My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall)

by Stuart David

  “Okay,” I say to Mum. “You win. Uncle Ray’s it is.”

  My big fat crazy uncle is as good as his word. Within twenty minutes, he turns up in his bampot taxi and starts hammering his horn out on the street. Mum hands me my suitcase and tells me not to worry about anything.

  “It’s only for a night or two,” she says. “Just until we work out if your dad and I have any kind of future together. Then you can come back.”

  This is the routine I have to go through every time. The reality of it is, in two or three days, even the Regular Madness will be gone for a while. Mum and Dad will be like two new best friends, seeing who can be the nicest to each other, and indulging in a bit too much parent kissing in front of me for my liking. There’ll be a few things missing from the house, a chair and a couple of plants maybe, or a few ornaments and one of the small tables. Then I’ll find it all lying by the bin when I take the rubbish out at some point. There might be a couple of new cracks or dents in the woodwork around one of the doors, or a new mark or two on the walls or the floor when I get back, but that’ll be the full extent of the damage. Mum knows this as well as I do, but I think she must enjoy the drama of it all or something.

  “Take care,” she says quietly, and I bump my suitcase over the threshold and drag it down the path, toward the waiting madman.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Mary,” he shouts, getting out of the car. “I’ll make sure he’s as right as rain.”

  Then he hurls my suitcase onto the back seat and ruffles up my hair and we’re off, with me clinging onto the dashboard for dear life and him making that god-awful noise he calls singing opera.

  22

  There are three main things an ideas man needs when he’s working on the Big One: the first two are peace and quiet, and the third is plenty of privacy to do his thinking in. I know from past experience I won’t be getting very much of any of them at Uncle Ray’s place. Uncle Ray will put paid to the first two, with his constant jabbering and his crashing about in the kitchen, his insistence on always having at least two TVs and one radio on at any particular time, and then the opera singing on top of all that. Harry, on the other hand, should take care of the privacy issue. Whenever I get dumped at Uncle Ray’s house, I always have to share Harry’s room and sleep on his floor on a blow-up mattress which constantly leaks. The worst thing is, when Harry’s not at school, he never ever leaves his room. He’s always playing chess against himself, getting stuck into his school books, messing about on his computer, or sticking bits onto model cars with a brain-warping glue. You can’t even get any time to yourself in the bathroom. If you ever try to spend more than thirty-five seconds in there, Uncle Ray comes and starts banging on the door, shouting about needing to “quickly solve a few crossword clues” or “batter on some aftershave for the bowling club.”

  It’s a far from ideal situation, especially under the current circumstances.

  When the hair-raising taxi ride draws to a close, I spend about ten minutes in the kitchen with Uncle Ray, pretending to drink the beer he gives me in celebration of my interview being canceled, and listening to him hammering on about a variety of crazy men he’s had in his taxi over the past few days. Then he tells me to take my suitcase upstairs and get “settled in” while he knocks up some dinner for us. “Gourmet fare,” he calls it. I thank him again for saving me from a life of label licking, then drag my things up to Harry’s bedroom and bang on the door. Harry doesn’t answer.

  “I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you again,” he says when I open the door and go in anyway. “If you’ve brought my suit back, just throw it on the bed and get lost.”

  “I haven’t brought your suit back,” I tell him.

  “Even better,” he says. “That means you can just go.”

  I heave my suitcase up onto his bed and sit down beside it. “I can’t go anywhere,” I tell him quietly. “I’ve moved in. We’re roommates again.”

  And like you can probably imagine, he’s not particularly thrilled by this breaking news. He picks up his chess pieces, one at a time, and starts throwing them at the wall.

  “No way,” he shouts. “Not again. You can sleep out in the hall this time.”

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” I tell him. “Blame your dad. It’s all his fault.”

  “How?”

  “He told my mum about that interview, and now she and my dad are locked into the Special Occasion Madness. So I have to stay here till it’s over.”

