by Stuart David
“What do you want this thing for, anyway?” he asks me, and I tell him it’s for a school project. He mutters something incomprehensible about school and then drags a little set of steps across the wooden floor. I think it hits him on the shin or something, because before he climbs up on it he shouts “Arse-cakes!” in quite a high yelpy voice. Then he finally gets hold of the book, brings it to the desk to put it in a paper bag, and takes six pounds off me. I thank him and get out of there as quickly as I can, checking my watch to see how late I am for school.
Headcase.
The morning passes at about two kilobytes per second. Megaslow. I have French and then geography, the two subjects I have even less interest in than all the others, if you can imagine that. There’s one passable moment in geography, though, when Miss Voss gives us instructions to read a few pages in our textbooks about snow clouds or something, and I manage to slip out my purchase to have a proper look at it.
Despite the kind of worrying title, I actually feel quite pleased with it. There’s a drawing on one of the pages, about halfway through, of this medieval random standing underneath a window, playing a weirdly shaped guitar. And the thing is, he’s dressed almost exactly like Elsie Green dresses. He’s wearing these kind of puffy sleeves, and a waistcoat sort of thing, and some of the bits inside the book even sound like the sort of thing Greensleeves would say. So I decide I’m on to a winner.
Lunchtime eventually comes, and this time I’ve got a good head start on Sandy because Voss’s classroom is in the new block. By the time he arrives I’m already three-quarters of the way through my soggy pie, and Elsie Green is sitting over in her usual spot, staring off into eternity. Everything looks good.
“I can’t believe Murchison,” Sandy mutters as he sits down. “Nothing’s good enough for that guy.”
He starts talking about something to do with a chemistry experiment, a test tube falling off its stand or something, but pretty soon he catches on to the fact that I’m not really listening.
“What’s with you, anyway?” he asks, and I pat the paper bag that’s sitting on the table next to my tray.
“It’s back on,” I say. “I’m getting ready to do battle with Elsie Green.”
He turns round in his seat and has a look at her. She keeps adjusting and readjusting the strange hat she’s wearing, and from over here it looks as if she might even be talking to herself.
“Good luck with that,” Sandy says, turning back round and pummeling his steak pie. “Why does she dress like that? It’s insane.”
I slip my book out of the bag and hunt for the picture I found earlier in geography. Then I spin the book round and push it across to Sandy.
“No way!” he says. “It’s her.”
I nod and slap the book shut, then pop it back in the bag and shove my chair out from the table. “Wish me luck,” I say, and I get to my feet.
“You’ll need it,” Sandy replies, and I walk off into the storm.
6
According to my grandpa, the best way to do something scary is to do it without hesitating. One quick move. He mainly applies his philosophy to removing plasters when you’re a kid, but he says it doesn’t matter whether it’s a plaster or jumping out of a plane—it’s all the same. One quick move. Maybe he’s right. It’s not how I decide to go about this thing with Elsie Green, though. Instead, I pull out the chair beside hers without disturbing her bizarre rapture, then sit down quietly and clear my throat a little bit.
“Look at him!” she says, and at first I think she’s talking about me, telling me I’ve got a nerve approaching her like this. But the madness that follows soon convinces me I’m wrong.
“Have you ever seen such unspoiled virtue?” she asks. “And such modesty? He makes me want to live a better life. Look at how he blushes. Like the petal of a rose. He makes me want to do something heroic.”
I disguise my voice a little bit, in the hope she won’t know it’s me, and ask her who we’re talking about. I have the idea that if we’re already having a conversation before she realizes who she’s talking to, she might not just get up and walk off at the first opportunity.
“Drew Thornton,” she says. “See how his hair cascades to his shoulders? And his eyes! Oh my god.” Then things take a turn for the worse, if you can get your head round that. She starts asking me if I can imagine the ecstasy of seeing such innocence disrobed. Something like that. Something that means can I imagine him in the buff, anyway.
“I’d give up twenty years of my life to bear witness to that,” she says. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Well . . .” I say, “probably not, really.” And I’m finding the whole thing so bizarre, I even forget to sound like someone else. Elsie turns round then and sees who she’s dealing with.
“You!” she splutters.
“Hi,” I say, but she doesn’t reply. She stacks all her cutlery and lunch debris onto her tray and starts getting to her feet. I can tell I’ve only got a few seconds to save things, and I panic. A line I came across earlier, flipping through her book, suddenly appears in the front bit of my brain, and before I even really know what’s happening I hear it coming out of my mouth.
“I come on an errand . . .” I tell her. Somehow, this seems to slow her down. She’s still up on her feet, but her hands pause at the side of the tray and she doesn’t walk away.
“Sent by whom?” she asks me.
I struggle. Another line pops into my head, but I’m not even sure where this one came from. I don’t know whether it’s from the book or not.
“By the king . . .” I say.
Not good.
“What the hell are you talking about?” she says. “Are you mental?”
