Demon Dentist Page 5

  Tut-tut-tutting along the bottom corridor was the little red moped. The social worker’s legs were astride it. The bike was advancing slowly, Winnie’s sandals skimming the floor as she peered into all the classrooms to see if she could spot her prey. Even from this height, Alfie could tell Winnie was fuming. No one likes having to wait outside in the wind and rain. Now the social worker’s face was curled up like she was chewing on a stinging nettle.

  Alfie kept dead still for a moment. Winnie might detect any sudden movements.

  After a patrol up and down the lower corridor, the social worker stood up on her moped. She circled around the bottom of the stairs a few times to gain speed, then suddenly, with a sharp twist of the throttle she mounted the first step. Alfie leaped up from behind the balustrade, and as he did so, Winnie spotted him.

  “ALFRED!” she shouted as the moped bounced up the stairs. “ALFRED! COME BACK HERE, BOY!”

  Alfie was running, but he didn’t know where to. He darted down another corridor, bouncing off the walls as his legs carried him faster than his mind could direct him. The map of the school plotted out in his head from all that time trudging between lessons was now alerting him to something. He was reaching a dead end.

  The hum of the moped’s engine was getting louder. Now Alfie was at the end of a corridor, pinned against a large bank of lockers. Winnie had reached the top floor and was hurtling towards him.

  He leaped to his left. Darn. The stupid language lab door was locked. Still the moped was coming straight towards him. He leaped to the right and turned the handle.

  He put his weight against the door and burst into the room. Alfie found himself in the middle of a Drama class…

  “And go with it! Impro!” cried the teacher.

  Mr Snood taught Drama. He was a bald and bespectacled man who always wore a black polo neck jumper, black jeans and black shoes. If he stood next to the black curtain in the assembly hall, it looked like there was a giant boiled egg floating through the air. Snood lived and breathed Drama. Drama was his love. Drama was his life. Drama was his Drama. Snood taught his subject with a ferocious sincerity.

  Alfie found all that pretending to be a tree business in Snood’s classes acutely embarrassing. Most of the pupils did. In fact, as Alfie burst through the door, all the kids were loitering in the middle of the classroom looking like they would rather be anywhere else than here. They were reluctantly trying to improvise (or ‘impro’ as Snood called it) a scene based around the end of the world. This was always Snood’s favourite starting point for any ‘impro’ – the world ending.

  “A giant meteor is about to hit the earth. Impro!” is how the floating egg would start most of his classes. Then Snood would take his chair and spin it around rather dramatically (how else?). With it facing the wrong way, he would sit with his short legs astride it. From there the Drama teacher would watch intently as his pupils shuffled to and fro mumbling something about a giant meteor hitting the earth but really just praying for an actual meteor to hit the earth to save them from the embarrassment.

  “I said ‘IMPRO!’” exclaimed Snood.

  “I’m not doing Drama today, sir…” uttered Alfie.

  “That doesn’t matter, boy…” announced Mr Snood in his deep, rich voice. It sounded as rich as chocolate mousse. “You have become part of the scene. So a giant meteor is about to hit the earth and wipe out all human, animal and plant life! IMPRO!”

  “Erm…” said Alfie. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say, but could hear the moped stuttering just outside the room.

  “IMPRO!” implored Mr Snood.

  “Erm, um, mmm, bad news about the whole giant meteor thing hitting the earth,” spluttered Alfie, “but on the upside the pizzas I ordered are here…”

  Just then Winnie’s moped crashed through the door. Even Snood looked a little taken aback at this, but with the improvisation growing by the moment, this was no time to stop.

  “IMPRO!”

  “What?” replied Winnie, fixing Alfie in her sights as she skidded to a halt.

  “Tell us what flavours of pizzas you have!” exclaimed Snood.

  “I ain’t no pizza delivery service, you fool. I’m a social worker…”

  “Now, class,” Snood turned to his pupils, “what this lady has done here is… anybody? No? She’s swapped roles midway through an impro. As I have always said, that’s an IMPRO NO-NO!”

  “I am here to get this boy to the dentist!” exclaimed Winnie.

  “What I would say now, and I know the first rule of impro is… anybody? No? Never stop an impro. ANOTHER IMPRO NO-NO. But I do feel passionately, what with a meteor hitting the earth and pizzas just having been delivered (which by the way was a very skilful piece of ‘impro-ing’*, huge congrats, Alfie, you may well want your final meal to come with a free garlic bread), that adding a dentist appointment into the mix is just too much. I’m sorry, but it’s

  AN IMPRO on AN IMPRO on AN IMPRO and as such is a A HUGE IMPRO NO-NO!”

  * * *

  *Made-up word ALERT (Don’t blame me, blame Mr Snood.)

  * * *

  Winnie paused for a second, her whole body wobbling as the moped engine reverberated. She fixed Mr Snood with a steely gaze.

  “I don’t know who you are, but please stop talking out of your bum bum!” Then she turned her focus to Alfie. “Now, you get on this here moped at once!”

  The boy stood motionless on the spot for a moment.

  “I like this though, building tension, sense of drama, theatre at its best… will he get on the moped or not…?” whispered the teacher to his class.

