My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (17 page)

Meanwhile, I'm unpacking my bathroom stuff and wondering why Mum's put a pouch full of golf balls in my suitcase. Why would she do that?

“This is incredible,” Harry says. “How did you manage to talk Cyrus round?”

“Easily,” I say. “I told him I'd do him a favor.”

“What favor?”

I take out a couple of the golf balls and look at them for a minute, then hold them up for Harry to see.

“What the hell are these?” I ask.

“Golf balls,” he says distractedly.

“I know that, but why have I got them? Why did my mum put them in my case?”

He shrugs.

I hunt around in the pouch to see if there's anything else in there, but there's nothing. Just the golf balls. I think my mum must be finally losing her mind.

“What favor did you say you'd do for Cyrus?” Harry asks again, and I zip up the pouch and throw it back into my suitcase.

“I told him I'd get him to the school dance,” I say. “His parents banned him from going, because of the fight. So I told him I'll get him there.”

Harry slumps down in his seat, and some of the red color comes back into his face again. “Crap,” he says. “We're screwed. That'll never happen.”

“Of course it will,” I say. “This is my forte, Harry. It's what I do. Don't worry about any of that.”

“Do you even know who Cyrus's parents are?” Harry asks. “He's got, like, the strictest parents in the whole school. You'll never sort this one out.”

That isn't the kind of news I want to hear, but I push my empty suitcase under the bed and brave it out.

“Of course I will,” I say. “It's already sorted. Just about. I've got the perfect plan bubbling away. I just need to work on some of the finer details. You're going to university. I can guarantee it.”

He starts to rise up out of the slump a little bit. The red color begins to disappear again.

“You've got a plan already?” he says. “Honestly?”

“I'll give you it in writing if you want,” I say. “It's all systems go.”

“And then I can definitely go to Bailey? No more strings attached?”

“That's what I'm telling you,” I say, and he's up on his feet again.

“Do you need any help?” he says. “Is there anything I can do to help with the plan? Do you need a wingman?”

A wingman!

“I don't think so,” I tell him, trying not to laugh. “I'll let you know if I do, but I think the whole thing's self-functioning.”

“Is there anything else I can do to help? Anything at all?”

“Just give me some space to think when I need it,” I say. “That's all. Can you do that?”

“Absolutely,” he says, and he starts moving his alarm clock and his pajamas and stuff. “You can have the bed, too,” he tells me. “You need to be in tip-top condition for this. I'll sleep on the floor.”

“Straight up?”

“Straight up,” he says, and he drags the plastic mattress out and starts pumping it up there and then. I watch him struggling with it for a while, and then I lie down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to Uncle Ray breaking something or other downstairs.

Result!

As I'm sitting in French the next morning, though, looking out the window at a train that hasn't moved in almost half an hour, I start to wonder if there's really much advantage to having the bed in Harry's room. Uncle Ray's noise goes on so late into the night, and starts up again so early in the morning, that it's practically impossible to sleep there anyway. I spent most of the night sitting up at Harry's desk, watching the TV with a pair of headphones on, while he snored behind me on the blow-up. I was like a zombie by the time Uncle Ray drove us to school in his taxi, still hammering the opera.

I struggle all morning just trying to keep it together. There's a point where the train I'm staring at just disappears, and I can't work out what's happened. One moment I'm staring at it and it's there, the next moment I'm still staring at it but it's totally gone. It didn't drive away or anything—it just vanished. Then I realize I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes without knowing about it, and it freaks me out a little bit. Luckily no one else seems to have noticed. Luckily I couldn't have been snoring, or talking in my sleep.

I do manage to get it together enough to interface with Cyrus at lunchtime again, though. I find him sitting over by the window in the dining hall, where he'd been a couple of days ago during the Elsie Green debacle, and I set about getting the full details of his grounding and of his setup at home, just so's I know exactly what I'm up against. I've got my English jotter out, and I make a bunch of notes in it while I'm talking to him, which isn't something I usually have to do. Everything I need to know usually stays right there in my head, but my head's in such a mess from all the lack of sleep and everything that I don't trust it to keep hold of anything, so I write it all down.

