CHAPTER 4

Sorry about the name of Chapter Three. Malcolm didn’t get to America. Sometimes things don’t work out in the way you say they will.

This chapter hasn’t got a name in case things don’t work out in the right way again. Bad luck can sometimes come in twos.

Or threes. Or ones.

No, not weasels.

You’ll remember that the last chapter ended with an Awkward Silence. This chapter begins just as the Awkward Silence comes to an end with:

‘The Timeline,’ said Mr Keenly.

The Timeline was pinned up round the room. At the beginning of The Timeline it said 3000BC. At the end of The Timeline it said NOW.

In between there were all sorts of dates and next to the dates it said things like ‘War’, or ‘King’.

(Uncle Gobb loved The Timeline. When Malcolm said at tea-time that Mr Keenly had put up The Timeline round the Malcolm’s classroom, he ran round the kitchen, jumping up and down, shouting, ‘At last, at last, at last!’

‘The point is, Tessa,’ he said, ‘there are millions of people who don’t know which comes first, and which comes second, and which comes third. What comes after first? Second! What comes after second? Third! Everyone needs to know this. They know it in China.’

‘A lot of things happen where the third thing comes before the first thing,’ Malcolm said. ‘Like getting up, having things to eat and going to bed.’

‘What?!!!’ said Uncle Gobb very crossly.

‘Well,’ said Malcolm, ‘we say that first we get up, then we have things to eat, then later, we go to bed. But if you look at it another way, you could say, first we go to bed, then we get up and then we have things to eat.’

‘WHAT???!!!’ said Uncle Gobb even more crossly.

Malcolm noticed that a lot of conversations he had with Uncle Gobb ended with Uncle Gobb saying, ‘WHAT???!!!’

It was at moments like this that Malcolm loved to imagine a different kind of conversation at home; one that could just end with a ‘Mmmm’ or a ‘Hah!’ That would be nice.)

‘I want you all to write down in your Timeline Books,’ Mr Keenly said, ‘the time and place you would most like to have been alive.’

The Gobb Education people wrote something on their clipboards.

There was some hubbub while people couldn’t find their Timeline Books but Janet moved round the class like a red-hot arrow finding Timeline Books. The Timeline Books were quite easy to find because they had the words ‘Timeline Book, provided by the Timeline Corporation’ on them.

Malcolm wrote down, ‘I would like to be in America around about the time when my dad went there.’

‘Right, all eyes to the front,’ said Mr Keenly. ‘What have you got?’

‘50p’ said Ulla.

‘That’s nice,’ said Janet.

The children read out their answers.

‘I would like to be in Victorian times because I would say to Oliver Twist that he could have more cornflakes,’ said Oliver.

‘I would like to be in the Stone Age because I like the Rolling Stones,’ said Singalong.

‘I would like to be in the Great Plague because I would like to have a great plague,’ said Freddy.

Malcolm read out his:

‘I would like to be in America when …’

… and he stopped.

He didn’t want to say the thing about his dad.

He looked at Crackersnacker. Crackersnacker had that don’t-do-a-Blurting-Out-Thing look on his face.

Crackersnacker tried to think of something that he could say to Malcolm to help him. He had seen what Malcolm had written in his Timeline Book, and he could see that Malcolm didn’t want to say that.

Then Crackersnacker got it.

He whispered to Malcolm, ‘When Clint Eastwood got out of Alcatraz.’

‘… when Clint Eastwood got out of Alcatraz,’ said Malcolm, ‘the only prison in the United States that no one ever got out of … apart from Clint Eastwood … and Alcatraz is an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay,’ Malcolm added.

The inspecting people from Gobb Education Force were still writing on their clipboards.

Mr Keenly said, ‘What you need to be telling me are the times you would like to be in, taken from OUR Timeline … Oliver – Victorians, very good; Freddy – Great Plague, very good; Singalong, I think you’ve got your Stones a bit muddled; Malcolm, no Alcatraz in America on our Timeline, I’m afraid.’

(Quite a lot of big eyes, and wiggly underlining fingers went on there.)

‘Excuse me, Mr Keenly,’ Crackersnacker said, ‘the thing is, Malcolm’s got to get to America.’

Malcolm had stopped listening. He was staring at some tiny writing on the bottom of the back page of the Timeline Book. It said:

Of course it does, he thought. It’s just like at home, when Uncle Gobb starts firing off questions and facts about spiders and stuff. Now it’s Timeline questions. Uncle Gobb was coming at him from all directions. It felt like Uncle Gobb had got hold of his head and was squeezing it harder and harder and harder.

‘Well,’ said Mr Keenly in one big rush … (Note: That means you have to say what Mr Keenly says next, really, really quickly. On your marks, get set, go!)

‘I’m sure we all want to go to America, but Malcolm, you wouldn’t be able to go to Alcatraz when Clint Eastwood was there … that was a film … it wasn’t real … No. Yes. I mean Alcatraz is real. It was real. But Clint Eastwood wasn’t in Alcatraz. That was a story. About the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz. If that’s true. And Alcatraz is still there. People go. You can go in a boat. I’ve been there. Ha! Imagine? Someone on the boat fell off. It was awful. Look, let’s hear some of the other answers …’

Malcolm thought that Mr Keenly was getting fizzy. Everyone else could see that the people in suits from the Gobb Education Force were making Mr Keenly VERY, VERY nervous, so they tried to help. They all said that they wanted to know about the boat, Mr Keenly’s trip to Alcatraz and the awful thing that happened. This just made Mr Keenly even more nervous because he thought that going to Alcatraz wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing. It wasn’t THE TIMELINE and it wasn’t the Learning Objective.

‘All eyes to the front,’ said Mr Keenly. ‘The bit of The Timeline that we’re going to focus on this term is the Stone Age.’

He pointed at the bit of The Timeline on the wall that said, ‘Stone Age’, and he did more eyebrows, wiggly fingers, underlining words thing.

Singalong said, ‘My granddad used to do electricity for the Rolling Stones.’

Mr Keenly switched on the whiteboard and there was a picture of a pile of stones.

Malcolm felt prickly – that feeling you get when things aren’t going quite right. They’re nearly right and if you could do something to get them more right, you wouldn’t feel prickly. Like there are little tiny pins sticking into the back of your neck. Not painful pins. Just prickly pins.

No, there are no such things as weaselly pins.

The thing is, Malcolm thought, we were nearly going to talk about America. America was in the air all round them. You could almost touch America. But something in the room meant that suddenly we couldn’t talk about America. It looked like Mr Keenly wanted to talk about America. Crackersnacker had been really helpful. But then it just … slipped away.

I know, he thought, I’ll have to have another big conversation with Crackersnacker about my Dreamy Stuff, and how to get to America and how we’re going to get rid of Uncle Gobb in America, because it’s not going to happen here in school.

‘Now these stones …’ Mr Keenly was saying … and Malcolm was imagining going home that night and Uncle Gobb saying, ‘You did the Stone Age in school today? Right, how many rocks where there in the Stone Age? What were the names of the rocks? How heavy were the rocks?’

Mr Keenly carried on: ‘… these stones may not look like the most interesting stones in the world, but …’

… but let’s interrupt Mr Keenly there. Let’s not carry on with the stones, eh?

Let’s leave the stones alone.

Mr Keenly was going to say something that he hoped would make the Inspection People very pleased. He was going to say that these stones are fascinating stones and really, really, really amazing.

(Note: Some fascinating stones turn up in a book called ‘Fascinating and Really, Really, Really Amazing Piles of Stones in the Stone Age’ written by a very, very close friend of Uncle Gobb called Jack Rock, but that book is not this book.

Sorry.)