My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (10 page)

“What are you doing here?” he asks me, and I try to tug my wrist out of his grip.

“I'm waiting for my friend,” I say.

“Which friend?”

“Paul Glover. He lives down there. He went back to get his jacket.”

“An hour ago?”

I try to think of some explanation for that, and then I just nod.

“I don't think so,” the old man says. “I think you're casing the Green joint. You're part of a criminal syndicate.”

“A what?”

“A heist gang. I've been watching you. I know what's going on.”

“I'm only fifteen,” I tell him, and struggle with my wrist again. It feels like he's going to break it. There's no way that's not against my human rights.

“Fifteen!” he says, in that way, without laughing but sounding as if he is. I realize I should've used that myself. Right back when he said “casing the Green joint.” Or I could have said, “A criminal syndicate!” Or, “A heist gang!” Now it's too late. He's beaten me to it. I really need to get on top of that thing.

He starts trying to drag me along the sidewalk and into his driveway. He's still on the other side of the wall, in his garden, and he grits his little teeth as he pushes and pulls. They look all thin and sharp, like white pins or something.

“Come on,” he says, “I'm calling the police. You're waiting in here till they come. I've had enough of you.”

“I'm only waiting for my friend,” I tell him again, and tug and tug against his bony fingers. He screws his face up, exposing more of the little needle teeth, and then he starts to grunt. I reach out with my free hand and try to pry the bony witch fingers off my wrist.

“You're going down,” he tells me, and I bend one of the fingers back a little bit until he screams. I twist my wrist and pull, and suddenly I'm free.

“Murder!” he shouts, and I start running.

I run until I see a street turning off from the one I'm on, and then I nip down that one at a fair old speed. I keep doing the same thing every time a new street appears, and pretty soon I'm lost. I'm in a place I've never seen before, and I stop running for a minute and look about. Everything is quiet, and the little man is nowhere to be seen. I stand still, catching my breath and listening, but all I can hear are some birds tweeting and a couple of kids playing in a garden farther up the street. When my heart stops bumping, and breathing doesn't seem so difficult anymore, I realize I've escaped and start taking whichever turnings lead me back down the hill. I feel a bit annoyed that Operation Spot Elsie has been cut short, but it's balanced up by the relief of escaping the witch hand, and as I walk I start to feel pretty certain that Elsie must be all right anyway, because of her dad not being in mourning or anything like that. I could probably have called time on the job as soon as I saw him, and saved myself another half hour of sitting on that wall, along with all the mad stuff that followed. But as it turns out, the little witch man has done me a favor, anyway.

He's knocked all thoughts of the iPad out of my head, for the first time since I told Harry I'd get it back. And when I finally call it up again, I realize there's something new waiting for me there. A new thought. Not quite an idea, but the suggestion that I've been looking at the thing all wrong, trying to have the wrong idea. I've spent hour after hour wondering how to get the iPad back, forgetting that the iPad isn't really what's important. The iPad doesn't really matter. All that matters is getting Harry to tell Bailey he was in that fight. And the iPad is just one way to make him do that. But there must be others. Hundreds of others.

The thing is, I already had all the best ideas for getting the iPad back pretty soon after I lost it. And none of them worked. I offered Gary a double-or-quits bet, and he told me he didn't gamble.

“What about our bet?” I asked him.

“That wasn't gambling,” he said. “That was a certainty.”

So I came up with all kinds of tricks for getting it back off him at school, but none of them were any good because he doesn't bring the iPad to school. He only uses it at home. And the only option that left me was breaking into his house, which isn't really my style.

No, getting round Harry will be a breeze compared with getting that thing back. So as soon as I start recognizing where I am again, I start walking at different speeds to get the frequency of my brain waves locked into the ideal state, and then I give myself over to finding a new plan.

Nothing solid comes to me, but I know it will. That's just how things are. I'm an ideas man. It's only knowing what idea to have that sometimes muddles me up.

