Barmy Bernard said, vying for peace.
“All right,” Horrible Horace replied,
When Horrible Horace had finished telling his best friend about his sister’s school trip to Haling Island, including the fact that she and her classmates had been sent home, to rest, for the remainder of the day, Barmy Bernard breathed a sigh of relief. “Is that all?” he asked. “From the way you were behaving, I thought the end of the world was coming. I can’t see why you think it unfair,” he said. “They must be exhausted after their weekend away, and especially so your sister, being the live wire, that she is.”
“They are getting the rest of the day off, and I am not!” his Horrible friend told him.
“What’s wrong with that?” Barmy Bernard asked, thinking his friend might be barmier that he.
“Because.”
“Because? That’s not much of an explanation,” his Barmy friend carped.
Feeling that he was at nothing, trying to explain the injustice of it, Horrible Horace said, “Forget that I said it.” Then he said, “Have you seen Tinkering Tommy?”
“Tinkering Tommy?” his barmy friend replied. “He’s over yonder, playing football. Do you want to go see him?”
“Yes,” Horrible Horace replied. “You go first, though. I want to get a drink of water; a piece of the chicken pie we had for lunch has got stuck in my throat,” he lied. With that, he walked away from him, towards the school building.
“I’ll see you later, then,” Barmy Bernard said to him.
No sooner had he rounded the corner, Horrible Horace darted into the shadows, hiding, for he had things that he wanted to do...
When he was sure that no one was watching him, Horrible Horace darted out from the shadows, heading fast for the school gate, the same one the coach with his sister in had pulled alongside, earlier. “No one can see me,” he whispered, stopping briefly just inside the gate. Opening it, he entered the world of the street. “Hah!” he said triumphantly. “If Moidering Maria gets time off school, so shall I! Yes,” he declared, “and no one can tell me otherwise!”
Sauntering along the pavement, happy that he had seized the moment, and taken the afternoon off, Horrible Horace felt like a king, a monarch supreme, an emperor benign; a pope in all of his holiness. “This is more like it,” he chirped, “no boring lessons for me, today. Like my silly old sister, I too have the rest of the day off. Scratching his head thoughtfully, he said, “Hmm, what shall I do with it?” He tried, he tried, and he tried some more, to think of something he might do with his afternoon off, but no matter how hard he tried, he was unable to think of anything. Finally, he said, “I shall go home. Yes. That is what I shall do, and when I am there, I shall sit down and work out the best course of action. What an excellent idea!” With footsteps light and heart ever so cheerful, he headed for home.
Approaching the front door of his house, Horrible Horace’s confident footsteps faltered.
Gazing upwards, at the brass doorknocker, a resemblance of a Monoceros, he wondered why his parents had chosen so formidable an item to adorn their door. Moreover, he wondered what kind of reception would greet him.
“The only one way to find out,” he said, “is to give it a knock.” Gulping hard, standing on tiptoes, he reached for the knocker. Lifting it slowly, carefully, he rapped the door. Boom! Boom! Boom! The door boomed loud and long as the doorknocker stuck it hard and square. “Who’s that?” his father asked, from inside the house.
“Cripes, it’s dad!” Horrible Horace whispered. “I forget he was on night work this week.” Then he said, “I wonder why they can’t make enough lino at the lino factory during the day. He’ll be mad with me for knocking the door, with him trying to sleep during the day. And what will he say when he finds out that I took the afternoon off?” Stepping away from the door, what little courage Horrible Horace had left, took a sudden nosedive.
“Go to bed, dear,” the wife said to her husband. “I’ll see who it is.”
“Ah, mum’s coming,” Horace said cheerfully. “I can always sweet-talk her. She will listen. I will tell her the school boiler sprung a leak. And I will tell her that we had to go home because it was too dangerous, there, that it could have blown up at any moment. Yes, she’ll believe that. Everything is going to be all right, Horrible.”
However, when the door opened, it was not Horrible Horace’s mother behind it. It was his father. “What are you doing home from school at so early an hour?” he barked. “Don’t you know that I am on night work this week?”
“I, I...” his startled son mumbled, the excuse that he had worked out, to tell them, fading fast from his memory.