And there it is: I’ve been called mental by Elsie Green. Me. By her. It doesn’t really bear thinking about. Maybe if I hadn’t been in such a panic, I would just have said Drew Thornton, and maybe I could have woven something out of that. I try one last desperate line of attack. Off with the sticking plaster.
“I’ve just come to apologize, Elsie,” I say. “That’s all. I really didn’t mean to mess up your plans that time. And I’ve brought you a present.”
I take the book out of its bag and lay it down on the table beside her tray.
“Very nice,” she says, disinterestedly. “Whatever you’re after, forget it.”
“I’m not after anything,” I tell her. “Just trying to make amends.” I reach out and flip the pages of the book. When it comes to the drawing that looks like her, I let it fall open and move my hand about on it, trying to attract her attention. It kind of works.
“What is this, anyway?” she asks, and she sits down and picks it up. She turns back and forward through the thing, then closes it and looks at the back.
“Actually,” she says, “this is very nice. Whose is this?”
“Yours,” I say. “If you want it.”
She looks at me suspiciously. “You ruined five months of my life,” she says. “That’s not easy to forgive.”
I nod.
“I know,” I say. “But it was a total accident. I had a scheme going with the bread rolls, and I had no idea you were going to be there chatting up Stoogey. It was just bad timing.”
She looks at me, appalled. “I was not chatting anyone up,” she says. “Especially not Stephen. How dare you suggest such a thing?”
I apologize.
“My mistake,” I say. “That’s what everybody said was going on. What was really happening?”
She straightens up and looks at the top of my head. “I was attempting to woo him,” she says. “I’d been working on it since the end of the Easter holidays. Then, in the space of ten minutes . . .” She stops, apparently unable to continue. She clenches her teeth, and a strange little noise comes out.
“I feel your pain,” I tell her, with no real idea what I’m saying anymore. I dig deep and come up with nothing. Then I give myself a sharp punch on the back of the head, in the hope it’ll knock something into the front. It works.
“But maybe if none of that had happened, you’d never have found out how you feel about Drew,” I say, and ever so slightly I think I see her teeth begin to unclench. She opens the book up again and has another look through it.
“This is really mine?” she asks.
“If you want it,” I say.
“‘How many oceans . . . ?’” she reads. Then she looks up in a strange trance and finally fixes her gaze on poor, unfortunate Drew. “I’ll take it,” she says, and I hand her the paper bag to wrap it up in.
That afternoon, sitting in Baldy Baine’s science class again, I feel kind of drained. It might just be the extra work my digestive system is having to do to cope with the soggy pie, but I get the feeling it’s more to do with the time I spent in Greensleeves’s company. It makes me wonder if I really could work on my idea with her, for the weeks or even months it might take. I might end up dead. I’m so tired in class, I even find myself listening to some of what Baldy Baine is saying for a while. Not that I understand any of it, but his voice is kind of soothing. Like a boring radio program droning away in the corner. It quiets down my head and stops me thinking. Gives my circuit boards a rest. Up until then, I’d been constantly going over the thing Greensleeves said to me before I got on her good side, the bit where she asked me what I was after. She was definitely on to me at that point, and I know things are going to be double hard when she finds out I really am after something. So listening to Baine chattering away about acceleration or something stops me driving myself a bit bampot and gets me back on my feet again.
Halfway through the lesson, I can really feel my buzz returning, and I start to feel good about how it went with Elsie and the book. I realize it’s a case of mission accomplished. And then I have a fizzer. There must be something special going on in Baldy Baine’s classroom, I think, some kind of hypercharged atmosphere or something because of all the experiments he does in here. Whatever it is, that’s definitely the place where I’m connecting with the Big Ones at the moment. And this One is huge. I’m just listening to him cracking wise about a feather falling in outer space when I see my way clear to how I can convince Elsie to make generous with her Objective-C skills. After that, I can’t pretend I listen to Baldy Baine much more. My leg’s bouncing and I’m watching the clock, looking for it to perform some of those properties of acceleration Baine had been talking about earlier. It seems to be going in more for the opposite thing. The immovable force meeting the unsomethingable something.
But finally it gets there, and I’m up out of my seat before Baine has even reached the end of his “dismissed.” I streak out like Tom Murdoch did during our first-ever fire drill, letting no woman or child stand in my way.
Elsie Green isn’t difficult to find in the school corridors. All you have to do is follow the trail of giggling first-years who’ve already passed her, and let them lead you all the way to the source. The fresher the laughter, the closer you’re getting. I hunt around in the new block, then the old one, till I find what I’m looking for, and I follow the laughter up the stairs to the second floor. It doesn’t take me long to spot her. She’s passing the language labs, and I turn and run back down the stairs again so I can come up the middle staircase and make it look as if I’ve bumped into her by accident. I’m kind of breathless by the time I get there, but I manage it and meet her just as she reaches the top of the stairs.
“Hi, Elsie,” I say, all kind of surprised, but she just sort of frowns.
“What do you want?” she asks me, not particularly warmly considering the present I gave her earlier.
