Boom! by Mark Haddon
“You know something, Jimbo,” he said when I’d finished my story.
“What?”
“You are one gullible prat. If your sister told you that the sky was going to fall down, you’d go round wearing a crash helmet.”
“But…” I was feeling embarrassed now. “It could be true, couldn’t it? I mean, it’s possible, right?”
“Well,” he said, “there’s only one thing to do. We have to find out what the teachers really think of you.” He wandered over to the far side of the room, shoved the bed aside, lifted a loose floorboard and extracted a small black object from the hole.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A walkie-talkie,” he replied. “And it’s going to solve this problem once and for all.”
“How?” I asked.
Charlie flicked a switch on the walkie-talkie and I heard his mum’s voice crackling out of the speaker: “…I don’t care what you say, that boy has got to learn his lesson. This week he’s trying to drive the car. Next week he’ll be burning the house down. Now, what do you fancy for supper? I’ve got some of the trout left over from the Kenyons’ wedding. I could rustle up some new potatoes and green beans – ”
Charlie flicked the switch off. “The other one’s in the kitchen, on top of the dresser.” He put the walkie-talkie back under the floorboards. “I use it to keep in touch with what’s going on down there in Parentland. Good, eh?”
“Brilliant,” I said. “But how is it going to help me?”
“Use your brain, Jimbo,” said Charlie, tapping his forehead. “We put one in the staff room.”
“Isn’t that a bit risky?” I said nervously. Things were bad enough already. If the teachers found me bugging their private conversations I’d be marched out of the school gates and banged up in Fenham before tea time.
“Course it’s risky,” said Charlie, shrugging his shoulders. “It wouldn’t be any fun if it wasn’t risky.”
I was halfway down the rope ladder when a light came on. There was an ominous thump and I looked up to see Charlie’s mum looming out of the staircase window.
She was carrying the secateurs she used for clipping her roses. “Good evening, Jim.” She smiled down at me. “And what a pleasant evening it is.”
“Er, yes,” I croaked. “Very pleasant.”
“Especially for climbing into people’s houses uninvited,” she tutted. “Why, Jim, I might have thought you were a burglar, mightn’t I? And if I’d thought you were a burglar, heaven knows what might have happened.”
I clambered down the ladder as fast as I could. It wasn’t fast enough. And this is what I mean about the flame-thrower temper. I’ve seen Charlie’s mum throw a breadboard across the kitchen during an argument. She just doesn’t operate according to the normal rules of being a grown-up.
I was couple of metres off the ground when she cut through one of the ropes of the ladder. I lost my footing and found myself dangling upside down. Then she cut the other rope and I hit the gravel, tearing the sleeve of my shirt and scraping the skin off my elbows.
As I ran for the front gate, I could hear her bellowing, “Charlie…! You get down here right now!” I just hoped she wasn’t holding the breadboard.
∨ Boom! ∧
3
Walkie-talkie
Charlie had the plan worked out like a bank heist.
He’d pop into the staff room at break and hide the walkie-talkie under a chair. The weekly teachers’ meeting began just after the end of school. When the playground was empty we’d slip into the athletics shed and tune in using the second walkie-talkie.
If they said nothing, I was in the clear and we’d fill Becky’s bike helmet with mayonnaise. If they mentioned my removal to Fenham, it was time to start doing three hours of homework a night and buying presents for all my teachers.
There were flaws in the plan, obviously. They might have more important things to talk about than me. They might have discussed my removal to Fenham last week. To be honest, I think Charlie was more interested in bugging the staff room than putting my mind at ease.
Worst of all we might be found by the caretaker. When Mr McLennan caught the Patterson twins in the athletics shed last year he simply pretended he hadn’t seen them and locked them in overnight. He was very nearly sacked but the headmistress reckoned it would help cut down vandalism if everyone knew there was a dangerous lunatic looking after the school buildings.
