A Thousand Water Bombs (13 page)

‘Come on,’ said a disembodied voice from the garden, so we did what he said.

‘Where are we going, Jonno?’ Bee asked the back of Jonno’s fluffy head.

‘Keener’s.’

‘Why?’ said Bee.

‘Because that’s where our only lead is.’

Bee turned round to look at me. ‘Why are we going to yours?’

I shrugged. ‘Ask him?’

‘Jonno, why —’

He was already through the cat flap so Bee didn’t bother with the end of her sentence. We all wriggled through after him.

‘We’re going to Keener’s because we need Flo. She was there. She’s our best witness.’

Great!
We were going to spend
all afternoon
getting nowhere with Flo. I was miffed, so I hung back, hoping someone would notice. But no one did so I caught up. No one noticed that
either. Jonno and Bee were talking about Doodle – they sounded like parents! Jonno seemed to know a lot about dogs, considering he doesn’t have one.

‘How do you know so much about dogs?’ asked Bee.

‘My friend, Ravi, the one from Glasgow. He had a Labrador called Taylor,’ said Jonno. ‘She looked a bit like Doodle, but not as curly.’ That explained it.

Copper Pie was telling Fifty how he managed to get through five interviews with the Year 3s so quickly. ‘I gave them twenty seconds to answer. If they didn’t say anything – too
bad! How come you only did one?’

Fifty made a smug kind of smile. ‘I wanted to be absolutely sure the kid wasn’t hiding anything so I asked all the questions and then asked them again in a slightly different way.
Cunning of me, don’t you think?’

I thought about joining in – explaining how I did my interrogations – but I was in a mood. And knowing we were on our way to see Flo didn’t make it any better. She was bound to
be all bossy when she realised Jonno
needed
her.

‘I didn’t expect you back so soon,’ said Mum. ‘Or there to be so many of you. Has the Tribehouse fallen down?’ (Her idea of a joke.)

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ve come to —’ It occurred to me just before I said the next word that Mum might not agree with us being on the trail of stolen medals.

‘We’ve come to play with Keener’s models,’ said Fifty.

‘That’s right,’ I said and walked past Mum, out of the door and up the stairs. I could hear Flo upstairs. She was talking to her cuddly toys. ‘Don’t cry, there are
a few bumps and then you’ll be at the bottom.’ She was obviously mattress surfing again. She likes to warn the toys so they don’t get scared. Mum says it’s role-playing. I
think it’s stupid.

We waited on the landing for her to slide down from the top floor. Whoosh! She nearly ran into Jonno who was standing right by the bottom stair.

‘Hello Flo,’ he said.

‘Hello Jonno.’ She smiled. ‘Have you got another idea? Shall we look in all the classrooms on Monday? Maybe behind the radiators? Or by the coats.’ Flo sounded really
happy, for the first time in ages.

‘No. I’ve got a better idea, but it needs you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. We need you to sit down and go through every single thing that happened in Show and Tell. Where everyone was sitting? Where Jack showed off his medals? Who went before him? Who went
after him?’

Flo’s face switched from happy to terrified.

‘It’s all right, Flo,’ said Bee. ‘It’s to get ideas, isn’t it, Jonno?’

‘Partly. But also because if you go through it step-by-step you might remember something that you didn’t before. The police do it all the time. It’s called a
reconstruction.’

Flo started sobbing. ‘I don’t want to do it, Keener.’

‘Yes you do – you love talking,’ I said. That didn’t exactly help. She pushed past me and went into her room. She tried to slam the door but there was a cuddly toy in the
way (exact species unknown: a cross between a bear and a dog) so there was no ‘slam’, only a decapitation (just joking).

Bee knocked on the slightly open door.‘Flo,’ she whispered.

‘Go away,’ said my angry little sister.

‘Come on,’ said Fifty. ‘Let’s play with Keener’s Deathmobile.’ (I didn’t use to like anyone messing with my models but we’re Tribe now and sharing
is part of it.)

Fifty bagsied my hammock. The rest of us found things to shoot him with as he swayed. Copper Pie had his own catapult, of course, I grabbed the Deathmobile (which shoots missiles), Jonno had a
rocket that launches foam darts but Bee was empty-handed.

