Goggle-Eyes by Anne Fine

Author:Anne Fine [Fine, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141944272
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1989-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Right in the middle there’s a plain white square, with one tiny black dot sitting all alone inside it. Then the whole of the rest of the banner is black dots – thousands and thousands of them – like the most frightful measles.

Prising one of the poles out of his hand, I moved backwards so that the banner unfurled, foot by foot. The wind whipped it taut, and Goggle-eyes saw the whole thing properly for the first time.

‘What is it?’ he asked again.

‘It’s my firepower banner.’

‘Firepower?’

‘That’s right.’ I pointed to the white space in the centre, to explain. ‘That little dot there, all by itself in the middle, represents all of the firepower used in the whole of the Second World War.’

‘All of it? Every side?’

‘All of it,’ I said. ‘From every country that was fighting. Three megatons of firepower.’

‘And all the rest?’

He waved his hand over the acres of measles.

‘That’s all the firepower in the nuclear weapons on the planet today.’

‘Dear gods!’

Poor Goggle-eyes looked a bit shattered.

‘How many dots are there?’ he asked after a moment. (That’s everybody’s next question.)

‘Six thousand,’ I told him. ‘Exactly. Gran helped me get it absolutely right. That’s eighteen thousand megatons of firepower.’

He whistled through his teeth.

‘Six thousand Second World Wars,’ he said slowly.

‘That’s right.’

Leave them to think, Mum says. Leave things to sink in at their own good speed. I stood holding my pole against the tug of the wind, and watched his eyes moving slowly over the banner. You can’t just look at it. There are so many dots they swarm and jump. You get a headache if you stare too long. Gran and I ought to know. We made it, and it nearly killed us.

Sure enough, after a moment he blinked and narrowed his eyes. But they kept moving over it.

‘I’m going to roll it up again,’ I said after a bit. ‘Till we get going.’

He watched me twist my pole until, foot by foot, the banner swallowed itself up. Then he stepped forward and took it from me.

‘I’ll grant you one thing,’ he said, slinging the poles over his shoulder and making off. ‘If that lot ever goes up, there won’t be much world left.’

Raising my eyes to heaven, I followed him.

Round the front of the bus, everyone was milling about impatiently.

‘We really ought to get moving,’ Josie was saying. ‘Snowballing can take hours.’

‘Snowballing?’ Mum looked confused. ‘I thought we were reclaiming hills.’

‘We were,’ said Josie. ‘Till Beth changed the plan last night. Now it seems we’re snowballing instead.’

A look of deep mystification settled on Gerald Faulkner’s face. He stared up at the clear October skies, and you could tell exactly what he was thinking: How can you snowball on a day like this? He turned to Mum for an explanation, but she was already busy complaining to Josie:

‘This snowballing is news to me. You can’t expect people to turn up and snowball out of the blue!’

‘Indeed, no.’ Gerald Faulkner supported Mum to the hilt. ‘No throwing snowballs on a day like this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.