I looked into Mr Kosinsky’s eyes. Did he think I was a brainless nuisance? Had he decided that he couldn’t bear teaching me any longer? Was he the sort of man who would want to expel someone?
I glanced over at Megan Shotts. She was sitting in the back row, as per usual, carving chunks out of her desk with a penknife. Megan beat up small boys in the playground. She knocked the wing mirrors off Mrs Benton’s car. Last summer she let out the locusts from the biology lab. I found one in my packed lunch. I could be a pain at times, even I knew that. But I couldn’t hold a candle to Megan.
I glanced in the other direction. Barry Griffin. He’d answered a couple of questions last year, got them wrong, then gone into permanent hibernation. He spent every lesson staring into the distance, motionless and vacant, like someone listening to music on earphones. Except that he didn’t have any earphones. What he did have was short legs and very long arms. He looked like prehistoric man. Barry made me look like a guy from NASA.
Why should I get sent to a special school instead of those two? Becky had to be lying.
“Earth calling Jim.”
I looked up to see Mr Kosinsky standing next to my desk.
“Yes?” I said.
“The tides, Jim. What causes the tides?”
“Well…” I said, floundering.
Mr Kosinsky bent down and looked into my ear. “Astonishing. I can see all the way through and out the other side.”
People started to laugh.
“What causes the tides, Jim?” he asked for a second time. “Is it perhaps the gravitational pull of the sun?”
“It might be,” I said gingerly.
“Or is it perhaps a very large fish called Brian?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Jim,” he sighed, walking back to the front of the room, “I sometimes wonder why you bother coming to school at all.”
My heart sank. Perhaps Becky was right after all.
After lunch I lingered by the school secretary’s door and watched Charlie do the drop. With the walkie-talkie tucked snugly inside his jacket pocket, he knocked on the door of the staff room. The door opened and Mr Kidd appeared with a mouth full of sausage roll and copy of What Car? in his hand.
Mr Kidd taught art. He wasn’t really meant to be a teacher. He looked like he’d wandered into a school some years ago and never quite managed to get out. His tie was always undone, his shirtsleeves were always rolled up and he always had a slightly depressed look on his face. I think he really wanted to be at home watching Sky Sports with a can of lager. On the other hand, he could draw a really good picture of a horse. And horses are seriously difficult.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Charlie. “Do you mind if I come in and have a word?”
“Can’t you…” Mr Kidd swallowed his mouthful of sausage roll. “Can’t you tell me out here?”
“It’s kind of a personal problem,” said Charlie.
“Oh, all right, all right,” agreed Mr Kidd, wafting him inside with his magazine.
A few minutes later Charlie re-emerged into the corridor and grinned at me.
“Did you do it?” I asked.
He slapped an arm round my shoulder as we walked away. “Sometimes I am so cool I even amaze myself.”
“So what was the personal problem?”
But at this moment the bell rang.
“I’ll tell you later,” said Charlie, and we headed back to the classroom.
In the afternoon we did the Industrial Revolution with Mrs Pearce. The spinning jenny. Watt’s steam engine. Children being sent down mines. Or rather, that’s what everyone else did. Me, I just sat at the back of the class thinking about getting sent to Fenham and being murdered by Craterface and how going down a mine sounded preferable to both.
At the end of school we hung about for ten minutes or so, then slipped into the athletics shed. Charlie took the second walkie-talkie from his bag and turned it on, and suddenly we were spying on our teachers.
For a couple of minutes it was one of the most exciting things I’d ever done. Over the next quarter of an hour, however, it rapidly became one of the most tedious things I’d ever done. They talked about the £400 they were going to spend on new books for the library. They talked about the fire safety drill. They talked about which contractors they were going to use to re-tarmac the playground. They talked about the secretary leaving to have a baby. They talked about the staff toilet and how it didn’t flush properly.
I began to understand why Mr Kosinsky wore weird socks. Choosing what to put on his feet every morning was probably the most thrilling part of his day.
“By the way,” said the crackly voice of Mr Kidd over the walkie-talkie, “Charlie Brooks came to see me at lunch today. You probably saw his bandages.”
There were murmurs around the room.
“Hey, they’re talking about you,” I hissed at Charlie.
“Shhhh!” he hissed back.
“Apparently,” continued Mr Kidd, “he was attacked by the neighbour’s dog. Bit of a vicious brute, it seems. The poor boy very nearly lost his fingers. His parents had to rush him to hospital.”
“You what?” I spluttered at Charlie.
Charlie looked very smug indeed.
“So, go easy on him over the next few days,” said Mr Kidd. “He sounded pretty shaken by the whole affair.”
Grunts of agreement came out of the little black speaker.
I glanced over at Charlie. “Now that was clever.”
Charlie just smiled at me and said, “Well, it looks like you’re in the clear too.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Which is more important?” said Charlie. “You geting expelled, or the staff toilet not flushing properly? If you were going to be expelled, I think they’d have mentioned it.”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed.
“So,” said Charlie, “when do we put the mayonnaise in Becky’s helmet?”
“Now that I think about it, I’m not sure that’s a terribly good plan.” I stood up. “I don’t want to wind Craterface up even more.”
In the staff room teachers were scraping their chairs back from the table, filling their briefcases and heading home.
“Give them five minutes to get away,” said Charlie, stretching his legs and yawning. “Then the coast’ll be clear and we can split.”
It was at this point that something very odd happened. I’d picked up the walkie-talkie and was about to turn the thing off when it said, “Bretnick,” in a woman’s voice.
I shook it, thinking one of the wires had come loose.
“Toller bandol venting,” said a man’s voice.
“Charlie,” I whispered. “Listen to this.”
He walked over and crouched down in time to hear the woman’s voice say, “Loy. Loy garting dendle. Nets?”
Our jaws dropped and our eyes widened.
“Zorner.”
“Zorner ment. Cruss mo plug.”
“Bo. Bo. Tractor bonting dross.”
“Are you hearing what I’m hearing?” asked Charlie.
“I am. But who is it?”
Charlie listened carefully. “That’s Mrs Pearce.”
“Wendo bill. Slap freedo gandy hump,” said Mrs Pearce.
“God, you’re right. But who’s the other one?” I turned the volume up and concentrated.
“Zecky?” said the man’s voice. “Spleeno ken mondermill.”
“It’s Mr Kidd,” I said.
“I think my head is about to explode,” said Charlie.
“Wait…” I fiddled with every knob on the walkie-talkie. I took the batteries out and put them in again. There was no getting away from it. Our art teacher and our history teacher were standing in the empty staff room saying “Tractor bonting dross,” and “Slap freedo gandy hump,” to each other like it was the most natural thing in the world.