  “I hate my dad,” Harry says. “I absolutely hate him.”

  I open my suitcase and start putting some of my things out on a chair. I might as well make myself at home, I decide, and I don’t want my clothes to get too many creases in them.

  “It’s not all bad news, though,” I say to Harry after a while, when his constant muttering to himself is starting to ease off and his rate of throwing the chess pieces is down to about one a minute. “I’ve brought some of the good stuff too.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “We’re back on for the whole Chris Yates thing,” I say, and I can tell he doesn’t believe me. “I spoke to Cyrus again today. It’s all arranged. He says he’ll okay your story with Bailey.”

  “Bullshit,” Harry says, but I nod. “I don’t believe you,” he says.

  “Why would I make it up?”

  “So you don’t have to sleep in the hall.”

  “I’ll sleep in the hall if you want,” I tell him. “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  That gets him. All the red color starts to disappear from his face, and he stands up and looks at me.

  “Genuinely?” he says. “Cyrus really said that?”

  “Totally.”

  “Jesus!” Harry says, and he starts picking up all of his scattered chess pieces and putting them back in place on the squares of the board. “This is unbelievable, Jack.”

  Meanwhile, I’m unpacking my bathroom stuff and wondering why Mum’s put a pouch full of golf balls in my suitcase. Why would she do that?

  “This is incredible,” Harry says. “How did you manage to talk Cyrus round?”

  “Easily,” I say. “I told him I’d do him a favor.”

  “What favor?”

  I take out a couple of the golf balls and look at them for a minute, then hold them up for Harry to see.

  “What the hell are these?” I ask.

  “Golf balls,” he says distractedly.

  “I know that, but why have I got them? Why did my mum put them in my case?”

  He shrugs.

  I hunt around in the pouch to see if there’s anything else in there, but there’s nothing. Just the golf balls. I think my mum must be finally losing her mind.

  “What favor did you say you’d do for Cyrus?” Harry asks again, and I zip up the pouch and throw it back into my suitcase.

  “I told him I’d get him to the school dance,” I say. “His parents banned him from going, because of the fight. So I told him I’ll get him there.”

  Harry slumps down in his seat, and some of the red color comes back into his face again. “Crap,” he says. “We’re screwed. That’ll never happen.”

  “Of course it will,” I say. “This is my forte, Harry. It’s what I do. Don’t worry about any of that.”

  “Do you even know who Cyrus’s parents are?” Harry asks. “He’s got, like, the strictest parents in the whole school. You’ll never sort this one out.”

  That isn’t the kind of news I want to hear, but I push my empty suitcase under the bed and brave it out.

  “Of course I will,” I say. “It’s already sorted. Just about. I’ve got the perfect plan bubbling away. I just need to work on some of the finer details. You’re going to university. I can guarantee it.”

  He starts to rise up out of the slump a little bit. The red color begins to disappear again.

  “You’ve got a plan already?” he says. “Honestly?”

  “I’ll give you it in writing if you want,” I say. “It’s all s
ystems go.”

  “And then I can definitely go to Bailey? No more strings attached?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” I say, and he’s up on his feet again.

  “Do you need any help?” he says. “Is there anything I can do to help with the plan? Do you need a wingman?”

  A wingman!

  “I don’t think so,” I tell him, trying not to laugh. “I’ll let you know if I do, but I think the whole thing’s self-functioning.”

  “Is there anything else I can do to help? Anything at all?”

  “Just give me some space to think when I need it,” I say. “That’s all. Can you do that?”

  “Absolutely,” he says, and he starts moving his alarm clock and his pajamas and stuff. “You can have the bed, too,” he tells me. “You need to be in tip-top condition for this. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  “Straight up?”

  “Straight up,” he says, and he drags the plastic mattress out and starts pumping it up there and then. I watch him struggling with it for a while, and then I lie down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to Uncle Ray breaking something or other downstairs.

  Result!

