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I have looked for a wormhole at school. The most likely place was in the corner
near the bins as that’s quite private but I don’t think schools are allowed wormholes. If there was one I think most of us would jump in it and never come back.
I have a school list of people because Andrew has gone to Essex for good and all my other people are girls and not in my class and have to be kept separate so they can do skipping. This could be confusing, so I keep the two lists in different drawers like my mother keeps my winter and summer clothes. School is like winter while home is like summer, so this is a good solution. The only thing that I can think of about school that is not terrible are the helicopter seeds that fall from the tree at the bottom of the playground near the road and the balsa wood we sometimes get in craft lessons. Usually, we get card. You can’t make anything real in card. Everything else especially the teachers are bad.
When I grow up I will have a cupboard full of balsa wood so I can make a real helicopter and fly away.
*
I wish all the teachers would go on holiday and never come back like my dog March. Actually I wish they would go somewhere terrible like Iceland or Hell or the desert like Jesus did and either burn up or freeze or learn to be less terrible. Mrs Friend is ok – she is friendly although she is so fat. Perhaps fat makes you friendly because if you are fat you need to be friendly to get friends. The football teacher likes to choose the clever boys for the team, the ones who can draw and do sums while the others stand around waiting. We wait and think.
He doesn’t know that; he thinks we are just waiting for a turn but we aren’t. Thinking makes you clever as well as angry so I am both. One day I will hurt him. I have a new friend Brian. He is very weak and small so he is always waiting but I don’t think he thinks much. He has
something wrong with his brain as he looks frightened all the time as if someone was about to hit him. Sometimes the clever boys hit him and I join in.
When I grow up I won’t hit Brian anymore because I will have become clever and good.
*
Our village has a famous river. It is famous because it is shallow so you can walk in it with Wellingtons without getting wet socks at all and it has a track through it that lorries can drive through if they are too big for the bridge. So it isn’t really a river; it is more of a road with a river running on top. Common people’s cars from Dartford or East Hill don’t use the bridge; instead they break the rules and show off by going through the river very fast and making a big wave that fills your Wellingtons and probably kills lots of fish. My dad always hopes they get stuck and water gets in the engine and ruins it. At weekends lots of common people’s children come to shout and splash in the river with just their pants on and throw stones and water at each other and at us. I hate them because they don’t know the rules. Luckily they have me to teach them. The bridge is only wide enough for one small car at a time. It is so narrow that it has places to hide at the top so that people don’t get squashed by the cars. I like to stand on guard stopping the small children from getting in hoping they will get killed. That way they will learn the rules like we have to at school. Rules for waiting or eating and playing and drinking from the water fountain and running and going to the toilet without wetting the walls or falling without getting gravel in your knees or spilling ink and getting hit for not folding your arms and writing in the lines and colouring in the lines and standing in lines with nowhere to hide to avoid being killed.
When I grow up I won’t have to go to school and I won’t have to hide.
*
Alice is the biggest girl at school. She has a lot of curly hair that makes her head look big. She lives in a big house and nobody bothers her because she is strong like a boy. She also has freckles all over that makes her look dirty. At dinner time at school we all have to walk along the pavement to the canteen. We all have to hold hands with someone and aren’t allowed to let go. Sometimes I hold hands with Alice but we don’t talk. The canteen smells horrible because the food is horrible and the people who make it are horrible. Mrs Grevitt has hair like a red-hot poker and she shouts all the time. She makes us eat everything even if it makes us sick. Alice does not like much meat so she left some on her plate. This is silly because when I don’t like something I put it in my pocket and drop it in the playground later. Mrs Grevitt shouted and told the teachers, so Alice had to sit at a desk with her plate in the playground all afternoon without doing any lessons but she didn’t eat the meat.
I have put her on my school list near the top even though we never talk. When I grow up Mrs Grevitt will have died.
*
I like telescopes and cameras. I have a telescope that my uncle gave me and then he died. We went to see him and his breath smelled of cancer but he was showing me the telescope so I pretended not to notice. He also gave me a mandolin but all it does is music. I like to clean the lenses on the telescope until you can’t see any marks and you can pretend to see
wormholes in the sky even in the evening when it is not that dark. I know they are there because I came from one which makes me special like an astronaut but not famous or American. My cameras all came from jumble sales. They don’t have film except one called a Brownie which is my least favourite because you can’t change anything just click. I don’t care about taking pictures; I just like cleaning the lenses and changing the dials then thinking about what pictures they would take if they had a film in.
When I grow up I will take a picture of a wormhole.
*
On the way home from school I have to walk along a path next to the church. Inside there are graves with shiny green or purple crystals on top of them like a bed. I don’t know why but maybe the dead people liked sparkly things or maybe it is something magic for Heaven or the afterlife. We were told about the afterlife in Sunday school but halfway through Stephanie was dizzy and said she felt sick so we never got to hear the end. She wasn’t sick after all so maybe she just got scared or bored. I am always very bored in Sunday school although the teacher is a lot nicer than at school and very very old. I think she wants the afterlife to be real just in case. I suppose the afterlife doesn’t end because if it did you would be dead again and it would all have to start all over again. If the purple crystals are to do with the afterlife, then it might be good to take them to do some experiments to find out if they work or if there is some mix up about wormholes which we know exist. Now Andrew has gone I only have the twins and Jill to be my assistant inventors or Brian but he is not at all clever. So that’s a problem. I won’t take any crystals home until I have a plan.
When I grow up I won’t need an afterlife because I won’t die.
