Pizza Cake

by Morris Gleitzman

  I looked up.

  Imelda was sneering at me and pointing towards the horizon. In the distance, next to what must have been the highway, was a huge advertising billboard with an ad for a caravan park. Most of it was a woman with half her bosoms showing.

  I stared at it for a long time.

  Imelda kept on gloating for a long time.

  I didn’t care. I was thinking about a long time ago, when all this had started. When Imelda reckoned I had the biggest bosom and I reckoned she did.

  We couldn’t both have been right. Then another thought hit me. What if we’d both been wrong? What if Mum’s bosoms were exactly the same size? All this whingeing and complaining and gloating and winning wouldn’t be necessary anymore.

  Suddenly I wanted to know the truth.

  That night, in the motel, I took a peek.

  Mum was having a shower. Dad and Imelda were watching a movie on TV. During an exciting bit when they were totally engrossed, I crept over to the bathroom, opened the door and peeped in.

  Just as I did, the shower screen slid open and Mum stepped out.

  She saw me looking.

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake,’ she said, grabbing a towel and wrapping it around herself. ‘Can’t a person get a moment’s peace in this family?’

  My guts went tight and cold. Not because Mum was annoyed. Because of what I’d seen.

  Mum’s left bosom was slightly bigger than her right one. And it hung slightly lower. Which made it seem even larger.

  ‘What’s wrong, love?’ said Mum.

  She must have noticed my miserable face.

  ‘Imelda was right,’ I said sadly.

  ‘Right about what?’ said Mum.

  ‘That my bosom was bigger than hers,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I was right,’ said Imelda, coming over. She gave me a jealous look. ‘Your bosom was always bigger.’

  Mum frowned and looked puzzled.

  Then she grinned.

  ‘What a pair of nongs,’ she said.

  For a moment I thought she was talking about her bosoms. But then I saw she wasn’t, she was talking about me and Imelda.

  ‘You didn’t have a bosom each,’ said Mum. ‘You couldn’t. The right-hand one didn’t feed properly. The milk kept getting blocked. So I fed you both with the left one, taking turns.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘But I can remember us both sucking at once,’ I said. ‘I can remember it.’

  ‘So can I,’ said Imelda.

  Mum shook her head.

  ‘Nope,’ she said.

  ‘Wasn’t possible,’ said Dad, joining us.

  ‘When we get home,’ said Mum, ‘I’ll show you the doctor’s report from the baby health centre. I was a lefty. That’s why it sags a bit now.’

  I looked at Imelda. I could see she was as shocked as I was.

  ‘The right one was a waiting and burping area,’ said Mum. ‘While one of you was feeding on the left side, I’d cuddle the other one of you on the right side.’

  Me and Imelda stood there for a long time, just staring at Mum’s towel-covered chest.

  Mum let us. I think she could see that me and Imelda had some important things to think about.

  ‘Don’t you mind?’ I said to Mum after a while. ‘That we made one of them a bit saggy?’

  ‘Course not,’ said Mum. ‘It’s what it’s for. Anyway, when I’ve got a pair of anything, I always like them both exactly the same amount.’

  Dad nodded.

  Mum gave me and Imelda a long look.

  I realised she wasn’t just talking about her bosoms.

  I glanced over and saw that Imelda had realised this too. She opened her mouth to say something. I wondered if she was going to boast about having a worse memory than me.

  For a moment I wanted to be the one to boast about having the worst memory.

  But I didn’t.

  I decided to give Imelda the chance.

  Imelda stayed silent.

  After a while I realised she was giving me the chance.

  We stood there, glancing at each other nervously. Then we swapped a little grin. Mum gave us both a hug. And at last there was no need for me or Imelda to say anything.

  Harriet’s Story

  Harriet wakes up.

  She can’t see anything except the dull glow of her bedside clock.

  3.14 a.m.

  That explains why the rest of her bedroom is dark. Darker than the inside of a black sock that’s been swallowed by a large bat who lives in a cave with very thick curtains.

