by Stuart David
“You’re going down,” he tells me, and I bend one of the fingers back a little bit until he screams. I twist my wrist and pull, and suddenly I’m free.
“Murder!” he shouts, and I start running.
I run until I see a street turning off from the one I’m on, and then I nip down that one at a fair old speed. I keep doing the same thing every time a new street appears, and pretty soon I’m lost. I’m in a place I’ve never seen before, and I stop running for a minute and look about. Everything is quiet, and the little man is nowhere to be seen. I stand still, catching my breath and listening, but all I can hear are some birds tweeting and a couple of kids playing in a garden farther up the street. When my heart stops bumping, and breathing doesn’t seem so difficult anymore, I realize I’ve escaped and start taking whichever turnings lead me back down the hill. I feel a bit annoyed that Operation Spot Elsie has been cut short, but it’s balanced up by the relief of escaping the witch hand, and as I walk I start to feel pretty certain that Elsie must be all right anyway, because of her dad not being in mourning or anything like that. I could probably have called time on the job as soon as I saw him, and saved myself another half hour of sitting on that wall, along with all the mad stuff that followed. But as it turns out, the little witch man has done me a favor, anyway.
He’s knocked all thoughts of the iPad out of my head, for the first time since I told Harry I’d get it back. And when I finally call it up again, I realize there’s something new waiting for me there. A new thought. Not quite an idea, but the suggestion that I’ve been looking at the thing all wrong, trying to have the wrong idea. I’ve spent hour after hour wondering how to get the iPad back, forgetting that the iPad isn’t really what’s important. The iPad doesn’t really matter. All that matters is getting Harry to tell Bailey he was in that fight. And the iPad is just one way to make him do that. But there must be others. Hundreds of others.
The thing is, I already had all the best ideas for getting the iPad back pretty soon after I lost it. And none of them worked. I offered Gary a double-or-quits bet, and he told me he didn’t gamble.
“What about our bet?” I asked him.
“That wasn’t gambling,” he said. “That was a certainty.”
So I came up with all kinds of tricks for getting it back off him at school, but none of them were any good because he doesn’t bring the iPad to school. He only uses it at home. And the only option that left me was breaking into his house, which isn’t really my style.
No, getting round Harry will be a breeze compared with getting that thing back. So as soon as I start recognizing where I am again, I start walking at different speeds to get the frequency of my brain waves locked into the ideal state, and then I give myself over to finding a new plan.
Nothing solid comes to me, but I know it will. That’s just how things are. I’m an ideas man. It’s only knowing what idea to have that sometimes muddles me up.
Dad’s still out in the garden when I finally get home again. He’s over in the corner, banging at something fragile-looking with a wooden mallet. I try to sneak in through the gate without him noticing me, but it doesn’t work. Before I’m halfway down the path, he turns round and holds the mallet up in the air, waving it about as if it’s some kind of welcoming flag. Then he uses the other hand to call me over to where he is. He looks like a demented traffic cop who’s totally lost the plot.
“I better get in,” I tell him. “I’m feeling pretty tired.”
“Two minutes,” he says. “I need to check something with you.”
I sigh and go a bit closer to where he’s standing. There’s all this broken stuff lying on the grass, the stuff he’s been hitting with the mallet. I don’t have a clue what any of it is. It looks a bit like hard cottage cheese.
“Come here,” he says, and he’s not happy until I’m standing right up against him. Then he starts with the whispering again. “Not a word to your mum about earlier,” he says. “She’s back home now. Remember, this is between us.”
I stare down at the smashed-up cottage cheese stuff.
“I think I have to tell her,” I say. “It’s giving me hypertension thinking up lies. It’s going to spoil my performance in the interview.”
“Nonsense,” Dad says. “You’ll be fine. You can tell her when it’s over.”
I shake my head. He looks at me and I stare at his mallet. “What’s all that stuff you’ve been breaking up?” I ask him.
