My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) (16 page)

I feel as if I'm probably doing Amy Gilchrist a disservice by trying to get her together with Cyrus, but I put that to one side and go out on a limb.

“We need to get you to that dance,” I say. “Getting Yatesy back is important, but no matter how badly we hurt him you'll still have lost Amy. Nothing we can do to him will change that. You've got to get to that dance, Cyrus.”

He nods sadly. “It can't be done, though,” he says. “You don't know my parents. It could never happen in a million years.”

“What if I told you I could make it happen?” I say. “This is what I do, Cyrus. I'm an ideas man. I think I can get you there.”

He looks at me with a kind of disbelief in his eyes. “If you could do that,” he says, “if you could, Jack . . .”

“Call me Jackdaw,” I tell him, and he nods.

“Jackdaw . . .” he says, and I trust to the wave of good fortune that's carrying me along, and I strike while the iron's hot.

“Remember my cousin Harry?” I say, and Cyrus nods. “He wants to go to university, but his dad won't let him. His dad's kind of a bohemian, and he wants Harry to be a bohemian too. But Harry wants to be just like . . . society. That's why I'm trying to help him.”

“I hate parents,” Cyrus says. “All of them.”

“How about this, then,” I say. “I'll come up with a plan that really sticks it to Yatesy good and proper, and another one to make sure you get to the school dance. I can do that. No problem. But you'll have to do something for me in return.”

“Anything,” Cyrus says, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

“Help Harry out,” I say. “Let him go to Bailey and take the rap for being in that fight with you. Say he was the guy if Bailey asks you anything about it. That's all. That's all I'm asking.”

It's quite clear that when he said “anything,” this wasn't in the list of things he was thinking about. He probably thought I was after his Xbox or something. But he thinks it over. He sits looking toward the games hall, and he stays like that for a while.

“But then Yatesy doesn't get punished for the fight,” he says at last. “How can that be right, Jackdaw?”

“I admit it's not ideal,” I tell him. “But you have to remember we'll hit him with something bigger, later on. Think of how smug he'll feel thinking he's off the hook, then think of the shock he'll get when we hit him with the real thing.”

Cyrus continues to sit silently, and then he slowly begins to nod. He gets up into a crouch and starts rubbing his hands. Then he stands right up.

“That could work,” he says. “What kind of thing would you do?”

“Nothing at all,” I think to myself. “As soon as you've done the business with Bailey that's the end of the matter.” The thing is, Chris Yates seems okay to me, and Cyrus is so unpleasant, with his bizarre dislike of bohemians for no apparent reason, that it'll be a bonus to get one up on him.

“Something big,” I say. “Something that'll ruin his life. I'll probably do something to make him fail his art exam, so he can't go to art school. If he got expelled for this fight, he could probably still get in somewhere else and do his art exam there. But if I make sure he can't pass it, no matter how many times he tries, that'll be worth its weight in gold.”

“You're an evil genius,” Cyrus says, and he smiles.

“So I'll tell Harry he can go to Bailey?” I say, and Cyrus nods enthusiastically.

“Totally,” he says. “I'll even go with him. And I'll erase that recording off my phone, too. Just as soon as I'm back on for going to the dance.”

“How about letting Harry go to Bailey this afternoon?” I say. “And how about erasing that message right now?”

“Not a chance,” Cyrus says, and I can tell this is as far as the wave is going to carry me for today. I have another couple of shots at him, but my efforts lead nowhere. So in the end I give it up and reach out to shake his hand, forgetting all about the gunk and the licking until it's too late. We shake hands in that old-fashioned way, just to seal the deal, then I hurry off to the toilets and scrub and scrub all the way up to the elbow, to avoid contracting some kind of weird macaroni disease.

So I'm almost there. All my dominoes are back in place. Chris Yates will get his pardon, Harry will get to go to university, and Elsie Green will have her perverted desires for Drew Thornton fulfilled. All I have to do is make sure Cyrus gets to that stupid school dance. That's all.

