The Great Blue Yonder Read online

Most of the time she just ignored them – which is the best thing to do when people are being stupid like that. But even ignoring people can get difficult, and Mrs Throggy had to tell them all to pack it in and to stop acting so daft, which they did eventually.

  As far as I was concerned, I just acted dead cool about it. And when Pete Salmas came up and said, ‘Olivia says she’s in love with you, Harry,’ I just acted all nonchalant about it, like it was all the same to me, and like that sort of thing was always happening and that people were always falling in love with me all the time, on account of my good looks and winning ways and natural charm and magnetic personality.

  But they weren’t. Not really. No one had even been in love with me before.

  But I never said anything, mind, not to Olivia. I just ignored her and tried to avoid her as much as possible, and I definitely made sure that we were never left on our own together. Because, you see, if we’d ever been spotted on our own, then it might have given rise to rumours that I was in love with her too. Which, of course, I wasn’t, as that was all dead soft. And while it wasn’t so bad for people to go round saying, ‘Olivia loves Harry’ for them to have gone round saying, ‘Harry loves Olivia’ would have been the pits.

  Sometimes though, maybe during a lesson, I might sneak a look at her – when no one could see me sneaking it – and to be honest, she was ever so nice and really pretty, and I didn’t mind that she was in love with me at all. In fact, I rather liked it in some ways, because it made me feel that I was special and it made me feel all warm inside.

  And the funny thing, you know, was that after a while I did begin to love her a little bit too. Just because she was in love with me. Isn’t that strange? I’d never really thought of her much before, but now I’d found out that she was in love with me, I sort of saw her in a different light, and could see that she was nice really and that she had a lot of good qualities, and I thought about her a lot of the time.

  I even got a Valentine as well, back on Valentine’s Day, February 14th. I’m not saying she sent it, because it wasn’t signed. All it said was ‘from an admirer’. It might have been from her, or it might have been from someone else, doing it as a joke, to make me think that it was from her when it wasn’t. But the other thing is that she got a Valentine too, or so I heard. And it was also unsigned and it also had ‘from an admirer’ on it. And when she brought it in to the class and showed it to her friends, some of them said that it looked like my writing – though I didn’t see how they could have said that, because I reckoned that whoever had written it would have used their left hand – if they were right-handed. Or their right hand if they were left-handed, so as to disguise their writing. But the other hand anyway, not their proper, usual hand, if you see what I mean.

  So that was what I said, anyway, and I don’t know why anyone could have reckoned that I’d sent it at all.

  ‘A thousand and sixty!’

  My minute’s silence was up. It was time to look in. Time to enter my old classroom. Time to see my desk, now a shrine, with a little candle burning on it, and with the decorations and the scroll, and the single, dark red rose, with the small drop of water upon it, which looked at first like a dewdrop, but which was really a lonely tear, probably belonging to Olivia Masterson.

  I walked through the door. (No, that’s not a mistake. I didn’t open it first, I just walked right through it.) Mrs Throggy was teaching some Maths.

  ‘And so if we divide by a hundred, where should the decimal point go?’

  My hand went up immediately, and before I could stop myself I was going, ‘Miss! Miss! Me, Miss!’

  She pointed straight at me.

  ‘Yes, over there, you,’ – only instead of adding ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘Olivia,’ and she looked right through me.

  Stupid, really, for a moment there I’d thought I was still alive.

  I turned to see what Olivia was going to say, and to see how she’d been taking my sad demise – pretty badly, probably. She’d be distraught, no doubt about it.

  ‘The decimal point goes after the second five, Miss.’

  ‘That’s it, Olivia, well done.’

  But no. Olivia didn’t look distraught in the least. But that wasn’t all. It wasn’t just that there were no black armbands, that no one was wearing dark glasses or talking in hushed whispers or blowing their nose into a tearful hanky.

  It was my desk. My desk! My precious desk! My desk that should have been like a shrine, like a tombstone, like a permanent memorial to my memory. My desk! The terrible truth was . . .