“I’m just saying hello,” I say, and she looks at me suspiciously again. “What have you got next?” I ask her.
“Double Latin,” she says.
By then I’m already walking beside her, not quite sure what classrooms are along in this direction, and not quite sure what to say if she asks me where I’m going. She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t seem to care where I’m going.
I watch some of the younger kids staring at her as we walk, but she’s oblivious to their attention. And to the laughter that starts as soon as she’s passed.
“By the way,” I say, as if it’s just suddenly occurred to me, “you know what you were saying about Drew Thornton at lunchtime?”
She turns to look at me with narrowed eyes. It’s pretty much the first time she’s turned to look at me since I accosted her, so I take it as a good sign.
“How can you even dare to speak his name?” she asks me. “You should be struck dumb.”
“Yes,” I say, taking a lesson from the bookshop bampot. It doesn’t faze her the way it fazed me, though. I’m not even sure she’s noticed I spoke. “Anyway,” I continue, “were you serious about what you said?”
She does the narrowed eyes again. “I’m always serious,” she says. She’s right. Seriously mental. “Especially when I’m talking about Drew.”
I nod.
“Good to know,” I say. “So you meant it?”
“Meant what? That he makes me want to live a better life?”
“Not that,” I say. “When you said you’d give anything to . . . to see him . . . I forget exactly how you put it.”
“Is this one of your schemes?” she asks me, and I shake my head. She screws her face up as if she’s just sucked on a lemon. “What, exactly, are you after?”
We’ve reached her classroom by then. She stops walking and turns to face me close to the open door. She looks inside the room and then back at me.
“I just thought I might be able to help you,” I say, “now that we’re friends.”
“Friends?”
“Well, now that we’re on speaking terms.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “Help me to do what?”
“To see Drew,” I say. “To see him . . . unrobed.” And I can tell I’ve finally got her interest. Her ears go kind of red, and a little muscle starts twitching at the side of her eye.
“Really?” she says.
“If you want.”
She covers her mouth with her hand. A couple of randoms squeeze past us to get into the classroom, then start laughing when they’re in there.
“But what would you want in return?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Well, nothing much. Definitely not twenty years of your life. Maybe you could, I don’t know, do a little bit of programming for me or something. A bit of Objective-C.”
She waves her hand as if to say that means nothing, and we stand and look at each other. My heart suddenly starts racing. It’s going to happen. The idea is going to fly. In my delirium I even notice that she’s quite pretty, when you just look at her and don’t see all the medieval finery.
“No tricks, though,” she says. “No photographs of him or videos or drawings or glimpses through a window. He has to be there. In the room. And so do I.”
I nod.
“Okay,” I say. “And the programming . . .”
“After it happens,” Elsie says. “If you make this happen and it isn’t a scam, I’ll program whatever you want.”
“Elsie!” her teacher shouts from inside the classroom. “Would you do us the honor of joining the class? Please come inside and close the door.”
Greensleeves rolls her eyes, and I tell her it’ll happen. No question. I turn to watch a bunch of first-year girls giggling their way toward us, and when I turn back she’s gone. She’s disappeared into the class and the door’s been closed.
“Is she your girlfriend?” a girl with a squeaky voice asks me, and I shake my head.
“She’s weird,” another one says.
“I think she is your girlfriend,” the squeaky one tells me, and they all crease up, but I don’t really care. I’m untouchable. I’m flexing my wings. Getting ready to fly.
7
For once, there’s no threat of the Regular Madness at home tonight. I go downstairs prepared for it, but it turns out Mum’s working late, and it’s just me and Dad for dinner. Unfortu
nately, that clears a space for an entirely new form of madness I haven’t experienced before, and it starts with what we’re having to eat.
“That all right for you?” Dad asks as he puts my plate down in front of me. It turns out to be cold pizza and peas. Is that a thing? I’m not sure if the pizza had been warm and just got cold sitting on the plate or if he didn’t cook it enough in the first place. The peas are boiling hot. So hot I get a blister on my tongue with the first mouthful. He’s spilled quite a lot of pea water onto the plate as well, so the pizza has the added attraction of being all soggy as well as cold.
“Pizza and peas,” he explains as he sits down at his own spot.
“Is that a thing?” I ask him.
“It is now,” he says.
The radio is playing very loudly. That’s the only way he can hear it, but he doesn’t seem to have much interest in listening to it anyway. He seems much more intent on “bonding” with me, now that it’s just the two of us.
“I’ll have a word with Frank Carberry about you in the morning,” he says, obviously quite a fan of cold pizza, judging by the way he’s wolfing it down. “Don’t tell your mum, though. There’s bound to be something for you at the factory. Bound to be. Don’t get yourself too worked up about those exams.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Still struggling with them?” he asks.
“I haven’t had any yet,” I tell him. “I’ll probably be okay.”
“Not if you’re anything like me,” he says. “If you’re anything like me, it’ll be a bloody disaster. Don’t worry about it, though. You’ll do fine in with us. You’ll love it.”