The Ministry of SUITs (22 page)

“Why do you need scaffolding?” asked Jack.

“Because I was going to decorate.” The Misery held his arms out straight in front of him. For the first time Jack noticed that he was holding two tins of magnolia paint and a roller. “I was going to brighten the place up a bit. All this gloom was beginning to depress me.”

The Misery looked sadly at the broken planks. “But now that you've broken the scaffolding I'll never be able to paint the walls in this place.” He threw the paint pots and roller across the room. They clattered into the darkness.

Jack felt slightly guilty, but tried to justify his actions. “… Maybe you should have labeled the planks as scaffolding…”

“What?” The Misery gaped at him. “Who labels scaffolding?”

“I mean, just when they're in the training room. It was an easy mistake to make.”

“No,” the Misery disagreed. “It was not an easy mistake to make. A lot of people have been in this room before and never made that mistake. You must have been trying very hard to make such a ridiculous and stupid mistake.”

“Be fair,” said Trudy. “They did look like they were for training.”

The Misery looked at Trudy, surprised that she had interjected on Jack's behalf. He shook his head and went to start a sentence, but found himself shocked into silence. Jack was pleased by this state of affairs, but then disappointed as the stunned silence lasted only thirty seconds.

“If you want to justify what he did, then you're both equally responsible.”

“But the planks looked like…”

“Never mind what the planks looked like,” snapped the Misery. “What are you here to do? Why am I teaching you how to use The Speed?”

“So we can defend ourselves?” Trudy offered.

“Genius,” the Misery said. “I
am
here to teach you how to defend yourselves. Now, what kind of creatures might you end up fighting?”

“Uhh, werecreatures, Porcupods, bears? Potentially a businessman called Mr. Teach,” said Jack.

Trudy nodded. “Pirates, zombies, evil beings from another dimension.”

“Very good,” said the Misery, smiling in the same way a shark would—all teeth with dead eyes. Jack knew that the smile was a clear signal that the killer question was about to arrive. “And do you think you will ever be attacked by a wooden plank? Or a house brick?”

And there it was. The killer question.

“I wouldn't think so.” Jack winced.

“So, if you aren't going to be attacked by a plank or a house brick, why on earth would I teach you how to break one in half with your bare hands?”

Jack couldn't answer the question. Suddenly years of watching karate movies on television seemed rather pointless. Why did karate masters spend all their time attacking DIY materials? Why did they break planks in two, rather than practicing punching people in the face, which was clearly what they were best at?

“I'm really, really sorry,” said Jack. “I didn't realize.”

The Misery wasn't listening to him anymore. He sat down cross-legged on the ground.

“Would it help if I…?”

Before Jack could finish his sentence Trudy had put a hand on his shoulder. She shook her head, indicating that there was no point in trying to cheer up the Misery.

Trudy nodded toward the door and they both left, leaving the Misery to his misery.

“Thanks for that,” said Jack when they got outside.

“Thanks for what?” asked Trudy.

“You stuck up for me in there. You didn't need to try and defend me from the Misery, but you did.”

“Didn't do much good, though.” Trudy laughed.

“Well, no. But you tried and that's the main thing.” Jack smiled and decided to do something different. He punched Trudy in the shoulder in a friendly manner. Jack was slightly confused when it hurt his hand. He thought that either Trudy had very hard shoulders or he had very soft hands.

As a matter of fact, it was a combination of the two.

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK

MARTIAL ARTS/KARATE

O
RIGINS

Many people wonder why karate masters attack bricks and planks with their hands. Interestingly enough, the answer to this question is rather straightforward. The original karate masters were Japanese builders. However, as they lived in a time before power saws and pneumatic drills they had to learn other ways of quickly cutting a plank in half or breaking a brick so it would fit at the end of a row. Years of practice taught them to cut and break planks and bricks with their bare hands.

Of course, as already noted, many houses in Japan were built of paper. So there wasn't a need for many builders. If you really wanted a lovely house put together in the latest fashion, a stationer was of more use than a builder. Either that or an origami master who could fold your walls into interesting shapes.

And so the master builders of Japan soon got called by the nickname “karate,” which means “empty hand” because at the end of the week they generally hadn't gotten paid for any building work and so could never buy a round of drinks in the pub. Their hands were literally empty of money.

As you can imagine, the builders got a bit annoyed with everyone making fun of them having no money. One night, one of the builders got so annoyed at being called “karate” (empty hand) in the pub that he attacked the man who called him by the shameful name. The builder hit the man with the blow that he normally used on house bricks and was pleasantly surprised to find that a blow that would crack a house brick into two neat pieces also had a very similar effect on a man's arm.

After that, the Japanese builders who had previously had no work found that they could charge people to teach them how to fight. Over several hundred years the term
karate
changed from being a term of derision into a term of pride.

 

33

A MISSING FRIEND

THURSDAY

When Jack got on the bus the next morning David wasn't there. The thing that had been worrying Jack all this time had finally happened—his odd-kid friend had disappeared. With another friend Jack would have put it down to illness, but that would never be the case with David.

For all his lack of physical prowess and coordination, David was never ill. Jack and his classmates had several theories as to why this was true. Someone had suggested that as the outside of David's body was so hopelessly disorganized, he was probably equally hopelessly disorganized on the inside. Therefore once a germ or a virus got inside him, it would take a wrong turn, get lost, lose all sense of hope, and die of starvation before it got to the particular organ it was meant to attack. Another suggestion was that germs were house-proud little creatures and none of them would want to live inside someone like David. Possibly the most likely explanation was that David fell down so often that any germs that managed to find their way inside his system were subsequently shaken like maracas and were therefore too bruised to make anyone seriously sick.

As Jack was David's best friend, he felt these explanations were nasty and mean … even if they were very likely to be true.

