Flour Babies Read online

  ‘It’s all writing.’

  ‘Choosing recipes.’

  Wayne Driscoll did one of his laborious brain searches, and rather triumphantly came up with a phrase unwittingly committed to memory in first year.

  ‘Well-balanced meals, sir!’

  ‘What two old codgers with wobbly teeth might have for breakfast.’

  ‘It’s dead boring.’

  ‘No cooking.’

  ‘Just looking at charts and stuff.’

  Mr Cartright was mystified. What was the point of the taxpayer lashing out on giant gleaming kitchens in schools all over the country if the pupils didn’t even use them?

  ‘You must have cooked sometimes,’ he insisted.

  The scowl Sajid Mahmoud turned on him would have frightened stone.

  ‘The only time I got to cook,’ he said, ‘I got a giant great row for scraping it in the bin after it had been marked.’

  ‘I should think so!’ said Mr Cartright. ‘What a waste!’

  ‘I couldn’t eat it though, could I? It was meat stew, and I don’t eat meat.’

  ‘You should have chosen to prepare something different.’

  Sajid burned with refreshed outrage at the ancient injustice.

  ‘Why? Nobody said a thing about eating it! Nobody even so much as mentioned eating it. They went on and on about it being all well-balanced, like Wayne says, and having vitamins and such. But nobody ever said a thing about liking it or eating it.’

  He relapsed into furious muttering.

  ‘And the Old Meanie changed my B to an F. And made me rinse out the bin…’

  ‘What about the rest of you?’ interrupted Mr Cartright. And with what he thought was real cunning, he offered Simon a chance to shed all the responsibility for having accidentally picked the wrong option in the first place. ‘How about you, Simon? You’d prefer cooking, wouldn’t you?’

  Simon gave him a low-grade glower.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Really?’ Mr Cartright persisted. ‘Surely a growing lad like you enjoys the odd plate of extra fodder.’

  But Simon had no intention of letting himself be won over. Nor of letting any of the rest of the class be seduced without remembering the grim facts of yesteryear.

  ‘We could have starved/ he said. ‘We could have keeled over and died before we got round to actual cooking. First we spent weeks and weeks learning how to change ounces into grammes, and then we spent weeks and weeks learning how to change them back again, and then we were nagged about eating fibroids –’

  ‘Fibres, surely.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Simon shrugged off the correction. ‘But we only got to go in the kitchen twice the whole term.’

  He couldn’t resist adding bitterly:

  ‘And, one of those times, half of us got sent out practically right at the start, just for standing quietly in a line.’

  Mr Cartright gave him a look.

  ‘Standing quietly in line? Like in Assembly this morning when I sent you out?’

  ‘Quieter than that,’ Simon responded virtuously.

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ Robin Foster backed Simon up.‘We were all queuing.’

  ‘Queuing to use the food processor.’

  ‘Needed to slice our tomatoes, didn’t we?’

  And, suddenly, Mr Cartright could see it. A vision, as if it were in front of him, as if it were this morning. A whole class of them, mucking about in a line, pushing and shoving and jostling and cat-calling one another. Half of them holding their tomatoes so carelessly that watery red drips wept on the gleaming floor tiles. The rest spurting slimy yellow tomato pips as far as possible up the walls, or into one another’s faces.

  ‘Queuing,’ he said. ‘Just queuing quietly?’

  ‘That’s right,’ all the ones who had been there assured him.

  Mr Cartright had put up a good fight. But he was cracking now. Simon couldn’t help grinning with pleasure and relief as, watching his form teacher intently, he spotted the very moment at which nutrition, as an option, lost its appeal. All Mr Cartright could see now, in his mind’s eye, was a line of boys queuing for the food processor. Each one prepared to waste almost a whole lesson standing in line, simply in order to get a turn on that magical whirring and whining machine. Each boy frittering away half an hour of his short life waiting to drop one poor battered lone tomato into the fat round bowel of that precision appliance with all its switches, blades and speeds. Each boy slowly and impatiently inching forward, ignoring utterly the simple, humble kitchen knife with which, within seconds – no fuss, no mess – he could have chopped or sliced or diced his tomato.

