Unreal Collection!

by Paul Jennings

  Aunty Flo was very good to me. She liked me. ‘Bob,’ she would say, ‘you need fattening up.’ She made jam tarts and little cakes with icing, and set them up on the table with neat napkins. She was a very good cook, and very old. She didn’t know much about boys. She let me go wherever I liked. She only had one rule. ‘Be home for tea on time.’

  I liked Aunty Flo. But I didn’t like her outside dunny.

  3

  One day Aunty Flo took me aside. She was waving a bit of paper and she looked very serious. ‘It is very sad about your parents, Bob,’ she said. ‘I am worried about your future. If I die there will be no one to look after you.’

  She was a good-hearted old girl. A tear ran down her face. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I have made some plans. This is my will. It tells what will happen to my things if I die. I have left everything to you. If I die you will get the lot: the house and my money.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my shoes. She kept talking with tears in her eyes. ‘The only thing you won’t get is a painting I used to have. You can’t have it because it is gone. Stolen. It was in my family for a long time. It was worth a lot of money – very valuable. It was a painting of this house. I wanted you to have it.’

  I pretended not to notice her tears. ‘Who stole it, Aunty?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I went away to England for two years. A man called Old Ned lived in the house and looked after everything for me. But when I came back he was dead, and the painting was gone.’

  I asked Aunty Flo how Ned died. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I found him on the toilet at the bottom of the garden. He had been there for a year. There wasn’t much left of him – just a skeleton, sitting on the toilet.’

  4

  Well, that was nice. That was very nice. Now I had to go and sit in an outside dunny where someone had died.

  I didn’t like going to that loo at the best of times. You had to walk down a long path, overgrown with weeds. Trees stuck out and scratched your face. When you got inside it was very dark – there was no light globe. There were cobwebs. And no toilet paper, just a nail on the wall with newspaper hanging on it. It wasn’t even worth reading the paper. It was only The Age. Very boring.

  Those cobwebs had me worried too. There could be spiders – redback spiders. Redbacks are poisonous. I knew that song about redbacks on the toilet seat. It wasn’t funny when your pants were down, I can tell you that.

  Redbacks, cobwebs, stories about skeletons and no one around. I didn’t like sitting there with the door closed, especially at night. At night it was creepy.

  One day I was in the dunny paying a visit. There wasn’t much to do. I started counting holes in the wall. A lot of knots had fallen out of the wood. They were little round holes that let in a bit of light. I had counted up to hole number twenty when I saw something that made my hair stand on end.

  An eye was looking at me. Staring at me through the hole.

  It was not just any old eye. I could see right through it. I could see the trees on the other side of it. It was not a human eye.

  I pulled up my pants fast. No one has ever pulled up their pants that fast before. I ran up that path and back to the house like greased lightning.

  I told Aunty Flo about it, but she didn’t believe me. ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘There is nothing down there. It’s just your imagination.’

  5

  You can imagine how I felt. Very nice. Very nice indeed, I don’t think. I was not going down there again. No way. Just think how you would feel at the bottom of the garden, in the dark, sitting on a dunny where someone had died. Not only died, but turned into a skeleton. Then there were cobwebs, redback spiders and eyes. Eyes looking at you through holes in the walls.

  I made up my mind. I wasn’t going down there again. Ever.

  I didn’t go there for a week. Then I started feeling a bit crook. I felt terrible. ‘You’re not looking well,’ said Aunty Flo. ‘You’ve not been regular, have you, dear? You’d better have some medicine.’

  The medicine fixed me up all right. I got the runs. I spent most of the day sitting down there. But what I was really worried about were the nights.

  Sure enough it happened: I had to go to the loo in the night. I took a torch and went slowly down the dark path. The trees were rustling and something seemed to be moaning. I told myself that it was a bird. I hoped that it was a bird. It had to be a bird.

  At last I reached the dunny. I went inside, shut the door, and locked it. I had no sooner sat down than something terrible happened. The torch slowly went out. The batteries were flat – as flat as a tack.

  I think I should tell you what happens to me when I get scared. My teeth start to chatter. They go clickety click. Very loudly.

  So there I was, sitting in the dark with my teeth chattering. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. You must have been able to hear the noise a mile away.

  I started to think about creepy things. Eyes. Bats. Vampires. Murderers. I was scared to death. I wanted to get out of there. My teeth were chattering louder and louder.

  Then the moon came out. Moonbeams shone through the space on top of the door. I felt a bit better – but only for a second. I looked up and my heart froze. A face was looking at me. An old man’s face. He had a beard and was wearing an old hat. He just stood there staring at me over the top of the door. And even worse, much worse, the moon was shining right through him. I could see through him. He didn’t block out the moonlight at all.

  6

  I couldn’t get out. The old man was on the other side of the door. I was trapped. I started screaming out, ‘Aunty Flo, Aunty Flo. Help! Help! A ghost!’

  The face looked startled. Then it disappeared. I didn’t waste any time – I kicked open the door and ran out. But fell flat on my face. I had forgotten to pull my pants up.

  When I finally pulled up my pants the ghost had gone. I tore up the path screaming out for Aunty Flo.

  Aunty Flo didn’t believe me. She knew I was scared. But she didn’t believe there was a ghost. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘there are no such things as ghosts. I have been going down there for sixty years, and I have never seen one.’

  I tried to make the best of it. I smiled. A weak smile, but a smile. Aunty Flo did not smile back. She was staring at me. Her mouth was hanging open. ‘Bob,’ she shouted. ‘Bob. One of your teeth is missing. One of your beautiful teeth.’

  I put my hand up to my mouth. Sure enough a front tooth was gone – broken clean off. I knew what had happened. My teeth had chattered so hard that the tooth had broken. That ghost had done it, now. I was starting to get mad with that ghost.

