by Alex Wheatle
“No,” Fumbold said.
“Anyway, that bit is called the afterbirth.”
“Gross!” responded Fumbold. “But it’s proper inspired!”
“Right, it’s gross,” I said. “So this girl’s mum is so ugly, the doctor thought the afterbirth was the baby. Get it?”
Fumbold’s face curved into an evil smile. He liked his purchase. A satisfied customer.
Chapter 5
Metalwork
After lunch, I had Metalwork. We were making these metal peg things, but I couldn’t focus on my task because Harry Stanley, the class clown, was imitating my vomiting of earlier. It seemed the whole school had heard about me emptying my insides into the lovely ginger hair of Karen Francis.
I tried to ignore it, but a few of Harry’s friends joined in. They all made this retching and spewing sound. Mr Prang, my Metalwork teacher, was in his little office on the phone. He always told us what we had to make, then only ever came out of his office if a kid sawed off his thumb, drilled into someone’s ear or went nuts with a nail-gun. So, unless I drew blood myself, I would have to put up with Harry’s fake projectile vomiting for the whole lesson.
But there was only so much I could take, especially after the morning I’d had, so when Harry kept going on, I roared, “JUST FREAKING LEAVE ME ALONE!”
At the precise moment I half-swore, Mr Prang came out of his office. Everyone stood still.
“Mr Blake,” he said to me in a near whisper. He called everyone Mister – even girls, eleven year olds and sausage dogs. “You are aware that I detest profanity in my workshop, aren’t you, Mr Blake?”
At least he never called me Blakey.
“Yes, sir, but it wasn’t a full swear word,” I said.
“Half an hour detention this afternoon.”
Detention! My day can’t get any worse even if bullies force me to watch re-runs of The Phantom Menace.
Chapter 6
Detention
After the last lesson of the day, I made my way to Mrs Swanson’s room, where I would serve my detention. In a strange way, being in detention was perfect. No one would see me on the way home, especially Carmella. I had suffered tragedy, despair and shame today, but I was still breathing. My ankle bone might’ve been crushed into powder, but things were looking up for me.
Tomorrow, I’d wear clean garms. My breath would be passable. My ankle would finally stop throbbing and I’d be ready to face Carmella. Hopefully every student in the school would’ve forgotten about my projectile vomiting – and my beatdown from Karen Francis. And in a few days’ time, I’d be going to the movies with Carmella. All that pain and humiliation would be worth it.
Mrs Swanson was the school’s drama teacher and, like most drama teachers, she was, well, slightly bonkers … Actually, no, not slightly but proper bonkers and a bit over-dramatic. Today, she was sitting on her desk wearing an African long shirt thing and this green and white scarf around her head.
“Welton! Welton!” Mrs Swanson welcomed me like a long-lost relative. “What cruel twist of fate brings you here? Take a seat, Welton. You will be reading An Inspector Calls.”
I recognised some of the other students serving detention with me. Timothy Smotheram, known for his stink bombs and being a champion farter. Coral Chipglider, the school’s spit and bogey queen. And … Oh no! Yoda be merciful! Bernice Cummings! Bernice was one of Carmella’s mates and I hated her almost as much as school Brussel sprouts. She had muscles in her ear lobes, biceps bigger than hovercraft bumpers and she walked like an angry cowboy. There was no doubt that she would tell Carmella I had turned up in detention smelling less than fresh.
I settled at a desk in a corner as far away as possible from Coral and Bernice. It was next to Timothy Smotheram, but I reasoned that it was better for my health to suffer one of his fatal farts than be drowned in Coral’s spits or beaten by Bernice’s right hook.
I noticed Coral staring at me like a poor kid in a poor country might gaze at a cream cake. She didn’t blink once. What’s with her? I thought. Man! She was proper intimidating.
Then Bernice turned around and looked at me as if I had crapped on her pillow. I couldn’t work out what I had done to upset her. I tried to focus on reading An Inspector Calls, but every time I glanced up, Bernice glared at me with evil Sith-like eyes.
With a flourish of her arms, Mrs Swanson told us, “I have to get something from the staffroom. I’ll be back before you can say house lights and stage right.” She windmilled her arms again, then was gone.
