ONE

Billy stopped writing. He looked around at his classmates scratching pens on their paper, frantically finishing their sentences. Mrs Clinch was walking around. He could tell she was near him as the air stank of cabbage. With less than thirty seconds ticking on the clock, he looked down at his scrambled answers on the page and took a deep breath.

He was good at maths. He had received good marks in his English tests and his science knowledge was improving all the time. This test was different. All of these weird questions where there appeared to be no right or wrong answers.

He stared down at the final question and the short answer he’d given. Other people seemed to have written really long paragraphs and he’d just written six words. How difficult could it be to answer such a simple question he was thinking? He read it again just to check he’d understood.

‘If you had one superpower, what would it be?’

Billy looked over at Mrs Clinch who was staring at the second hand of the clock so intently that she poured half of her coffee over her chin when she lifted it up to her face. It was like watching a vampire addicted to caffeine. She dabbed her chin with her floral blouse and looked around to see if anyone had noticed. Billy moved his head quickly to pretend that he hadn’t seen. Coffee, he thought, is bound to smell better than cabbages.

‘Stop writing please,’ Mrs Clinch squealed. The sound echoed around the room. Thankfully Billy was sat the right way round. As his left ear didn’t work as well as the right, he always tried to position himself so that his left side was nearest to her so that her shrill shriek didn’t make him wince. He remembered his Dad saying after parents’ evening, ‘She’s clearly a good teacher, but I swear her voice could pierce skin.’ Billy told Dad about repositioning himself in class to his advantage and Dad joked, ‘Good move son. Do you want me to block the other ear as well?’

Mrs Clinch began moving around the tables, collecting up the papers one by one. When she had eventually finished, she let out a sigh like she’d just run a marathon. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is an hour of your lives that you’ll never get back. I apologise on behalf of the Department of Education.’

She then went on to waste a full fifteen minutes ranting about government ministers and stupid tests. Nobody understood what she was going on about. The boredom was broken when Danny Thompson yawned loudly. As he threw his head backwards, open-mouthed, he fell off his chair.

All of a sudden, the smell of cabbage intensified as Mrs Clinch rushed over, like a scene from a television hospital drama. She shouted for Ruby to run and get the school nurse, despite Danny standing up almost straight away and giggling to himself.

It was unusual for people to talk about work during the lunch break, but this particular test had been so odd that nobody could help it. Even the demon dinner lady knew about it. She was the grumpiest, least hygienic dinner lady in the world, often wiping her nose on her apron before spooning the beef stew into your bowl. Billy found her quite funny. She was one of those people who spoke incredibly loudly at him. He often met them: old people in the supermarket; aunty Rita; uncle Dave; and, Mrs Somerset from next door. Dad and Billy had nicknamed them ‘the loudspeakers.’ The Demon Dinner Lady was one of them.

‘HOW. WAS. THE. TEST. DEAR?’ she shouted in Billy’s face. Just for fun, everyday Billy would shout back at her with pauses after every word too. ‘QUITE. BORING.’ he replied, loudly.

By the end of the day, Mrs Clinch was practically in tears with all of her pent-up test frustration from the morning and as it turned five minutes past three, Billy was delighted to be leaving.

He grabbed his backpack from the peg and began the short walk home, to find his mother stood in the kitchen.

‘Hello darling. How was the test?’

Billy looked at her, surprised. This test had been a shock to everybody that morning.

‘How did you know?’ he said inquisitively. ‘It’s been all over the news,’ she said ‘they haven’t stopped talking about it all day. Top secret reasons. Sudden tests. The whole country really cross. People refused to do it in some schools in London and went outside the Houses of Parliament to protest.’

‘It was fine, Mum. Just, some odd questions…’

‘Like what?’

‘Like…’ Billy paused for a moment. Maybe the government didn’t really want adults to know. The questions were super weird and perhaps they were keeping a close eye on those parents who complained and would set off a million stink bombs at the houses of those who dared to moan about it.

‘Just weird stuff, that’s all…’ he said. Then, Billy did something that he never did. Hesitantly, he looked up at his Mum, took a deep breath and said, ‘How was your day?’

Mum smiled and then her cheeks started flushing the way they did when Billy gave her the locket that Dad had bought on behalf of him for her birthday, or the times when Dad would say ‘I love you Sandy’ and kiss her cheek on a Sunday afternoon. It made Billy feel sick.

‘You’re such a sweet boy. Thank you for asking. I took your Nan out for some lunch, did some paperwork and then made a start on this washing up.’ she said smiling.

‘That sounds like the most boring day ever.’ Billy replied, kicking off his school shoes and casting his bag aside like finishing the end of an apple.

‘You can help with the drying up if you like?’

