Chapter 1: Why You Should Never Lock Yourself In The Bathroom

 

 

 

  Hi there. It's nice to meet you... though technically I'm not meeting you, so scratch that. 

  Seeing as you can't really introduce yourself to me, I guess I should start.

  My name is Charlie Laidlaw. I'm 15 years old and a pupil at Catmeer's School for Abnormal Children. Yes, that is actually what it's called. But I guess I haven't even told you how I got there yet, so for all intents and purposes, I still go to St Francis' Boarding School for the Criminally Inclined. Because according to everyone, I'm a criminal. It's hard to explain.

  I'm not, I just tend to have a string of criminal-like things happen around me. Back when I wasn't at Psycho-Kids School, I used be a perfectly normal student, who things just happened to blow up around. Again, hard to explain. Once I brought in fireworks to school, I was planning to take them home afterwards, but then they somehow went off in my bag, and almost killed three people in my class. That was the first time I got expelled.

  Another time we took a trip to a weapon's museum. It was great, we even got to hold a rifle. Of course, I ended up almost shooting the tour-group leader. Honestly, no one had even known it was loaded! I just pulled the trigger without thinking.

  Add both of those incidents to the time I actually did steal a car, and yeah, I got myself stuck in a criminal school. But the car thing sounds more dramatic than it was, I just drove it for ten minutes so I could get to the hospital quickly, my dad had been injured badly, and there were no taxis about. What's a bloke to do?

  Being sent to St Francis' had been terribly embarrassing for me, Maddy Panes, a girl from my old school who I had never seen eye to eye with laughed so hard snot came out of her nose. At least my father wasn't disappointed, or at least, never for longer than a few minutes. That's about as long as his moments of lucidity last.

  So, now to actually begin the story. I suppose the day everything kicked off and I started getting myself landed in mortal peril two times a week was actually my 15th birthday.

  I'd been working all day at "Fun Dogz", the local fast food restaurant. I'd started off as a waiter, but my terrible coordination and chronic clumsiness had soon proven that my future did not lie in balancing breakable objects on trays. So now I just mopped the floors, and cleaned the toilets, never as often as they needed cleaning, but you wouldn't catch me complaining on that front.

  When I pushed open the little flat door, my keys jingled and the hinges creaked, but that was the only sound in the place.

  "Dad? Mell?" I called, but there was no answer. I wasn't expecting one from dad, but I still called his name, just because I never thought not to.

  "Hello? Mell? Dad? Where are you?" I said, nudging the door shut with my foot, my hands full of brown-paper shopping bags full of half-price food, and stuff from the 99c shop.

  I thought I knew how to coax my little sister out of her hiding place "I've brought sweets!"

  Quick as a whip a tiny tangle-haired blond girl shot out into the hall and rounded on me.

  "Where?" she demanded. So polite.

  I grinned sneakily at her, knowing this would drive her mad "I never said they were for you."

  Mell shot forwards and started stamping on my toes. Charming.

  "Charlie! Give me the sweets!"

  I laughed and dropped the bag of sweets lightly onto her head.

  She snatched them into her little hands, and immediately started shoving the sticky pink balls into her  mouth.

  I didn't get her sweets as often as she would like, because if she got sweets as often as she would like, she would have no teeth by the time she was twenty.

  Back when mum had been around she had never let either of us eat anything but health-food. She had been fitness obsessed and spent most days at the gym, which had been fine until we found out she was having an affair with her fitness instructor. The two of them ran off to Brazil when Mell was 2, and we hadn't seen her since. At first I missed her a lot, but  then I reckoned, if my mother didn't care enough to stay with me and my sister, then I was better off without one.

  My dad missed her though. He often forgot that she had left, and I never had it in me to tell him what had happened.

  When Mell had vanished again, I went and unpacked the rest of the shopping into the small cupboards and fridge in our tiny kitchen. The freezer in our fridge was broken, and I didn't have the money or skills to repair it. One of the lights on the inside was dead too, and the whole thing cut out at random intervals, so I tended to go shopping as often as possible, and buy very little, so less food was wasted if the fridge did die for a while.

  When I was done unpacking I decided to pay my dad a visit, mustering a little strength before I pushed his bedroom door open.

  The room smelt of stale air and old cologne, and everything was dark except the the orange square in the wall, where sunlight was trying to seep through the thick weaving of dad's hideous mustard curtains.

"Yuch, dad! You're meant to open the window at least once a day! It smells really bad in here."

