Flour Babies

by Anne Fine

  Tucking her under his arm, he gazed out over the water.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind you being real,’ he said. ‘Even if it was more work. Even if you howled, and kept filling your nappies, and threw giant tantrums in shops. I wouldn’t mind.’

  He peeped down at her, comfy and safe in his armpit, and pressed a finger where her nose would be, if she weren’t just a bag of flour.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I don’t understand,’ he confided. ‘I don’t understand how people can treat babies badly.’

  Her huge eyes stared up at him. He tried to explain.

  ‘Mum says she knows how it happens.’ Simon couldn’t help scowling. ‘In fact, she says she wouldn’t like to count the number of times I nearly copped it from her, when I was teething.’

  He shook his head in amazement.

  ‘And Gran says her sister lost her temper once, and threw her baby in the cot so hard that one of its legs broke.’

  He bent his head closer.

  ‘Not one of the baby’s legs/he explained. ‘One of the cot’s.’

  Glad to have made that clear, he pressed on.

  ‘And Sue claims she gets so ratty if she doesn’t get a full eight hours uninterrupted sleep every night that it’s a good thing she never had a family because, if she did, she’d murder all of them within a week.’

  He pulled the flour baby on to his knee.

  ‘And Mum went camping with Sue once, for only two nights, and came back saying she believed it.’

  He poked her gently where her tummy would be.

  ‘And look at Robin,’ he said. ‘He’s usually easygoing enough. Puts up with Old Carthorse picking on him about keeping his rubber dropping collection in his desk, and puts up with all Wayne’s jokes about him having two left feet. It’s not like Robin to go totally ape like that.’

  He stared over the flour baby’s head, into the dark flowing water. It wasn’t even, he thought, as if anything very special had happened to drive Robin wild. Certainly nothing to explain him seeing red like that, and getting in such a frenzy. All that had happened was that Gwyn had asked to borrow somebody’s workbook.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To copy out yesterday’s homework.’

  ‘You don’t want mine, then,’ Wayne had said. ‘I got the whole lot wrong.’

  ‘You don’t want mine either,’ George assured him. ‘Carthorse told me a brain-dead troll could have made a better stab at it.’

  To Gwyn, the actual quality of the work on offer was clearly a matter of total indifference.

  ‘All Carthorse said was that I had to do it,’ he explained. ‘He didn’t say anything about getting it right.’

  ‘You can borrow mine if you like,’ Robin offered. ‘He never said it was rubbish so I think he must have liked it.’

  ‘Right, then,’ said Gwyn. ‘I’ll take yours.’ And he stood by while Robin dug in his bag, pushing aside his maths textbook and the new French picture dictionary Mr Dupasque had insisted on giving him only that morning. In search of the homework, he dug too deeply too fast, and his flour baby fell out on the muddy path.

  ‘Oh, shoot!’

  Picking it up, he brushed the worst of the mud and gravel off, and tossed it to Gwyn for safe-keeping.

  True to form, Gywn dropped it.

  It fell in the mud again. This time, Robin picked it up and stuck it firmly in a bush beside the path, before digging deeper in the bag. Above his own furious scrabblings, he didn’t hear the soft ripping noise of the flour baby behind him. It was only when the little sacking bag had torn sufficiently to drop back in the mud with a soft floury splat that he even realized what was happening.

  And that was the moment at which he lost his temper.

  ‘Stupid!’ he yelled. ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!’

  Gwyn stepped back nervously. Was he being blamed? But no. It was the flour baby that had put Robin in a rage. Picking it off the ground, he’d shaken it till flour spilled.

  ‘Stupid! Stupid!’ he yelled again, punching it hard.

  Flour puffed out in clouds.

  Robin went berserk.

  ‘Take care of your flour baby!’ he screamed, in mimicry of all the adults who had been nagging him for days. ‘Don’t forget! Take it here! Take it there! Make sure you strap it safely on your bike! Don’t lose it! Keep it out of the mud!’

  For every order he shouted, he gave the flour baby a hard punch.

  ‘Don’t let it get wet! Don’t dirty it! Make sure it doesn’t fall! Don’t forget to pretend it’s a real baby!’

