make a Nazi flag, please, sir?’
‘If it’s textiles, can we do stains?’
‘Oh, yes, sir! Yes! I can think of some great stains which wouldn’t wash out. Never.’
Inwardly, Mr Cartright shuddered.
‘Tell you what,’ he said brightly. ‘Let’s not bother with textiles. Let’s just make it consumer studies instead.’
But they were already lying in wait for him on this one.
‘Yeh! Yeh!’
‘Done consumer studies before. It was dead good. Once we had to count how many baked beans there were in eight different sorts of cans. Our team would have won, sir, except for Wayne pigging so many.’
‘We would have won the value-for-money-in-sweeties test, too, sir. But Tariq kept spitting them at Phil instead of sucking them properly.’
None of this sort of soft stuff was likely to daunt Mr Cartright, Simon could tell. If they were to succeed in their unspoken purpose of making sure everything except flour babies was right out of favour, someone had to roll out the big guns.
‘You’re let off down the shops in consumer studies,’ he threatened Mr Cartright darkly.
And, promptly, the others came up trumps.
‘Yeh! Only four of our lot came back once. Poor Mr Harris took a major fit.’
‘And Russ nearly got run over. That was a laugh.’
‘This man jumped out of his car, and as soon as he’d checked Russ was all right, he bashed him.’
‘Just for making a dent in his bumper, sir. And it wasn’t my fault. Luis pushed me.’
‘Luis was chasing a girl.’
Luis gazed round the room proudly.
‘Met Moira, though, didn’t I?’
At the mere mention of Moira’s name, there were animal roars of approval. Mr Cartright turned his back on the lot of them. He didn’t want to have to see the rush of arcane and dubious gestures he knew from experience greeted any female name. In any case, he found the whole idea of sending them trailing round the shops utterly dispiriting. Why had schools been invented, for heaven’s sake? Surely to fill young people’s minds with loftier things than knowing how best to shop for floorcloths.
No, he’d have nothing to do with this new-fangled philistinism.
He picked up the board rubber, and with two long, firm strokes, wiped textiles and consumer studies off the board.
‘How about domestic economy?’ he suggested.
Cries of contempt rang round.
‘Wendy Houses!’
‘Let’s pretend!’
‘Oh, golly me! You mustn’t use that cloth to wipe the plates. You’ve just used it down the lavatory!’
‘Bring in your washing when it rains, or, guess what! It might get wet!’
‘You must be making all this up,’ Mr Cartright accused them sternly. But for the life of him, he couldn’t think what else domestic economy might be about, except stuff that any halfwit could work out for himself in a fortnight.
He rubbed domestic economy off the board.
‘You realize,’ he said, ‘that only leaves babies and food.’
He was convinced that