The Impossible Boy (2 page)

‘What the hell was that?’ she groaned. Her voice was hoarse. She adjusted the sunglasses in her hair with trembling fingers.

Mr Abbott shrugged dumbly. Instinctively he went to place his hands on Fleur’s shoulders. The pipe dropped from his mouth and landed softly on the grass. He looked around, suddenly
wild-eyed, his heart thumping, his thick-fingered hands clasping and unclasping anxiously. ‘Where’s Fleur?’ he asked his wife, a tiny tremor in his voice.

(BLUE HILLS: PRESENT DAY)

Barney Watkins was quaking with rage.

He clenched his fists, the skin on his knuckles turning a translucent yellow-white, as he stomped through the open door into classroom U13. Eleven years old, with a snub nose and a flick of
shiny black hair, he was the kind of kid, average in seemingly every way, that people instantly forgot the moment he left the room. He sighed long and hard, his breath escaping like steam fizzing
from a volcano.

His friend Gabby Grayling was waiting for him in the room with a girl he didn’t recognise. The girl was about his age, with long dark hair and a pale complexion.

‘Barney,’ said Gabby, ‘this is Laura. She—’

‘You won’t believe what ridiculous old Mr Jones has done!’ interrupted Barney. ‘Urgh. He makes me . . . So. Flipping. Angry.’

Gabby blinked at him and adjusted her small round glasses on her nose. She had curly brown hair and big dark eyes that seemed to swallow you whole. A couple of years older than Barney, she often
felt a little protective of him. ‘What happened, mate?’

‘He just confiscated my EGG!’

Gabby shrugged. ‘So what? It’s lunchtime. We’ll get some food from the canteen later.’

Barney moaned as if in pain. ‘Not that sort of egg, Gabby! An
E-G-G
. Electronic Gaming Globe? It’s a vintage hand-held video game. From the 1970s. I got it from a charity
shop in Kent last year. I brought it in to show Lewis and Mr Jones caught us looking at it in maths and now he’s confiscated it, put it in that stupid old safe he has at the back of his
classroom!
The Black Hole
, everyone calls it. Once stuff ends up in there it never sees the light of day again!’

‘Tough break, mate,’ said Gabby, trying to look sympathetic and not making a terribly good job of it. ‘A major injustice, I’m sure. We’ll figure out a way to get it
back later. But can we get on with some Geek Inc. business? Laura has just told me something that could need further investigation.’

Geek Inc. was a school club run by Barney and Gabby and devoted to investigating the impossible. That was the idea, anyway. When Barney had first joined the club about two months ago –
being new to Blue Hills High School, lonely, and in need of something to do at lunchtimes – Gabby (the club’s only other member, a fact that she’d not mentioned until Barney had
already agreed to join) had implied that they would spend all their time chasing ghosts and investigating flying saucers. This had so far, somewhat conspicuously, failed to happen. There had been
one genuinely strange incident, shortly after he had joined, involving a secret government formula that brought inanimate objects to life. But since then, nothing.

Since their first investigation, Barney and Gabby had tried to encourage kids at Blue Hills High to come forward with any reports of strange happenings for Geek Inc. to look into, but all of
these had turned out to be much less odd than they first appeared. A ‘sea monster’ in the canal was revealed to be no more than a cardboard cutout of a dinosaur thrown in by the manager
of the town’s bookshop to generate publicity for a ‘monster sale’ he was planning. He was fined for littering. A ‘vampire postman’ kids reported seeing on the way to
school was just an ordinary, if somewhat paler than normal, postman with a habit of drinking tomato juice on the job. And tales of a werewolf stalking the town’s bowling green every full moon
were found to be outright lies spread by a pensioner with too much time on his hands.

The business with the government formula had briefly shown Barney that the world could be a much weirder and more remarkable place than he had ever imagined. But since then normal life, with its
unchanging routine of school, homework, football practice and nagging parents, had quickly reasserted itself and he had started to wonder if anything out of the ordinary would ever happen to him
again.