Dad's still out in the garden when I finally get home again. He's over in the corner, banging at something fragile-looking with a wooden mallet. I try to sneak in through the gate without him noticing me, but it doesn't work. Before I'm halfway down the path, he turns round and holds the mallet up in the air, waving it about as if it's some kind of welcoming flag. Then he uses the other hand to call me over to where he is. He looks like a demented traffic cop who's totally lost the plot.

“I better get in,” I tell him. “I'm feeling pretty tired.”

“Two minutes,” he says. “I need to check something with you.”

I sigh and go a bit closer to where he's standing. There's all this broken stuff lying on the grass, the stuff he's been hitting with the mallet. I don't have a clue what any of it is. It looks a bit like hard cottage cheese.

“Come here,” he says, and he's not happy until I'm standing right up against him. Then he starts with the whispering again. “Not a word to your mum about earlier,” he says. “She's back home now. Remember, this is between us.”

I stare down at the smashed-up cottage cheese stuff.

“I think I have to tell her,” I say. “It's giving me hypertension thinking up lies. It's going to spoil my performance in the interview.”

“Nonsense,” Dad says. “You'll be fine. You can tell her when it's over.”

I shake my head. He looks at me and I stare at his mallet. “What's all that stuff you've been breaking up?” I ask him.

“Just bits and pieces,” he says. “Just getting things off my list.”

I notice what look like peanut shells lying in amongst the cottage cheese too. Then I look up at my dad—not quite at his eyes, just at his mouth or something.

“I think I'd better tell her,” I say, and I start walking back toward the path. He doesn't look very happy, but that can't be helped. Rather that than a lifetime of label-sticking.

“Don't, Jack,” he says, still in a sort of whisper. “I'll owe you one.”

I avoid looking back and head into the house. I half expect him to follow me, but he doesn't. There's a moment of quiet and then the banging starts up again, the cottage cheese and peanuts taking the full brunt of his frustration.

I find Mum upstairs in her bedroom, sitting in front of the mirror twisting bits of rubber into her hair.

“Listen to that bloody noise,” she says. “It's driving me crazy. What the hell's he doing out there, anyway?”

“Working on his list,” I say. “What's that you're putting in your hair?”

“Rubber things,” she says. “I got them at the shops. I don't know if they work.”

“They look weird,” I tell her. “Are you going to wear them outside?”

She tuts. “You don't wear them. You put them in to make curls, then you take them out again.”

I nod. I pick one of them up off her table and look at it. It's kind of bendy. That's the sort of idea I'd like to come up with one day. Simple. I'll probably look online later to see who invented them in the first place. I might stick their picture in my book of role models. Successful ideas people.

“I need to tell you something about Dad,” I say, and Mum half turns away from the mirror, still keeping her eyes on the reflection of the blue thing she's twisting in.

“What's that?” she asks. “What's he been doing now?”

And then it hits me. The zinger. My brain starts to tingle, and my fingers go all warm. I feel the familiar sensations before I'm even aware the idea is there, and then the idea makes itself heard. Loud and clear. The brain freeze has thawed. I'm back in action.

“He . . .” I say, quickly trying to think up something different to tell her, “I think he's gone a bit mad. I think he's smashing up cottage cheese on the lawn. You should probably call somebody.”

“It's been a long time coming,” Mum mutters, and I tell her I have to rush off for a minute.

I clatter down the stairs two and three at a time and then haul the front door open. Dad hears it and turns round, kneeling on the grass with his mallet raised midattack. I walk quickly over to him.

“What did she say?” he whispers. “Is it all off?”

I stay quiet for a moment, and he lowers the hammer.

“I didn't tell her,” I say, and I watch the look of surprise appearing on his face. He tries to work out whether he can believe me or not, then gets up on his feet and drops the mallet down into the grass.

“You didn't?” he says. “Seriously?”

I nod, and he slaps me on the back.

