Flour Babies

by Anne Fine

  BANG!!!!!!

  There was a glorious explosion. Showers of sparks and splintered glass rained down on them, and their gasps of astonishment and delight were drowned by the hissing and spitting of ancient and overstressed electrical wiring.

  The silence that followed was palpable. Then,

  ‘See?’ Robin said loyally. ‘Simon was right.’

  Loyally, too, he went off with his friend, to fetch the broom and the dustpan. Together they swept the shards of glass into a neat pile behind the door, and set Mr Cartright’s desk back on its legs.

  Mr Cartright set the scales down.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Joke over.’

  He pointed at Russ, as the nearest.

  ‘Hand over your flour baby.’

  Not knowing what else to do, Russ passed his flour baby to Mr Cartright, who dumped it on the scale.

  ‘Not bad, Russ. It’s only lost a tiny bit of weight, and, apart from the cat hairs, it looks almost presentable. Well done!’

  Mr Cartright dropped the flour baby into the huge double-duty black bin bag he’d been keeping in his desk for the occasion.

  ‘One!’ he said, cheering visibly.

  He pointed again.

  ‘Gwyn.’

  Gwyn glanced at Sajid who, shrugging, reached in the pram cr che to pull out Gwyn’s little sack of flour.

  ‘We’ll settle up now, shall we?’ Sajid asked sweetly, deliberately holding Gwyn’s flour baby over the muddy upturned spikes of Philip Brewster’s running shoes.

  Business was business, after all.

  Scowling, Gwyn dipped his hands deep in his pockets and pulled out enough cash to redeem his flour baby.

  ‘There you are,’ he said sourly, handing it to Mr Cartright.

  Mr Cartright dumped the flour bag unceremoniously on his scales.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Spot on!’ And tossed it merrily into the bin bag.

  ‘Next?’

  Before it was too late, Sajid decided to seize the chance to force public payment on some of his most persistent defaulters. He reached in the pram creche, and dug out Luis Pereira’s flour baby. Accepting defeat as graciously as he could, Luis paid up, and took the flour sack to Mr Cartright, who weighed it.

  ‘This one’s gained a bit of weight,’ he said. And then he noticed the sandwiches Luis’s mother had carefully pinned to its bottom.

  ‘No,’ he corrected himself, prising them off and putting the flour sack on the scales again. ‘Just within limits. Just.’

  A weak cheer greeted this announcement. By now the general disappointment had begun to fade as, one by one, the members of 4C came to realize that, even if they didn’t get to kick the flour babies about, there was consolation to be found in using Simon as a substitute. All around, his classmates had begun to take advan-tage of Simon’s frozen misery to indulge in a barrage of hisses and jeers.

  ‘Glorious Explosion, eh, Sime?’

  ‘Wait till break-time!’

  ‘We’ll gloriously explode you!’

  Mr Cartright kept on with his weighing, trying to ignore the cross-currents of disaffection and malevolence slewing about him. Not even having most of them in such a bad mood could stop his own spirits rising. As he called out each name, and dumped each flour sack in the shiny black bin bag, out of sight, he felt a weight dropping from him.

  ‘Who’s left?’ he called out. ‘Bill Simmons, do I have yours? Yes? Wayne, then.’

  Wayne brought his flour baby up to the front.

  ‘Looks a bit thin,’ Mr Cartright said critically.

  He threw the flour baby on the scales. The little steel pointer did its best, but, after a deal of desperate quivering, all it could manage was to struggle halfway across the scale.

  ‘Three pounds, seven ounces!’ Mr Cartright was incredulous. ‘Only three pounds, seven ounces! Do you realize that this thing of yours has lost getting on for half its body weight?’

  Wayne scowled so horribly that even Mr Cartright thought better of pursuing the matter.

  And that left only one.

  ‘Simon?’

  Simon sat tight.

  Mr Cartright looked up.

  ‘Simon?’ he said again.