How the hell am I going to manage that?

When I get home from school, after another hard afternoon at the coalface of boredom, I see the sign which means the Regular Madness will move up a few notches to the Special Occasion Madness later tonight: a packed suitcase sitting in the hallway. I didn't manage to come up with anything for my dad. There was a point in geography when I thought something was stirring, something about him owning up to Mum that he'd been in a brawl with Uncle Ray the other night, and then telling her it was only a work-experience place I'd been coming in to see about. But it didn't really form into anything solid. My circuits were still a bit overheated from my session with Cyrus, and I think part of my operating system had already gone to work on coming up with something to get Cyrus to the school dance. So, in the end, I just sent Dad a text that said I was still thinking and that I hadn't come up with anything yet. And that's how things stayed.

I notice the suitcase just as Mum comes out of the kitchen with her face all angry looking, probably because she thinks it's my dad that's just come through the door. When she sees it's me, she looks kind of disappointed, but more friendly at the same time too.

“Didn't you go to work?” I ask her, and she tells me she didn't.

“I had a few things to catch up on here,” she says. “I just worked at home this afternoon.”

Perhaps you're thinking the packed suitcase standing at the bottom of the stairs is hers. It isn't. You might even be thinking it's my dad's; that Mum's thrown a few of his essentials in there, and she'll hand it to him as soon as he walks through the door and tell him to get out. But that's not how it works during the Special Occasion Madness. The suitcase is mine, and it's me who'll be getting the elbow pretty soon.

“Uncle Ray's coming round in about twenty minutes,” Mum tells me. “You'll be staying with him for the next couple of nights, just while your dad and I work things out. It'll be easier for you there.”

I'm surprised she still thinks she even needs to explain this stuff to me anymore.

“Can't I go somewhere else, though?” I ask her. “It's insane at Uncle Ray's. He's a crazy man.”

“The only other place is Grandpa's,” she says, but I know that isn't really an option. I tried that once before, and it ended up with Mum and Dad having to come and collect me from the police station. Everything went okay for the first couple of days. Then, on the third morning, I was crashing about in the kitchen trying to work out how to use Grandpa's ancient hardware, when he threw the kitchen door open, still wearing his pajamas, and picked up a big bread knife that was lying on the table.

“All right, sonny boy!” he shouted at me. “Get yourself into the living room.”

I thought it was a joke to begin with, and I started laughing, but he didn't like that.

“Find this funny, do you?” he said. “I'll show you funny if you don't get moving. I've dealt with your kind before. Come on, get in there.”

I got quite scared then and just did as he told me. When we were in the living room, he kept the knife pointing at me and picked up the phone to call the police.

“It's me, Grandpa,” I kept saying to him. “Jack. The Jackdaw.”

But he kept telling me he knew all about my sort and that this was a victory for the little man, and within five minutes the police arrived and drove me to the station, thinking I was a burglar. Then Mum and Dad had to come down to confirm I was who I said I was, and to take me home.

“Okay,” I say to Mum. “You win. Uncle Ray's it is.”

My big fat crazy uncle is as good as his word. Within twenty minutes, he turns up in his bampot taxi and starts hammering his horn out on the street. Mum hands me my suitcase and tells me not to worry about anything.

“It's only for a night or two,” she says. “Just until we work out if your dad and I have any kind of future together. Then you can come back.”

This is the routine I have to go through every time. The reality of it is, in two or three days, even the Regular Madness will be gone for a while. Mum and Dad will be like two new best friends, seeing who can be the nicest to each other, and indulging in a bit too much parent kissing in front of me for my liking. There'll be a few things missing from the house, a chair and a couple of plants maybe, or a few ornaments and one of the small tables. Then I'll find it all lying by the bin when I take the rubbish out at some point. There might be a couple of new cracks or dents in the woodwork around one of the doors, or a new mark or two on the walls or the floor when I get back, but that'll be the full extent of the damage. Mum knows this as well as I do, but I think she must enjoy the drama of it all or something.