On the other hand, what else could I do? I had no brilliant plan of my own and at least I was doing something positive. Doing something positive, as Mum was always saying, is a jolly good thing. Much better than sitting around all day moping. Like a certain member of our family.
Besides, two people wanted to kill me. A secateur-wielding cook and a kung-fu death metal biker. One lived at Charlie’s house and the other spent a great deal of time at our flat. In the greater scheme of things the athletics shed was probably the safest place to be.
I met up with Charlie the following morning at the school gates just before assembly. His right hand was wrapped in a large white bandage, with faint bloodstains seeping through it. A hideous image flashed through my mind.
“Oh my God!” I said. “She cut your fingers off.”
“What?”
“With the secateurs.”
“No, no, no,” Charlie laughed, shaking his head. “She’s crazy, but she’s not that crazy. I tried to escape. I jumped over the window ledge and scrambled down the ladder. I thought I’d come back when she’d cooled off.”
“But she cut the ladder in half.”
“As I discovered.” He held up his wounded hands. “I landed on a pile of old plant pots.”
“Nasty.”
“It could have been worse,” he said. “There was a box of garden tools next to the pots.”
We began the morning doing physics with Mr Kosinsky. Mr Kosinsky thought he was very funny. We thought he was a stick insect with weird socks. You could always see his socks because his trousers were too short. This morning they had little pictures of snowmen all over them.
“Ah, you lot,” he said, whisking his jacket off and slipping it over the back of his chair. “What a treat. Now, what were we doing last time? Was it, by any chance, the role of quarks and gluons in quantum field theory?”
“Gravity, sir,” said Mehmet. “We were doing gravity.”
“Ah yes, my mistake,” said Mr Kosinsky, easing his lanky body into his seat. “Now, who can give me a quick resume of what we were doing on Monday?”
Dennis stuck his hand in the air and started telling everyone about Isaac Newton and escape velocity and why it was so difficult going to the loo in a spaceship.
I looked into Mr Kosinsky’s eyes. Did he think I was a brainless nuisance? Had he decided that he couldn’t bear teaching me any longer? Was he the sort of man who would want to expel someone?
I glanced over at Megan Shotts. She was sitting in the back row, as per usual, carving chunks out of her desk with a penknife. Megan beat up small boys in the playground. She knocked the wing mirrors off Mrs Benton’s car. Last summer she let out the locusts from the biology lab. I found one in my packed lunch. I could be a pain at times, even I knew that. But I couldn’t hold a candle to Megan.
I glanced in the other direction. Barry Griffin. He’d answered a couple of questions last year, got them wrong, then gone into permanent hibernation. He spent every lesson staring into the distance, motionless and vacant, like someone listening to music on earphones. Except that he didn’t have any earphones. What he did have was short legs and very long arms. He looked like prehistoric man. Barry made me look like a guy from NASA.
Why should I get sent to a special school instead of those two? Becky had to be lying.
“Earth calling Jim.”
I looked up to see Mr Kosinsky standing next to my desk.
“Yes?” I said.
“The tides, Jim. What causes the tides?”
“Well…” I said, floundering.
People started to laugh.
“What causes the tides, Jim?” he asked for a second time. “Is it perhaps the gravitational pull of the sun?”
“It might be,” I said gingerly.
“Or is it perhaps a very large fish called Brian?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Jim,” he sighed, walking back to the front of the room, “I sometimes wonder why you bother coming to school at all.”
My heart sank. Perhaps Becky was right after all.
After lunch I lingered by the school secretary’s door and watched Charlie do the drop. With the walkie-talkie tucked snugly inside his jacket pocket, he knocked on the door of the staff room. The door opened and Mr Kidd appeared with a mouth full of sausage roll and copy of What Car? in his hand.
