My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall)

by Stuart David

  Sandy takes one more mouthful of gruel, then pulls the tub of muffins across the table toward himself. He opens the lid again, smells them lovingly, and starts demolishing one.

  “So what’s wrong with you?” he asks. “What’s happened?”

  “Me?” I say, suddenly confused. “What do you mean?”

  “The idea,” he explains. “I know what you’re like when you’re on one. I shouldn’t be getting a word in edgeways here, but you haven’t even mentioned it yet. What’s happened?”

  “Ah,” I say, catching his drift. “It hit a snag. I don’t know if it’ll happen.”

  He doesn’t look too bothered.

  “It was pretty stupid anyway,” he says. “Pie in the sky.”

  “Grow up,” I tell him. “There’s nothing stupid about it. It’s gold dust.”

  He shakes his head.

  “It’s insane,” he says. “It doesn’t even make any sense. How can an app stop you getting into trouble for not listening?”

  I consider laying it all out for him, explaining the combination of voice-to-text conversion and predictive text searching. But he doesn’t know much about any of that stuff anyway, so I just tell him it’s all confidential at the moment.

  “Patent pending,” I say. “But the idea’s a peach—don’t worry about that. It’s the programming that’s the problem. Turns out only one person in the whole school could do it.”

  “How come you don’t just pay a real programmer, then?” he asks me, and I laugh.

  “Are you serious?” I say. “Do you know how much that would cost? I’d have to rob a bank.”

  I consider explaining the copyright issues to him as well, but it would be a waste of time. He’s totally lost in muffin heaven for the moment. He holds his handiwork up to the light and turns it around, occasionally biting into it, and I start to feel envious. The sausages are all chewy and they won’t go away. I let out a little groan, and Sandy suddenly comes back into the real world and asks me why the one programmer in school isn’t enough.

  “How many do you need?” he says.

  “Two,” I reply.

  “What for?” he asks. “Why can’t you do it with one?”

  “Because of who the one is,” I explain. “I need two so’s I can ditch the space cadet and just work with the normal.”

  He stops abusing his muffin and looks a bit stupid for a minute: it takes him a while to unzip the data I’ve sent him. Then he gets it.

  “Who’s the space cadet?” he asks, and I look around the canteen and over his shoulder at the geek table, where they’re arguing about a pack of cards one of them is spreading out. Then I look at the table of popular girls, putting on lipstick and admiring their hair in tiny mirrors. I turn round in my seat to look behind me and watch a sad group of teachers all staring down at their plates and saying nothing to each other, and I see a big gaggle of first-years generally behaving like primary school morons, throwing bits of food at each other and shrieking a lot. Then I see her. Sitting at a table on her own and staring into the distance with what I’m sure she imagines is poetic intensity.

  Elsie Green.

  I turn back round to face Sandy and use my thumb to point at her over my shoulder.

  “Her,” I say.

  Sandy follows my directions, and I watch his eyes wobbling about until they finally lock on their target. Then his eyebrows go up.

  “Greensleeves?” he asks.

  “Greensleeves,” I reply.

  He gives a low whistle. “Game over,” he says.

  “Could be,” I say, and suddenly unable to carry on with the sausage and onions, I push them aside and grab one of Sandy’s muffins. They taste good. They taste really good.

  I should have taken hospitality instead of history.

  4

  That night, back at home, the Regular Madness kicks off for a while. It’s been brewing up for a few days, I suppose, but it still takes me by surprise. As usual, everything starts off calmly enough: I’m sitting at the table with my originators (Mum and Dad, to give them their formal titles) and all three of us are just quietly eating dinner. Dad has stripped down to his undershirt, rolling pinches of tobacco up tightly in little pieces of paper, making a pyramid of fresh cigarettes for later on. Mum is still wearing her suit from the office, telling a story about someone else who works there, I think. I’m not really sure. I catch bits and pieces now and again, and it seems to be about a woman who lost a lot of money for the company by pressing the wrong button on a computer. Something like that. Anyway, that’s all that’s really going on. It’s nice and peaceful. And then, suddenly, the heat turns on me. Mum asks me the million-dollar question.

