How to Write Really Badly (4 page)

That sort of thing. And maybe I was in a
mood because I hadn’t had time to get started on my own work.

‘Oh, right,’ I muttered. ‘All the really
hard
words.’

Joe lifted his face.

‘That’s right,’ he said gratefully. ‘All the words where it’s easy to make mistakes.’

So I admit it. Though I didn’t smirk, I was still feeling pretty superior as we ploughed through the silt at the bottom of his desk.

‘Trash or treasure?’

‘Trash.’

‘Into the bin. And this?’

He reached for it in relief.

‘My dictionary!’

‘Just try to keep it near the top in future.’ (Miss Tate could take lessons from me.) ‘Is that the lot?’

He took the last thing I was holding up.

‘Trash.’

He dropped it in the bin, and was about to put his foot on it when I reached down and snatched it.

‘What is this?’

‘It’s just a photograph.’

‘I know it’s a photograph, Bean-brain,’ I told him sharply. ‘But what
is
it?’

He shrugged.

‘It’s just a model that I made last year.’

‘Just a model?’ I inspected it. Then I inspected him.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘But may I ask you a very personal question? If you can make a three-metre model of the Eiffel Tower out of macaroni, why can’t you keep your desk tidy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, I’m sure I don’t.’

I was still staring at him when the bell rang. I hadn’t got any work done. But I’d achieved something. I’d shifted a major
health hazard in the next desk. I’d got to know the worst writer in the world. And I’d worked out he wasn’t daft.

Not bad for my first morning, you’ll admit.

I soon found out why he’d been sitting alone before I showed up to take the last desk. Come silent-reading time, my hand spent more time flapping in the air than turning pages.

‘Miss Tate. Joe’s sound-it-outs are getting on my nerves.’

‘He’s driving me
mad
, Miss Tate. No one could read against his mutterings.’

‘I’ve read exactly four pages. Exactly four. Each time he starts up, I have to go back to the top of the page.’

Miss Tate laid down her marking pen.

‘Joe. Please try and do your sound-it-outs more quietly.’

He went even redder than he was before.

‘I
am
. You’d practically need an
ear-trumpet to hear me, Miss Tate.’

‘Howard can hear you well enough.’

‘I most certainly can,’ I burst out. ‘C-a-t, cat. D-o-g, dog.’

‘That isn’t fair,’ said Joe. ‘I’m reading about camels.’

When I got home that night, I asked my dad:

‘What’s
wrong
with him, anyway? How can he have enough of a headful of brains to walk and talk, and not be able to write “would” and “could” without making eighty mistakes?’

‘Wiring,’ my dad said darkly. ‘Faulty wiring. A bit like that flat we rented in Rio.’

I nearly died in a fire in that flat. So next day, back in school, I made an effort to be more sympathetic.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Either you get your act together a bit, or I will murder you. Which is it to be?’

‘I
try
,’ he said. ‘I really
try
. It’s just that some things don’t
stick
.’

‘It’s not as if you’re
stupid
,’ I complained. ‘If you were
stupid
, we’d know where we stand.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

I got the feeling he’d been saying it since he was born.

‘Oh, never mind,’ I snapped. ‘I’ll work something out.’

And some of the things I worked out went quite well. That afternoon I tackled
should
(along with
would
and
could
).

‘Start it with one of your ghastly little sound-it-outs, and then remember “Oh, you little darling” for the end.’

‘Oh, you little darling?’

‘O-U-L-D.’

‘Brilliant!’

Then his face fell.

‘But how do I remember which words it
works on, Howard?’

‘Try putting them in a rhyme.’

And suddenly it was drama night at the next desk. Joe Gardener was pulling an imaginary cloak around his shoulders, twisting his face into an evil leer, and saying to me cruelly:

Oh, you little darling!
You know you
would
if you
could,
And you
should!

I pushed him off smartly. He fell on the floor.

‘I hope you two aren’t distracting one another,’ called Miss Tate.

We kept our heads down for a bit. I tried to get on with my work, but over and over my eyes were drawn to Joe’s ‘How to Write Really Badly’ book. I tell you, this boy works like a duck with a shovel. It is so horrible, you have to watch. And, after about a billion false starts, he’d only got this far.

I pointed to the last big filthy smudge.

‘What’s this supposed to mean?’

‘
Efficient
,’ he said bravely. But he was worried, you could tell.

‘Backwards “e”s,’ I warned.

He fixed the ‘e’s.

