How to Write Really Badly (8 page)

‘You have to put your pen down now.’

‘Nonsense,’ I told him, carrying on ruling
squares. ‘Old Frost Top will never notice.’

But Old Frost Top did.

‘Howard! You’re last to put down your pen, so I’m afraid you’ll have to run a little errand for me.’

Oh, joy! I’m out of here for five whole minutes! But, as I pass, everyone looks sorry for me, as if they think she’s punishing me too hard. One thing you can be sure of, none of these wimpettes spent wet afternoons sticking pins in their dollies. Off I go.

I whistle up the corridor, around the bend, past the assembly hall, and into the secretary’s office. No one is there. The list I’d come to fetch is lying on the table, though.
Miss Tate’s Class: List of Open Day Prizes
. And then a heap of dreary, crudbucket honours.

No prizes for Joe in there. And then an idea struck. I snatched the scissors from the secretary’s desk, and snipped off the bottom line – Whoops! Sorry, Beth! No prize this year! – and at the top, very carefully, I printed out:

Then I went strolling back. Miss Tate was busy fighting a tragic avalanche of window display, and barely glanced at it.

‘Just stick it up where everyone can see it.’

I prised a pin out of the pig dribble
painting I hated most, and watched with satisfaction as it peeled off the wall and fell in the bin.

‘There!’ I said, using the pin. ‘I now declare this class’s List of Prizes officially on display.’

A second avalanche fell on Miss Tate. And what with her sticky tape rolling away under the desks, and all the fuss about what sort of glue she ought to use to stick the photo of Ben’s mother’s stuffed owl, Patricia, on to the nature display, nobody even noticed my own little, secretive, one-person crime wave.

My mum put up a fight.

‘In case you hadn’t noticed, the firm I work for is called Hightechnicon Systems, not Huge Wobbly Models Removals Inc.’

‘Joe’s models aren’t wobbly,’ I told her. ‘He’s an expert.’

‘Chester, it costs a fortune just to keep that van idle on the tarmac. Think how much it would cost to send it on your little errand.’

‘It won’t take long.’

‘Loading and unloading.’

‘I’ll arrange all that.’

Moodily, she poked at her pasta. I was winning.

‘Do this one thing for me,’ I said. ‘And I won’t moan about any school I’m in – ever again.’

Dad’s eyes lit up.

‘Close the deal right this minute!’ he ordered Mum. ‘Close the deal instantly, or it’s divorce.’

Mum closed the deal. She made a couple of phone calls, and that was that. The van showed up outside Mrs Gardener’s house early the next day.

‘We’ve come for all Joe’s models,’ I told the cleaning lady. ‘For the Open Day display.’

Eye lighting-up time is getting earlier and earlier around this neighbourhood.

‘What?
All
of them?’

‘All of them,’ I said firmly.

‘Even the wall-sized cooked tagliatelle spider’s web?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the disposable plastic coffee cup spaceman. And the fully spinnable tin bottle top Wheel of Fortune. And the personally collected driftwood crocodile.’

The cleaning lady trembled.

‘So I’d be able to get in and vacuum under the bed? And wipe down the windowsill? And wash the walls?’

‘The room will be all yours. As empty as a summer desert drain till four o’clock. Just lead the way.’

She stopped tremulously halfway up the stairs.

‘Will you be taking the dried bread lampshade?’

‘Yes, we’ll be taking that too.’

She clutched her light-bulb duster tightly in her emotion.

‘Just along here!’

I wouldn’t want to pass much time in Little Joey’s bedroom. I wouldn’t mind picking my way under the toilet roll holder flying rocket. Or through the papier-mâché Valley of the Kings. But I’d just hate sleeping directly underneath that filled plastic water bottle mastodon. Or waking up to put my feet by accident on to that jelly-filled freezer bag octopus.

‘Is that the lot?’ the driver asked, when I’d filled up the van.

Joe’s parents’ cleaning lady wiped what I could only take to be a tear of joy out of her eye.

‘You promise me they won’t be back
till four o’clock?’

‘No chance,’ the driver said, putting the van in gear. ‘You might think this is Mad Model Movers PLC, but actually I have a regular day job.’

