Flour Babies - Anne Fine [9]
Life was too short for nutrition.
Let it be flour babies. Let chaos reign.
3
Simon sat across the kitchen table from his flour baby and gave her a poke.
The flour baby fell over.
‘Ha!’ Simon scoffed. ‘Can’t even sit up yet!’
He set the flour baby up again, and gave her another poke.
Again, she fell over.
‘Not very good at standing up for yourself, are you?’ Simon taunted, setting her up again.
The flour baby fell over backwards this time, off the table into the dog basket.
‘Blast!’
‘You mustn’t swear in front of it,’ Simon’s mother said. ‘You’ll set it a terrible example.’
Simon reached down to scoop the flour baby off Macpherson’s cushion, and picked the dog’s hairs off her frock.
‘Not it,’ he reproved his mum in turn. ‘Her.’
She was definitely a her. Definitely. Some of the flour babies Mr Cartright had handed out that morning could have been one or the other. It wasn’t clear. But not the one that landed in Simon’s lap.
‘Catch, Dozy! Aren’t you supposed to be one of the school’s sporting heroes? Wake up!’
She was sweet. She was dressed in a frilly pink bonnet and a pink nylon frock, and carefully painted on her sacking were luscious sexy round eyes fringed with fluttering lashes.
Robin Foster, beside him, was jealous instantly.
‘How come you get one with eyes? Mine’s just plain sacking. Do you want to swap?’
Simon tightened his grip round his flour baby.
‘No. She’s mine. You paint eyes on your own if you want them.’
‘And yours has clothes!’ He turned to yell at Mr Cartright, who was just coming to the end of tossing bags of flour round the room. ‘Sir! Sir! Sime’s dolly has got a frock and a bonnet and eyes and everything. And mine’s got nothing. It’s not fair.’
If every parent who had a baby who was a bit lacking sent it back,’ Mr Cartright said, ‘this classroom would be practically empty. Sit down and be quiet.’
He heaved himself up on the desk, and started reading the rules of the experiment.
FLOUR BABIES
(1) The flour babies must be kept clean and dry at all times. All fraying, staining and leakage of stuffing will be taken very seriously indeed.
(2) Flour babies will be put on the official scales twice a week to check for any weight loss that might indicate casual neglect or maltreatment, or any weight gain that might indicate tampering or damp.
(3) No flour baby may be left unattended at any time, night or day. If you must be out of sight of your flour baby, even for a short time, a responsible babysitter must be arranged.
(4) You must keep a Baby Book, and write in it daily. Each entry should be no shorter than three full sentences, and no longer than five pages.
(5) Certain persons (who shall not be named until the experiment is over) shall make it their business to check on the welfare of the flour babies and the keeping of the above rules. These people may be parents, other pupils, or members of staff or the public.
He looked up.
‘That’s it.’
He’d never seen a class reduced to silence before. An interesting sight. You had to hand it to Dr Feltham and these boffin types. They had weird powers. Some of them might fumble in and out of the staffroom, letting their woollies unravel behind them, and visibly having to trawl through their memory banks each time someone asked them if they took sugar in their tea. But they could work wonders. They could wreak miracles. With their mysterious arts, they could do the unimaginable. They could blow the whole