  Someone else was sitting at it!

  Yes, I know. Incredible! But it was true. There were no flowers, no candles, no scrolls, no nothing. There was a new boy sitting at my desk!

  ‘OK,’ Mrs Throggy was saying, ‘we’ll go on to something else now, and do a little more work on negative numbers.’

  That came as a shock too. Negative numbers. What did I know about negative numbers? Not a lot. Not a lot about negative numbers or negative anythings. The only negatives I knew much about were the ones you got back from the chemist’s when you took your holiday snaps in to be developed. Something else had moved on without me. My old schoolmates were learning new lessons; they knew things that I didn’t.

  They turned their books to the right pages. I studied the boy who was sitting at my desk, to see if he had anything lying there that might give a clue to his identity. There was nothing I could see on his Maths book, but then as he picked his ruler up to draw a straight line, I made out a name on it, scratched into the plastic.

  Bob, it read. Bob Anderson.

  So!

  So this was him! This was sleazy, slimy Bob Anderson. This was the rat who had gone and stepped into a dead boy’s shoes. This was the one who had nabbed my peg for his coat and collared my space on the bench for his lunch box. Me, barely laid to rest in the cemetery, and here he was, pinching all my stuff like it belonged to him, and always had done, just like I’d left it all to him in my will. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t even made a will. And even if I had, why would I leave all my belongings to someone I didn’t know?

  So! Bob Anderson! This was him. Why, I’d half a mind to give him a good thumping. (Well, half a mind to give him a good haunting, anyway.)

  First my peg, then my lunch box space, and now my desk. And what next? What else of mine had he got? Why, he was probably even wearing my shirt number in the football team.

  And then I saw Olivia look across and smile at him, and I thought that he was probably going to get my Valentine cards as well. He really had, he’d gone and pinched everything – my peg, my lunch box space, my desk, probably my place in the football team, and to top it all, my Valentines.

  It just didn’t seem fair. This Bob Anderson wasn’t as big as me, or as good-looking, and he certainly hadn’t put his hand in the air and shouted, ‘Me, Miss, me! I know!’ when Mrs Throggy had asked a question. So he probably wasn’t as intelligent as me either.

  He just happened to be alive, that was all. And it didn’t seem right. People who haven’t got half your good looks and abilities, they pinch your peg and they steal your desk and your fond admirers, and why? – just because they’re alive. That’s why. Just because he was alive and I wasn’t. What a creep. I absolutely hated him. I didn’t know where he had come from, but I hated him for taking my place.

  ‘OK,’ Mrs Throggy was saying, ‘now to recap. What do you get when you multiply two negative numbers together? Peter?’

  ‘A positive number, Miss.’

  ‘Good. And what do you get when you multiply three negative numbers together?’

  She seemed to look towards me. But it was no use in asking me. I didn’t know. I’d missed out on all that, I’d slipped behind. What did I know about multiplying three negative numbers together? No use asking me, I was dead.

  I stood there a while, invisible in the classroom. I looked around at all my old friends and classmates. I looked at this new boy who had come to take my place. I turned and looked at
Mrs Throggy, and listened to her voice. Was there a catch in her voice? A note of sorrow? A note of sadness for her long-lost pupil Harry? There didn’t seem to be. Not at all. ‘Life goes on,’ people say. ‘Nobody’s indispensable.’ And it seemed to be true. Because here was life, going on as if I had never existed, and it seemed that I was as dispensable as an old empty drink carton, used up, finished with, thrown away, and worst of all – forgotten.

  I looked at Bob Anderson. He was chewing the end of his pencil and looking like he was having trouble understanding his negative numbers.

  ‘When you multiply two negative signs together, one cancels the other out, and so you end up with a positive,’ Mrs Throggy was saying.

  But it was all Chinese to Bob Anderson and me. It was probably all Chinese to even Chinese people.