“Just bits and pieces,” he says. “Just getting things off my list.”
I notice what look like peanut shells lying in amongst the cottage cheese too. Then I look up at my dad—not quite at his eyes, just at his mouth or something.
“I think I’d better tell her,” I say, and I start walking back toward the path. He doesn’t look very happy, but that can’t be helped. Rather that than a lifetime of label-sticking.
“Don’t, Jack,” he says, still in a sort of whisper. “I’ll owe you one.”
I avoid looking back and head into the house. I half expect him to follow me, but he doesn’t. There’s a moment of quiet and then the banging starts up again, the cottage cheese and peanuts taking the full brunt of his frustration.
I find Mum upstairs in her bedroom, sitting in front of the mirror twisting bits of rubber into her hair.
“Listen to that bloody noise,” she says. “It’s driving me crazy. What the hell’s he doing out there, anyway?”
“Working on his list,” I say. “What’s that you’re putting in your hair?”
“Rubber things,” she says. “I got them at the shops. I don’t know if they work.”
“They look weird,” I tell her. “Are you going to wear them outside?”
She tuts. “You don’t wear them. You put them in to make curls, then you take them out again.”
I nod. I pick one of them up off her table and look at it. It’s kind of bendy. That’s the sort of idea I’d like to come up with one day. Simple. I’ll probably look online later to see who invented them in the first place. I might stick their picture in my book of role models. Successful ideas people.
“I need to tell you something about Dad,” I say, and Mum half turns away from the mirror, still keeping her eyes on the reflection of the blue thing she’s twisting in.
“What’s that?” she asks. “What’s he been doing now?”
And then it hits me. The zinger. My brain starts to tingle, and my fingers go all warm. I feel the familiar sensations before I’m even aware the idea is there, and then the idea makes itself heard. Loud and clear. The brain freeze has thawed. I’m back in action.
“He . . .” I say, quickly trying to think up something different to tell her, “I think he’s gone a bit mad. I think he’s smashing up cottage cheese on the lawn. You should probably call somebody.”
“It’s been a long time coming,” Mum mutters, and I tell her I have to rush off for a minute.
I clatter down the stairs two and three at a time and then haul the front door open. Dad hears it and turns round, kneeling on the grass with his mallet raised midattack. I walk quickly over to him.
“What did she say?” he whispers. “Is it all off?”
I stay quiet for a moment, and he lowers the hammer.
“I didn’t tell her,” I say, and I watch the look of surprise appearing on his face. He tries to work out whether he can believe me or not, then gets up on his feet and drops the mallet down into the grass.
“You didn’t?” he says. “Seriously?”
I nod, and he slaps me on the back.
“You’re a good boy,” he says. “The best. You’ll love it in there once you get started. I know you will.”
“Maybe,” I say, severely doubting it. “But you know when you told me you’d owe me one?”
“When?”
“When I said I had to tell Mum. You said you’d owe me one if I didn’t.”
“Did I?” he says. He doesn’t really look as if he believes me, but I power on.
�
�I think I might need your help now,” I tell him. “I think I might need to call in that favor.”
He doesn’t look very happy. He obviously didn’t mean he would owe me one at all. But he knows how easy it would be for me to go back upstairs and fill Mum in on all the finer details of the interview, so he sticks with it. He looks over his shoulder at his handiwork lying on the grass, then turns back to face me.
“All right,” he says at last, bending down to pick up his mallet, “what have I let myself in for this time? What is it you’re after? Let’s hear it.”
13
Half an hour later, I’m sitting in the car with my dad, a few doors down from Gary Crawford’s house. The engine’s turned off and I’ve explained the plan to Dad twice, once back at the house and once on the way here. He seems to understand it. He’s not particularly happy about it, but he seems to understand it.
“Are you ready to go?” I ask him, and he holds up a hand to let me know he can’t answer while his mouth’s full. He chews noisily, continuing to hold up one finger of the hand, and then he swallows.
