Dream Guy (2 page)

Mr. Crosbie was there, still showing slide after slide, but he was wearing scuba gear, apparently unfazed by the transformation of his habitat. Joe swam to a window and wrestled with it. He pushed up the lever handle then took hold of the catch to ease it open. Water started gushing out, and Joe pushed his head free, taking long gulps of cold air. He turned around as water cascaded around him. The fish-people pressed up against the window and tried to flap it shut, but the volume of water was too great, pouring out and out and out onto the ground. Fortunately for Joe, fins weren’t equipped to close windows. Mr. Crosbie waded through the water, still thigh-high in the classroom, and he flicked on the light. Everyone turned to look at him. They shook their heads in bafflement and in the whir of movement, one by one, they regained their normal heads, although these were now soaked, causing some dismay among those who’d used gel or mousse to maintain their favored hairstyle.

“Joe, I know Hieronymus Bosch can seem a bit strange, but he doesn’t normally cause my students to chunder out of the window. Have you quite finished?” Mr. Crosbie took off his aqualung and diving mask.

“I wasn’t being sick, sir. It was the water.”
How can I explain? It started as a dream…then somehow
I
made my dream actually come true. They’re going to think I’ve gone bonkers.
I
think I’ve gone bonkers, but it did happen. It really happened. My dream came true. No way I can say that out loud.

“Give him a detention, sir,” urged several girls, their hair hanging in limp rats-tails. “Go on. He pinched the condoms from last time and used ’em to make water bombs. It was him. We saw.”

His friend Smokey spoke up. “How can you have seen anything? Anyway, look around you. There isn’t any evidence.” Smokey’s tone was customarily derisory. “Witless bimbos.”

The girls turned as one on Smokey. “Give
him
a detention an’ all, sir. Go on. He’s abusing us. That’s bullying that is, calling us bimbos. Go on, sir. Give him one.”

“Smokey, Joe, get out of here before the lynch mob gets you. And Joe, try not to nod off in next week’s lesson.” Mr. Crosbie nodded at the boys. As they left, Joe heard him address the hyena-like hoydens surrounding him. “Now, girls, where’s your sense of humor? What sort of fish did you turn into, Kaylee? A monkfish, I think—not particularly attractive but very tasty grilled with a saffron sauce.”

As they came out, Mr. Tucker was waiting outside the classroom with the school nurse, pointing at the wall and saying, “Look. He was standing here, then the wall just sucked him up.” The teacher closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the wall, as if fighting off tears.

The nurse looked understanding and patted him on the shoulder. “I think you should see someone about this, Mark. Really I do. Look. Here’s Joe Knightley now. Everything all right, Joe?”

“Yeah, fine, Mrs. Naismith.”

“You see, Mark? Joe’s absolutely fine. He’s been in Mr. Crosbie’s classroom all this time. Learn anything useful in PSHE this week then, Joe?”

“Not really.” Joe burrowed into his rucksack for the brochure Crosbie had handed out. It was sodden and disintegrating. He offered it to the nurse. “Here. It’s about how to be a town councilor, I think.”

“Off you go then, Joe. And is that Silas with you?”

No one was meant to call Smokey by his given name, but Joe could see that he was too keen to ask Joe what the hell was going on to make a big issue of Mrs. Naismith’s slip. Joe let Smokey hustle him down the corridor and out of the building before anyone else could interrupt.

“So?” Smokey stopped as they rounded the corner of Ashgate Way and sat down on someone’s garden wall.

Joe bit his lip. “So what?”

Smokey reached into his jacket for his cigarettes and lighter. With disgust, he took one sodden fag out of the packet then scrunched up the whole squelchy mess and tossed it into the garden behind him. “Four quid down the drain. So why did we all grow fish heads, and you didn’t? If it hadn’t been for you, we’d all have been swimming around there for the next week without anyone noticing. Mind you, it was quite cool being a piranha. I was just about to give Lisa a little nibble, then you came along and opened the window.”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand anything.” Joe shook his head. A flurry of movement caught his eye, and he hauled Smokey away as an irate woman emerged from the house on whose garden wall they were sitting. She yelled at them, snatched up Smokey’s crumpled cigarettes and hurled the pack after them with a force that should have earned her a place on the Olympic javelin team.

