Playschool

by Colin Thompson

  The long jump – Because this event took too long, it has been replaced by the short jump. The school record is 0.003 seconds.

  Cross country – In 1994, the school made Belgium so cross that everyone at Quicklime’s had to wear a T-shirt for the rest of the year that said: ‘Belgium is not at all boring. It is a really, really interesting place.’

  The pole vault – Temporarily cancelled because there is no more room in the vault and Poland has lodged a complaint with the United Nations.

  Three-legged race – Teams are made up of families. Where there are more than two children, like in the Flood family, they are all tied together and have to leave some of their legs in the changing room. Where there is only one child, they are allowed to grow an extra leg for the day. There is always a protest about this race from the Millipedes – a family of witches and wizards from a damp ditch in Tristan da Cuhna – who claim the whole race is ‘leggist’.

  Long distance cricket – You will probably find it hard to believe but long distance cricket is actually slower and even more boring than normal cricket. One wicket is on the school playing field and the other wicket is thousands of kilometres away in the back yard of number 7, The Street, St Kilda.5 Top score for a three-day match is Quicklime College 3, Scotland 0.)

  After the school anthem, other teachers stood up one by one with various announcements: things that had been lost – the usual iPods, fountain pens and fingers; and things that had been found – usually nothing because the school was kept very clean and tidy by someone we shall meet later.

  And as it was the first Assembly of term, there was a report of the past holiday’s great achievements by students and ex-students. The highlight that holiday had been Winchflat Flood’s creation of a volcano right at the North Pole.

  ‘Talk about global warming!’ said Professor Throat to hoots of laughter.

  ‘Well, I thought that was what they wanted,’ said Winchflat. ‘What with so many humans walking around whingeing about how cold they were.’

  Finally, Assembly was dismissed and everyone went off to their classes. Classes at Quicklime’s are different from those at other schools. Apart from the subjects being much more interesting, children of different ages are often in the same class. Quicklime College knows that you don’t get more clever as you get older. You’re as clever when you die as you are on the day you’re born. The only difference is that you know more stuff.

  Even better, the school doesn’t make anyone go to any lessons they find boring – which is a bit like a Steiner school, except that at Quicklime’s everyone actually learns to read and write. So, if you are really keen on something like genetic engineering, you can go to every single Genetic Engineering class each week no matter what age you are. And if you think that maths is boring, which of course it is, you don’t have to go to any Maths classes. The only rule is that you have to go to four classes every day.

  The Flood twins, Morbid and Silent, went off to study Invisibility. Satanella trotted off to her Special Breeds class.

  Winchflat, who was brilliant at everything, shook a little bag with all the lessons written on different tiles, like Scrabble, and picked out the class he would go to first. His favourite class was Genetic Engineering, so to make sure he went to that class more often than the others, he had twenty-three tiles with ‘Genetic Engineering’ written on them and only one each for the other subjects.

  And Merlinmary went off to play Gristleball.

  Lesson: Sport with Pain

  Teacher: Radius Leg

  ‘Today, children, we will enjoy the pain that great sport can bring,’ said Radius Leg. ‘I don’t mean the pain caused by the screaming boredom of watching a normal human soccer match or the pain of trying to stay awake during a normal human cricket match. Nor do I mean the mild physical pain of playing cricket with hand grenades. I mean the sheer bone-breaking, skin-tearing, blood-squirting, bubonic-plague-ridden joy of Quicklime College’s own special game: Gristleball.’

  The thirty-nine children in the class were standing at the top of the Gristleball field as the school’s sports teacher addressed them. They were all raring to go because, like all lessons at Quicklime’s, you didn’t have to go to Gristleball classes unless you wanted to. The only student who had no choice was Orkward Warlock. Orkward spent his entire life at the school, including holidays, weekends, half-term and even Christmas Day, and because he was a naturally lazy boy, Professor Throat had decided he should play Gristleball to get some exercise.

