The Stuffing of the Bear: April 2009

“Have you seen the paper this morning?”
I looked at Hazel, startled. “Say what?” I asked.
“Have you seen the paper? The Metro?” she asked me again to my astonishment.
“I thought you didn’t read the papers?” I inquired, frowning. I’ve been doing that a lot lately; frowning I mean, not inquiring. There are an awful lot of things going on in my life that I’m getting quite confused about.
“Yeah, well, I saw it on the bus this morning and the headline caught my eye. I picked it up. Here,” she said as she rifled through her bag looking for the Metro. “Didn’t you see it on the train this morning?” she added.
“No,” I said simply as I gazed round the noisy lecture theatre. There wasn’t much to see; the entire place was in darkness, the light from outside filtering in to prevent an awful lot of accidents.
This morning I had got a text from Hazel to the effects of “In the dark dark lecture theatre, ther was a dark dark student with dark dark intentions…” Assuming the lecture theatre was in darkness and that Hazel was on her own I hurried to get there only to find that she was sitting with Kirsty and Nicola. I was going to sit beside her but my way was now blocked. I performed a daring feat to get to the chair further in and impossible to get to unless people moved. I found out that the benches we write on are actually quite comfy to sit on.
That had been the extent of my excitement this morning.
“I had been reading a book and not paying much attention to the world around me,” I continued. “Except for the occasional, where are we? I better not have missed Argyle Street. Then I looked out of the window.”
“Well, look!” exclaimed Hazel. “We’ve had superheroes fighting in our Union!”
I looked at the headline on the cover. HEROES FIGHTING FOR THE UNION!
The article then went on to talk about the small skirmish the team and I had had last night. It told how I had arrived in time for the start of the fight for once and even had an “interview” with Floppy afterwards.
I looked up at Hazel, who was obviously waiting for me to be surprised. I was happy to oblige; how had Floppy been interviewed. We had left at the exact same time.
“How the hell did they get in the Union on a Sunday?”
Hazel gave me a Look. “I’m pretty sure the Union is open on a Sunday,” she said, slowly. “Besides, I think that’s where their headquarters is. It’s where that light’s kept. You know, that one.”
She pointed to the cover where there was a picture of a cloudy sky with the Fire Bear sign lighting up the sky.
“Oh, yeah,” I said in a monotone. “You mean the light which Fire Bear came personally to me to ask for the picture ‘cause she had just happened to see it, God knows how?”
“Ye-es.” Hazel was talking slowly again, the way most people do when they are worried for people’s sanity or when they don’t understand you. “Why do you always do that?”
“Anyway,” I continued, avoiding the question, “I hope they didn’t mess up the pool tables; what are we meant to do tomorrow night if they have?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it!” grinned Hazel.
“Why not?” I asked, puzzled again.
Hazel quickly changed the subject. Hmm, I thought. I wonder if there’s something she’s not telling me… After thinking for a minute (while ignoring what Hazel was saying, blanking her out like I do whenever she’s talking about bands or films I’ve never heard of), I decided that she was either the one who had wrote into the Metro under an assumed name or she was secretly going out with one of the superheroes.
“Hmm?” I asked her, zoning back into the conversation to hear her say something about a supermarket.
She repeated what she had said. Basically, she had just given me a list of places she needed to go to. I told her where I needed to go.
Later, halfway through the lecture when we were writing notes to each other, she asked me where the Scout Shop was, that being one of the places I needed to go to. ’21 Elmbank Street,’ was my reply.[*]

Later, as we wandered round Glasgow, highly probably attracting the attention of people talking about things which happened to mentioned sex and so forth in bank queues and the like, I suddenly noticed that Hazel kept on checking her phone.
“What’s up?” I asked, concerned.
She looked up guiltily. “Nothing,” was her answer. “Laura just said she might need my help and she’d text me if she did.”
“What does she need help with?” was my next question.
After a brief hesitation, Hazel said, “Tidying the flat!” She grinned, still looking guilty.
I frowned for a minute, then concentrated on walking up the Goddamn hill. This distracted me from what I was thinking about. Instead I started planning how to get people to come up a real hill with me.