It turns out the thing Harry was trying to tell me about Cyrus's parents is that they're pacifists. I don't really know what that means at first, but Cyrus explains that his parents are completely against any kind of fighting. Or violence. When he was a kid, he wasn't allowed to have any toy guns or soldiers or tanks or anything like that, and that's why this thing with Chris Yates has landed him in it so deeply. I wish I'd known about this pacifist thing the other day, in history. Maybe I could've used it against Monahan, told him I was one of those, and got myself excused from all that war boredom he was peddling.

“So it's like you've gone against your mum and dad's religion?” I ask Cyrus.

“It's not a religion, dumb-ass,” he tells me.

But I write that down in my notebook anyway.

I also put this bit in about when his parents were becoming pacifists in the first place. Cyrus was still quite young, and his dad bought him a bow and arrow, and then when his mum found out, she went ape-shit and took it off him. My brain is still working just enough for me to recognize this means Cyrus's mum is probably more of a pacifist than his dad is, even though they're both totally strict on it now. It's possible there might be some way to use this to my advantage. Apart from that, my jotter is just filled up with all the details of the mess Cyrus is in, and of his setup at home. Ever since he came back to school, after his suspension, his dad drives him in the morning and picks him up at the gate at the end of the day. He's not allowed any kind of social life at all, and he has to have these sessions in the evenings with his parents, where they contemplate peace and talk about the effects of violence in the world each day. At the weekends he has to go with them wherever they're going, and all the rest of the time he has to study. His ban isn't going to be lifted until he gets his exam results.

“What about their jobs?” I ask him. “Where do your mum and dad work?”

“My dad works at home,” he says. “My mum works in the primary school.”

“Do they ever go out together in the evenings and leave you on your own?” I ask, and he shakes his head. “What about leaving you with somebody else?”

“Sometimes my grandma comes round and they go out somewhere. Not much.”

I write that down anyway. I might see something in it when my head starts to work again.

“So what about the school dance?” I ask him. “Why are they so against you going? Is that 'cause they're pacifists too?”

“Are you mad?” he says. “Why would pacifists be against a dance?”

“I don't know,” I tell him. “I don't know anything about it. It's your religion.”

“It's not a religion!” he screeches. “It's just a thing. I've already told you that. They just won't let me go because they know I want to go. As a punishment. Are you sure you can do anything about this? You don't seem to know anything about anything.”

“It's all under control,” I tell him. “I just didn't get much sleep last night. I'll be all right again tomorrow. Don't worry about it. You'll be at the dance.”

I have to admit, though, that as the afternoon wears on I begin to wonder how I'm ever going to pull it off. I try to read through my notes in science, but all the words just sort of swim in front of my eyes and I can't even make out what any of them are. And things at Uncle Ray's place don't get any better. The chaos continues unabated, and Harry's idea of giving me plenty of space seems to revolve around him sitting staring at me wherever I am, saying, “Anything yet, Jackdaw?” every five or ten minutes. The only thing I seem to be on course for at the moment is a full psychotic episode.

Get this, though: Elsie Green finally accepted my friend request. I'd forgotten all about it, but I was using Harry's computer to carry on the argument I've been having with Sandy Hammil, about whether it was him who told everyone Elsie kissed me or not, when the little red rectangle suddenly appeared up in the corner of my profile. I couldn't even guess who it was from, my head was so mashed. But the worst of it was, when I clicked it open, I noticed she'd sent me a message, too.

“I don't want this to give you the wrong idea,” it said. “This doesn't mean your suit has found favor with me. But I don't want to add to your torture. I know what the heart of the lover will do. Be strong, Jack. Elsie.”

Jesus Christ!