  "I don't like having the window open, it's cold outside!" dad barked from the bed in a darkened corner. He wasn't bed-bound. In fact he had been advised to move around more, and go out, but he preferred to stay in his room all day.

  I ignored his objections and walked over to the window, tearing the curtains open and revealing a blizzard of swirling dust mites in the shaft of light that fell into the room.

  "There." I stated "That's much better."

  "No it's not, you always do that! Even when we were children you used to open the window all the time!"

  I sighed. Dad often got me confused with his brother John. He'd been lost at sea when I was a little kid, before Mell was born. I remembered him vividly, I always used to say he was like Indiana Jones, because he'd been everywhere and had the best stories. He also wore kaki more than 90% of the time. Looking back I guessed most of his stories were really just stories. They always included dangerous shadow-monsters and people with magical powers. Before dad had been diagnosed he had told me the real versions, they weren't quite so cool, but still pretty awesome for a guy coming from our family.

  I suppose I did look quite like John. My dad always said I had inherited the Laidlaw-looks more than he himself ever did. Dark brown hair and eyes that were so dark-blue they were almost black, with a slightly round face and long legs. Dad had got his looks from his mother's side, light brown hair and extremely pale blue eyes, narrow shouldered and scrawny. Mell was my polar opposite, blonde hair and big brown eyes, just like our mother. To look at the three of us, the last thing you'd think would be "they must be related".

  "I'm not John, I'm your son, Charlie, remember?" I said calmly.

  My dad frowned for a second, then understanding dawned "Of course! Charlie! Sorry, you really reminded me of my brother for a second there."

  I shrugged in a doesn't matter way that I always used when dad realised he had forgotten something, or confused something.

  "Yes... Charlie... so how was school?"

  "I didn't have school, remember? It's two weeks into the summer holidays."

  Dad frowned again "Yes, of course... sorry..."

  "Doesn't matter. How are you?"

  "Cold. Could you close that window please, Miss Chive must have left it open earlier." dad said, gesturing to the window.

  "No. I just opened it, you need some fresh air." I said strictly.

  I hated this. Being the responsible one. I was the criminally inclined kid for heaven's sake! I wasn't meant to be the one taking care of him, telling him to get out of bed, get some fresh air in his room, put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket. This had used to be exactly the other way round. I really missed that.

  "Right... Charlie! I just remembered! Your school report, what is this all about!?" dad suddenly demanded and I flinched.

  This year's school report had been worse than most, and I had discussed this with him five times already, but he never remembered. The conversation never got easier for me though.

  "Yeah, about that..."

  "Five fights, Charlie? Five?"

  I felt uncomfortable "Trust me, they were all perfectly justified. This bloke was kicking in a first year, and-"

  "Why didn't you talk to him? Or get a teacher?"

  "I did talk to him!" I lied.

  I never talk when that kind of thing is happening. I just sort of barge in without thinking. Impulsive doesn't even begin to describe me. Thinking before acting is a concept that never really gripped me.

  "And getting a teacher?" dad said sternly. Well, at least he was the one being stern again.

  "There wasn't one anywhere near..."

  "What's wrong with you, Charlie? You're not an aggressive boy!"

  "I know, but he was really pounding the kid and-"

  "You wanted to to be the hero."

  I frowned "What? No! Someone had to stop him."

  "And why did that someone have to be you?"

  I could feel myself getting annoyed. I'd done nothing wrong!

  "No one else was doing anything. You always told me to help people who couldn't help themselves!"

  Dad shook his head sadly "You don't always have to be the hero, Charlie. What good did that do? You'd have saved yourself an enemy and a bad report if you just went to get a teacher!"

  He was right, I knew he was. That didn't mean I wasn't annoyed.

  It had been in the break, and I was strolling around the football pitch when I saw Brian Torkins punching a kid in the stomach. The kid had ridiculously spiky hair like a hedgehog, dyed a neon orange, which was all I could see of him because he was doubled over, but I recognised him as Petey Smith, a kleptomaniac from the first grade. He was nice, if a little sneaky. I'd immediately run over and punched Brian in the back of the head. The enormous hulk-like bully rounded on me instantly and I'd ended up with a bruise on my cheek and yes, a bad social report.

  I felt sure there had been no teachers around. But what if there had? Did I really have some kind of hero-complex?

  "Where's your mother, I haven't seen her all day." dad cut into my thoughts.

  "She's uh... down at the gym. Said she'd be back in a minute."

  Dad sighed "She spends half her life at that gym, I've told her I love her the way she is, but she's still convinced she could be more toned. I think that's what she calls it. Hope she doesn't wish I was more  "toned", eh Charlie?" dad said and winked, chuckling.