We went back to the Union afterwards to play pool. The side we had had the fight on was cordoned off. I was rather concerned when Hazel pointed it out to me. I didn’t remember any damage. Someone was going to pay: I paid last time.
When Hazel went off to look for something in the Union shop and while she was marvelling over the bank she had never seen before, Dr. Zaze texted me. My heart raced as I double-checked Hazel wasn’t going to appear.
‘Ive found them! Zaze,’ it said.
Startled, I texted back: ‘Shall meet you soon: just hold on!’
After waiting a while, Hazel returned. We played one more game with me continually looking at my watch. I blame this on my sudden lack of success.
Finally, Hazel announced we needed to go to a supermarket. And finally, after we had been, she decided she was going home. I celebrated inside my head and told her that I would go home, too. I waited with her till her bus eventually arrived (I’m pretty sure it was more than one minute!).
I rushed off, found somewhere with a toilet and got changed.

“What’s the situation?” I asked as I appeared by Zaze’s side five minutes later.
“I’ve tracked them down!” cried Zaze. I glanced round at the Union packed full of gawping students and placed my finger on my lips. “Sorry,” said Zaze. “It took me all bloody day to find them, but the Tracker did it! They’re in a warehouse on the bank of the Clyde!”
“Amazing,” I said, sarcastically. “A warehouse on the Clyde. There’s not a lot of them about.”
My brain decided to alert me to something I had completely overlooked.
“Wait! What ‘tracker’?”
“Oh,” replied Zaze, breezily. “I invented this tracker thing that goes straight to my phone, which I can control from my normal phone. You know, like the special identical, but not identical SIM I gave you so that if there was an emergency you would know about it, even during the day. I called it the Almost Identical SIM for All Heroes.”
“Yes, but how can you track the three of them?” I asked, ignoring the last few seconds of conversation.
“I chipped them with this!” she exclaimed, pulling out a large metal thing that looked like something out of Futurama.
“Let’s see?” I said, holding out my hand to take it.
Suddenly, she leaned forward and closed it over my hand. I felt something puncture my skin. I lost control of my fire for a second and it flared up, melting the device slightly.
“Yes!” Zaze cried, celebrating. “I’ve finally got you! I’ve been trying to get you for months!” She turned to me. “Every time I would try to surreptitiously inject you, something would happen and you would move.”
My eyebrows formed a ‘V’ on my forehead as I rubbed my sore hand. Before I could flame her, the team walked in and I decided it was better just to get to the warehouse to save our three friends and, thus, the day. Again.
“So have we got transport?” I asked the assembled troops after Zaze had filled them in. Their silence said it all.
“Bus it is, then!” I said, cheerily, trying not to laugh.

By the time we arrived at the warehouse, it was beginning to get dark.
There was just enough light left to make out the yard which was strewn with rubbish. Leftover boxes of junk lay any old way all over the mucky place. A spare tyre for lorries was propped up forlornly against the wall. A perfectly good ladder had been left to rust.
“So how are we going to get in?” asked Floppy after we had made an inspection of the locked and bolted doors. “Are we gonna kick the door down and go in, all guns blazing?”
I looked at him. “We don’t have any guns.”
“That’s what you think!” exclaimed Bob, grinning.
Spiky sniggered. I thought about it for two minutes before I understood what the hell he had been talking about.
I rolled my eyes to the heavens and that was when I saw it. The way in. A ventilation shaft. Clichéd, yet effective.
I looked round at the ladder. “Help me with this,” I said.

Two minutes later, I realised why it was not a good idea to want to be able to fly via fire as I shuddered at the distance between me on the top of the ladder and the ground.
I placed my hand on the grill and began to heat my hand, then my whole body. I was attempting to melt the grill.
From the ground came the whispered conversation of the others.
“I could have gone back in time, if you really wanted me to, and stopped them from putting the grill back on,” said Time Travelling Hero, glumly.
“I’ve got plenty of contraptions for this sort of thing with me!” moaned Dr. Zaze.
“I could have got that off in one blow!” Spiky was saying to Captain Formal. Formal shrugged an agreement. There was probably some kind of answer, but I became rather preoccupied with a certain problem that was just starting.
I heat up really quickly and, even though I was concentrating all my heat into the grill, my entire body was heating up. This heat was transferring to the ladder via conduction. The ladder was becoming red hot which was going to be difficult for Floppy and Bob who were silently holding the ladder up.
Hmm, I thought. I am the worst leader of a group of superheroes in the history of superheroes.

