My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (20 page)

“But we're going to make sure we get Yatesy later. Remember? That was the deal.”

“I'm going with Kirsty,” he says flatly. “She's got a plan. You haven't.”

“But I have,” I say. “Listen, I'll give you an example of a rough sketch I've come up with for getting you to the dance. It's not ideal or anything, it's just to prove I can come up with the goods.”

He looks at me without saying anything, but I can't tell if that's because he's got nothing to say or if it's because the chips have formed into putty in his mouth, like they did in mine.

“Here's what you'd do,” I say, and in my desperation I lay out Uncle Ray's idiot plan about pretending to be ill. Replacing the rope ladder with a real ladder of course.

He looks quite impressed for a minute, still trying to make inroads on the mouth putty, and then, when he's cleared a good enough space in it, he says to me, “I live up on the tenth floor. Hillside Towers.”

I just stare at him. I find myself going down the bampot road of thinking about getting the fire brigade involved, or something like that. Surely Uncle Ray must know someone in the fire brigade.

“It's just an example,” I say, a bit too loudly. “We're not actually going to use it. It's just to show you I'll come up with something.”

“It's the worst idea I've ever heard,” he says. “I think you're losing it, Jackdaw. If that's the caliber of your thinking, it's just as well Kirsty came along.”

“But I didn't come up with that,” I tell him. “It was my uncle Ray. I've been living at my cousin's place, and my uncle's insane. And listen to all the forks in here, Cyrus. You probably haven't noticed it before, but when you really start listening . . . And they close up the library at lunchtime. Did you know that? Two more days, Cyrus. Three more days. All you have to do is back up my cousin's story. Then my mum and dad will have sorted everything out, and I can go back home, and I'll come up with a zinger. I promise.”

He looks at me kind of sadly. “You're freaking me out now,” he says. “I've got to go, Jackdaw.”

“Everybody hates you, Cyrus,” I tell him, and he carries his tray off to another table and leaves me sitting there on my own. And I know that's the end of it now. No doubt about it.

I don't have the heart to skip maths and spend the rest of the afternoon in the library. I know my wave of good fortune has run its course, and the way my luck is now I'd probably get caught and suspended if I tried it. So I do the zombie walk to the maths class and just sit in there watching pigeons out in the playground. I start to hope Cyrus doesn't tell anyone else about the ladder idea—I really don't want anyone to find out about that—and I try to think of a way to convince him to keep quiet about it. Then I find myself attempting to adapt it into something workable again, while Mrs. Cunningham breaks out the quadratic equations or something like that.

I think Cyrus was right. I think I must be losing it.

When the bell rings for the end of the day, I do the zombie walk again toward the school gate and wish it was twenty-four hours later. By then Kirsty Wallace will have done her thing, Chris Yates will be expelled, Harry will be confined to a life of misery, and I can stop thinking of ways to get everyone out of it all. I can stop thinking about abseiling equipment and bungee cords, boom lifts and basket cranes, and numerous other kinds of mental ways to bring Cyrus down safely from a ten-story window in Hillside Towers.

And then things get even worse.

I'm quite near the gate, just at the bottom of the slope leading up to them, when Sandy Hammil appears beside me and says, “Heard you spent the day in the library. I heard you were studying love poems to recite for Elsie Green.”

I can tell he's just joking, trying to make me laugh so we can start being friends again, but I'm really not in the mood for it. He's got me just at the wrong point in time. And I smack him in the mouth.

He looks sort of stunned. He just stands there staring at me for a minute, as if he's not able to believe what's happened. Then
he
smacks
me
in the mouth. Hard. And then
I'm
kind of stunned, just standing there staring at
him,
even more unable to believe what's just happened. And then the crowd arrives. Suddenly we're at the center of an ever-expanding donut, and all I can hear is the sound of people running from all over the school, and the sound of those who've already arrived shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Nothing much happens for a bit after that. I stand looking at Sandy and he stands looking at me, and I hear people shouting things like, “Hit him, Jackdaw!” and “Kick him in the balls, Sandy!” But we both just keep standing there, looking at each other.

