She turned back to face him.
“Yes, Fred. The next game. And the one after that. To be really good at football, you have to practise and train and work. It takes time and energy and thought and dedication. This …” she pointed to the Controller “… is just a short cut. That you can’t keep taking.”
“I can’t?” said Fred.
“No,” said Ellie. “I can’t control you into being brilliant at football for the rest of your life. And you can’t make me look … look …” Ellie’s face scrunched up and her voice caught in her throat: “… like a Disney Princess for the rest of my life.”
“Well … I was thinking more Pixar than Disney actually …” replied Fred.
But Ellie wasn’t listening. In fact, Fred realised, as he looked at her that, quietly, not wanting anyone else to see, she was crying.
Fred didn’t know what to do. He hated to see his sister so upset. Her crying was making him want to cry.
He looked down. The Controller was still there, in her trembling hands.
Fred thought about everything that had happened in the last few months. They had got Margaret Scratcher off the roof; they’d cut Isla and Morris down to size; they’d got Fred into the school team; they’d made Ellie the belle of the ball at Rashid’s party. But that had all been at the start. When he thought about the things that had happened more recently, all Fred could see was that they’d ended up having to fight the bullies again, more bruisingly the second time; they’d upset Scarlet and Stirling; and, for the first time ever, he and Ellie were fighting.
He finished thinking about all that and his face hardened a little.
“Ellie. Can you think Street Fighter …?” he said.
“Why?” she said tearfully.
“Just … do it …” he said.
She shrugged and nodded.
“Now press the main button and jerk the control stick sideways and upwards.”
“What for?” she said. “It’ll just use up the power …”
“Please,” said Fred.
Ellie sighed deeply. And did what she was told.
Fred’s arm, the one with the bracelet on it, retracted sharply and then came forward at incredible speed, in an upwards karate chop … expertly aimed not at Ellie, but at the Controller.
Together, brother and sister watched as it spun from her hands and rose in the air, above the goals, above the crowd, out somewhere beyond sight, beyond the reaches possibly even of Broom Hill Playing Fields, even though they were the size, as we know, of at least five football pitches.
Fred looked across at Ellie, who was still staring up in the air. He was pleased with himself. He knew that he’d done the right thing. He knew she would think so too. They always thought the same way. Eventually, she turned to look at him.
“YOU STUPID IDIOT!! WHAT DID YOU DO THAT FOR?” she cried.
Twenty minutes later, the game was about to start. Mr Barrington’s team talk was still ringing in the Bracket Wood XI’s ears:
“So. Let’s make sure that we back up any diagonal runs from midfields with quick one-twos and cross-field balls, although don’t forget to stick to a diamond shape if they start counter-attacking down the flanks; meanwhile, switch between 4–5–1 and 4–4–2 with the inside players down the middle – stick to our zonal marking at the back, play off the front men, knock it short, knock it long and, come final whistle, we’ll have our hands on that trophy!!”
There had been a long pause.
“Sorry, Mr Barrington,” said one of the boys eventually. “We didn’t really understand what you just said.”
Mr Barrington sighed. “OK. Just get the ball to Fred! And let him work his magic!”
At that, the rest of the team had turned to Fred and cheered. They even started chanting: “Fred! Fred! Fred!”
Fred had smiled, as best he could – he even thought about doing a little kind of royal wave, to imply how confident he was – but he didn’t feel it.
And he felt it even less now, standing on the centre spot, about to kick off, looking at Oakcroft lined up on the other side. Everything about them seemed to be … better. Their kit looked better; their boots looked better; most importantly, their bodies looked better – they all looked about seventeen! The goalie looked like he had just started university! Where he’d been studying Goalkeeping and Extreme Tallness For Your Age.
Turning round, Fred could see the ten other players in his team gazing hopefully at him. He scanned the crowd, taking in the Bracket Wood supporters’ section. They were all looking … hopeful as well.
He could see Mr Fawcett looking hopeful; he could see his mum and dad looking hopeful (although in his dad’s case this may have partly been because he’d worked out that there would be enough time at half-time to pop out to a nearby sandwich shop); he could see Sven Matthias looking hopeful (about having found a new great young player); he could see Stirling and Scarlet looking hopeful (in between checking out other people’s mobile phones and telling them how out of date they were); he could even see Isla and Morris, back to their normal selves, making not a bad job of pretending to look hopeful.
But he couldn’t see Ellie. No matter how hard he searched.
One thing about Ellie Stone – one thing that probably helped her be so good at video games – was that she had very good eyesight when it came to tracking moving objects. When there was, say, a football, tennis ball or baseball moving about on a screen, she seemed to know instinctively where it was going to end up and, well before it got there, had already moved her screen football, tennis ball or baseball player to where he or she needed to be to hit that ball with his or her foot, racket or bat.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that, even though she’d been cross with her brother, she had watched the flight of the Controller carefully. Carefully enough, in fact, to have quite a good sense of where it might have ended up.
However, you didn’t actually have to have an eye that was really good at tracking the movement of objects in flight to know that Fred had managed to send it really high into the air; and that objects in flight that go really high in the air but can’t actually fly – well, there’s only really one place they tend to end up.