“Just let me finish this,” he says. “I need my vitamins.”
He insisted on stopping halfway here to buy a six-inch medium pan pizza. He told me it was impossible for him to go into an operation like this on an empty stomach, and he tried to get me to have a pizza too. I told him I don’t go into operations like this while I’m still digesting. It clouds the mind, and I tried to get him to see sense and wait till we were finished. But he told me it was each man to his own, and went ahead with his own way of doing things.
I sit and watch the windows steaming up, anxious just to get on with the thing. Then I start chattering to try and pass the time.
“Is it against your human rights if someone grabs hold of your wrist and won’t let go?” I ask my dad.
He frowns while he decides which slice of pizza to pick up next. “Depends why they did it, I suppose,” he says.
“What if you were just sitting on their wall?” I ask. “What if you weren’t doing anything wrong apart from that?”
“That seems fair enough,” he says. “Nobody wants somebody sitting on their wall.”
“But you can’t just grab them, can you? Surely that’s against their human rights.”
“You’re obsessed by human rights,” Dad tells me. “Nobody had any human rights when I was young. Whose wall were you sitting on, anyway?”
“Just an old guy’s,” I say, and hold my wrist out to show him. “Look, it’s bruised. I think it might be sprained.”
He holds it up and then turns it over. He looks at the other side for a while and then turns it back. “You’re hallucinating,” he tells me. “There’s nothing wrong with it.” He rolls his own sleeve up and pushes his arm out in front of me. “Look at that,” he says. “That’s a bruise.”
It certainly is. There’s a big mark on his arm that looks like a full-scale hemorrhage.
“Can’t even feel it,” he says. “Once you’re working in the bottling hall, you’ll get one of those nearly every day.”
He stuffs the last slice of pizza into his mouth, almost in one go, then screws up his napkins, puts them into the box, and folds the box shut. He chews and swallows, chews and swallows, has quite a serious choking fit, throws the empty pizza box full of napkins onto the back seat of the car, and tells me he’s ready to go.
“I’ll just have a quick smoke first,” he says, and he rolls down the window and pulls out a cigarette. One that obviously wasn’t made in his crazy new machine.
I think it was finally giving up on getting the iPad back that left my brain with the room it needed to come up with a solution. That’s quite often how it works. Once I’d switched over to looking for a way to get round Harry, there was no pressure on the thinking apparatus anymore. It could just get on with its work. And that’s exactly what it did.
So the first part of the plan is that I ring Gary’s doorbell while my dad stands off to the side, up against the wall of the house, facing out toward the road. We came up with that part together. If it’s Gary who answers the door, I give a signal with my hand and Dad steps out beside me. If anyone else comes to the door, I ask if Gary’s in, and when whoever it is goes to get him we swap places and my dad’s standing there when Gary arrives.
It’s Gary’s mum who answers the bell. I ask if I can speak to Gary, then hold my breath, hoping she doesn’t say he’s out. She doesn’t. She asks who I am and I tell her I’m Jack Dawson, then she shouts loudly to Gary there’s someone at the door for him, and she walks away. Quickly, we make the switch, and I stand up against the wall, looking out at the road, listening intently to hear what’s going on.
I hear some heavy footsteps coming down the hallway, and then I hear the door creaking open a little bit more. I imagine Gary must have been looking at the floor or something, because he makes a sort of sniffing noise and doesn’t seem to have noticed it’s my dad standing there, and then I hear the little note of surprise.
“Oh . . .” he says. “I thought it was for me. Do you want my dad?”
“Probably,” Dad says. “I’ve come to tell him about the wheelchair lift in the new block.”
Everything goes silent. I pretend to myself I can hear Gary swallowing. He creaks the door a bit and then speaks very quietly.
“I didn’t do anything,” he says.
Dad doesn’t respond. I turn my head round to the side, still keeping it pushed up against the wall, and I see him just standing there.
“Is your dad in?” he finally asks Gary.