As soon as she disappeared, Bernice Cummings stood up from her chair. She walked towards me and I remembered that scene in Jurassic Park when the Tyrannosaurus Rex planted a big heavy foot in the mud. I should’ve hyper-toed out of there, but I knew I wouldn’t get far with my ankle.
Bernice pulled me up by the lapels of my school blazer. My feet barely touched the ground. She caught the scent of something nasty. My breath was still full of toxic sick fumes.
“What … what is it, Bernice?” I managed.
“Did you sell an insult to Fumbold?” she wanted to know. Tiny bits of cheesy puffs flew into my face. They stuck on my cheeks.
My mind had a big fat question mark in it. Surely Fumbold wouldn’t be so dumb as to say to right-hook happy Bernice that her mother was so ugly that when she was born the doctor slapped the afterbirth. Surely not.
Bernice pulled my face towards hers. I smelled the cheese real strong. There were bits of a chocolate caramel bar between her teeth. I was losing the feeling in my legs when she slammed me against the wall. “Fumbold insulted my little sister!” she raged. She slapped me across the forehead with her Chewbacca-like paw. I could feel the vibrations in my toes.
“I didn’t know the insult was for her,” I squealed.
At times of intense panic or when I think I’m going to die, my voice goes into a high-pitched squeal for some reason. I was sure the local wolves and hounds could hear me.
I felt another crushing blow on my left cheek.
“She was very upset,” Bernice added. She shoved my broken body into the wall again, her hands like mechanical grave diggers.
My voice went even higher. “I’m really sorry, Bernice. Really sorry.”
She punched me in the stomach and I dropped to the floor. Satisfied, Bernice finally returned to her seat and casually picked up her copy of An Inspector Calls.
There were giggles as I staggered to my feet. As I went back to my chair, I was thinking that it must be some sort of record at the school for a boy to be beaten up by two girls in the same day.
Mrs Swanson returned and I read for a further ten minutes before we were given permission to leave. I allowed plenty of time for Bernice to disappear before I rose from my chair. As Coral left, she glared at me as if I’d spat on her granny.
Chapter 7
The Football Game
Timothy was hanging around waiting for me in the hallway outside the classroom door. “Are you still selling cusses?” he asked me.
Didn’t he see me get a smackdown from Bernice? Was he insane? I rolled my eyes and walked past him. My body hurt all over and my ankle still felt like it’d been attacked by a peckish pack of hyenas. But I tried to walk normally. I didn’t want to show anyone that I was a hospital case.
“Hold up,” Timothy said. “It’s not for Bernice’s sister or anybody in this school. Between you and me, Bernice’s sister is an evil little goblin. And if you spread that around, I’ll deny it for ever and ever.”
I stopped walking. Fifty pence is fifty pence. And if I could earn it without getting my blood cells boshed to different parts of my body, then so much the better. Maybe the jingles wouldn’t go towards a cinema link with Carmella McKenzie, but I could buy a couple of chocolate bars on the way home. That would make me feel better at the end of my day from hell.
“OK,” I agreed. “What kind of cuss do you want?”
“About being poor,” Timothy said. His eyes got bigger and he opened his mouth. It wa
s full of saliva. He moved closer and I got a strong whiff of his egginess. It was like someone lined his clothes with stale boiled eggs. It was overpowering and made my stomach do a little dance. I stood at an angle to Timothy so if I puked up it wouldn’t be in his face or all over his brown hair.
“You had a ‘being poor’ argument,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “This rude girl who lives three doors away from me said my family’s so poor that families living in a really poor country with a drought had sent food and water to us.”
I swear that was an insult I sold a few months ago. I couldn’t help but laugh a bit. Well, not a bit, I laughed a lot. In fact my stomach crunched up and I nearly fell to the floor. I could see in Timothy’s eyes how much that insult had upset him. The pain in his expression told me that I had done my work well.
“Fifty p,” I demanded.
Timothy handed me the cash. Man! “OK,” I said, pocketing the money. “Tell her this. Say that her family is soooo poor that when her mum wanted wooden flooring she had to go to the park with a kitchen knife and strip the bark off an oak tree. Tell her that.”
