Flour Babies

by Anne Fine

  ‘I can’t! It’s not just people from our class, you know. There’s only me and Wayne from our class on the team. Everyone else will see. They’ll fall about laughing. We’ll get crucified!’

  ‘Just keep her out of sight.’

  ‘Mu-um!’ Had the woman never been in a locker room? Didn’t she know your sports bag was not your own? You would be lucky if one time in the whole season you got away without having some joker root through your kit to tug out your underpants and make a great drama of sniffing them and whirling them about, or even just borrowing your deodorant or nicking your bus fare.

  He’d give a flour baby doll a life expectancy of minutes in a locker room.

  Less.

  ‘You’ll have to look after it, Mum.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Just while I’m gone.’

  She put on her Forget-it-Simon look.

  ‘Forget it, Simon. I’m out myself until nine. If you think I’m taking your homework with me –’

  Simon made his mind up.

  ‘She can just stay here. She’ll be all right. It’s perfectly safe. I’ll shut Macpherson in the living room, so he won’t chew her or anything. She’ll be fine.’ There was a glint in Simon’s mother’s eye. Amusement? Interest? Mischief? He couldn’t tell.

  ‘And what about Rule 5?’

  Rule 5? The snoopers! Simon snatched the list of rules towards him and struggled through Rule 5 again.

  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.

  Members of staff! Old Carthorse must know about the football. What had he said this morning when he tossed the flour baby over? ‘Aren’t you supposed to be one of the school’s sporting heroes?’ Maybe he’d make it his business to sneak along and rummage through the changing rooms, looking for his and Wayne’s babies.

  And ‘other pupils’. Maybe he’d ordered someone else to check up on both of them. Maybe that Jimmy Holdcroft had been signed on secretly as a nark. He was an oily piece of work. Being a stool pigeon would be right up his street.

  And ‘members of the public’. Next door was always twitching her curtains. She was a natural spy. She’d love to gang up with the enemy. All in a day’s work for Mrs Spicer.

  No. When it came down to it, no one was safe. You didn’t know if you could trust your own mother…

  His eyes fell on the snooper rule again. “These people may be parents…’

  Slowly, casually, he turned to look at her. That glint! It was still in her eye!

  Oh, surely not. Surely not his own mother. The very idea was ridiculous.

  Except –

  They’d do anything, these parents, if they thought it was good for you, or for your education. In this respect, she had no pride at all. Didn’t he know from bitter experience that there were no depths to which she wouldn’t sink? Over the years she’d done everything to try and improve his school record. Threats. Bribes. Even punishments. She’d stopped his allowance. She’d grounded him. She’d yelled. She’d begged. Sometimes she’d even cried. (That was the worst.)

  Spying on him would be chicken-feed. It would be nothing to a mother like her. She’d take it in her stride.

  He couldn’t trust her. No, he couldn’t trust her.

  Sighing, Simon lifted his flour baby off the table and wrapped her carefully in his Tottenham Hotspur towel, so just her eyes were peeking out.

  ‘Right,’ he said. “Off we go. Your first football practice. I hope I’m not going to have to remind you how to behave. And I suppose that, on the way, I’m going to have to explain all the rules.’

  Mrs Martin moved to the window to watch her son striding down the path, explaining the rules of football to a small flour sack with a bonnet and eyes, wrapped up in a Tottenham Hotspur bath towel. She wasn’t the only one paying attention, she noticed. Next door’s curtains were twitching. Mrs Spicer was watching too.

  And Simon saw. Turning at the gate, he spotted next door’s golden brushed-velour curtains shivering in the still air. He broke off his explanation of how an indirect free kick differs from a corner, and, leaning closer to his flour baby, whispered in the pointy bit he took to be her ear:

  ‘You can’t trust anyone, you know. No. Not round here.’

  4

  Boot… Boot… Boot… Boot…

  Mr Fuller’s bellow reached Simon across the length of the football pitch.

  ‘Don’t boot it, lad! Tickle it.’

  It was Simon’s third and last circuit. He was quite fortunate, really. Last year, any member of the team who showed up so late had to do fifty press-ups. Compared with that, dribbling the ball three times round the pitch was a doddle. Old Fuller must be going soft.

