Staying Alive in Year 5

by John Marsden

  At lunchtime Johnny and Michael and I were helping Mrs Wilson in the office, folding letters and putting them in envelopes. It wasn’t a bad job, except it was a bit boring, but Mrs Wilson always gave us something from the tuckshop when we helped her. Anyway, as we were working, we could hear Miss Holland in her office next door. She was talking to someone, I don’t know who, it might have been someone on the ’phone even. Miss Holland sounded angry, but we couldn’t hear what she was actually saying, until she suddenly raised her voice and said, ‘Well he apparently threw all of the Year Five class sets into the bin. On the first day of term!’

  Mrs Wilson got up quickly and shut the door, but we knew who Miss Holland was talking about. We just looked at each other and kept folding the letters.

  That afternoon we had a Science lesson, with snails. We had to put the snails through all kinds of tests and experiments, and answer questions about them. We held cotton buds soaked in different liquids near them, made noises beside them, put obstacles in front of them, stuff like that. Then we had to say whether we thought they could hear and smell and see and feel.

  Mr Murlin explained how you have to have a ‘control’ when you’re doing experiments. So if you put some mustard on a cotton bud and hold it near a snail and it backs off, you can’t say it’s the mustard doing that—it might be the cotton, or your fingers. So you do it again with just a plain cotton bud, nothing on it. And if it doesn’t back off, it’s the mustard. But then when you think about it there’re a lot of other things that we should have checked too, before we could say that it was definitely the mustard. I mean, it might have been a bump it could feel on the top of the desk, or the sight of Johnny’s face, or something on the wall behind us. Or we might just have got a crazy snail. So really, you’d have to do the same experiment with thousands of snails, at different times of day, in different weather, in different buildings, with different people.

  It’s like Candice said at the end of the experiments, when we were all talking about them: if you were a doctor who’d developed new tablets, and you wanted to try them out, so you gave them to your sick patients and they miraculously got better, it mightn’t be the tablets that did it, it might be the water they drank with the tablets.

  In the bus on the way home we tried to tell some of the Year Six kids about the snails, but instead of listening, they started giving us a hard time, telling us how weird Mr Murlin was.

  ‘He looks like a grapefruit with gravel rash,’ Mary Tarnamides said.

  ‘He looks like he came out of someone’s stomach in Aliens,’ Laurie Smith said.

  ‘He looks like he’s got Coco Pops in his brain,’ said Mary.

  ‘He looks like he played chicken with a Jumbo jet and lost,’ said Tim McCarthy, joining in.

  ‘My dog looks better than him,’ said Mary again, ‘and he’s been dead for two years.’

  In between the jokes they were all rolling off the seats, laughing at how funny they were. Actually they were pretty funny sometimes, but I was a bit worried about the number of people who seemed to have it in for Mr Murlin.

  CHAPTER 8

  When I got home I found my brother, Anthony, waiting for me. Grandpa had been taken to hospital and Mum had left work and gone there to be with him. Why does everything have to go wrong at once? Anthony thought he might have had a heart attack, but he wasn’t sure.

  Anthony had been waiting to take me to the hospital. He’d seen the ambulance come, and everything. He said they’d had the siren on till they were about two blocks away—he’d heard it—but then they turned it off, probably so as not to scare Grandpa. And they hadn’t used the siren when they drove off, so that was a good sign. It must have been exciting. I wish I’d been there, even though I’d rather it hadn’t happened at all, of course.

  When we got to the hospital it was really hard to find out where he was. We asked all these different people at all these different places, and they kept directing us all different ways. But finally we were shown a ‘phone with a sign above it that said: ‘Patient Enquiries’. What you did was to pick it up and tell them who you were looking for, and they’d tell you where the person was. Well, it turned out that he was in a place called CCU, but it took us another ten minutes to find that. It was a pretty big hospital.

  Grandpa was in bed, and Mum was sitting next to the bed. He was all wired up with tubes and stuff. He looked strange, different, and his hair looked whiter than normal against the pillow. He was asleep, which I was secretly a bit relieved about, because I didn’t know what I would have said to him when he looked so funny. At least it gave me the chance to get used to it.