Timothy’s grin started from the corners of his mouth and reached his eyes. As he opened his mouth, I got an extra blast of egginess, but it was worth it. Another satisfied customer.
“Excellent!” Timothy said, rubbing his hands like some evil scientist in an old horror film. “Excellent!”
I started walking away, but he called me back. “You’re not gonna watch the football?”
“Football?” I repeated. “What football?”
“Our year is playing Miller’s Pond High. Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Miller’s Pond High were our main sporting rivals. This year they had beaten us at everything. Netball, hockey, and track and field. In football they’d murdered us 11 goals to 1 at their place. A few weeks ago in basketball they’d destroyed us 66 points to 12. During that defeat I thought our PE teacher, Mr Purrfoot, was gonna explode like the first Death Star.
“What’s the point?” I finally replied to Timothy. “We’re gonna lose big-time.”
“Yeah,” said Timothy. “And I’m gonna wind up every player on our team.”
I liked the idea of that. It would make a nice change to watch someone else getting humiliated.
Timothy and I made our way to the back of the school and onto the sports grounds. We made a right pair: me with my vomit breath and him with his stale-egg stink.
The game had already started. I was about a hundred metres away, walking across the cricket square, when I saw him. Muscle Freak. The Sith Lord who had hugged my Carmella. He was playing football for our school team. I couldn’t believe it. I could see the muscles in his legs from where I stood. This demon was the reason for all my humiliation, pain and shame. Man, I wanted him to suffer.
I stopped in my tracks. Timothy, and the egginess that surrounded him, walked on. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked.
“No, I’m gonna watch it from here,” I said.
There was a decent crowd on the touchlines. I could see Bernice Cummings and … Carmella.
Oh, for the life of Yoda, no!
I stepped back a few paces so she wouldn’t catch sight of me. I wanted her new boyfriend to break his leg into a million and one pieces. I hoped a Miller’s Pond High defender would tackle him mouth-high so he could never taste lips with a chick again.
Unfortunately, Carmella’s boyfriend was pretty good. In fact, he was totally depressingly brilliant. I watched him dribble past defender after defender and hop past the goalkeeper, then casually tap the ball into an empty net. Our home support went cadazy. Carmella was jumping up and down, clapping her hands. She hadn’t been that excited when I’d asked her out for a movie date.
I kneeled on the ground and punched the turf with my right fist, pure rage and bitterness overwhelming me. Ouch! It didn’t make me feel any better. My total humiliation was now complete.
I was just thinking of running to the hills high above Monks Orchard to let out a mighty scream when I heard my name.
“WELTON! WELTON!”
Oh, sweet Yoda! That was Carmella’s voice. She had seen me.
“WELTON! WELTON!”
I looked up. Carmella was waving her arms, trying to get my attention.
I felt this heat of shame and embarrassment burn within my body. I had no option. I had to sonic-boom out of there as fast as I could. It was obvious that she wanted to deliver the bad news in person. She didn’t want to go to the movies no more, but she wanted to be polite about it. Welton, I’m sooo sorry! I really like you and wanted to go to the movies with you, but I met someone else. It was love at first sight. You understand, don’t you?
Then she’d mention the dreaded f word. There is no reason why we can’t be friends. In fact, we can all be friends. We could still talk and hang out. Maybe we could do history homework together sometime?
I didn’t wanna be friends. I definitely didn’t want to hang out. She could hyper-speed her history homework into a black hole at the far side of the galaxy.
Despite the state of my ankle, I turned on my heels and half ran, half hobbled out of the sports grounds. I fell over a couple of times, but I didn’t care. Every third stride I looked behind me, checking to see if Carmella was following. She wasn’t.
Panting heavily, I reached the bus stop five minutes later. I prayed for a bus to come soon. There was mud on my forehead, but I just couldn’t be bothered to wipe it off. When the bus arrived, I took a seat upstairs at the back and told myself that at least my day couldn’t get any worse.