“You're a good boy,” he says. “The best. You'll love it in there once you get started. I know you will.”

“Maybe,” I say, severely doubting it. “But you know when you told me you'd owe me one?”

“When?”

“When I said I had to tell Mum. You said you'd owe me one if I didn't.”

“Did I?” he says. He doesn't really look as if he believes me, but I power on.

“I think I might need your help now,” I tell him. “I think I might need to call in that favor.”

He doesn't look very happy. He obviously didn't mean he would owe me one at all. But he knows how easy it would be for me to go back upstairs and fill Mum in on all the finer details of the interview, so he sticks with it. He looks over his shoulder at his handiwork lying on the grass, then turns back to face me.

“All right,” he says at last, bending down to pick up his mallet, “what have I let myself in for this time? What is it you're after? Let's hear it.”

Half an hour later, I'm sitting in the car with my dad, a few doors down from Gary Crawford's house. The engine's turned off and I've explained the plan to Dad twice, once back at the house and once on the way here. He seems to understand it. He's not particularly happy about it, but he seems to understand it.

“Are you ready to go?” I ask him, and he holds up a hand to let me know he can't answer while his mouth's full. He chews noisily, continuing to hold up one finger of the hand, and then he swallows.

“Just let me finish this,” he says. “I need my vitamins.”

He insisted on stopping halfway here to buy a six-inch medium pan pizza. He told me it was impossible for him to go into an operation like this on an empty stomach, and he tried to get me to have a pizza too. I told him I don't go into operations like this while I'm still digesting. It clouds the mind, and I tried to get him to see sense and wait till we were finished. But he told me it was each man to his own, and went ahead with his own way of doing things.

I sit and watch the windows steaming up, anxious just to get on with the thing. Then I start chattering to try and pass the time.

“Is it against your human rights if someone grabs hold of your wrist and won't let go?” I ask my dad.

He frowns while he decides which slice of pizza to pick up next. “Depends why they did it, I suppose,” he says.

“What if you were just sitting on their wall?” I ask. “What if you weren't doing anything wrong apart from that?”

“That seems fair enough,” he says. “Nobody wants somebody sitting on their wall.”

“But you can't just grab them, can you? Surely that's against their human rights.”

“You're obsessed by human rights,” Dad tells me. “Nobody had any human rights when I was young. Whose wall were you sitting on, anyway?”

“Just an old guy's,” I say, and hold my wrist out to show him. “Look, it's bruised. I think it might be sprained.”

He holds it up and then turns it over. He looks at the other side for a while and then turns it back. “You're hallucinating,” he tells me. “There's nothing wrong with it.” He rolls his own sleeve up and pushes his arm out in front of me. “Look at that,” he says. “That's a bruise.”

It certainly is. There's a big mark on his arm that looks like a full-scale hemorrhage.

“Can't even feel it,” he says. “Once you're working in the bottling hall, you'll get one of those nearly every day.”

He stuffs the last slice of pizza into his mouth, almost in one go, then screws up his napkins, puts them into the box, and folds the box shut. He chews and swallows, chews and swallows, has quite a serious choking fit, throws the empty pizza box full of napkins onto the back seat of the car, and tells me he's ready to go.

“I'll just have a quick smoke first,” he says, and he rolls down the window and pulls out a cigarette. One that obviously wasn't made in his crazy new machine.

I think it was finally giving up on getting the iPad back that left my brain with the room it needed to come up with a solution. That's quite often how it works. Once I'd switched over to looking for a way to get round Harry, there was no pressure on the thinking apparatus anymore. It could just get on with its work. And that's exactly what it did.

So the first part of the plan is that I ring Gary's doorbell while my dad stands off to the side, up against the wall of the house, facing out toward the road. We came up with that part together. If it's Gary who answers the door, I give a signal with my hand and Dad steps out beside me. If anyone else comes to the door, I ask if Gary's in, and when whoever it is goes to get him we swap places and my dad's standing there when Gary arrives.