“Don’t do that again, you little sods!”

Smokey made to turn around so he could tell her to eff off, but Joe was still tugging at his sleeve, determined not to let things get out of hand. Smokey shrugged then went back to the fishy business.

“What do you mean, you don’t understand?”

“I was asleep. I just woke up, and it’d happened. Wasn’t Tucker looking sick as a parrot? That was worth it. Weird though. Could you breathe? What was it like when the water came in?”

“Crosbie made it happen. He just whipped out his scuba kit from somewhere and turned a stopcock and the whole place filled with water really quickly. Remember when we went on that trip to the battlefields in Belgium?”

“Yeah. Flanders field trip. What about it?”

“Remember that weird fountain outside Ypres? The tap standing in the middle of nowhere and just pouring out water?”

Immediately Joe recalled the huge blue tap with water gushing out of it, suspended in the air on a little roundabout on the way into Ypres.

“Well, it was like that,” continued Smokey. “Just a big tap with loads of water filling the place up in seconds. It was a relief, speaking as a fish, I can tell you. We were all lying around flapping our gills until then.”

“Why was the projector still working? When I came back in the room, it still had that weird picture up on the wall, but you guys were all swimming around, all going in the same direction. Did you know you were a fish, or were you just in a fish state?”

“I had conscious thoughts, like how fat and juicy Lisa’s legs looked, but I didn’t think, ‘Hey, man, how did I get to be a fish?’ That seemed natural.” Smokey paused. “Do you think you made it happen when you fell asleep or something?”

“Don’t be daft. How could I do anything like that?”

“You’re bonkers, you are. Look. I’m going to be late back. I’d better get home.”

Smokey nodded and thumped Joe on the back before loping off into the darkness. Joe adjusted his backpack and walked on toward his house. He felt damp and increasingly cold, so he quickened his pace and was almost running by the time he reached the path. The lights were on in the front and upstairs, which meant that Mum was home.

After his shower, he came downstairs in shorts and a T-shirt. His parents might nag about money, but at least they kept the house at a decent temperature, despite moaning nonstop about heating a drafty Edwardian barrack. Joe still remembered going around the house the first time six years before. They’d left Liesel, then three, with Gran, but both Ben and Joe had wanted to see the house. High ceilings, weirdly shaped rooms, the old-fashioned bathroom and the open-plan kitchen leading into the walled garden with an apple tree and a mass of rhododendrons… They’d all loved it. It had been way too expensive, but somehow his parents had scraped together the deposit. Joe had been eight when they’d moved in. First he’d shared with Ben, but when it came to Ben’s GCSE year, they’d moved Joe upstairs to the third-story loft, which had been converted into two bedrooms and a shower room.

Susan Knightley was in the kitchen, leaning over the table where Liesel was slumped over some homework. They both looked up as Joe came in, still rubbing his hair dry with the towel.

“Good day?” asked his mother.

“All right. You know.”

“See if you can help Liesel with this stuff, will you? Then I can get on with making supper.”

Joe sighed. “I don’t know why you can’t be just like everyone else and get us stuff to microwave.”

“A, because it’s expensive. B, because it’s bad for you. C, because I want us to sit down and talk to one another occasionally instead of living like strangers occupying the same space, and D, because I like cooking. How many times do we have to go over this one, Joe? I’m never going to be ‘like everyone else’, and you might as well accept it.”

Her voice was beginning to sound plaintive, so Joe rushed to help Liesel to avoid any further discussion. He just couldn’t seem to say anything to her these days without getting some ratty answer. Liesel shifted her book away as Joe sat next to her.

“Joe’s no good. I’m better at maths than he is. I’ll wait for Ben.”

Joe rolled his eyes and curled his lip at her. Ben was best at everything. Ben was the one everyone wanted to wait for. Ben was the reason girls like Becky Sutton and Chloe Hance even spoke to Joe. It wasn’t exactly original to hate your own brother, but increasingly, Joe found himself unable to resist loathing Ben—Mr. Perfect. He wished that girls liked him for himself, not because his brother was the best-looking boy in year twelve. And if they found out the truth about Ben—which they would any day now that Charlie Meek had seen him coming out of the Rainbow Hacienda down in Brighton entwined with his boyfriend, snotty Zahid—they’d think Joe was gay too. Bloody Ben.

