The Daydreamer (2 page)

Then he takes from his pocket two important things he has remembered to bring with him – his hunting knife, and a box of matches. He takes the knife from its sheath and sets it down on the grass, ready in case the wolves attack. They are coming closer now. They are so hungry they are drooling and growling and baying. Kate is sobbing, but he cannot comfort her. He knows he has to concentrate on his plan. Right at his feet there are some dry leaves and twigs. Quickly and skilfully Peter gathers them up into a small pile. The wolves are edging closer. He has to get this right. There is only one match left in the box. They can smell the wolves’ breath – a terrible rotten meat stench. He bends down, cups his hand and lights the match. There is a gust of wind, the flame flickers, but Peter holds it close in to the pile, and then first one leaf, then another, then the end of a twig catch fire, and soon the little pile is blazing. He piles on more leaves and twigs and larger sticks. Kate is get- ting the idea and helping him. The wolves are backing off. Wild animals are terrified of fire. The flames are leaping higher and the wind is carrying the smoke right into their slobbering jaws. Now Peter takes hold of the hunting knife and …

Ridiculous! It was daydreams like this could make him miss his stop if he wasn’t careful. The bus had come to a halt. The kids from his school were already getting off. Peter leaped to his feet and just managed to jump to the pavement as the bus was starting off again. It was more than fifty yards down the road when he realised he had forgotten something. Was it his satchel? No! It was his sister! He had saved her from the wolves, and left her sitting there. For a moment he couldn’t move. He stood watching the bus pull away up the road. ‘Come back,’ he murmured. ‘Come back.’

One of the boys from his school came over and thumped him on the back.

‘Hey, what’s up? Seen a ghost?’

Peter’s voice seemed to come from far away. ‘Oh, noth- ing, nothing. I left something on the bus.’ And then he started to run. The bus was already a quarter of a mile away and beginning to slow down for its next stop. Peter sprinted. He was going so fast that if he spread his arms far apart, he would probably have been able to take off. Then he could skim along the top of the trees and … But no! He wasn’t going to start daydreaming again. He was going to get his sister back. Even now, she would be screaming in terror.

Some passengers had got off, and the bus was moving away again. He was closer than before. The bus was crawling behind a lorry. If he could just keep running, and forget the terrible pain in his legs and chest, he would catch up. As he drew level with the bus stop, the bus was no more than a hundred yards away. ‘Faster, faster,’ he said to himself.

A kid standing by the bus shelter called out to Peter as he passed. ‘Hey, Peter, Peter!’

Peter didn’t have the strength to turn his head. ‘Can’t stop,’ he panted, and ran on.

‘Peter! Stop! It’s me. Kate!’

Clutching at his chest, he collapsed on the grass at his sister’s feet.

‘Mind that dog mess,’ she said calmly as she watched her brother fighting for his breath. ‘Come on now. We’d better walk back or else we are going to be late. You’d better hold my hand if you’re going to stay out of trouble.’

So they walked to school together, and Kate very decently promised – in return for Peter’s Saturday pocket money – to say nothing about what had happened when they got home.

The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially the ones who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you are rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head. A teacher who saw Peter staring out the window or at a blank sheet of paper on his desk might think that he was bored, or stuck for an answer. But the truth was quite different.

For example, one morning the children in Peter’s class were set a maths test. They had to add up some very large numbers, and they had twenty minutes to do it. Almost as soon as he had started on the first sum, which involved adding three million five hundred thousand, two hundred and ninety-five to another number almost as large, Peter found himself thinking about the largest number in the world. He had read the week before about a number with the wonderful name of googol. A googol was ten multiplied by ten a hundred times. Ten with a hundred noughts on the end. And there was an even better word, a real beauty – a googolplex. A googolplex was ten multiplied by ten a googol number of times. What a number!

Peter let his mind wander off into the fantastic size of it. The noughts trailed into space like bubbles. His father had told him that astronomers had worked out that the total number of atoms in all the millions of stars they could see through their giant tele-scopes was ten with ninety-eight noughts on the end. All the atoms in the world did not even add up to one single googol. And a googol was the tiniest little scrap of a thing compared to a googolplex. If you asked someone for a googol of chocolate- covered toffees, there wouldn’t be nearly enough atoms in the universe to make them.

Peter propped his head on his hand and sighed. At that very moment the teacher clapped her hands. Twenty minutes were up. All Peter had done was write out the first number of the first sum. Everyone else had finished. The teacher had been watching Peter staring at his page, writing nothing and sighing.

Not long after that he was put in with a group of children who had great difficulty adding up even small numbers like four and six. Soon, Peter became bored and found it even harder to pay attention. The teachers began to think he was too bad at maths even for this special group. What were they to do with him?

Of course, Peter’s parents and his sister Kate knew that Peter wasn’t stupid, or lazy or bored, and there were teachers at his school who came to realise that all sorts of interesting things were happening in his mind. And Peter himself learned as he grew older that since people can’t see what’s going on in your head, the best thing to do, if you want them to understand you, is to tell them. So he began to write down some of the things that happened to him when he was staring out of the window or lying on his back looking up at the sky. When he grew up he became an inventor and a writer of stories and led a happy life. In this book you will find some of the weird adventures that happened in Peter’s head, written down exactly as they happened.