  23

  As I’m sitting in French the next morning, though, looking out the window at a train that hasn’t moved in almost half an hour, I start to wonder if there’s really much advantage to having the bed in Harry’s room. Uncle Ray’s noise goes on so late into the night, and starts up again so early in the morning, that it’s practically impossible to sleep there anyway. I spent most of the night sitting up at Harry’s desk, watching the TV with a pair of headphones on, while he snored behind me on the blow-up. I was like a zombie by the time Uncle Ray drove us to school in his taxi, still hammering the opera.

  I struggle all morning just trying to keep it together. There’s a point where the train I’m staring at just disappears, and I can’t work out what’s happened. One moment I’m staring at it and it’s there, the next moment I’m still staring at it but it’s totally gone. It didn’t drive away or anything—it just vanished. Then I realize I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes without knowing about it, and it freaks me out a little bit. Luckily no one else seems to have noticed. Luckily I couldn’t have been snoring, or talking in my sleep.

  I do manage to get it together enough to interface with Cyrus at lunchtime again, though. I find him sitting over by the window in the dining hall, where he’d been a couple of days ago during the Elsie Green debacle, and I set about getting the full details of his grounding and of his setup at home, just so’s I know exactly what I’m up against. I’ve got my English jotter out, and I make a bunch of notes in it while I’m talking to him, which isn’t something I usually have to do. Everything I need to know usually stays right there in my head, but my head’s in such a mess from all the lack of sleep and everything that I don’t trust it to keep hold of anything, so I write it all down.

  It turns out the thing Harry was trying to tell me about Cyrus’s parents is that they’re pacifists. I don’t really know what that means at first, but Cyrus explains that his parents are completely against any kind of fighting. Or violence. When he was a kid, he wasn’t allowed to have any toy guns or soldiers or tanks or anything like that, and that’s why this thing with Chris Yates has landed him in it so deeply. I wish I’d known about this pacifist thing the other day, in history. Maybe I could’ve used it against Monahan, told him I was one of those, and got myself excused from all that war boredom he was peddling.

  “So it’s like you’ve gone against your mum and dad’s religion?” I ask Cyrus.

  “It’s not a religion, dumb-ass,” he tells me.

  But I write that down in my notebook anyway.

  I also put this bit in about when his parents were becoming pacifists in the first place. Cyrus was still quite young, and his dad bought him a bow and arrow, and then when his mum found out, she went ape-shit and took it off him. My brain is still working just enough for me to recognize this means Cyrus’s mum is probably more of a pacifist than his dad is, even though they’re both totally strict on it now. It’s possible there might be some way to use this to my advantage. Apart from that, my jotter is just filled up with all the details of the mess Cyrus is in, and of his setup at home. Ever since he came back to school, after his suspension, his dad drives him in the morning and picks him up at the gate at the end of the day. He’s not allowed any kind of social life at all, and he has to have these sessions in the evenings with his parents, where they contemplate peace and talk about the effects of violence in the world each day. At the weekends he has to go with them wherever they’re going, and all the rest of the time he has to study. His ban isn’t going to be lifted until he gets his exam results.

  “What about their jobs?” I ask him. “Where do your mum and dad work?”

  “My dad works at home,” he says. “My mum works in the primary school.”

  “Do they ever go out together in the evenings and leave you on your own?” I ask, and he shakes his head. “What about leaving you with somebody else?”

  “Sometimes my grandma comes round and they go out somewhere. Not much.”

  I write that down anyway. I might see something in it when my head starts to work again.

  “So what about the school dance?” I ask him. “Why are they so against you going? Is that ’cause they’re pacifists too?”

  “Are you mad?” he says. “Why would pacifists be against a dance?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t know anything about it. It’s your religion.”

  “It’s not a religion!” he screeches. “It’s just a thing. I’ve already told you that. They just won’t let me go because they know I want to go. As a punishment. Are you sure you can do anything about this? You don’t seem to know anything about anything.”