Five minutes later, I was halfway up the ladder following Floppy and Spiky, who had broken down the grill.
I was about to crawl into the opening when there was a distant mechanical whirring. I looked down to see the garage door opening. Oh, brilliant, I thought. That was a waste of time and effort.
As I watched, several small, but vicious (we had encountered them before) robots filed out. They turned to Zaze, Bob, Formal and Time who were waiting for me to get off the ladder before they embarked on it. The robots began shooting lasers, throwing spikes and other general things that Curly Emma, Mcbain and the Overlord thought was necessary to make a robot truly evil at my trusty team.
“Quick!” I called down to them. “Get up here!”
But Formal didn’t listen. He’s the master of not listening. (Actually, that’s a lie. Dr. Zaze is the master of not listening, but at that moment she had developed super hearing and was already on the ladder.) He drew his rapier and challenged the robots by flinging down one of his gloves.
Time sighed and let go of the ladder, said something to Bob and turned, drawing a futuristic gun from nowhere.
“Get up!” cried Zaze, suddenly just below me. I worriedly looked at her then looked at Formal trying to fight metal with a very thin bit of metal. I looked at Time who was trying to wind up the gun. “Move!” shouted Zaze. “They can take care of themselves!”
I turned and hurried up the ladder. At the last step, I felt it move. I hung on to the edge of the shaft and pulled myself up. Turning, I saw the ladder move again with Zaze and Bob still on it, clinging on for dear life. Below them I could see two robots trying to dislodge them.
I grabbed the ladder. A second pair of hands, Floppy’s, also grabbed it. We tried to hold it steady. Below us all, a fierce battle was taking place.
Time had by now successfully wound the gun up and was shooting at the robots. Whenever he got one, it would freeze and tremble before either disintegrating into a million tiny pieces of metal, exploding into a million tiny pieces of metal, or disappearing altogether, never to be seen again. Not even as a million tiny pieces of metal. Unfortunately, he was missing a lot more robots than he was actually hitting and was thus responsible for the demolition of several boxes of junk, the spare tyre and most of the perimeter fence.
Formal, meanwhile, had managed to find the supervising robot and was tackling it with his rapier. Occasionally, he would find a gap between the robots joints and would thrust it in before wiggling it about a bit, breaking a small amount of the robots circuits. The robot, while being attacked, was casually waving its arms like a football coach shouting at his team.
My view was suddenly blocked by Zaze’s head; she had reached the top of the ladder. I tried to back up to give her room but bumped into Floppy who was crouching right behind me.
Extremely stressed out, trying to think of when I was going to get time to study for the two class tests on the Friday what with all this ‘superheroing’, worrying about Formal and Time, my eyes began to burn brightly. I could see this only in the reflection in the metal of ventilation shaft and Zaze’s goggles.
“Move!” I growled at Floppy. He backed off, allowing me to back up and Zaze was then pulled into the ventilation shaft. Once she had got in, Bob’s hand suddenly appeared, and he pulled himself up.
I awkwardly turned and crawled forward.
“It’s rather cramped in here,” observed Zaze. “I’m gonna be rubbing up against people!”
“That’s what sh-” began Bob. I interrupted him, growling at him, my eyes still glowing and lighting up the dark tunnel.
“Not now!” I tried to calm myself down, as I could feel my cheeks glowing red hot; my body would soon follow.
I took a few deep breaths and imagined ice. Ice in drinks. Icebergs. Ice Bear.
My cheeks soon stopped burning. My mask, however, felt like it had melted again.
We crawled along silently until we came to a junction.
“Which way do we go?” asked Spiky over his shoulder.
“Try right,” Zaze replied. “We want to go into the warehouse, not round the outside.
Again we crawled in silence. Suddenly, this silence was broken by Spiky breathing, “Watch out! There’s a grill here over a room!”
There was a very quiet rattling noise from ahead. “And it rattles!” came Spiky’s increasingly quiet voice.
In front of me, Floppy very carefully lifted himself off the floor of the shaft and awkwardly crawled across with his hands and feet at the edges so he wasn’t putting pressure on the grill.
Next it was me. I do not have super strength. I tried very, very hard to keep myself off the grill but my arms suddenly buckled, as did the grill. I fell through into the room below.