  Suddenly Alfie pushed a chair into the path of the moped and fled out of the room. Winnie swerved around it in hot pursuit.

  “Let’s go where the impro takes us! Come on, my actors. This is impro on the move!”

  With that, Snood stood, punched his fist in the air triumphantly and led his utterly bemused students out of the room. They chased after Winnie, who chased after Alfie, as he ran back down the corridor.

  The boy turned the corner and ran smack into his headmaster coming the other way.

  “Now come on…” said Mr Grey, trying his hardest to sound authoritative, but failing. “What does the sign say?”

  “Toilets?” offered up Alfie.

  “The other one!”

  “Oh, ‘No running in the corridor’, sir.”

  “Thank you. You nearly knocked me clean over!”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “You could have had someone’s eye out.”

  Alfie wasn’t sure this was true, teachers tended to say this a lot. In their minds, just about anything (a stray football, a bag left in the wrong place, even late homework) could have an eye out.

  However, this wasn’t the time to argue.

  “Yes, of course, sorry, sir,” agreed Alfie.

  “Now be on your way, boy,” said the headmaster. A proud smile spread across his face. At last he had done something headmasterishly*.

  * * *

  *Made-up word ALERT

  * * *

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Alfie walked off as quickly as he could without breaking into a run. Mr Grey straightened his grey tie, combed his fingers through his grey hair and continued on his way with a renewed sense of self-importance.

  However, as he turned the corner he screamed…

  Winnie was flying towards the headmaster on her moped.

  “Out of the way, you fool!” she shouted.

  Just in time, Mr Grey leaped against the wall.

  “Excuse me, madam!” the headmaster called after her. “No riding of mopeds or any kind of two-wheeled motor vehicles in school corridors, please!”

  Winnie didn’t look back. She barely heard him, such was the roar of the engine. The headmaster stood and watched Winnie disappear off down the corridor, shaking his head and tutting to himself. Just then he was knocked over by the Drama teacher and run over by thirty of his pupils.

  As Mr Snood
passed, he commented, “Very powerful trampled underfoot acting, Headmaster! Huge congrats!”

  14

  Balls

  Alfie galloped around the next corner and tripped over a schoolbag. With both his eyes still intact, he fell towards a door that was ajar and landed in a heap on the floor of the Science laboratory. The poor elderly teacher, Miss Hare, was slap-bang in the middle of a delicate experiment involving magnets and ball bearings. When Alfie crashed through the door, she dropped her large box of ball bearings. It smashed to the floor, which within seconds was awash with hundreds and hundreds of tiny bouncing metal balls. As Alfie climbed to his feet, a huge number of them rolled under his shoes at speed. Soon it was like he was wearing a set of roller-skates which had a crazed mind of their own. The boy started rocking and rolling all over the classroom, as if he were a very drunk person trying to dance.

  The prim and proper Miss Hare shouted, “You, boy, come here!” She made a dash for him. However, the ball bearings spun under her shoes too. She started sliding around her classroom like an emu on ice. Unable to stop herself, Miss Hare tumbled through the air. The Science teacher’s legs were now where her arms had been. Worse than that, her knickers were where her head had been.

  Miss Hare had flashed her knickers to the entire class. The pupils, who had been expecting nothing more exciting that afternoon than seeing some ball bearings roll slowly towards a magnet, exploded with laughter. Now they had had a good look at their teacher’s knickers.

  And these were no ordinary knickers. Oh no. These knickers were rather large and rather frilly, almost Victoriany*.

  * * *

  *Made-up word ALERT

  * * *

  The laughter turned to gasps as an outsized lady on an undersized moped knocked the door off its hinges as she exploded through it.

  Winnie revved the engine until it roared. “Get on the back of my bike, boy!”

  Just then Mr Snood and his Drama students caught up. They crowded around the door frame so they could watch the ‘impro’ continue to unfold.

  “No!” shouted Alfie. “Never!”

  “Mmm, what did I tell you last term?” commented the Drama teacher to his students. “Important rule of impro. Anybody…? No? In any impro always say ‘yes’! Saying ‘no’ is an impro no-no.”

  Alfie made a dash to the left, and the bike lurched to the left.

  He made a dash to the right, and the bike lurched to the right.

  Then he dived down on to his hands and knees to try to scuttle to the door under the rows of desks and stools.

  By this time Miss Hare, now completely red-faced at the incident that would surely live in school legend forever as ‘KNICKERGATE’, had righted herself. Smoothing down her pleated tweed skirt as if nothing had happened, she took off after Alfie too. The Science teacher grabbed the back of his blazer, her hands gripping on to the cloth with all her might. Alfie jerked his body forward.

  Miss Hare lost her balance and tumbled backwards. Once again those knickers that seemed to have travelled through time now travelled through space as well.

  This was ‘KNICKERGATE II’ or ‘KNICKERGATE: THE SEQUEL’, as it would surely become known. Winnie skidded back over to the classroom door on her moped so she could block Alfie’s way out.

  “Give up, child!”

  “No!”