‘Now is it right?’

‘Oh, no,’ I told him. ‘We’re still miles from home.’

Sadly, he crossed it out, and wrote
good
above it.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘I always end up having to use the easy words I can get right.’

‘You can’t do that. People will think you’re a halfwit.’

‘A lot of them think that anyway.’

‘Well, that won’t do, will it?’

I sat and thought for a while. And then:

‘I’ve got it! ICI is an efficient company.’

‘So?’

‘So you can remember that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ I said triumphantly, writing it down in the big baby letters I had already
learned to use for him, ‘it sorts out the difficult middle bit.’

He stared at it for a while. Then:

‘Got it!’

Maybe he had. Maybe he hadn’t. (He’d be the last to know.) In grim fascination, I watched his slow, scruffy progress down the page, till the bell rang for lunch.

‘Goody!’ he said, stuffing things in his bag. ‘Time to go home!’

‘But we haven’t had the afternoon yet.’

‘Oh.’ His face did fall. But I can’t say he looked all that surprised. And, later, when it really was time to go home, he looked surprised all over again.

‘He has no sense of time at all,’ I told my dad. ‘If you ask him the days of the
week, he’ll reel them off all right. But even if someone told him it was Tuesday yesterday, he still won’t realise that it’s Wednesday today.’

My father tossed chopped onion in the pan.

‘How is he on the months?’

‘He
says
he knows them. But he misses out November.’

‘You get to Christmas sooner, I suppose. And what about the alphabet?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ask him tomorrow.’

So I did. He had to sing it. But he sang it perfectly. By G, I’d started conducting. And when he finished with a flourish on X,Y,Z, I said to him:

‘If you know your alphabet as well as that, how come you have to spend the best part of a week riffling through your
dictionary to find the letter you’re after?’

‘Singing’s different.’

I reported back that night.

‘He says that singing’s different.’

And while my dad chopped parsley for the salad, I did my imitation of Joe Gardener scouring the dictionary for the letter W.

My dad looked up from the chopping board. ‘Show you a trick?’

He took the dictionary from me.

‘What do you bet that I can’t turn to the M’s in one go?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. (I’m not stupid.)

He opened the dictionary and showed me a page full of M-words.

‘Very good.’

‘And what do you bet me I can’t find the D’s?’

‘Nothing.’

He opened the book again, in the middle of the D’s.

‘Excellent.’

‘Bet me I can’t find the S’s in one go?’

‘I’m hanging on to my money.’

Just as well. He opened to the S’s in one go.

He went back to his salad. I opened the dictionary, looking for E, and landed on F. Then I tried B and landed on A.

‘So how did you do that?’ I asked him finally.

‘Old trick,’ he said.

‘But it’s a new dictionary.’

‘It works with all dictionaries,’ he said. ‘Open it right in the middle, and you’re in the M’s.’

I tried it. He was right.

‘Now try exactly halfway to the end again.’

‘Three-quarters through?’

‘That’s right. You’ll land on S.’

I did. Then I tried the first quarter,
and I landed on D.

‘Works every time,’ he told me.

‘I’m impressed.’

Not half as impressed as Joe was, the next day.

‘Do you realise that now you’ll only have to riffle through a quarter of the dictionary each time you want to find a word?’ I told him.

‘So I will.’

He tried it, humming his little alphabet song under his breath.

‘It works!’

‘Of course it works.’

‘You are so clever, Howard!’

‘Thank my dad.’

Miss Tate interrupted our little festival of praise. ‘Shouldn’t you two be getting on with your work?’

Joey was radiant. ‘Oh, really! We are!’

He
might be, I suppose. I haven’t actually got any work done since I came. My How-to book is still a total blank. But now he won’t be riffling and humming quite so much, I suppose there’s hope. At least it’s getting quieter around here.

Within a week or two, I’d got his sloppy bag packing down to an art.

‘So where are we going now?’

He’d look at everyone rushing through the door, brandishing their gym stuff.

‘To games?’

(Sherlock the Second, this boy.)

‘So what do you need?’

He wasn’t allowed to say it until he had it safely out of his locker into the bag.

‘Sneakers. Shorts. T-shirt. Socks.’

Then off we’d go to games. Not that there was much point. He wasn’t very good at them. (I’m being nice, here. Joe was
terrible
at games. He was so bad that even Miss Tate’s pack of Goody Two-Shoes had
to grit their teeth not to groan aloud if he ended up on their team.)