by Stuart David
“I haven’t got anything to do with Elsie Green.”
“Whatever. What you do in your private life isn’t my concern. All I’m interested in is you standing in for Chris Yates.”
“I’m not. I told you that. It’s my cousin Harry.”
“Either way,” Kirsty says. “So where do you want to talk? Up in the common room?”
I look at my watch. “I’ve got science in a couple of minutes,” I say.
“Skip it,” Kirsty tells me.
Usually I wouldn’t need any encouragement to skip science. Any excuse would do. But talking to Kirsty Wallace, about whatever she wants to talk about, seems even less appealing than sitting listening to Baldy Baine making merry with the quantums.
“I can’t do it,” I say. “Baine saw me in the corridor before the break. He knows I’m in.”
“Your call,” Kirsty says. “All I really need to tell you is, you’ve got until lunchtime to do that stand-in thing in Bailey’s office. You or your cousin Barry. Whoever. That’s pretty much what it boils down to.”
“What’s that got to do with you?” I ask her.
“We had a meeting,” she says. “For the school trip. Everybody who’s going on the trip, and everybody who’s just tired of the crap. We’re standing up. If you or your man don’t step in now, we’re all going to Bailey’s office at the end of the lunch break. And we’re telling him about Yatesy together. There’s nothing him or his henchmen can do about that. Too many of us. People power.”
“But I’m still squaring the thing with Cyrus McCormack,” I tell her. “I need to sort something out for Cyrus before he’ll tell Bailey he fought Harry. If you go at lunchtime, Yatesy gets expelled.”
Kirsty shrugs. “He’s standing in the way of the greater good,” she says. “There are always casualties in the interests of the greater good.”
“Just give me a few more days,” I say. “Then there don’t need to be any casualties. What difference does a few more days make?”
“Can’t do it,” Kirsty says. “We’re taking back the streets.”
“What streets?”
“It’s a saying. It’s a figure of speech.”
“It doesn’t make any sense, though.”
“Of course it does,” Kirsty says. “We’re taking back the streets of Barcelona. For the school trip. It’s over, man.”
I start to feel everything slipping away from me. Maybe she’s right—maybe it is all over. The worst of it is, I know if I hadn’t been farmed out to Uncle Ray’s, I would have a proper plan by now. I’d be all over the Cyrus situation like a rash. But even with my newfound quiet spot in the library, I don’t know if I can come up with something even if she does give me a couple of days. Once my train of thought’s been broken, all burst up by the noise and the chaos, it can take a couple of days just to get back on track, never mind to have the whole thing sorted out.
And then the bell rings.
“Enjoy science,” Kirsty says, and heads off down the middle staircase. I start running after her.
“Hang on,” I shout. “Give me another couple of minutes.”
She slows down, and I catch up with her before she’s on the first landing.
“My cousin Harry doesn’t get to university if this falls through,” I say. “There are a lot of long stories involved, but think of all the consequences. Yatesy gets expelled, Harry’s life is ruined. Cyrus, too—he’ll be high and dry. Think of all the good you’d be doing if you give me a bit more time. Who gets hurt if the school trip’s on ice for a bit longer? It’ll still happen. At least give me till tomorrow morning—twenty-four hours.”
I regret that as soon as I’ve said it. Twenty-four hours is as good as useless to me. I’ve got as much chance of sorting the whole thing out by lunchtime as I have of getting anything done by the same time tomorrow. But the thing about helping people out seems to have made a little dent in Kirsty.
“Let me see what my people think,” she says. “Whatever they want I’ll go along with.”
“But you can convince them,” I tell her. “Get me two more days. I’ll tell Yatesy and Harry and Cyrus it was you who held back the mob, and you can take the credit for making Harry go to Bailey. You’ll be feeling the love from all directions.” She thinks it through for a minute, twisting a big bit of her rope hair. Then she comes to a decision.
“Twenty-four hours,” she says. “I like Yatesy—he’s a freethinker. You’ve bought him a reprieve.”
“Give me two days,” I say, but it’s not happening.
“Twenty-four hours,” she says again. “Then we march on Bailey’s headquarters. Tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours.”