  “It’s all under control,” I tell him. “I just didn’t get much sleep last night. I’ll be all right again tomorrow. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be at the dance.”

  I have to admit, though, that as the afternoon wears on I begin to wonder how I’m ever going to pull it off. I try to read through my notes in science, but all the words just sort of swim in front of my eyes and I can’t even make out what any of them are. And things at Uncle Ray’s place don’t get any better. The chaos continues unabated, and Harry’s idea of giving me plenty of space seems to revolve around him sitting staring at me wherever I am, saying, “Anything yet, Jackdaw?” every five or ten minutes. The only thing I seem to be on course for at the moment is a full psychotic episode.

  Get this, though: Elsie Green finally accepted my friend request. I’d forgotten all about it, but I was using Harry’s computer to carry on the argument I’ve been having with Sandy Hammil, about whether it was him who told everyone Elsie kissed me or not, when the little red rectangle suddenly appeared up in the corner of my profile. I couldn’t even guess who it was from, my head was so mashed. But the worst of it was, when I clicked it open, I noticed she’d sent me a message, too.

  “I don’t want this to give you the wrong idea,” it said. “This doesn’t mean your suit has found favor with me. But I don’t want to add to your torture. I know what the heart of the lover will do. Be strong, Jack. Elsie.”

  Jesus Christ!

  It got me so wound up, I even started typing a reply to her, telling her what I really thought of her in an attempt to make her see this madness was all in her head. But I realized the last thing I need is to have her refuse to help with my programming, after everything. So I used my anger instead to type up a reply to Sandy, telling him he must be drunk if he thought I’d believe everybody had just seen Elsie kissing me. It was quite a sizzler. Then I went downstairs to face the “Something Special” Uncle Ray had promised to make us for dinner.

  “So how’s the latest scheme going?” Uncle Ray says as I sit down and try to work out what, exactly, the Something Special is. “Regale us with tales of your latest exploits, Mr. Jackdaw.”

/>   In my delirium, I have the mad idea Uncle Ray might be able to come up with a solution that will help me if I tell him about it, so I decide to lay it out for him.

  “I’m helping one of my friends,” I say. “His parents have banned him from going to the school dance, and there’s a girl he’ll lose if he can’t take her to it. So I’m working on a way to get him there.”

  Uncle Ray slaps his knee and starts creasing up.

  “I love it,” he says. “You’re a regular Figaro, Jackie D.”

  Then he points his fork at Harry. “You could learn a thing or two from this boy,” he says. “That’s the way to go about life, Harry. Get right in about it. Mix things up a bit.”

  He shuffles some of the stuff from his plate into his mouth and thinks for a minute. God knows how he manages to think with all the noise that’s going on. There’s a TV and a radio both playing in the kitchen, and then there’s the noise from the TV that’s blaring away in the living room too. But after a bit, Uncle Ray starts nodding, then swallows some beer to push down all the food that’s in his mouth.

  “Here’s how you go about that, Jack,” he says, tapping his fork on his plate. “All you need are some pillows. Your pal tells his parents he’s not feeling well on the night of the dance, and he goes up to bed early. He fills the bed with the pillows, so’s it looks as if he’s in there. Then you’re underneath his bedroom window, holding on to the bottom of a rope ladder to keep it steady. He climbs down and—whammo!—you whisk him off to the dance and if his parents come up to check on him they see the pillows in the bed and think he’s sleeping soundly. After the dance, he climbs back up the rope ladder, and no one’s any the wiser. How does that sound?”

  “Pretty crappy,” I say. “Unless we’re living in a lame children’s comic.” Or else I say, “Pretty good, Uncle Ray. I’ll give that some thought and see if I can use it.” I’m so confused by all the noise, and so exhausted and ready to fall asleep, that I’m not even sure what I say. I meant to think the first one and say the second, but maybe I did it the other way around. I’m too bewildered to even know.