Blocker didn’t wait until lunchtime. He waylaid Ben in the stairwell, pinning him against the wire-reinforced glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The clatter of kids’ feet continued below the landing, but those of us coming down stopped as a knob of kids bunched up to watch Ben get the snot kicked out of him.
There were six or seven kids in front of me, so it seemed I was going to have to watch as well.
I didn’t want to. I was feeling uncommonly guilty. It hadn’t been Ben’s fault really, it had been mine. If I hadn’t made Frau Blüchner write knickers on the board, then Ben wouldn’t be about to get his teeth smashed in.
‘Something funny in class?’ big, sneering Blocker Blüchner asked little Ben Holly, knowing he wouldn’t answer.
Ben just shook his head, terrified.
‘Here’s a good joke,’ Blocker said, and punched Ben in the stomach, hard.
Ben gasped and doubled up, clutching at his midriff.
‘You’ll split your sides,’ Blocker said and drew back his fist for another strike.
I couldn’t do nothing. It just wasn’t fair. I aimed all my attention at the back of Blocker’s head and thought furiously: Leave him alone, you big ugly ape. Leave him alone, you big ugly ape.
Blocker paused, one arm drawn back, and I slammed the thought again and again into his brain. Leave him alone, you big ugly ape!
Then, to my horror, Blocker slowly turned and looked directly at me. To my even greater horror I saw the other kids were turning too, with looks of disbelief. Urgently I replayed my mental videotape of the last few seconds and realised, to my immense fright, that I had been concentrating so hard I had said the words out loud!
‘What did you say, Freak?’ Blocker asked, almost unable to comprehend that someone would be stupid enough to say such a thing.
Nothing! I wanted to scream. I didn’t say anything! But it was far too late for that. ‘Leave him alone,’ I said out loud, and added ‘Blockhead.’ What did I have to lose?
Blocker moved towards me, pushing through the crowd of kids gathered on the stairs but, just at that moment, the sound of a door closing came from the classroom above us. Frau Blüchner was on her way down. The kids quickly started to disperse, and Blocker stopped where he was.
‘I’m going to get you, Freak,’ he said, in a voice that was as low as it was deadly and punctuated with a stabbing finger in my direction.
Out of nowhere another bizarre thought popped into my head and, without stopping to think, I said, ‘You think you’re so tough, I’ll take you on. I’ll take you on at GWF!’
There was a gasp from the crowd, and Blocker’s eyes widened in surprise.
‘You’re on, Freak,’ he said with a malicious sneer. ‘You are so dead.’
‘OK, then,’ I said, wondering why kids like Blocker always spoke in such terrible clichés. ‘But in the meantime, try not to be so noisome.’
While he tried to work out what that meant, I pushed through the crowd, and walked, much more casually than I felt, past Blocker. I wasn’t feeling all that clever though, because unless I could come up with something, and fast, I was shortly going to be turned into mincemeat by the toughest son-of-a-bum in year nine.
A hand caught me by the arm as I walked out of G block, and I whirled around, expecting a fight. But it was Erica.
‘You did a good thing,’ she said in that beautiful burr of an accent, and, for the first time, I saw the smile that was bubbling just below the surface. Just for a brief flash. Then the Ice Queen was back and, before I could say anything, she was off, gliding down the path towards F block.
Ben came and stood by me as I watched Erica walk away. He was rubbing his stomach and looking a bit confused.
‘Why did you stick up for me?’ he asked in his perfectly controlled, but quite realistic-sounding, artificial voice.
‘No reason,’ I said. There was no way of explaining it.
‘Well, thanks,’ he said, and the way he said it conveyed such emotion that I found myself wondering if he really was a robot. Maybe it was all the stress of the moment or maybe it was something else but, normally, I never would have said what I said next.
‘Are you a robot?’ I asked, and winced, realising how silly it sounded when you said it aloud.
‘What!?’ Ben gave me a funny look. Once started though, I had to continue.
‘Are you a real kid, or are you a robot?’
‘I’m a kid,’ Ben said emphatically. ‘A real kid.’
‘Well, you walk like a robot.’
There was silence while he digested this.
‘Do I?’ he asked at last.
‘Yeah. Are you sure you’re not a robot? Maybe your creators wouldn’t tell you. Maybe they’d want you to think you were a real kid.’
‘Oh.’ Ben looked more and more confused. ‘Right. I hadn’t thought of that. How would we tell?’
I thought about that for a moment, then said, ‘We could cut one of your arms open, and see if there’s wires and stuff inside.’
‘Ouch,’ said Ben, quite calmly really, considering what I was suggesting. ‘But what if you were wrong? There’d be blood everywhere.’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
We started to head down the path, in the same direction as Erica.
‘Do you have a mum and dad?’ I asked, thinking he might live in a laboratory or something.
‘Yes,’ Ben said. ‘Just like other kids.’
‘Are there any photos of you as a baby?’ It would be a dead giveaway if there weren’t.
But Ben said, ‘Yes, just like other kids.’
‘And what happens when you go home after school?’ I asked, still searching for clues.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I go home, do my homework, then go to bed and Mum plugs me into the charger for the night, just like other kids.’
I turned and stared at him in shock, and it took me a moment or two to realise he was joking.
Then Ben Holly walked alongside me to physics class, and we got to talking a bit more. I kind of liked his sense of humour and realised that I’d better be careful or I’d end up having a friend.
GWF stands for Glenfield Wrestling Federation. It’s not a federation at all. It’s just a bunch of stupid kids ripping off those wrestling shows on TV.
The biggest, thuggiest kids in the school run it. Year elevens mainly. I suppose years twelve and thirteen have outgrown the whole wrestling thing.
They run the wrestling on Fridays after school, in the school boxing ring.
Not many schools have a boxing ring, so I guess we were lucky, or unlucky, depending on your point of view. Old Sea Salt had been a champion boxer in his day, and he’d somehow persuaded the principal, the Board of Trustees and whoever else needed to be persuaded, that it was good for fitness and self-defence.
It served just as well as a wrestling ring and the kids who were into that would bash the crap out of each other using moves borrowed from the TV and for some reason think it was fun.
I heard that they almost had to stop it a couple of years ago when one of them broke his arm. But the kid never told his parents or any teachers what really happened, so they just kept it quiet for a few weeks then carried on as usual.
And I, stupid, idiot me, was going to get into the ring with big bully Blocker Blüchner, who was hell-bent on my destruction, unless I could find some way to weasel out of it.
My new friend Ben had some ideas on how to weasel out of things. For a start, this coming Friday was the last day of term so the GWF kids weren’t holding a match.
That meant it would be at least three weeks before the first GWF match in the new term.
Ben thought I should spend those weeks at a boxing gym, or karate lessons, learning to defend myself. I felt that I was unlikely to learn enough in two short weeks to defend myself against a monster like Blocker.
I wondered if there was some way to use my strange new power to win the fight, but I couldn’t see how it would help when he was body-slamming me and smashing me into the floor of the ring.
As far as I could work out, I had about three weeks left to live.