The Impossible Boy (10 page)

Another strange occurrence was what happened to David Brume. David – an eccentric kid whose chief delight in life was scribbling on people’s books, clothes and schoolbags with a
large fluorescent yellow highlighter pen he called Excalibur – was lurking in a quiet corner of the playground like a spider in its web, waiting for some unsuspecting victim to come within
highlighting range. He chuckled quietly to himself as he remembered how the previous week he had drawn a beautiful long yellow line down the back of Gabrielle Grayling’s white blouse. Without
warning, the highlighter pen jerked out of his hand and pressed its wedge-shaped tip against David’s forehead.

‘Excalibur,’ cried David, ‘what’s got into you?’ He always spoke to his highlighter pen as if it were alive but it had never until this day done anything to suggest
it actually was. The pen danced in the air before his eyes and drew another line, this time down his right cheek. He pressed his hand to it. ‘Stop it!’ he demanded. ‘Stop it at
once!’

But Excalibur had only just begun.

A few minutes later, a strange bedraggled figure limped into the school nurse’s office. Upon seeing it, the school nurse, Miss Blakeway, let out a scream – as, indeed, would anyone
who had just met a boy whose entire face was a vivid, fluorescent yellow.

A fourth odd event concerned the trophy cabinet outside the headmaster’s office. In it was a large bronze-coloured cup awarded annually to the pupil who won the school’s popular
end-of term general knowledge quiz. The name ‘Gabrielle Grayling’ had been engraved on the cup five times in a row, but the latest name to be added was not Gabby’s but that of
Abigail Pipit, a girl who Gabby was convinced had cheated on the quiz by photocopying the answer sheet and memorising it a week in advance. The bronze cup lay now on the floor in front of the
cabinet. It appeared to have been stamped on and smashed almost beyond recognition. Oddly, the cabinet itself was still intact and locked. Odder still, and which would not be discovered yet for
some while, the names engraved on the cup had mysteriously transformed into mirror writing.

The side of Barney’s boot connected perfectly with the football. It made a
tump
sound. Barney loved that sound. It usually meant the ball was going to go exactly
where he wanted it. In this case, he wanted the ball to sail majestically over the head of Adam Crabtree and just to the right of where Thomas Gilchrist, the goalkeeper, would dive, arms furiously
outstretched, on to the cold dry mud of the goalmouth. And this is exactly what happened.

Thomas rose slowly to his feet and retrieved the ball from the net, muttering grimly in a Glaswegian accent.

‘Top scoring, dude!’ Barney’s team captain, Nick Goodwin, yelled and clapped Barney on the back.

Barney winced.Nick was one of those kids who referred to everyone as
dude
, including his mother, all teachers, and even, when he was putting them on before a game, his football boots.
But Barney hated it.

‘Cheers,’ said Barney and jogged back to his side’s half of the pitch. He was not one for extravagant celebrations after scoring a goal. He didn’t run around the pitch
with his shirt over his head or slide spectacularly along the grass on his knees, arms raised. He preferred merely to nod with quiet satisfaction and maybe indulge in a dignified handshake or two
with his teammates. Anything more looked like showing off – and that wasn’t his style.

It was a bright, cold, early evening, perfect for football. Blue Hills High had sold its playing fields years ago so the school team always practised in the nearby park. They usually attracted a
decent crowd while they were practising but the park was peculiarly empty this evening, with only the players’ coats and schoolbags dotting the perimeter of the pitch.

‘OK, dudes!’ Nick called to his team. ‘That makes two-all! One more goal, dudes! That’s all we need! One more little goal! Let’s do this, dudes!’

‘Yeah,
dudes
, called a mocking voice. Someone laughed. Nick ignored them.

The opposing team (who were, in fact, the other half of Blue Hills High’s squad as this was a practice game) took their positions for kick-off. Their captain, a squat, cocky kid called Dan
Perch, placed the ball on the centre spot. He intended to give it a swift kick almost immediately, passing to midfielder Rob Yellowwood, but when Dan drew back his leg he was astonished to find the
ball had gone. Assuming some freakish gust of wind, he searched around for it, without success.

‘Anyone seen the . . . er . . .
ball
?’ he called out, feeling a bit of an idiot.

‘Look!’ cried someone.

‘There!’ shouted another.

‘Blimey!’ yelled someone else.

‘Above your head!’ bellowed a fourth.

Dan looked upwards and was dumbstruck to find the ball floating quite contentedly in the air about twenty centimetres above his head. Furious, he grabbed it with both hands, as if the ball were
somehow misbehaving on purpose and showing him up in front of his friends. But it refused to budge, however hard he yanked it, remaining steadfastly in position in the air. In fact, he was able to
lift himself clean off the ground by hanging on to it. Silently he mouthed the words ‘What the flipping heck . . .?’ before letting go and dropping down on to the grass.

‘Well,’ said Barney, ‘that’s weird.’

Dan looked around at the other boys, finally regaining the power of speech. ‘It’s stuck. What do we do?’

‘Stuck?’ growled Thomas. ‘It cannae be stuck in the air! That makes no sense!’

‘Well, you come and move it then if you’re so clever, Professor Stephen McHawking!’ suggested Dan. ‘I would love to see you have a go, I really would.’

Thomas strolled up to the floating ball. Barney had never seen him worried or intimidated by anyone or anything for as long as he’d known him and he didn’t expect the big Scots lad
to start freaking out now just because some pesky football was refusing to behave in the usual manner.

‘Right, you,’ said Thomas, staring hard at the football. ‘Stop messing about and let us get on with our game!’

