Anne Fine
Goggle-eyes
For my Ione
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Scottish Arts Council during the writing of this book
1
Helen came into school today in the worst mood. She looked peculiar, and her eyes were red and puffy. She wouldn’t speak to anyone, and if anybody spoke to her, she simply shrugged and turned away. She buried her head in her arms on her desk lid, and waited for first bell.
‘Is anything wrong?’
A muffled, ‘No!’
‘What’s up, Helly?’
‘Nothing!’
She lifted her head and practically spat it out. We were a bit shocked. She has to be the gentlest person in our class, normally. There must have been something terribly wrong.
And you could tell that Mrs Lupey thought so, too, when she came in.
‘What’s up, Helen? Anything the matter?’
Another muffled, ‘No!’
She didn’t even raise her head, or try to sound the slightest bit polite.
Mrs Lupey looked round at all the rest of us. With Helen’s head safely buried on her desk, she let a look of: ‘Does anyone here have any idea what’s wrong with her?’ spread over her face, and we all shook our heads and shrugged.
Then first bell rang.
‘Seats, please,’ said Mrs Lupey. ‘Register.’
There was a note tucked in the register, sent down from the office. We waited while she pulled it out of the envelope, read it, and made a little face, glancing at Helen. Then she picked up her pen.
‘Number off!’
‘One,’ called out Anna Artree. ‘Two,’ shouted Leila Assim. That’s how we do our register. It’s one of Mrs Lupey’s Great Ideas to Save Time. Everyone’s numbered in alphabetical order, and then each day we rattle through the numbers from one to thirty-four. I’m twenty-two.
‘Eighteen.’ ‘Nineteen.’ ‘Twenty.’
Silence.
(Helen is twenty-one.)
Usually Mrs Lupey doesn’t fuss. If we get held up on a number because someone’s rushing through last night’s homework, or scrabbling on the floor for something they’ve dropped, she just glances up to check they’re there, and then she says the number herself, and we just carry on. This time she didn’t.
‘Twenty-one?’
Everyone looked towards Helen, who was still trying to bury herself in her desk lid.
‘Mission Control calling Twenty-one,’ said Mrs Lupey. She was watching Helen closely. ‘I know you’re out there, Twenty-one. Speak to me. Please.’
Silence. We were all watching now. When Helen Johnston acts as awkward as this, then something’s very wrong.
Mrs Lupey gave her a moment, then:
‘Please…? Pretty, pretty please…?’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Astonishingly, Helen leaped to her feet and scraped her chair legs back across the floor. She lifted her desk lid and slammed it down so hard her pens flew off in all directions. ‘Leave me alone, for heaven’s sake!’
And rushing across the room, she wrenched the classroom door open and banged out, leaving it swinging on its hinges.
Everyone stared.
‘Well!’ Mrs Lupey said ruefully after a moment. ‘I handled that really well, didn’t I?’
She looked quite shaken.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Alice assured her. ‘She wouldn’t speak to any of us, either. Not a word.’
Mrs Lupey glanced at the note lying on the pages of the register. Then she looked thoughtfully through the open doorway. Far off, more doors were banging, one by one.
‘I think I’d better send someone after her,’ she said. ‘Just to sit with her in the cloakroom, till she’s calmed down.’
She looked directly at me.
‘Kitty,’ she said.
She took me totally by surprise. ‘Why me?’ I squawked, and pointed across the room. ‘You ought to send Liz. Liz is her best friend.’
‘You,’ Mrs Lupey said. ‘You are the Chosen One. Go, now, before she rushes out of school and gets run over.’
Liz tried to back me up. You could tell she, too, thought Mrs Lupey had picked the wrong person.
‘Can’t I go too?’
‘No.’ Mrs Lupey put her fingertips together and looked over them, first at me, then at Liz.
‘No offence, Liz,’ she said. ‘But I think, this once, Kitty here might be just the right man for the job.’
(You can see why we’ve ended up calling her Loopy.)
I stood and started packing my books into my school bag.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Mrs Lupey. ‘Just get after her.’
‘But what about my classes?’
Mrs Lupey stepped out from behind her desk and held the classroom door open.
‘Go!’ she said.
Extraordinary. I shovelled my school bag under my desk, and hurried to the door.
As I went past her, she saluted me.
‘We’re counting on you, Twenty-two,’ she said. I think it was some sort of joke.
It wasn’t hard to work out which way she’d gone. To bang that many doors one after another, you have to be running downstairs to the cloakroom. I pushed the last one open quietly.
‘Helly? Are you hiding?’
There was no answer. I’m not sure that I was expecting one, but I was pretty sure she was in there somewhere. The trouble is that the cloakroom’s enormous – rack after rack, bulging with thick winter coats and woolly scarves. You could spend hours searching the place for missing persons.
I’m not daft. I used the method my sister Jude perfected to catch the gerbils each time they make one of their spectacular cage-breaks. First I stepped in the room and called again: ‘Helen? Helen, are you in here?’ Then I sighed, slightly impatiently, and did a quick shoe-shuffle on the spot. Then I clicked the door shut firmly behind my back.
And then I waited.
It wasn’t long before I heard them, the first little gerbilly scrabblings for a tissue, some long sniffs and a huge fruity blow.
‘Gotcha!’
She sprang up like a scalded cat.
‘Just go away!’
She looked quite frightful, truly she did. If you’d have seen her, you’d have thought everyone in her family had just been swept away by tidal waves. Her face was swollen and her nose was running. She screamed at me:
‘Leave me alone!’
‘I can’t,’ I told her. ‘I’ve been sent. I’m to sit here and wait till you calm down. It’s my job to make sure you don’t get run over.’
‘Run over?’ On top of distraught, she now looked absolutely baffled. ‘Oh, run over.’
This information seemed to weaken her a bit. She stopped glowering at me quite so fiercely. I took advantage of her slight softening of attitude to sweep a pair of hockey boots off the bench opposite, and sit down between two very nasty damp coats. She didn’t seem to mind my being there any longer. She seemed to accept that it was my job to sit amongst all those dangling shoe bags and straying socks, and stop her getting run over. It is a generally accepted fact in our school that all of the teachers and most of the parents are obsessed with the fear that one day someone will charge out of the main door without looking, and end up squashed to pulp under the tyres of some delivery van. It comes from the building being smack in the middle of town. When we did block graphs in maths, we made one of every single thing we could think of, down to the last words everyone’s parents said as we left home in the mornings. That was a really odd looking block graph. Alice said her parents always told her: ‘Be good, little beansprout,’ and everyone else reported some version or another of: ‘Mind you be careful crossing all those roads!’