Contents
2 All goody-goody and old-fashioned
6 ‘Why are you torturing him like this?’
8 A little, secretive, one-person crime wave
1
Bad News Bear
I’m not a total lame-brain. Nor am I intergalactically stupid. And I don’t go wimpeyed and soggy-nosed when bad things happen to me. But I confess, as I looked round the dismal swamp that was to be my new classroom, I did feel a little bit cheesy. Oh, yes. I was one definite Bad News Bear.
‘Lovely news, everyone!’
Miss Tate clapped her hands and turned to the lines of dim-bulbs staring at me over their grubby little desks.
‘We have somebody new this term,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that nice?’ She beamed. ‘And here he is. He’s just flown in from America and his name is Howard Chester.’
‘Chester Howard,’ I corrected her.
But she wasn’t listening. She was busy craning round the room, searching for a spare desk. And I couldn’t be bothered to say it again. I reckoned she was probably bright enough to pick it up in time. So I just carried my stuff over to the empty desk she was pointing towards, in the back row.
‘And that’s Joe Gardener beside you,’ Miss Tate cooed after me.
‘Hi, Gardener Joe,’ I muttered, as I sat down.
It was a joke. But he was clearly even more of a bean-brain than Miss Tate.
‘Not Gardener Joe,’ he whispered. ‘Joe Gardener.’
I didn’t have the energy to explain.
‘Oh. Right,’ I said. And my spirits sank straight in my boots, setting a personal (and possibly a world) record for getting to hate a new school. I’ve moved more times than you’ve watched Sesame Street. I’ve managed bookish schools, and sporty schools, and schools where the teachers keep hunkering down to your level to look you in the eye and ask you how you really feel. I even managed four months in a school where no one else spoke English. But I never took against a place so fast as I took against Walbottle Manor (Mixed).
Some Manor! I reckon the building was designed by someone who was taking a rest from doing morgues and abattoirs. The walls were shiny brown and shiny green. (The shiny made it worse.) The windows hadn’t been washed since 1643. And all the paintings pinned up round the room looked like eight sorts of pig dribble.
But, hey. Nowhere’s perfect.
I gave Gardener Joe a nudge. ‘So what’s she like?’
‘Who?’
I nodded towards the front. ‘Her, of course. Crock at the top.’
He stared at me. ‘Miss Tate? She’s very nice.’
My turn to stare. Was my new neighbour touched with the feather of madness, or what? Here was this epic windbag, droning on and on about whose turn it was to be the blackboard monitor, or some other such great thrill, and Gardener Joe was sticking up for her. I knew right away that this was the sort of school where everyone lines up quietly to do something really exciting, like opening the door for a teacher. And if you gave them something wild to play with, like a wobbly chair, they’d probably be happy all through break.
I looked at my watch.
‘Six hours,’ I muttered bleakly. ‘Six whole hours!’
Joe Gardener turned my way. ‘Six hours till what?’
‘Till I can complain to my mother,’ I explained.
‘Complain?’
‘About this place.’
His face crumpled up in bewilderment. ‘But why complain?’
And he was right, of course. Why bother to complain? It never gets me anywhere. ‘Marry the woman, marry the job,’ my father always says.
‘But I didn’t marry her. You did,’ I point out to him. ‘So why should I suffer?’
‘It could be worse,’ he warns. ‘Your mother could get fired. Then we might be stuck here for ever.’
That usually snaps me out of it pretty fast.
‘You’ll like it here,’ this Joe was telling me. ‘We do a lot of art.’
I stared at the pig dribble pictures. ‘Oh. Very nice.’
‘And we have fun at break.’
‘Watching the puddles dry?’
Joe’s puzzled look came back to take another quick bow. And then he finished up: ‘And we have singing on Fridays.’
‘No kidding? Not sure I can wait that long.’
But this Joe Gardener was turning out to be a bit of a sarcasm-free zone.
‘I feel that way sometimes myself,’ he said. ‘But wait and see. It’ll come round so fast.’
His eyes shone as if he were talking about his birthday, or Christmas.
‘Singing on Fridays,’ I said. ‘Right. I’ll remember that when things get grim.’ And I looked up to see how we were doing with today’s great excitement – choosing the blackboard monitor.
‘So that’s agreed, then, is it?’ Miss Tate was saying. ‘Flora this week, and Ben the week after.’
I suppose, when something of world-shattering importance like this is decided, it’s always best to check things one last time.
‘Everyone happy with that?’
I’d have put money on the fact that no dill-brain in the world could give a flying crumpet who was blackboard monitor, this week or next. But – whoa there! I was wrong. Quite wrong.
This hand beside me shoots up in the air. ‘Miss Tate?’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘I think it would be nice if Howard –’
‘Chester,’ I couldn’t help correcting.
But