CHAPTER THREE
On Tuesday morning Jim didn’t want to go to school without his Scrobbler. But he had to. His parents made him.
‘It’ll be fine,’ they said. ‘Everyone will be amazed to hear you lost your Scrobbler. They’ll all be really nice to you.’
They were right about everyone being amazed.
‘I’m amazed,’ said Jim’s teacher, when Jim explained about his Scrobbler being absent. ‘In fact, we’re all amazed. It’s a dream come true.’
But they were wrong about everyone being nice. Everyone was horrible to Jim.
Phil Spit flicked pellets at him, and Mike Speers, who sat on the table behind, jabbed him in the back with a pencil. And when Jim went up and told the teacher that Carly Peters had tipped his work drawer on the floor, all she said was, ‘Come on, Jim. Your Scrobbler’s done some pretty awful things to Carly in the past. I think she’s just getting her own back, don’t you?’
Jim had to go back to his table and pick everything up by himself. It was awful. Everyone was laughing at him. Everyone was picking on him. He felt as if he was alone in the middle of a war zone, with no-one to fight on his side.
‘I don’t care,’ he muttered, as he crawled under the table to pick up his crayons. And he thought of his Scrobbler – the wonderful Scrobbler who would have swung from the light with a ruler in his grabber and a mouthful of rubbers, who would have splat! splat! splatted Phil, Mike and Carly, until they were the ones under the table, cowering and whining and whimpering for mercy.
‘Please come back, Scrobbler,’ Jim whispered. All in all, he had a miserable day at school.
But things are never so bad they can’t get worse. When Jim arrived home, his Mum was out at work, his little sister was building mudcastles in the front garden and there was a magician sitting on the front door step. He was reading a newspaper with a podgy white rabbit on top of his head.
How Jim hated that rabbit. It was pathetic. It was fluffy. It was the exact opposite of his Scrobbler. He didn’t think much of the magician either. Who could admire a grown man who made silly, fake magic to please little children at parties? Jim couldn’t. But he kept his private thoughts to himself.
Out loud he said, ‘Hi, Dad. You’ll go bald if you let Flopsy nibble your hair like that.’
‘Yes, but it saves money on hair cuts,’ replied the magician. ‘And money’s what we’re short of.’ He took out a pen and drew a red circle round a job advertisement in the newspaper.
‘I can’t make enough money making magic,’ he sighed, ‘so I’ve got to get myself a proper job. It’s back to boring boring office work for me, and back to a boring boring rabbit hutch for Flopsy.’
As he spoke, he glanced up and saw Jim’s face. ‘Hey, you look as miserable as I feel. What’s wrong?’
Jim didn’t answer. He wanted to tell his Dad all about his day at school, but it didn’t feel right, talking about things that hurt to someone with a white rabbit on their head. Besides, there was a very interesting photograph on the front page of his Dad’s newspaper. Jim twisted his head round so as to see it better.
The photograph showed a man and a baby on a crowded railway platform.
‘Meet Sarah Saunders’ said the caption underneath,
the amazing bouncing baby. When she fell in front of the train to London, she actually bounced back on to the platform again. “Thank goodness she’s so fat,” said her fond father Fred.
But Jim wasn’t interested in the baby, or in anything her branless Dad had to say. He was interested in the small blurry thing behind them in the photograph. No-one seemed to notice it, no-one seemed to care that it was bouncing up up into the air, in front of the train to London. But Jim noticed.
‘That’s my Scrobbler!’ he gasped. ‘Look. Look. It’s my Scrobbler!’
‘So it is!’ spluttered the magician. ‘Now isn’t that just typical. Isn’t that just how you’d expect a Scrobbler to behave. He’s been running on the train track, hasn’t he? And we all know that’s the most bad and dangerous thing you could possibly do.’
Suddenly the magician shuddered and shook his head so hard that the rabbit on top of it very nearly fell off. ‘Thank goodness you lost him, Jimjam,’ he said. ‘He’s not good for you. He’s a bad example. He’s a wild thing.’
Jim looked at his father’s Flopsy-rabbit hairdo. That tame timid rabbit said it all, it did.
‘Of course he’s wild,’ he snapped. ‘That’s what’s so wonderful about him.’
The magician just snorted. ‘Let’s hope he lives to be wild another day,’ was all he’d say. ‘In my experience you don’t get hit by the train to London and live to tell the tale.’