Chapter Two

Home

“That’s not very fair,” said Mrs. Knightley to Liesel, as Joe lumbered off to slump on the sofa and mess with the remote. “Joe is actually quite good at maths, and you were really mean.”

“So?” Liesel thumped her books into a pile and stood, the wooden chair legs screeching against the tiled floor.

“Liesel, how many times have I told you not to do that?”

“You shouldn’t have put in your soppy old quarry tiles then. Dad wanted to put lino down, and it would have been miles better—and cheaper,” Liesel answered.

Before Mrs. Knightley could say any more, Liesel had flounced out. Joe peered over the sofa and saw his mum pursing her lips in frustration. Instead of following Liesel, his mum began dicing onions like a fiend. Ben would be back soon. He would smooth things over.

In the sitting room, Joe checked out the PS4 but all the games seemed lame. He flicked through the channels on the telly. Every channel was showing hours and hours of stuff that had been on a hundred times before. It was like supper being nothing but leftovers. He flicked to
The Simpsons
. It was one he’d seen before, but it was still better than all the other rubbish sitcoms.

So what exactly happened in Crosbie’s class?
So bizarre, the bright colors of the fish, the slop of the water, the graininess of the plaster. There had been a moment between wakefulness and sleep when something had tipped him out of the solid world he had known, a shiver of awareness like the moment you know when you’ve made the wrong move in a computer game, and it’s too late to back off. He’d lied to Smokey. Well, he hadn’t denied it point-blank, but he certainly hadn’t told the truth, because he’d known that he
had
made the dream happen. He just wasn’t sure how.

By now, Joe was lying full stretch along the sofa, his feet propped on the armrest at the other end. He gazed at his feet distractedly as his eyes drooped closed, trying to work out the exact sequence of events and simultaneously thinking that his feet seemed outrageously enormous. They reminded him more and more of those pictures drawn by Elizabethan explorers of the one-footed tribesmen who used their feet as umbrellas to protect themselves from the heat of the sun. His eyes snapped open, but his feet were up there, entirely the right size. Big, as Mum never tired of pointing out, but not bizarrely huge.

He closed his eyes again then heard the scrape of a key in the lock, and he sat up quickly, adjusting his T-shirt and crossing his arms as Ben came in. Joe listened as his brother took off his coat, hung it on the rack in the hall and went through to the kitchen, where he exchanged effusive kisses and hugs with his mother. Liesel came running downstairs and joined in, her earlier grump forgotten. Joe idled on the sofa, his gaze fixed on the patterns in the carpet.

Liesel showed Ben the maths homework. While sniffing at the pot of whatever stuff Mum had on the stove and agreeing with her disquisition on which herbs to use to bring out the flavor of beef, Ben also managed to give Liesel a tutorial in long division. He was such a suck-up. Then he came through to the sitting room.

“What’s up, mate?” Ben sat on the arm of the sofa and clapped a hand on Joe’s shoulder, nearly knocking him off. Joe shrugged his hand away.

“Nothing much. You know. Just school.”

“I heard something weird happened in Crosbie’s class. You must have done something pretty amazing to freak Tucker out. He was gibbering like a chimp in the nurse’s room.” Ben threw himself into the big armchair, plonked his feet onto the coffee table and looked at Joe, who averted his gaze.

“It was nothing. He was just imagining stuff. He probably picked up one of those weird pills that Charlie Meek is punting around the place. He’s such a dodgy geezer, Meeky.” Joe leaned forward, picked up the
Radio Times
on the table and stared at it as though Jane Asher’s recipe for a stress-free dinner party was massively gripping. But Ben wasn’t about to be diverted onto the topic of Charlie Meek.

“I heard something about tons of water coming out of the room and everyone’s heads going weird, except yours.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Michaela Potts. You know. Big hair, thinks she’s God’s gift to Terpsichore. She’s in your class, isn’t she? She’s always hanging about, but she doesn’t usually say much. A bit different today.”

Ben’s dance classes…
argh.
“It’s embarrassing you doing dancing.”

“You know why I do the dance class. It’s good for balance, and it’s given me upper body strength, hoicking all those girls around.” Ben’s pained expression reminded Joe of the way their mother had reacted to him over the dinner business.