‘You are going to be there really, aren’t you?’ I asked Holly and Artie.
Nothing. Neither of them said anything.
I didn’t sleep very well that night. Constantly thinking about what I should have said that would have made Artie and Holly see how important the strike was. And at the same time turning over and over in my mind how I could make the strike even bigger.
When I woke up, it came to me.
They say time can slow down, and I never knew what that really meant until Friday’s S-DAY. Lunch break dragged on endlessly, limping its way towards the time for action. That’s if anyone really did join me in the planned sit-down protest. I kept looking at my watch and I spotted a few other kids doing the same. Like some secret sign that they too were part of the resistance.
Some were in groups, talking excitedly. I detected a growing buzz about what was about to happen.
Blissfully unaware of the excitement in the dinner hall was Merit Radio, which carried on in its usual badness. I heard only a few select sound bites as my mind was on the approaching showdown, but I think I heard one of St Brenda’s pupils doing the alphabet backwards to great fake applause in the studio.
Now it was time to put my plan into action.
I snuck away from the main hall and made my way to the headmaster’s office. It really should have been an aquarium as that would be the perfect home for Fish Face. I knew he would be in the staffroom during lunch break, holding court while devouring a sausage roll the size of his head. As you know, Mr Harris loves sausage rolls. As a result, the Sausage Jumbo is one of Mr Cake’s bestsellers. I think sales from Fish Face’s addiction to them paid for Artie’s house. Every afternoon, if you had the misfortune of seeing Mr Harris, there would be bits of sausage roll on his suit jacket and tie. Like he had pastry dandruff.
So: there would be no problem with Mr Harris. I just had to get past his secretary, Mrs Hubert. She sometimes hangs around at her desk just outside his office during the lunch break, working through her hour off to type up Fish Face’s latest angry letter to some poor parent about their underperforming kid. She’s like his terrified pet. Always trying to keep bad news from getting to him for fear of a Fish Face spit explosion.
I casually walked towards Mrs Hubert’s desk, outside the gates of hell – mentally preparing some kind of excuse for my presence. But … she wasn’t there. Result! The coast was clear; maybe she had finally run away to join the circus. Would we see her on the evening news?
‘Good evening. Breaking news tonight of a school secretary who has disappeared. Mrs Hubert, 59, who works for the devil, was last seen wearing a sparkly leotard in the company of a Bulgarian trapeze artist named Radko.’
It looked like the day was going to go my way. I doubled back and slid for the first time ever into the belly of the beast. Mr Harris’s office.
It took me a few moments to take in the spectacle before me. I’m not making this up when I say all his walls were covered in pictures of himself apart from one of the Queen of England. Behind his office chair was a huge painting of himself!
Whoever’d had the misfortune of being hired to do this portrait of the monster must have been reduced to a quivering mess, having to sit a few metres away from such a hideous beast. Mr Harris looked like a jumbo sausage that had been left too long on one of my dad’s barbecues. Ready to burst.
Then there was the smell. An animal must have died in here, I thought. It smelled of sweating cows and beefy burps. How could anyone work in such an environment?
I left the letter I had prepared earlier on his desk and got out quickly, for fear of collapsing from the sickening stench.
It was just minutes away from the end of lunch break. My palms were getting sweaty.
If I’m honest, I was scared and worried that no one would go through with the strike. I would be like a leader whose army had deserted him.
But as I came back into the main hall an amazing sight awaited me. Groups of kids were heading out, excitedly. I joined them at the back. As we all got to the playground, the excitement evaporated and fear took its place. Everyone was cautiously hanging around the edges, waiting for someone else to go and sit down first.
Did it need to be me? What if no one joined in? Would my cover be broken as Radio Boy?
Giles Hunter, the new kid, was the first to break ranks and head out into the middle of the playground. I recognised a few of the others who joined him. They had been callers and emailers to the show! I recognised Craig from Year 8, Lotty, Tom, Alex. Our loyal fans!