  I couldn't bring myself to laugh back. This was just painful.

  There was about a minute of silence where I didn't know what to say, and dad drifted into some daydream, then he suddenly eyed me suspiciously "Do I know you? What are you doing in my room? Get out!"

  "I'm your son Charlie."

  "No you're not! Get out right away! And you can tell my real son, if you see him, that he's never to let you in here again!" dad shouted, and I winced.

  "Yes d- ...uhhh Mr Laidlaw."

  I walked to the door, fighting back the crushing feeling of despair threatening to wash over me. There was something indescribably terrible about my dad not recognising me.

  I wasn't going to dwell on it though.

  I was just about to close the door gently behind me, when dad called again "Happy Birthday, Charlie. I'm afraid I don't have a present..."

  I felt a wave of relief. Every time he forgot me I was terrified he would never recognise me again, but usually it only lasted a few seconds, a minute at the most.

  "That's fine." I said.

  "No it's not, your mother never let me forget!" he said.

  "It's really fine." I said, and closed the door. At least this way I would be leaving it on a happy note.

  Now that I had seen Mell and dad I didn't really have much to do other than avoid Miss Chive, so I locked myself in our bathroom.

  She was dad's carer. Health insurance and my earnings couldn't stretch to anything more than one carer with not much training, and although I hated her and she hated me, I was glad she was there. I could never take care of Mell and dad on my own.

  She was a small fat woman with greasy grey curls and a hideous plastic apron with flowers on. Her arms were amazingly thick, and she always carried a mop to hit me with.

  As I didn't really have a responsible parent, she was the one who ended up attending any mandatory parent/teacher conferences, and she was also always the first one to read my report cards. Being described as "recklessly impulsive", "hyperactive", "antisocial" and "innatentive" along with all the fights I got into had not put me in her good books. Of course the teachers never bothered to mention that all the people I got into fights with deserved it, and when I tried to tell her this, she added "liar" to her own list of things she disapproved of about me.

  Our bathroom was small and grimy with a tiny bath and a toilet that the white paint was peeling off of in crackling patches. The mirror over the sink was smudged and rust-coloured specks were spreading from the corners. My reflection had dark bags under his eyes, made worse by the poor over-head lighting.

  I decided to have a shower, but I brushed my teeth first. I was just about to pull off my shirt when Miss Chive's voice pierced my eardrums like two very sharp needles.

  "Charlie? Get out right now! I have to clean in there!"

  On the inside I groaned. Loudly.

  "I was just going to take a shower."

  "You can do that afterwards. Get out. Now."

  I was about to do what she said. I really was. But then my head suddenly exploded with pain. It felt like someone was driving a white-hot railway spike through my brain. I think I might have yelped, but I'm not sure, I was quite distracted at the time.

  "Charlie?!" she called again, but by this point I was doubled over with my hands on the sink, trying not to scream. It was terrible, the kind of pain that continues without any kind of release. My feet were stamping and jumping and trying to pace, just so I had something to do that wasn't think about the pain.

  "Charlie, open this door this instant or I'll kick it down!" Miss Chive said, worry creeping into her voice ever so slightly. Under other circumstances I would have been touched by her concern, as it was I barely registered the words, let alone what they meant.

  The pain was getting worse, like all the headaches I'd ever had at once, times twenty.

  I was about to konk out. My brain was shutting down so it didn't have to cope. Then, as the pain reached a level I associated with medieval torture, it stopped, and all I could see was blue.

  I felt like there was power, flowing along the floor beneath my feet and in the walls around me, all I needed to do was move my arms and I could control it. I turned my hand, just a fraction, then there was a deafening bang and the blue, rippling haze was gone, and I was standing in my bathroom, with water pouring from where the tap had been seconds before.

  The door crashed open, Miss Chive standing in the frame. She had broken the lock with one strong kick. Dislike her as I might, that woman was hard as nails.

  "What the hell have you done?!" she screeched, staring at the bubbling stream of water, and the tap lying in the corner. My eyes followed hers, and I saw a smashed wall tile where the tap had hit.

  "I didn't do anything! There must have been a build-up of water pressure or something..."

  The water stopped bubbling, but the damage was done. There were dark, wet patches seeping into the carpet in the corridor outside, and to repair the bathroom would cost way more money than we had.

  I hurried out of the bathroom, knowing that if I offered help she would hit me.

  "And get those sweets off of your sister!" Miss Chive shouted after me.