  “How were things at school today, Jack?”

  I don’t even look up, just nod. “Fine,” I say.

  “What happened?” Mum asks.

  “Well . . .” I tell her, inside my head, “I had a real cosmic brain tingler, the one I thought would free me from having to sit here answering these questions for much longer. Then it turned out the only person who could help me with it is someone it’s dangerous to go anywhere near. And who hates me anyway. So the whole thing went up in smoke, and now I’m back here answering these questions for the rest of my life.”

  But all I say through my mouth is, “Nothing much. Just the usual.” Which is obviously nowhere near enough for Mum.

  “What subjects did you have today?” she asks, and right at that moment I can’t even remember most of them.

  “I had maths last thing,” I say, and realize instantly that I should have thought about it for a little bit longer. If I’d said English, or history, Mum might well have left it at that. Just nodded and told me that was nice. But she’s big on maths. She sees herself as something of a maths expert, even though most of the stuff she got at school in the olden days isn’t even the way we do it anymore.

  “What are you on at the moment?” she asks me. “What were you doing this afternoon?”

  I think it over, and I’m amazed to find it’s a complete blank. I can barely even remember being there. I was mainly going back and forward between deciding I would have to teach myself Objective-C and then feeling convinced there must be someone else in the school besides Greensleeves who already knew it. But it blows my mind to realize I haven’t downloaded a single piece of information.

  “I . . .” I say, “well, I had a lot on my mind today.”

  That gets everything going nicely. Mum crosses her knife and fork on her plate, smoothes down her skirt, and sits up a little bit straighter in her chair.

  “Oh, Jack,” she says, then she appears genuinely lost for words. “How long is it till the exams now?”

  “Two months,” I mumble.

  “But what could you possibly have on your mind,” she says, “apart from that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I think I’m stressed.”

  “About what?”

  “About the exams.”

  “Jack,” she says. “Jack. If you were paying attention, the exams wouldn’t be a problem. You wouldn’t need to be stressed. Can you see how crazy that is?”

  I nod, and then my dad steps in.

  “He’ll be fine,” he says. “Look at me—I didn’t sit a single exam at school. It hasn’t done me any harm. He can come and work with us. I’ll talk to Frank Carberry about it in the morning. Don’t get yourself tied up in knots, Jack.”

  “Don’t be idiotic,” Mum says. “He’s not going to work in there. He’s made for something better than that.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Dad asks, his eyes already starting to go a bit wide at the outside.

  “Meaning that’s not good enough for him,” Mum replies, and although none of this is particularly pleasant, I feel grateful that the heat has been taken off me and that it’s unlikely to come back again this evening. Normally, I would slip off at this point and just leave them to it. But owing to me losing heart halfway through the sausage and onions at school this afternoon, I’m absolutely st
arving. So I finish my dinner while they’re jabbering away, make my excuses—which no one appears to notice—and head for my room, where I lie on my bed and listen to the Regular Madness for about an hour and a half.

  I went into the factory where my dad works one time. He forgot to take his lunch with him one morning, and Mum didn’t have time to drop it off before she went to her own work, so she asked me to take it up to him on my way to school. It was at the start of the summer, quite a warm day outside, but when I stepped inside the factory it was so hot, I was scared to breathe. I thought I might burn my lungs. For the first few minutes I just held my breath, and it was so noisy in there, I thought my ears might burst. It sounded as if a whole bunch of planes were all taking off at once, right overhead.

  The woman who had asked me what I wanted in the front office led me down aisles and round spluttering machines. The place seemed as big as a city inside. It’s a bottling hall: the place where they put whisky and vodka into bottles and then slap the labels on. My dad plays some vital role in the process of getting the labels onto the bottles, although I’m not sure what. When the woman found him, he was standing beside this big long conveyor-belt-type thing, tapping a bit of plastic up above it with the handle of a screwdriver. The woman prodded him on the shoulder, and he turned round and saw me. It was too loud for him to speak, and I was still holding my breath, so I just held the lunch bag up to him and he gave me the thumbs-up. Then I tried to find my way back out of there again and got lost because the woman had gone off and left me on my own.

