Googol Boy and the peculiar incident of the Great Quiz Trophy by John Michael (classic books for 13 year olds txt) 📕

We found ourselves in front of the Sports Hall for Gym. We were already fifteen minutes late and to say that our teacher wasn’t going to be happy would be the understatement of the month.

Chapter eight

controversion

We entered the Gym Hall and, as always, the smell was a mix of dirty socks and linoleum. Today I would have to say that the dirty sock odour (a peculiar blend of parmesan cheese and rotting prawns) was the clear winner and had left the linoleum scent for dead.

The class was busy doing warm-up stretches but they all stopped as soon as we walked in and stared at us in dreary anticipation. The students looked at us and then back to Mr Perriman and then back to us again. It was like a scene out of the Colosseum during Roman times. In one corner you had the battle-hardened Gladiator and in the other corner you had Barney and me − two docile lambs ready for slaughter.

“Well, well, well... what have we here? Looks like someone dropped the ball,” bellowed the teacher.

Cormac Perriman or, as we called him, Corporal Punishment (not to his face of course), was a mountain of a man. He was close to two metres tall with a ramrod straight posture. He had a barrel of a chest, and legs like tree trunks. His face was frozen in an everlasting scowl as if he was permanently sucking on a lemon.

“Sorry that we’re late sir,” we whimpered with our heads bowed.

“Gotta be a team player... if you wanna be in the team. My question to you is, are you team players?” he asked as his chin moved from side to side.

Mr Perriman had one of those big chiselled manly chins which you could bounce a tennis ball off. He thought that every Gym class was the Olympics and that all the other school subjects were a waste of time − sport was his life and he always took each class activity and school game way too seriously. One time, during the so-called ‘friendly’ student versus teacher dodgeball competition, he played with such zeal and abandon that he put three of the kids in hospital and, as a result, was barred from participating in future student/teacher games.

His favourite phrase was “no pain, no gain,” which he would scream in your ear as you were trying to finish that extra push-up or chin-up. He really had it in for the students who sucked at sport and if you were late to class he took it as a personal insult − so Barney and I were in for a double whammy this morning.

“Sorry sir, it’s just that −”

“Save it for the full-time siren princess!” He bent down low and eyeballed us. “You wanna play hardball? Is that what you want? Huh? Do ya? Huh?”

We shook our heads vigorously − we definitely did NOT want to play hardball with Mr Perriman. Those battered students were still recovering from their dodge-ball injuries.

Our Gym teacher would always get students’ names wrong and always spoke in sporting clichés and brought every conversation back to sport. I once lost my gym bag and was frantically searching for it after school. I bumped into Mr Perriman near the lockers and asked, “Sir, have you seen my gym bag?” Without skipping a beat, he responded, “The gloves are off when there’s a hurler on the ditch,” and walked away. Still to this day, I have no idea what he meant (and I never did find my bag).

He slowly paced around Barney and me, like a big mountain cat about to pounce on a couple of gerbils.

“You gotta put your game face on! Don't pull any punches! Gotta step up to the plate and knock it out of the park! You hear what I’m saying Heathcliff and Bernardo?”

We both nodded... we didn’t know who Heathcliff and Bernardo were and we didn’t care, we just wanted to join the rest of the students and to stop being Mr Perriman’s centre of attention. Everybody knew that if you were targeted by Corporal Punishment your life would be a living nightmare.

Mr Perriman could be relentless and merciless and if he had you in his sights, it was like having a bloodhound on your scent. Take Rufus Magee for example. Not to say that you had to be a bloodhound to be on Rufus’s scent − he smelled of peanuts. He always kept a handful in his pockets and he would nibble them throughout the day like a hungry chipmunk. Actually, you didn’t even have to rely on any scent − Rufus would leave a trail like Hansel and Gretel, but instead of breadcrumbs, you could just follow the discarded peanut shells. He was a tubby kid who was a little short on height and had a shock of red hair and freckles. Everywhere. He had freckles on his forehead, his nose, his ears, his neck, his arms, his legs and when Lazy Lenny once gave him a wedgie in the locker room, we discovered that, yep, he had freckles on his butt too. Hence his nickname, Freckles.

He always had his head in the clouds and was forgetful at the best of times. One lesson, he was asked to get the bag of basketballs from the storage room, which was in a locked shed on the oval. Somehow, on the way to the shed, Freckles managed to lose the key and, as a result, Mr Perriman made him suffer for the entire week − until a replacement key was made. Every lesson he was on Freckles like a Pitbull on a pork chop. He made him clean the locker room, scrub the toilets, run up and down the stairs, and do extra squats. Barney and I were wondering what type of punishment Mr Perriman had in mind for us.

It didn’t take long for us to find out, Corporal Punishment crouched down besides us and looked at us like