  Strange, thinks Harriet. I don’t usually wake up in the middle of the night. And if I do, I don’t usually lie here making up weird sentences about how dark it is.

  She wonders what’s going on.

  Then she realises.

  She’s thirsty. Very thirsty. Thirstier than a blast-furnace operator lost in the middle of the Sahara desert who forgot to have a drink before he went on holiday.

  Of course, thinks Harriet. That’s why I’ve woken up. And that’s why I’m making up these weird sentences. My brain’s dehydrated.

  Easily fixed.

  Harriet switches on her lamp and reaches for the glass of water Mum always leaves on the bedside table.

  The glass is empty. Emptier than a cave whose usual inhabitant, a large hungry sock-eating bat, has rushed off to the Sahara after hearing that an overheated blast-furnace operator has just taken off his shoes.

  Harriet blinks.

  This thirst, she thinks, is really making me think weird things.

  Oh well, still easily fixed.

  Plenty to drink in the kitchen. Water in the tap. Juice in the fridge. Long-life milk in the cupboard if I feel like a long life.

  Harriet gets out of bed, opens her bedroom door and creeps out. She closes the door quietly behind her.

  The hallway isn’t as dark as her room. There’s a faint haze of moonlight coming through a window.

  This is more sort of gloomy than dark, thinks Harriet. As gloomy as a bat in the desert staring at two socks it can’t eat because it’s allergic to polyester.

  Stop it, Harriet says to herself.

  The kitchen.

  She doesn’t turn the hallway light on. Mustn’t wake Mum and Dad. They both work hard and need their sleep.

  As Harriet creeps past their room, she hears gentle snoring. And wheezing. And slobbering.

  Muttley must be sleeping on their bed.

  Just the thought of her beloved dog makes Harriet’s insides go warm. Almost as warm as the polyester-sock soup a hungry bat might make to try and get some of the sock flavour without having to swallow any of the actual …

  Harriet concentrates on getting down the stairs to the kitchen.

  Luckily there are some glints of moonlight on the stairs. She goes down carefully, step by step, counting each stair silently to keep her mind from wandering.

  … three, four, five …

  She stops.

  Gleaming on the next stair is a small plastic racing car.

  Typical, she thinks. Younger brothers always leave their toys where other people could step on them and do triple backward somersaults down the stairs and land on their pelvises and sprain their anterior fibulate cartilages and miss out on selection for the school swimming team.

  Harriet reminds herself that Billy is only four and probably didn’t mean it.

  Then the moonlight disappears.

  The plastic racing car glows eerily. Particularly around the headlights.

  Strange.

  Harriet didn’t think racing cars had headlights.

  She stands in the darkness, feeling a bit spooked. She’s read about this. Hallucinations. Seeing things. It can happen to people who are extremely thirsty. She read a story only recently about somebody dying of thirst in a desert who thought a large bat was eating his socks.

  Mum. Dad. Help.

  Harriet wants to call out. She wants Mum and Dad to wake up and switch on the light and stumble concerned out
of their room and trip over Muttley and do triple backward somersaults down the stairs and land on their pelvises and sprain their anterior fibulate cartilages and miss out on …

  No, she doesn’t.

  It’s OK, Harriet tells herself. I’m not in the desert. I’m standing on the stairs at home. People don’t usually die of thirst standing on the stairs, even when they feel like they might.

  Slowly, carefully, she moves down the dark steps towards the kitchen.

  … eleven, twelve, thirteen …

  She knows there are fifteen steps because that’s how Mum and Dad taught her to count, years ago. But she prepares herself for a few more now, maybe a few hundred more, because that’s what happens when you’re hallucinating from thirst.

  … fourteen, fifteen …

  She tests ahead with her foot.

  No more.

  Just flat floor.

  Good, the hallucinations have stopped.

  Harriet walks towards the kitchen, very slowly and carefully because this downstairs hall is darker than a …

  Stop that.