  I walked into the sitting room, confused and somehow angry. What was I meant to do now? It would take ages to get enough money to mend that!

  Mell was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, her lips pursed as she sucked on a sweet.

  I knew she must have heard the bang and was expecting her to ask what had just happened.

  "Miss Chive wants to take my sweets." she said thoughtfully.

  "Yeah? Well tell her she can't have them." I said heatedly.

  Mell frowned at me, and I suddenly felt the slight rush of anger drain away. I flopped down on the sofa next to her.

  Mell studied me for a while longer, then launched herself onto my stomach.

  "Why are you in such a bad mood?l

  I gasped in pain "I'm not! Get off... I need... to breathe!"

  She moved onto her elbows and knees, the spiky little things sticking painfully into my chest and abdomen.

  "Tell me!" she demanded, and I felt all the air leave my body.

  "Mell... ow... pain... lungs... collapsing... ribs... breaking..." I managed, somewhere between gasping and groaning.

  She rolled off me, long hair falling in her face.

  "You sulk when you're angry. It's annoying. You never tell me why."

  "I do not sulk!"

  "Yes you do. You sulked when dad got sick."

  I sighed "That wasn't sulking."

  "Yes it was, you locked yourself in our room and wouldn't let me in for two hours." she said matter-of-factly.

  I didn't really feel like telling my little sister I had been crying. She took the piss out of me enough as it was.

  After a few seconds she figured out I wasn't going to answer, and crawled away on the floor, long blonde hair brushing the carpet.

  I dug my earphones out of my pocket and plugged myself in. I flicked through my song list until I found my favourite David Bowie song, and settled back on the sofa, closing my eyes.

  My thoughts ran wild for about a minute, trying to figure out what had just happened, but I had been working all day, and it didn't take me long to fall asleep, Life on Mars drowning out all other sound.

*

  I woke up about two hours later with a krippling pain in my neck. I'd been sleeping at a strange angle, and I couldn't even move my head anymore.

  I tried to sit up, and felt something small slide off my chest. My hand shot out with reflexes I didn't know I had, and I caught the thing before it hit the ground.

  It was a little cupcake with a note stuck in with a toothpick. I pulled the note off and took a second to recognise Mell's illegible, scrawled handwriting, and another ten to decipher the actual message.

  Happy Birthday! Miss Chive said I shouldn't wake you, and I forgot to give this to you earlier.

  I smiled, and took an enormous bite out of the spongy cake. A few chews in I felt something spiky sticking in my throat.

  I choked and pulled whatever it was out of my mouth. It was a small plastic unicorn. I should've seen that coming.

  Mell was going through her unicorn-phase. A while ago I had bought her a few little figures and she scattered them around the flat, gathering them again every evening just to scatter them again the next day.

  Clearly despite her birthday wishes she was still evil enough to try and kill me with a plastic pointy thing on her edible present.

  I slipped the unicorn into my pocket, and ate the rest of the cupcake, wary of more small toys that could kill me.

  Miss Chive would be at home at this point, and dad and Mell would be asleep, so all that was left to do was to flop into bed.

  So that's just what I did, stealthily sneaking into our room so I didn't wake her.

  She was curled up on her small bed in a stripy blue-and-white nighty. She was scowling in her sleep like she always did, and I was reminded that she had been through way too much for someone her age.

  I felt somewhere between happy and miserable. Happy because it was my birthday, miserable because of everything else.

  As I went to sleep for the second time that night, I wondered whether my sixteenth year would be different than the others. I should have wondered more.

 

2: Chapter 2: How To Hand In Your Resignation With Style

Chapter 2: How To Hand In Your Resignation With Style

 

 

 

  The next day I was back at my dream career. Fun Dogz.

  The place is a hole. A big, squeaky-plastic cesspit, run by the world’s leading expert on how to make your employees hate you. Martin Hunt is the kind of man who kicks small dogs and children when he thinks no one’s looking, then usually blames it on me if he is caught. My Aunty Rosa used to say I had the kind of grin that made you want to remove all sharp or flammable objects from the room, and my teachers certainly agreed, so naturally everyone believes him.

  Hunt was enormous, over six feet. He was strangely diamond shaped, going out around the middle and then getting thinner in both directions. He had a horrible moustache he couldn’t quite get away with, and always wore a tacky red “Fun Dogz” cap. To my eternal mortification I was forced to wear one as well, along with a pastel yellow polo shirt and similarly bright red apron. As a hilarious joke someone had changed my name tag to read “Carly” rather than “Charlie”, which lead to some of the more confused senior citizens to call me “miss”. If I corrected them they apologized and mumbled something about everyone looking the same nowadays. Good to know I retained my masculinity even when my dignity was taken.

