Star Blaze by Keith Mansfield

squeeze through a gap between Mr. Wilkins and the magnolia-painted wall.
    He wasn’t quick enough. The cook pressed his enormous bulk into Johnny, lifting him up and pinning him against the side of the corridor. “Gotcha!” said Mr. Wilkins, smiling through his tiny black eyes. The cook’s hot breath and bristly beard were on Johnny’s face, forcing him to close his eyes. The huge man continued, “Where’d you bugger off to yesterday, you good-for-nothin’? Who did you think was going to cook the roast?”
    Johnny wanted to say, “That’s your job,” but when his eyes reopened he was distracted by the clumps of dandruff on the shoulders of Mr. Wilkins’s blue polo shirt, twinkling like tinystars under the fluorescent lights. It was, perhaps, just as well.
    The cook backed off slightly allowing Johnny’s toes to touch the floor but, before he could make a run for it, Mr. Wilkins grabbed hold of Johnny’s ear and dragged him along the corridor into the kitchen.
    â€œYou’ll cook up the porridge and then you can change into your school uniform. I don’t want you keeping that nice Mrs. Devonshire waiting. Is that clear, sonny?”
    Johnny nodded. He couldn’t afford to do anything else.
    â€œDon’t think I’m enjoying looking after you,” continued the man who, Johnny was certain, was loving every minute of it. “But I will drag you to that school myself if I have to—it’s right next door to the pet food factory and I need to pick up some cheap meat.” Mr. Wilkins licked his lips.
    Johnny tried to shut out the horrible thought of what he might have been eating all these years and set to work making the porridge. He could hear Alf speaking in his ear, wondering what was taking so long, but daren’t respond as Mr. Wilkins was watching him like a hawk, from behind the cover of an upside-down newspaper. Instead, he knelt down, slid open a cupboard door and tried to pull out the large two-handled metal pan from the very back, without tripping any of the mousetraps Mr. Wilkins had set around the inner walls. There were loads of smaller pans, bowls and baking trays in the way, but eventually, after a final tug followed by a loud clunk, the pan broke free and Johnny fell backward, gripping it to his stomach. One of the handles was half hanging off, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t done it. Inside, burned onto the bottom, was a charred brown crust—remnants from previous visits to the hob. When he picked some off with his fingernails it just made things worse, exposing a lighter layer that looked far more likely to contaminate any new meal.
    He lifted the pan, hoping the dodgy handle would hold, anddropped it onto the charcoal bars that sat above the grease-coated hob. Mr. Wilkins placed the paper beside him, folded his arms, focused his small beetle-like eyes on Johnny as though X-raying him and began barking orders. “A mug of oats’s more than enough,” he said. “Plenty of water in the pan—no skimping on that. And don’t forget the salt, sonny. Lots of salt.”
    There was no chance at all of swapping tastier ingredients as he had before, so he followed the cook’s instructions to the letter. The oats already looked gray and soggy; the water from the curved cast-iron taps was, again, rusty brown, and the drum of salt had all sorts of unidentifiable black bits and pieces inside. After everything had been added to the pan, Johnny walked to another set of cupboards and opened the third drawer down where all the odds and ends were kept—blunt corkscrews, broken chopsticks, garlic crushers and battered straws—and took out a big box of kitchen matches. Johnny smiled, despite himself. The massive box made it seem as if he was in
Land of the Giants
. He took out a gigantic match, around ten centimeters long, and struck it away from him along the side of the box. He turned the gas on,