  It was like being trapped in a nightmare or something. I kept bumping into people whose jobs seemed to be to test the whiskey, judging by the way they were staggering around and singing to themselves and everything. I passed a section where a bunch of people were just sitting sadly sticking labels onto strangely shaped bottles by hand. Over and over again. And I watched someone mopping up the broken glass and spilt whisky from a dropped bottle, and dumping it all into this metal bin, and then someone else came along and dipped a jam jar in there and started drinking the bin whisky, all full of dirt and everything.

  I suppose you have to get through the days somehow in a place like that. I was just glad to get out of there alive, and s­chool didn’t seem nearly so bad as usual on that particular day.

  It was quite an experience.

  “It’s a good living,” I hear my dad shouting downstairs, as the Madness continues to flourish. “He could do a lot worse.”

  “No he couldn’t,” Mum shouts back. “It might be a living, but it’s no kind of a life.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Dad asks her.

  “What do you think I mean?” she replies.

  “Do you want him to spend his life at a desk?” Dad says. “All huddled up?”

  “I want him to contribute something to society,” Mum tells him. “Something other than liver damage.”

  And on it goes.

  The thing is, though, I’ve been into the place where my mum works too. Quite a few times now. She’s managed to get me in there using all kinds of excuses, but I’m pretty sure her real motivation is to try to get me hooked on the place, to let some of its charm rub off on me, in the hope I’ll want to work somewhere like that myself one day. I have to be honest: so far it hasn’t worked. The best way I can describe it is to say it’s pretty much like school for grownups. School without any of the good bits. In fact, it wasn’t until I’d been in there that I even realized school had any good bits. But now I see that it does. Having a laugh when the teacher’s back is turned, looking out the window at pigeons attacking old sausage rolls in the playground, just generally daydreaming and working on your crazy ideas. There doesn’t appear to be any of that going on at Mum’s work. It’s pretty much just the sitting-at-your-desk-doing-your-project type stuff, slowly losing your mind from the boredom. You can’t even dress like a normal person in there. No wonder the pigment in my hair started to die when I realized I’d be going to my dad’s place if I duffed the exams, and a place like my mum’s if I pulled off a miracle and somehow managed to pass them.

  I’m amazed I didn’t go gray overnight.

  “People will always want to drink whiskey,” Dad shouts in the kitchen.

  “They will as long as they’re living with people like you,” Mum responds.

  I consider going down there and asking them to stop fighting over whose world is the best one, telling them they’ve both been an inspiration to me. The only problem is, they might ask me what I mean by it, and I’d have to explain that I’m so terrified by both their worlds, I’ve been forced to become a spectacular ideas man. I don’t know if they’d like that answer. So I lie on and continue to listen to it, and eventually I come to quite a radical decision: I decide I’m going to have to bite the bullet and attempt to hook up with Elsie Green. I can’t let her insanity stand in the way of my escape from this insanity. So I do what I can to filter out the Regular Madness, and I call up my ideas machinery. Then I set to work on coming up with a plan that will somehow convince Elsie to forget all about what’s transpired between us in the past and do some programming to help me out on the big idea.

  5

  Success!

  I amaze even myself sometimes.

  One day, when I’m famous for all these incredible ideas I keep having, they’ll probably have me on TV or something to ask me where my brain waves come from. I’ll have to tell them I don’t know.

  “What about techniques?” they’ll say. “Do you have any methods for bringing ideas on? A system of some kind?”

  “I just try to keep the front bit of my brain occupied,” I’ll say. “As long as you do that, the back bit can get on with sorting things out, undisturbed. Then it just sends a sizzler through to the front part when it’s ready.”

  They might even ask me to demonstrate having an idea right there and then, in the studio, but I’ll probably refuse. Not because I couldn’t do it, but just to maintain the mystique.