  Still Simon made no move. The boy looked ashen, Mr Cartright thought. Far more upset than could possibly be justified by the ring of hostile whispering around him. The boy was, after all, the most powerful member of the class by far. And fearless, too. If push came to shove, he could probably leave the whole pack of them lying bruised and battered on the pavement around him. So why on earth was he sitting there looking so wretched? Mr Cartright peered at him curiously. Could it be that he had truly believed all that nonsense about kicking the flour bags to pieces? Was this the sad snuffing of a glorious dream?

  Really, if you thought about things too much, Mr Cartright decided, you could go quite unhinged, teaching 4C.

  ‘Simon!’ he bellowed. ‘Get yourself and your flour baby up here. Now!’

  Like someone in a deep trance, Simon stood up, dug in his school bag and pulled out the flour baby. Like a sleepwalker, he came up to the scales. Reluctantly, he handed her over.

  Mr Cartright stared.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Simon forced himself out of his reverie.

  ‘Sir?’

  Mr Cartright prodded the flour baby. Her bonnet promptly fell off, and she looked up at him at a distinctly rakish angle out of one badly smudged eye.

  ‘What’s this?’ Mr Cartright repeated.

  Simon was baffled.

  ‘It’s my flour baby, sir.’

  Mr Cartright’s look turned to one of dark displeasure.

  ‘But it’s disgusting,’ he thundered. ‘It’s utterly revolting. It’s in the most disgraceful state. It’s an absolute outrage.’

  ‘She did get a little bit grubby,’ Simon admitted.

  ‘Little bit grubby?’ Mr Cartright lifted the flour baby by one of its corners. ‘This isn’t grubby. This is black.’

  ‘Not exactly bl–’

  But Mr Cartright didn’t give him the chance to argue.

  ‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to bring this travesty, this disgrace, up to my desk.’ He turned the flour baby over. ‘And what’s all this?’ he roared. ‘Burn! Toffee! Mud! Glue! Dribble!’

  ‘It’s not my dribble, sir,’ Simon hastened to point out. He was all set to embark on his prepared indictment of Macpherson when he realized it was too late. Mr Cartright had reached flashpoint. While everyone else in the room settled back in their seats to relish Simon’s discomfiture, Mr Cartright leaned over his desk, and stuck his angry face closer.

  ‘I’ve put up with a good deal from you already this term,’ he shouted at Simon. ‘I’ve put up with your dark mulligrubs, and your mucking about in Assembly, and your continual persecution of poor Miss Arnott. But if you think for one moment I am going to put up with being handed back this – this –’

  He lifted the flour baby and shuddered.

  ‘This revolting little horror bag –’

  He held it over the waste bin.

  ‘Then you are wrong. Quite wrong.’

  The flour baby trembled in his angry grip as she hung, sagging and dishevelled, over whatever sticky remnants of food had recently been spat out under orders.

  Simon’s eyes widened with panic. He couldn’t drop her in there. Surely he couldn’t.

  He could, and did.

  In a flash, with one of those lightning moves that kept him on the team, Simon had made the save. As Mr Cartright dropped the little sack of flour and turned away in irritation and disgust, Simon’s hands shot out and caught it. And with a simultaneous access of quick thinking, he kicked the waste bin, hard.

  ‘There!’ Mr Cartright said, satisfied at what he took to be the clang of flour baby in waste bin. ‘Now can we get on with some work, please?’

  He picked up a stump of chalk and started scratching away on the blackboard. Hastily, Simon stuffed the flour baby up his jumper and turne
d back to face the class. No one seemed to have noticed his sleight of hand and foot. Good. They were all still glaring at him, certainly. But as he stumbled back to his seat, no one reached out and poked or grabbed at the tell-tale bulge in his sweater. For the moment, she was safe.

  Simon collapsed on to his chair, and tried to pay attention to Mr Cartright.

  ‘I’m writing names up here,’ he was telling them sternly. ‘The names of everyone who still has days missing from his flour baby diary. I don’t care if you find them, rewrite them, or make them up. But everyone is to hand in enough for eighteen days.’

  Not surprisingly, given its length, the list took some time to chalk up on the blackboard. While his classmates were busy watching out for their names, and, by extension, the chance for a noisy and protracted wrangle about the precise number of entries that were actually missing, Simon managed to smuggle his flour baby, completely unnoticed, out from under his sweater into the safe haven of his desk.