“I was only joking, you prick,” Sandy says. “I was about to tell you I'm glad you're studying at last.”

“I'm not studying,” I tell him. “Only pricks study. Pricks like you.”

“Use your own words,” he says. “Don't use my words.” Then he sort of comes at me. He starts pushing me against the wall of bodies behind me, and doing this weird dragging-me-about thing. I'm not exactly sure what he's trying to do, but I start pushing him back toward the wall of bodies behind him, and we struggle about like that for a good few minutes.

“Are you fighting or shagging?” somebody shouts, and somebody else tells me to put a thumb in Sandy's eye. But there's only really one thing I hear being shouted that has any effect on me. Something that starts with the randoms near the back of the crowd and gradually makes its way forward. Just one word: “Bailey!”

Then two words: “Bailey's coming!”

I only become aware of it gradually, but as soon as I do I stop pushing Sandy about.

“Sober up,” I tell him. “We've got to break it up. I'm on my final warning.”

“Good,” Sandy says, and he hits me properly then. Full in the face. I forget all about Bailey for the time being. All I can see is the red mist, and I hit him back. And I hit him properly now too. The crowd likes that, and the shouting gets wilder. Sandy grabs hold of me and starts doing the strange swinging-about thing again, and that's when I start to feel the crowd parting behind me. It's quite a bizarre sensation, but I know exactly what it means as soon as it starts. I know someone's coming through to the center of the circle, and no one in the crowd has any intention of stopping them.

“We've got to quit,” I tell Sandy again, but he holds me even tighter and swings me about even more. “Get off me,” I say, trying as hard as I can to break free and do a Yatesy. But I'm too late. Before I know what's happening, a man hand reaches out and grabs me by the arm, pulling me hard and freeing me at last from Sandy's grip. Bailey's got me. He starts pulling me backwards so's I can't see where I'm going. My head tips back, and all I can see is the sky. Then he's bumping me through the crowd, smashing me off various randoms as we go, cracking me into their arms and their backs and their legs while I'm struggling to get free and still somehow believing there's a point in trying to make a run for it.

When we get out of the crowd, I'm still facing the wrong way. I keep trying to turn round, but he's pulling me too quickly and it's all I can do to make sure a foot touches the ground now and again while I continue to stare up at the sky. Eventually I feel myself being forced through a door and pushed down onto a seat, and I drop my head forward and try to catch my breath. I feel badly winded. My face is alive with pain, and blood drips down out of my nose.

I hold my nose shut with my hand and then look up, look out a window. I can't work out where I am at first, and then I have the most terrifying experience of my life. Everything outside the window suddenly starts rushing toward me, extremely fast, and I throw my free hand up in front of my face, expecting something to hit me. Expecting something to kill me. Nothing does, though. Nothing happens at all, and I slowly lower my hand again and realize I'm not in a classroom like I thought I was. In fact, I'm not in any kind of room at all. I'm in a car. I'm in a car being driven down the road outside the school, at a breakneck speed, and it suddenly becomes clear that it wasn't Bailey who was dragging me about after all. It was my uncle Ray. The big fat crazy bastard. And it's his car I'm in too. His opera-star taxi. And he's sitting beside me crunching the gears and flooring the accelerator and laughing like a hyena who's just heard the funniest joke in the world.

“Boy oh boy,” Uncle Ray shouts. “You're the man, Jackie. You . . . are . . . the . . . man!”

I don't really feel like the man. I feel as if I'm about to burst into tears. My face is in agony, and my nose won't stop bleeding.

“What a punch!” Uncle Ray says. “What a crack! You really showed that ball sack. You were on fire, Jack.”

“He's not really a ball sack,” I say. “He's my best pal. Usually.”

Uncle Ray slaps his hands together. “Fantastic!” he shouts. “Even better. There's nothing like a good punch-up to deepen a friendship. You're a chip off the old block, Jackdaw.”

He takes one hand off the wheel and pushes my chin up without looking at me. “Tip your head back,” he says. “That's it. And pinch your nose. Now you've got it. Just stay like that till it stops bleeding. It won't take long.”

