Free The Sound of Laughter by Peter Kay Page A

before we set the fire alarm off. Danny Thorncliffe had just got out of the burns unit and we were teasing him by throwing lit matches at his bandages. Happy days.
    The first thing we had to do was pick a name for our group. Mr India said that ideally it should have something to do with speed and dexterity. Everybody else chose names like 'Supersonic' and 'The Hurricanes'. After a deliberation of ten seconds we came up with 'The Very Fast'.
    I have to confess we did nothing but piss about for three weeks. Every time we saw Mr India coming we'd each grab a pair of masonry goggles and stand round the lathe looking busy. But when I realised we only had three days until the competition and my mum had booked the day off work I began to panic. We had designed nothing.
    Mr India gave everybody an appraisal and we hung our heads in shame when we saw what the other groups had come up with. 'The Speed Demons' had risen mightily to the challenge with their remote-controlled, jet-powered land cruiser. By incorporating the guts of a Dyson and over three hundred ball bearings that they'd 'found' in a skip behind MFI, they'd managed put the cast of Robot Wars to shame. Quite an achievement when you consider that Robot Wars would not be invented for another fifteen years.
    I was personally very jealous when I saw what 'Red Rum and Co.' had come up with. It was just a bloody wooden ball, the clever sods. They'd sculpted it out of pine in the woodwork room and were planning to roll it down the hall. Everybody hates a smart-arse.
    Eventually Mr India got round to our group and when he saw what we'd done (or rather what we hadn't done) he totally lost the plot. I felt bad because he was a gentle soul. He let the kids call him Pablo and played the
guitar whenever we had a power cut but now we'd let him down.
    'I can't believe you've done nothing. You've had four weeks.'
    We just shrugged pathetically. He kept repeating himself over and over. We even tried farting on him in an effort to make him stop but the poor bugger had inhaled so many toxic chemicals over the years that his sinuses were dead. Danny Thorncliffe, on the other hand, pushed a little too hard and followed through. What a stink. So there we were, stood in front of Mr India, with tears in our eyes. Luckily he mistook them for tears of regret and granted us a twenty-four-hour reprise.
    That night after watching Wacky Races I had a dream. If we took a piece of wood about a foot long, drilled two holes in it and then threaded a couple of axles through the holes, then placed four wheels at the end of them, then (and here's the genius bit) we attached a powerful spring to the back, maybe, just maybe, if the laws of physics allowed, we could push the coiled spring up against a wall, hold it tightly and when we let it go, it would hopefully shoot forward . . . thirty feet? In theory anyway.
    Well, it was just a dream but goddammit, that's all we had.

    The contraption took about an hour to make, which was handy as it was now the presentation day. We needed a decent spring, though, for the back. Simon Birch (or Fingers as we called him) managed to come up with the goods. He never revealed where he got it from but I noticed the town hall clock had stopped working a few days later. Maybe it was just a coincidence that his dad worked as a security guard there.
    Quickly we screwed the spring to the back of the wood and cleared a path in the metalwork room. Time
for the acid test. I pressed the vehicle against the wall, coiling the spring as tight as I could. I held my breath, counted to three and let rip. It shot forward all right, about four feet. We stared at it in silence until Danny Thorncliffe pulled out a cigarette, lit it calmly and said, 'We're fucked lads.'
    'No we're not,' I said, but I could feel the group glaring at me.
    'It's supposed to travel thirty feet,' said Fingers.
    But before I could answer him, I was distracted by the sight of the Lord Mayor's car pulling into the staff car