Читать книгу The Kid Who Came From Space - Ross Welford - Страница 18

Iggy Fox-Templeton. He’s about to be a big part of this story. I ended up getting much closer to him than I ever thought I would – or even should.

He is ‘the kid who set fire to the school’. Except I was there and he didn’t. It’s just that ‘the kid who set fire to a litter bin’ doesn’t sound as good.

According to Mam and Dad, he is ‘a bad influence’, because of that thing with him stealing crisps from the pub storage shed. Dad told his mum, who didn’t seem very concerned. Dad didn’t do anything more about it because we were new to the village and he says a new pub landlord can’t go around making enemies. ‘And he calls his mum Cora, for heaven’s sake,’ said Dad with a sneer. ‘Mad old hippy would be closer’ – and Mam tutted at him and told him not to be so mean.

I’ve only been at the school since September, but Iggy has either truanted or been suspended from school so many times already that he’s pretty much never there.

And most recently he set fire to the bin in the east playground.

It wasn’t serious. No one was hurt, although I suppose they could have been, and he’d have got away with it if Nadia Kowalski hadn’t split on him. He had already made an enemy of her, though, so she was out for revenge.

It all started in a physics lesson with Mr Springham. He was going on about the refraction of light. Or reflection. Or both – I can’t remember. All I do remember is that Iggy had moved himself to the front and was watching, fascinated, as Mr Springham used a glass flask of water to bend a beam of light into a single point. He even wrote something in his notebook, which I had never seen him do before.

The next day he was sitting behind me on the school taxi-bus.

Tammy was in the seat in front of me, next to Nadia Kowalski. There’s about six other regulars on the bus and I don’t actually know them much: they’re in different years and they were either chatting to one another or playing music or on their phones.

‘Greetings, Tait,’ Iggy said, leaning over my seat. This was in October, a few months after we had moved to Kielder and I kind of knew him a bit. Apart from Tammy, he’s the only other kid near my age in the village. He’s older than me and Tam by a year or so, but is still in Year Seven because he’s missed so much school.

‘Wanna see my Death Ray?’ he whispered, casting a sidelong glance at Tammy and Nadia.

Without waiting for me to answer (I was going to say ‘yes’ anyway – I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a Death Ray, whatever it might turn out to be?), he shuffled past me to sit next to the window.

‘Promise you won’t say anything?’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ I said without thinking.

Then he took off his glasses and said, ‘Wait till we stop.’

It was really warm that day: more like August than October. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. A few minutes later, the taxi-bus stopped at the end of a farm lane, and we knew we’d be waiting because the girl who lives there is nearly always a minute or two late. The driver turned off the engine and everything was still. Iggy fumbled in his bag and brought out a small, round glass flask exactly like the one Mr Springham had used in his ‘bending light’ demo.

‘Hey, is that …?’ I began.

‘Shh. I’ve just borrowed it. Watch.’

He held the flask against the bus window, then took his glasses off with his other hand, moving them to and fro near the bottle.

The sun shone through the bottle and the thick lenses of his specs, and formed a sort of long triangle of light on the back of the seat in front of us, with a brighter circle at the top of the triangle. As Iggy angled his glasses into the light, the circle became a sharp point of brightness, which he controlled by moving his glasses about. Slowly, he moved the point of light until it cleared the seat back and rested on the neck of Nadia Kowalski.

‘It’s physics,’ whispered Iggy, like he was suddenly an expert. ‘The lens of my specs concentrates the sun’s light into a central point which will become very hot. Watch.’

We didn’t have to wait long. Only a few seconds later, Nadia squealed ‘Oww!’ and her hand shot up to her neck. She looked left at Tammy, and then back at us.

Iggy had put his glasses back on and was drinking water from the flask.

‘Did you … did you just …?’

Iggy and I looked at each other, and then back at Nadia, our faces composed in expressions of wide-eyed innocence.

‘What?’ we said together, and she turned back.

On her neck I could make out a tiny burn-mark from Iggy’s ‘Death Ray’. Also from her neck, I could tell she was blushing furiously because everyone had turned around to look when she squealed, including a boy called Damian from Year Nine who everybody knows Nadia is crazy about.

With a cruel smirk, Iggy got ready for another go, slipping off his glasses and holding them up, but at that moment, the bus’s engine started again. The vibration of the bus made it impossible to hold the point of the Death Ray steady.

But he wasn’t going to give up. Twenty minutes later, we had arrived at the school gates. The engine went off, and everybody stood up.

‘Wait!’ shouted Maureen, the driver, who always refused to open the doors until she’d completed some form she had to fill in on a clipboard.

Iggy seized his moment, whipped off his specs, and focused the Death Ray on the back of Nadia’s knee.

She wasn’t moving and the point of light was sharp and bright. She was actually talking to Damian Whatsisname and flicking her hair when, suddenly, she shrieked loudly.

‘Aaaaaaow!!’ The stack of books in her hands fell to the floor, and everyone stared as she bent down to rub her leg.

As she bent, she headbutted Damian in the chest, knocking him into the kids behind him and causing Maureen to shout, ‘Watch it, you’s lot!’

I managed to keep a straight face, but Iggy couldn’t. He was spluttering with laughter.

Eventually, we filed off the bus, and heard Damian saying to his mates, ‘What a weirdo she is!’ easily loud enough for Nadia to hear.

Tammy sidled up to me. ‘That was mean of you,’ she said, but I think she was trying not to smile.

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘It was Iggy’s Death Ray.’

Tammy shook her head and tutted. ‘She’ll get him back. Just you wait.’

He didn’t have to wait long.