  Unlike other sports, there were no different leagues for boys and girls. In fact, when the players were dressed in their protective clothing, you couldn’t tell who was a boy and who was a girl.

  Gristleball was not played on the normal school playing field. Because of the frequent accidents, it had its own special place away from the rest of the school in a one-hundred-metre deep three-sided pit carved into the rock. This helped to muffle the sounds of agony that accompanied every game. At the bottom of the pit sat the playing field. There was no soft girly grass and mud down here, just smooth slippery marble. On each side of the field there was a goal similar in shape and size to a football goal, except the goals were alive and could change size. Radius Leg and the players were lowered into the Gristleball pit in a wicker basket.

  ‘Right,’ said Radius Leg. ‘Misery House side one, Leech House side two, and Gored House side three.’

  Orkward Warlock, who was in Misery House, took up his usual position of creeping off the field and hiding in the toilets, which were in a little cave near one of the corners. He always pretended he was in there in case the gristleball came flying through the window, but everyone knew he was just scared.

  Radius Leg moved to the boundary and blew his whistle. In the centre of the triangle, the ground began to shake. The marble cracked from side to side, rose up and suddenly burst open as the ballworm reared up out of its tunnel. It tipped its head back, heaved, opened its mouth wide and spat a massive ball of slimy gristle embedded with nails into the air. As the ball shot up into the clouds, the ballworm slid back into its burrow, pulling the rocks and marble back down behind it. The players stood looking up into the sky, waiting for the gristleball to reappear.

  Three minutes went by as the gristleball hovered above the clouds, waiting for the moment when the players would drop their concentration for a split second.

  Merlinmary Flood loved Gristleball. Round the walls of her bedroom in Acacia Avenue she had photographs of all the greatest teams and players Quicklime’s had ever produced. If it had been up to her, she would have played Gristleball every day, but it was only played once a week to allow the players time to re-grow the bits of their bodies that had broken off during the game. With her incredibly thick hair crackling with electricity, she was the only player in the history of the school who had played the game without protective clothing. Those few minutes when the ball hid in the clouds were the most exciting moments of her life. The anticipation was almost too much to bear and it was all Merlinmary could do not to give herself a serious electric shock.

  The seconds ticked by as the ball hovered. The seconds became another minute and still the gristleball waited. And then, at the very moment when the players least expected it, it came screaming down, heating up as it did so until it was glowing red. If a team was ready and in the right place, they grabbed the gristleball in their asbestos gloves and threw it into the nearest goal.

  If it was their own goal they got ten points. If it was either of the other two goals they scored five. For every other player the ball crashed into, seven points were added. If it hit Radius Leg and threw him against the boundary wall, the team got fifteen points plus one extra point for each broken rib.

  That day, the ball flew straight down towards Merlinmary, but she was ready. She grabbed it and, ignoring the smell of her own fur beginning to burn, she spun round in a blur of sparks and fire before hurling it with an almighty scream. It knocked three players to the ground, smashed through the lavatory windo
w and threw Orkward Warlock down into the toilet bowl with such force that the entire thing shattered, leaving him sitting in a pool of water with the wooden toilet seat around his neck like a huge collar.

  ‘Goatface pig bottom!!’ he screamed through his pain as the ball shot back through the window towards the opposite side of the field. For as long as he could remember, Orkward Warlock had hated the Floods. Every day there was something else they did that made him hate them more.

  Merlinmary’s throw shot through all three goals before hovering just out of reach in one of the corners of the playing pit while the gristleball regained its strength. Her score was forty-one points, though when it was later discovered what had happened to Orkward Warlock another twenty-seven points and a gold star were added – seven for hitting Orkward and a special referee’s bonus of twenty for smashing the toilet, which no one had ever done before. The fact that he had been the source of Merlinmary getting anothet twenty-seven points made Orkward hate the Floods even more.

  The game ended when the gristleball ran out of energy. It collapsed in the corner panting for breath until Radius Leg gave it a drink of water and summoned the ballworm to take it back to its nest.