It’s a victory of a kind, I suppose, but it’s as close to utterly useless as any victory could ever be. And I wander off to Baldy Baine’s science class in a state of total defeat.
26
I don’t even bother visiting the dining hall before I head for the library at lunchtime. Trying to think on an empty stomach isn’t always the best way to go, but time is so short, I don’t really have much choice, and I come out of Baine’s science class like a bullet out of a gun, breaking a world record for reaching the new block, and taking the stairs in there two and three at a time. I’d been hoping to get some thinking done in the Baldy One’s class, but Sandy Hammil kept throwing dirty looks at me from the other side of the room, and Baine had us heating things up and mixing things together almost from the get-go, so I hardly got a minute to myself.
When I finally reach the library door, I stop and look in through the little window, at all the silence waiting for me in there. I thought it might be busier at lunchtimes, but it’s empty again, so I grab the door handle and get ready to feel the peace. The thing is, though, the door doesn’t open. At first I think I’ve just pulled it the wrong way, and I feel a bit stupid, but when I push it away from me the same thing happens. Nothing. I start pulling and pushing as hard as I can, till the door rattles in its frame. Then I stop and bang on the window.
Someone walks up behind me and stops there.
“Keen today, Mr. Dawson,” they say. “I’ve never seen such a passion for learning before. Not in this school.”
I keep my hand on the door handle and turn round. It’s my geography teacher, Miss Voss.
“I can’t get in,” I tell her. “I think it’s locked.”
“Of course it’s locked,” she says. “It’s lunchtime.”
“So?”
“So the library closes over lunchtime.”
“But I need to get in. I’m working on an essay.”
“You shouldn’t have left it till the last minute,” she tells me. “Then you wouldn’t need to work on it at lunchtime.”
“But it’s not last minute,” I say. “I’m making an early start on it.”
“Then you don’t need to work over lunch,” Miss Voss says. “Go and get something to eat.” And she wanders off and leaves me to stare through the little window at everything I’m missing inside. I can’t work out how they get it so quiet in there. Out here in the corridor, people are rushing about and chatting, their shoes clopping on the hard floor, doors banging everywhere.
“Can’t you see I’m trying to think?” I want to shout. “People’s lives are at stake here.”
Out loud, though, I just shout after Miss Voss.
“Miss!” I call. “What time does the library open again?”
She doesn’t even turn round, just keeps walking. “When lunchtime is over,” she says. “One thirty.”
And I decide there’s nothing I can do but head back to the dining hall and at least fill up my empty stomach.
I sit a few tables down from Sandy Hammil, and pretty soon he starts giving me the evil eye again. He gives me it all through my war with the rubber chicken and the powdery chips, and by the time I’m moving on to the neon cheesecake I’m getting pretty sick of it, so I send him a text.
“I know you told Kirsty Wallace about Elsie Green and me,” it says.
&
nbsp; “About your love affair?” he texts back. “I didn’t tell her. Or anybody.”
“She told me you did,” I reply. “You’re busted.”
“And you’re a moron,” he says. “And she’s a liar.”
Then he gets up and leaves the dining hall, holding his middle finger up behind his back as he walks away. For a few minutes I manage to convince myself I’ll be able to think more clearly with him out of the picture, but my head is mashed. Digesting the road accident I’ve just eaten takes up most of my vital juices, and the noise in the dining hall starts to drive me almost insane. I’ve never really noticed it before—it was always just there in the background—but my experience at Uncle Ray’s must have given me some kind of battlefield trauma, and I become aware of the full blaring cacophony—knives and forks on plates, the roar of talking and laughing and screeching, the cooks up at the counter banging dishes and trays and wheeling carts about, everyone’s phones ringing and vibrating and beeping and playing music all the time. It gets so bad, I even find myself thinking seriously about Uncle Ray’s rope ladder scheme, and I try to modify it into some kind of workable solution. Maybe if I climbed up the ladder after Cyrus climbed out, and I went into the bed instead of the pillows. Maybe that would be more convincing. And if I used a real ladder instead of a rope ladder . . .
