Government Health Warning: Feline-Origin Respiratory-Tract Infection – commonly known as ‘cat flu’ – is a virus spread by domestic house cats. Although the virus is not especially serious, it is extremely contagious. You can avoid infection by keeping your contact with cats to a minimum. If you have a cat, please keep it indoors until the epidemic is over. Thank you. No one called it cat flu except on the news. Everyone called it ‘Killer Kittens’. Especially my mum. We didn’t have a cat, but we did have a cat flap – the people who lived in our house before us put it there. Mum nailed up the cat flap and spread anti-cat pellets all over the back garden. ‘Don’t be scared, love,’ said Dad. ‘No one else is scared.’ ‘Just because no one else is scared doesn’t mean things are not scary,’ said Mum. She was definitely right about this, by the way. No one else was scared the day we started at Handsworth High. I was scared and I was one-hundred-per-cent right to be scared, because on that very first morning Grim Komissky took my bag off me, rooted around inside, took out my sandwiches and ate them right in my face. Bonnie Crewe – the Girl with the World’s Longest Ponytail – said to him, ‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?’ ‘There is no one my own size,’ growled Grim, through a mouthful of my lunch, ‘and if there was, why would I take that risk? It’s much safer for me to pick on someone I know I can squash like a bug.’ ‘That makes sense,’ said Bonnie and skipped off with her ponytail swinging from side to side. Dad explained to Mum that the virus wasn’t serious anyway – it caused flu-like symptoms and drowsiness. Plus, even if you had a cat, you only had a ten-per-cent chance of catching it. ‘If there’s a ten-per-cent chance of catching it,’ said Mum, ‘that means ten per cent of people will catch it.’ ‘No, it doesn’t.’ ‘Yes, it does.’ ‘It doesn’t.’ ‘It does.’ ‘It doesn’t.’ ‘If ten per cent of people catch it, that will mean ten per cent of people are off work. What if those people are the people who deliver flour to the bakeries or milk from the dairies? What if they’re the people who take the food to the supermarkets? Or the people who open the supermarkets in the morning? What then? That’ll mean there won’t be enough food to go round. And people will be rioting for food. And what if some of the people who are too sick to go to work are policemen? Then there won’t be any policemen to stop the rioters rioting, and what then? A total breakdown in law and order all because of Kittens.’ ‘I think the chances of that are about 0.001 per cent,’ said Dad. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Or only 0.001 per cent.’ Mum bought about a million tins of Spam and ten tons of pasta. She didn’t buy them in one big lot from one big shop because people might see her, then copy her, and that might trigger a wave of panic buying. She also bought a camping stove with its own gas canister and loads of matches and candles in case the electricity went off, and she made us keep the bath filled up with cold water in case the water went off. ‘Now I’m not scared,’ she said. ‘Now I’m prepared.’ Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared is the name of a book that Dad had bought for her. Under the title it said, ‘Dangerous situations are not dangerous if you know what to do.’ It tells you: What to do about wasp stings How to light a fire with no matches How to catch, skin and cook rabbits How to stop a nose bleed And what to do in the event of a total breakdown of law and order in society, etc. And . . . How to deal with bullies. Until then everything I’d done to try and stop Grim Komissky picking on me had failed. There was the night I tried to stop him from throwing my bag off the back of the bus by giving my bag to my big sister Ciara, who went home on the late bus. Instead of throwing the bag off, he threw me off. There was the time I tried to avoid him by getting the late bus myself. He waited for it with me, complained about the delay to his homeward journey and threw me off again. Every day he’d take my sandwiches out of my bag and lift off the top layer to check on the filling. If it was something he liked – say, ham – he would eat the whole sandwich. If it was something he didn’t like – say, cheese – he’d roll the whole sandwich into a ball between his chopping-board hands, drop it on the floor and stamp on it. SQUELCH! In the comic-book version of my life story, there was a drawing of me hiding in the geography store cupboard, which was surprisingly comfortable. The caption said: At last Rory Rooney finds peace in his Fortress of Solitude. The Fortress of Solitude is a vast complex hidden away under the polar ice where Superman goes to do his thinking. Except Superman has droids to serve him food, whereas I had a big papier mâché model of the West Midlands in the Ice Age, which I used as a table to put my sandwiches on while I was listening for Trouble. And the next picture was Grim Komissky bursting into the geography store cupboard with his almost-as-big-as-him mates (Kian Power and Jordan Swash) shouting, ‘Surprise!!!’ In the drawing you can tell from the expression on my face that it’s no surprise to me. The next picture after that would be just the storeroom door with ‘POW! CRASH! THUNK!’ written across it and the word ‘Ow!’ sneaking through the gap under the door. In Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared it says that if you’re being bullied the first thing you should do is inform a responsible adult – for instance, a parent. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘bad things are happening at school.’ ‘Have you disinfected your hands?’ She’d put a squeezy bottle of disinfectant gel by the front door. ‘Yes.’ ‘Then don’t worry. We’re not going to catch the virus, and even if there’s a total breakdown in law and order, we’ve got pasta. We’ve got candles. We’ve got water. We could last out for weeks. We’re not scared. We’re prepared.’ ‘Great.’ I also mentioned it to my dad. ‘When I had trouble at school,’ he said, ‘you know what I did? I sneaked into our yard when everyone else was asleep and tried to summon Batman. I got a big rubber bat from a joke shop and shone a torch at it on to the side of our house – to make the Bat-Signal.’ Dad has always been unusually serious about comics. ‘Did it work?’ ‘No. You know why?’ ‘Because Batman’s not a real person?’ ‘Exactly. If you need a hero, you have to be one. Sometimes – for instance if you are the youngest and the littlest in your year – you might think, How can I be the hero? I’m the littlest in my year. But there’s more than one kind of hero. There are heroes with shocking great muscles who can stop a speeding train with their bare hands, thus saving the passengers from Certain Death. But there are also skinny little heroes who destroy big bullies using only their superior intelligence and cunning.’ ‘But I don’t have superior intelligence or cunning.’ ‘But I do.’ And to prove it he showed me his antigravity trick. In the Rory Rooney comic there was a diagram to show you how to do this trick. Humiliate Bullies with this Simple Antigravity Trick Ask the bully to pick you up and then they pick you up. Ask them to put you down and try again. While they’re getting ready to lift you, allow your own body to go limp. Concentrate on a spot on the floor, between their legs. Put your arms out, forcing the bully to pick you up by your forearms. When they pick you up, gently press on the inside of their elbow joint with your thumbs. Continue to concentrate on the spot on the ground and to keep your body limp. They will not be able to lift you up. Works every time. ‘Are you sure it works every time?’ ‘Absolutely.’ So I tried that. After Grim picked me up the first time I was about to say, ‘Now . . . put me down and try to pick me up again.’ This is when you do the part with the thumbs and staring at the floor, etc. In fact, when I said, ‘Now put me down –’ Grim did put me down – face down – DUNK! – in the wheelie bin. In every story there are Heroes and Villains, winners and losers. If you don’t decide which you are, someone else will decide for you. Someone like Grim Komissky.