OK, WE’VE HIT a new low. Or high, given that it registered 11.8 on the Higgenthorpe Badness Scale. To put this into perspective, if I was a zebra, right now not only have I been ambushed by a pride of lions, and not only has the chief badass lioness got me by the throat, but the whole family has also come up and actually started eating me, without doing me the basic courtesy of waiting until I’m dead.
This is what happened.
I slept in. Only by ten minutes, but that set in motion a train of events that led to my downfall. Because I slept in, I was at the back of the queue for the bathroom. Which meant waiting twenty minutes for Ruby to pinkerize herself, and half an hour for Ella to transform herself from a normal human girl into the Queen of the Undead. Then Mum did her thing, which doesn’t take that long because she’s got very good at hiding what she really looks like with the aid of stuff she puts on her face. Then there was Dad, and I don’t even want to think what he does in there, but he always comes out looking older and sadder than before.
By the time I’d finished brushing my teeth and peeling some of the dead skin from between my toes (yep, I’ve got athlete’s foot without having to go to all the bother of being an actual athlete), I was already on the Road to Perdition, i.e. there was no way I was getting to school on time. So I began to take it easy, thinking that half an hour late gets you into exactly the same amount of trouble as ten minutes late.
So I had a leisurely breakfast of tea, toast, Weetabix, Shredded Wheat and pizza (I found a slice left over from the other night). I was careful not to write anything potentially embarrassing on my mid-morning snack banana – just giving it the classic shark makeover with an evil, grinning mouth and three vertical gill-slits.
‘You should grow up,’ said Ruby, looking at it like it was chewing-gum on the sole of her shoe. So, naturally, I attacked her with the banana, which was quite satisfying, although that took up even more time and meant that the banana was a bit bruised and battered.
Then I went to the bus stop, getting there just in time to see a bus trundling away. I ran to catch it at the traffic lights and gave the bus driver a pleading look, but he just made a rude gesture, roughly translated as: ‘Get lost, fatty.’
Naturally I made a rude gesture back, roughly translated as: ‘I may be a fatty, but when I grow up I’ll probably get a decent job and have an OK life, whereas you are a bus driver, and a rubbish one at that, plus you stink, so you’ll never get a decent girlfriend, etc. etc.’
Yes, you can do a lot with a gesture, if you put enough effort into it.
So I had to wait another twelve minutes for the next bus. But I didn’t mind because usually when you miss the bus you can guarantee that it will be raining, but right now it wasn’t.
Yay!
Anyway, by the time I got to school the half an hour late had turned into forty-five minutes. I expected to have to walk into the middle of double maths with Mr Kennilworth, who always looks like you’ve caught him out doing something embarrassing, even though he’s actually too boring to be properly embarrassing. But I sensed straight away that there was something wrong. You can see into some of the classrooms, and they should have been full of bored-looking kids. But they were as empty as a six-box of donuts five minutes after I’ve opened it.
This could mean only one thing: an Emergency Special Assembly. If I was caught wandering around the school during an Emergency Special Assembly then I’d get massacred.
I hurried along to the hall, hoping to sneak in at the back. Before I reached it, I heard the muffled sounds of Mr Whale’s insidious voice. I read somewhere that the best way to kill someone is to stab them with an icicle. Once the icicle has melted, there’s no murder weapon, so the police can’t get you. Mr Whale’s voice is a bit like that icicle. Cold and deadly: killing you without leaving a trace.
There are three ways into the hall. The first is via the big sliding doors at the back. Then there are two smaller doors, one on each side, nearer the front. I decided to try the big back door, hoping that everyone would be facing the front, and that maybe Mr Whale would be too busy being sly and insidious to notice me.
I reached the hall and, to my relief, saw that there was a nice Dermot-sized gap in between the doors. I sneaked up and looked in. Mr Whale was on the stage with a couple of other teachers – Mr Fricker and Miss Choat, who, with her long neck and small head and big eyes and beaky mouth, looked as much like an ostrich as you could look whilst still being (more or less) human.
The hall was packed, and there were loads of other teachers standing at the sides.
‘These events will not be tolerated,’ I heard Mr Whale saying. Then he dropped a piece of paper, and bent down to pick it up. I took my chance – there were a couple of seats in the back row, and if I could just slip in and nab one I’d be safe.
I squeezed into the gap. My head was through. My chest was through. But that was it. My belly, swollen with my slightly-bigger-than-average breakfast, just wouldn’t fit. And, worse – I couldn’t get back out. I was stuck like a cork in a bottle.