Billy was already halfway up the stairs and pretended he couldn’t hear, a trick that worked with some people - but not with Mum. She knew. Five minutes later he was stood, tea towel in hand, wishing for the end of the world to come before he had to dry any more plates. Mum was singing quietly. Billy always thought her singing voice sounded like a cross between a strangled cat and a dying frog but could never place it exactly. The previous year at Christmas, Billy and Dad had to go and watch her singing carols with the local choir. It was set to be the most boring evening of his life, until the local vicar choked on a mince pie and had to be given mouth to mouth resuscitation halfway through ‘Silent Night.’ When the lyrics got to ‘All is calm’ a large piece of pastry shot out of Father Derick’s mouth and straight into the eye of Aileen Hesketh-Smythe, who was playing the organ.

By the time Dad got home from work, Billy had listened to three news bulletins about the morning’s test. The protests had grown in numbers and it looked like half of London was ready to storm into the Houses of Parliament, screaming and shouting.

Nobody seemed to quite get to the bottom of what was actually on the test itself. Children were interviewed and had admitted to taking the test but couldn’t really remember many of the questions. They had a vague idea and could remember sitting there, but not about what had been asked of them.

At dinner, Dad was joking over his plate of chilli con carne that perhaps everyone who had taken it had been poisoned, or perhaps every teacher was in on it and had zapped all of their pupils with a Dr-Who-style pen. All of a sudden, Billy’s heart began beating really fast and he was swirling rice around his plate, desperate to leave the table so he could think.

‘Can I go to bed? I’m really tired.’ Billy said. Mum looked at Dad carefully. ‘Absolutely,’ she said, ‘but if you think you’re going to get away with sitting on that X-machine-thing all night, I’m afraid you’re mistaken.’ Billy had no intention of playing computer games, he, for the first time in his life was trying to search for clues with the mystical bottle of water.

TWO

Billy lay in bed, running through all of the events for a third time. Mrs Clinch had placed a copy of the test face down in front of each person. She then went back to her desk, opened the plastic top of a large box full of bottles of water and put one in front of everybody.

This was strange. Anybody could drink water whenever they wanted to at school. It wasn’t uncommon, particularly on hot days, to see water bottles at every table in lessons after lunch. People would swig from water bottles that they had brought in from home all afternoon and if you got particularly desperate, you could visit the water fountain.

Before the test began, Mrs Clinch opened a sealed envelope and read an instruction sheet. She said something about it being important to be well hydrated before starting on the questions, so ‘feel free to sip the water provided whenever you wish.’

Almost everyone unscrewed the cap of their water bottle and began glugging. Billy didn’t.

He thought back and could distinctly remember thinking that it just looked like any other bottle of water. He tried to study the label in his mind, what it looked like, the colours and shapes…but he just couldn’t recall it.

Billy sat up sharply. It was pitch black. He had fallen asleep, he still had his school uniform on, and Mum had clearly popped in and turned his light out when she had gone to bed. He looked across at his clock and it read ‘3:06 AM’

He had that horrible feeling that you get when you fall asleep fully clothed, like sleeping on a train or an aeroplane. His skin was clammy, and he had absolutely no desire to undress and put his pyjamas on.

But he was desperate for the toilet. A few moments before his bladder actually exploded, he stood up and walked across his bedroom floor. He knew that turning his light on would make him feel even more disgusting, so he chose to find his way to the toilet in the dark.

Bad move. Mum had also brought his school bag and PE kit up to his room and left it by the door. His foot got caught in the strap and he fell forwards flat onto his face. After scrambling back from the toilet, not wanting to make the same mistake a second time, he picked his school bag up and threw it across the room.

Soon afterwards, he heard a thump on the floor. As loud noises were often a little quieter to him, he was worried at first that it would’ve woken Mum and Dad. Billy, being so intrigued, had to switch the light on to see what it was. After his eyes had grown accustomed to the light and he was squinting a little less, he found the thump culprit. There, on the floor, was the bottle of water he’d been trying to picture. He remembered putting it in his bag at the end of the test. He picked it up and studied it closely.

The front of the bottle simply read ‘mineral water’ in a similar font to what you’d see on any bottled water in a supermarket. The back of the bottle was blue and green, with the government ‘Department of Education’ logo clearly visible across the middle. Nothing extraordinary at all. He sat there thinking and as he did so, his finger was peeling away at the label join on the bottle.

There was something written in tiny writing, beneath the top flap of plastic label. ‘Ingredients: Pure Mineral Water bottled from Scottish Highlands. EMC249.’

Nothing funny about that, he thought. In the comfort of his pyjamas, sliding between the warmth of his bedsheets, he reached out for the bottle and unscrewed the cap. He took a large swig of water, placed the bottle back down and went to sleep.

THREE

Billy was walking down a murky corridor. It smelt of dust and damp and it was decorated like something out of an old book. The wallpaper was pink and yellow and there were pictures of important looking people on the wall, wearing medals and holding swords.

The lady in front of him was dressed like a headteacher. Her hair was scraped back, and her jacket flailed out to the side as she moved. Her shoes clip-clopped on the floor as she walked and she moved at quite a speed, as if she was late for a meeting. Billy followed, struggling to keep up.

The light was