CHAPTER 5
Eldred's ninth birthday was one that his parents would never forget and Eldred himself didn't like to remember.
For a start, he had flu.
‘You're staying in bed,’ said Mildred, but Eldred had one of his rare moments of stubbornness. (Mildred wouldn't have said they were rare, but then she didn't know how often Eldred struggled with inner protests and yielded to her way. Her requests were always quite reasonable, so she had no way of knowing they caused her young son such agony.)
‘I have to go to school,’ said Eldred. ‘I'm going to school.’
‘I'd have thought you'd be glad to stay at home on your birthday,’ said Mildred, ‘even without a temperature like this.’
‘It's the class trip,’ Eldred reminded her.
Mildred was immediately suspicious. ‘Where to?’
‘A farm,’ he said.
‘Oh, that's all right,’ said Mildred, relieved. ‘I thought it was something educational.’
Eldred got out of bed and began looking for socks. ‘Why don't you like things being educational, Mum?’
Mildred pushed him away from the drawer and took out the socks herself. ‘I want you to grow up normal, son,’ she told him. ‘People can make life miserable for anyone who's that bit different. You can learn too much and become too clever for your own good.’
‘But everyone is different,’ said Eldred. ‘Unique. We were told that in Religious Ed. at school,’ he added hastily, in case Mildred suspected him of being original. ‘Each person is different from everyone else. They might pretend not to be, if they want popularity.’
‘Well, pretend, like everyone else,’ said Mildred. ‘You don't have to be that different, do you? Moderation in all things.’
Eldred's sigh was huge.
‘What's wrong with that?’ Mildred demanded. ‘I'm telling you how to get on in the world, that's all.’
Eldred put on his socks, took them off again and put them on the other feet. Catching his mother's eye, he excused himself, ‘There's a slight difference in the design. They don't fit so well the other way round.’
‘You're changing the subject,’ Mildred said, ‘just because your dim old mother has said something sensible.’
‘You're not dim,’ said Eldred kindly, ‘but I didn't follow your reasoning. How could I be moderately myself and moderately pretending? Surely I could only be Eldred if I was Eldred all the time, not pretending some of the time to be someone else? It's all one life, isn't it?’
‘Hurry up, if you're going to school,’ said Mildred. ‘You should have reminded me last night about the trip. I'll put some cartons of squash in your bag. With a fever like that, you'll be needing a lot of cold drinks.’
‘Thank you,’ said Eldred.
On the coach, Eldred was so excited he could hardly wait to arrive at the farm. He did equations in his head to calm himself down. The other children were equally excited. They threw sandwiches and squirted drinks, stuffed crisps down each other's sweaters and screamed and were reprimanded by Mrs Garcia.
The farm was a large, modern and highly mechanized one, owned by a consortium. The children were met by the farm manager, a farm mechanic, and the stockman. ‘We'll divide you into three groups,’ said Mrs Garcia, ‘and these men will each take one group and show you their particular area of work. Then we'll change you round.’
Most of the girls volunteered for the stockman's group, wanting to see the animals. Most of the boys ran towards the mechanic, hoping for a chance to drive the tractors and combine harvester. The teacher firmly equalled out the groups. ‘You'll all get a chance to see everything. Be patient.’
Eldred, who stood a head shorter than the others in his class, stationed himself beside the farm manager. ‘If you don't mind, I'll come with you,’ he said.
The man grinned. ‘Bit small to be interested in management, aren't you?’
‘I thought it would be more appropriate to start by getting an overview of the running of a farm,’ Eldred explained, ‘before studying the details such as care of animals and maintenance of machinery, important though those matters undoubtedly are.’
The grin dropped from the man's face. He looked at Eldred more closely. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘An overview, eh? Then you've picked the right man for the job.’
‘What I'm particularly interested in,’ Eldred confided, as the first group moved away, following the stockman towards the milking parlour, ‘is the recycling of organic farm waste.’
‘Are you indeed?’ said the manager. ‘I have a special interest in that myself. The problem with a farm of this size, you see, is the quantity of waste it generates and the space required to store it while it's being converted into a usable form. It's all useful stuff, no doubt about that, but it's the time taken, see, to reduce it. Can't use the space for nothing else, all that time.’
‘And how long precisely would it take,’ Eldred enquired, ‘to reduce, say, a metric tonne of raw slurry to usable manure? And how long to produce silage from waste vegetation? Is there a time difference between maturing it in a closed container and out in the open? Would there be an appreciable difference in quality between these two methods? Are chemicals lost, for instance, by exposure to the elements?’
‘I'll show you how we deal with this at the moment, and what the chief disadvantages of the different systems are,’ the man promised. ‘Follow me.’