‘I’ll have this,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is.’ She hoicked a long blue handle out from behind my skimboard.

I laughed. ‘It’s not a weapon.’

‘It is now,’ she said, swinging my metal detector round like a ball and chain.

‘Cool,’ said Jonno. ‘Does it work?’

‘Not very well,’ I said. ‘Dad buried some money in the sand for me to find when we were on one of our trips. Even though he knew exactly where he’d put it we never found
the 50p.’

Bee turned it on. It made a long beep.

‘That means it’s alive,’ I said.

‘What does it do when you find metal?’

‘It makes little bleeps with gaps in between and the closer you get, the smaller the gap between the bleeps.’

Bee wanted to metal detect my room but we wanted to fire stuff at Fifty.

‘OK. I’ll try somewhere else.’

Off she went.

In between launching attacks on each other we talked about you-know-what.

‘Who would bother to steal someone’s medals?’ said Fifty. ‘You’d have to find a way to take them with no one seeing you. Then you’d have to find somewhere to
hide them. It would be silly to take them home because your mum would know you haven’t been out winning competitions on the dirt bike
you don’t have
without her knowing. All too
much trouble.’

‘You’d have to be really mean,’ said Jonno. ‘And a bit stupid because there’s a risk you’d get caught. There are easier ways to get back at
someone.’

‘Hitting them works,’ said Copper Pie. We all laughed. He stood up and pretended to box. Fifty slid out of the hammock and boxed as well. I didn’t join in. The trouble with
pretend fighting is that Copper Pie sometimes forgets the ‘pretend’ part. Jonno hasn’t worked that out yet. He stood up and got a karate kick in the chest. It must have hurt but
he didn’t say anything. He took his glasses off and put them on my bookshelf, did a few shoulder rolls (to limber up) and launched himself across the room, screaming something that sounded
Chinese. Copper Pie sidestepped and then the three of them rolled around on my rug for ages as though they were about four years old. I reclaimed my hammock and watched them being idiots. It would
have gone on and on if Bee hadn’t come back in with my red-eyed sister and told them to stop.

‘Flo’s got something to say.’

It took us a few seconds to get the right way up and the right way round.

‘Go on then,’ I said.

My sister’s hand, which was behind her back, crept round to the front. She was holding something.
Another terrible pom-pom animal most likely,
I thought. I got ready to say how
lovely her pom-pom guinea pig was . . . but I was wrong. She was holding three medals. They caught the light as they swung gently from side to side on their stripy ribbons.

Flo is the thief

No one spoke. It was too awful. I wanted to throttle her. My sister, a thief! She started sobbing. Good.
Sob all you like,
I thought.
You’re in dead
trouble.

‘Flo, you need to stop crying and tell them why you’ve got Jack’s medals,’ said Bee.

‘Because she took them,’ I said.

‘Leave it, Keener,’ said Bee. Charming! My sister steals precious medals and I get the grief.

‘Come on, Flo.’ Bee’s voice was kind, not like her normal bossy one.

‘I took them.’ She started to howl.

‘Shh,’ said Bee. ‘Do you want your mum to hear?’

What did it matter?
I thought. Everyone was going to know soon – Mum, Mr Dukes, the Head.

Flo wiped her snotty nose on her sleeve, and the tears slowed down. ‘Sorry,’ said Flo.

‘Don’t worry, Flo,’ said Fifty.

What!

‘Why are you being so nice?’ I said.

‘There must be an explanation,’ said Jonno, looking directly at me.

‘Let’s hear it then.’ I was all ears. I folded my arms and stared at Flo, evil-personified. She gulped, looked up at me, looked quickly back down and started talking in a very
small un-Flo-like voice.

‘Jack was really mean.’ Big sniff. ‘He said Fat Cat was dead because she hasn’t got legs. He said they’d been chopped off by the Fat Cat butcher.’
OK. Quite
mean. But not bad enough to steal from Jack’s desk.
‘And then he said Fat Cat was ugly, even uglier than me.’ Another big sniff.

‘But Flo, you can’t take things from people because they upset you,’ said Jonno.

‘I wasn’t going to keep them. I was going to put them back.’

‘So why didn’t you?’ I said.