(It’s my belief that, in the rarefied Hightechnicon world, sarcasm passes for humour.)

Joe’s parents’ cleaning lady raised her mop in warm salute as we drove off. The driver turned to me.

‘Where next?’

‘Walbottle Manor (Mixed).’

‘I used to go to that school,’ the driver said, running his gnarled fingers through his silvery hair. ‘I had a really nice teacher called Miss Tate.’

‘That figures,’ I told him. ‘Can we drive round the back?’

He knew the way. In fact, I’ll swear I saw his rheumy eyes mist over as we passed
the old school sign. He backed the van up to the fire doors beside the gym.

‘I don’t believe that you can open these from the outside,’ I warned him.

‘That’s what you think,’ he said, sliding a spectacle arm in a gap in the doors, and springing some catch. ‘I used to break back in here regularly, after I left, to get to sing on Fridays.’

(This is what happens when you get a town without a bowling alley or a cinema. Everyone goes loopy.)

He helped me carry the models along the corridor, past the big hall, where
everybody’s eyes were goody-goody shut for prayers, into the classroom.

‘It looks just the same!’

‘I’m sure it does.’

And we set everything up. How Joe got all this lot in one small room, I’ll never understand. They did fit in. But the huge water bottle mastodon loomed horribly over Miss Tate’s desk, and Beth’s angora rabbit, borrowed for the ‘Textures’ table, eyed the wall-sized tagliatelle spider’s web with real dismay.

‘Splendid,’ said the van driver. ‘A job well done.’ He patted his own particular favourite – the tin can baby elephant – with evident satisfaction. ‘And this is sturdy stuff. I’ve moved top-of-the-range Hightechnicon Systems that will fall apart sooner than this.’

‘Joe only uses the best glue and string.’

He glanced round wistfully, and sighed.

‘I’d better go.’

‘It isn’t Friday,’ I consoled him. ‘So at least you won’t be missing singing.’

He hesitated at the classroom door, looking back one last time.

‘I spent the happiest days of my whole life inside this room.’

See what I mean? Spend one term with Miss Tate, and you go bats. Quite bats.

Miss Tate’s bun shook as she clapped her hands. I watched for moths.

‘Now, class!’

They sat smartly in their seats, like doggies waiting for bones.

‘I hope everyone’s got over the
surprise
of all these –’ Nervously, she glanced up at the huge water bottle mastodon towering above her, gnashing his cardboard teeth. ‘All these
wonderful
models that Joe has so kindly brought in to show us today.’

‘I didn’t br–’

I stepped on Joe’s foot to shut him up.

‘Because,’ Miss Tate went on, ‘it’s time to award the prizes.’

She opened her desk drawer and brought out five rusty-looking medals she’d
obviously bought cheap in bulk back in the Stone Age, when she started teaching. (As soon as I saw them, I realised that the van driver had had one exactly the same dangling from his rear-view mirror, but in the hoo-ha of the move, I’d taken it for a St Christopher.)

‘We’ll start from the bottom, as we always do.’

She unpinned the list from the wall.

‘Best How-to book!’

Believe it or not, this went to the hard-boiled egg decorator in the front row.

‘Best Reading!’

That should have gone to me. I
always
win best reading, whichever school I’m in. But I had blown it this time because I hated our Reading Together book
(Six Little Peppers and How They Grew)
so much that, each time she’d made me stand and read, I’d hung my head, and pawed the ground
in my embarrassment, and mumbled so softly that she couldn’t hear.

So I didn’t get that one this year. Missed my big prize!

‘Best Essay!’

Flora, of course. She came to fetch her chipped old medal with a beam on her face, stared at it meaningfully as it lay rusting in the palm of her hand, and then started one of those ghastly telly speeches.

‘The first person I’d like to thank today is my mo–’

Miss Tate cut her off pretty sharpish.

‘I certainly hope no one helped you with the winning essay, Flora. That was supposed to be all your own work.’

Flora shut up then, and went back to her desk.

‘Best Spelling!’

This one was a toss-up, I reckoned. I usually get spelling as well. But Ben was pretty good.

‘Ben!’ Miss Tate announced. ‘Though Howard might have won, if he’d not had so much Hungarian goulash spattered over his book that I couldn’t read some words.’