  Now he was shaking it so fiercely the rip widened, and flour spilled on the path.

  ‘Pretend you’re real? Fine! I’ll pretend you’re real! And if you were real, if you were mine, I’d kick you in the canal!’

  And then, before their very eyes, he’d drawn back his foot, let go of the flour sack, and done it.

  Thwack!

  Simon sat quietly on the bank, remembering how, just as the damaged sack had sunk at once, the flour along the path had blown away in an instant. In less than a minute there was nothing to see except a few sad, rising bubbles.

  He hugged his own flour baby tightly to his chest.

  ‘I don’t know much,’ he told her. ‘But I do know this. I’d never do that to you. Never, never, never.’

  And, at that moment, he believed himself.

  7

  On Day 16, Mr Cartright couldn’t do a thing with them. Philip Brewster fell off his chair, arguing that the Chinese were the tallest people on earth. Luis Pereira kept pushing his desk out of line, over and over, till Mr Cartright realized Henry had convinced him that the spider on the ceiling just above his head was deadly poisonous, and also dribbling. Bill Simmons wouldn’t stop adding rather unpleasant flourishes to the huge bluebottle tattoo he’d inked on his forearm. And even Robin Foster, who usually wasn’t much trouble, kept flicking bits of his rubber dropping collection at the petunia on the window sill.

  ‘Right!’ said Mr Cartright. ‘I know what we’ll do. We’ll have a few snippets from the diaries.’

  He waited for the groaning to peak.

  ‘Or –’ he threatened. ‘We could just have a second go at yesterday’s disastrous test.’

  Everyone settled down hastily to listen to the diaries. Gwyn Phillips laid his head gently on his flour baby, as though it were a pillow on the desk. His eyes closed, and his thumb crept in his mouth. Nobody scoffed. It was as if they took it for a signal that today was time out. It was back to the nursery.

  Within moments, everyone had spread themselves as comfortably as possible. Some of them even copied Simon by propping their flour babies on the desk tops, as if they were listening too.

  Mr Cartright began.

  ‘I’ll start with Henry,’ he told them. ‘Henry on Day 9.’

  Henry’s arm punched the air.

  Mr Cartright began.

  ‘ “I hate my flour baby. I hate it worse than anything else on earth. It weighs about a ton. I asked my Dad how much I weighed when I was born, and he said he might have got me mixed up with our Jim or our Laura, but he thinks I weighed eight pounds. Eight pounds! That’s another two on top of Fatso here! I asked Dad how much that was in kilos, and he went all snitty and said he cooked my supper and fixed my bike, I couldn’t expect him to do my homework as well.” ’

  Mr Cartright broke off.

  A faint roar of approval came from those members of 4C who had both stayed awake and listened till the end.

  ‘Now we’ll have Tullis’s,’ said Mr Cartright. ‘Since he’s not here. This is Day 8. I should warn you Days 2 to 7 and 9 to 13 are unaccountably missing.’

  He waited for the laughter to subside before reading out, with an expression of distaste:

  ‘ “My flour baby has a bogey down her front. I’m not flicking it off. It’s not mine, so why should I?” ’

  He stopped.

  ‘That’s it.’

  A cheer rose to greet this announcement. Encouraged, Mr Cartright picked up Ric
k Tullis’s effort for Day 14.

  ‘ “If I’ve been off a lot, you can blame the flour baby. I’m not saying I would have bothered to come much anyway. But what with that thing, I’m definitely staying away again tomorrow.” ’

  Mr Cartright lifted his head to gaze round the class room.

  ‘He’s taken to numbering his sentences,’ he informed them. ‘In case he should make the terrible mistake of writing more than three.’

  He rooted through the pile of diary entries.

  ‘Here’s something interesting,’ he told them. ‘Two exactly the same.’

  He read the first aloud. It was by Wayne Driscoll.