  Life was too short for nutrition.

  Let it be flour babies. Let chaos reign.

  3

  Simon sat across the kitchen table from his flour baby and gave her a poke.

  The flour baby fell over.

  ‘Ha!’ Simon scoffed. ‘Can’t even sit up yet!’

  He set the flour baby up again, and gave her another poke.

  Again, she fell over.

  ‘Not very good at standing up for yourself, are you?’ Simon taunted, setting her up again.

  The flour baby fell over backwards this time, off the table into the dog basket.

  ‘Blast!’

  ‘You mustn’t swear in front of it,’ Simon’s mother said. ‘You’ll set it a terrible example.’

  Simon reached down to scoop the flour baby off Macpherson’s cushion, and picked the dog’s hairs off her frock.

  ‘Not it,’ he reproved his mum in turn. ‘Her.’

  She was definitely a her. Definitely. Some of the flour babies Mr Cartright had handed out that morning could have been one or the other. It wasn’t clear. But not the one that landed in Simon’s lap.

  ‘Catch, Dozy! Aren’t you supposed to be one of the school’s sporting heroes? Wake up!’

  She was sweet. She was dressed in a frilly pink bonnet and a pink nylon frock, and carefully painted on her sacking were luscious sexy round eyes fringed with fluttering lashes.

  Robin Foster, beside him, was jealous instantly.

  ‘How come you get one with eyes? Mine’s just plain sacking. Do you want to swap?’

  Simon tightened his grip round his flour baby.

  ‘No. She’s mine. You paint eyes on your own if you want them.’

  ‘And yours has clothes!’ He turned to yell at Mr Cartright, who was just coming to the end of tossing bags of flour round the room. ‘Sir! Sir! Sime’s dolly has got a frock and a bonnet and eyes and everything. And mine’s got nothing. It’s not fair.’

  If every parent who had a baby who was a bit lacking sent it back,’ Mr Cartright said, ‘this classroom would be practically empty. Sit down and be quiet.’

  He heaved himself up on the desk, and started reading the rules of the experiment.

  FLOUR BABIES

  (1) The flour babies must be kept clean and dry at all times. All fraying, staining and leakage of stuffing will be taken very seriously indeed.

  (2) Flour babies will be put on the official scales twice a week to check for any weight loss that might indicate casual neglect or maltreatment, or any weight gain that might indicate tampering or damp.

  (3) No flour baby may be left unattended at any time, night or day. If you must be out of sight of your flour baby, even for a short time, a responsible babysitter must be arranged.

  (4) You must keep a Baby Book, and write in it daily. Each entry should be no shorter than three full sentences, and no longer than five pages.

  (5) Certain persons (who shall not be named until the experiment is over) shall make it their business to check on the welfare of the flour babies and the keeping of the above rules. These people may be parents, other pupils, or members of staff or the public.

  He looked up.

  ‘That’s it.’

  He’d never seen a class reduced to silence before. An interesting sight. You had to hand it to Dr Feltham and these boffin types. They had weird powers. Some of the
m might fumble in and out of the staffroom, letting their woollies unravel behind them, and visibly having to trawl through their memory banks each time someone asked them if they took sugar in their tea. But they could work wonders. They could wreak miracles. With their mysterious arts, they could do the unimaginable. They could blow the whole planet to smithereens. They could silence 4C.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, somewhat unnerved. ‘Any questions?’

  Simon picked up his flour baby and lifted her frock. No knickers, unless you counted sacking bag. Already she had black smudges on her bum where he’d sat her on the pen runnel of the double desk along which Robin Foster’s rubber dropping collection had recently overflowed.

  ‘Now look at that,’ he complained to Robin. ‘She’s already dirty, and it’s your fault, Foster. You’re going to have to keep this desk a whole lot cleaner in future.’