I landed flat on my back, for some inexplicable reason, on a desk. I lay, there winded, gulping at the air. I looked wildly up at the opening above me where the others were looking through.
In my shocked state, I found their faces hilarious. Bob had a Johnny Depp mask on tonight and, for some reason, Floppy was wearing a green eye mask, making a complete fool of the Zorro-like costume.
I probably look ridiculous, too, I thought.
Finally, I got my breath and looked around the dark room. There was a single door and the walls were lined with filing cabinets of every size and bookcases stuffed with folders and books. On the desk, I had narrowly missed landing on a computer. There was no-one there.
I propped myself up on my elbows and saw that I was on eye level with the Overlord.
I nearly had a flipping heart attack; I rolled off the desk, away from him, landing in a heap on the floor.
He gazed at me in disbelief. I looked at him and willed the others to get away, before remembering that the Overlord could read minds. Damn it! I thought.
“Don’t worry,” said the Overlord in a hoarse voice. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Don’t worry. Your friends have continued along the ventilation shaft – to their ultimate demise!” I could hear the grin in his voice.
He lifted his hand and the grill flew up to the gap and locked into place. A drawer behind me opened and he lifted a thick woolly dressing-gown to the grill and wedged it there. The dressing-gown was pink.
“Mcbain saw you coming!” laughed the Overlord. “He said you would try to alert your friends, so I came prepared.”
I didn’t bother trying to protest that I had been thinking no such thing. I had been thinking such a thing. Instead, I said, “That your own dressing-gown?”
“No!” snapped the Overlord, and I grinned to hear him not so cheery and a lot more defensive. “That’s Curly Emma’s!”
“Sure it is!” I goaded him, playing with fire on my fingertips.
The Overlord was silent and didn’t move. Finally, he said, “I’m giving you a look.”
I blinked at him as more silence followed this statement. “Oh, the horror,” I muttered after a while.
“Your friends are doing well,” said the Overlord, suddenly.
“They’re very good at crawling on their knees,” I said. Nothing else happened. I had been expecting Bob to appear with a sexual innuendo, but obviously it wasn’t good enough.
“No…” said the Overlord, slowly. “I meant your other friends!” He turned the monitor screen round to face me in a dramatic fashion. It showed the scene down in the yard where Formal and Time were obviously in need of some assistance. Bigger robots had appeared, Formal appeared to have lost his rapier and was using a pole he must have found in the yard, and Time appeared to have lost the power for his gun and was winding it up while he kicked at the robots that were attacking him.
“Oh, no!” I breathed.
“Oh, yes!” grinned the Overlord.
I could hear his maliciousness. I could tell we were all in trouble. I knew I would never get a story ready for tomorrow. And I was Goddamn exhausted since the morning.
It was the final straw.
Without thinking about the consequences, without thinking about it at all, I threw a fireball at the Overlord; I was in a fury.
I threw fireball after fireball at him. His initial shock prevented him from diverting them, but the others he could. He teleported away.
“Stand and fight, you bastard!” I screamed at the ceiling.
“I am,” came his voice from behind me. “I’m right behind you!”
I spun round, shooting fire at the floor around him. He teleported away again. I spun back to the desk. He was right in front of me and he was able to punch me in the face.
My mask bended inwards catching me in the eye. My nose was crushed and I could feel blood drip down my face. I could taste the blood in my mouth.
I was so shocked, I fell backwards.
Right, I thought two seconds later. If that’s the way you’re having it!
I kicked out my leg, catching his shin with my foot. There was a sickening crack. He fell over like a footballer from Rangers.
I jumped up. I fired another fireball at his face, but he rolled away at the last second and struggled to his feet.
A mirror was on the wall behind him and the (extremely) small sane part of my brain was shocked at the Fire Bear it could see. The crushed mask made the bear persona look ugly and furious and around my whole body was a red, glowing aura of heat. I was irate.
This only took a couple of seconds to register. It was going to take a couple of hours to calm the rest of me down.
I launched myself at the Overlord in a rugby tackle, thanking my wee sister for demonstrating it on me the other night.[†]
This brought the Overlord onto his back. His hood fell back. I jumped up and summoned up a fireball, ready to shove it in his face.
The fireball shrank and disappeared as I stared at him in shock.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “You!”
“Me?” asked the diminutive man.
“Thomas Fraser!” I exclaimed again, without thinking.
Tom frowned at me. “How do you know who I am?”
“Um,” I thought, quickly, realised that that wasn’t such a good idea and tried not think. “Red hoodie,” I said to cover my tracks. “Name,” I added.
“Oh,” said Tom, looking at me in a calculating way I wasn’t sure if I liked. “So, now you know who I am, it’s only fair to know who my nemesis is!”
He jumped up and lunged at me.
I could have flung a fireball at him, but I didn’t want to hurt him. I could have leapt to the side, but I wasn’t thinking straight and didn’t think about it till afterwards.
He grabbed my mask and pulled, the inflammable string breaking. (Damn cheap stuff!)
“Aha-” he began. He stopped. He stared at me. “Rebecca? Rebecca from Writers?”