  The highest score ever for a single throw had been four years before, when Valla Flood, in his final game before leaving school, had thrown the gristleball through his own goal with such force that it had thrown Radius Leg against the wall and broken nine of his ribs before bouncing back across the field seventeen times through all three goals and finally hitting Radius Leg a second time, breaking both of his legs. The score was one hundred and eighty-seven points, more than double the previous record. It had earned Valla a lifetime honour award, fifty out of ten and a whole bucket of gold stars.

  ‘They don’t make gristle like that any more,’ Radius Leg would say proudly, stroking his scars as he remembered that wonderful day.

  Orkward Warlock hated everyone. He hated his parents. He hated his sister Primrose, who was disgustingly nice, and he hated all the other relations he assumed he had but had never met. He hated his teachers and every other person he knew or read about or saw on TV. Sometimes, for practice, he even hated himself, and pretty well everyone hated him too.

  But Orkward Warlock had one hate that was deeper than all his other hates. It was so dark and deep that it had no end, like the lake in Scotland where the Loch Ness Monster lives. This hate was bigger than all Orkward’s other hates added together and multiplied by twelve plus seven.

  The thing that Orkward Warlock hated more than anything in the whole universe was the Floods.

  Orkward Warlock was one of the twenty-seven boarders at Quicklime’s. The boarders were usually children who lived too far away to be able to come to school by bus each day. The fleet of wizard buses that took the children to and from school covered the entire globe. There was even one very small witch – Felicia McThursday – who came from a lighthouse on a remote rock fifty kilometres past Iceland. The children who boarded at Quicklime’s came from even further away, from other galaxies and parallel universes.

  All except Orkward. He was the only boarder who actually came from Earth, and he was a boarder because his parents couldn’t stand to have him at home, not even during the holidays. He had spent every single day of his life since the age of three days at Quicklime’s. In the holidays, when everyone, including his sister Primrose and most of the teachers, went home, Orkward stayed behind with Matron, Doorlock the handyman, George Shrub the mandrake gardener and Narled, a strange creature, half man, half suitcase, who spent the whole time picking things up and taking them somewhere.

  Over the years, several children and teachers had invited Orkward to come and stay with them in the holidays, but to everyone’s relief he had always refused.

  ‘I think my parents are coming to take me to Tahiti,’ he would say, but everyone knew it wasn’t true.

  Because Orkward was at school all the time, Professor Throat had given him his own room up in one of the seven-sided turrets. It was there, in the darkness, where even spiders were afraid to go, that Orkward practised hating. Around the walls of the room, he had photographs of everyone – every student, every teacher and all the other staff – and into these photographs he stuck pins and knives and knitting needles. Everyone knew he was doing this and wore an amulet issued by Matron that protected them against the magic.6

  Sticking pins into pictures of the Floods wasn’t enough for Orkward. It didn’t begin to cover the hatred that he felt for them. They had everything. They had brothers and sisters to play with and parents who loved them, and they all seemed to like each other. They even did smiling,7 and their mother, Mordonna, was one of the most famous witches that had ever existed. Her beauty was legendary across the galaxies. Her photo was pinned up in cafes and bars in every one of the fifteen parallel universes. Orkward didn’t even know what his own mother looked like. All he could remember about her was a blurry face close to his and a voice saying, ‘Take it away, it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.’

  Nerlin, the Floods’ father, as well as being a direct descendant of Merlin Flood the Fifteenth, was in The Hemlock Book of Records as the owner of the world’s hairiest wart in the most embarrassing place. Everyone at Quicklime’s thought Nerlin was a legend – even though he’d never attended the school. Orkward had no memory of his own father and no one had ever spoken of him, not even Primrose.

