Head Kid

But sometimes Tina was so busy that she let her son play on it to keep him busy. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, her mum used to say, which isn’t quite as difficult a saying to understand as the one about butter not melting in the mouth. It means that if people, especially naughty boys, are left on their own with nothing to do, their hands will probably soon start doing naughty things – like ringing people’s doorbells and running away, or putting Cup-a-Soup powder in the bathroom shower head. (Which had been funny, though Tina did sometimes worry that her laughing quite so much at the sight of her husband’s head covered in instant leek and potato may have been one of the reasons he’d left.)

That was always part of the problem. Ryan was naughty, but sometimes his naughtiness was really funny. Even most of the clips that he watched on the internet – when he showed her – were funny, and rather than telling him off, she ended up laughing with him. It was one of the things she loved about being with Ryan – sometimes it felt more like being with a friend than a son.

But she did worry that although she was always his mum, and sometimes his mate, the one thing she couldn’t be was his dad – and that he might maybe sometimes need one. Not least to make him do up his school tie properly. By the afternoon, it was always halfway down his shirt. She sometimes wondered if he just pulled it down as soon as he got out of the door.

“Crip! Crip! Crip!” said Holly, pointing at a bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps on the table. Holly in general missed out at least one letter of every word. “Yan!” she continued, to Ryan. “Crip!”

“You won’t like those, Holly,” said Tina. “They’ve got a really strong taste. I’ve heard he’s really strict.”

Ryan, gathering that his mum was no longer talking about crisps, or to the baby, shrugged.

“Your point is …?”

“Well, Ryan,” said Tina, getting up with Holly’s bowl, “I think we know what my point is. If the new head teacher is really strict, you might need to watch yourself.”

Might I? thought Ryan. Hmm. A really strict head teacher? That’s a bit of a challenge.

He didn’t say that, though. He said, “OK, Mum. I’ll be as good as gold.” And handed Holly, who was still straining with both arms towards the bag, a salt-and-vinegar crisp. In his defence, her face when she tasted it screwed up in a way that was really funny.

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Ryan’s mum, Tina, however, was right.

Mr Carter, the new head teacher, was very strict. Perhaps that’s the wrong place to stress. Perhaps it should be: Mr Carter, the new head teacher, was very strict.

Either way, strictness, in fact, was exactly what the Bracket Wood board of governors had been looking for. OFFHEAD was coming soon and they needed a head who could turn the place round fast. And if that meant dealing with naughtiness – meaning Ryan Ward – with an iron fist, so be it.

All this was pretty clear at the new head’s first assembly. As the children filed in, the teachers – Mr Barrington; Miss Gerard, the head of the lower school; Miss Finch, who taught Reception; and PE teacher Mrs Wang, on crutches (she, if you remember, is the one who slipped up on Ryan’s butter prank outside the staff room) – were sitting at the back of the tiny school stage.

Then Mr Barrington stood up and said, “Quiet, please!”, which he always said, and was always needed, as the noise in the Bracket Wood school hall during assembly was always crazy.

Normally, though, he had to say it about seven times, getting louder each time until he was basically screaming at the top of his voice, his face as red as a tomato. After which he could finally take a deep breath and say, “Good morning, everyone!” and the cross-legged children would reply, “Good morning, Mr Barrington!” or, in Ryan’s case, “Good morning, Mr Bummington!”

But on this particular morning he only had to say it once. And everyone, even Ryan, went quiet.

Because after he said it once, Mr Carter, who had been facing the wall adjusting his jacket, turned round.

He did look like a head teacher – he had short, neat hair and was dressed in a black suit with a black tie (very much done up properly, right to the top button) – but also a tiny bit like a gangster. There was an air of menace about him. His eyes, which were also black, were narrowed and his head was moving slowly round like a searchlight in a prison camp.

Silence.