I grabbed at my mask, but he held it out of reach. “I prefer my full name when you’re being surprised, thanks,” I snapped at him.
“Oh, right, sorry,” he muttered, then he put on a surprised tone of a voice to say, “Rebecca Elizabeth Ewart?”
I stopped reaching for my mask and stared at him. “Elizabeth? Where did you get Elizabeth from?”
He shrugged and frowned. “Isn’t it Elizabeth?”
Ignoring him, I realised that this was the perfect opportunity to ask him a question which had been bugging me for a while.
“Why are you doing this, Tom?”
Suddenly, Tom’s demeanour changed. He looked despondent and guilty.
“I can’t tell you. There is a reason, but I can’t tell you.”
Not knowing what to say or do, I settled for grabbing my mask back. I glared at the string and proceeded to tie reef knots so that it would fit over my face again; I didn’t care if Overlord, the self-proclaimed leader of the evil gang, had seen who I was. I wasn’t about to let the other two see.
“Maybe you could help me!” exclaimed Tom. “You could help me out of a bit of a sticky situation, then,” he grinned, evilly, “you could join us.”
I stopped what I was doing and thought about it, slowly. Firstly, he could read minds, and the fact I decided not to set him on fire must have set him on the path towards thinking that he could get my sympathy vote. And he nearly damn well did!
Annoyed, I rubbed the blood away from my mouth and put the slightly melted and crushed mask back on.
“Rebecca?” he pressed for my answer.
“When the mask is on,” I snapped, “you will call me Fire Bear!”
He seemed to sense that he had lost the mental battle and he threw up his hood. “And you must call me Overlord!” he commanded.
We stood there looking at each other for a moment. Nothing happened. We watched each other for the slightest movement. I scratched my ear. A couple more minutes past.
Deciding that I had better help my friends, I turned towards the door.
The Overlord stood there. He locked the door and put the key in his pocket. I sighed.
“If you’re going to attack me, then hurry up. I don’t have all day!” I said, exasperatedly.
He appeared to think about it. “No, I can’t,” he said, finally. “The book says that there must be a very slim chance for you to save the day. Since I’ve blocked the exits, the only slim chance you’re getting is if I don’t attack you.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “What book?” I asked. “And who on Earth gave you it?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the handbook on how to be a successful super villain.”
“I think whoever wrote it didn’t have a successful career as an author,” I sighed at the insanity of it. Beside the Overlord I could see a table lamp. God knows what it was doing on the filing cabinet. And if he wasn’t going to attack me…
I strode forward, grabbed it and swung it at the bewildered Overlord. It clanged against his head in a satisfying way. The Overlord crumpled to the ground, so that he was just a pile of cloak lying on the ground.
I turned to the grille in the ventilation shaft. The only way to know for sure where the others would come out was to follow their progress through the easily accessible shaft.
I burned away the dressing gown, before I stood on the desk to remove the grille. I glanced at the monitor to check on Formal and Time’s progress; they were nowhere to be seen.
Sighing, I reached up to pull myself into the ventilation shaft.
It was out of my reach.
I tried stretching, jumping up and down, anything I could think of. I tried flying as well, but I only started burning the desk so I stopped.
I climbed back of the desk and looked at the room. It looked like it was long enough to take a running jump.
I ran from the Overlord’s prone body, jumped a few feet from the desk, landed lightly and bounced up to the ventilation shaft. I caught the edge and almost choked as I felt the cloak around my neck being pulled backwards.
I twisted round slightly and was able to see the Overlord holding tightly on to my cape.
Ah, I thought to myself. This is why you don’t wear capes.
I reached up, seeking a firmer handhold, as I could feel myself slipping. I found the grille I had been planning to put back, instead. I tried to grab it to use as a weapon, but I slipped as the Overlord pulled the cape harder.
“I know what you’re thinking!” he called up to me.
I threw fireballs in his general direction. I looked down and saw that the desk had caught fire. The Overlord let go of my cape with one hand to shield his eyes, and I was able to grab the grille and throw it at him. It caught him on the side of the head with a crash and he fell to the floor again.
I climbed fully into the ventilation shaft and began to melt it together to stop the villain from following me. I looked down onto the scene below.
He seemed to be genuinely unconscious this time. The fire from the desk was starting to spread onto the floor.
Sighing, I put my hand out, my palm facing downwards. The flames began to rise from the flammable objects below and congregated on my hand. I used the heat from these flames to melt the metal of the ventilation shaft. The fire below ceased to burn.
I pulled the sides of the hole below me together. A small hole remained and I left it at that. God only knew who else could be in the tunnel and the metal would be turning red hot.
I crawled along in silence and darkness. I decided not to light the tunnel; I may then be able to mark my progress along the shaft, but so would others.
Soon the darkness began to be relieved by a small sliver of light up ahead. I realised I was coming to another grille. I would be able to see where I was.
I increased my speed and fell through a hole.