  Boot… Boot… Boot… Boot…

  ‘Are you going cloth-eared, boy? You’re not practising goal kicks! Chase the ball gently! Keep it under control. I want to be able to see the elastic holding it to your feet.’

  It wasn’t his fault he’d been late. He blamed Wayne. If Wayne hadn’t dragged him off through the empty classrooms, rooting through desks to find that bottle of Tippex…

  Good laugh, though. Pity he wasn’t back in the changing rooms with the rest to see Froggie’s face when he picked up his tin of foot powder and read what it said on the side now:

  Kills Athletes

  Brilliant.

  It was Wayne’s idea to paint out the word Foot. But it was Simon who guessed the comma thing in Athlete’s ought to go too. He wasn’t sure. It was just a hunch. But hunches were sometimes right. What about the time he’d been fetched out to stand beside Miss Arnott’s desk for mucking about in English? She’d been marking some essay of Gwyn Phillips’s called ‘My Summer Holiday’, and muttering to herself under her breath. Then, raising her voice, she’d asked irritably:

  ‘What is this rubbish you’ve written, Gwyn? “The Italians are all retarded and fiendish”?’

  Gwyn Phillips had looked baffled. How would he know? He hadn’t been on holiday at all. He’d copied the whole thing from Bill Simmons, without thinking. But Simon, peering over Miss Arnott’s glorious golden summer holiday arm, had taken a stab at it differently.

  ‘I think it says “The Italians are all relaxed and friendly”, Miss.’

  Terrific. Goal! He’d earned a flash of Miss Arnott’s wonderful smile, and been sent back to his desk in a riot of applause, weighed down by his gleaming halo.

  Yes, hunches could work. It was just a pity that, tonight, they’d lost those precious minutes going back to blot out that comma thing. And Wayne hadn’t speeded matters up by doing his Hunchback of Notre Dame both ways down the corridor. But what took the most time, and landed Simon with his punishment circuits, was finding somewhere safe to put the flour babies.

  Wayne was for shoving them behind the cistern pipes.

  ‘No one will see them here,’ he’d called down from where he was perched, on a lavatory stall partition.

  ‘Throw them up, Sime.’

  Furtively, Simon unwrapped Wayne’s flour baby from the spare shirt in which he’d hidden it, and passed it up. Wayne was about to wedge it between the pipes when Simon suddenly asked him:

  ‘Are you sure it’s clean?’

  Wayne blinked down like an owl caught in a torch’s glare.

  ‘Clean?’

  ‘Yes. Are the pipes clean?’

  ‘Grief, Sime!’

  But already Simon was stepping on the lavatory seat and hoisting himself up on the partition beside Wayne. He ran his finger along the lower of the two pipes.

  ‘It’s filthy! It needs a good wipe.’

  ‘Sime! Don’t be a plague-spot! We’re already late!’

  ‘It’ll only take a minute.’

  Slithering down the partition wall, Simon dived under the nearest sink, in search of a cloth.

  ‘Sime…’

 
; ‘Hold on, Wayne. There must be a cloth somewhere round here.’

  ‘Sime! Pass up my dolly thing! Now!’

  ‘I don’t believe this! Ten lavs, ten sinks, and no cloth! I mean, I’m not fussy, but wouldn’t you think –’

  ‘That’s it, Sime!’

  Wayne let himself down to the floor, picked up his flour baby, scrambled back up, and shoved it tight between the pipes.

  ‘It’ll get filthy, Wayne.’

  Wayne wasn’t listening. Rubbing the grime on his fingers off on to his tracksuit, he made for the door.

  ‘Bye, Sime! Enjoy your press-ups!’

  Simon lifted his own flour baby out of his sports bag.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ he told her. ‘Let’s go outside where it smells less hoofy. We’ll find you somewhere nice to sit, in the fresh air.’

  The place he chose was a bush a few yards behind the one goal still flooded in sunlight. He thrust the flour baby into the rather meagre greenery, desperately hoping she would appear to be no more than a bundle of towel to the circle of his team mates already booting the ball to one another in the warm-up. Mr Fuller was watching him dangerously, arms folded, from the side of the pitch. But still Simon took his time, wedging the flour baby firmly into the bush. Mr Fuller was the least of his problems. At least now the snoopers couldn’t pick on him. She was there, in sight, and she was clean and safe. Mr Fuller could punish him for being late by giving him fifty press-ups. But if Simon got thrown off the flour baby project, he might miss The Glorious Explosion.