  Mr Cartright wrote the last name – Rick Tullis – up very neatly in the top left-hand corner, well out of the way, since the chances were high it would stay there.

  Then he turned round.

  ‘Anyone who finishes,’ he consoled them, ‘may go off to the library and do some private study.’

  The general aura of resentment cleared a little at this announcement. One or two of them even cheered up enough to punch their fists in the air. For most of the members of 4C, the words ‘private study’ were generally taken to be synonymous with ‘have a good laugh’.

  Only George Spalder still seemed dissatisfied.

  ‘But what about the snoopers?’

  ‘Snoopers?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Surely you’re going to tell us who the snoopers were.’

  ‘Snoopers…’

  A feeling of unease crept over Mr Cartright. Snoopers… Picking up Dr Feltham’s huge Science Fair memorandum, he turned to the page of rules in order to refresh his memory, and his eye fell on the one claiming that certain people – parents, pupils, staff, or even members of the public – would secretly be checking on the flour babies.

  He wasn’t supposed to have done anything about that, was he?

  Mr Cartright turned over a page and saw the number in the top corner – 84. He turned back a page. Number 81. Not the sort of error Dr Feltham would make. A man who could spin round the school not only correcting the mistakes in everyone else’s mental arithmetic, but also pointing out how they came to make the error in the first place, must know how to number pages correctly. Why, even Mr Cartright could count.

  Gently, carefully, fearfully, Mr Cartright picked at the uncommonly thick page in question to find that, as he suspected, the hidden pages numbered 82 and 83 peeled apart, revealing detailed instructions for the teacher on the recruitment and supervision of out-of-class observers.

  Snapping the memorandum shut, Mr Cartright said firmly to George:

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we need worry our heads about the snoopers.’

  George couldn’t have disagreed more strongly.

  ‘You have to tell us who they were,’ he insisted. ‘So we can go out and bash them.’

  It seemed that, on this issue at least, the whole class was in accord.

  ‘Yes! Punch their lights out!’

  ‘Rearrange their faces!’

  ‘Give them a knuckle sandwich!’

  Mr Cartright was reduced to cunning.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘You make a list of everyone you think was snooping on you, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.’

  They fell to the task with a will. And Mr Cartright was astonished to find each and every one of them labouring to write a list of a dozen or more badly-spelled names, to the accompaniment of a barrage of offensive remarks.

  ‘I’m putting her down first. Nosy bat!’

  ‘Prying old busybody! I don’t think she took her beady eyes off me for a moment!’

  ‘ “Had your eyeful?” I asked him. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about”, he said. But I knew. Oh, yes. I knew.’

  Mr Cartright ambled round the class, watching in amazement as their lists of suspects grew longer and longer and their mutterings more and more baleful. It was extraordinary, he thought. And something to tell Dr Feltham. It was a waste of time recruiting real snoopers. There was clearly no need for that at all.

  He walked past Tariq just as the boy was complaining venomously:

  ‘Of course, they claimed they were just taking an interest. Anyone else would call it meddling.’

  And the point was borne out in Bill Simmons’s last diary entry.

  Day 18

  Good thing it’s the last day because I couldn’t stand any more prying and nagging. People with real babies must be totally soft targets if even flour babies make people you’ve never even met before come up and pretty well order you about. ‘I shouldn’t leave it there, dear. It might get muddy.’ ‘Don’t you think you ought to bleh-bleh-bleh.’ ‘Shouldn’t you bleh-bleh-bleh-bleh-bl–

  Mr Cartright reached down and lifted Bill Simmons’s pen off the last bleh.

  ‘Stuck in a groove?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Allow me to help you.’

  Ignoring Bill’s poisonous look, he moved on to read Philip Brewster’s last effort. Here again, the subject of snoopers was well to the fore.

  What got me most about the flour babies was how sneaky people are. They go round pretending they’re just being friendly and chatting to you, but really they’re telling you you ought to be doing things differently. ‘I’ll tell you how I coped with mine,’ they say, smiling creepily. Or, ‘What I found worked best was this.’ And you’re supposed to smile back, and pretend you’re so thick you haven’t realized that they’re telling you off.

