sponge layers oozed chocolate cream with a load of sweets all spilled over the top. Awesome.
“As it’s your birthday, you can have cake first,” Mum said.
“Can I as well?” Kirsty said. “I am the oldest.”
“And me,” Milly said.
“We’ll all have a big piece of cake first,” Dad grinned.
“Are you going to make a wish?” Milly said.
I blew out the candles, thinking it was a long time until next year to get a new bike.
“Stop it, Leo,” George said, spinning around on his computer chair. “You’re supposed to be helping with our presentation.”
“I’m doing research,” I said.
“Yeah, right.” George swung back to his computer. “Write your ideas down. And get off my bed, you’re messing it up.”
Sometimes I’d forget what I was supposed to be doing and be battling a new gladiator, swept away by the roaring crowd. If I wasn’t doing that in Clarendon Road I’d be at George’s house and he would help us do our homework (he did most of it). George liked books and words. They were his favourite things.
“George?”
“What?”
“How come things from the past are so deep under the earth? I mean, where did all the stuff on top of ancient ruins come from?”
The Romans left a ragged flint wall here, in our town, straight as an arrow along the back of the Rec, which you can still see. They left pots and coins and buckles and pins in the earth, which we stared at when Mr Patterson, our teacher, took us on a field trip to the museum. We stared at the artefacts and I imagined all the people who might have owned them, wondering about what they were like and what their stories were. Were some of them gladiators like me?
“I don’t know,” George said. “It’s erosion or compost or something.”
I opened his book on Romans to find something interesting. I looked at the pictures and caption boxes and read one out.
“Romans invented amphitheatres and arches, and realistic-looking statues, socks—”
“Socks?!”
“That’s what it says, socks and baths, and a law that we still have today, which says you’re innocent until proven guilty.”
“Although if you’re guilty you know you’re guilty, even if nobody proves it,” George said.
“There was also a man called …” I passed the book to George because it was one of those words that looked impossible to say.
“Ptolemy,” he pronounced “Toll-a-me. It’s a silent ‘P’.”
“Oh, right. Anyway, he mapped the stars and joined the dots, and named them after a whole mysterious collection of mythical beasts and animals and gods and heroes. I think I would have liked him, George.”
I had posters of the universe and everything in it stuck up in my bedroom. You could get posters inside Dad’s newspaper every Sunday for free until they covered your ceiling.
I put my gladiator helmet on and saluted to the sky out of the window, to the audience of the stars. I thumped my arm to my chest.
“I will return,” I said and punched my imaginary sword in the air, just to hear the men and gods and monsters cheer.
“Leo!” George said. “The helmet’s good, but do I have to do everything else myself?”
“All right, grumpy,” I said.
I fell back on his bed and crossed out my three lines of notes and tried to write them again. Something weird happens between your imagination and your pencil. I tried hard, really I did, to describe what it was like to be a gladiator. It all felt real and bold and brilliant inside my helmet – and when I was in Clarendon Road with a cosmic crowd to cheer me on – but it was dull and lifeless on paper.
“George, I think I need your help or I might end up letting us down.”
“Give it to me,” he said.
He typed out some of the information from his book. George had enough words for the both of us. He printed out a few pages and handed me two sheets. Lines and lines of words and paragraphs.
“You can read that out in class,” he said. “It’s lots of facts about gladiators.”
“Do you think we should have some pictures in our presentation?” I asked.
He sniffed. “I’m not doing any more. I don’t feel well and I’ve got a headache. Anyway, it’ll be good.”
I wasn’t so sure. This presentation was like a battle all on its own and I needed backup, even for George’s excellent words. I fell on his bed, let the papers float to the ground. I needed to do something so that Dad, Mum, Mr Patterson and the kids at school would know I had a good imagination, that I was good at something, not just relying on George.
“What if I acted out a gladiator battle? Maybe with a tiger or something?”
George did his you-are-kidding face. George is good at knowing when you need to be invisible. “In front of the whole class?” he said. “In front of Warren Miller?”
It was a warning, not a question, and we both knew I wouldn’t do it.
Kirsty said there’s a Warren Miller in every year at school. Ours was the new boy. He walked into our class in September with his chin in the air like he was looking way ahead of us. Some people just have it, whatever ‘it’ is. Everyone tried to impress him, until he gave them a soft punch in the arm and sealed their popularity fate. Or not.
Warren ignored me and George. Everybody usually ignored me and George. Except Beatrix Jones, but then she’s kind of unusual. George and me sat together in class on the far-side desk of the middle row. It’s like a blind spot, which is good for not answering too many questions, but bad if you do want to get noticed. For something. Just once maybe.
“Anyway, we won’t need any of that,” George said. “You’ve got your helmet and I’ve made this.”
From under his desk he pulled out a cut-out-and-build-your-own-amphitheatre, made from white card.
“Nobody else will have anything like this. What do you think?”
George has a different sort of imagination to me. I didn’t say what I was thinking, that perhaps he should have coloured it in before he built it, or drawn people
