Arjun and the Timer Challenge

"Ten more minutes," said Mum, and put the little egg timer on the arm of the sofa where Arjun could see it.

Arjun did not look up. Ten minutes was ages. Ten minutes was practically forever. He went back to his game.

The thing about ten minutes is that it is only ages at the beginning.

The timer beeped.

Arjun's hands did something all by themselves: they gripped the iPad tighter. His shoulders came up towards his ears. Inside his head a very fast voice said no no no not yet I'm nearly at the good bit.

This is worth saying plainly, because grown-ups sometimes forget it. Stopping is hard. It is hard in your actual hands. It is not naughtiness — it is a real pull, like the last bit of a magnet.

Mum did not say anything. She was in the doorway, waiting, which was somehow worse and better at the same time.

Arjun felt the sentence coming up his throat. Just five more minutes. He had said it about four hundred times before. He knew exactly how it went, and he knew exactly how it ended, which was usually with everyone cross.

And then he remembered yesterday.

Yesterday, after the beep, he had gone into the front room in a bad mood and started stacking blocks because there was nothing else to do. And the tower had got taller. And taller. And then it had got taller than his sister, who was extremely annoyed about it and made him measure it twice.

The tower had happened because of the beep. That was the strange part. If the beep had not gone off, the tower would never have existed at all.

Arjun looked at the screen. Then he thought about the blocks, which were still in the box under the window, and about how a tower could definitely be taller than his sister and have a dinosaur on top.

He closed the app.

Nobody took it off him. He did it with his own thumb.

Mum did not make a big fuss, which Arjun was quietly glad about. She just said, "Nice one," and went back to the kitchen.

The tower took until dinner. It was a tower with a garage in the bottom and a nest at the top and a small plastic T. rex standing on the nest, guarding it, for reasons Arjun explained at length and nobody entirely followed.

It was taller than his sister by the width of two fingers.

That night, they invented a game. Mum called it Beat the Beep. The rule was simple: if Arjun put the iPad down before the timer finished, the leftover minutes went into a jar as marbles, and when the jar was full, they got a Saturday morning at the woods with the big climbing tree.

"So if I stop early I get more?" said Arjun, who thought there must be a catch.

"More of the thing you actually like best," said Mum.

Arjun thought about the climbing tree, which is enormous, and which has a branch shaped like a saddle.

The next day the timer beeped and he stopped with two minutes to spare, on purpose, and put two marbles in the jar himself.