My Brilliant Idea (And How It Caused My Downfall) by Stuart David Page B

finer details of the interview, so he sticks with it. He looks over his shoulder at his handiwork lying on the grass, then turns back to face me.
    â€œAll right,” he says at last, bending down to pick up his mallet, “what have I let myself in for this time? What is it you’re after? Let’s hear it.”

13
    Half an hour later, I’m sitting in the car with my dad, a few doors down from Gary Crawford’s house. The engine’s turned off and I’ve explained the plan to Dad twice, once back at the house and once on the way here. He seems to understand it. He’s not particularly happy about it, but he seems to understand it.
    â€œAre you ready to go?” I ask him, and he holds up a hand to let me know he can’t answer while his mouth’s full. He chews noisily, continuing to hold up one finger of the hand, and then he swallows.
    â€œJust let me finish this,” he says. “I need my vitamins.”
    He insisted on stopping halfway here to buy a six-inch medium pan pizza. He told me it was impossible for him to go into an operation like this on an empty stomach, and he tried to get me to have a pizza too. I told him I don’t go into operations like this while I’m still digesting. It clouds the mind, and I tried to get him to see sense and wait till we were finished. But he told me it was each man to his own, and went ahead with his own way of doing things.
    I sit and watch the windows steaming up, anxious just to get on with the thing. Then I start chattering to try and pass the time.
    â€œIs it against your human rights if someone grabs hold of your wrist and won’t let go?” I ask my dad.
    He frowns while he decides which slice of pizza to pick up next. “Depends why they did it, I suppose,” he says.
    â€œWhat if you were just sitting on their wall?” I ask. “What if you weren’t doing anything wrong apart from that?”
    â€œThat seems fair enough,” he says. “Nobody wants somebody sitting on their wall.”
    â€œBut you can’t just grab them, can you? Surely that’s against their human rights.”
    â€œYou’re obsessed by human rights,” Dad tells me. “Nobody had any human rights when I was young. Whose wall were you sitting on, anyway?”
    â€œJust an old guy’s,” I say, and hold my wrist out to show him. “Look, it’s bruised. I think it might be sprained.”
    He holds it up and then turns it over. He looks at the other side for a while and then turns it back. “You’re hallucinating,” he tells me. “There’s nothing wrong with it.” He rolls his own sleeve up and pushes his arm out in front of me. “Look at that,” he says. “That’s a bruise.”
    It certainly is. There’s a big mark on his arm that looks like a full-scale hemorrhage.
    â€œCan’t even feel it,” he says. “Once you’re working in the bottling hall, you’ll get one of those nearly every day.”
    He stuffs the last slice of pizza into his mouth, almost in one go, then screws up his napkins, puts them into the box, and folds the box shut. He chews and swallows, chews and swallows, has quite a serious choking fit, throws the empty pizza box full of napkins onto the back seat of the car, and tells me he’s ready to go.
    â€œI’ll just have a quick smoke first,” he says, and he rolls down the window and pulls out a cigarette. One that obviously wasn’t made in his crazy new machine.
    Â 
    I think it was finally giving up on getting the iPad back that left my brain with the room it needed to come up with a solution. That’s quite often how it works. Once I’d switched over to looking for a way to get round Harry, there was no pressure on the thinking apparatus anymore. It could just get on with its work. And that’s exactly what it did.
    So the first part of the plan is that I ring Gary’s