Chapter 37
After a while the stomach cramps passed, and David Mentmore found himself unable to tell if he was awake or asleep: lying on his bed, he seemed to float in an intermediate state, his mind surfacing and submerging like an overturned boat in a gently swelling sea. Sometimes he would be back in the naughty room, with the bovine Phoebe handing him a lollipop, or then he was being failed - nearly failed - in some test he couldn’t remember.
And there was the Major. The fat little Major someone, strutting round him, eying him up and down, fiddling with a pencil, saying he’d got potential, and now here, telling him to get up! Well, tup that! No hallucination was going to tell him what to do! Even if his face appeared a bit stiff and somehow wrong, like a misfiring holo, but now his ar