  Mum took us outside to the waiting room. She said he’d had a turn but they didn’t know whether it was a heart attack or not, and they wouldn’t know till they got the results from the tests. But he’d hit his head when he had fallen, so he was a bit dazed. It was lucky Mrs Betts, the lady he plays chess with, had been there when it happened, because she’d called the ambulance. Otherwise he might have been there till Anthony or I got home. I’m glad I didn’t walk in and find him—I would have really freaked out. But Anthony usually gets home before me.

  We went back into the ward. There was only room for about four patients, because it was absolutely packed with equipment, but only one other man was in there. He was reading a magazine, so maybe he wasn’t too sick.

  There was a TV screen next to Grandpa, with a wavy line on it. It went ‘beep, beep, beep’ all the time, just like in the movies. I guess that was his heartbeat. It looked OK but I didn’t know how it’d look if there was anything wrong.

  Just then he opened his eyes and saw us. ‘Hello Scott,’ he said, then ‘Hello Anthony’. I was so happy. I gave him a kiss and a big hug and so did Anthony. ‘What are you two doing here?’ he asked. ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  ‘It’s nearly six o’clock, Dad,’ Mum said.

  ‘Oh. That late?’ he said. ‘How was school, Scott?’

  ‘Good,’ I said ‘We did Biology experiments, on snails.’

  He raised his eyebrows and smiled a bit. ‘How do you spell “biology”?’ he asked, and I told him. He was always checking my spelling and my Maths like that.

  ‘That’s an interesting teacher you’ve got there,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to come and meet him. Snails, hey? Well, we used to have guinea pigs.’ He closed his eyes again and a nurse, who’d come in without my noticing, said to Mum, ‘I think the boys should leave him for a while now, so that he can stay resting.’

  Well, we tiptoed out and went back to the waiting room and read magazines. We got some food out of a vending machine, but it wasn’t very nice. At ten o’clock Mum took us home, but we saw Grandpa again before we went. I’d fallen asleep in the waiting room so I just went to bed as soon as we got home. I remember saying to Anthony, ‘Maybe Dad’ll come and look after us while Mum’s at the hospital,’ but he just said, ‘Oh yeah, very likely.’

  Next day I had to go to school as normal, which was a bit unfair. Mum said that the tests showed Grandpa had had a heart attack, but the doctors were pretty optimistic. But he’d have to stay in hospital for a while so they could do some more tests and keep an eye on him.

  School was OK but I couldn’t concentrate. Mr Murlin must have noticed, because he asked me to stay back at morning recess. When all the kids had gone out he asked me what was wrong, and I burst straight into tears. I was a bit surprised at myself.

  Well, Mr Murlin didn’t say anything, he just let me cry. And after a while I started telling him all about it, how awful Grandpa looked and how he didn’t seem like the same person, and how I was scared that he might die or something.

  Finally I calmed down a bit. I didn’t have a handkerchief but there was a box of tissues on Mr Murlin’s desk and he offered me those. I blew my nose and wiped my eyes.

  ‘I wish you could do some of your magic and make him better,’ I said. I knew he couldn’t, but I still sort of half hoped and half believed that maybe he could.

 
; He didn’t smile, but he said, ‘There’s a greater magic than mine. There are some laws of the Universe that no-one dare upset.’ Then he said gently, ‘One of the laws is that all things must pass.’

  I knew what he was saying but I felt a bit better now that I’d got it all out. The bell was ringing, and we had PE, which was one of my favourite subjects. I had to go and change into my runners. We were continuing a cricket match that we’d started on Friday. Tom Tregonning and I were batting and I wanted to make a lot of runs.

  CHAPTER 9

  Johnny arrived at school with his bag full of string. So much string! I’d never seen that much before. If you’d unwound it into a straight line you could have fenced off half the Sahara and still had some left over for a kite. He said he’d got it out of his garage, but I don’t know. Johnny was always nicking stuff. He was just as likely to have pinched it from the school Bookroom.