*
I have my own bedroom at home with a bench and tools. I used to share with a brother but he got in the way so now I am on my own with Mother and Dad. My bench is where I do my inventing and writing lists. It is covered in the same lino as on the floor in the bathroom. It’s an offcut which means I don’t have to be careful not to spoil it when I make things because it didn’t cost anything. One funny thing is that I can make lino cuts from other offcuts of the same lino on the bench covered in lino. I think this like a circle: I need the bench with the lino to cut the lino offcuts. I always cut the same pattern. A house with four windows, a door, a garage, a garden, a fence, a gate, a car, a road, a sun, a cloud and a dog. This is another circle because that’s where I am now except without a dog. With lino cuts you have to ink the lino with a roller and then print it on paper but I don’t do that; I just keep the lino cut and put it in a drawer. I don’t want to spoil it with ink all over it especially because I only have red ink so if I printed it the sky would be red which wouldn’t be real.
When I grow up nothing will change.
*
The girls at school play games with elastic tied around their ankles. They make the elastic go with saying poems. I like to watch but boys don’t play. We don’t have songs or elastic because that’s too much trouble; we have cars that we can race on the flat bit of the playground near the helicopter tree. I don’t race because all my cars are still in their boxes
from when I got them but Brian brings his with all the body parts taken off and just the wheels on the bottom bit with the name and number on. He oils the wheels so they go extra fast. He is the best at this but his cars are the worst so nobody really likes him and I pretend to ignore him even when he wins which is nearly always. Once everyone is gone I go over to him and make friends again and help him cleans his cars which are all greasy and dirty. I don’t know if he has any whole cars left because Mum says he hasn’t got a dad to buy them. Sometimes Keith joins us to help. He lives in one of the houses on the road to my house where all people just borrow their houses because they are poor and he has learnt all the birds in The Observer’s Book of Birds.
When I grow up I will buy my house.
*
A fish tank is very unusual in a house. This one is in a house where Mother does her painting class. Someone has painted a picture on the wall. The fish tank is bright because it has a light in it to keep the fish warm I am told. The painting is bright because the colours are oranges and reds in big splodges with black which isn’t bright and is meant to be a sword or a stick. It’s terrible but the fish tank is good because the things in it are real. I don’t see the point of making pictures because all you end up with is pretend. Mother says it’s a Spanish bullfight but I don’t really care because it’s not a real bullfight with a bull; it’s just a picture made of paint. The fish need feeding every day and if you give them too much they die and float about so you have to change all the water. I am glad only fish do this because once I ate too much strawberry ice cream on a hot day and I was sick so if I had been a fish I might have died and would not be remembering the fish or the picture but would just be floating about in Heaven which I suppose is a bit like the fish tank but with air not water.
When I grow up I won’t ever eat fish.
*
I have a plan for the purple crystals from the graves. I will ask Keith to be my assistant. As well as knowing all the birds in The Observer’s Book of Birds, Keith is good at inventing things. Not as good as me but he made a steamboat from a cocoa tin that really worked even though it just had candles as the fire. I need an assistant because if my plan works and I go to the afterlife I need someone to get me back. Once you are there I don’t suppose there will be any tools or a bench or anything other than air and stars and clouds so I could get stuck. Keith has agreed but says his sister should also have a job. I don’t understand this because I don’t know his sister and she is likely to want to play a different game than inventing like the elastic skipping and we can’t do that but I tell him that her job will be to get the crystals from the graves. I think that will put her off because it’s quite dangerous because the last time I walked past the church there were a lot of people standing around and someone was talking loudly.
When I grow up I will have all the Observer’s books on things with engines. So that’s cars, trains, planes, motorbikes and some ships.
*
Keith’s sister has got the crystals. She got some of both colours although I said we only needed the purple ones. I am not putting her on my school list but I have told Keith that she is near the top. I don’t really understand Keith because even though he is clever he is always playing with his sister rather than doing important things like inventing. Sometimes we walk home together and he holds his sister’s hand even though we are not going to the canteen and the teachers haven’t told him to. I don’t like any girls much even though at home I play mainly with girls but I think Keith likes his sister more than boys. Mother says this is fine but I am not sure. Just this time I will let it pass because we need the crystals to go to the afterlife. I told Brian about our plan and he said he would like to be in it. I said no. I like saying no to Brian because then his frightened face goes sad and frightened and I feel like hitting him or kissing it better. I don’t think I can kiss it better because if I did I would be a boy that kisses boys and I don’t like that idea. On the other hand I could kiss Keith’s sister and that might please Keith but she is not at all pretty and she has stuff around her eyes that Mother says you can catch. So any kissing is not good so I will stick with hitting Brian which feels nice.
When I grow up I will be a boxer and have a boxer dog.
*
Every weekend I see the twins across the road and we get to explore their back garden. This never gets boring because our back garden just ends in someone else’s garden with a fence but their garden has a wood at the end with a slope and a broken fence you can climb over. There are leaves everywhere, so deep you can bury things in them. We bury ourselves and hope someone walks by and we can scare them but not many people come to this part of the wood. Because of the fence they think it’s private. We bury things for people to find one day a long way ahead. Today we bury one of Grandad’s tins with some secrets in. I can’t say what those are because that would spoil it but we have sealed the tin with wax from a candle to stop any water getting in and written ‘DO NOT OPEN TILL THE FUTURE’. Judith said that was stupid because the future will never come but I said it would and moved her down my list.
When I grow up I will buy a wood and build a house in it and bury it under a giant pile of leaves.