Life's Lottery Read Online Free Page B
Author: Kim Newman
pretending to like it. You
know
school custard is made of worms and goblin’s snot and that it eats away inside at your stomach, destroying your body bit by bit until you turn into custard yourself. The other children have been fooled by Mrs Fudge, who is Evil.
The dinner lady bends low over you and holds a spoon heaped with yellow gloop, waving it in front of your mouth, cooing soothing words like a hypnotist. You calm down, tears drying up. A wicked-witchy smile twitches across Mrs Fudge’s lips and she says, ‘There now, that’s better.’ You mop your cheeks with the sleeve of your cardigan. The yellow blob is still there on the spoon in front of your face. You see it move, dripping over the edges of the spoon, spattering on the table-top. Suddenly, Mrs Fudge pinches your nose. You open your mouth instinctively and the spoonful of custard is stabbed against your tongue.
The stuff is inside you. The taste – that horrible,
horrible
taste – is in your mouth, exploding outwards.
You spit the custard back at Mrs Fudge and produce a yell from your stomach and lungs that flows out and threatens to fill the whole dinner hall, rattling cutlery, cracking glasses, bursting eardrums. Mrs Fudge is driven back, wiping her face. All the other children, from Class One up to Class Six, are struck silent. You pause to draw breath, allowing a second or two of silence, then renew the scream, louder and louder.
Mrs Fudge calls Mr Brunt, the headmaster, and Miss Slowley, the Class One teacher. You still scream, trying to purge the custard from your body. You’re out of your chair – two curves of plywood bolted to a tubular metal frame – and are on the floor, pounding with hands and feet. Everyone thinks you’ll do yourself an injury. Finally, you run down. Your screams become sobs, painful after-burps of the explosion. Miss Slowley helps you up and finds a hankie to wipe your face.
Dinner break is over. Your roly-poly (and custard) is taken away, uneaten, and scraped into the pigswill tub. Everyone, kids and teachers, regards you with a kind of awe. Knowing a screeching beast is caged inside you, they walk carefully as if around an unexploded bomb. You have survived. You’ve got through dinner break without having to eat your custard. This is a victory.
Next day, as you push away your pud, Mrs Fudge only has to say, ‘No more of that nonsense, Keith’ to set you off. Cocooned inside your screaming fit, you know you can keep this up all the way through to Class Six in the unimaginably distant Dan Dare future of 1971. After a week, Mum and Mr Brunt hold negotiations behind the scenes and you are excused custard. Mrs Fudge never talks to you again, her world shattered. An exception has been made to the rules that are her life; she’ll never forgive Mr Brunt for backing down, or forget you for defying her tyranny. You always knew you could sometimes get your way by crying. Now, you know losing control can frighten even grown-ups.
Your mother calls you ‘Nuisance’, Miss Slowley calls you ‘sensitive’, Shane calls you ‘mental’. But whatever they call you, you are excused custard.
After a while, you don’t even have to explode to get your way. Knowing what you are capable of makes grown-ups and children, even wild creatures like Mary Yatman and Timmy Gossett, wary of you. In Class Three, you have to spend an afternoon with a lady called Dr Killian, the school psychiatrist, talking about your fits. She’s the first grown-up to realise that sometimes you don’t really lose control, that you pretend. By then, you have proved yourself excellent at reading and drawing and have tried hard with sums. You only go off under extreme provocation. You overhear Mr Brunt telling Mum that Dr Killian thinks you’ll grow out of it. You know the doctor is wrong: you haven’t changed, you’ve just got cleverer about holding it in.
* * *
You have friends, mostly other children Shane and Mary pick on: Michael, who has a bad
know
school custard is made of worms and goblin’s snot and that it eats away inside at your stomach, destroying your body bit by bit until you turn into custard yourself. The other children have been fooled by Mrs Fudge, who is Evil.
The dinner lady bends low over you and holds a spoon heaped with yellow gloop, waving it in front of your mouth, cooing soothing words like a hypnotist. You calm down, tears drying up. A wicked-witchy smile twitches across Mrs Fudge’s lips and she says, ‘There now, that’s better.’ You mop your cheeks with the sleeve of your cardigan. The yellow blob is still there on the spoon in front of your face. You see it move, dripping over the edges of the spoon, spattering on the table-top. Suddenly, Mrs Fudge pinches your nose. You open your mouth instinctively and the spoonful of custard is stabbed against your tongue.
The stuff is inside you. The taste – that horrible,
horrible
taste – is in your mouth, exploding outwards.
You spit the custard back at Mrs Fudge and produce a yell from your stomach and lungs that flows out and threatens to fill the whole dinner hall, rattling cutlery, cracking glasses, bursting eardrums. Mrs Fudge is driven back, wiping her face. All the other children, from Class One up to Class Six, are struck silent. You pause to draw breath, allowing a second or two of silence, then renew the scream, louder and louder.
Mrs Fudge calls Mr Brunt, the headmaster, and Miss Slowley, the Class One teacher. You still scream, trying to purge the custard from your body. You’re out of your chair – two curves of plywood bolted to a tubular metal frame – and are on the floor, pounding with hands and feet. Everyone thinks you’ll do yourself an injury. Finally, you run down. Your screams become sobs, painful after-burps of the explosion. Miss Slowley helps you up and finds a hankie to wipe your face.
Dinner break is over. Your roly-poly (and custard) is taken away, uneaten, and scraped into the pigswill tub. Everyone, kids and teachers, regards you with a kind of awe. Knowing a screeching beast is caged inside you, they walk carefully as if around an unexploded bomb. You have survived. You’ve got through dinner break without having to eat your custard. This is a victory.
Next day, as you push away your pud, Mrs Fudge only has to say, ‘No more of that nonsense, Keith’ to set you off. Cocooned inside your screaming fit, you know you can keep this up all the way through to Class Six in the unimaginably distant Dan Dare future of 1971. After a week, Mum and Mr Brunt hold negotiations behind the scenes and you are excused custard. Mrs Fudge never talks to you again, her world shattered. An exception has been made to the rules that are her life; she’ll never forgive Mr Brunt for backing down, or forget you for defying her tyranny. You always knew you could sometimes get your way by crying. Now, you know losing control can frighten even grown-ups.
Your mother calls you ‘Nuisance’, Miss Slowley calls you ‘sensitive’, Shane calls you ‘mental’. But whatever they call you, you are excused custard.
After a while, you don’t even have to explode to get your way. Knowing what you are capable of makes grown-ups and children, even wild creatures like Mary Yatman and Timmy Gossett, wary of you. In Class Three, you have to spend an afternoon with a lady called Dr Killian, the school psychiatrist, talking about your fits. She’s the first grown-up to realise that sometimes you don’t really lose control, that you pretend. By then, you have proved yourself excellent at reading and drawing and have tried hard with sums. You only go off under extreme provocation. You overhear Mr Brunt telling Mum that Dr Killian thinks you’ll grow out of it. You know the doctor is wrong: you haven’t changed, you’ve just got cleverer about holding it in.
* * *
You have friends, mostly other children Shane and Mary pick on: Michael, who has a bad
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