By lunchtime, Mrs Garcia was seriously annoyed. The children in farm manager Bruce Mackeson's group had all run off and were playing in the hayloft, while Eldred and Bruce were locked in a conversation that seemed to be, as far as she could overhear, on the subject of decomposition of cow dung.
‘We got bored,’ the other children said, when she told them off for straying.
‘I'm not surprised,’ said Mrs Garcia tartly.
She redistributed the groups, forcing Eldred to go and watch hens’ eggs being collected and Bruce to answer another group's questions about the difference between hay and straw and whether veal was an animal.
‘When we're back at school tomorrow,’ Mrs Garcia announced at the end of the day, herding evil-smelling children on to the coach, ‘we'll start to use our new knowledge in a little project. How many of you think you can now draw a good tractor for me?’
Amid cries of, ‘Me, Miss!’ and a sea of waving hands, Bruce Mackeson boarded the coach, stamping most of the mud off his boots first and, ignoring Mrs Garcia, strode to the back of the coach. She watched him with narrowed eyes as he handed Eldred a slip of paper. ‘Let me know,’ he said, ‘as soon as it's ready.’
He returned to the door of the coach, where Mrs Garcia shook his hand and thanked him politely for all the trouble he and his colleagues had taken with her class. As soon as the coach was out of the farmyard, she made her way down the aisle towards Eldred. A girl put her hand up, stopping her: ‘Please, Miss ...’ and while her attention was distracted, Eldred crumpled up the paper and threw it out of the window. Mrs Garcia saw him. ‘What was that he gave you?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Eldred, watching it blow away. Rage rose in him and he tried to rationalize it away: Mrs Garcia couldn't take Bruce Mackeson's phone number away from him; he had memorized it. It was good to have an ally who was so interested in his design for a waste recycling plant and had promised support when Eldred's work was completed. It was not a bad birthday present. He had no reason to feel angry with Mrs Garcia for asking a perfectly normal question. His disproportionate rage with the world frightened him at times. Mrs Garcia had already turned away.
It may have been anger with Mrs Garcia that fuelled Eldred's rebellion that day, or it may simply have been a flood of enthusiasm for his own personal project and an impatience to get on with it now that he had some evidence of its potential usefulness. Whatever it was, it impelled Eldred to get off the coach when it stopped near the school gates, rather than stay on to be dropped nearer home with the other children who lived on the same estate.
T
he unknown force - anger or enthusiasm or a mixture of both - sent him running through the open door of the high school, where first-schoolers never ventured, and up and down corridors.
The classroom doors were all closed; there was still another half hour of the high school day to go. Scurrying through the empty corridors stirred memories in Eldred's heart of his early forays in search of knowledge in the hospital and he felt the same mix of emotions: excitement, apprehension and loneliness.
He located the computer room on the third floor of the main building. It contained fifteen VDU screens and no people. Eldred went in and shut the door behind him.
Switching on the nearest computer and inserting a spare disk, he noted with satisfaction that the machine was a more sophisticated model than his own computer at home. It would give him more scope. The software was unfamiliar, though. He would need time to assimilate the different programs before he could begin to apply the new information gleaned at the farm to the model he had been working on at home over the past few months.
The dimensions of the plant and the equations associated with its chemical process were fresh in his mind, but it would take time to key in the information. He wished he had brought a floppy disk with him when he left home this morning. Seizing a software manual from one of the desks, Eldred retired to an alcove out of sight of the door, sat down cross-legged and began to read. When the school bell rang at four o'clock he didn't move, although by now he had memorized the procedures he needed. He was waiting for the duty teacher to put his head round the door prior to locking it for the night.
The idea of being locked in the computer room till next morning troubled him briefly, then he dismissed the worry. He rarely felt hungry while he was working; he still had a carton of squash left in his bag; if necessary, he could pee in the metal waste bin. There was no problem.
He gave brief consideration to his parents’ reaction but reasoned that their anxiety would soon give way to rapturous approval when they saw what he had designed and heard that an expert like Bruce Mackeson had described it as exactly the breakthrough the agriculture industry needed. Also, it was his birthday and he hadn't been consulted about what he would like as a treat (his father having decided that a football would be an appropriate gift for a nine year old boy) so surely Edgar and Mildred would concede him a choice in the use of the rest of his day? He had been very patient with all their restrictions until this time but he was nine now.
His own reasoning satisfied him, so when he heard the key turn in the door no qualms inhibited Eldred from installing himself on a chair in front of one of the computer screens, propping himself up to the right height with a couple of large books and getting started.
Nine years old today and the whole night ahead to work on a quick-conversion recycling plant for organic waste: what more could Eldred ]ones’ heart desire?