  Does it mean you’re going mad when you start imagining things like that?

  Maybe it does, but the technique I imagine telling them about is exactly how it works for me, and that’s exactly how it happened while I was lying on my bed waiting for the download on how to make amends with Elsie Green.

  There was a spider up on the ceiling, almost directly above my head, and I was watching it trying to deal with two of its legs that wouldn’t grip onto the paint up there. Six of its legs were doing fine, but these other two just wouldn’t cooperate. The spider kept moving along a little bit, and forcing the two weirdo legs back up against the paint in a new spot, but they’d just slip down and hang off a little bit again. I was trying to come up with some kind of solution for what you could paint onto those feet, to make them properly sticky, when the solution for what I could give Elsie to get on her good side smacked me hard. It’s just like I said: keep the front bit of the brain busy and the back bit will get on with delivering the juicy stuff.

  It never fails.

  So first thing in the morning, on my way to school, I take a detour at the bridge and head for the bookshop there, to start putting my plan into action.

  It’s open, but only just, I think. I’m the only customer, and the owner’s sitting up at the back of the shop, eating a bowl of cereal and warming his feet in front of an electric heater that’s blowing his wispy hair about all over the place. I stand amongst the shelves for a while until I begin to get dizzy, then give up on being able to find anything myself and reluctantly approach the owner.

  He looks at me as if I’ve wandered into the living room of his house, the little wisps of hair flapping up and down on his forehead like they’re waving to me.

  “I’m looking for something to do with medieval times,” I tell him.

  “Yes,” he says. Nothing else. He doesn’t even say it like a question, just pops it out and then continues to stare at me.

  I’m not exactly sure what to do next, so I just say it back to him.

  “Yes.�
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  Then we look at each other for what seems like ages, until I’m the one who cracks.

  “Have you got anything like that?” I ask him. “To do with the Middle Ages?”

  “Are you looking for something from the Middle Ages? Or something about the Middle Ages?”

  I think it over.

  “Either,” I say, and he starts up with the staring thing again. I’m just getting ready to give up on the whole enterprise when he turns away from me and starts typing things into an ancient-looking computer on his desk. The monitor is huge and yellow, with a big bit sticking out of the back like on my grandpa’s television, but when I lean forward to see what he’s doing I notice the screen is tiny. He glances up at me and gives me a look as if I’ve suddenly materialized in his bathroom while he’s sitting on the toilet, so I lean back again and wait for him to give me the results.

  “Medieval Poetry: Love Songs of the Troubadours?” he says, and I imagine handing that over to Greensleeves. Very likely to give her the wrong impression, I think, and I stick my bottom lip out.

  “What else?” I ask him, and he looks at me disdainfully and batters the yellow keyboard again. He stops for a moment and stares at the screen, frowning, then mutters something to himself and punches the same key about fifteen times.

  “A History of Plague: Agony of the Black Death in Medieval Europe?”

  That seems to me a bit far in the other direction. It doesn’t quite strike the note of reconciliation I’m looking for.

  “What other ones are there?” I say, and he straightens up and moves away from the computer.

  “That’s it,” he tells me. “Take your pick.”

  “Two books?” I say, but he doesn’t respond. He’s already opened a magazine and started reading it. I screw up my face and try to think. There only really seems to be one way I can go.

  “I’ll take the poetry one,” I tell him, and he nods.

  It takes him forever to find the thing. He goes over and stands in front of a shelf in the middle of the shop and doesn’t move for about twenty minutes. Maybe his eyes move—I can’t really tell from where I’m standing—but he certainly doesn’t move his head. Then, just when I’m starting to wonder if he’s got narcolepsy or something, he lets out a loud groan and stomps back to the computer. After some furious punching, he calls it a “butthole” and then storms over to a wooden cabinet thing where he pulls out lots of different drawers, hunting through all these little pieces of cardboard. Eventually he carries one piece of cardboard across to another part of the shop and stretches up to a high shelf which he can’t quite reach. By this time he’s starting to lose his mind.