  ‘ “My mum says when I was born, we were so poor we practically lived in a bucket and ate coal. This was because my grandpa said I looked like a goblin. Mum stopped speaking to him, so he wouldn’t lend her any money. Mum thinks he was fed up because I’m black and he isn’t. Not that he’s my dad, just my grandad, so what’s it to him? I reckon my dad would have been a whole lot worse than fed up if I’d come out all white! Mum says she’s no patience with either of them and wishes everyone in the world was green.” ’

  Picking up another, scruffier, piece of paper, Mr Cartright read the whole sorry tale out over again, word for word.

  One by one, they all raised their heads to look at Gwyn Phillips.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Gwyn demanded. ‘Why are you all staring at me?’

  ‘You can’t just copy anything,’Robin Foster explained kindly. ‘It has to make sense for you. And you’re not black.’

  Gwyn took to muttering. Very little was audible, except to his nearest neighbours. But some approximation to the phrase ‘racial discrimination’ could be heard coming up now and again in the course of his grumbling.

  Mr Cartright ignored him.

  ‘Shall we move on?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘Let’s have Sajid Mahmoud on Day 14.’

  Sajid stared round the room proudly, inviting admiration. A few of them took the trouble to scowl, but most pretended that they hadn’t noticed him.

  ‘ “By today, I should have made well over a hundred pounds, but what with six people not putting their flour babies in my creche, and Tullis forever being off, and me not thinking to start till Day 4, and some people not coughing up what they owe me in spite of having Henry and Luis set on them, I only have half of that so far. Still –” ’

  Mr Cartright stopped on the upbeat, and waited for everyone to guess the end.

  ‘That’s business!’ roared everyone, in unison.

  Mr Cartright took time out to run his eyes over Sajid’s work a second time.

  ‘There’s only two sentences here,’ he warned.

  Over and above Sajid’s prolonged and furious disputation with Mr Cartright about the exact nature and role of the comma, some serious accusations could be heard from the others.

  ‘… robbing us blind!’

  ‘… chiselled me out of four weeks’ pocket money already!’

  ‘… never get round to paying for next door’s coal bin at this rate

  ‘Good as thieving, frankly…’

  Mr Cartright shifted uncomfortably on the desk. Waving Sajid into silence, he reminded the others:

  ‘Nobody forced you to put your flour babies in his creche.’

  Then, hastily, he picked up another sheet of paper.

  ‘Here’s Simon,’ he told them. ‘Simon on Day 12. “I was really upset by Foster booting his flour baby in the canal like that. I never thought of Foster as a hard nugget before. In fact, he’s a really good friend of mine. I expect that his problem is what Miss Arnott’s always saying. He’s rather immature.” ’

  Mr Cartright raised his head from the paper in order to interrupt himself and say to Simon:

  ‘I hope you realize that reading all this out so smoothly and evenly is a real triumph of the decipherer’s art.’

  Not really grasping the full force of Mr Cartright’s insult, Simon contented himself with a sour grunt, which Mr Cartright chose to take as permission to carry on reading.

  ‘ “My mum kept sticking up for Robin too. She said you can’t go round giving people The Black Spot just because they do something daft, or I’d still be marked down for a bad lot for throwing that cactus at Hyacinth Spicer, or giving Tullis’s alsatian my gran’s wig to chew, and one or two other things I don’t really want to write about in this diary.”‘

  Unfortunately for Simon, George Spalder did not seem to share his very acute sense of privacy.

  ‘I think he means the time he flushed his geography project away, and flooded all the lavatories,’ he confided to everyone.

  ‘No,’ said Tariq. ‘He means the time he fed Miss Arnott’s aspirins to the gerbil, and the poor thing fetched up in a coma.’

  He looked round, to check no one had misunderstood.

  ‘Not Miss Arnott,’ he said, just in case doubt was lingering in anyone’s mind. ‘The gerbil.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Impatiently, Wayne brushed Tariq’s theory aside. ‘He means the time he used that big red DANGER sign as a leg-up to get over the wire fence, and got caught leaning against that huge gas cylinder, having a quiet cigarette.’

  By now, Mr Cartright was eyeing Simon with a new respect. A huge hunk of a lad, yes. And strong. But what he’d never realized before was what a swathe of mayhem the boy left behind, as he shambled through his life.

  Then, suddenly noticing everyone looking at him expectantly, Mr Cartright felt obliged to come up with some suitably pedagogic response.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ he scolded Simon. ‘You might stunt your growth.’