I landed on my back again. As before, I was winded.
I stared up at the hole in the ventilation shaft. I was really beginning to hate that thing. I heaved in big gulps of air. I really hoped I hadn’t broken anything; my fall didn’t seem to have been broken by anything. Not even a handy passing minion.
Finally, I got my breath back and stood up. I glanced around the room.
The occupants had completely frozen.
The three friends we had come to rescue, Kitty, Miss Jen and Mojojojoe were tied to wooden chairs with rope. Everyone else had been tied to chairs as well. Well, apart from Floppy who was in the act of being tied to a chair by one of the robots. He had stopped struggling in surprise and the robot itself was staring at me.
I noticed that he was wearing all green, like a weird cross between Robin Hood and Zorro. Without the arrows or sword.
McBain and Curly Emma were standing at the other end of the room. Curly Emma had a larger whip in her hand than the last time I had seen her. McBain had a small pistol in his hand, like those guns they had in the Second World War. He had been pointing it at Floppy’s head but had lowered it slightly due to my entrance.
Not again, I thought. At least I’m not tied to a chair; it rather hurt the last time.
I stepped forward. “Look!” I called out to the two evil ones. “I don’t want to have to hurt you; I’d much rather let you go!”
“What?!” cried Spiky in disbelief.
I glanced at his surprised face before continuing. “Let you go to the nearest police station,” I finished. “So just let my friends go, and-”
“Never!” cried Curly Emma. McBain lifted the pistol, his finger on the trigger. He wasn’t fast enough, however, as I threw a fireball at his hand. He yelped and dropped the weapon which melted in on itself in the intense heat. There was an awful cracking noise as the heat caused the bullets to try to fire out of the twisted barrel.[‡]
I hurried forward, firing more fireballs at a now weapon-less and perhaps defenceless McBain.
Curly Emma decided to come to his aid and cracked her whip a few inches from my face. I pulled up, annoyed; I wasn’t a bear in a circus. My brain at this point decided to go on a tangent, thinking that I would have to go and release the cruelly treated bears.
I didn’t have long to think about this, though, as Curly Emma drew back her whip to strike. “Ha!” I cried out. “I’ll just burn through it!”
Curly Emma pressed a button on the whip’s handle and spikes suddenly appeared along the length of the whip.
“Oh, no!” I breathed.
As she brought it down I leapt nimbly to the side. Or I would have done, had I not tripped over Dr. Zaze’s chair. I rolled back onto my feet and set fire to the rope binding her to set her free.
I heard a rush of wind behind me. I pushed Zaze out of the way and leapt to the side again.
I looked back at the whip to see it was stuck in the now vacant chair. Seizing my chance, I grabbed the leather part of the whip and heated my hand up. Eventually, it began to burn and Curly Emma gave a yelp and dropped the now useless whip.
I strode up to them. Curly Emma was sucking at her fingers, while McBain cradled his destroyed gun.
“I think you should come with us,” I said to them, putting Curly Emma’s hands behind her back to cuff them.
There was a sudden pain in the back of my head, followed swiftly by darkness.

