“You said I could have them both!” said Patrick, no longer in a whisper. Others in the queue began to turn their heads.
“Will you shut up?” hissed Omri.
“No,” said Patrick in a loud clear voice. He held out his hand.
Omri felt trapped and furious. He looked into Patrick’s eyes and saw what happens even to the nicest people when they want something badly and are determined to get it, come what may. Omri slammed his empty tray down on the floor and, taking Patrick by the wrist, pulled him out of the queue and into a quiet corner of the hall.
“Listen to me,” he grated out between teeth clenched in anger. “If you let anything happen to Little Bull, I will bash you so hard your teeth will fall out.” (This, of course, is the sort of thing that happens even to the nicest people when they are in a trap.) With that, he groped in his pocket and brought the two little men out. He didn’t look at them or say goodbye to them. He just put them carefully into Patrick’s hand and walked away.
He had lost his appetite, so he didn’t get back in the queue; but Patrick did. He even pushed a bit, he was so eager to get some food to give to the cowboy and the Indian. Omri watched from a distance. He wished now he hadn’t been too angry to give Patrick some pretty clear instructions. Like telling him to separate them. Now he thought about it, perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to feed them in a pocket. Who wants to eat something that’s descended between two layers of cloth and collected bits of dust and fluff? If he’d still had them, he would have taken them to some private place and taken them out to eat properly. Why had he ever brought them to school at all? The dangers here were too awful.
Watching, he suddenly stiffened. Patrick had reached the hatch now, and received his dinner. He almost ran with it to a table – he did try to go to one in the outside row near the windows, but a dinner-lady stopped him and made him sit in the middle of the hall. There were children all round him and on either side. Surely, thought Omri, surely he wasn’t going to try to feed them there?
He saw Patrick take a pinch of bread and slip it into his pocket. He wasn’t wearing a jacket; the men were in his jeans pocket. Fortunately the jeans were new and loose, but still he had to half stand up to get the bit of bread in; when he was sitting down the people in his pocket must be pretty well squashed against his leg. Omri imagined them trying to eat, held down flat by two thick layers of cloth. He could almost see Patrick imagining it, too. He was frowning uneasily and shifting around in his chair. The girl next to him spoke to him. She was probably telling him not to wriggle. Patrick said something sharp in reply. Omri sucked in his breath. If only Patrick wouldn’t draw attention to himself!
Suddenly he gasped. The girl had given Patrick a hard push. He pushed her back. She nearly went off her chair. She stood up and pushed him with all her might, using both hands. He went flying over backwards, half on to the boy on the other side of him, who jumped from his place, spilling part of his dinner. Patrick landed on the floor.
Omri didn’t stop to think. He raced towards him across the hall, dodging in and out among the tables. His heart was hammering with terror. If Patrick had fallen on them! Omri had a terrible, fleeting vision of the pocket of Patrick’s jeans, with bloodstains spreading – he clamped down on his imagination.
By the time he got there, Patrick was back on his feet, but now the other boy was angry and clearly looking for a fight. The girl on his other side looked ready to clobber him too. Omri pushed between them, but a stout dinner lady was ahead of him.
“’Ere, ’ere, what’s goin’ on?” she asked, barging in with her big stomach and sturdy arms. She grabbed Patrick in one hand and the boy with the other and kind of dangled them at arm’s length and shook them. “No fighting in ’ere, thank you very much, or it’ll be off to the ’ead master’s orfice before you can say knife, the ’ole bloomin’ pack of you!” She dumped them down in their separate chairs as if they’d been bags of shopping. They were both thoroughly tousled and red-faced. Omri’s eyes shot down to Patrick’s thigh. No blood. No movement either, but at least no blood.
Everyone began to eat again as the stout dinner-lady stamped away, tut-tutting as she went. Omri leant over the back of Patrick’s chair and whispered out of a dry mouth, “Are they all right?”
“How do I know,” said Patrick sulkily. But his hand crept down and delicately explored the slight bump on the top of his leg where his pocket was. Omri held his breath. “Yeah, they’re okay. They’re moving,” he muttered.
Omri went out into the playground. He felt too jumpy to stay indoors, or eat, or anything. How would he get them back from Patrick, who, quite obviously, was not a fit person to have charge of them? Nice as he was, as a friend, he just wasn’t fit. It must be because he didn’t take them seriously yet. He simply didn’t seem to realize that they were people.
When the bell rang Omri still hadn’t come to any decision. He hurried back into school. Patrick was nowhere to be seen. Omri looked round for him frantically. Maybe he’d gone into the washroom to be private and give the men something to eat. Omri went in there and called him softly, but there was no answer. He returned to his place in the classroom. There was no sign of Patrick. And there was no further sign of him till about halfway through the lesson – not one word of which Omri took in, he was so worried.
At last, when the teacher turned her back to write on the board, Patrick slipped round a partition, rushed across the room silently and dropped into his chair.
“Where the hell have you been?” asked Omri under his breath.
“In the music-room,” said Patrick smugly. The musicroom was not a room at all, but a little alcove off the gym in which the musical instruments were stored, together with some of the bulkier apparatus like the jumping horse. “I sat under the horse and fed them,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Only they weren’t very hungry.”
“I bet they weren’t!” said Omri, “after all they’d been through!”
“Cowboys and Indians are used to rough treatment,” Patrick retorted. “Anyway, I left some food in my pocket for later if they want it.”
“It’ll get all squashy.”
“Oh, so what? Don’t fuss so much, they don’t mind!”
“How do you know what they mind?” said Omri hotly, forgetting to whisper. The teacher turned round.
“Oh ho, so there you are, Patrick! And where have you been, may I enquire?”
“Sorry, Miss Hilton.”
“I didn’t ask if you were sorry. I asked where you’d been.”
Patrick coughed and lowered his head. “In the washroom,” he mumbled.
“For nearly twenty minutes? I don’t believe you! Are you telling me the truth?” Patrick mumbled something. “Patrick, answer me. Or I’ll send you to the headmaster.”
This was the ultimate threat. The headmaster was very fierce and could make you feel five centimetres high. So Patrick said, “I was in the music-room, and that’s true. And I forgot the time.”
And that’s not true, added Omri silently. Miss Hilton was nobody’s fool. She knew it too.
“You’d better go and see Mr Johnson,” she said. “Omri, you go too, chattering away there as usual. Tell him I said you were both disturbing the class and that I’m tired of it.”
They got up silently and walked through the tables, while all the girls giggled and the boys smirked or looked sorry for them, according to whether they liked them or not. Omri glanced at Patrick under his eyebrows. They were for it now.
Outside the headmaster’s office they stopped.
“You knock,” whispered Omri.
“No, you,” retorted Patrick.