Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce Read Free Book Online Page A

next room. Or in her head. Finally she said, “Can anyone else hear music? Or are the angels finally coming to carry me away?”
    I laughed at this—probably too loud and definitely too long. No one else joined in but everyone did stare at me—including Ms. Jewell, who stared at me and then at my pocket. “It’s Holst, isn’t it?” she said.
    I said, “No, miss, it’s me,” thinking, Who’s Holst?
    “This music was written by Gustav Holst. It’s called The Planets . It’s not the usual rubbish. Why’re you playing it?”
    “Well, miss, I saw a thing on TV about how if you play classical music in the background your brain really likes it and it makes extra pathways through your synapses. You can get brainier just by listening to classical music. It definitely works, miss—look how many questions I’ve answered this morning….”
    She was sort of humming along to the music now. I tookthe phone out so she could hear better and asked, “Why’s it called The Planets , miss?” I know this was cynical. But she’s a teacher. She loves questions.
    Ms. Jewell talked nonstop for the whole lesson about music, about Greek mythology and about the solar system. At one point she tried to explain just how far away Neptune was, and everyone gasped. And then she said, “And it’s a near neighbor compared to the stars…,” and she did a massive calculation on the board to show how far away the nearest star was in both kilometers and light-years. It was the best lesson she ever gave us.
    But I was still on hold at the end of it.
    I did get another text alert though:
     
    Our second winner is Samson Two Toure from Waterloo in Sierra Leone. Samson Two is the cleverest boy in the country. Recently his class was given a geography project about irrigation. Some of the other boys got A grades. Samson Two’s project was so good that the government bought it. His father says, “It is important to push your children hard to fulfill their ambitions. Samson Two and I have fun setting achievement targets. For instance, on his tenth birthday he set himself the target of becoming president of our country. I set him the target of winning this competition to ride the Rocket and he did it by writing a computer program that bypassed the ‘on hold’ part of the phonecall and put him straight through to the operator. Although he is not interested in fairground rides, he is looking forward to this opportunity to study one of the Wonders of the World.”
     
    I’m sorry, but if you already live in the Waterloo in Sierra Leone, instead of the Waterloo near Bootle, then you really don’t need to go and see the Wonders of the World. Because you already are one of the Wonders of the World—you’ve got jungles and rivers instead of gaso-meters and bypasses. It’s like the Grand Canyon wanting to come and look at the crack in my bedroom ceiling.
     
    Still two lucky winners left to go. During the kerfuffle between lessons the next one was announced:
     
    Our third winner is Max Martinet of Lille in France. Max’s father believes in discipline. “So many children today are allowed to run wild,” he says. “Not Max. I insist that he does exactly what he is told to do. If children are bad, you must punish them. If they are good, you must reward them. Max does as he is told. I told him to win this competition and he did.”
     
    See? All these other kids are getting help from their parents. What’s my dad doing? Valeting the taxi.
     
    The next lesson was media studies with Mr. Middleton, who blatantly hates me. We watched a DVD about the history of washing-powder adverts. No one noticed my phone playing in the background. I wondered how my credit was holding up. I’d now been on hold for three hours. Did it make me want to give up? No. What made me want to give up was the next text message. There were only going to be four winners in the competition, and this was the fourth:
     
    We have a new winner: Hasan Xanadu from Bosnia. Hasan’s