My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (2 page)

“Sit down,” he says, and he puts the book back on its shelf. “This is now available if anyone else would like to come out here,” he says, and he glares at the zombie faces again. “No one? All right. Let's keep it that way. Get back to your projects.” And he flips another page on his big chart book and carries on with his scribbling.

Mark turns to look at me with narrowed eyes, and I quickly manufacture another note for him.

“I'm sure I've heard Bronson talking about Objective-C,” it says, but I can't even get Mark to look at it. I have to resort to threatening to tickle him, which he knows will cause him to laugh his way to the book punishment, before he makes any response.

His lips go thin, and he starts writing. “Of course he mentions it,” he scribbles. “That doesn't mean he teaches it. What class have you been in all year?”

He leaves the note lying on his desk—doesn't even pass it across to me—and I have to lean over just to read it. I'm pretty surprised when I decipher its contents. Bronson bangs on so much about apps being made of Objective-C, I'd been sure he was trying to teach us it. I must pay even less attention in there than I thought I did. I know I zone out quite a bit, but this is pretty spectacular. I suppose that's the thing about being an ideas machine: you can't really see the sense in spending too much of your time listening to a teacher telling you about other people's ideas.

The main thing is always to make sure you're looking after your own brain waves.

The double history feels like it goes on forever. A few more randoms have close shaves with the heavy book, but nobody actually ends up out there holding it. Emma Wilkinson gets closest when she accidentally drops her pencil and it rolls all the way across the floor to the other side of the classroom. She decides to go and find it without asking the Sergeant first, and he goes full-scale mental. Emma makes such a hash of apologizing, though, even starting to cry at one point, that the Sergeant lets her off with a warning, and calm descends on us once more. When the bell rings, and the whole sorry ordeal finally draws to a close, I grab hold of Mark before I gather up my stuff, and we walk along the corridor together.

“What about that idiotic gang of yours?” I ask him. “Surely one of those guys must know Objective-C.”

He shakes his head as if I've just wandered into his chess club and set up a game of draughts. It's a bit much, but I power through. I need to know whatever he can tell me.

“There's pretty much only one person in the whole school who knows Objective-C,” he says. “Some of the teachers might, but there's only one pupil.”

“I only need one,” I tell him. “That's all I'm looking for.”

“Not this one,” he says. “You'd be better off forgetting about it.”

“Who is it?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “You should dream up something else,” he says. “You don't want to know.”

I stop walking and grab hold of his elbow. He gets a little bit of the ghost look again, although not quite as much as he had in Monahan's class. “Just tell me who it is,” I say. “Let me judge whether I want to know or not.”

He pulls his arm away and makes a show of brushing the sleeve of his jacket. I stand waiting, and eventually he says just one word to me, the name I've been asking him for.

“Greensleeves.”

I nod at him slowly and then let him walk away. Greensleeves. Elsie Green. Bloody hell.

The school canteen is over in the new block, so Sandy gets a head start on me lunchwise. By the time I drag my terrifying sausage and onions over to his table, he's already halfway through his ordeal.

“All right?” he asks me, and I nod as I pull out a chair and sit down. He points his fork at my sad-looking sponge cake while he's doing battle with a mouthful of misery, and when he manages to clear some of it away he tells me I won't be needing the cake today.

“Why not?” I ask him, and he opens a plastic tub that's sitting on the table.

“Hospitality muffins,” he says.

They look good. In fact, they look so good, I consider bypassing the sausage and onions altogether and just making a lunch of the muffins. I realize I'm pretty much starving from all the brain work I've done that morning, though, so I pinch my nose and get started on the main course.

“How was Monahan?” Sandy asks. “Who got the book?”

“Fritter Mackenzie,” I say. “Emma Wilkinson almost got it, but she started crying and Monahan caved.”

Sandy looks surprised. “If I was in that guy's class, I'd write to the European Parliament,” he says. “He needs stopping.”

“Probably,” I agree, “but the more time he spends on the craziness, the less time we spend on the history. That can't be all bad.”

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.

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 starving. 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.