He leaped into the air in a great two-footed jump and planted his forehead against the ball with the force of a jackhammer. There was a loud
tump
noise not dissimilar to the one Barney
was so fond of and Thomas’s head rebounded backwards at enormous speed, toppling him over on to the ground in a dizzy heap.

The football remained hovering in the air, completely unmoved, and, as far as is possible for a football, looking a little aloof.

Some boys ran to see if Thomas was hurt. He shooed them away noisily and stared at the football with wide, terrified eyes, as if it were some hideous demon. ‘That’s no ball o’
this Earth,’ he hissed.

Nick now approached the ball, feeling, as captain of the school team and as there was no referee present, that he should take charge of the situation. ‘Now look here, ball, dude,’ he
began in reasonable tones, assuming as Thomas had done that the ball had a mind of its own as well as the ability to defy gravity, ‘we mean you no harm. I know we’ve kicked you about a
bit – but we thought you didn’t mind. We assumed, what with you being a football, you’d be OK with us treating you like—’

He didn’t get to finish the sentence, at least not audibly to the others, because at that moment the ball suddenly lowered itself through the air and made contact with the top of
Nick’s head. There was another
tump
sound, softer this time, as the ball distorted, flattening as if squashed by a great weight, and then a
flomp
as it swallowed
Nick’s head completely.

The other boys now began seriously to freak out. Some ran away screaming; some ran up to Nick and tried to help him remove the football encasing his head. Nick himself wasn’t helping
matters, running in random directions, shouting muffled instructions to the other boys, gesticulating wildly and clawing, panic-stricken, at the football he was now wearing like a space helmet.

Barney watched as the football-headed boy ran blindly into a goalpost and bounced off it like a striker’s poorly aimed shot. ‘Bad luck,’ he thought wryly. Then the seriousness
of the situation hit home. Nick was almost certainly suffocating inside the football. Barney dashed to his schoolbag and fumbled in it for his pencil case. He drew out his compass, a blunt stubby
pencil still clasped in its arm, and ran to Nick, who was lying on the ground just behind the goal, his skin a sickly bluish white and his legs kicking convulsively. Barney thrust the point of the
compass into the top of the football and ripped, hoping the point would not spike the top of Nick’s head. There was a loud
pop
! and the football burst, dropping on to the grass in a
scraggy mess of torn plastic. Nick gasped for air, wheezing loudly. The colour slowly returned to his face.

‘Thanks, dude,’ he croaked at Barney.

‘No worries, mate,’ said Barney and helped him sit up. From the corner of his eye he noticed a bright flicker of light. Lightning? He waited for the thunder but none came. More
explosions of brilliant light followed, like rapid bursts of a camera’s flashbulb. Barney turned his head away and shielded his eyes with his arm. He could hear boys shouting in panic and
confusion. What was going on now? He lowered his arm and blinked at the pitch. Rob Yellowwood had his arm around another boy, who was doing his best to hold back tears. The boy’s lip was
quivering uncontrollably.

‘What’s wrong?’ called Barney, rising to his feet.

At the far end of the pitch there was another flash of white light and a startled yelp of surprise from one of the players.

‘Stay back!’ yelled Rob. ‘Don’t come on the pitch!’

Barney kept outside of the pitch’s perimeter line. ‘Why? What’s up?’

‘It’s the lines on the pitch,’ said Rob. ‘We can’t go outside the lines. Don’t you come on and get stuck too.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t go outside the lines?’

‘Watch,’ said Rob. He strode towards Barney. As his foot crossed the white painted line marking the edge of the pitch, there was a flash of white light and Rob vanished. Barney
gasped. A figure at the opposite end of the pitch waved at him. It was Rob. He jogged back up towards Barney.

‘What just happened? You vanished!’

‘Vanished as I crossed the line – appeared again back there. It’s mad!’ said Rob. ‘Every time someone tries to leave the pitch, they end up vanishing and then
reappearing on the opposite side!’

‘Whoa,’ said Barney. ‘That’s pretty messed up.’

‘You’re telling me,’ said Rob. ‘What the heck are we gonna do? I’m supposed to be going for a meal with my mum and dad and sister later. I don’t want to be
stuck on a football pitch for the rest of my life!’

Nick struggled to his feet. ‘Stay there, dudes,’ he wheezed. ‘I’ll go and get help,’ adding, ‘my dad’s an engineer,’ as if that explained
everything. He sprinted towards the park gate.

‘Stay here?’ repeated Rob. ‘Is he having a laugh? Like we have any choice.’

‘Psssst! Barney!’ hissed a voice.

Barney spun around. There was no one there. ‘Hello?’ he called uncertainly.

‘Psssst! Over here.’ It was Gabby’s voice. And it was coming from a clump of trees not far from the pitch.

Barney approached it, a little warily. ‘Gab? Is that you?’

‘I’m here!’ said Gabby’s voice.

‘Where?’

‘In this tree.’

Shading his eyes against the low evening sun, Barney looked up into branches of the trees. There was no sign of Gabby.

‘I can’t see you . . .’

‘Don’t look up. Look at the trunk of the tree directly in front of you.’

Barney looked. Then he said a single word. A very bad word.

A moment passed.

‘Ha!’ said Gabby. ‘That’s pretty much the reaction I had earlier. Maybe the fourth dimension just has that effect on people.’

Barney nodded dumbly. The reason why he was so dumbstruck was that Gabby’s face seemed to be protruding from the trunk of the tree in front of him. It wasn’t that the tree was hollow
and she was sticking her face out of a hole in the trunk. Her face seemed actually to be
growing
from the wood.