  My colleagues were two other teenagers, Jake and Kathy. Jake was nice enough, with bad acne and snake-bite piercings. His mouth always hung open, and he had layered brown hair. He sounded like he was permanently stoned, and his eyes clouded over frequently. He struggled with words with over one syllable. All in all, not the sharpest spike on the hedgehog, but still a good guy.

  Kathy was quiet and really shy. I’m not sure if she’s ever said two words in a row to me, and she tended to hide behind her long blonde bangs, she definitely didn’t deserve such a terrible boss as Martin Hunt. But then again, you’d be hard put to find someone who did.   

  On the morning after my fifteenth birthday I was de-clogging the toilets. The bathrooms smelled like the rear-end of something that lived solely off of rotten bananas, and there was so much rude graffiti on the tiled walls that the whole room started to feel like an optical illusion.

  I was somewhere between retching and coughing most of the time in “Fun Dogz”, but today was particularly bad. I was sure I would develop lung cancer if I worked there much longer. I was coughing so much I didn’t hear Jake enter the bathroom until he was standing right next to me.

  “Dude. It stinks, man.” Jake said, the words sounding weird with his Yorkshire accent.

  “That would be down to all the clogged toilets.” I said, leaning on the cistern, then drawing my hand back, thinking I might be better off not touching it.

  “Totally... so anyway, did you hear Hunt kick off a second ago? It was mental.”

  I frowned. I hadn’t. That never usually happened, Hunt bellowed like an elephant with a megaphone, everyone within a five mile radius could hear it when Hunt kicked off. But I had been very distracted, thinking about what had happened yesterday evening. How was I going to pay for the repairs? Could I get another job? Ha! With my criminal record? Not likely.

  “Umm... no, I don’t think so. What did you do?” I asked distractedly.

  Jake looked at me for a few seconds, then understanding dawned “Oh, dude, no, he kicked off at Kathy. I’m totally innocent.”

  “What did Kathy do?” I asked through gritted teeth, already feeling my face get red. I hated bullies, and no word described Martin Hunt better.

  “Uh... I don’t know, like... she probably did... something...” Jake said helpfully.

  I tried to settle down. I was determined not to pick any fights, especially after what my dad had said yesterday. Hero complex, yeah right.

  “He’s such a prat.” I couldn’t help growling.

  “I know, dude, but, like, what are you gunna do?”

  I had a few ideas of what I might do, but I thought I should probably keep them to myself. “Yeah, you’re right.” I said instead, and went back to cleaning the toilets.

  For a few minutes I just crouched there, breathing through my mouth to avoid the smell and bubbling with silent rage. My rubber gloves squeaked against the toilet bowl, and the noise was starting to really get on my nerves. I wasn’t sure if Jake was still behind me, he was good and standing still and not doing anything, so I jumped slightly when a different noise invaded my bubble of tedium.

  Kathy cleared her throat behind me, sounding a bit like a sneezing kitten, and I spun around.

  She flinched.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you, Charlie, I’m sorry, I just... Hunt told me to ask you if you were done with the toilets...” she said very quietly, looking at her feet (couldn’t have been a pretty picture. I hadn’t mopped the floor yet, and there had been a group of pothead teens in in the early hour of the morning. Drugs and late-night milkshake-drinking-competitions make for some bad aim.)

  “Oh, well, I’ll be done in a sec.”

  “No, he... he told me to take over if you weren’t done.” she whispered.

  I glanced at Jake, who it turns out had been silently mouth-breathing next to me for a significant amount of time, to see if he thought this was as ridiculous as I did. I got the standard no-brainwaves look for my troubles.

  “I’ve only got the one left, I’ll finish it.” I said.

  “Please. He said I had to.”

  “I’ll finish them up myself.” I insisted forcefully. I was not going to be an aid in our boss’s ridiculous punishments.

  “Charlie, dude, I think you’re, like, picking fights where you don’t need to be.” Jake droned. That was possibly the most philosophical thing to ever come out from between his lips, so I did stare at him a bit. Kathy used this opportunity to slip past me into the stall and kneel down.

  I started “Hey, Kathy, no. I’m finishing, not you.” I insisted, and she doubtlessly would have answered had she not suddenly squeaked and hidden behind her hair again. I frowned and looked around to see what had startled her.

