“He PUSHED me!” howled Tom. He dragged himself to a sitting position. Screwing his face into a murderous scowl, he snatched up a wooden building block and drew his arm back. He clearly intended to hurl it at the innocent Gordon, who was still sprawled where he had been pushed when Tom first entered the room.
“NO!” Edith yelled. She tried to get her body between her precious son and the incoming missile; but before Tom’s arm could reach maximum speed, his hand seemed to meet some invisible force. It stopped for a moment in mid-air, fingers still wrapped around the brick, then continued its rapid sweep forwards and downwards to smack into the floor with the ends of Tom’s fingers still underneath it.
If you thought his first wail was loud, you should have heard that one.
“Oh dear,” said Edith. There was just a hint of grim satisfaction behind her air of concern. “We do seem to be in the wars, don’t we?”
Zack walked over to Gordon, grinned and held his hand out. Gordon grinned back, grasped it and hauled himself up. Neither mother noticed Gordon gain some leverage out of thin air while pulling himself to his feet. Tom certainly noticed the grin on Gordon’s face.
“He’s laughing at me,” he complained; but the aggression had drained out of him for the moment. He had a sore bottom, a sore head and a sore hand. He decided to pause for thought, or at least the closest form of that mental activity he could manage.
“Oh dear”, Tom’s mum wittered, “What am I to do? I’m late already.”
Edith took a deep breath: decision time. “Nerves of steel,” she told herself. “You get off, Yvonne,” she assured the other woman. “We’ll look after him. He’ll be fine here.”
“Are you sure?” Yvonne asked. She was clearly relieved, but going through the motions.
“Yes of course!” Edith said. She laid a firm hand on Tom’s reluctant shoulder. “We’ll be fine, won’t we Gordon?”
“Yes,” Gordon agreed. “Zack and I will show Tom how to put the castle back together again.”
“I didn’t know you had another little boy here.” Yvonne said. She looked round expectantly and a little puzzled.
“We don’t,” Edith said. She ushered her towards the front door. “Zack is Gordon’s imaginary friend. They do everything together. It’s a phase.”
“He’s young to have an imaginary friend, isn’t he?” asked Yvonne. She bustled gratefully through the front doorway. “Aren’t they normally older before they get one of those?”
“Gordon’s very advanced,” Edith told her with a fixed smile. She shut the door and turned back to the challenge in hand. “Better than having an imaginary enemy,” she thought to herself, and re-entered the living room on full alert.
She needn’t have worried. Gordon and Zack had everything under control. Tom was picking up the scattered bricks and bringing them back to Gordon. He was moving very carefully, his eyes darting around the room. Gordon was rebuilding the castle and discussing possible modifications with Zack. His mum watched them for a minute, then decided it was safe to go into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
“Who you talkin’ to?” Tom asked Gordon, once his mum was safely out of the way.
“Zack,” Gordon told him, without diverting his attention from the task in hand.
“Who’s Zack?”
“My best friend.”
Tom looked down at the bruised knuckles on his right hand, while his left hand felt the bump on his head. “You’re a weirdo,” he sneered.
A puff of air blew on the back of his right earlobe and he jumped about a foot in the air. Gordon laughed. “Come here, Zack. Leave him alone.”
Tom whirled round, his eyes like saucers. There was no one else in the room. He turned his attention back to Gordon, and made one more attempt to regain the upper hand. “Stark, raving bonkers. AHHAHAAAH!” This time the gust of wind was behind his left ear. It made a whooshing sound, and made him realize he needed the toilet.
“Zack!” Gordon said. “Well maybe he did deserve it, but we need to get this castle finished. Oh, yeah, OK.” He pointed at the armchair in the corner. “There are some bricks under there,” he told Tom. “See if you can get your arm under and get them out, will you.”
“Why should I?” Tom demanded. Gordon’s eyes narrowed. Tom felt himself being spun round and propelled towards the armchair. He landed on his stomach while he still had some forward momentum. His outstretched right arm shot under the chair.