  Anyway, there we were, with all this string, and we had to do something with it. I’m not sure how we got the idea really. We thought of running it around the outside of the school. Then we thought we could trail it across the playground, so that Miss Holland, or whoever found it, would pick it up and follow it to see where it led, and half-an-hour later they’d still be following it . . . It was about then we realised that because it was a Tuesday afternoon, Miss Holland would be at the staff meeting. And because it was after 3.30, Mrs Wilson and the office staff would have gone home.

  Johnny didn’t exactly dare me and I didn’t exactly dare him but I think I said I’d do it if he would and he said he’d do it if I would, so somehow we more or less agreed to do it. On the way over we ran into Wesley Brown, the little Year Two kid, and it took a while to get rid of him, ’cos he knew we were doing something interesting. He’s a real little devil and he would have been in it if he’d known what we had in mind. Luckily, his bus came, so he had to go. We didn’t want to get him into trouble.

  Then we got another idea: to tie something on the end of the string, as a little surprise, like a treasure hunt. So we raced around the school having a quick look—we were already running short of time—and we eventually found a scraggy old bone that a dog must have brought in and chewed on for a while and then half buried. It smelt a bit. So that seemed the right sort of surprise.

  We got into Miss Holland’s office easily—just walked straight in. We pulled the blind down, even though it meant we wouldn’t have much warning of anyone coming, and got to work. I tied the bone to one end of the string and put it in a drawer of her desk. Then we started unwinding it. We passed it through the handles of the desk, around the filing cabinets and through their drawers, over the fluorescent light, under the desk, between the legs of the chairs, in and out of the pot-plants, past the cords of the blinds (tying it to them on the way), around the air-cooler, through the document trays, under the ornaments, along the back of the bookshelves, through the spines of some of the biggest books, around a statue that was on a pedestal in a corner, under the rug, and around the umbrella stand. By this stage we were getting short of space, so I went out to Mrs Wilson’s office and kept watch. Johnny kept going, giving me a running commentary. He wound it round the clock, up over the light again, across to the curtain rod and round and round one of the curtains, then he pinned it in a pattern on the notice-board with the drawing pins, and threaded it through the backs of the chairs, round the handle of a vase, across the telephone and up to a clothes hook on the back of the door. Just then I saw the first couple of teachers coming out of the Staff Room after their meeting, so I yelled a warning to Johnny. He quickly cut the unused string off (not that there was much left) and tied the loose end to the door handle. Miss Holland came out of the Staff Room door but stopped for a moment to talk to Mr Kelvin. We couldn’t leave by the normal way, or we’d be in full view of them. We opened a window in Mrs Wilson’s office on the side away from the quadrangle, and shot out of that, tumbling over each other in our hurry. We were in a sort of heap on the ground for a moment, till we sorted ourselves out. Then we ran like crazy down to the road and around the corner to the bus-stop by the shops.

  It was a while before we could speak, being so out of breath from running and laughing. We’d left our bags at school which didn’t matter. But we were pretty nervous till we were safely on the bus and a few ks away from the school.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mum got home late from the hospital but Anthony had some money so we got fish and chips. When she did get in she was pretty tired. Anthony made her a cup of coffee while she told us about Grandpa. She said he was better, more alert and talkative, but in a bit of pain. He’d had a few things to eat, which Mum was pleased about. He was still in CCU. Apparently that’s where they keep you when you’re really sick, so Mum said he was going to stay there for a few days yet. We wanted to go in and see him again straight away but she said we’d have to wait.

  School the next day was a buzz. The place was humming like a beehive being attacked by a chainsaw. At assembly Miss Holland gave a big speech about how some kids had vandalised her office. She made it sound much worse than it was. I mean, it was just a joke. She said there were confidential files in there that it’d be bad for kids to see. And she said she’d always trusted the kids in the school and never locked her office but now she’d have to lock it. Well, I don’t reckon that was true, because she always locked her classroom every time she left it for recess or lunch or anything else, so she couldn’t have trusted us that much.