  Primrose never spoke to Orkward about anything. It had come as a complete surprise to both of them to discover, after Primrose had been at Quicklime’s for four years, that they were actually brother and sister. Orkward was one of those boys who thought girls were gross and didn’t want anything to do with her. Primrose, like almost everyone at Quicklime’s, thought Orkward was vile and wanted as few people as possible to know she was related to him. Orkward had tried a couple of times to befriend his sister so he could find out about their parents, but his attempts at friendship were a bit like a crocodile trying to make friends with your leg. He just didn’t know how to do normal things like smiling or being nice. In the end Primrose told him they were not related and that he had been adopted. It wasn’t true, but at least it meant he stopped bothering her.

  When no one was watching or listening, Orkward would lie in bed in the darkness and nearly allow himself to cry. He would imagine a gigantic white dragon arriving in the valley with the greatest wizard in creation riding on its back, a wizard who was king of all the other wizards, a wizard who had arrived for one reason and one reason only – to claim his long-lost son, Orkward Warlock.

  The truth was not so wonderful. Orkward Warlock’s father was a milkman, an ordinary middle-aged balding human with no magical powers and a small moustache that he called Gerald. Orkward’s mother, who was a genuine witch, had only married him because she was addicted to milk and couldn’t afford the fifty litres a day she needed to drink and bathe in to keep her skin glowing white.

  Orkward had only two friends. One was an innocent boy known as The Toad, who spent many hours under Orkward’s bed cuddling Orkward’s dirty socks. The other was a magic mirror, but that didn’t really like him or tell him what he wanted to hear.

  ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall,’ Orkward would say, ‘who is the cleverest boy of all?’

  ‘Winchflat Flood,’ The Mirror would reply. ‘Why do you keep asking me? You, like, totally know the answer, idiot.’

  ‘You are, Orkward,’ The Toad would call out from under the bed. But Orkward would always get so angry he would take The Mirror off the wall and stick it under the bed with The Toad.

  ‘Mirror, Mirror on the floor,’ Orkward would say, ‘who has the most evil eyes?’

  ‘Merlinmary Flood,’ The Mirror replied.

  ‘You do,’ squeaked The Toad as Orkward threw a well-aimed boot under the bed.

  Whatever Orkward asked The Mirror, the answer was always one of the Floods.

  ‘Enough with the Floods already!’ screamed Orkward as his brain contorted itself in rabid anger. �
�I need a plan,’ he said, trying to calm himself down. ‘A plan to finish the Floods off once and for all.’

  ‘Sports day,’ whimpered The Toad.

  ‘Shut up, slug pus,’ sneered Orkward and threw another boot under the bed. ‘Don’t you need to go somewhere and shed skin?’

  ‘You could get them on sports day,’ said The Toad, crawling out to get Matron’s special bruise ointment, which he always kept close by since he’d become friends with Orkward. ‘It’s the only day when they’re all together at the same time, and it would be really dramatic and worthy of your great evil.’

  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ shouted Orkward, stamping his foot on the tube of bruise ointment. He had forgotten that he’d thrown both his boots at The Toad, and the purple ointment began to soak through his socks and dissolve his toenails.

  The Toad started to lick Orkward’s toes clean. The Toad lived with a terrible conflict going on inside his head. Basically he was a sweet kind child, but because he was a toad, not many people wanted to be his friend. No one at all wanted to be Orkward Warlock’s friend, so when The Toad came along, Orkward took him under his evil wing. The trouble was, there was no place for sweet and kind in Orkward’s world so The Toad had to pretend to be nasty and mean like Orkward.

  ‘Hold on,’ Orkward said. ‘Even though you are fifty million degrees more stupid than an amoeba, that is actually a brilliant idea. Sports day is the highlight of the year. I will make this one the sports day to end all sports days, the ultimate sports day, the sports day people will remember forever, when all the Floods will die in one magnificent, er, skull-shattering, um … something or other.’

  ‘YES!’ cried The Toad.

  ‘No you won’t,’ said The Mirror glumly from under the bed. ‘You’ll totally stuff it up. You always, like, do.’