It got me so wound up, I even started typing a reply to her, telling her what I really thought of her in an attempt to make her see this madness was all in her head. But I realized the last thing I need is to have her refuse to help with my programming, after everything. So I used my anger instead to type up a reply to Sandy, telling him he must be drunk if he thought I'd believe everybody had just seen Elsie kissing me. It was quite a sizzler. Then I went downstairs to face the “Something Special” Uncle Ray had promised to make us for dinner.

“So how's the latest scheme going?” Uncle Ray says as I sit down and try to work out what, exactly, the Something Special is. “Regale us with tales of your latest exploits, Mr. Jackdaw.”

In my delirium, I have the mad idea Uncle Ray might be able to come up with a solution that will help me if I tell him about it, so I decide to lay it out for him.

“I'm helping one of my friends,” I say. “His parents have banned him from going to the school dance, and there's a girl he'll lose if he can't take her to it. So I'm working on a way to get him there.”

Uncle Ray slaps his knee and starts creasing up.

“I love it,” he says. “You're a regular Figaro, Jackie D.”

Then he points his fork at Harry. “You could learn a thing or two from this boy,” he says. “That's the way to go about life, Harry. Get right in about it. Mix things up a bit.”

He shuffles some of the stuff from his plate into his mouth and thinks for a minute. God knows how he manages to think with all the noise that's going on. There's a TV and a radio both playing in the kitchen, and then there's the noise from the TV that's blaring away in the living room too. But after a bit, Uncle Ray starts nodding, then swallows some beer to push down all the food that's in his mouth.

“Here's how you go about that, Jack,” he says, tapping his fork on his plate. “All you need are some pillows. Your pal tells his parents he's not feeling well on the night of the dance, and he goes up to bed early. He fills the bed with the pillows, so's it looks as if he's in there. Then you're underneath his bedroom window, holding on to the bottom of a rope ladder to keep it steady. He climbs down and—
whammo!
—you whisk him off to the dance and if his parents come up to check on him they see the pillows in the bed and think he's sleeping soundly. After the dance, he climbs back up the rope ladder, and no one's any the wiser. How does that sound?”

“Pretty crappy,” I say. “Unless we're living in a lame children's comic.” Or else I say, “Pretty good, Uncle Ray. I'll give that some thought and see if I can use it.” I'm so confused by all the noise, and so exhausted and ready to fall asleep, that I'm not even sure what I say. I meant to think the first one and say the second, but maybe I did it the other way around. I'm too bewildered to even know.

“You're a spunky one,” Uncle Ray laughs. “I want you to watch this boy while he's here, Harry. Get versed in some of his ways. Let some of his spunk rub off on you.”

Harry looks appalled. “Dad!” he says. “That doesn't mean what you think it means.”

“Don't tell me what I think I mean,” Uncle Ray shouts, banging his beer bottle down on the table. “I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about, son. Tell him, Jack. Tell him what your favorite subject in school is.”

“French,” I say, trying to give Harry a sympathetic look.

“Exactly,” Uncle Ray shouts. “Now tell him why.”

“Because the French class has got the best view of the trains.”

Uncle Ray gets a major crease on. He starts slapping the table. “You see, Harry?” he says. “You see? That's what I'm talking about. Spunk! Now tell him what your second favorite subject is, Jack.”

“Arithmetic,” I say.

“For why?” Uncle Ray asks theatrically.

“Because it's got the best view of the river.”

Uncle Ray has heard all this a hundred times before. Mainly because he's asked me it ninety-nine times now, after I told him about it the first time. But he still laughs as if it's a brand new joke with a brand new punch line, and he points his fork at Harry while he's laughing. Harry just stares at him, screwing up his mouth.

“Have I told you what this one's been getting up to recently?” Uncle Ray says to me. “Did you hear what I found him doing the other night when I walked into his room?”

“Shut up, Dad!” Harry says, and Uncle Ray's black eye starts to bulge and throb.