On the ground.
In pieces normally.
So Ellie was trudging across the outskirts of Broom Hill Playing Fields without much hope. Clearly, her and her brother’s little adventure was over. A part of her didn’t even know why she was bothering. Maybe they could put the Controller together again. Or maybe … maybe she just wanted to gather up the bits and give it a decent burial. Perhaps in the Boxspital.
But, even as she was thinking this, she did keep on looking up in order to work out exactly what path the Controller would have taken across the sky. And then, in the distance, she realised it wouldn’t have landed on the ground at all. In fact, she thought she could see a glint – a tiny reflection of sunlight off its shiny silver plate – in the branches of … yes … that tree.
Meanwhile, back inside the ground, the game had just kicked off. For the moment, perhaps surprisingly, Bracket Wood were in possession. Barry Bennettfn1 had the ball. “Fred!” shouted Mr Barrington. “Get up there! Into their box!”
Fred did as he was told.
“Right! Now, Barry! Kick it up to him!”
“Sorry?” said Barry.
“BARRY! CAN YOU NOT KNOCK IT??!!!” shouted Mr Barrington.
“Oh. Right,” Barry said. He drew his foot back and kicked the ball forward, as hard as he could.
Fred was waiting in the Oakcroft box. He could see the ball coming. He looked round desperately at the crowd, in the hope that Ellie might somehow be there, with the Controller. But all he could see was his dad asking someone next to him if he could have some of his crisps.
Then he remembered: it was him – Fred – who had thrown the Controller away. It was him – Fred – who had realised that they – he and Ellie – couldn’t live the rest of their lives relying on it. It was him – Fred – who ha
d decided that he was going to play – AND WIN – this game, without help from some weird magic machine.
With that stirring thought, he drew himself up to his full height and jumped for the ball, knowing – just knowing – that it was going to come off his forehead cleanly and sharply into the Oakcroft goal.
Seconds later, his forehead made contact certainly sharply – but not, to be honest, especially cleanly – with the large muddy puddle behind the goal, having been sent there, face forward, by impacting quite hard with the three enormous Oakcroft defenders who had jumped in the air at the same time as him.
“Ooofff!” said Fred, who noticed that not only had he failed to achieve quite the same level of impressive sporting excellence as when Ellie and the Controller had been helping him, but also that, when he wasn’t being controlled, stuff that looked like it should hurt, did. Really did.
He got up slowly. As he wiped the mud out of his eyes, he could see Oakcroft had taken the ball from their own penalty area right up the pitch and were advancing, very menacingly, on the Bracket Wood goal.
He could also see that quite a few of his own team – and Mr Barrington – were looking at him with expressions that clearly said: What happened?
Ellie, much like her brother waiting for the ball 450 metres away inside the ground, looked up with a yearning for the Controller. Only her yearning for the Controller to help her was also a yearning to reach the Controller, which was dangling on a tiny leafy offshoot of a big branch about halfway up the tree. It was stuck there, the tiny leafy offshoot holding it at the central point of the V formed by its two little branches.
She sighed. Ellie wasn’t really a tomboy. Or at least, if she was, she was a modern tomboy, not an old-fashioned one. She was good at video games, not catapults and scrumping apples and climbing trees. But she had walked all this way and it had turned out the Controller wasn’t actually in fifty pieces, so she thought she’d better give it a go.
She was about to raise herself on to the lowest branch of the tree when a voice said: “Can I give you a hand?”
She turned round to see Rashid smiling at her.
The policy of just giving the ball to Fred wasn’t quite working. In that every time he’d got the ball so far, he’d been knocked off it and ended up in a muddy puddle. Not, at least, exactly the same muddy puddle. You couldn’t fault Fred for his work rate: he was, as football people sometimes say, box to box – he was here, he was there, he was every jolly where – being knocked into muddy puddles.
He’d been knocked off the ball and into a muddy puddle in the Oakcroft penalty area; he’d been knocked off the ball and into a muddy puddle at the centre circle; he’d been knocked off the ball and into a muddy puddle at all four corner flags; and – just now – he’d been knocked off the ball and wished he’d fallen into a muddy puddle in the Bracket Wood penalty area where, instead, he’d fallen into their own goalpost, banging his back quite hard. Which had left him too winded to get up and prevent the ball from going in.
The score presently was Oakcroft three, Bracket Wood nil.
As Fred finally got up, he saw most of his team walking sadly back to the centre circle. A number of them – and Mr Barrington, and a fair few supporters, he noticed this time – were looking at him with facial expressions that now said (as well as: What happened?): You were really good in the last game and everyone thought you were our magic ingredient that meant we were going to win; but now, frankly, you’re rubbish. We don’t understand.
They had got quite detailed, those facial expressions.
“What are you doing here?” Ellie asked Rashid. “Don’t you want to watch the game?”
“A bit,” said Rashid. “But I don’t like real football that much.”
“Real football?”
“Yes. I like FIFA. I basically like video-game football more than I like real football. Because real football can get …”
“Boring!” said Ellie.
