“Smashed a headlight too,” said Charlie. “I am seriously not in Mum’s good books at the moment.”
We lay around for half an hour, reading old copies of Police Surgeon’s Weekly that Charlie had nicked from his dad’s study, looking for pictures of really bad industrial accidents. Then I finally got round to telling Charlie what had been bugging me all evening.
“I’m in trouble.”
“Join the club,” he said.
“No,” I insisted. “I mean big trouble.”
“Tell me.”
So I told him. He was always the right person to talk to about stuff like this. He listened properly and thought hard and when he said something it was usually pretty sensible.
Charlie looked like a Victorian chimney sweep — pointy face, beady eyes, hair going in all directions, clothes a couple of sizes too large. Not that you’d really notice him. He didn’t say much in class and he avoided fights in the playground. He was the person who is always leaning against a wall somewhere in the background, keeping his eye on things.
“You know something, Jimbo,” he said when I’d finished my story.
“What?”
“You are one gullible prat. If your sister told you that the sky was going to fall down, you’d go round wearing a crash helmet.”
“But…” I was feeling embarrassed now. “It could be true, couldn’t it? I mean, it’s possible, right?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s only one thing to do. We have to find out what the teachers really think of you.” He wandered over to the far side of the room, shoved the bed aside, lifted a loose floorboard and extracted a small black object from the hole.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A walkie-talkie,” he replied. “And it’s going to solve this problem once and for all.”
“How?” I asked.
Charlie flicked a switch on the walkie-talkie and I heard his mum’s voice crackling out of the speaker: “…I don’t care what you say, that boy has got to learn his lesson. This week he’s trying to drive the car. Next week he’ll be burning the house down. Now, what do you fancy for supper? I’ve got some of the trout left over from the Kenyons’ wedding. I could rustle up some new potatoes and green beans—”
Charlie flicked the switch off. “The other one’s in the kitchen, on top of the dresser.” He put the walkie-talkie back under the floorboards. “I use it to keep in touch with what’s going on down there in Parentland. Good, eh?”
“Brilliant,” I said. “But how is it going to help me?”
“Use your brain, Jimbo,” said Charlie, tapping his forehead. “We put one in the staff room.”
“Isn’t that a bit risky?” I said nervously. Things were bad enough already. If the teachers found me bugging their private conversations I’d be marched out of the school gates and banged up in Fenham before tea time.
“Course it’s risky,” said Charlie, shrugging his shoulders. “It wouldn’t be any fun if it wasn’t risky.”
I was halfway down the rope ladder when a light came on. There was an ominous thump and I looked up to see Charlie’s mum looming out of the staircase window.
She was carrying the secateurs she used for clipping her roses. “Good evening, Jim.” She smiled down at me. “And what a pleasant evening it is.”
“Er, yes,” I croaked. “Very pleasant.”
“Especially for climbing into people’s houses uninvited,” she tutted. “Why, Jim, I might have thought you were a burglar, mightn’t I? And if I’d thought you were a burglar, heaven knows what might have happened.”
I clambered down the ladder as fast as I could. It wasn’t fast enough. And this is what I mean about the flame-thrower temper. I’ve seen Charlie’s mum throw a breadboard across the kitchen during an argument. She just doesn’t operate according to the normal rules of being a grown-up.
I was couple of metres off the ground when she cut through one of the ropes of the ladder. I lost my footing and found myself dangling upside down. Then she cut the other rope and I hit the gravel, tearing the sleeve of my shirt and scraping the skin off my elbows.
As I ran for the front gate, I could hear her bellowing, “Charlie…! You get down here right now!” I just hoped she wasn’t holding the breadboard.
3
Walkie-talkie
Charlie had the plan worked out like a bank heist.
He’d pop into the staff room at break and hide the walkie-talkie under a chair. The weekly teachers’ meeting began just after the end of school. When the playground was empty we’d slip into the athletics shed and tune in using the second walkie-talkie.
If they said nothing, I was in the clear and we’d fill Becky’s bike helmet with mayonnaise. If they mentioned my removal to Fenham, it was time to start doing three hours of homework a night and buying presents for all my teachers.
There were flaws in the plan, obviously. They might have more important things to talk about than me. They might have discussed my removal to Fenham last week. To be honest, I think Charlie was more interested in bugging the staff room than putting my mind at ease.
Worst of all we might be found by the caretaker. When Mr McLennan caught the Patterson twins in the athletics shed last year he simply pretended he hadn’t seen them and locked them in overnight. He was very nearly sacked but the headmistress reckoned it would help cut down vandalism if everyone knew there was a dangerous lunatic looking after the school buildings.
On the other hand, what else could I do? I had no brilliant plan of my own and at least I was doing something positive. Doing something positive, as Mum was always saying, is a jolly good thing. Much better than sitting around all day moping. Like a certain member of our family.
Besides, two people wanted to kill me. A secateur-wielding cook and a kung-fu death metal biker. One lived at Charlie’s house and the other spent a great deal of time at our flat. In the greater scheme of things the athletics shed was probably the safest place to be.
I met up with Charlie the following morning at the school gates just before assembly. His right hand was wrapped in a large white bandage, with faint bloodstains seeping through it. A hideous image flashed through my mind.
“Oh my God!” I said. “She cut your fingers off.”
“What?”
“With the secateurs.”
“No, no, no,” Charlie laughed, shaking his head. “She’s crazy, but she’s not that crazy. I tried to escape. I jumped over the window ledge and scrambled down the ladder. I thought I’d come back when she’d cooled off.”
“But she cut the ladder in half.”
“As I discovered.” He held up his wounded hands. “I landed on a pile of old plant pots.”
“Nasty.”
“It could have been worse,” he said. “There was a box of garden tools next to the pots.”
We began the morning doing physics with Mr Kosinsky. Mr Kosinsky thought he was very funny. We thought he was a stick insect with weird socks. You could always see his socks because his trousers were too short. This morning they had little pictures of snowmen all over them.
“Ah, you lot,” he said, whisking his jacket off and slipping it over the back of his chair. “What a treat. Now, what were we doing last time? Was it, by any chance, the role of quarks and gluons in quantum field theory?”
“Gravity, sir,” said Mehmet. “We were doing gravity.”
“Ah yes, my mistake,” said Mr Kosinsky, easing his lanky body into his seat. “Now, who can give me a quick resume of what we were doing on Monday?”
Dennis stuck his hand in the air and started telling everyone about Isaac Newton and escape velocity and why it was so difficult going to the loo in a spaceship.