Читать книгу The Person Controller - David Baddiel - Страница 11

This was last year, when Fred was in Year Five. For the trial, Fred had spent all his pocket money on a new pair of football boots. Bright yellow ones. Marauders. Fred was totally convinced that they were going to make all the difference (to the fact that he hadn’t been picked on any of the three preceding years).

Unfortunately, Eric and Janine had never taught Fred how to tie his shoelaces properly.^fn1 So what normally happened was that every morning, before school, Ellie would tie Fred’s school shoes very, very tightly with a triple bow. And that would be fine; they would stay tied for the whole day.

But, before the school team trial, Fred had asked Ellie to tie his Marauders with just a single bow. Because a triple bow, he thought, would be too bulky and make it very difficult – for example – when the ball came to him on the edge of the penalty area to bend it round five defenders into the top right-hand corner (not something he had ever done, but he was sure he was going to this time).

“Really?” said Ellie, kneeling down by the touchline of the school pitch. I say school pitch. And touchline. Bracket Wood was a good school – more or less – but its school pitch was a muddy triangle in the local park and its touchline was the concrete path around it.

“Really,” said Fred. “A single knot.” And ran on. And, as his laces came untied, tripped over. Into some mud.

And then ran backwards and forwards to the touchline throughout the game so that Ellie could retie his shoelaces.

He did stop doing that eventually. Because, after the fifth time, Ellie said: “If you’re not going to let me tie a triple knot, I’m not tying them at all any more!!” and went to sit on the roundabout in the playground six metres away.

After which Fred had to ask the referee, Mr Barrington, to tie his shoelaces. Bracket Wood was a good school – more or less – but its sports teacher was Mr Barrington, who was sixty-seven and wore glasses with lenses thicker than a rhinoceros’s foot.

So after Mr Barrington had sighed very heavily and bent down on one knee in the mud to tie up Fred’s shoelaces – and after it had taken him three minutes to get up again, during which time four goals were scored that never got recorded – he made a point of running (well, staggering) away every time Fred approached him.

Fred didn’t know what to do. His boots kept on coming off. Briefly, he even wished his mum or dad was there, which was something he didn’t often wish for.

Then, eventually, Ellie came back from the playground and Fred let her tie the Marauder shoelaces into a triple bow. Two minutes later, the ball came to him on the edge of the penalty area.

“Come on, Fred!” shouted Ellie. “Hit it!”

Fred focused on the ball. He ran towards it, confident now that his shoelaces were not going to come undone. He hit the ball square in the middle of his left boot.

Square in the middle of his triple bow.

So the ball went almost nowhere near his actual foot. It went almost entirely near the big knot of his shoelace. Fred, to be fair, had been right. A bow that size was too bulky. Which wasn’t much comfort to him as the ball spun backwards over his head, hitting Mr Barrington full in the face. “Ow!!!” said Mr Barrington, as his rhino-foot-lens glasses flew off his face and into the mud.

Everyone apart from Fred laughed, loud and long. Fred himself just turned and walked off, knowing that he certainly wasn’t going to get into the school team this time.

Now let’s go back to the main story.