  Anyway, she said she had a pretty good idea of who’d done it, so she’d give them the rest of the day to own up, or else it’d be even bigger trouble for them. Teachers always say that when they don’t know who it is, but all the same I was pretty scared. I only looked at Johnny once, and his face was all white and guilty-looking, so I hope no teachers noticed him.

  In class all the kids were asking Mr Murlin what had been done to the office, but he wouldn’t tell them, except he smiled once or twice. If anyone was going to see the humour in it, he would. We had a pretty quiet morning’s work. He read us a story out of a book called Unreal. It was unreal. At recess he called me over, and I thought I was in trouble, but it was to ask me how Grandpa was.

  At lunchtime Johnny told me he thought we’d better own up, but I told him ‘No way’. I was a bit surprised, because Johnny never owns up to anything, except in Year Three when he owned up to putting a dead mouse in Mrs Mudd’s lunchbox, which he hadn’t done, but he said he wanted to know what it felt like to get in trouble when you were innocent. But I wasn’t going to admit to tying up the office with string, because I was beginning to realise that it just didn’t look too funny to Miss Holland.

  I said to Johnny: ‘You know, if they find out it was us, they’ll want to know where the string came from’, and that shut him right up. So I knew then that the string must have come from somewhere illegal, like I’d suspected.

  That evening Mum took us in to the hospital. I was a bit nervous again, but it was all right. Grandpa was sitting up watching TV and he didn’t look as white as he did last time. But he still had lots of tubes and wires sticking out of him. Although the bloke in the other bed had gone, someone else had come in, but there were screens all round the bed, so you couldn’t see what was going on. Grandpa asked me about school and stuff, like he does at home. Anthony told him all these messages from his teachers, ’cos his school’s close to Sandor Road and a lot of the teachers there know Grandpa.

  When we were going out, we went past Casualty and an ambulance driver and a policeman were walking in with this young guy who had blood all over his face and shirt. The ambulance driver was holding one of his arms and the policeman was holding the other one, so maybe he was under arrest.

  CHAPTER 11

  At lunchtime I got a message to go to Miss Holland’s office. I couldn’t see Johnny, so I had to go on my own, packing darkies all the way. When I got in there she said, ‘Well, Scott, I thought you’d have come to see me, to tell me what was going on, instead of my having to send
for you.’ I said, ‘Johnny wanted to own up Miss Holland, but I talked him out of it.’ She said, ‘Own up?’ and I said, ‘Yes. We didn’t think you’d take it so seriously. We didn’t break anything and we didn’t look in any files.’ I was trying hard to be gutsy and not cry, but I was scared. I thought we’d be sent to Reform School for sure, and I kept thinking of the guy I’d seen with the policeman in Casualty the night before.

  Miss Holland gave this sort of tight, icy little smile. She said, ‘I was referring to your grandfather’s illness, which I only found out about today by accident. As we are old friends, I thought you might have paid me the courtesy of coming to tell me about it.’

  I just gasped and said, ‘Oh no.’ She kept sitting there and looking at her desk. Then she said, ‘Well, perhaps you’d better tell me about the string first.’ I was angry at myself for being sucked in so badly and I didn’t know what Johnny was going to think. But I had to say something, so I said again, ‘It was only a joke.’

  Miss Holland went through the same stuff that she’d said in assembly, but she didn’t sound as angry as she had then. I didn’t feel her heart was in it. Maybe she was worried about Grandpa, or maybe she didn’t like to be too angry with me because of Grandpa being in hospital. Anyway, she said that she’d let me know my punishment later. Then I had to tell her about Grandpa, which was hard because I was pretty cut about being caught.

  At the end she said, ‘It’s only because of my concern for your mother and all she’s going through that I’m not going to call her straight away about the string.’ I mumbled, ‘Thank you Miss Holland’, knowing that would please her. She said, ‘Send Johnny Heath to me, please.’