Class Six and the Nits of Doom (4 page)

‘Quick!’ said Emily, doing a little jig of terror. ‘I can hear her footsteps. Oh,
quick
!’

Slacker pushed Rodney into the nearest chair, and all the rest of the class threw themselves into their places. Some of them even remembered to start coughing again. When Miss Broom arrived with
a tray full of beakers they were all red in the face and breathing hard.

Miss Broom viewed them all, still puzzled, as she began to hand out the beakers of water.

‘You all must have some sort of an allergy to…er…to my special methods,’ she said, as she went round the classroom. ‘Perhaps I shall have to stop using them for
the time being.’

Class Six sipped their glasses of water and felt very relieved. Miss Broom was going to stop doing magic for a while, and Rodney had been rescued from the cupboard. They were safe.

For the moment.

There must have been something itchy in the witch’s cupboard, though, because Rodney had started scratching and scratching and scratching at his head.

Class Six were so weak with relief that they didn’t even have the strength to fight to be first in the queue at lunch time.

The children from the other classes stared at Class Six curiously, but none of them dared come up to ask any questions. They all knew about Miss Broom. Every year, Class Six was the best-behaved
class in the whole school—and everyone knew why.

It was terror. Sheer, utter terror.

Unless, of course, it was something even worse…

Class Six stood quietly in line, as dull as cows, grateful simply to be still alive, and the only person who wasn’t completely shattered was Rodney Wright. The sleep in the cupboard seemed
to have perked him up, because he was quite lively. He kept squiggling and scratching. And scratching. And scratching.

‘What was it like in the cupboard?’ asked Emily timidly, when they were all sitting down and trying to summon up the energy to eat.

Rodney scratched his head.

‘Smelly,’ he said. ‘And dark. I was a bit worried at first because the luminous grasshoppers had huge teeth, but they left me alone so it was all right.’

‘Grasshoppers?’ echoed Anil.

‘Yeah. They were all sort of oily green and purple. But it was OK, they just sat quietly on their shelf and carried on playing backgammon.’

‘I would have screamed and screamed and screamed,’ said Emily, with a shiver. ‘To be locked up with magic grasshoppers…’

Rodney scratched his head again.

‘There’s no such thing as magic,’ he said.

Everyone in Class Six took in a deep breath to say
WHAT?????
But then they just sighed and started eating their dinners. Rodney had always been really stupid. It wasn’t that he
couldn’t read or write or add up or stuff, it was more that it never occurred to him that he might be wrong. Not even the fact that Miss Broom had orange eyes that showed pictures of skulls
and vampire bats had made the slightest difference to his belief that there was no such thing as witches.

‘The only
scary
thing,’ Rodney went on, talking through a mouthful of lettuce, ‘was when Miss Broom’s hat fell down over my head. It smelled of compost and ferret
poo.’

‘Yuk!’ said Jack.

‘Ew!’ said Serise. ‘That is really
disgusting
. I mean, even if Miss Broom
is
a watch she could still keep her clothes clean, couldn’t—’

Serise broke off as she realised that the others were all staring at her. ‘What?’ she snapped.

‘What did you just say, Serise?’ asked Winsome quietly.

Serise scowled. ‘I said, that even if Miss Broom
is
a watch, then at least—hey, what are you lot looking at?’

‘She said
watch
!’ squawked Jack, pointing a wavering finger. ‘She said Miss Broom is a
watch
!’

‘No, I didn’t!’ snapped Serise. ‘Don’t be silly. I said she was a
watch
!’

Everyone had gone completely still.

Slacker frowned. ‘Say it again.’

Serise began to look defensive.

‘Miss Broom is a…is a…is a…
WATCH
!’ she said. And then she clapped her hands to her mouth and went all cross-eyed.

Anil took a deep breath.

‘Miss Broom is a-a-a
wicket
!’ he said. ‘I mean, she’s a wer-wer-wer-
wick
!’

Class Six looked at each other wildly, and then they all tried.

‘Miss Broom is a
wish
!’ said Winsome.

‘Miss Broom… Miss Broom… Miss Broom is a
with
!’ said Slacker.

‘Miss Broom,’ said Jack, making a great effort. ‘Miss Broom is a wer-wer-wer…a wer-wer-wer…a wer-wer-wer…
an ostrich with chestnut stripes and a tree
growing out of its head
!’

Everyone stopped and glared at him.

‘Trust you to come up with something really
silly
,’ said Serise, in disgust.

Jack’s eyes bulged with the unfairness of that.

‘Well, it’s not
my
fault, is it?’ he demanded. ‘It’s not my fault I’ve been put under a spell by a
large fluffy rabbit with free wifi reception
!
Oh, blow it! I mean by a
gold-plated washing machine with hiccups
—I mean—I mean—by a you-know-what! Is it?’

‘Well, at least the rest of us aren’t being stupid about it,’ said Anil. ‘At least we’re just saying words like
watch
or
wish
, or
daffodil singing
the National Anthem with a straw up its nostril
.’

He stopped and looked a bit baffled.

‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Winsome, alarmed. ‘Miss Broom has cast a spell on us, and that means we can’t even tell anyone.’

Rodney Wright scratched his head.