“Take care,” she says quietly, and I bump my suitcase over the threshold and drag it down the path, toward the waiting madman.

“Don't worry about a thing, Mary,” he shouts, getting out of the car. “I'll make sure he's as right as rain.”

Then he hurls my suitcase onto the back seat and ruffles up my hair and we're off, with me clinging onto the dashboard for dear life and him making that god-awful noise he calls singing opera.

There are three main things an ideas man needs when he's working on the Big One: the first two are peace and quiet, and the third is plenty of privacy to do his thinking in. I know from past experience I won't be getting very much of any of them at Uncle Ray's place. Uncle Ray will put paid to the first two, with his constant jabbering and his crashing about in the kitchen, his insistence on always having at least two TVs and one radio on at any particular time, and then the opera singing on top of all that. Harry, on the other hand, should take care of the privacy issue. Whenever I get dumped at Uncle Ray's house, I always have to share Harry's room and sleep on his floor on a blow-up mattress which constantly leaks. The worst thing is, when Harry's not at school, he never
ever
leaves his room. He's always playing chess against himself, getting stuck into his school books, messing about on his computer, or sticking bits onto model cars with a brain-warping glue. You can't even get any time to yourself in the bathroom. If you ever try to spend more than thirty-five seconds in there, Uncle Ray comes and starts banging on the door, shouting about needing to “quickly solve a few crossword clues” or “batter on some aftershave for the bowling club.”

It's a far from ideal situation, especially under the current circumstances.

When the hair-raising taxi ride draws to a close, I spend about ten minutes in the kitchen with Uncle Ray, pretending to drink the beer he gives me in celebration of my interview being canceled, and listening to him hammering on about a variety of crazy men he's had in his taxi over the past few days. Then he tells me to take my suitcase upstairs and get “settled in” while he knocks up some dinner for us. “Gourmet fare,” he calls it. I thank him again for saving me from a life of label licking, then drag my things up to Harry's bedroom and bang on the door. Harry doesn't answer.

“I thought I told you I didn't want to see you again,” he says when I open the door and go in anyway. “If you've brought my suit back, just throw it on the bed and get lost.”

“I haven't brought your suit back,” I tell him.

“Even better,” he says. “That means you can just go.”

I heave my suitcase up onto his bed and sit down beside it. “I can't go anywhere,” I tell him quietly. “I've moved in. We're roommates again.”

And like you can probably imagine, he's not particularly thrilled by this breaking news. He picks up his chess pieces, one at a time, and starts throwing them at the wall.

“No way,” he shouts. “Not again. You can sleep out in the hall this time.”

“It's nothing to do with me,” I tell him. “Blame your dad. It's all his fault.”

“How?”

“He told my mum about that interview, and now she and my dad are locked into the Special Occasion Madness. So I have to stay here till it's over.”

“I hate my dad,” Harry says. “I absolutely hate him.”

I open my suitcase and start putting some of my things out on a chair. I might as well make myself at home, I decide, and I don't want my clothes to get too many creases in them.

“It's not all bad news, though,” I say to Harry after a while, when his constant muttering to himself is starting to ease off and his rate of throwing the chess pieces is down to about one a minute. “I've brought some of the good stuff too.”

He doesn't answer.

“We're back on for the whole Chris Yates thing,” I say, and I can tell he doesn't believe me. “I spoke to Cyrus again today. It's all arranged. He says he'll okay your story with Bailey.”

“Bullshit,” Harry says, but I nod. “I don't believe you,” he says.

“Why would I make it up?”

“So you don't have to sleep in the hall.”

“I'll sleep in the hall if you want,” I tell him. “It doesn't make any difference to me.”

That gets him. All the red color starts to disappear from his face, and he stands up and looks at me.

“Genuinely?” he says. “Cyrus really said that?”

“Totally.”

“Jesus!” Harry says, and he starts picking up all of his scattered chess pieces and putting them back in place on the squares of the board. “This is unbelievable, Jack.”