***

Light filtered through my closed eyelids, so I opened them. I must be late for uni, I thought, panicking.
Instead of my purple-painted room, with the hole in the ceiling, I found myself in a strange white room. I sat up quickly, felt a sharp pain at the back of my head and collapsed back down, which didn’t help matters.
Slowly, I raised myself on my elbows.
The room was long and filled with beds and people in nurses’ uniforms. My brain finally registered a strange beeping noise. I looked round and saw a heart monitor. Looking down at my own body, I could see wires coming from my chest. I was wearing some kind of night shirt.
To my right was a window. I looked right to see where in the world I was, when I noticed someone dozing in the chair beside me.
I was immediately terrified. I knew I was in a hospital and at night by the looks of things, but I didn’t recognise this person. I should know who he is, I panicked. Wait, who am I?
My brain supplied me with an answer. Relieved, I was still disturbed I didn’t know this guy.
He had brown hair. He had a dark t-shirt thing on. On the floor in front of him was a small rucksack sitting beside my own bag. Beside him, thrown over the arm of the chair, was a bright red jumper of some kind. From the folds in the crumpled item of clothing, I could tell there was writing on the back of it.
Thinking of TV and films where the patient is always dressed in that stupid thing with the open back, I attempted to stay in bed while reaching for the jumper so I could read it.
It didn’t quite work.
Untangling myself from the covers, I reached up from the floor and grasped the jumper. Meanwhile, the loud bang seemed to have woken the guy up and he stirred in the chair.
I pulled at the jumper. It came towards me but stopped; it seemed that the guy was sitting on top of the arm.
Panicking that he would wake and talk to me, I tugged at the jumper. It finally fell on to my lap and I could see it was a hoodie.
On the back of the hoodie were the words “CLUBS AND SOCIETIES”. Confused as to what these cryptic words could mean, I turned it round to see the front. On the front, smaller words told me who he was: “CLUBS TREASURER. THOMAS FRASER.”
Memories resurfaced from the depths of my throbbing head. Beginning uni, signing up to Writers, meeting everyone, being scared out of my mind about the sanity of Stewart et al.
Above me, Tom opened his eyes and blinked several times. Not wanting to be found on the floor, I backed up and rose at the same time.
I banged my neck hard on the bed frame.
I yelped in surprise and pain. Tom looked down at me in surprise.
“You’re awake!” he exclaimed. An amused look crossed his face. “What are you doing on the floor with my hoodie?”
Bewildered, with no memory of why I was in hospital, and more importantly, why Tom was here, I shrugged, handing him back his hoodie. He took it and watched me as I struggled back into the bed, without turning my back to him.
“What’s wrong?” Tom asked, looking rather worried.
“What happened? Why are you here? Where am I? Where are my mum and dad?” I croaked, trying to stop myself from crying.
He looked rather relieved as he held up his hands to stop the flow of questions. “Hold on!” He grinned at me. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
I thought back to the previous day. I tried hard to remember, but the last thing I could remember was: “Lying in bed on Sunday night.”
Tom looked worried for a moment before he proceeded to answer my questions in order. “Earlier tonight, we met by chance in the Union and I was going to meet a friend in the City Centre so I walked with you towards the train station. Some guys came out from behind us and whacked you over the head. Luckily, after someone came round the corner, the thugs disappeared and I brought you here to the Royal Infirmary. Your mum and dad are on their way.”
I tried to remember all this but it just wasn’t happening.
At this point, my mum and dad rushed into the room with my wee sister and a nurse in tow.
[*] There was an awful lot more interesting random conversation on this piece of paper. (You can read the full conversation only if you can follow our crazy wanderings with the pen. It’s quite random, writing stuff anywhere it will fit, so conversations tend to run into each other.) I only put this bit in cause I’m being paid to advertise it. It helps me to pay the council for all the damages our fights end up causing.
[†] She is at this very moment doing rugby in P.E.
[‡] There is a proper scientific explanation for this, but I can’t be bothered going into detail.

The Stuffing of the Bear

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Thursday, 30 April 2009

End of an Essay, Start of an Era

Monday, 20 April 2009

The Next Bit

Friday, 10 April 2009

So, I can destroy things, can I?

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