“That’s it,” Gordon said. “Well done. Bring them over here, will you? The toilet is out the door, turn left and first on your right.”
Tom did as he was told. Zack, in the meantime, was staring at Gordon with significantly raised eyebrows.
NOTES
CRENELLATIONS; KAMIKAZE; MEDIAEVAL; MOMENTUM
Chapter 5
The Cunning Plan
Tom seemed very pleased to see the babysitter when she came to collect him. “Oooer,” the young woman confided to Gordon’s mum. “What ‘ave you done to ’im? ’E’s almost polite! You must ‘ave the magic touch.”
Edith had smiled modestly. As she was about to shut the front door, she heard Tom say: “I don’t like it there. ’E’s weird.”
“Wot? – make yer do as you were told for once, did they?” his babysitter asked him cheerfully. “Well yer can do as yer told for me now, else yer won’t get no sweets and I’ll take yer down the police station.”
“No yer won’t.”
“Yes I will.”
“No yer WON’T!”
Edith closed the door with a shudder. She was already working on a range of excuses why she wouldn’t be able to look after Tom the next time Yvonne asked. In any case, it sounded like he would resist any attempt to dump him next door again.
Gordon was quite satisfied with the way things had gone. He was surprised when Zack began sounding notes of caution. “I think we need to agree on one or two things before anyone else comes round here to play,” Zack told him.
“Like what?” Gordon wanted to know. He surveyed the rebuilt castle with a critical eye. Tom had helped him put the finishing touches to the crenellations and he hadn’t been good at it. Gordon had told him what they were for - which he thought was interesting - but Tom could not have cared less. His specialism was demolition. He wasn’t into putting things back together again. Humpty Dumpty would have had NO chance.
“Like not talking to me out loud when other people are around.” Zack told him.
“Why not?” Gordon asked. Talking out loud to Zack seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. It was just like talking to his mum or his dad, or to anyone else who happened to be in the room.
“Because it spooks them,” Zack explained. “Didn’t you notice Tom staring at you like you were from outer space? He even said you were weird.”
Gordon had thought Tom was weird, to tell the truth. He had completely ignored sound advice on the amount of space to be left between the crenellations. There was no point to them if you didn’t space them properly.
“You can’t keep chatting away to me when there are other people about,” Zack told him firmly. “And you can’t be telling people they’re not doing something right because I told you to do it differently. And you can’t tell them about the things we’ve done and the places we’ve been, like the Middle Ages and the Jurassic Era.”
“I thought he’d be interested,” Gordon said sullenly.
Zack sat down next to him and put a comforting arm around his shoulders. “It’s not your fault, Gordon, it’s mine. We’ve been having a great time, but you’re growing up really fast. You’re going to have more and more to do with other children and other adults besides your mum and dad. Heavens, you’ll be going to school before we know it. It’s time we worked out how you and I can be together without scaring anyone.”
Gordon screwed his face into an impressive frown. It was an effort, because he hardly ever used his frowning muscles. “What’s to be scared of?” he demanded.
Zack sighed. He’d been putting th
is off. Sometimes the facts of life are a bit hard to take, especially when you’re not quite four and you don’t yet know how really different you are. “OK,” he said, “it’s like this. You and I are … unusual.”
Gordon stared sadly at him. “Why can’t anyone else see you?” he asked.
“It’s always been like that,” Zack told him. “Most adults don’t believe in us. Some children do, for a while, but then they close the window and shut us out.”
“Is it bad to be unusual?” Gordon asked.
Zack shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. He stared so intently into Gordon’s eyes that his senses started swimming. Zack drifted gently into his brain and out again, enjoying the warmth of the welcome and the breeze from the wide-open window. “It’s how I exist: by finding someone special.”
“Am I special?” Gordon asked. That sounded better than being unusual.