  I felt a wave of sympathy for him, and I suddenly didn’t hate him so much any more. After all, it wasn’t this Bob Anderson’s fault that he had taken my place. He’d probably just come along, maybe moved into the area with his mum and dad, and they’d looked for a place for him at the nearest school. And they’d found mine. He was quite innocent, really. He probably hadn’t even known that it was my peg and that it still would be, if it hadn’t been for the lorry.

  It was the rest of them. They were to blame. It was their fault for letting him take it all over. It was their fault for not telling him, not stopping him, for not explaining to him that my desk and peg and lunch box space were like holy articles and sort of tombstones to my memory.

  How could they have let it happen? All the people I had thought were my friends. How could they have forgotten me so soon? Pete and Olivia and Mrs Throggy and Mr Hallent and everyone on the football team. There was nothing in the classroom there to remember me, nothing at all. Not one single, solitary black armband on anyone’s sleeve.

  ‘Now, if you add a positive number to a negative number which is greater than the positive number . . .’

  And then I saw it. I turned and there it was, up on the wall behind me. It covered every inch. There were poems and pictures and drawings and paintings and memories and momentos and photos that people had brought in. And along the top of the wall, in big cutout letters were the words: Our Friend Harry.

  And that was me. It was all about me. The whole wall, the whole great big wall, every inch of it, all covered with – well – it embarrasses me to tell you really, after the horrible things I said about everyone forgetting me. But everyone was so nice. It was unbelievable really, all the things people wrote and said. Even people who hadn’t liked me, just as much as the ones that had.

  There was a poem up there, on a white piece of paper stuck on to a blue card and decorated with dried, pressed flowers, and it was called Just Harry and it was signed Olivia. And I don’t really want to tell you what it said, as it’s a bit sort of personal and private – even if it was stuck up on the wall for everyone to see. But if I’m honest with you, I felt a bit upset after I’d read it, just like you feel when you’re going to cry. Not that I ever did cry, not much, as anyone could tell you, ’cause I was well-known for being pretty tough and all.

  Then there was a sort of essay up there too entitled My Mate Harry and this was written by Pete. But it wasn’t sort of sad stuff, it was really funny, more like a sort of celebration. And Pete had written down all the things that we’d got up to, even the stuff about us getting into trouble. But it didn’t seem like trouble, the way he’d written it, it all sounded like it was lots of fun and a real good laugh – more fun than I’d remembered. And it was so good, I had to read through it a couple of times, just to remind myself that it was really me he was talking about. And he said a bit about the both of us in the football team, and about that time we went off in the coach for the away game, and how when we got there I discovered I’d lost my shorts. And he remembered how the only spare pair we could find was this red pair, and so I had to play the game in this red pair of shorts, and how everyone called me the red devil for a while after. And although it wasn’t that funny at the time, the way Pete put it, it seemed really great and like we’d had a tremendous time together, and that I’d sort of had a marvellous life.

  And maybe I had. Maybe I had had a marvellous life. The way Pete wrote it, it made me think I had. And, you know, at the bottom of Pete’s essay, Mrs Throggy had written, ‘Thank you, Peter, for this wonderful depiction of Harry and of Harry’s life. We will all miss him more than we can ever say, but thank you for putting our feelings into these words and for reminding us what a unique and wonderful character he was. He was so life-enhancing and full of curiosity and fun and no one will ever be able to take his place in our hearts. I’m sure that Harry would be pleased to know that he was so loved and valued by us all.’

  But I didn’t. I didn’t feel pleased. I just felt like crying again. I just felt like crying because I’d had such good friends and I’d gone and thought they’d forgotten me. But they hadn’t. And I felt ashamed.

  ‘Now, if we subtract minus six from minus four, what will . . .’

  Mrs Throggy’s voice droned on like background music – well, like a background voice, anyway. I read everything that was up there on the wall in ‘Harry’s Corner’ and I looked at all the drawings and the photos and took in everyone’s memories of me.

  You’d think I’d been the best thing since sliced bread according to everything up there, the best invention since computers, that was me. In fact you’d have had a hard job working out quite how the world was managing without me – though it seemed to be getting by all the same.