  And it was going to be brilliant. That much he knew. Once or twice since Mr Cartright dealt out the flour babies, Simon had suffered moments of doubt. It struck him that he might somehow have misheard the conversation in the staffroom, or missed the point. And even if he hadn’t, one question still remained to be answered. Was the whole business worth it? After all, it wasn’t generally Simon’s way to stick at a project for the length of a lesson, let alone for a whole three weeks. Would any – Could any explosion Mr Cartright had to offer be worth the grind of dragging this flour baby around, keeping her clean, for twenty-one days of his life?

  Yes. Yes, it could and would. Hadn’t he heard that from the expert himself, Dr Feltham? Running to join the warm-up, Simon braced himself against the look on Mr Fuller’s face by remembering what had happened that very afternoon, in the school corridor. He played it through his brain one more time, like a favourite moment on video. Mr Cartright had been beached up on the radiator outside the classroom door, seemingly doing nothing more strenuous than admiring the knot in his laces. It looked the picture of an unofficial break: the teacher idling outside in the corridor, the class causing mayhem within. But anyone who had strolled back late to Miss Arnott’s class last year as often as Simon knew the set-up for what it was. Mr Cartright wasn’t resting. He was listening. In fact, he was about to pounce. What he was doing out there in the corridor was taking a moment to work out to which of the hoodlums inside he would most enjoy awarding a punishment essay.

  Simon was accustomed to this old routine. At any moment, Mr Cartright would heave his great carcass off the radiator shelf, sidle softly to the door, take a deep breath, and let it out on the other side in such a bellow that poor Miss Arnott, in the next-door room, would all but fall off her chair from fright.

  Simon slid back round the corner and waited. From Carthorse’s point of view, he reckoned, the fewer punishment essays to dish out the better. Like Simon, he was not a great reader. If Simon showed himself now, he’d be bound to become Carthorse’s prey in an instant. But wait till some other poor victim had been named, and Simon might get a home run through the doorway and back to his desk in all the riot of somebody else’s ‘Who? Me, sir? Sir! Why me? It isn’t fair!’

  Worth the risk, anyway.

  Simon lounged against the wall, waiting. And that was how he came to see Dr Feltham and his retinue of willing helpers (‘crawlers’ to Simon) coming round the bend in the corridor. Piled in their arms were all the complicated and unwieldy bits of equipment without which it seemed Dr Feltham couldn’t get through a single forty-minute period in the last weeks before his great Science Fair.

  Simon doubled up in a fake coughing fit. Dr Feltham and his retinue swept past. And Simon stopped coughing just in time to catch Dr Feltham’s remark as he strode past his colleague, still parked on the radiator.

  ‘Starting the term with a real bang, I see, Eric’

  Mr Cartright dealt Dr Feltham one of his poisonous looks, but Simon’s doubts were banished and his worries fled away. After all, Dr Feltham was famous for his extraordinary detonations. His exploding custard tins were the envy of all. If someone with his credentials could admire in advance any big bang of Mr Cartright’s, then that had to settle it once and for all. The experiment was going to be glorious.

  Simon’s smile widened into rapture then. And now, as he booted the football across the circle to Wayne, it was widening again. It was, thought Simon, a bit like one of those promises God used to make to those people he’d been spatting with in the Old Testament… a covenant! They’d done a whole module on them in first year. Rainbows, floods, dead babies – that sort of thing. Well, Dr Feltham coming down the corridor and saying what he did just as Simon happened to be standing there was a sort of covenant in itself. A private promise between The Explosion and Simon…

  Mr Fuller materialized beneath his left elbow.

  ‘I see we’re in blinkers today,’ he started pleasantly enough as Simon, startled, bungled the next pass. ‘Not wearing a watch, though, were we?’

  No point in saying anything, thought Simon. All that would happen is that Mr Fuller would pitch into some fresh complaint about him leaving his underwear trailed over the local greenery. And then the flour baby might catch it.