‘You’re all nuts,’ he said. ‘Totally bonkers.’

Anil suddenly began to look hopeful.

‘Can
you
say it, Rodney?’ he asked.

‘Yes!’ exclaimed Winsome. ‘Perhaps Rodney escaped the spell because he was trapped in the cupboard.’

‘Say it,’ said Jack. ‘Go on! Go on, Rodney! Say it!’

Rodney sighed. ‘Say what?’

‘That Miss Broom is a…is a…you know.’

‘Miss Broom is a you know?’

‘Perhaps we could write it down,’ said Winsome.

But even when Slacker had found an old doughnut bag in his pocket, and someone else had gone and swiped a biro from the dinner ladies’ register, all Winsome found she could write was

—and then the biro stopped working.

‘Tut!’ said Anil. ‘Give that pen here!’

His effort spelled out:

Which was quite pleasing, but not a lot of help.

‘Perhaps we could find some way of letting people know without saying the words,’ suggested Emily.

Winsome considered. ‘You mean, like a mime or something?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Serise, very sarcastic. ‘We’ll probably all end up acting like mad bluebottles. Anyway, who could we tell?’

They all looked at each other, and there was silence apart from the sound of Rodney scratching at his head again.

‘Mrs Elwig?’ suggested Slacker. Mrs Elwig was the headteacher.

Anil rolled his eyes. ‘Slacker, Mrs Elwig is always looking in a mirror and combing her long golden hair,’ he said. ‘She travels about in a wheelchair with a blanket over her,
so no-one has ever seen her legs, and she smells of fish. She’s hardly going to start objecting to the fact that one of her teachers is a
stitch
, is she? Even if we could get the words
out.’

‘Well, at least we know why last year’s Class Six never told anyone about Miss Broom,’ said Winsome sadly.

Everyone nodded.

‘Hey,’ said Jack. ‘Do you remember when last year’s Class Six put on that production of
The Wizard of Oz
in the playground where the wicked wer-wer-wer—oh
blast it!—the thingammyjigs of the east and west were actually gibbons? Because I always thought that was a bit odd.’

Winsome sighed.

‘We’ll just have to hope for the best,’ she said. ‘And after all, we
are
all whizzes at maths now.’

‘Hey, Rodney!’ said Jack. ‘What’s fifty-six times eighteen?’

A thousand and eight
, everyone in Class Six except Rodney murmured, still slightly wonderingly.

Rodney was too busy scratching his head to reply.

When Class Six got back to class at the end of lunch they sat down in their places, folded their arms, sat up straight, and tried to look as uninteresting as traffic cones.

Luckily they were all wearing bright orange sweatshirts, which helped.

At least, they all tried to look like traffic cones apart from Rodney. Rodney shambled in after all the others, still scratching his head.

‘Hurry up and sit down!’ said Emily anxiously. ‘Miss Broom will be here soon!’

Rodney nodded, and immediately tripped over the edge of the carpet.

‘Watch out!’ everybody hissed, as he clutched at Miss Broom’s desk to stop himself falling over. ‘You don’t want to upset Algernon!’

Rodney steadied himself. It was strange, but his eyes looked a bit red. No. They actually looked a bit
purple.

‘I think I might be going to be ill,’ he said, a bit puzzled. ‘Everything keeps turning round like windmills, and it’s making me feel sick.’

Winsome got up and led Rodney to his place.

‘You sit quietly,’ she said. ‘It’s probably just the shock of having a school dinner after all those weeks of home cooking.’

Slacker grunted.

‘You don’t get enough in a school dinner to make anyone feel anything,’ he said. ‘Except hungry.’

Serise leant away from Rodney as he went past her.

‘I hope he hasn’t gone and caught anything in that cupboard,’ she said.

Rodney sat down rather suddenly when he got to his place.

‘I feel sort of…’ he said.
‘I feel sort of—’

Everyone jumped. Rodney’s voice had suddenly gone very deep and loud. Instead of sounding like a puzzled duck, as usual, he sounded like a cow mooing up from the bottom of a well.

Even Rodney noticed something was different.

‘That’s funny,’
he said, his voice booming out like a foghorn.

Class Six nearly hit the roof.

‘Shhh!’ they hissed, frantically. ‘Don’t make so much noise!’

Rodney frowned.

‘But—’
he began.

His voice was getting louder with every word he spoke.

‘If he goes on like that he’ll end up cracking the ceiling and bringing the roof down on us!’ said Anil.

Emily whimpered. Serise turned round and leant over Rodney’s desk.

‘Keep
quiet
,’ she hissed fiercely. ‘Because if you say one single word from now on I’ll bash you over the head with my library book. Do you understand?’

Rodney took in a breath, but everyone said
shhhh!
again and he closed his mouth. He was stupid in lots of ways, but his memory was all right, and Serise had hit him over the head with her
library book before.

‘But he can’t just not say anything at all! He
can’t
!’ said Emily, in a panic. ‘What if Miss Broom asks him a question?’

‘That won’t matter,’ said Anil. ‘He can never answer questions anyway.’

‘But he’s going to have to answer the register,’ said Winsome. ‘What can we
do
?’

Class Six looked at each other, but the only sound in the whole classroom was Rodney’s nails scratching at his scalp.