  And he went on to Philip Brewster, Day 10.

  ‘ “Bad times! I thought my flour baby was the pits, but next door have a real one and it’s a yowler. On and on and on. I hear it through the wall. As I told Trish my goldfish, if it were mine, I’d tie its neck in a reef knot.” ’

  Fascinated, Mr Cartright shuffled through the pages till he found Philip Brewster, Day 11.

  ‘ “What gets me is that I get seriously ticked off for playing my radio so soft I can’t even hear it. This baby is switched up to Volume 10 all night, and when I come down in the morning firing on only one cylinder because I’ve had no sleep, everyone tells me we’re lucky it isn’t our baby. I wish it were. I’d soon put an end to its bleating.” ’

  Everyone turned to look at Philip, who blushed.

  ‘Go on,’ Tariq begged Mr Cartright. ‘Go on with the story, sir. Find his Day 12.’

  Mr Cartright found Philip’s Day 12.

  ‘ “I went round and told that woman next door I wasn’t getting much sleep, and she went totally unpicked. I only just managed to get off the doorstep ahead of the lava. I don’t understand people with babies, really I don’t.” ’

  A warm, full-throated cheer of agreement greeted this last announcement.

  ‘Yeh! People with babies have to be totally unhinged.’

  ‘Barking mad.’

  It was Sajid, as usual, who put the point over most coherently.

  ‘I mean, they stroll round all day with these real ones tucked under their arms that keep bawling and messing and having to have their bums wiped –’

  ‘Not just their bums!’ interrupted Henry. ‘My mum says you have to keep wiping their noses.’

  ‘Grotesque!’

  ‘Disgusting!’

  ‘Just the thought of it makes you feel sick.’

  ‘And then they yowl all night!’

  A fresh onset of grumbling from the back row proved to be Philip Brewster’s personal corroboration of this last complaint.

  ‘That’s all I said to her, that it had been yowling all night. And she went unpicked.’Sajid went on with his allegations.

  ‘And some of them are even heavier than ours. My aunty brings hers round and it weighs twenty-four pounds. Twenty-four pounds! And my aunty still has to carry it. It still can’t walk!’

  Wayne Driscoll broke in at this point.

  ‘That’s definite
ly the thing that gets me about them. They can’t walk. They can’t talk. They can’t kick a ball, or even get the spoon anywhere near their own faces.’

  ‘They’re just a total nuisance.’

  ‘You can’t blame Robin for booting his in the canal.’

  ‘His flour baby was lucky,’ Tariq told them darkly. ‘In the good old days, people used to dump babies out on the mountainside.’

  ‘Or cook and eat them.’

  Mr Cartright felt obliged to step in at this point to pull 4C’s lively discussion back on the rails.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, George. Not cook and eat them.’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’ George was adamant. ‘They taste exactly like pork. I read it in a book.’

  The general clamour for more information was almost drowned out by potential individual researchers.

  ‘What book?’

  ‘Do you still have it?’

  ‘Can I borrow it?’

  ‘Pork?’

  ‘What about crackling? Do babies make proper crackling?’

  Hastily, Mr Cartright wellied in again.

  ‘People with babies aren’t all barking mad,’ he told them. ‘In fact, any one of you lot might choose to have one some day. Not to mention the fact that many people fetch up with babies by accident.’

  The rush of feeling engendered by this observation astonished even Mr Cartright.

  “That’s terrible, that is!’

  ‘Having a baby by accident!’

  ‘Strick!’

  ‘I’d never have one by accident. Never!’

  Bill Simmons seemed almost in tears at the idea.

  ‘It’s horrible even to think about. One careless moment and then – hell on wheels!’

  Gwyn clearly agreed with him.

  ‘Your whole life ruined by one slip.’

  ‘Shocking!’

  Luis Pereira took full advantage of his reputation for knowing more girls than anyone else in the class.

  ‘And it might not even be your fault,’ he warned them all conspiratorially.

  There was sheer consternation at the thought that anyone present might end up with a baby through no real fault of his own. For the second time in under three weeks, 4C fell absolutely silent.