My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (3 page)

It was like being trapped in a nightmare or something. I kept bumping into people whose jobs seemed to be to test the whiskey, judging by the way they were staggering around and singing to themselves and everything. I passed a section where a bunch of people were just sitting sadly sticking labels onto strangely shaped bottles by hand. Over and over again. And I watched someone mopping up the broken glass and spilt whisky from a dropped bottle, and dumping it all into this metal bin, and then someone else came along and dipped a jam jar in there and started drinking the bin whisky, all full of dirt and everything.

I suppose you have to get through the days somehow in a place like that. I was just glad to get out of there alive, and s­chool didn't seem nearly so bad as usual on that particular day.

It was quite an experience.

“It's a good living,” I hear my dad shouting downstairs, as the Madness continues to flourish. “He could do a lot worse.”

“No he couldn't,” Mum shouts back. “It might be a living, but it's no kind of a life.”

“What do you mean by that?” Dad asks her.

“What do you think I mean?” she replies.

“Do you want him to spend his life at a desk?” Dad says. “All huddled up?”

“I want him to contribute something to society,” Mum tells him. “Something other than liver damage.”

And on it goes.

The thing is, though, I've been into the place where my mum works too. Quite a few times now. She's managed to get me in there using all kinds of excuses, but I'm pretty sure her real motivation is to try to get me hooked on the place, to let some of its charm rub off on me, in the hope I'll want to work somewhere like that myself one day. I have to be honest: so far it hasn't worked. The best way I can describe it is to say it's pretty much like school for grownups. School without any of the good bits. In fact, it wasn't until I'd been in there that I even realized school had any good bits. But now I see that it does. Having a laugh when the teacher's back is turned, looking out the window at pigeons attacking old sausage rolls in the playground, just generally daydreaming and working on your crazy ideas. There doesn't appear to be any of that going on at Mum's work. It's pretty much just the sitting-at-your-desk-doing-your-project type stuff, slowly losing your mind from the boredom. You can't even dress like a normal person in there. No wonder the pigment in my hair started to die when I realized I'd be going to my dad's place if I duffed the exams, and a place like my mum's if I pulled off a miracle and somehow managed to pass them.

I'm amazed I didn't go gray overnight.

“People will always want to drink whiskey,” Dad shouts in the kitchen.

“They will as long as they're living with people like you,” Mum responds.

I consider going down there and asking them to stop fighting over whose world is the best one, telling them they've both been an inspiration to me. The only problem is, they might ask me what I mean by it, and I'd have to explain that I'm so terrified by both their worlds, I've been forced to become a spectacular ideas man. I don't know if they'd like that answer. So I lie on and continue to listen to it, and eventually I come to quite a radical decision: I decide I'm going to have to bite the bullet and attempt to hook up with Elsie Green. I can't let her insanity stand in the way of my escape from this insanity. So I do what I can to filter out the Regular Madness, and I call up my ideas machinery. Then I set to work on coming up with a plan that will somehow convince Elsie to forget all about what's transpired between us in the past and do some programming to help me out on the big idea.

Success!

I amaze even myself sometimes.

One day, when I'm famous for all these incredible ideas I keep having, they'll probably have me on TV or something to ask me where my brain waves come from. I'll have to tell them I don't know.

“What about techniques?” they'll say. “Do you have any methods for bringing ideas on? A system of some kind?”

“I just try to keep the front bit of my brain occupied,” I'll say. “As long as you do that, the back bit can get on with sorting things out, undisturbed. Then it just sends a sizzler through to the front part when it's ready.”

They might even ask me to demonstrate having an idea right there and then, in the studio, but I'll probably refuse. Not because I couldn't do it, but just to maintain the mystique.

Does it mean you're going mad when you start imagining things like that?

Maybe it does, but the technique I imagine telling them about is exactly how it works for me, and that's exactly how it happened while I was lying on my bed waiting for the download on how to make amends with Elsie Green.

There was a spider up on the ceiling, almost directly above my head, and I was watching it trying to deal with two of its legs that wouldn't grip onto the paint up there. Six of its legs were doing fine, but these other two just wouldn't cooperate. The spider kept moving along a little bit, and forcing the two weirdo legs back up against the paint in a new spot, but they'd just slip down and hang off a little bit again. I was trying to come up with some kind of solution for what you could paint onto those feet, to make them properly sticky, when the solution for what I could give Elsie to get on her good side smacked me hard. It's just like I said: keep the front bit of the brain busy and the back bit will get on with delivering the juicy stuff.

It never fails.

So first thing in the morning, on my way to school, I take a detour at the bridge and head for the bookshop there, to start putting my plan into action.

It's open, but only just, I think. I'm the only customer, and the owner's sitting up at the back of the shop, eating a bowl of cereal and warming his feet in front of an electric heater that's blowing his wispy hair about all over the place. I stand amongst the shelves for a while until I begin to get dizzy, then give up on being able to find anything myself and reluctantly approach the owner.

He looks at me as if I've wandered into the living room of his house, the little wisps of hair flapping up and down on his forehead like they're waving to me.

“I'm looking for something to do with medieval times,” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says. Nothing else. He doesn't even say it like a question, just pops it out and then continues to stare at me.

I'm not exactly sure what to do next, so I just say it back to him.

“Yes.”

Then we look at each other for what seems like ages, until I'm the one who cracks.

“Have you got anything like that?” I ask him. “To do with the Middle Ages?”

“Are you looking for something
from
the Middle Ages? Or something
about
the Middle Ages?”

I think it over.

“Either,” I say, and he starts up with the staring thing again. I'm just getting ready to give up on the whole enterprise when he turns away from me and starts typing things into an ancient-looking computer on his desk. The monitor is huge and yellow, with a big bit sticking out of the back like on my grandpa's television, but when I lean forward to see what he's doing I notice the screen is tiny. He glances up at me and gives me a look as if I've suddenly materialized in his bathroom while he's sitting on the toilet, so I lean back again and wait for him to give me the results.