  She can’t see the kitchen door, but she knows roughly how far it is from the bottom of the stairs. She holds her hands up in front of her in case the hallucinations start again and she bumps into a stuffed gorilla or a big pile of bat poo or the Eiffel Tower.

  Bump.

  Her fingers are touching something. It doesn’t feel lumpy or pooey or French.

  It feels like a door handle.

  Yes.

  The kitchen door.

  At last she can get a drink.

  Harriet turns the handle, steps into the kitchen and quietly closes the door. Now she can switch the light on without disturbing Mum and Dad.

  She does.

  At first the brightness hurts her eyes. She can’t see anything. All she can think of is thirst. She wants to rush to the fridge and grab the bottle of juice and glug it down, blind and squinting. But she doesn’t. There are other bottles and jars in the fridge she wouldn’t want to grab by mistake. Soy sauce. Dad’s home-made ginger beer.

  Instead Harriet turns away from the glare and waits for her eyes to adjust. Which they do. Soon she can see the back of the kitchen door clearly.

  She can also see a big shadow looming over her.

  Somebody else is in the kitchen.

  Somebody big.

  From the shape of the shadow, it doesn’t look like Mum or Dad or Billy. It looks like a man with the sort of very broad shoulders a burglar would probably have. And over one of his shadow shoulders is what looks like a huge sack. Bulging with something very big inside it.

  Probably the fridge, thinks Harriet.

  She wants to run.

  She wants to claw open the kitchen door and leap up the stairs and fling herself into bed with Mum and Dad.

  But her hands are sweaty with fear and she knows that if she tries to grab the door handle her fingers will probably slip and she’ll be fumbling and the burglar will have heaps of time to grab her and put her in his sack.

  She has to think of something else.

  Behind her, the burglar isn’t saying anything.

  He’s probably in shock too, thinks Harriet. Burglars are probably cowards underneath, which is why they slink around stealing fridges in the dark.

  Harriet has an idea. She decides to turn and face the burglar and pretend she’s braver than she is. She’ll offer him a deal. If she can have the juice, he can take the fridge.

  She turns, guts twisted tighter than a polyester sock. And blinks.

  There isn’t a burglar.

  Just Mum’s ski suit, hanging from the light fitting. The hood has flopped over to one side and is making a big sack-shaped shadow.

  Harriet remembers Mum saying the ski suit has to go to the drycleaners. She must have hung it here so she wouldn’t forget.

  Dizzy with relief, and thirst, Harriet pulls the fridge door open, almost tasting the cool sweet juice.

  She grabs the juice bottle.

  It’s empty.

  So’s the milk.

  Dad’s ginger beer fermentation jar is lying broken in the bottom of the fridge. Most of the ginger beer has leaked out and been soaked up by the leftover curry and rice in the salad crisper.

  Harriet stares, horrified.

  There’s only one person who’d drink everything in the fridge that carelessly.

  Harriet knows she should be waking Mum and Dad and telling them the bad news so they can inform the insurance company and get some more ginger beer yeast for Dad and call the police to see if there’s a Younger Brother Punishment Squad.

  But first she absolutely must have a drink.

  Harriet grabs a glass from the cupboard and goes to the sink and turns the tap on.

  Nothing comes out.

  She turns the tap on more. Still nothing. She tries the hot tap. Nothing.

  The taps are completely dry. Drier than a pair of socks that have been lying in the desert sun so long you wouldn’t even know a bat had tried to make soup out of them.

  Oh no, thinks Harriet. I’m making up weird sentences again.

  Another thought hits her.

  Is it just a coincidence the fridge is empty and the water pipes are dry on the same night? Or is something else going on?

  Like …

  Like …

  Harriet can’t imagine what it could be. She thinks about the moonlight disappearing, and the plastic racing car going spooky, and the burglar-shaped shadow. And now suddenly here’s a drought or a burst water main or a clogged valve at the reservoir. Everything that’s happened since she got out of bed has made it harder for her to get a drink.

  Getting a drink should be so simple.

  Not a big problem.