“Oh yes,” Zack murmured, “you’re special all right.” He’d had nothing to do with Tom’s spin-round and power-glide under the armchair. Gordon had made that happen without his help, without even noticing.
Gordon cheered up. “What shall we do next?” Zack was a fountain of good ideas. He always came up with something interesting.
“Let’s practise something I know you’ll be brilliant at. It’s going to come in very handy from now on.”
Gordon loved practising new things. “What is it?” he asked eagerly.
Zack’s eyes glittered. “It’s called ‘telepathy’.”
NOTES
MIDDLE AGES; MOST ADULTS DON’T BELIEVE IN US; TELEPATHY
Chapter 6
Getting Ready For School
Gordon’s fifth year whizzed by, and Edith noticed that Zack was fading into the background. By Christmas, Gordon had stopped talking to him when he was with her. By Easter, he no longer mentioned him. She heard him chattering away in his bedroom sometimes, but small children do that, don’t they? - especially only children.
She knew that Gordon needed to get used to being around other children before being plunged into the hurly burly of primary school. Nursery School would give him the chance to make friends with real children. It should be easier for him to make other friends, now that he had grown out of his imaginary one.
Curiously, she found herself almost missing Zack. It had been like having two children: one visible and the other with a lot to say for himself. She told herself not to be silly. It was good that he was gone. Gordon didn’t seem to be missing him at all.
Gordon’s telepathy skills were improving all the time. He no longer had to move his lips or close his eyes. The first stage had been dropping his voice to a whisper, and then he progressed to being able to say the words without making any sound.
For a while when he did this he would close his eyes and move his lips. It helped him to concentrate on beaming his message. His mum came across him once while this was going on. It was a few weeks after his fourth birthday. “What are you doing, Darling?” she asked curiously.
“Practising counting,” suggested Zack from his bedroom upstairs. Telepathy is even more useful when you can do it over decent distances.
“I’m seeing how fast I can count to a hundred,” he told his mum. It was only a little lie, and it was for her own good. He didn’t like doing it, but he already knew that the truth isn’t always what people want - or need - to hear.
“That’s good, darling. Do you know what we used to say when I first went to school?”
“No.”
“One, two, miss a few, 99, 100,” she said, smiling.
Gordon laughed. “That’s cheating.”
“We thought it was really funny at the time,” his mum told him. There was a little pause. “School can be good fun,” she said. “You could go now, you know. You’d make lots of new friends and learn new things.”
“No thanks, Mum” he had said. “Next year when I’m five: I think I’ll be ready for school by then.”
“It needs to be sooner than that,” his mum thought, but she didn’t push it. After all, he soaked up information like a sponge. He was working his way through the early reading scheme she had got him, and he always had his head in some book or other. It wasn’t the learning side of it that worried her. It was the social side that could prove to be a real challenge.
Within six months, Zack had bowed out entirely and she couldn’t wait any longer. She made her enquiries and secured a place for Gordon in the local nursery class. He’d only be going for a term, as he was already 4¾. She broke the news at the beginning of the Easter holidays, to give him a chance to get used to the idea.
He looked doubtful. “What do YOU think, Zack?”
Zack was sitting cross-legged in their bedroom, immersed in a history of The Castle in England and Wales by D.J. Cathcart King. He grinned: Gordon’s telepathy skills were improving by the day. “I think we’re ready.”
That “we” made Gordon feel a lot better about it. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad after all. “OK,” he told his mum.
She breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Good. The teacher says you can take a toy with you if you like. Sometimes they do ‘Show and Tell’, when you show the other children something you’ve brought and you tell them a bit about it.
“I’ll take one of my dinosaurs,” Gordon decided.
His mother nodded eagerly. “That would be perfect. You know a lot about dinosaurs.” What her Gordon didn’t know about dinosaurs was probably not worth knowing - unless you were a palaeontologist, and really into that sort of thing.
Chapter 7
The First Hurdle
The first day of the summer term duly arrived, and they set off after breakfast. It was only a short walk away. They could hear excited yelling at least two minutes before they turned the final corner. And there they all were: the other children, a very large number of them.