  Simon pawed the ground apologetically with his boot, and said nothing. Fortunately, just at that moment Froggie Hines and Saul Epstein collided with one another, and rolled over and over, inextricably tangled.

  Mr Fuller sentenced Simon on the trot.

  ‘Three full circuits at the end, please. And tickling the ball, not booting it!’

  He turned his foghorn voice on to the other two.

  ‘Hines! Get your foot out of his ear’ole! Get up, boy! Fetch that ball!’

  Simon took off for the safety of the back line while the going was good. He’d escaped press-ups, at least. And the rest of the practice wasn’t too bad, what with one short break while Fruzzy Woods was seriously bawled out for waving through the hedge at his girlfriend Lucinda, and another a few minutes later when Mr Fuller caught sight of Lucinda for a second time, and held up the next throw-in while he gave her an earful.

  So having to stay and dribble the ball three times round the pitch after everyone else had gone back to the changing rooms shouldn’t have been too much of a pain. Of course he was missing a good laugh: Froggie’s look of sheer wonder when he picked up his tin of foot powder, and, egged on by Wayne, read its vastly inflated claim. But Simon could easily imagine his face. And Wayne would fill him in on details later. So why was he making such a hash of the circuits? Why weren’t his feet under his control?

  Boot… Boot… Boot… Boot…

  ‘What are you thinking about, lad? Don’t hammer it! Treat it gentle as a baby!’

  Mr Fuller’s talk of babies made it worse. Rattled, Simon glanced back over his shoulder at the bush he’d just run past. Was that the right one? Where was the flour baby? Was the little sack of her still propped up safely in the branches, or had the lads noticed as they thundered off the field? Maybe Wayne had even split on him! Was she still there, all wrapped up and happy as a sandboy, or had they reached in and dug her out? Were they kicking her around the changing rooms right now, having another good laugh pretending she was a football?

  Froggie would kick her hardest. She’d be destroyed.

  Distracted, Simon missed the ball entirely.

  The bellow came over the pitch on cue.

  ‘Are you tr
ying to be funny, Simon Martin? You certainly aren’t amusing me!’

  He nearly missed again. This was unreal. These weren’t even proper kicks. He was only dribbling. And yet he couldn’t concentrate at all. How were you supposed to get your feet going in the right directions when your brain was totally cluttered up with horror-show visions of what might be happening to your flour baby? It was a pity Mr Fuller was watching him so closely, or he could spin round, dancing on his toes, and take a proper look at the bush. The flour baby was bound to be in there still, all safely bundled up. It’s just he could concentrate better if he was sure.

  Unwilling to bring the wrath of Mr Fuller down on his head again, Simon didn’t turn. He kept his face forward and ran, as one ghastly vision after another swam through his brain. His flour baby floating, face down, in one of the scummy sinks, then gradually sinking as the water soaked through her thin sacking! Froggie borrowing a felt pen and, with their unauthorized alterations to his tin of foot powder in mind, taking sweet revenge on her face with some artwork: a nose, a gappy smile, two cauliflower ears – worse! And, most disastrous of all, Jimmy Holdcroft drawing back his foot as she lay so vulnerably on the changing-room floor, about to demonstrate his vicious and spectacular goal kick.

  Simon hurled himself onwards. Is this, he asked himself, what people go through every time they leave a baby sitting in a pram outside a shop? No wonder they always looked so grim, pushing and shoving in their hurry to get out again. No wonder you kept crashing into them, on escalators and in doorways, determinedly hauling pushchairs where pushchairs obviously couldn’t go.

  His foot missed the ball again, and it rolled past.

  ‘I’m watching you like a hawk, Simon Martin! Keep up this performance and you’ll be doing press-ups afterwards!’

  Ten yards to the corner. And then, at last, he would be able to swivel his head and see the bush out of the corner of his eye. One thing he’d learned, it was ridiculous trying to practise football and watch a flour baby. No one can do two things properly at the same time. Weren’t they always saying that? ‘You can’t be concentrating on your work if you’re staring out of that window!’ And, ‘No one can talk and listen simultaneously. If you’re talking, you’re not listening.’ It was one of their regular, all-purpose naggings.