“Yes!” said Rashid. “But, when you play it on a video game, you can keep it interesting.”
“That’s what I think!” said Ellie.
“Oh good,” said Rashid. “I’m glad. It’s hard to find someone who agrees. So anyway … are you trying to reach that controller?”
Ellie wasn’t sure what to say. But she guessed that lying hadn’t helped the situation much so far. So she said yes. Then, feeling like she should explain, added: “It’s in the tree because—”
“I saw. Fred karate-chopped it out of the football ground.”
Ellie nodded.
“Amazing karate chop,” said Rashid.
Ellie nodded again.
There was a short pause.
Then Rashid said: “Why did he do that?”
There was another short pause. Then, Ellie sighed and said: “Well. It’s a magic Controller. I’ve been using it to control Fred. I work the Controller and when it’s in sync with my brother, he’s like my avatar on a video game and I can make him jump really high and fight really well and dig really deep and play football really well. But then it started losing power and we had a row about it and he kind of tricked me into controlling him to karate-chop it out of the ground.”
There was a longer pause after this. Eventually, Rashid nodded and said: “OK. We’d better get it down then.”
At half-time, with the score now at four-nil, the mood in the Bracket Wood changing room was not good. The players were all sitting on the benches, looking down at their boots. Prajit, who was really too small to be in goal – his nickname was the Cat, not because he was good at leaping and jumping, but because his dad was a vet and he sometimes smelt, therefore, of a mix of fur, cat wee and Whiskas – looked particularly depressed.
“So … shall we stick to the same plan for the second half, Mr Barrington?” said Barry Bennett after a bit.
Mr Barrington, who had been very quiet, and not actually doing what managers tend to do in this situation, which is shout very loudly at the team about how it’s been a disgrace, shrugged his shoulders and just looked at Fred.
“What do you think, Fred?” he said. “Should we stick to the plan? Or should we change it?” Mr Barrington leant in towards him. “Should I, in fact, take you off?”
Fred held Mr Barrington’s gaze. The teacher’s eyes behind his glasses were huge and sad. Fred became aware that everyone else in the room was also looking at him.
As it happens, the last thing Fred had seen before Mr Barrington’s huge and sad eyes was the even sadder sight, as he trudged off the pitch at half-time, of Sven Matthias heading for the exit. So he wanted to say, Yes, please: take me off and never pick me again; never even come near me with a football again; never even SAY THE WORD “football” near me again, but suddenly, as he thought about saying these things, he realised he might cry.
And so, because he didn’t want to cry in front of the whole team, he didn’t say anything.
And so, because Fred wasn’t saying anything, Mr Barrington assumed he didn’t want to come off and said, in a kindly voice: “OK. Go back on for the first five minutes of the second half and we’ll see how it goes.”
“So … does it still work?” said Rashid.
Ellie brushed the last few leaves – and a small crumbling piece of bark – from her front before answering. It hadn’t been an easy climb. But it had been quite exciting. Partly because it just was quite exciting, climbing a tree. But also because she’d been doing it with Rashid.
He had been pretty good at climbing, but even better at helping her from the ground – getting down on all fours to give her a step up in the first place, directing her to knots and footholds she couldn’t see, and, once she’d rescued the Controller, holding out his arms for her to jump into on the way down.
“Come on!” he’d said. “I’ll catch you!!”
“It’ll hurt you!” she’d said.
“I think it’ll be OK!”
So she had jumped, from the lowest branch. It had hurt him a bit, she thought – he did say “Ow!” �
� but that was maybe only because she was holding the Controller and one of its handles had hit him on the nose.
Then there had been a kind of embarrassing moment where she had just stayed in his arms for two seconds before they’d separated, standing about a metre apart and not saying anything. Then they’d caught each other’s eye and laughed. And then Rashid had asked the question about how the Controller worked.fn1
“I don’t know,” replied Ellie, looking at it doubtfully. It was covered in tree dust and the blue light was pulsing as weakly as she’d ever seen it. “I can’t tell unless I sync it with the person wearing the bracelet.”
“Bracelet?”
“Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you about that. It’s a little black bracelet that comes with it and has a blue light on it, like … this one,” she said, pointing to the Controller.
“Or … like this one?” said Rashid, producing from his pocket another bracelet.
“Where did you get that?!” said Ellie, amazed.
“From Isla and Morris Fawcett,” said Rashid.
“Oh …” said Ellie.
“Morris was wearing it. But Isla seemed to be a bit cross with him about it. ‘Why are you still wearing that stupid thing! It just reminds me of how we got our butts kicked again!’ she kept on saying to him. I didn’t really know what she was talking about.”
Ellie shook her head as if she didn’t either. Rashid held out the bracelet to Ellie, who took it, and began examining it closely.
“Anyway, so Morris looked all ashamed,” Rashid continued, “and took it off and chucked it away. But I quite liked the look of it. So I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Was that wrong?”
“No! No …” said Ellie. Who had noticed something: even though it wasn’t the bracelet she and Fred had been using, the light on it was pulsing … more or less … in time with their Controller. Which might mean that …
“Rashid,” she said. “Would you mind just holding the Controller a minute …?”
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