When he did eventually speak, it was very slowly and deeply. It was as if Batman had walked on to the school stage and said, “Good morning, everybody …”

Although, as it turned out, Mr Carter was Scottish. And so far there has not been a Scottish Batman. Having said that, the accent did somehow make his voice even more frightening. There was a pause when the whole school seemed too scared to reply.

Mr Carter blinked slowly and then repeated, just a little louder.

“I said, Good morning, everybody …”

And then, too quickly, falling over each other to say it, the whole school replied:

“Good … good … morn … morning … good … ing … yes … good morning … morning good … Mr Car … Mr … ter … Carter!”

Mr Carter looked into the crowd of children and said, “Yes. Well. We can work on that.” He left another long pause. You could almost hear the sound of the children starting to sweat. Then …

“This school. It has a reputation, doesn’t it? What is that reputation for?”

All the children either looked confused, scared or at the ground. Mr Carter nodded to himself, as if expecting no answer.

“Well, I’ll tell you, shall I? RUBBISHNESS.” He said this word much louder than the others. Which is why I’ve written it in capitals. He said it so much louder that some of the Year Ones began to cry.

This didn’t seem to worry Mr Carter, who continued: “It has a fine, longstanding reputation for being rubbish. It really has won all the awards that don’t exist for not being very good. And there’s a problem with that, isn’t there? Do you know what that problem is, Bracket Wood?”

Apart from the odd Year One sob, silence reigned in the assembly hall.

Miss Gerard, who had very big curly hair, and teeth that always looked a bit like she’d drunk too much red wine the night before – and who was standing just behind Mr Carter – leant over and whispered, “Sorry, Headmaster, are you expecting answers to all these questions? Because I think the children are a little confus—”

“I’ll tell you,” said Mr Carter as if Miss Gerard wasn’t there at all. “It’s not you. It’s not a problem for you. You can go on being rubbish, and then you can go to a rubbish secondary school and your life can turn out – guess what? – rubbish. That’s fine. That’s up to you. No. The problem, Bracket Wood, is with me.”

He put his hands together in a praying position and placed them in front of his face.

“Because I’m. Not. Rubbish,” he said, jutting his hands downwards with each word. “I have turned round every single school I’ve ever run. Every single school I’ve ever run has ended up with an OFFHEAD rating of Outstanding. And I’m not going to let this school, clearly the worst that I’ve ever had to work in, tarnish my one hundred per cent reputation. Is that CLEAR?”

Still no one spoke, although at least now there was a response – a lot of children’s heads nodded furiously.

“Good. The staff will be pinning notices round the school this morning with a whole series of new rules that I wish to be followed to the LETTER.”

Mr Carter began to leave, then paused and turned his searchlight glare on the assembled children.

“Oh! And one more thing. This school. It also has a bit of a reputation, doesn’t it, for pranks? It’s known all across the land – well, the borough – for being a no-go zone for teachers who can’t deal with pranks. Fire extinguishers let off into dinner trays, butter spread dangerously on the floor outside the staff room, teachers –” and here Mr Carter glanced round at Mr Barrington – “unwittingly humiliated by words written on their foreheads.”

Mr Barrington looked down.

“Not any more,” said Mr Carter in an icy tone. “If anything like that happens, the perpetrator will be rooted out and punished immediately and severely. From now on, Bracket Wood School is operating a zero-tolerance policy on pranks.”

As Mr Carter said this, his eyes seemed to narrow even further and go a shade darker. Like some old portraits, his eyes seemed to stare directly at you wherever you were in the room.

So every child in that assembly hall felt terrified, as if he was speaking specifically to them.

But, if you’d looked very, very closely, you would have realised that Mr Carter was, in fact, staring at and speaking to one pupil in particular – Ryan Ward.

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“What you gonna do, Ryan? What?” said Stirling.

“Yes, what, Ryan, what?” said Scarlet.

Stirling and Scarlet were brother and sister. They were not in Year Six. They were in Years Three and Two. Most of their time was spent bothering Fred and Ellie Stone about computers and video games, but they bumped into Ryan coming out of assembly and couldn’t contain their curiosity.