I only wondered … would Artie and Holly come? I felt bad about the way we’d left things. Like something important was missing. We had started this adventure together and created this amazing moment; it didn’t seem right for us all not to share in it.
Heart racing, I went to join the strikers. As Spike Hughes on the outside, but as Radio Boy on the inside. There were lines of kids heading towards us. I reckoned there were now over a hundred of us. Sitting down. Protesting. All because a secret radio show in a shed on Crow Crescent had told them to. My heart was pounding. I had never felt so much adrenaline in me before. It was like I’d eaten ten of Artie’s sugar-coated doughnuts.
It didn’t take long for the strike to have an effect.
First out was Mrs Hubert – clearly, she hadn’t run away. The expression on her face made me feel a bit guilty actually. She’s a kind, decent woman (with a cat face), and she could sense something was happening and that her boss wasn’t going to like it.
‘Now come on, everyone, back to class,’ she said, anxiously. ‘Is this the Radio Boy thing? Oh, come on before you get in trouble …’
Her reasoned pleas fell on deaf ears.
‘PLEEEEAAASE,’ was her next effort, even folding her hands together while she said it, as if intoning a prayer.
Still nothing.
Sighing, she trotted off to get reinforcements.
A few moments later, she returned with a reinforcement, in the form of the head of sport, Mr Jackson. A fearsome man. I almost admired her plan: she was unleashing the school guard dog before Mr Harris knew anything about it.
Mr Jackson’s hair is always perfect, like the men who model shorts in Mum’s clothing catalogue. For some reason, they are always on a yacht, pointing to something on the horizon. That’s what Mr Jackson looks like. Mr Catalogue Man. ALWAYS wearing shorts, regardless of the weather. He doesn’t have mere human skin, he has weatherproof skin like a bin bag.
He also has a very loud voice.
‘GET BACK TO YOUR CLASSROOMS NOW!!!!’ he shouted.
He bellowed so loudly that schoolchildren in Africa would have heard him and sprinted back to their classrooms. But today, for the first time in St Brenda’s school history, his words didn’t have their normal power.
In fact, they had the opposite effect. They made us more defiant.
One of us yelled back at him: ‘NO MORE HOMEWORK!’
Mr Jackson was a talented sportsman in his youth, playing for the England under-16s football team, and only a bad tackle ended his promising career. Which is to say, fair play and team spirit are important to him. He shouts about them often enough when drilling us in football techniques (I mean, failing to teach me football techniques). As a result, he seemed quietly impressed with the spirit and heart of the reply and our protest.
Nevertheless, he still fired back, ever the sportsman trying to win the challenge.
‘GET UP!’
No one did.
‘NO MORE HOMEWORK!’ several voices yelled back at the same time. Then more, including me, joined in.
‘NO MORE HOMEWORK! NO MORE HOMEWORK! NO MORE HOMEWORK!’
Hundreds of us were now chanting together. All as one voice. I was shaking with the excitement of what was happening, and the unknown of what was going to happen next.
Mr Jackson and Mrs Hubert chatted together intensely – it looked like Mrs Hubert was bringing our sports teacher up to speed with the Secret Shed Show, Radio Boy and this str
ike. Then there was a very strange noise that none of us, not the kids striking nor Mr Jackson and Mrs Hubert, will ever forget for the rest of our lives. I imagine it will remain a shared experience, so that if any of us bump into one another in twenty or thirty years’ time, we’ll look at each other and, without needing to say a single word, just know we heard that noise.
It was a noise like no other. It was part war cry and part human grown man, crying and yelling at the same time. I think it’s what hell must sound like. I’ll try to recapture it here for you:
‘ARGHGHHGHGHGHGHGYIP—
WHATTHEHELL—
ARGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—
IN ALL MY YEARS SEEN SUCH—
NOOOO—
RADIO BOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!’
Mr Harris was no longer Fish Face. He had the face of an angry, barking dog that had broken free of its lead and wanted to bite somebody.