Chapter 8
The Big Announcement
When I got home, I took off my blazer, threw it over my bedside chair and crashed on my unmade bed. I closed my eyes and began to go over all the crazy events of the day. One thought came to my mind. Why am I soooo unlucky?
A year or so ago, I was happily living in Ashburton. Back then, Dad and Mum weren’t threatening to delete each other on the way back from the supermarket like they did when we arrived in Monks Orchard. I had a bus-load of friends, got invited to lots of birthday parties and I had many cousins to fling snowballs at. But my parents decided the only way they could afford to buy a house was if they moved out of Ashburton. So we ended up in Monks Orchard, the most uncool part of the galaxy.
On my first day at school here, everyone thought I was the bomb, with me coming from Ashburton. But then they realised I couldn’t maul with the best of them and I wasn’t a boy-soldier of an Ashburton drug gang, and the guys laughed out their ribs at me. The girls ignored me. Soon after, Brian Broxslater started to tax me.
Broxslater was my year’s school bully. He originally came from the grimy ends of North Crongton. Everybody feared him. He wasn’t that tall, just kind of thick and stumpy. He had legs like castle turrets, arms like giant German sausages and he had a moustache at twelve years old. Well, it wasn’t a full grown-up moustache. But you could see the hair follicles, outline and shadow.
Because of his whiskers everyone agreed that Broxslater was the baddest fighter in our year – especially as he was a Crongtonian. None of us had ever seen him fight, but the whole first year he went unchallenged. I mean, what idiot would try to fight somebody who already had a moustache? He stood on patrol at the school gates before registration and stepped up to kids like me and whispered, “Tax for the Chancellor.” One look at his moustache and his huge fist and I would give him my jingles.
At least I hadn’t bumped into Broxslater’s taxing paws today. I had to be grateful for that now I was crashed on my bed.
I was hungry – not surprising after emptying most of my bodily contents into Karen Francis’s hair. I hoped Mum had something in the fridge that I could heat up in the microwave. I got up and had a look. There was macaroni cheese on a plate from three days ago. If I didn’t eat it a day after cooking, then why would I do so three days later?
I checked the cupboards. There weren’t any cheese
and onion or barbecue flavour crisps there, only salt and vinegar. There were no custard creams either – I think I finished them off a couple of days ago. I had to settle for four slices of toast and two mince pies I found at the back of the cupboard. The sell-by date was long gone, but I didn’t care.
I poured a drink of flat Coke and settled on the sofa, my mashed-up ankle resting on a cushion, to watch my favourite film – The Empire Strikes Back.
I was monster-munching into my second slice of toast while the 20th Century Fox fanfare announced my film was about to start when I heard Mum coming in the front door.
“Are you home, Welton?” Mum called. “Welton?!”
“I’m in the front room, Mum.”
Maybe she’s got pizza?
Pausing my film, I heard two other voices. Oh, Yoda, give me the Force, no! Mum’s boyfriend, Kingsley (who I’d branded Greyback because of his grey ponytail) and his five-year-old demon son, Devon. The Brat came running into the front room and jumped on my bad ankle. “Welton!” he yelled, while throwing his arms around my neck.
“Arrrrggghhhh!” I yelped. “Get off me! Get off me!”
If I’d had the strength to launch him into orbit, I would’ve done so. It wasn’t something a Jedi Knight should say, cos they’re meant to be good with kids, but, sweet Yoda, I didn’t like Devon too much.
Mum entered the lounge. She had a big smile on her face. Greyback had his right arm around her. He was grinning like he had won a Naboo Starship or something. I couldn’t see what Mum saw in him. I mean, Greyback was ancient. His hair was greying, obviously. He had ridges in his forehead, like you see in those wrinkly beef-flavoured crisps. He had hair in his ears and shaving bumps like mountains on his neck.
I couldn’t work out why Mum wasn’t worried that Greyback might be out on a date with her one night and just collapse and die of old age. I also couldn’t work out how Greyback had managed to produce a kid at his age. I’d given this a lot of thought and decided that Greyback wasn’t Devon’s real dad. He couldn’t be. Devon must be the satanic child of some prince of hell and Bernice Cummings’s ugly aunt.