In my crazy state of mind, this difference seems to matter somehow. I genuinely seem to believe the flaw in Uncle Ray’s plan lies in the fact that it’s a rope ladder. If only it was a proper ladder . . .
Just before I’m about to be taken away by a security patrol from a crazy hospital, though, I see Cyrus coming into the dining hall and sitting down, and I dump my tray up at the counter, then go and sit beside him.
“It’s all over,” I tell him as he tries to work out whether his chicken is real or not. He spears a piece of it with his knife and holds it up in front of me.
“What the hell is this?” he asks me. “Is this food, or is it packaging the food came in?”
“I think that’s the chicken,” I tell him, and he looks appalled. Then he pushes it into his mouth.
“What are you talking about, anyway?” he asks me. “What do you mean by ‘It’s all over’? It’s been all over for me for weeks.”
“Not like this,” I tell him, and I explain the whole Kirsty Wallace thing to him. Strangely, he suddenly looks a lot happier than he did a minute ago.
“She’s really going to do that?” he says. “No bullshit? That sounds amazing.”
“No it doesn’t,” I tell him. “What sounds amazing about it? This isn’t what we want at all, Cyrus. If Yatesy goes down, I don’t help you get to the dance. Think of it that way.”
He shrugs. “You’d never be able to pull that off anyway,” he says. “No offense, but no one would. It can’t be done.”
“Of course it can,” I tell him. “I was almost there, Cyrus. This is the kind of thing I do all the time.”
He shakes his head. “Not with my parents,” he says. “No way.”
He struggles with another bit of the chicken for a while, then gives up on it and sees what he can make of the chips. I sit and watch him, numbly, searching through my broken brain for even the hint of an idea. Then I resort to begging.
“Please let Harry go to Bailey this afternoon,” I say. “Then I’ve got all the time in the world to make sure you get to the dance. You can’t let this thing get away from you, Cyrus. Think about Amy.”
He shakes his head. “Kirsty’s got a concrete plan,” he says. “This way I’m guaranteed the bohemian’s head on a spike. I can’t pass that up.”
“But we’re going to make sure we get Yatesy later. Remember? That was the deal.”
“I’m going with Kirsty,” he says flatly. “She’s got a plan. You haven’t.”
“But I have,” I say. “Listen, I’ll give you an example of a rough sketch I’ve come up with for getting you to the dance. It’s not ideal or anything, it’s just to prove I can come up with the goods.”
He looks at me without saying anything, but I can’t tell if that’s because he’s got nothing to say or if it’s because the chips have formed into putty in his mouth, like they did in mine.
“Here’s what you’d do,” I say, and in my desperation I lay out Uncle Ray’s idiot plan about pretending to be ill. Replacing the rope ladder with a real ladder of course.
He looks quite impressed for a minute, still trying to make inroads on the mouth putty, and then, when he’s cleared a good enough space in it, he says to me, “I live up on the tenth floor. Hillside Towers.”
I just stare at him. I find myself going down the bampot road of thinking about getting the fire brigade involved, or something like that. Surely Uncle Ray must know someone in the fire brigade.
“It’s just an example,” I say, a bit too loudly. “We’re not actually going to use it. It’s just to show you I’ll come up with something.”
“It’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” he says. “I think you’re losing it, Jackdaw. If that’s the caliber of your thinking, it’s just as well Kirsty came along.”
“But I didn’t come up with that,” I tell him. “It was my uncle Ray. I’ve been living at my cousin’s place, and my uncle’s insane. And listen to all the forks in here, Cyrus. You probably haven’t noticed it before, but when you really start listening . . . And they close up the library at lunchtime. Did you know that? Two more days, Cyrus. Three more days. All you have to do is back up my cousin’s story. Then my mum and dad will have sorted everything out, and I can go back home, and I’ll come up with a zinger. I promise.”
He looks at me kind of sadly. “You’re freaking me out now,” he says. “I’ve got to go, Jackdaw.”
“Everybody hates you, Cyrus,” I tell him, and he carries his tray off to another table and leaves me sitting there on my own. And I know that’s the end of it now. No doubt about it.