“Well?” his father asked. “Or has the cat got your tongue? It’s strange how you dry up for words whenever you are asked to explain yourself.”
“Who are you talking to?” his wife asked. Then she appeared in the doorway, beside him. Seeing her son, her only, beloved son standing there, she said, “What are you doing home at this hour of the day, Horace?”
“I’ve already asked him that question,” her husband told her, “but the cat has got his tongue again. Isn’t that right, Horrible?”
“Don’t call him that!” his wife scolded. “His name is Horace.”
“Then, why do all of his friends address him, so?” he asked.
“They’re only children,” she replied. “You know how foolish children can be.”
“I don’t know if I know anything anymore,” her husband grumbled, as his thoughts returned to his bed and much needed slumbers. Climbing the stairs, he said, “Make sure he keeps quite – and also his Miodering sister; I’m bushed.” With that, he disappeared round the corner at the top of the stairs, heading for bed.
“I don’t know what I am going to do with you, Horace,” his mother whispered. She invited him in. “In there,” she said, pointing to the kitchen. “Your father will not hear us, from there.”
Closing the kitchen door, Horrible Horace’s mother gazed at the ceiling, and then she said, “You can whisper, but please don’t talk any louder than that. All hell will break loose if you wake up you father. He needs his sleep. Withdrawing a chair from under the table, she sat on it, instructing her son to do likewise. “Now,” she said, “will you please tell me what this is about, why you have come home from school so early?”
“It’s the boiler,” her Horrible son told her.
An eyebrow rising, she said, “The boiler? What about the boiler?”
“It sprang a leak. It was ever so dangerous,” he insisted. “We had to go home – all of us – or we might have been blown to smithereens!”
Her eyebrow raising further, his mother said, “A leak?”
“Yes. It was a whopper. There was steam everywhere. They sent us out, into the playing field. We were standing there – for ages. Then the headmistress, Mrs Carcass, came out, and she said, ‘Everyone go home, lest you are blown to smithereens.’ That’s why I came home.”
“In that case,” said his mother, “you had better go into the garden, where you can play. You must stay out there for the rest of the day, mind you, until school time is over, when your father get’s up from his bed.
Smiling, hardly believing his luck, that his mother had actually believed his story, Horrible Horace jumped down from his chair. Dashing into the garden, he whooped with delight. A few moments later, however, he peered into the kitchen, and said, “Where’s Moidering Maria?”
“You sister is upstairs, asleep. She’s as tired as an alley cat that stayed out all night,” his mother answered.
“Why did it stay out all night?”
“Never you mind,” she answered. “Into the garden, with you.” Horrible Horace ran into the garden, to freedom.
Left alone in the kitchen, the mother said, “That child will either end up in prison or become a millionaire.”
Outside, Horrible Horace searched for somewhere to sit. He had a lot of thinking to do about his afternoon off. Finding a place, a statue of the laughing Buddha, that
his mother had installed in a shady nook to the rear of the garden, he sat on its head. “What shall I do?” he mused. “Shall I play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers?” Then he remembered that in order to play such games he needed his friends, friends who were still in school. “Drats,” he hissed. “I shall have to think of something else to play. I know,” he said, “I shall play, ‘let my sister’s guinea pigs out from their hutch.’ Hah, that’ll teach her, my rat bag sister, for taking the afternoon off without telling me, first!”
Standing up, Horrible Horace rubbed his sore bottom (Buddha’s can be quite uncomfortable to sit on, at times), then he gazed up to his sister’s bedroom window. The curtains were drawn. “That’s good,” he whispered, “everything’s going according to plan. Gazing up at his father’s bedroom window, he saw that his curtains were also drawn. Satisfied that nobody was watching him, Horrible Horace crept furtively through the garden, towards his sister’s guinea pig hutch...
“I don’t know why she keeps them,” he said to himself, “because she never cleans them out. Nine times out of ten it’s me who has to do it – and I hate doing it! Their hutch is always so dirty and smelly. I feel like puking, just thinking about it.” Approaching the hutch, he knelt in front of it. “Hello, little guinea pigs, I have come to set you free,” he said to them. Opening the door of the hutch, he said, “Come out, it’s a fine day. Freedom awaits