  And Sajid, as usual, cogently summed up the whole issue.

  I’ll tell you what I can’t understand. You can hardly open the newspaper without reading about someone who’s been arrested for bashing a baby, and it’s never the first time they did it. I don’t understand that, really I don’t. I only had to give my flour baby a look, and my whole family was practically queuing up to phone the police and tell on me. So where do all these baby bashers live? Don’t they have any family? Don’t they have any neighbours? Don’t they have anyfr -

  Sajid raised his head.

  ‘How do you spell “friends”?’ he asked of the room at large.

  No reason not to try mending a fence or two, Simon thought, and spoke up.

  ‘I think it’s f–r–e–i–n–d–s. I wrote it that way a few minutes ago, and it looked quite all right to me.’

  Dutifully, Mr Cartright strolled over the room to correct Simon’s pitiful spelling. But before reaching down to despoil the last diary entry with his mark ing pen, he stood quietly behind the desk for a few moments, practising the skilled decoder’s art.

  Day 18. Over & Out.

  So I was all wrong about the Glorious Explosion and getting to kick the flour babies to bits at the end. Who cares? I was planning on cheating anyway. I was going to hide mine, and join in battering everyone else’s. I might be in 4C but I’m not absolutely stupid. ,’ worked out days ago that I wouldn’t be able to hurt mine, not any more, not now I’ve grown to like her. (And especially not now, when everyone hates me and I have no fr –

  Mr Cartright was just leaning over, pen uncapped, to rearrange the next two vowels, when both of them disappeared before his eyes, dissolving in a miniature blue pool.

  A teardrop. No doubt about it. And just like everything else about the boy, it was enormous. Hastily, before more could fall, Mr Cartright dug in his jacket pocket, fished out the huge spotted handkerchief, and thrust it into Simon’s hand.

  Simon stared down at the large blue blur on his work. No doubt about it. It was a teardrop. What was the matter with him? If he didn’t get a grip, the others might notice. Come break-time, he would be destroyed.

  Gratefully he took the handkerchief he was offered. And while Mr Cartright heaved his massive
back end up on Simon’s desk, deliberately shielding him from everyone’s view, he tried to pull himself together.

  When Mr Cartright felt the damp handkerchief pushed back in his hand, he took it that it was safe to slide off the desk, and carry on reading.

  I really liked having that flour baby to look after, even though I got sick of her and she drove me mad. I liked seeing her sitting on top of the wardrobe watching me while I lay in bed at night. I liked chatting to her at breakfast. And I liked cuddling her to make Macpherson jealous. Last night, when I was rocking her in my arms, Mum said I reminded her of someone. She didn’t say who, and I didn’t have to ask. But it was good to know he used to rock me like that when I was a baby. Maybe he really did love me, in his way.

  Quite forgetting, in the emotion of the moment, that the handkerchief had already been pressed into service more than once, Mr Cartright drew it out, and, lighting on a fairly dry patch, blew his nose in a trumpeting fashion. Then, bravely, he forced himself to read to the end.

  He just wasn’t very good at showing it, running away like that. But I can’t talk, can I? My flour baby ended up such a mess, I practically got my ears torn off. But I really did care about her. I really did.

  Mr Cartright could bear it no longer.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, lad,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘If you love the thing that much, go and fish it out of the waste bin. Take it home.’

  Simon said nothing. But, flushing scarlet, he unconsciously leaned forward and gripped the sides of his desk.

  Slowly, suspiciously, Mr Cartright tipped Simon back a few inches, lifted the desk lid, and peered in.

  The flour baby peered back at him anxiously, out of the dark.

  Mr Cartright lowered the desk lid. He looked at Simon. Simon looked at him. Then Mr Cartright said:

  ‘Do you want to know your problem, Simon Martin? You sell yourself too short. Your flour baby is a squalid and disgusting little creature. She wouldn’t pass any hygiene tests, and, if she were real, she wouldn’t win any Natty Baby competitions. But if keeping what you care for close and safe counts for anything, I’ll tell you this. You’ll make a better father than most.’