Mr Kidd taught art. He wasn’t really meant to be a teacher. He looked like he’d wandered into a school some years ago and never quite managed to get out. His tie was always undone, his shirtsleeves were always rolled up and he always had a slightly depressed look on his face. I think he really wanted to be at home watching Sky Sports with a can of lager. On the other hand, he could draw a really good picture of a horse. And horses are seriously difficult.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Charlie. “Do you mind if I come in and have a word?”
“Can’t you…” Mr Kidd swallowed his mouthful of sausage roll. “Can’t you tell me out here?”
“It’s kind of a personal problem,” said Charlie.
“Oh, all right, all right,” agreed Mr Kidd, wafting him inside with his magazine.
A few minutes later Charlie re-emerged into the corridor and grinned at me.
“Did you do it?” I asked.
He slapped an arm round my shoulder as we walked away. “Sometimes I am so cool I even amaze myself.”
“So what was the personal problem?”
But at this moment the bell rang.
“I’ll tell you later,” said Charlie, and we headed back to the classroom.
In the afternoon we did the Industrial Revolution with Mrs Pearce. The spinning jenny. Watt’s steam engine. Children being sent down mines. Or rather, that’s what everyone else did. Me, I just sat at the back of the class thinking about getting sent to Fenham and being murdered by Craterface and how going down a mine sounded preferable to both.
At the end of school we hung about for ten minutes or so, then slipped into the athletics shed. Charlie took the second walkie-talkie from his bag and turned it on, and suddenly we were spying on our teachers.
For a couple of minutes it was one of the most exciting things I’d ever done. Over the next quarter of an hour, however, it rapidly became one of the most tedious things I’d ever done. They talked about the £400 they were going to spend on new books for the library. They talked about the fire safety drill. They talked about which contractors they were going to use to re-tarmac the playground. They talked about the secretary leaving to have a baby. They talked about the staff toilet and how it didn’t flush properly.
I began to understand why Mr Kosinsky wore weird socks. Choosing what to put on his feet every morning was probably the most thrilling part of his day.
“By the way,” said the crackly voice of Mr Kidd over the walkie-talkie, “Charlie Brooks came to see me at lunch today. You probably saw his bandages.”
There were murmurs around the room.
“Hey, they’re talking about you,” I hissed at Charlie.
“Shhhh!” he hissed back.
“Apparently,” continued Mr Kidd, “he was attacked by the neighbour’s dog. Bit of a vicious brute, it seems. The poor boy very nearly lost his fingers. His parents had to rush him to hospital.”
“You what?” I spluttered at Charlie.
Charlie looked very smug indeed.
“So, go easy on him over the next few days,” said Mr Kidd. “He sounded pretty shaken by the whole affair.”
Grunts of agreement came out of the little black speaker.
I glanced over at Charlie. “Now that was clever.”
Charlie just smiled at me and said, “Well, it looks like you’re in the clear too.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Which is more important?” said Charlie. “You geting expelled, or the staff toilet not flushing properly? If you were going to be expelled, I think they’d have mentioned it.”
“You’re probably right,” I agreed.
“So,” said Charlie, “when do we put the mayonnaise in Becky’s helmet?”
“Now that I think about it, I’m not sure that’s a terribly good plan.” I stood up. “I don’t want to wind Craterface up even more.”
In the staff room teachers were scraping their chairs back from the table, filling their briefcases and heading home.
“Give them five minutes to get away,” said Charlie, stretching his legs and yawning. “Then the coast’ll be clear and we can split.”
It was at this point that something very odd happened. I’d picked up the walkie-talkie and was about to turn the thing off when it said, “Bretnick,” in a woman’s voice.
I shook it, thinking one of the wires had come loose.
“Toller bandol venting,” said a man’s voice.
“Charlie,” I whispered. “Listen to this.”
He walked over and crouched down in time to hear the woman’s voice say, “Loy. Loy garting dendle. Nets?”
Our jaws dropped and our eyes widened.
“Zorner.”
“Zorner ment. Cruss mo plug.”
“Bo. Bo. Tractor bonting dross.”