  Robin stared down at the little heaps of filthy rubbing-out scurf, assiduously kept so he and Simon would always have raw material for flicking pellets. Then he glanced at Simon, trying to work out if he had been joking. Finally, from the quiver of possible responses, he chose the sharpest arrow: ridicule.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ he’d yelled, his fist punching the air as he called for the whole room’s attention. ‘You’ve got to move me, sir. I can’t stay here. It’s not safe. Sime Martin’s turning into my mother!’

  They kept the joke up for the rest of the day. By the time the last bell rang, Simon was absolutely sick of having to prop his flour baby carefully on top of his book bag, then go after whoever it was who’d last called him Old Mrs Martin, or Mother Sime, and bash their head hard against the wall. By the time he shambled out of the back gate at half past three, his knuckles were burning and his wrist badly grazed. He only stopped himself wiping the blood off on the flour baby’s frock because, through some miracle, he heard the echo of his mother’s voice ring out of nowhere in his ears: ‘Oh, no, Simon! Not blood! It’s the worst!’ He wiped his hand clean down his shirt instead.

  And now here was his mother in the flesh, spooning out more free advice.

  ‘You ought to put it in a plastic bag. Keep it clean.’

  ‘Is that what you did with me?’

  His mother laughed as she dumped his supper down in front of him. Egg and beans.

  ‘I wish I’d had the sense.’

  She was joking, he supposed. But still, it was a thought. Having him must have made all the difference. He’d come along, a whole other person to be taken into account. Real, too. Not just something like a flour baby that could be shoved in a plastic bag to be kept clean, without fetching up on some murder charge. When had she realized how much trouble he was going to be? Some pennies took time to drop. He himself could still remember the day, not that long ago, when he’d first realized he was a person.

  He’d been having it out with a turkey. Behind the caravan park where Simon and his mother went on holiday there was a farm, and one of the larger turkeys had pushed its bad-tempered, gobbling way through the fence and was giving Simon the eye – well, first one eye then the other – and stopping him getting to the lavatories.

  Simon got his own back the simplest way he could.

  ‘Christmas!’ he jeered. ‘Din-dins!’

  The turkey gobbled off. But Simon had to sit on the lavatory steps for a moment. He’d suddenly realized that by Christmas Day the turkey would really be dead on a plate, but (barring the sort of daft accidents his mother was always going on about), he, Simon, would still be alive.

  And somehow that set him thinking. He pulled the flesh on the back of his hand up into a miniature tent, and then let go. The skin sprang back instantly, keeping him in shape. His shape. It struck Simon for the first time in his life that he was totally unique. In the whole history of the universe, there had never been one of him before. There would never be another.

  ‘Not a very nice place to sit,’

  Someone was stepping over him to get to the urinals. But Simon, off on another tack, scarcely heard. Once, only a few years ago, Simon wasn’t – didn’t exist at all. And one day, like that turkey, he wouldn’t exist again. Ever.

  ‘Can’t you find somewhere a bit more salubrious to park yourself?’

  The same fellow again, on his way out. Simon paid no attention, his mind on other things. Hadn’t he just discovered himself – him – the one and only Sime Martin, alive, and (unlike the turkey) knowing it?

  From that day on, Simon had looked at himself with a whole new respect, a far greater interest. The other holiday-makers became almost accustomed to seeing the lad from the end plot contorting himself into odd shapes, not like the family near the showerhuts who did yoga, but simply in order to gaze at parts of his body he’d never really looked at properly before: heels, elbows, belly button, inner thighs.

  ‘God knows which bits of himself he stares at in private!’

  ‘Do you suppose the poor boy’s mental?’

  ‘It’s his mother I feel sorry for really.’

  ‘Do stop that, Simon! People will think you’ve got lice.’

  Neither the neighbours’ whispered comments nor his mother’s sharp orders grazed Simon’s consciousness. He was busy. Busy probing his huge, lank body with a curiosity, a real wonder, he’d never felt before. All that went through his brain was ‘This is me’. But there was more to it than that, much more, though he could never have explained it, and, in the intervening years, no one had ever asked him.

  He had a question for his mother now, though. Picking the last of Macpherson’s wiry hairs off the flour baby, he asked:

  ‘What was I like?’