I don’t have the heart to skip maths and spend the rest of the afternoon in the library. I know my wave of good fortune has run its course, and the way my luck is now I’d probably get caught and suspended if I tried it. So I do the zombie walk to the maths class and just sit in there watching pigeons out in the playground. I start to hope Cyrus doesn’t tell anyone else about the ladder idea—I really don’t want anyone to find out about that—and I try to think of a way to convince him to keep quiet about it. Then I find myself attempting to adapt it into something workable again, while Mrs. Cunningham breaks out the quadratic equations or something like that.
I think Cyrus was right. I think I must be losing it.
When the bell rings for the end of the day, I do the zombie walk again toward the school gate and wish it was twenty-four hours later. By then Kirsty Wallace will have done her thing, Chris Yates will be expelled, Harry will be confined to a life of misery, and I can stop thinking of ways to get everyone out of it all. I can stop thinking about abseiling equipment and bungee cords, boom lifts and basket cranes, and numerous other kinds of mental ways to bring Cyrus down safely from a ten-story window in Hillside Towers.
And then things get even worse.
I’m quite near the gate, just at the bottom of the slope leading up to them, when Sandy Hammil appears beside me and says, “Heard you spent the day in the library. I heard you were studying love poems to recite for Elsie Green.”
I can tell he’s just joking, trying to make me laugh so we can start being friends again, but I’m really not in the mood for it. He’s got me just at the wrong point in time. And I smack him in the mouth.
He looks sort of stunned. He just stands there staring at me for a minute, as if he’s not able to believe what’s happened. Then he smacks me in the mouth. Hard. And then I’m kind of stunned, just standing there staring at him, even more unable to believe what’s just happened. And then the crowd arrives. Suddenly we’re at the center of an ever-expanding donut, and all I can hear is the sound of people running from all over the school, and the sound of those who’ve already arrived s
houting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Nothing much happens for a bit after that. I stand looking at Sandy and he stands looking at me, and I hear people shouting things like, “Hit him, Jackdaw!” and “Kick him in the balls, Sandy!” But we both just keep standing there, looking at each other.
“I was only joking, you prick,” Sandy says. “I was about to tell you I’m glad you’re studying at last.”
“I’m not studying,” I tell him. “Only pricks study. Pricks like you.”
“Use your own words,” he says. “Don’t use my words.” Then he sort of comes at me. He starts pushing me against the wall of bodies behind me, and doing this weird dragging-me-about thing. I’m not exactly sure what he’s trying to do, but I start pushing him back toward the wall of bodies behind him, and we struggle about like that for a good few minutes.
“Are you fighting or shagging?” somebody shouts, and somebody else tells me to put a thumb in Sandy’s eye. But there’s only really one thing I hear being shouted that has any effect on me. Something that starts with the randoms near the back of the crowd and gradually makes its way forward. Just one word: “Bailey!”
Then two words: “Bailey’s coming!”
I only become aware of it gradually, but as soon as I do I stop pushing Sandy about.
“Sober up,” I tell him. “We’ve got to break it up. I’m on my final warning.”
“Good,” Sandy says, and he hits me properly then. Full in the face. I forget all about Bailey for the time being. All I can see is the red mist, and I hit him back. And I hit him properly now too. The crowd likes that, and the shouting gets wilder. Sandy grabs hold of me and starts doing the strange swinging-about thing again, and that’s when I start to feel the crowd parting behind me. It’s quite a bizarre sensation, but I know exactly what it means as soon as it starts. I know someone’s coming through to the center of the circle, and no one in the crowd has any intention of stopping them.
“We’ve got to quit,” I tell Sandy again, but he holds me even tighter and swings me about even more. “Get off me,” I say, trying as hard as I can to break free and do a Yatesy. But I’m too late. Before I know what’s happening, a man hand reaches out and grabs me by the arm, pulling me hard and freeing me at last from Sandy’s grip. Bailey’s got me. He starts pulling me backwards so’s I can’t see where I’m going. My head tips back, and all I can see is the sky. Then he’s bumping me through the crowd, smashing me off various randoms as we go, cracking me into their arms and their backs and their legs while I’m struggling to get free and still somehow believing there’s a point in trying to make a run for it.