‘I was too scared. I didn’t want to get found out.’ She started crying again.

I sighed. Fifty was nearly in tears too. He’s so soppy about girls.

‘Hang on there, Flo,’ said Jonno. ‘Something doesn’t make sense. Why did you ask us to find them if you knew where they were?’

‘I was too frightened to put them back in Jack’s desk. I thought if I put them in the muddle by the coats and bags and lunch boxes, the bit Mr Dukes is always telling us to tidy,
you
could find them and
you
could give them back. But you wouldn’t do it.’

‘So that’s why you kept asking us to look for them at school,’ I said. It was all fitting together. Flo wanted
us
to agree to search the school. Then she was going to
put the medals there for
us
to find, to keep
her
out of trouble. Not a bad plan. Perhaps she wasn’t that dim.

Flo nodded. ‘If you’d done what I’d said Jack would have them back already and you wouldn’t be cross with me.’ A big tear rolled all the way down her cheek.

‘We didn’t do what you said because if the medals were by the coats they’d have been found already.’ I was cross, but not as much as before. She did look totally
pathetic, all wet-faced and blotchy. And Jack
was
wrong – she’s not as ugly as Fat Cat. No one’s as ugly as Fat Cat.

‘So where were the medals?’ asked Jonno.

‘In her pom-pom box,’ said Bee. ‘With Fat Cat.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘In her toy cupboard.’

‘How did you find them, Bee?’

‘By using the metal detector that doesn’t work very well.’ She held it up. ‘I was messing about, trying to cheer her up, and the bleeps starting getting closer together.
So I followed them. And hey presto, there were the medals.’

I gave Flo a disappointed look.

‘I wanted to tell you,’ she said.

‘If you’d wanted to tell us, why didn’t you? I said.

‘Because she was embarrassed. And that’s why she wouldn’t do the reconstruction, isn’t it Flo?’ Jonno peered over his glasses at her.

‘I didn’t want to lie anymore,’ she said.

‘So, what are we going to do about Flo?’ said Bee, hands on hips.

‘Nothing,’ said Copper Pie.

‘We’ve got to do something. We need to return the medals to Jack,
without
being caught.’ Bee raised her eyebrows. They disappeared under her fringe.

‘Is that what we’re going to do?’ I said. ‘Do you think that’s fair? Fair and TRIBISH?’ I shouted the last word.

‘Well, she’s sorry. Aren’t you, Flo?’ Flo nodded at Bee.

‘So if you’re sorry about something, that’s enough, you cry and everyone covers up for you?’ Ten eyes turned to me in horror.

‘Well, we can’t turn her in,’ said Copper Pie. ‘I wouldn’t even do that to Charlie . . . I don’t think.’

‘Great! So we can steal cars, laptops, phones . . . and as long as we’re sorry, it’s OK.’

‘Keener, listen. You can see how bad she feels. It was a mistake. If we hand the medals in, saying we found them by the bags, like Flo planned. Problem solved. Jack gets his Show and Tell
back. Flo will never do anything like it again.’

‘Please, Keener. Please.’ Flo tried the big-eyes look. It almost worked.

‘I bet we’ve all done
something
we’re ashamed of,’ said Fifty. ‘Something we’d rather forget.’ I didn’t like the way he was looking at
me.

‘Come on, Keener,’ said Jonno. ‘She’s your sister.’

‘And what if Jack was your brother?’ I said. ‘And he’d been crying at home about his lost medals. How would you feel then?’

There was silence. I’d made a good point – I could tell.

‘We’d feel differently,’ said Bee, eventually. ‘But we’re not Jack’s friends or family, we’re Flo’s. It’s about loyalty, Keener, something
Tribers are meant to know all about. Come on, Flo. Let’s go and mattress surf and leave your brother to work out what’s right.’

Bee took Flo’s hand, which seemed very little, and led her out. One by one the others followed and left me on my own, with the medals lying on my blue rug.

Mr Dukes

‘Mr Dukes,’ said Bee. Mr Dukes bent his head slightly to show he was listening. (He really is quite a nice teacher.) ‘We found these.’ Bee held out her
hand and the three coloured ribbons slipped over her fingers, making the medals dangle down and bang each other.