CHAPTER 12
Mr Austin's computer class was not one of Eldred's successes.
Towards the end of the lesson, Mr Austin told him, ‘Go up to the staff room and wait for me there; I'll see you when the bell goes for break.’
Guiltily, Eldred stood up and left the class. He didn't know where the staff room was. He didn't know whether Mr Austin meant him to go into the staff room or wait outside. He didn't know what he had done wrong. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes.
‘Looking for someone?’ asked a woman emerging from a door marked School Secretary.
‘The staff room,’ whispered Eldred.
She took pity on him. ‘I'll show you.’
They went up several flights of stairs and down a couple of long corridors. Waves of boredom, anxiety and frustration billowed like smoke from the cracks under closed doors of classrooms. Eldred shivered.
‘Who do you want to see in the staff room?’ the school secretary asked, tapping on the door.
‘No one. I have to wait for Mr Austin.’
She opened the door and looked round it. ‘Nobody in there. He'll be along when the bell goes. He's always first in line for coffee! Take a seat here.’
‘Am I allowed?’ asked Eldred fearfully.
She ruffled his hair. ‘They won't eat you.’
Left to himself, Eldred did as he always did when he was worried: he gathered information. Some of his best researches had arisen from reading at random in the public library when parents or teachers were annoyed with him for something he had done, or not done.
He thumbed through a few piles of exercise books awaiting correction, mentally filing away the contents and comparing the inconsistencies in different pupils’ accounts of the same historical battle, till he was almost certain where the errors lay. Discarding the errors, he memorized the facts. This took him about five minutes. Eldred looked around for something else.
Heaps of periodicals hung off the edges of shelves. Gingerly, Eldred removed the top dozen or so, without toppling the whole stack. Most were educational supplements, teaching journals, newspapers open at the Situations Vacant – Educational section; there were several publishers’ brochures and advertising leaflets for audio-visual aids. Eldred scanned them all, committed them to memory, replaced them and took down another pile.
The bell rang, making him jump and causing a cascade of magazines from the shelf. Some fell on his head; the rest scattered on the floor around his feet. Flustered, he gathered them up, clutching them to his chest. Another pile sighed and subsided gracefully from the far end of the shelf, just as the door opened and three teachers entered, one of them Mr Austin.
‘What's this?’ said Mr Austin, putting his hand to his head theatrically. ‘I told you to wait for me, child, not to wreck the place.’ The other teachers laughed.
Agitated, Eldred looked down at the brochure on top of the pile he held. He blinked, photographing the words that would later be developed in his sleeping brain, then looked back at Mr Austin, who was unaware of this process.
‘What happened to you in my class?’ Mr Austin said.
‘I couldn't do it,’ said Eldred.
‘If you could design a waste reprocessor, you could have done the exercises I set the class today,’ said Mr Austin. ‘Are you ready to tell me the truth now?’
‘Pardon?’
‘I won't be angry with you,’ said Mr Austin. ‘You found the design lying around the farm office, didn't you, and brought it home to copy?’
Eldred was speechless. He blushed deep red.
‘I thought it was something like that,’ said Mr Austin. ‘I knew there was no way a boy of your age could design something like that.’
‘It's not true,’ Eldred whispered.
‘Oh yes, I did know,’ Mr Austin averred. ‘We teachers get quite good at assessing a child's ability, you know. I suppose you thought you'd get into trouble. Well, you've had your telling off for being in the school building after hours and using the school computers. If you run along back to your class now, you'll hear no more about this from me. But in future, tell the truth - all right? It gets you into less trouble in the long run. And if you haven't returned the original design yet, you'd better send it back to its owner, pronto, or you will really be in trouble - appropriating someone's invention for your own nefarious purposes.’
Eldred's brain registered ‘nefarious’- initial letters probably n-ef, or n-e-p-h; possible meanings ‘unworthy’ or maybe ‘shady’. Later he would look it up in a dictionary. Another part of his brain informed him that he had lost all his work on the reprocessing plant, and something inside his heart began to weep.
‘Please,’ said Eldred. ‘Please, can I have my disk back?’
‘Your disk?’ said Mr Austin. ‘The disk you stole from the school computer room?’
‘Can I copy it on to one of my own disks? Or pay for it out of my pocket money? Or at least have one last look at it?’ begged Eldred.
He had done the last part so quickly, when he had heard the police coming down the corridor and trying to push down the computer room door, that he hadn't memorized the precise dimensions of the important second chamber of the plant.
Mr Austin took a cup from beside the coffee urn. ‘If you don't convince me of your intention to put this matter right immediately,’ he said, ‘I really have no other option than to speak to the Head about this. Is that what you want?’
‘No,’ said Eldred.
‘Then return the original to wherever you got it from - by post, anonymously, if you want - and forget about any plans to copy it. All right?’
Eldred didn't think it would help to say that the disk held the original design and there were no copies. ‘What will you do with the information on the disk?’ he asked.
‘Erase it,’ said Mr Austin. Eldred ran.
Playtime was in session in the First School compound. By the gates, watching everyone, was Jilly Martin. Her nose was running. Eldred, who was making furtive use of his handkerchief, offered her a wipe. She sniffled into it happily. ‘I thought you'd gone,’ she said.
‘I'm back.’
‘Didn't they want you?’ asked Jilly.
‘No.’
She nodded. ‘Couldn't you do the work?’
‘Oh,’ said Eldred, 'the work was easy enough. But I couldn't do it there.’
‘Why?’
‘Nobody wanted to be there,’ said Eldred. ‘They were all thinking really loudly about all the other things they wished they were doing instead. They're better at that than us. They're fourteen, so they've had years of being forced to do things they don't want to do, and thinking of something else. I couldn't do it. It was tiring.’
‘I get tired at school,’ said Jilly.
‘Is it like that for you all the time?’ Eldred asked. ‘In every lesson?’
‘Yes,’ she said simply.
They stood in silent companionship.
‘We could run away,’ said Jilly hopefully.
‘Where?’
Jilly looked around for inspiration. ‘We could live in the sports shed?’
Eldred sighed. ‘It wouldn't solve anything. What we want to escape from is not having any choice. They don't take any notice of your choices until you're grown up. When we leave school, then we'll be free to decide what to do with our own lives.’
‘I don't think I will,’ said Jilly. ‘My mum couldn't cope without me. She says I'm her cross in life.’
‘Is that good’’ asked Eldred doubtfully.
‘It's something,’ said Jilly. ‘Better than nothing for her, I suppose.’
Eldred mused on this. ‘Do your mum and dad talk about you a lot?’
Jilly nodded silently.
‘Mine too,’ said Eldred. ‘Do they complain about you and wonder why you are like you are?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Her expression was sad.
‘I wonder,’ said Eldred, ‘what they would talk about if they didn't have us?’
r /> ‘Maybe they'd complain about somebody else,’ Jilly suggested .
‘But somebody else wouldn't be theirs to change, so there'd be no point in that,’ said Eldred. ‘They can only try to change us, because they made us; we're their flesh and blood.’
‘They didn't make us,’ said Jilly sagely. ‘God did.’
‘Do you believe in God?’ asked Eldred, surprised.
‘Yes. Don't you?’
‘I haven't seen much evidence of him so far,’ Eldred said.
The bell rang. Automatically, they turned away from the gate and lined up with the other children, to return to thirty-five minutes of basic geometry shapes.