  Martin Hunt was standing in the doorway, fag in hand, cheap suit covering his enormous, pear-shaped frame. “Competition for my approval, Laidlaw?”

  My toes curled, but I managed not to clench my fists. He always called me by my last name, probably thinking it made him sound like some New York copper, and we were hardened criminals.

  “No, I just thought since I started-“

  “Don’t make assumptions, Laidlaw, you’re too young for it. What are you, twelve?” Hunt scoffed.

  “15.” I corrected tersely.

  “Well how mature.” he said patronizingly.

  For a few seconds we stared each other dead in the eye. He was daring me to react, I could feel it, but I forced myself to keep calm.

  “Look, I just think I should finish doing the loos, you’re the one who told me to do them in the first place.” I pointed out.

  “Yes, well now I’m telling you Kathy should do them. Understand?” he said slowly, leaning over me.

  OK, he was asking for a punch.

  “That’s not fair, sir, at the start of the summer we agreed only me or Jake were allowed to do the gents. Kathy has to do the girls’ all by herself.” I reminded him.

  “And now she’s also doing the gents. I’m sorry, is there something you don’t understand about this?” He said, his voice getting louder.

  “Charlie I can do the toilets.” Kathy said quietly, still kneeling on the floor.

  By this point, I was aware this was a stupid fight. If I got the sack, I’d never get another job, and I had no idea what would happen to dad and Mell. Was it possible I was just trying to be the hero again? Probably.

  “I’m finishing the loos. It’ll only take me another few minutes. The others can go home.” I insisted. I knew the last suggestion was pushing it, but the words were out of my mouth before I even had time to think don’t say that.

  “Laidlaw, don’t test me. I will fire you in one second flat, and won’t even feel bad about it.” He was leaning so close over me, that I could smell his sour breath. I leant away from him, the backs of my legs up against the toilet bowl. If I leant back any further I would fall onto the loo, which wouldn’t be very dignified.

  I pulled my lips in between my teeth and bit down. As much as I hated bullies, I knew I couldn’t win this one, so I stood down.

  “Fine.” I said finally, and stepped out of the small cubicle. Kathy stood up and started pulling on her own pair of rubber gloves.

  I was walking away again, letting Hunt get away with another ridiculously piggish act. Again. And I would have done it, if it weren’t for my stupid boss’s stupid need to gloat.

  “I knew that would get you, Laidlaw, I knew you couldn’t lose your job. Not with that father of yours.”

  I spun around “Excuse me?” I demanded. The blood was pounding in my ears like a drum. And then it suddenly wasn’t just my blood, everything around me was pulsing, like back in our flat. I could feel power under my feet, in the walls, right next to Hunt.

  Knowing something bad was probably going to happen, I tried not to move muscle, but some greater instinct was at work. I’m not sure how my arm came to be stretched out in front of me, but it was. Then everything exploded.

  Shards of tile flew through the air on currents of water. The cisterns exploded and the floor under my feet crumbled leaving only squirting floor pipes. Kathy screamed, and Jake’s eyes widened for the first time in a long time. Hunt’s face was so red, it made Kathy and Jake’s “Fun Dogz” caps look faded pink.

  The feeling of power faded, and I stood awkwardly away from the others. Jake scrambled for the door, but tripped over a pipe and landed on the floor. He seemed to be muttering “What the hell what the hell what the hell” over and over again, which I think effectively summed up what I was thinking.

  Kathy took as many steps away from me as she could before her back hit the wall, and slid down into a crouch. She was looking me like I had just punched an old lady.

  Finally, and inevitably, Hunt found his shouting voice again.

  “WHAT THE HELL DID YOU JUST DO?!”

  I looked at him blankly “Me?”

  OK, I realise this must sound really stupid, but how was I meant to have done that? I could hardly have exploded the water pipes, could I?

  “YOU... YOU WRECKED MY BATHROOM, YOU LITTLE PUNK!” Hunt bellowed.

  “I- What? No! I didn’t do anything!” I said, my heart racing. What was happening here? I couldn’t seriously have done this, could I? But how likely was it that two pipe-related catastrophes would happen to me in as many days, just by accident. I’m thinking not very.

  “GET. THE. HELL. OUT!” Hunt screamed, and I did. The door was behind me so I just ran blindly. Out in the main eating area people were looking very alarmed, asking me what had happened, some running around in a panic, but I ignored them. Something weird was going on. Something really weird, and I had no idea what.

  And I’d lost my job. What was going to happen to dad and Mell now?

  I ran out into the street, and bolted.