He raised his eyebrows at Gabby. ‘This had better be really,
really
good because I’m not in the mood for any more time-wasters.’

Gabby looked at Laura. ‘Can you tell Barney what you told me?’

Laura crossed her arms and fixed Barney with a confidential, big-eyed stare. ‘
Well
,’ she said in a strong Blue Hills accent, ‘there’s this
lad
in my
class, right? He’s
new
. Only started here two weeks ago.
Seems
normal, like an
ordinary
kid, right?
But
. . .’

‘Go on,’ said Barney.

‘Get this . . .’ said Laura. She paused dramatically.

‘Yes?’

‘He’s
always
got a pen on him.’

Barney blinked. ‘What?’ He frowned and looked at Gabby. She was grinning.

‘I mean
always
,’ said Laura. ‘Absolutely
always
. It’s well weird.’

Barney raised a palm to his face. ‘Really? Great. Well done both of you for a great wind-up. Ha ha. How very, very clever. Now if you don’t mind I’m going to go and grovel to
Mr Jones to see if there’s anything I can do to get my EGG back because, believe it or not, I do actually have better things to do than stand here being treated like some kind of idiot by a
pair of smirking
girls
. He turned on his heel, tie swinging, face prickling with heat.

‘Wait!’ called Gabby. There was laughter in her voice. ‘Barney! Stop! This is a real mystery! Honestly!’

‘You think?’ said Barney, turning to face her from the doorway. ‘A boy always having a pen counts as a real mystery now, does it? Seems to me like the standard of oddness
we’re prepared to investigate in this club has declined a bit, Gabs. What’s our next case going to be?
The Strange Affair of the Sausage Roll That When Someone Ate It They Felt Less
Hungry? The Mysterious Case of the Grass That Was Green
?’

‘Please wait,’ said Gabby. ‘There is actually more to this. I promise.’

Barney shot her a sceptical look. ‘Well?’ he asked, leaning against the doorway and folding his arms.

Gabby touched Laura’s elbow. ‘Tell him the rest.’

Laura grinned. ‘OK. Here’s the thing, right? I say he’s always got a pen on him. I mean,
really
, always. It’s like a magic trick he does. He can produce a pen
out of nowhere.
Literally
. I’ve seen him do it. Like, three or four times in our English class before the teacher arrived. There’s nothing in his hands,
nothing
. He
rolls his sleeves up so you can see he hasn’t got anything hidden up them. Then he flicks a wrist and there’s a pen
right there
in his hand. A proper biro, not a fake paper
biro that he could hide between his fingers or anything. He can make pens appear out of nowhere. I swear. It’s like he’s
properly
magic.’ She nodded to emphasise this
last point.

Barney scratched his chin slowly. He had calmed down a bit now.

‘What do you think?’ Gabby asked him.

Barney shrugged. ‘So he knows a magic trick? With a bit of practice, I could probably do the same thing.’

‘But,’ said Gabby, ‘if this boy is really doing it the way Laura’s describing – nothing up his sleeves, totally empty hands – it sounds pretty impossible to
me.’

‘
If
that’s really how he does it,’ said Barney. ‘And it all depends on that one little word
if
, doesn’t it?’ He looked at Laura. ‘Who
is he, anyway?’

‘He’s called Chas Hinton,’ said Laura.

‘Chas Hinton?’ repeated Barney with a smirk. ‘I know Chas. He’s in my maths class! We were both just in Mr Jones’s lesson. He was sitting about three desks away
from me.’

‘You know him?’ said Gabby. ‘What’s he like?’

‘He’s
all right
, I suppose,’ said Barney. ‘He’s always making people laugh. Most people like him. Actually, everyone likes him. He’s dead popular.
Which is a bit weird because he hasn’t been at Blue Hills High very long.’

‘Is that a note of jealousy in your voice, Barney?’ asked Gabby.

Barney flushed. ‘Of course not. So Chas is brilliant and wonderful and everyone adores him. Good for him. But there’s nothing actually
magical
about him.’