The nursery class was attached to a primary school. It had its own little section of the playground, but you could still see infants and juniors running around in their much larger space. You could have counted up to a hundred and still not counted them all. It would have been impossible anyway, with all the racing around that was going on. The noise was deafening.
Gordon was overwhelmed and stopped dead. His courage had suddenly left him, and he wanted to turn around and run home. He pulled on his mother’s arm and his bottom lip quivered. She’d steeled herself, knowing he would need help over this hurdle. She knelt down and smiled bravely at him. “Everyone finds it scary the first time. After you’ve done it once you’ll be fine. You get used to it ever so quickly.”
“We can do this.” Zack stood next to his mum and grinned encouragement. “Come on Gordon, let’s go. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’.”
Dimly, Gordon understood. This was an important test life was setting him. Tests like this came along from time to time and they had to be passed. He was about to leave the safety of what he knew for the uncertainty of something new. Learning how to do that was an important part of growing up. At least he wasn’t on his own.
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he said to his mum, and her eyes filled with tears. She knew where he’d got that expression from. It was something his dad always said before they tackled a new model. “Come on Mum,” he said. “We can do this.”
They crossed the road and entered the nursery part of the playground. There were other mums and a dad or two standing chatting while they waited for the door to open. Most children already knew each other and were running around, especially the boys, Gordon noticed. Others stayed close to a parent until some other adult arrived to make sure they weren’t mown down by a bigger, more boisterous child. Survival of the fittest in its early stages.
“HELLO-O-O,” called Yvonne. She detached herself from another couple of mums and came over to Edith. “I wondered how long it would be before we saw you here. Tom’s been coming for ages. This place is a godsend.”
“WHEEEAAAOOOUUU!”
Gordon recognized that noi
se. “Whoah,” muttered Zack. Tom came charging out of the pack towards them, his arms spread wide in fighter-plane mode. Gordon stood a little closer to his mum while Zack jumped in front of him, ready for the onslaught; but at the last moment, the plane veered off in a near miss.
“TOP GUN!” Tom yelled. He charged at another group of smaller children, which obediently scattered. There were scared looks on some of the faces. Hmmmm. Tom wouldn’t risk a full-on assault while adults were around, but the grin on his face suggested he was looking forward to the first chance he got, once the coast was clear.
“Boys,” Yvonne said. “They’re so different from girls, aren’t they?”
“I think it depends on the boy.” Edith said. “Oh look, Gordon, there’s Nick. Why don’t you go and say hello?”
Gordon walked over to a nervous little boy standing near his mum. Nick saw him coming and smiled shyly. He and Gordon were quite good friends. Gordon had been cross with him that one time he’d got a bit creative in one of his colouring-in books, but that was a long time ago now. They’d both said they were sorry.
Nick was an only child too, and he needed a good friend at nursery school. He’d been coming for a while now, and had found it difficult to settle. Some of the other boys were rough. They’d taken one look at him and honed in on a soft target. Making “Knickers” cry was a favourite game.
“Hiya Nick.”
“Hiya Gordon.”
“What’s it like here?”
“It’s all right,” Nick said, but his eyes said something else. Nick’s mother put a comforting arm round his shoulders.
“It’s about to get a whole lot better,” said Zack. Gordon had never seen him angry before.
Their classroom door opened, and a smiling lady appeared. There was no need to blow a whistle or ring a bell. The children streamed towards her and disappeared inside. Edith joined Gordon and Nick as they walked over to her.
“So, this is Gordon,” said the teacher. She was stating the obvious, but showing him that she already knew his name. “I’m Mrs. Watkins.” She held her hand out for him to shake, and he decided there was a good chance he was going to like her. “You already know Nick, do you?” Mrs Watkins said. “That’s good. You’ll be company for one another.” She smiled down at Nick with just a hint of worry in her eyes.