I hear him rummaging about in the glove compartment while I'm staring at the roof. There's a screech of brakes and the blast of a horn, and then he drops a packet of hankies onto my lap and tells me to hold one up against my nose. He shouts out the window for a while, and when he's finished I ask him if he knows whether Bailey caught Sandy or not.

“I don't think so,” he says. “I think he legged it. What's with that headmaster, anyway? What's his game? You've got to let a fight run its course in the playground. That's why there's so much disruption in the classrooms nowadays. Too much pent-up aggression. If I was running a school . . .”

He carries on babbling while I fish out a hankie with one hand and take my phone out with the other. I manage to get the phone up in front of my face and send off a text to Sandy.

“Did Bailey get you?” it says.

If he did, it doesn't make much difference that Uncle Ray got me out of there before Bailey reached us. As long as he got Sandy I'm in exactly the same position as Chris Yates, and my long and illustrious academic career is probably at an end.

“Ten years I've been picking my boy up from school,” Uncle Ray continues. “Ten years, and not once has he done me the honor of being in a punch-up when I arrive. But you, Jack! Two days! It broke my heart to have to pull you out of there. What were you fighting about anyway—a girl?”

“Probably,” I say. “I don't really know.”

He sounds delighted. “Fighting just for the joy of fighting!” he says. “That's exactly the way it should be. Who needs a reason, Jack? Am I right?”

I want to tell him he's probably not, but it would be more trouble than it would be worth, so I just make a vague noise. He is right about one thing, though: he certainly knows what he's talking about when it comes to fighting injuries. My nose stops bleeding in a matter of minutes, and I let my head fall forward slowly, keeping the tissue under my nose and waiting for it to start up again, but it doesn't. I pull down the sunshade with the mirror on it to have a look at my face, and it doesn't look as bad as I expected it to. It doesn't look nearly as bad as it feels, and it certainly doesn't look as bad as Uncle Ray's. There's no black eye, no swollen chin. Maybe all of that will come later, but at the moment it looks fine. I use the tissue to clean off the crusty blood round about my nostrils, and then I push the sunshade back up again while Uncle Ray carries on ranting about his pipsqueak son.

“Where
is
Harry anyway?” I ask, and Uncle Ray tells me he's walking home.

“He always walks when we've had a blowout,” he says. “He's a real huff merchant. Can't take a bit of fun.”

It's only then that I remember about the ruin of my grand scheme. All the fight madness had cleared it out of my head for a little while, but thinking about Harry and the mess I've left him in brings it all rushing back. And now I've got all that unhappiness as well as the pain in my face to contend with. Plus, I'm pretty sure Sandy's nonreply to my text means he's sitting in Bailey's office at this very moment, organizing my expulsion. I stare out at the road and again feel like bursting into tears.

“I'll tell you what we'll do here,” Uncle Ray says. “I'm going to take you to the pub, Jack. We'll have a few beers, have a few laughs. This calls for a celebration. You're a man now. No landlord in the country can refuse you entry to their pub this afternoon. I'll take you to Billy's place.”

Thankfully, he stops talking for a little while then. I don't know if I could have taken much more of it. Unfortunately, though, the silence itself is short-lived. Almost immediately he puts some opera on the car stereo and starts warbling along with it, taking both hands off the wheel now and again to give full expression to whatever he thinks he's singing. I try desperately to come up with a way out of this pub thing, but we're already heading away from home, over in another part of town. He stops at a set of traffic lights, and I wonder if I could just open the door and run away. I could tell him later on I'd sustained a concussion in the fight and I went temporarily mad. Maybe he's so engrossed in the opera that he won't even notice I'm gone.

I look around at the street and wonder where I would head for, where would be the best place to take shelter. Then I see Cyrus out there. He's walking along the sidewalk with his dad, and he sees me sitting in the taxi and gives me the finger. I try to look at him in a friendly way and give him a friendly wave, aware that I want him back on my side to prevent him telling anyone about the ladder idea. He keeps looking at me, as if he's trying to decide whether to return the friendly gesture or not. Then he comes to his decision and gives me the finger again.