Chapter One
The Dolls

Ever since he could remember, Peter had shared a bedroom with Kate. Most of the time, he did not mind. Kate was all right. She made him laugh. And there were nights when Peter woke from a nightmare and was glad to have someone else in the room, even if it was his seven-year-old sister who would be no use against the red-skinned, slime-covered creatures who chased him through his sleep. When he woke up, these monsters slid behind the curtains, or crept into the wardrobe. Because Kate was in the room, it was just that little bit easier to get out of bed and sprint across the landing to his parents’ room.

But there were times when he did mind sharing a room. And Kate minded too. There were long afternoons when they got on each other’s nerves. A squabble would lead to a row, and a row to a fight, a proper punching, scratching, hair-pulling fight. Since Peter was three years older he expected to win these all-out battles. And in a sense, he did. He could always count on making Kate cry first.

But was this really winning? Kate could hold her breath and push and make her face the colour of a ripe plum. All she needed to do then was run downstairs and show her mother ‘what Peter did’. Or she might lie on the floor making a rattling sound in her throat so that Peter thought she was about to die. Then
he
would have to run down the stairs to fetch his mother. Kate could also scream. Once, during one of her noise storms, a car passing the house had stopped and a worried man had got out and stared up at the bedroom window. Peter was looking out at the time. The man ran up the garden and hammered on the door, certain something terrible was happening inside. And it was. Peter had borrowed something of Kate’s, and she wanted it back.
Now
!

On these occasions, Peter was the one who got into trouble, and Kate was the one who came out on top. This was how Peter saw it. When he got angry with Kate, he had to think carefully before hitting her. Often they kept the peace by drawing an imaginary line from the door right across their bedroom. Kate’s side there, Peter’s side here. On this side, Peter’s drawing and painting table, his one soft toy, a giraffe with a bent neck, the chemistry and electricity and printing sets that were never as much fun as the pictures on the box lids promised, and the tin trunk he kept his secrets in, which Kate was always trying to open.

Over there were Kate’s painting and drawing table, her tele-scope, microscope and magnetism sets which
were
as much fun as the pictures on their lids promised, and everywhere else in her half of the room were the dolls. They sat along the window ledge with their legs dangling idly, they balanced on her chest of drawers and flopped over its mirror, they sat in a toy pram, jammed like tube-train commuters. The ones in favour crept nearer her bed. They were all colours, from shiny boot-polish black to deathly white, though most were a glowing pink. Some were naked. Others wore only one item, a sock, a T-shirt, or a bonnet. A few were dressed to the nines in ball gowns with sashes, lace-trimmed frocks, and long skirts trailing ribbons. They were all quite different, but they all had one thing in common: they all had the same wide, mad, unblinking angry stare. They were meant to be babies, but their eyes gave them away. Babies never looked at anyone like that. When he walked past the dolls, Peter felt watched, and when he was out of the room, he suspected they were talking about him, all sixty of them.

Still, they never did Peter any harm, and there was only one that he really disliked. The Bad Doll. Even Kate did not like it. She was scared of it, so scared she did not dare throw it out in case it came back in the middle of the night and took its revenge. You would know the Bad Doll at a glance. It was a pink that no human had ever been. Long ago, its left leg and right arm had been wrenched from their sockets, and from the top of its pitted skull grew one thick hank of black hair. Its makers had wanted to give it a sweet little smile, but some- thing must have gone wrong with the mould because the Bad Doll always curled its lips in scorn, and frowned, as if trying to remember the nastiest thing in the world.

Of all the dolls, only the Bad Doll was neither boy nor girl. The Bad Doll was simply ‘it’. It was naked, and sat as far as possible from Kate’s bed, on a bookcase from where it looked down on the others. Kate sometimes took it in her hands and tried to soothe it with her murmurs, but it was never long before she shuddered and quickly put it back.

The invisible line worked well when they remembered about it. They had to ask permission to cross to the other’s half. Kate was not to pry into Peter’s secret trunk, and Peter was not to touch Kate’s microscope without asking. It worked well enough until one wet Sunday afternoon they had a row, one of their worst, about where exactly this line was. Peter was sure it was further away from his bed. This time, Kate did not need to turn purple or pretend to die, or scream. She clocked Peter on the nose with the Bad Doll. She held it by its one fat pink leg and swung it at his face. So it was Peter who went running down stairs crying. His nose was not actually hurting, but it was bleeding, and he wanted to make the most of it. As he hurried down, he smeared blood over his face with the back of his hand, and when he came into the kitchen, he dropped to the floor in front of his mother and wailed and moaned and writhed. Sure enough, Kate got into trouble, big trouble.

This was the fight that led their parents to decide that it was time Peter and Kate had separate rooms. Not long after Peter’s tenth birthday, his father cleared out what was called the ‘box room’, even though it contained no boxes, only old picture frames and broken armchairs. Peter helped his mother decorate the room. They hung curtains and squeezed in a huge iron bed with brass knobs on.

Kate was so happy she helped Peter carry his stuff across the landing. No more fights. And she would no longer have to listen to the disgusting gurgling, piping noise her brother made in his sleep. And Peter could not stop singing. Now he had a place where he could go and, well, just
be
. That night he chose to go to bed half an hour early in order to enjoy his own place, his own things, with no imaginary line down the middle of the room. He lay in the semi-darkness and thought that it was just as well that some good at last had come from that vile monstrosity, the Bad Doll.