CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,2

had their tongues hanging out.

‘Bethany, listen to this baby when we fire her up,’ Rat said eagerly, as he lunged towards the cockpit and reached in to press the starter button.

‘I’m nearest,’ Andy said, as the two boys leaned into the golf buggy from opposite sides and almost cracked skulls.

Andy reached the button first and there was a clattering sound, followed by a huge plume of foul-smelling exhaust and finally a roaring noise that made the metal walls of the workshop shudder.

‘Mr Campbell showed us how to tune the exhaust to make it as noisy as possible,’ Andy shouted, as he studied Bethany’s reaction.

‘Pretty cool, eh sis?’ Jake yelled.

The noise made Coral squeeze her hands over her ears as Lauren and Bethany looked at one another and shook their heads. Lauren leaned across, shouting into her best friend’s ear, ‘I think we’re supposed to be impressed by this.’

Bethany shook her head and laughed. ‘They’re so manly! How can we possibly resist them?’

2. BARGAIN

Karen had to collect six coupons in the newspaper. Once she had the full set, she went online and battled with an overloaded airline website for the bargain of the century, snaffling four flights for a long weekend of Christmas shopping in New York with her son, daughter and mother-in-law.

The offer was only valid on certain flights on certain days of the week. She ended up only being able to book flights in September and even then she had to pay a supplement to get the earlier flight back so that the kids would only miss one day of school (the headmaster gave her a withering look, as if the loss of a single Monday would destroy her children’s career prospects).

But Karen liked the idea of taking her kids to New York and she bit like a Rottweiler whenever a bargain came her way. Despite check-in queues, the godawful in-flight food and monster snarl-ups passing through immigration when they arrived at JFK, it had been a good weekend.

They’d been up the Empire State Building; they’d stayed in a swanky hotel and melted a pair of credit cards at an outlet mall ten miles out of the city. Karen’s mother-in-law spoiled the kids rotten and the two youngsters had loved every junk-fuelled sleep-deprived minute.

Angus was eleven and Megan nine. They had the right-hand pair of seats out of the four in the jet’s centre aisle, with their mum next door and Grandma fast asleep at the opposite end. They were two hours out of New York and the crew had dimmed the cabin lights and turned up the heat to try getting the passengers to rest, but Angus was under the spell of a new Gameboy game and Megan had found a film to watch on the little seatback screen in front of her. Their mum would have preferred them to catch up on sleep, but air travel always gave her a thumping headache and she wasn’t going to fuss as long as they kept quiet.

Megan’s film was a romantic comedy about a biker who falls in love with a doctor he meets after crashing his motorbike. The biker shaves his beard, buys a suit and gets a straight job which leads to all kinds of situations which were hilarious if you asked Megan, or boring romantic crap if you asked Angus. He’d watched the first five minutes before flipping open his Gameboy.

But as the film neared its climax – where the biker throws a punch at a wedding and runs away in shame before discovering that the doctor loves him for who he really is, not who he’s pretending to be, Megan’s headset kept going on the blink and she was only getting sound out of one ear. She reached under the armrest and swiped Angus’ headphones from his lap.

‘Hey,’ Angus snapped, as he reached across and grabbed the plastic headband. ‘What are you playing at?’

‘Mine are busted,’ Megan said. ‘You’re not using ’em.’

‘But I might use them later.’

‘You can have them back then, you div,’ Megan said, as she pointed frantically at the little LCD seatback screen. ‘My film’s almost finished and I can’t miss the end.’

Karen opened her eyes and looked crossly at her children. ‘Pack it in, you two. Angus, give her the headphones.’

‘But then I’m screwed for the whole rest of the flight! I know what she’s like. She says it’s for a minute but I’ll never get them back.’

Karen grabbed her own headphones and waved them in the air. They were still wrapped