No. I’ve got it! He was a human volcano, exploding forth all the rage that had been lying dormant in him. (Can you tell we’d just been doing volcanoes in geography? No other way would I ever use the word ‘dormant’. That word is linked with volcanoes for life. You wouldn’t use it in any other context. ‘This morning I had some pizza that had been lying dormant in the fridge.’ ‘My dad had been sitting dormant on the couch for an hour.’)
In Mr Harris’s hand, which was clenched in an angry fist, was the piece of paper I’d left on his desk.
Mr Harris stopped spewing his molten lava (you see why I got a B for my volcano project) and took in the sea of striking kids. He stood eerily still. Silence fell over the playground.
A silence broken a moment later by the unmistakable sound of a helicopter overhead. It was so low you could read the letters on its undercarriage:
Derek the reporter must have realised this was the story of the year and told his fellow reporters on the TV news team. We were going to be an item on the news that night!
We saw it. Mr Harris saw it and his shoulders sank, like someone getting really bad news. Moments passed and then something even more terrifying happened.
He started smiling.
He waved my cleverly disguised demand note in the air at us.
‘So, you want less homework? Radio Boy has got you all to do this. Impressive. I even appreciate the organisation that has gone into it – if only you could channel those energies into your schoolwork. But it all ends now with this important announcement …’
Mrs Hubert got ready with her pen and pad. As did Derek the reporter, who had appeared at some point and was now standing next to her. Mr Jackson flexed his muscles in his way-too-short satin sports shorts.
‘If I don’t find Radio Boy, I will keep your homework doubled FOR A YEAR.’ He paused. ‘However, I am prepared to be generous. The first person who brings me the name, the true identity of Radio Boy, gets NO HOMEWORK FOR THE REST OF THEIR TIME AT ST BRENDA’S!’
Oh no.
Oh very no.
So many thoughts were racing around my head.
I’ve got Mr Harris cornered.
I’m winning.
There’s a HELICOPTER reporting on us!
HELICOPTER!
Radio Boy, me, Spike Hughes, did all this.
I’ve got my own gang, my listeners.
I’ve never been part of a gang.
And I’m NOT ANY MORE.
Within a few moments, the tables have been turned.
Fish Face is back in control.
I’m now being HUNTED by my own listeners.
He’s put a bounty on my head.
I’m the most wanted boy in the school.
You can escape from the police anywhere, but not from your own school.
Who can I trust?
Did they just say my name?
Can I trust Artie and Holly?
The bounty on my head is HUGE.
No homework FOREVER?
You even know what a ‘bounty’ is? ‘Reward for capturing a fugitive.’
I’m a FUGITIVE?
Does this make me more/less attractive to Katherine Hamilton?
Do women marry FUGITIVES?
Do I need to go on the run?
Did I feed Sherlock this morning?
Well, I guess, on the plus side, the Hollywood movie of my life had just got way more exciting.
It was no longer just a movie about a kid with a secret radio show live from a shed who decides to take on the world.1
It was now a sure-fire box office smash hit about a kid FUGITIVE. The world’s most wanted boy. An outlaw. A masked crusader, adored by many, feared by many more.
Most of my dad’s action movies that Mum has permitted me to watch have a manhunt in them. This seems to involve a lot of running around, panting heavily, sweating and looking over your shoulder all the time. Some require you to leap into a raging river below. I hope this bit doesn’t happen to me as I can only do a half-decent front crawl and my mum would go berserk if I did any river jumping within an hour of eating a heavy meal.
If I have to go on the run from Mr Harris and leave my family home in Crow Crescent then I will take my dog Sherlock with me. No way could I leave him behind.
BUT have you ever seen a movie about a fugitive kid and his DOG? Not sure how to cast the role of Sherlock in the movie. How good are dog actors? Would they respond to direction or just lie on the floor having a nap during a key scene?
Maybe this is why they don’t have awards at the Oscars for Best Animal Actor in a movie. Just getting the winning cat, pony, dolphin or dog up on stage would be hard, let alone getting a speech out of them. There is also the risk the dog might lift its leg live on TV and take a pee against the award host’s podium.