Jack was desperate to find Trudy. He hoped she would know what to do, but the school bus seemed to be taking forever. Jack realized that he was inadvertently slowing it down with his negative emotions. Once at the school he dashed in the front entrance and found Trudy standing in front of the notice board.

“Look at this.” Trudy was pointing at a poster on the school notice board. “Apparently they're taking the school boiler away because thanks to Chapeau Noir Enterprises we're getting solar panels.”

“Trudy, I've got something important…”

Trudy kept on talking. “Why would they take the boiler away? It's too old to be of use to anyone.”

“TRUDY!” Jack shouted.

Trudy looked at Jack and her eyes widened. She wasn't used to being shouted at by anyone, let alone her new friend. However, for once Jack wasn't worried about being hit. He had something more important on his mind. “David's missing.”

“What do you mean ‘missing'?”

Jack explained to Trudy that David hadn't been on the bus that morning. Even after Jack explained that David was never ill she didn't seem worried. Jack had to convince her that this was serious. “Remember yesterday you stuck up for me because we were partners?”

“Yeah.”

“Well this is a partner thing again, Trudy,” Jack said as he stared into her eyes in deadly earnest. “I need you to trust me on this.”

Trudy didn't hesitate. “What do you want me to do?”

Jack hadn't thought that far ahead. They still had no idea if the missing children were being taken somewhere. Their clues seemed odd: wind turbines, new carpet, missing children, stolen dinosaur bones … and now a school boiler being taken.

In fact, these things didn't seem like clues at all. When he watched Agatha Christie mysteries with his mother, these were not the kinds of clues that turned up. Miss Marple never solved a mystery due to shag pile carpet and alternative energy sources. Her mysteries always involved foreign dukes with obscure pasts and untraceable poisons made out of Amazonian frogs.
61

“I don't know what we can do.” Jack sighed, fidgeting with his hands. He was full of nervous energy but he had nowhere to direct it. His heart was thumping in his chest and his breath was coming faster and faster. What should he be doing? “If we go to the Minister, he'll just tell us it's a mystery and that we should solve it. The police would never believe any story we could tell them.”

“Maybe there'll be a clue at David's house. We should go and speak to David's parents, at any rate.”

Jack nodded and tried to get his breathing under control. “We can cut across the rugby pitches. There's a hole in the fence and it'll get us to David's house faster.”

Trudy swung her bag over her shoulder and they set off at a fast trot. Within a few minutes they were halfway across the muddy pitches.

Jack was lost in thoughts of what would happen next. “What if it's my fault that someone kidnapped David? What if I hadn't joined the Ministry—would David have been…” Jack hadn't time to complete his thought because suddenly he was too busy falling ten feet straight down.

It took Jack a few minutes to orient himself and realize what had happened. Generally you didn't expect that kind of thing to happen when you were walking across the school rugby pitches. Some grass had gotten into his mouth and he spluttered, spitting it out.

At first he had thought that he must have fallen down something like an old abandoned well or a mineshaft, but as soon as he started looking around him he realized that wasn't the case at all.

He was in the center of a large bowl-like indentation in the ground. It wasn't that the ground had suddenly split open and swallowed him. It was more like a giant had suddenly reached down with his thumb and pressed it into the earth.

Trudy was standing at the edge of the bowl shape, looking down at him. She had been quick enough to leap back when the ground had collapsed. “Are you all right?” she called down.

“Yeah, fine,” said Jack as he spat out more grass. “Although I really don't know how cows eat this stuff. It's disgusting.”

He stood up and scrambled up the slope toward Trudy. “So what on earth do you think this is? It looks like a meteor's struck the ground.”

“Mmmm,” said Trudy. “Although clearly that didn't happen, because we would have noticed it.”
62

“I wasn't suggesting it had,” said Jack. “But thank you for your sarcasm.”

“I think this is another clue,” said Trudy.

“Maybe it is. But it doesn't matter. At the moment we've got to focus on trying to find out where David is.”

“We're looking for clues, Jack. If David is really missing, it's bound to be connected to whatever's going on at the school. I think if David's anywhere, he's under there.” Trudy pointed to the indentation in grass.

Jack's jaw dropped. “You mean he's buried? Dead?”

“No!” Trudy said, trying to calm Jack. “In a tunnel.”

“A tunnel?”

“Think about it. The only reason the rugby pitches would have collapsed like this is if someone's been digging under them. And those mobile classrooms were full of digging equipment. Exactly what you'd expect if someone was tunneling underground. And if there is a tunnel, that would be the ideal place to hide missing children.”

Jack looked at the ground. He wasn't entirely convinced by Trudy's explanation, but it was the best lead they had. “So what do we do? Get a spade and start digging?”

“No. We look for an entrance,” said Trudy. “If they're kidnapping kids on their way to or from school, there has to be an entrance around here somewhere.”

“So we look for the entrance. But where would they put it?”

“Well, it has to be hidden. So they'll put it somewhere that you would never go.”

“The girls' toilets!” suggested Jack.

“Jack, you might not go to the girls' toilets, but lots of girls do. We're talking about a place that is useless for everyone.”

“All right, then. We go back to the school and we search.”

Jack and Trudy rushed back to the school and did their best to search anywhere they thought a tunnel entrance might be hidden. It wasn't an easy task as they spent half their time hiding around the corner from teachers rather than having to explain why they weren't in class.

They searched under the stage in the assembly hall; they sneaked into the back playground and peeked through the staff room windows; they even searched behind the bike sheds.

The problem was that the places where people said they never went were actually the places they went all the time. The teachers were always in the staff room marking homework, the sixth formers were always behind the bike sheds kissing each other, and the caretakers were always under the stage in the assembly hall watching a portable television.