And – could it have been my imagination? – the gap between the doors seemed to be getting smaller. I was being CRUSHED TO DEATH. Few things make a boy panic more than being CRUSHED TO DEATH. My struggles began to attract attention. A couple of kids turned round. And some of the teachers. The more people who saw, the more noise there was. First grins. Then some laughter.
Mr Whale was standing again, after finding his notes. And now I’d caught his attention. That wasn’t good. Plus there was the whole being CRUSHED TO DEATH thing that I had going on.
Then, relief.
Someone had slid the doors wide enough for me to fall through. And fall I did, right into the arms of my rescuer, who turned out to be none other than the Floppy-Haired Kid.
Miss Brotherton was the first teacher to reach me.
‘Sit down and be quiet,’ she hissed, not really distinguishing between me and the FHK.
‘Thanks,’ I said, when we were safely in the back row. In reply he gave me a little smile.
Mr Whale finished saying what he had to say. I still hadn’t quite worked out what it was all about. I looked quizzically at the FHK.
‘The Phantom,’ he mouthed back silently.
‘And now,’ added Mr Whale, ‘I’m going to pass you over to the headmaster, who will add some further words of his own.’
This statement produced a gasp from the assembled school kids. The Head, Mr Steele, is famously frail and feeble-minded. He only ever appears in public to announce the school sports results during the normal Friday assembly. He has literally never been seen at any other time or in any other place.
And now he was shuffling towards the microphone. Being forced to change the routine he’d kept to for the past twenty years had clearly further confused his mental state. Even from the back I could see that he didn’t have any shoes on, and that one horny toenail had sliced its way through a dirty grey sock. He was dressed in what had probably once been a perfectly OK suit, woven from a mixture of asbestos, horsehair and belly-button fluff, but now it was in a pretty terrible state, with curious yellow and brown stains, as if the old headteacher had dribbled an egg-and-gravy sandwich down his front.
He reached the mic.
He stared with milky eyes around the hall.
He strolled away again, obviously convinced that he’d done whatever it was that he was supposed to do. Mr Whale firmly guided him back to the mic, and whispered urgently in his ear. Then he passed him the piece of paper he’d picked up off the floor. It was obviously a speech he’d written out for the Head.
Mr Steele began. The first few words were confident. For a moment, he seemed like a young man in his fifties and not the nonagenarian that he usually appeared.
‘As you will no doubt have …’
But he could not sustain it. His eyes wandered from the notes prepared for him. He tried to find something else in the wide space of the hall to spur himself into action. And then, suddenly, he had left us for another time, another place, another universe.
‘The Upper Sixth ice-hockey team has …’
Again Mr Whale approached and whispered. This time he looked a little angrier.
Mr Steele was dumbfounded. ‘What, no ice hockey?’ he said, his feeble voice caught and amplified by the mic. ‘There is no ice? Or hockey? Oh. I see. I see.’
He focused on the paper again. ‘Ah yes. The, ah, the dirty. The human dirt. This will not do. Really. Do, it will not.’
He looked over at Mr Whale, who nodded encouragement.
‘And nor, if I may say so, will not this do. I repeat again, IT. NOT. DO. WILL.’
This brought a small cheer from the audience. The cheer perhaps over-stimulated Mr Steele.
‘Well, thank you very much, and my congratulations to the girls’ second eleven dwarf-throwers, who came a creditable nineteenth in the … in the … ah. Well, good luck and good night. The lights are going out all over Europe. Ask not what your country can do for you, but for whom the bell tolls. You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be led.’
Then Miss Choat came over on her backwards-bending ostrich legs, took his arm and guided him off the stage.
This meant that the stage belonged again to Mr Whale.
‘Thank you, Headmaster,’ he began, glancing at Mr Steele’s receding figure. Then he turned the Evil Eye on us. ‘Do not doubt that we will catch the person who is doing this. And when we’ve caught him – or her, if a her it be – then the full might of the law will be brought to bear.’ He smashed his fist into his palm to add emphasis. ‘And until we find the culprit, all morning breaks will be spent in your form rooms.’
Groans and half-choked cries of ‘No!’ rose from the crowd. They were quelled by another glare.
‘Dismissed,’ said Mr Whale, and that was it.
Normally, of course, me getting stuck in the giant hall doors would have created a sensation, but the Special Assembly devoted to the catching and smashing of the Phantom was such a unique and memorable event that my own little mishap seemed to be forgotten. However, I hadn’t forgotten that the FHK had given me a hand when I needed it most. So I went and thanked him at lunch time.
‘Forget it,’ he said in his usual careless way, as if my thanks meant absolutely nothing to him. But it didn’t change the fact that he’d helped me out, and might not be such a swine after all.
Still within the new revised target …