He still couldn’t get the fishy taste out of his mouth. His friend Felix had suggested rubbing his mouth out with soap – but all that'd done was make him throw up. His friend Saffy told him never to feel sorry for a monster again. Some friends, thought Jasper. Mr Golag, the Mental Manipulations teacher, was lurching up and down between the desks. He was a hairy, thick-set man with a hunched back and a lumpy face. ‘Be the fly,’ he wheezed. ‘From understanding comes control.’ Everyone sat silently at their desks, staring intently at the flies trapped under the glass jars in front of them. The classroom was gloomy. It was only lit by lamps, as Mr Golag didn’t like bright lights. At one time Jasper would have thought that spending a whole class sitting in a dimly lit room staring at flies was boring, but not now. After months of nothing but reading and theory, Mental Manipulations class looked as though it was finally about to get interesting. Jasper knew that of all his classes, Mental Manipulations could turn out to be the most important.