“Are you hearing what I’m hearing?” asked Charlie.
“I am. But who is it?”
Charlie listened carefully. “That’s Mrs Pearce.”
“Wendo bill. Slap freedo gandy hump,” said Mrs Pearce.
“God, you’re right. But who’s the other one?” I turned the volume up and concentrated.
“Zecky?” said the man’s voice. “Spleeno ken mondermill.”
“It’s Mr Kidd,” I said.
“I think my head is about to explode,” said Charlie.
“Wait…” I fiddled with every knob on the walkie-talkie. I took the batteries out and put them in again. There was no getting away from it. Our art teacher and our history teacher were standing in the empty staff room saying “Tractor bonting dross,” and “Slap freedo gandy hump,” to each other like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Gasty pencil,” said Mrs Pearce.
“Spudvetch!” said Mr Kidd.
“Spudvetch!” Mrs Pearce repeated.
Two chairs scraped back, four shoes clicked across the floor, the door opened, the door closed and then there was silence.
Charlie and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows in unison. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t need to. We were thinking the same thing.
Forget Fenham. There was an adventure on its way, a nuclear-powered, one-hundred-ton adventure with reclining seats and a snack trolley. And it was pulling into the station right now.
∨ Boom! ∧
4
Doing it the simple way
When I got home I had plenty of time to think about what Charlie and I had heard, on account of being locked in the bathroom for an hour and a half.
I strode into the flat, threw my school bag into my bedroom and headed to the kitchen to grab a hot chocolate. Unfortunately, the kitchen was already occupied by my sister and Craterface.
“Howdy!” I chirruped.
My head was so full of Mr Kidd and Mrs Pearce and ‘Tractor bonting dross’ that I had completely forgotten about the flying sandwich and the death threat until Craterface lunged at me, shouting, “Come here, you little snotrag!” – at which point it all came flooding back.
I squealed and leaped out of grabbing range. I sprinted into the hallway, skidded into the bathroom and turned rou
“Come out and be killed!” he shouted, battering the flimsy plywood.
I wasn’t stupid. I picked up the bottle of bleach, took the top off, pointed the nozzle towards the door and waited. The hinges strained but didn’t give way.
Moments later I heard Dad wander out of his bedroom and mutter, “What’s all this then?”
Craterface replied that he was going to kill me. Becky said he didn’t mean it. And Craterface said he did mean it.
I waited for Dad to kick Craterface out of the flat or knock him unconscious with a blow to the head. But he just ummed and erred and said, “I’m going to the shop. If you’re not gone when I’m back, there’ll be trouble.”
I was beginning to see what Dad meant when he said that he wasn’t a real man any more.
When the flat door banged behind him, Craterface laughed, hammered on the bathroom door a bit more, got bored and returned to the kitchen. Keeping the bleach to hand, I sat down on the fluffy blue bathmat and did some thinking.
And what I thought was this…They weren’t talking nonsense. They weren’t the sort of people who talked nonsense. Ever. Mrs Pearce was eighty-five, or thereabouts, and Mr Kidd had no sense of humour. No. What they were saying sounded exactly like a real conversation. It was just that you couldn’t understand a word of it.
So they were talking a foreign language. Perhaps they used to live in Burkina Faso or the Philippines. Perhaps they’d gone on holiday to Greenland or Vietnam. Perhaps they went to Mongolian evening classes together.
In which case, why did we never see them talking at any other time? I couldn’t remember them exchanging a single word in all the years I’d been at the school.
And if they spoke a foreign language, why hadn’t they told us? They were teachers. Teachers loved showing off. Only last week Mr Kidd had been reminding us yet again of how he once played cricket for Somerset under-nineteens. And Mrs Pearce liked nothing better than sitting down at the piano during assembly and adding extra twiddly bits to the hymn music that weren’t meant to be there. If they could speak Mongolian, you could bet your bottom dollar they’d tell us about it.