Gary doesn’t say anything. I don’t know if he’s nodded or shaken his head or anything like that, but he doesn’t speak.
“How will your dad take the news?” Dad asks, and I hear Gary saying it was an accident.
“I was just helping Irene up to the first floor,” he lies.
“You and fourteen others,” Dad replies. “I found a copy of your diagram in Jack’s room. It’s clever. You’d make a good civil engineer if you weren’t about to get expelled from school. But you probably shouldn’t have signed it. That wasn’t too bright.”
This is the only shaky part of the plan. If Gary asks to see the diagram at this point, we’re in a spot of hot water, since we don’t really have one. If we did, I could’ve used it to get the iPad back weeks ago. But Gary’s obviously in a bit of a blind panic, and he doesn’t suspect for a minute that my dad’s scamming him.
“What can I do?” Gary asks, and he’s starting to sound quite scared.
“Jack says he lent you an iPad,” Dad says. “And that you won’t give it back.”
More seconds of silence follow, and more squeaking of the door. “He said I could keep that,” Gary says.
“Jack’s changed his mind,” my dad tells him. “It’s up to you, but you can either bring me the iPad or bring me your dad.”
I hold my breath. The door squeaks again. Then I hear Gary running down the hallway, and I hear his heavy feet clattering up the stairs. My dad takes a step back and turns toward me. I look at him and he lifts a thumb while still keeping his hands down by his sides. Then he takes a step toward the door again.
It’s not long before I hear Gary thumping back down the stairs, and then I hear the glorious sound of the iPad changing hands.
“Can I have the diagram back?” Gary asks, and my dad says, “Hmm . . .”
I hear some clicks as my dad turns on the iPad and plays about with it. I know he’s got no idea what he’s doing, and I hope he doesn’t break the thing before I get it back.
“I think I’ll keep the diagram for now,” he tells Gary. “That way, if anything happens to Jack because of this, I can still show it to your dad.”
Gary stays quiet, and my dad turns the iPad off again.
“Tell your dad I was asking for him, anyway,” he says, and I hear Gary sort of tutting before he closes the door. I stay up against the wall until I’m sure he’s gone, and then I step away from it, feeling sharp little pains all over my
back where the stones in the wall had been cutting into me.
“Let’s go,” Dad whispers, and gives me a sort of disastrous low-five. Then we hurry back to the car and head for Harry’s place.
14
After stopping for a twelve-inch crispy-thin on the way, with plenty of pineapple, I climb the stairs to Harry’s room and knock on the door. There’s no reply. I’m sure I can hear him moving about in there, though, so I knock again.
Still nothing.
“It’s Jack,” I shout, and I hear a soft groan coming from inside the room. I slip the iPad into my bag, then open the door myself and just walk in.
Harry’s sitting over at his desk, playing a game of chess against himself, turning the board round to move a white piece, then turning it back again to move a black one.
“Who’s winning?” I ask him, and go and sit down on his kid bed. He gives me a look as if to say, “Very funny, I don’t think!” and carries on playing. I make myself comfortable and look around his room for a while, and then I drop the bombshell.
“I’ve brought you a present,” I say, and that gets his attention. The chess game is instantly abandoned. He jumps up from his desk midmove and comes across the room, toward me.
“You’ve got the iPad?” he says. “Seriously?”
I put a hand in my bag and then frown, as if it’s not where I expected it to be. I search through the compartments, dipping in and out of them and making my frown deeper, then lay my hand on it and look relieved. I draw it out as if I’m a magician bringing out a rabbit or something, and Harry lunges forward and pulls it out of my hands.
“That bastard Crawford better not have refurbished it,” he says. “My stuff better still be on here.”
He slides his fingertip furiously around the screen, and I spend a few tense minutes just watching him like that, his face giving nothing away. Then, just when I’m starting to think I might hyperventilate, he punches a fist up into the air and shouts, “Yes!” and I start breathing like I’m normal again.