  Unless …

  Suddenly Harriet has to sit down on a kitchen chair.

  Could it be …?

  Last week in class Ms Lovett was talking about stories and how they work. How in every story, the main character must have a problem. And how the character never solves the problem straight away, because that would make the story too short and too boring.

  ‘In a story,’ Ms Lovett said, ‘things always come along to make the problem harder to solve. Things always get worse before they get better.’

  Harriet thinks again about the empty glass and the racing car and the dark hall and scary shadow and the empty juice bottle and the dry taps.

  Could it be, she thinks, that I’m in a story?

  No, that’s crazy.

  Harriet goes to the cupboard, finds the long-life milk, and opens the carton. She tips the milk into the glass. Except she doesn’t because nothing comes out. She shakes the carton. The contents feel solid. And now there’s a cheesy smell.

  She looks more closely at the carton to make sure Mum didn’t buy long-life cheese by mistake. No, it says long-life milk. Right next to where it says Use By September 2009.

  Harriet puts the carton down.

  She’s tempted to ring Ms Lovett for advice. But it’s 3.25 a.m, and she knows teachers don’t get paid overtime.

  No, thinks Harriet, I’ll deal with this myself.

  She remembers something else Ms Lovett said. As characters battle to solve their problems, they often discover they’re braver than they ever thought they were.

  Harriet isn’t feeling particularly brave at the moment, but definitely more determined.

  And thirstier.

  My problem, she says to herself, is getting a drink. If I’m in a story, things will keep coming along to make it harder for me to solve my problem.

  Let’s put it to the test.

  Harriet thinks about what she can do next.

  Of course. If a person finds themself in a drinkless kitchen, there’s an obvious solution. Go out into the garden and drink from the fish pond.

  Harriet opens the kitchen window and peers out. The moon is glowing again and the pond is rippling, but the trees around it are full of bats. They’re fruit bats and Harriet knows they’re harmless, but she a
lso knows it’s best not to drink anything that’s directly under a bat’s bottom.

  She closes the window.

  OK, she thinks. I need another way to fix the problem. How about waking up Mum and Dad and asking them to drive me to the all-night supermarket? It’s only a ten-minute journey.

  Harriet takes a couple of steps towards the stairs, then stops.

  She’s thinking of all the things that could happen on the way to the supermarket to stop her solving her problem.

  Dad crashing the car into the library.

  The whole family being abducted by aliens and taken to a planet where the inhabitants live on a diet of really salty chips and curried sand.

  Mum being pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt and then being charged with the desert murder of a sockless blast-furnace operator.

  Mind you, there would probably be a water cooler at the police station …

  No.

  Harriet sits down again and thinks hard. She needs a way of solving her problem that won’t put Mum and Dad in danger and cause them to lose sleep and/or their car and/or their freedom and/or their library tickets.

  Of course, she says to herself. Why didn’t I think of it before? I’ll break into our neighbours’ house and borrow a drink from them.

  Harriet creeps out the back door, staying well away from the fruit bats, climbs over the fence and runs, crouching, across the neighbours’ lawn.

  At their house, trying to feel braver than she ever has before, she looks for a possible place to break in.

  And finds one. An open toilet window. It’s a bit high up, but if she stands on this garden table, and pulls herself up using this metal box screwed to the wall with the little red flickering light on it …

  Oops, thinks Harriet as she jumps back down from the table. That burglar alarm wasn’t there last time I looked.

  Yet another thing making her problem harder to solve.

  As Harriet hurries away from the neighbours’ house, she remembers something else Ms Lovett said about stories. How trying to solve a problem can sometimes cause an even bigger problem.

  She also remembers something Dad said about the neighbours. How they collect Olympic swimming medals, buying them from all over the world, and how they’re always worrying that their priceless collection will be burgled.

  That would have been a bigger problem alright, thinks Harriet. If the neighbours had caught me in their house and thought I was trying to steal their medals, and had rung the police. The Older Sister Crime Squad would have been round in a flash.