THAT

Signs
Tom Spencer
Something had been trying to be told to him all day, but he couldn’t read the
signs. The maggots he had concealed in an old plastic pencil case inside a tree stump had
bored their way out, despite the leaves and earth he had left to make them feel at home.
The black car that was always there in the driveway at the bottom of the hill when he
walked to school but was always gone when he walked back was missing at the start of
the day today. The zip on his coat had broken; he had to walk with it open.
Now parents’ consultation was over and his mother was behaving strangely on
the other end of the phone. Edward had gone over to Andrew’s house while his mum
talked to the teacher, and Edward and Andrew had built a successful skateboard ramp.
Edward wanted to stay and play longer; this sort of thing was rarely a problem.
“You can stay for fifteen minutes,” said his mum in a blank tone. Fifteen
minutes was an odd amount of time. If he had to come straight home, ask him to come
straight home. On the other hand, if he could stay, let him stay. Fifteen minutes.
Edward decided to make the best of it. “We can do a lot in fifteen minutes,” he
said, hopefully.
He turned out to be right. They attached a laundry basket to the skateboard with
a piece of rope and went over the ramp together in it without falling out, though it was
a close thing. It was amazing, he thought as he walked home past the empty pencil case
and the missing car, how you could do a whole project in fifteen minutes if you had to.
On the other hand he didn’t see why there was any need to come home. Dinner wouldn’t
be for at least an hour. “Can I go back to Andrew’s in a minute?” he said after she let
him in.
“No. You can’t go out anywhere for a month,” she said. Edward was stunned.
The statement was strange, but even stranger was the strangled tone in which she said it,
and the fact that there were tears in her eyes and on her cheeks. Edward had never seen
his mother cry, or even get really upset. Instead of going into the living room she sat
down on the stairs. The front door was still open and he had to close it.
He saw her incredulous look and he knew, though he didn’t know anything
else, that he had betrayed her. “Mr. Martin said you were rude to your violin teacher,”
she said. He had taken consultation for granted. So had she; only now did he realize that
there was even anything to be taken for granted. Consultation was when they told her
how wonderful he was, how clever, charming, and well behaved, and she came home
pleased and hugged him and sometimes he got a present. She had failed to read him right,
to see that, all along, he had been a bad sort of boy who had deceived her as to his true
nature; that was what he saw in her eyes. How could he have been caught so off-guard?
96 THAT