‘Laura seems to think there is,’ said Gabby. ‘It’s got to be worth looking into, though, don’t you think?’

Barney screwed up his face. ‘Yeah, OK. Why not? I suppose we’ve been a bit short on things to investigate lately anyway. We can’t afford to be all that choosy.’ He turned
to Laura. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve noticed anything else strange about Chas, have you? Any other little tricks he gets up to?’

‘I have, actually, now you ask,’ said Laura. ‘I was going to mention it but it slipped my mind.’

‘What is it?’ asked Barney.

‘He can walk on water.’

They searched the playground but there was no sign of Chas. None of the kids they asked seemed to know where he was. They were about to give up when Barney had an idea.

‘Follow me,’ he said. He sounded decisive.

The two girls exchanged a glance and followed.

‘Tell us about the water thing again,’ he said to Laura. ‘In a bit more detail, please.’

Laura shrugged. ‘It was last week. In PE. The boys’ class had just come out of the swimming pool and I was with the rest of the girls queued up outside waiting to go in. I was first
in the queue. I looked through and I could see the lads getting out of the pool, going in their changing room. The last one out was Chas. He was just about to go in the changing room when their
teacher, Mr Ross, calls to Chas and tells him to fetch his whistle and his clipboard, which he’s left at the side of the diving board, right?’

‘OK . . .?’

‘So, Chas looks around, making sure there’s no one there to see him – he doesn’t know I’m watching from the other doorway, of course – and then, instead of
walking around the pool to get Mr Ross’s gear, he walks
across
it! Right across the surface of the water! He grabs the whistle and the clipboard and then he walks back the same way,
on the water
. Just like he’s walking on the ground. It was
well
weird!’

‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’ asked Barney. ‘Isn’t walking on water a few thousand times more impossible than doing some magic trick with a pen?’

Laura looked slightly shamefaced. ‘Forgot, didn’t I? I was gonna tell my mate Sharleen about it. She was standing right next to me in the queue for the pool, but before I could, she
turns to me and tells me this
amazing
bit of gossip about Fran Milton in Year Nine. It was awesome gossip – I’d tell you what it was, but I’m sworn to secrecy – and
the thing with Chas walking on the water just went totally out of my mind.’

Barney spluttered. ‘You saw someone walk on water and you forgot all about it because your friend told you some
gossip
?’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Laura. ‘This was pretty awesome gossip.’

‘It must have been,’ said Barney. He shook his head and looked at Gabby, expecting to find her as incredulous as him, but was astonished to find her giggling instead.

He led them around a corner to the back of the school canteen where he knew there was a wheelchair ramp leading up to a fire door. The area was hidden from the main part of the playground,
making it the perfect venue for dodgy activity. And it was here, standing on the wheelchair ramp, that they found Chas Hinton. A crowd of about ten kids from all years had gathered around him. They
were applauding.

‘Thank you, kindly! Thank you! Cheers m’dears!’ said Chas in a loud, friendly voice. He was a tall boy with straight blond hair parted to one side. He wore it very long at the
front so that one eye was permanently obscured by a curtain of hair.

Barney and the two girls stood a few feet behind the audience and watched. Gabby prodded Barney with a finger. He raised his eyebrows at her. She leaned in close. For a horrified second he
thought she was going to kiss him there and then in the playground. ‘By the way,’ she said in a low voice, ‘can I just say, over the past few weeks I’ve seen you really
blossom into quite the investigator. The Barney I met back at the start of term would never have taken command of this case and thrown himself into investigating it with such gusto. Well done,
mate.’

‘Oh,’ said Barney, face flushing. ‘Thanks, Gabs. Well, what can I say? I learned from the best.’

‘Really?’ said Gabby. ‘Aw!’ She beamed at him, her big eyes shining.

‘Yeah,’ said Barney, ‘I’ve been reading my dad’s Sherlock Holmes books. That guy’s a genius.’

Gabby’s face froze. She recovered herself quickly and flashed him a tight-lipped smile. ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. They’re great books.’ She turned away.