The Touchstone by Andrew Norriss

Author:Andrew Norriss
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141927473
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

At school the next morning, it got worse. Miss Rattle asked Douglas to wait behind at the end of registration. She was Douglas's form tutor, but also took him for maths.

‘I've marked the test you did yesterday,’ she told him, ‘and you scored one out of twenty.’

She held out his exercise book and Douglas stared at it.

‘Are you sure?’

‘You can check to see if I've made any mistakes.’ Miss Rattle was reaching for a piece of paper on her desk. ‘Rather more serious is the fact that you only scored four per cent on the exam we did on Tuesday.’

‘Four per cent!’ Douglas looked at her in disbelief. All his answers had been provided by Gedrus, and it was hard to believe the galactic librarian had failed to cope with a maths exam for twelve year olds.

‘Mr Harris tells me you did equally badly in his science quiz on Wednesday.’

The science quiz was another test to which Gedrus had provided all the answers. Douglas couldn't understand it.

‘I know you've been having problems at home,’ Miss Rattle went on, ‘but I really can't accept this work. I've asked Mr Linneker to talk to you about it. He's waiting for you in his office.’

As he left the classroom Douglas reached for the Touchstone under his shirt. ‘What's happening?’ he demanded.

Gedrus was hitting a tennis ball against an empty section of the wall on one side of the library. ‘Happening? Where?’

‘This maths exam!’ Douglas waved his exam paper. ‘I got four per cent! You told me what to write and I got four per cent! You gave me the wrong answers!’

‘I know.’ Gedrus flicked the ball with a neat backhand pass. ‘It was the next part of the plan.’

‘What plan?’

‘The plan to get your parents worried about you, so that your father would move back into the house. The last couple of days I've been letting your work get worse to show you didn't care about it.’

‘And you didn't tell me?’

‘If you remember,’ said Gedrus, pulling a large ring binder from a drawer in the desk, ‘I asked at the beginning if you wanted to be informed of all the details of the plan but you said no. You only wanted to be told what you had to do next.’

Douglas remembered that two weeks before, he had said exactly this, but it didn't stop him feeling distinctly aggrieved. Grimly he walked down the corridor to the headmaster's office wondering as he went, how someone with all the knowledge in the universe could be so incredibly stupid.

When he arrived at Mr Linneker's office, he found the headmaster sitting at his desk, staring out of the window. He seemed to have some difficulty remembering who Douglas was.

‘Yes?’ he said eventually. ‘What is it?’

‘Miss Rattle told me to come and see you,’ said. ‘About my maths.’

‘Oh yes.’ Mr Linneker nodded vaguely. ‘You didn't do very well, did you?’

‘No,’ said Douglas.

Mr Linneker picked up a teaspoon, took a spoonful of paperclips and slowly stirred them into a cup of tea on his desk.

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