  “You can’t go on running forever…”

  “And you can’t go on…” Alfie desperately searched for the right word, “…mopedding* forever!”

  * * *

  *Made-up word ALERT

  * * *

  He never found it.

  The boy had no way out. The door was blocked by Snood and his herd of Drama students. Jumping out of a window wasn’t an option as it was three storeys down. Alfie was trapped.

  15

  Bobsleighing Down the Stairs

  Alfie wasn’t going to go down without a struggle. He leaped on to the teacher’s desk at the front of the class, landing beside a tray with some magnets on it. Next to it was another box full of ball bearings. In that instant, a daring plan flickered across the boy’s mind.

  First, he hurled the box to the floor, scattering the ball bearings.

  Next, he grabbed the tray and held it to his chest.

  Last, he launched himself on to the ball bearings, and shot across the classroom floor.

  It was as if he were a one-man bobsleigh team. Alfie whizzed under the legs of Snood and shot straight out of the classroom door.

  The ball bearings spilled down the corridor, and Alfie, still lying on the tray, found himself sliding at speed along it. Looking back, he saw Snood and his pupils with ball bearings trapped under their feet trying desperately to remain upright. As Snood was rolling over he called out, “Roll with the impro!”

  The tray careered past classrooms before it reached the top of the huge central staircase.

  Oh no! thought Alfie, as he closed his eyes.

  The tray…

  …down the stairs, each step shaking his bones.

  TUT-TUT-TUT.

  Winnie’s moped was gaining on him, with Hare, Snood and their collective classes in pursuit. Just as the tray had reached a speed where it was impossible for Alfie to stop it, he spotted a figure at the bottom of the stairs. It was the headmaster, Mr Grey, no doubt retreating to the safety of his office.

  With every…

  …the tray was gaining momentum at an alarming rate. As Alfie accelerated down the stairs he quickly realised he was on a collision course with the headmaster. Nothing could stop the inevitable happening.

  The tray whacked into Mr Grey’s ankles.

  The headmaster was hurled into the air. In the smash, Alfie came clean off the tray, and ended up in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Sorry, sir, I would love to stay around for you to give me a detention…” said Alfie as he hobbled up and helped Mr Grey to his feet, “…but I really have to go.”

  With that, the boy burst out of the door that led outside into the playground. Just as the headmaster was about to call after him…

  WALLOP!

  …the poor man was thrown into the air by a large lady coming down the staircase at top speed on a moped. Mr Grey landed with a…

  THUMP! …on his bony bottom. As he sat there, the headmaster could have been forgiven for thinking his ordeal was over. He was wrong. Very wrong. No sooner had he pulled himself back up than he landed with a… THUD! …as he became the victim of a stampede.

  Once again Mr Grey was trampled underfoot. This time by a number of his own teaching staff, and a growing horde of pupils who were giving chase. Because of all the commotion, they were streaming out of the classrooms. There was a boy on the loose! And he had to be stopped! They pursued Alfie out into the playground.

  Next the dinner ladies joined in. They trundled out of the dining hall as fast as their chubby little legs would carry them, angrily brandishing their ladles. The caretaker stopped raking leaves in the car park and became part of the mob, waving his rake wildly in the air.

  “Imaginative use of a prop!” commented Snood.

  Even the ancient secretary, Miss Hedge, shuffled out on her Zimmer frame. “I’ll get him!” she cried, hobbling along way behind the throng, travelling slower than the speed of treacle.

  Leading the rabble was Winnie, racing after Alfie on her moped. “STOP THAT BOY!” she shouted, but the boy kept running.

  Alfie ran and ran and ran. He was not naturally sporty, and had never run so fast in all his life. Disappointment set in that this moment wouldn’t somehow count in the Olympics. Surely he was breaking a world sprint record?

  Glancing back, Alfie saw there were now hundreds of people chasing after him.

  It was one boy against an army, but he wasn’t giving up yet.

  Ahead of him he saw the huge iron gates that led out on to the main street.

  Surely the whole school won’t follow me out there? thought Alfie.

  He was wrong.

>   16

  A Beckoning Hand

  “STOP THAT BOY!” bellowed Winnie, as Alfie dashed past some mothers pushing their babies down the street. The women turned their prams around, and soon the infants were bouncing up and down as they too joined the chase. A lollipop lady, a homeless man, even a group of workmen who were meant to be digging up the road but as always were actually just drinking tea, reading newspapers or wolf-whistling at attractive women all joined the hunt.

  Winnie spotted PC Plank, who was idly patrolling up and down the road and somehow managing to miss everything that was going on. She bellowed at him:

  “STOP HIM, OFFICER!”

  At last the policeman realised that this was his moment. This was what all those years in Police Training College had been leading up to. Her Majesty the Queen was going to personally award him a medal for bravery. The octogenarian Scotch-egg thief was small fry. Now was the time. Time to save the day. Plank’s time.

  So he broke into a light jog.

  “Oh, it’s you! Come back here, boy!” he shouted ineffectually. After only a few paces of light jogging Plank was puffed out. Power walking also proved too much. Soon even walking was out of the question. Leaning on a wall to get his breath back, the policeman spluttered into his radio.