  His mother sucked a stray bean off her fingertip.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I was a baby.’

  Simon’s mother narrowed her eyes at him across the table. Give a boy a dolly, she thought, sighing inwardly, and he goes all broody within minutes. What hope is there for girls?

  But it was a fair question, and he hadn’t asked it for a good few years. Her son deserved an honest answer.

  ‘You were sweet,’ she said. ‘Good as gold, and chubby as a bun, and you had bright button eyes. You were so lovely that perfect strangers kept stopping the pram in the street to coo at you and tell me how lucky I was to have you. Everybody wanted to blow raspberries on your tummy. No doubt about it, you were the most beautiful baby in the world.’

  He knew she wouldn’t want him to spoil things by saying it, but he couldn’t help himself.

  ‘So why did my dad push off so quickly?’

  His mother tried her usual tack of making a joke of the whole business.

  ‘Be fair, Simon. He did hang around for six whole weeks!’

  But she could tell from the look on his face that the answer wasn’t working the way it usually did. So she tried throwing in her Old Crone imitation.

  ‘And there be those who say he could see into the future…’

  But still Simon wouldn’t smile.

  Mrs Martin gave up, and took another mouthful of her supper, watching him carefully to try and work out exactly how upset he was.

  Simon propped the flour baby up in front of him, and stared at her beautiful round eyes. He felt sour all over suddenly. Suppose his dad was able to see the future. Did that make up for Simon not being able to see the past? Anyone who’d ever met their real dad could put it together somehow. Take off some middle-aged spread. Wipe out a few wrinkles. Add a bit of hair. But if you’d never so much as seen the man –

  ‘Why aren’t there any photographs? I know you didn’t have a proper wedding or anything, but why aren’t there any other photos?’

  ‘Simon! There are photos! There are lots.’

  ‘But not with him. There’s hardly a single one of him.’

  ‘That’s because he was usually the one holding the camera.’

  ‘You could have taken at least one good photo of him.’

  She jammed her tea spoon back in the sugar bowl so hard that sugar flew out and sprayed all over.

&n
bsp; ‘And how was I supposed to know he was going to walk out on me? Women don’t always get a week’s notice, you know!’

  Simon stuck out his tongue and, after a small, insolent pause, began licking the grains of spilled sugar from his wrists. Then he turned his attention to the flour baby.

  ‘Don’t lick her, Simon!’ And then, instead of adding, ‘She’s been in the dog basket’, his mother warned him: ‘You might give her germs.’

  It wasn’t a very good joke. But the fact that she’d bothered to try and make one at all made Simon feel better. He realized that, for all she made light of it whenever the business of his father came up, she did understand he had reasons of his own to feel sensitive about the matter. Shovelling the last forkful of beans into his mouth, he asked indistinctly:

  ‘When did you first realize I was a real person?’

  He didn’t know what answer he was expecting. Maybe ‘When you were eight’ (when he’d refused to go to Hyacinth Spicer’s party). Even ‘As young as four’ (when he’d apparently thrown such a tantrum in a shoe shop that the manageress herself had stepped over and slapped him).

  But what she said really astonished him.

  ‘Oh, weeks before you were born! I think we must have been in different time zones. If I was up and about, you were so restful you might not have been there at all. But the moment I lay my head on a pillow, you woke up and set about kicking me.’

  ‘Football practice, see?’ he said proudly.

  And that reminded him. He glanced at the clock. First session of the term. Mustn’t be late.

  ‘Time to go.’

  His mother lifted her knife and fork, and slid his plate on to hers.

  ‘Don’t let the little lady get muddy,’ she warned, nodding at the flour baby. ‘Make sure you put her somewhere safe.’

  Simon was horrified.

  ‘I can’t take it to football!’

  ‘Not it, Simon. Her.’

  Irritably, he brushed off the tease.

  ‘How can I take her to football?’

  ‘You have to take her, Simon. It’s in those rules you brought home.’

  Simon cast about desperately for some reason not to take her.