  Even as I read all the tributes and accolades, there was one I was especially looking for. I maybe didn’t admit it to myself, but there was one contribution I particularly wanted to see. And then I finally found it, down at the bottom right-hand corner of the wall, partially hidden by an enlarged photo of me and the rest of the class, taken about eight months ago. There it was. The one thing I did, and yet didn’t, want to read. It wasn’t a very long essay, but it easily filled three pages, being done in a big, scrawling hand.

  Harry, it was titled. That was all. Not ‘Memories of Harry’ or ‘Dearly Beloved Harry’. Just ‘Harry’. Yes. Harry, it read, by J. Donkins.

  The J stood for John, even if – as far as most of us were concerned – it more usually stood for Jelly. And that’s what it was, the final tribute of my sworn enemy. What could he possibly find to say that was nice about me? Because I certainly couldn’t think of anything nice to say about him.

  Harry, by J. Donkins.

  He’d probably have felt he had to say something nice about me just because I was dead. I hate that though, when people go all gooey on you, just because you’re dead. I mean, a friend’s a friend and a foe’s a foe. You shouldn’t really go saying nice things about people just because they’re dead. Not if you don’t mean them. It’s better not to say anything at all.

  Harry, by J. Donkins.

  There he was, sitting at his desk, trying to come to terms with negative numbers, and not finding it too easy. What would he say if he knew I was standing there, able to read what he’d written?

  What indeed?

  I took a deep breath – at least in my mind I did – and I read on.

  Jelly

  ‘Me and Harry was never big mates . . .’ the essay began, and I thought to myself, No, well you can say that again.

  He didn’t have very good writing, did Jelly. It was big and clumsy, just like him. And where he had written ‘was’ as in ‘Me and Harry was never big mates’ Mrs Throggy had crossed out ‘was’ and had lightly written ‘were’ next to it in pencil. She had obviously given up on correcting it after that though. Maybe she didn’t feel it was right, seeing it was supposed to be my obituary and it wasn’t really a marks-out-of-ten thing. So she let the rest of it stand, just as Jelly had written it, with blots and smudges and all.

  Harry, by J. Donkins.

  Me and Harry was never big mates, not really, though to be honest, I don’t really know why. We just see
med to get off on the wrong foot somehow, from right back in the infants’ class, when we were small. I don’t know if maybe I’d done something to offend Harry that I never knew about, or if maybe he just didn’t like the look of me much or something, but the truth is we never really hit it off and he even got me once round at the back of the Portacabin.

  I tried to be mates with Harry lots of times, and I was always asking him if he fancied a kickabout. But he would never play with my football – almost like there was germs on it or something, or like there was something wrong with me.

  It was Harry who started calling me Jelly, ’cause I’m a bit fat, and maybe once he’d started doing that, I wasn’t so nice to him either, because thanks to him everyone else called me Jelly too. So I maybe started calling him names and stuff so as to maybe try and get my own back. And it was me who stole his football shorts that time we went to the away match on the coach, when he had to wear the red ones. But even then he still sort of came out of it all right, because everyone called him the red devil and I think he liked that really. But I’m sorry for nicking his shorts. I shouldn’t have done that, and I’ll send his mum the money so as to get some flowers for him and to try and make it up, and that’s a promise.

  But it wasn’t me who started the nastiness between us, at least I don’t think so, and I was only ever nasty to him because he’d hurt my feelings. I suppose I wanted him to feel hurt too, like I felt. So it’s true that I wasn’t very nice to Harry, and I’m sorry, and I didn’t really mean it. But he wasn’t very nice to me either, and that’s true as well.

  I used to wish Harry would be my mate sometimes, and I wished there was something I could do to change things. But it just seemed like we would be enemies for ever and that was it. I did like Harry in a lot of ways though, even though I’d never have admitted it. ’Cause he was very funny sometimes and it would be hard not to laugh at his jokes. But I’d sit there all the same, biting my lip and scowling and trying not to laugh, ’cause I didn’t want him thinking that he was funny, even though he was.