Anyway. Fish Face, I have to admit, had played a very clever move that I never saw coming. I’d underestimated his fishy ways. Mr Harris had outsmarted me. No homework for the rest of their time at the school, in return for giving up Radio Boy’s identity.
Killer move.
Who wouldn’t search high and low for me with that amazing prize up for grabs? Fish Face could just sit back on his throne in his honking office, stuffing his face with jumbo sausage rolls, and wait for the tip-off to come in.
Except … he didn’t just do that.
That afternoon, after the playground strike reached its premature and frustrating conclusion, I was trying to get used to my new fugitive status. Not so much escaping fleeing dogs tracking me by jumping into a river canyon, just a really boring double maths lesson. As I worked, I was attempting to ignore the constant murmur of gossip speculating about who Radio Boy might be, and the worrying rumours about Mr Harris’s investigation.
Fish Face was in his element and could smell victory – well, that or another animal had died in his office. He had now converted his stinking, beefy headquarters into a temporary interrogation room. Judging by the reports from the unlucky kids who’d been taken in for questioning by the school prefects, the interrogation room consisted of:
A bright light shining into your face to intimidate you (from the drama department, covered in glitter from the recent Joseph production, so not that scary).
Mr Harris with no jacket on and his sleeves rolled up, revealing the hairiest arms in the world. Even a gorilla would think he needed a trim. Yet more evidence that Martin Harris really is an ape-child.
The blood pressure pumpy thing from the school nurse, to measure any sudden rise in your anxiety levels. A makeshift lie detector to indicate whether you might be harbouring the identity of Radio Boy.
Poor Mrs Hubert making notes like a cat-faced detective and wishing she had decided to run away and join the circus.
The prefects had become Mr Harris’s prison guards, and the innocent suspects were marched one by one to the interrogation chamber from their classes. When they returned, many of them appeared to have been crying and several may actually have wet themselves.
Artie and Holly cornered me.
‘What you gonna do, Spike? We warned you,’ whispered Artie.
/> ‘You HAVE to turn yourself in – this is awful,’ hissed Holly.
‘Look, this will blow over by the end of today and by Monday, after a weekend of getting nowhere, he’ll calm down. If you don’t say anything, it will just blow over. Trust me.’
The question was: could I trust them? Would they turn me in to get a lifetime off homework?
I hoped not. I really hoped not.
I was about to ask them, but then …
At that very moment all three of us looked down the corridor to see Nick Culverwell and Josh Jones, two of the head prefects/prison guards, approaching with Martin Harris.
‘Come on then, weirdos, let’s go,’ Martin said, and his hench-apes stared at us as if we were dirt. It was our turn to be ‘invited’ into the interrogation chamber of horrors. My stomach tightened with fear and I could tell by the throbbing blood vessel bulging out of Artie’s forehead that he was scared too. Even tough nut Holly seemed frightened, as her ears had turned a dark shade of scarlet.
Had someone named us already?
Had Mr Taggart come clean about his part in all this in exchange for a pay rise? Everybody has their price.
Holly was tough, but Artie was terrified of being sent to boarding school. They could easily break him. Offer him a doughnut or some cash for new records as a bribe and he would roll on his back and let Mr Harris tickle his belly.
This was bad. As we walked down the corridor, my stomach felt hollow and like it was spinning at the same time.
I was the first in.
I left Artie and Holly to sweat some more outside in the corridor on some especially uncomfortable wooden benches. By the way, why is most of the school seating for kids so awful? Do they buy it from a special warehouse run by a former teacher whose life was made a misery by unruly pupils, so now he gets his own back making painfully uncomfortable school chairs and benches?
Anyway, back to the chamber of torture. I was swiftly ushered into. My eyes took in the sadistic spectacle before them. All the various tools of interrogation I’d heard about were there.
Radio Boy Page 11