“
Medieval Poetry: Love Songs of the Troubadours
?” he says, and I imagine handing that over to Greensleeves. Very likely to give her the wrong impression, I think, and I stick my bottom lip out.

“What else?” I ask him, and he looks at me disdainfully and batters the yellow keyboard again. He stops for a moment and stares at the screen, frowning, then mutters something to himself and punches the same key about fifteen times.

“
A History of Plague: Agony of the Black Death in Medieval Europe
?”

That seems to me a bit far in the other direction. It doesn't quite strike the note of reconciliation I'm looking for.

“What other ones are there?” I say, and he straightens up and moves away from the computer.

“That's it,” he tells me. “Take your pick.”

“Two books?” I say, but he doesn't respond. He's already opened a magazine and started reading it. I screw up my face and try to think. There only really seems to be one way I can go.

“I'll take the poetry one,” I tell him, and he nods.

It takes him forever to find the thing. He goes over and stands in front of a shelf in the middle of the shop and doesn't move for about twenty minutes. Maybe his eyes move—I can't really tell from where I'm standing—but he certainly doesn't move his head. Then, just when I'm starting to wonder if he's got narcolepsy or something, he lets out a loud groan and stomps back to the computer. After some furious punching, he calls it a “butthole” and then storms over to a wooden cabinet thing where he pulls out lots of different drawers, hunting through all these little pieces of cardboard. Eventually he carries one piece of cardboard across to another part of the shop and stretches up to a high shelf which he can't quite reach. By this time he's starting to lose his mind.

“What do you want this thing for, anyway?” he asks me, and I tell him it's for a school project. He mutters something incomprehensible about school and then drags a little set of steps across the wooden floor. I think it hits him on the shin or something, because before he climbs up on it he shouts “Arse-cakes!” in quite a high yelpy voice. Then he finally gets hold of the book, brings it to the desk to put it in a paper bag, and takes six pounds off me. I thank him and get out of there as quickly as I can, checking my watch to see how late I am for school.

Headcase.

The morning passes at about two kilobytes per second. Megaslow. I have French and then geography, the two subjects I have even less interest in than all the others, if you can imagine that. There's one passable moment in geography, though, when Miss Voss gives us instructions to read a few pages in our textbooks about snow clouds or something, and I manage to slip out my purchase to have a proper look at it.

Despite the kind of worrying title, I actually feel quite pleased with it. There's a drawing on one of the pages, about halfway through, of this medieval random standing underneath a window, playing a weirdly shaped guitar. And the thing is, he's dressed almost exactly like Elsie Green dresses. He's wearing these kind of puffy sleeves, and a waistcoat sort of thing, and some of the bits inside the book even sound like the sort of thing Greensleeves would say. So I decide I'm on to a winner.

Lunchtime eventually comes, and this time I've got a good head start on Sandy because Voss's classroom is in the new block. By the time he arrives I'm already three-quarters of the way through my soggy pie, and Elsie Green is sitting over in her usual spot, staring off into eternity. Everything looks good.

“I can't believe Murchison,” Sandy mutters as he sits down. “Nothing's good enough for that guy.”

He starts talking about something to do with a chemistry experiment, a test tube falling off its stand or something, but pretty soon he catches on to the fact that I'm not really listening.

“What's with you, anyway?” he asks, and I pat the paper bag that's sitting on the table next to my tray.

“It's back on,” I say. “I'm getting ready to do battle with Elsie Green.”

He turns round in his seat and has a look at her. She keeps adjusting and readjusting the strange hat she's wearing, and from over here it looks as if she might even be talking to herself.

“Good luck with that,” Sandy says, turning back round and pummeling his steak pie. “Why does she dress like that? It's insane.”

I slip my book out of the bag and hunt for the picture I found earlier in geography. Then I spin the book round and push it across to Sandy.

“No way!” he says. “It's her.”

I nod and slap the book shut, then pop it back in the bag and shove my chair out from the table. “Wish me luck,” I say, and I get to my feet.

“You'll need it,” Sandy replies, and I walk off into the storm.

According to my grandpa, the best way to do something scary is to do it without hesitating. One quick move. He mainly applies his philosophy to removing plasters when you're a kid, but he says it doesn't matter whether it's a plaster or jumping out of a plane—it's all the same. One quick move. Maybe he's right. It's not how I decide to go about this thing with Elsie Green, though. Instead, I pull out the chair beside hers without disturbing her bizarre rapture, then sit down quietly and clear my throat a little bit.

“Look at him!” she says, and at first I think she's talking about me, telling me I've got a nerve approaching her like this. But the madness that follows soon convinces me I'm wrong.

“Have you ever seen such unspoiled virtue?” she asks. “And such modesty? He makes me want to live a better life. Look at how he blushes. Like the petal of a rose. He makes me want to do something heroic.”

I disguise my voice a little bit, in the hope she won't know it's me, and ask her who we're talking about. I have the idea that if we're already having a conversation before she realizes who she's talking to, she might not just get up and walk off at the first opportunity.

“Drew Thornton,” she says. “See how his hair cascades to his shoulders? And his eyes! Oh my god.” Then things take a turn for the worse, if you can get your head round that. She starts asking me if I can imagine the ecstasy of seeing such innocence disrobed. Something like that. Something that means can I imagine him in the buff, anyway.

“I'd give up twenty years of my life to bear witness to that,” she says. “Wouldn't you?”

“Well . . .” I say, “probably not, really.” And I'm finding the whole thing so bizarre, I even forget to sound like someone else. Elsie turns round then and sees who she's dealing with.