  Aunty Flo was upset. ‘You must have done it when you fell over,’ she said. She put some new batteries in the torch. Then we went to look for the tooth. There was no sign of it. There was no sign of the ghost either.

  The next day we went to the dentist. He had bad news for me. ‘You’ll have to have a plate,’ he said. ‘The tooth is gone and the piece that is left is split.’

  ‘What’s a plate?’ I asked.

  ‘Like false teeth,’ he told me. ‘But you will only have one tooth that is false. And you will have to look after it. They cost a lot of money, so don’t lose it. Clean it every night and put it in water when you go to bed. And don’t break it by biting string or hard objects.’

  The plate cost two hundred dollars. Can you believe that? Two hundred dollars. Aunty Flo had to pay up. It was a lot of money. She made sure I looked after that tooth. I had to clean it every night and every morning. She checked on it when I was in bed. Every night she looked at the tooth in the glass of water. If the plate wasn’t clean she made me do it again. She wouldn’t let me take it out of my mouth in the day. She thought I might lose it.

  That ghost had caused a lot of trouble. I had lost a tooth. And Aunty Flo had wasted two hundred dollars.

  7

  I didn’t see the ghost again for about a month. I stayed away from the bottom of the garden at n
ight time. I only went in the day. He didn’t come in the day any more. All the same, I made my visits very short.

  I did a lot of thinking about that ghost. Who was he? Why was he hanging around a dunny? I asked Aunty Flo about Old Ned who had died down there. ‘Aunty Flo,’ I said one day, ‘you know that old man who lived here when you lost your painting? What did he look like?’

  She looked sadly at the place where her lost painting used to hang. And then she said, ‘He always wore an old hat. And he had a beard. A long grey beard.’

  I knew at once that the ghost was Old Ned. I felt a bit sorry for him. Fancy having your skeleton sitting on a dunny for a year.

  All the same, I wished he would go away. I didn’t want to see him again. But of course I did.

  One night I just had to go. You know what I mean. I got my torch out and I went out into the dark, down to the bottom of the garden. I was scared – really scared. My teeth began to chatter again. They were really clacking. I was worried about my plate. With all the clacking it might break. I took it out and held it in my hand. There I sat, tooth in hand, and my real teeth chattering enough to wake the dead. I left the dunny door open. If Old Ned showed up I wanted to get away quickly. I didn’t want to be trapped.

  I did the job that I went for. Then I pulled up my pants. I reached up and pulled the chain. As I did so I could feel someone watching me. My hands started to shake. Badly. The plate slipped out of my hand and into the dunny. In a flash it was gone, flushed down the loo.

  When I turned around I saw Old Ned standing there. I could see right through him – through his hat, through his beard, through his hands and his face.

  He looked very sad – very sad indeed. I didn’t run. I didn’t feel quite so frightened now that I could see him properly. He was trying to say something. His mouth was moving, but no sound came out. And he was pointing. Pointing to the roof of the dunny. I looked up, but there was nothing to see. Just a rusty old roof.

  ‘What do you want?’ I heard myself say. ‘Why are you hanging around this loo all the time?’

  He couldn’t hear me. He just kept pointing at the roof of the dunny. Then he started to fade. He just started to fade away in front of my eyes. Then he was gone – vanished.

  I walked slowly up the path. I wasn’t scared any more; not of the ghost. He looked harmless. But I was scared of something else. I was scared of what Aunty Flo was going to say when she found that my plate had gone.

  8

  The next morning I jumped out of bed early. I wrote a note for Aunty Flo. It said:

  Aunty Flo

  Gone for a ride on my bike.

  I will be back for tea.

  Bob.

  I set out to look for my tooth. I wanted to find it before Aunty Flo knew that it was gone.

  I knew where the sewerage farm was. It was twenty miles away to the north. My tooth had gone north.

  It was a long way. The road was very dusty and hot. The paddocks were brown. All the cows were sitting under trees in the shade. There was no shade for me, but I kept riding.

  By lunchtime I could tell that I was getting close to the sewerage farm. I could smell it. It was a bad smell – a terrible smell. As I rode closer the smell got worse.

  At last I reached the farm. It had a high wire fence around it. Inside were a lot of brown ponds. In the middle of all the ponds was a hut. Inside the hut I could see a man. He was writing at a desk.

  That man had the worst job in the world. He was sitting down working in the middle of a terrible stink – a shocking stink. But he didn’t seem to mind. I held my nose with one hand and knocked on the open door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He was a little bald man with glasses. He looked friendly. He didn’t seem to care that I was holding my nose. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Have you seen a plate? Has a plate come through the sewer?’ It was hard to talk with my hand holding my nose. It sounded as if I had a cold.

  ‘A plate?’ he said. ‘No. A plate could not fit through the pipes. It would be too big.’

  ‘Not that sort of plate,’ I told him. ‘Not a dinner plate. A mouth plate. A plate with a tooth on it. A false tooth.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Why didn’t you say. False teeth. Yes, we have false teeth.’

  He went over to the wall. There were a lot of baskets there. They all had labels. One said ‘pens and pencils’. Another said ‘watches’. He brought over a basket and dumped it in front of me. It was full of false teeth.

  They were all dirty. They were brown. The man gave me a pair of tongs. I started to sort through them slowly. I felt a bit sick. I felt like throwing up. At last I found a plate with only one tooth on it. My precious plate! It looked yucky. It was brown and slimy. And it stank. I thought of where it had been. And where I found it.

  I didn’t know if I could ever put it in my mouth again. I wrapped it up in my handkerchief and rode slowly home.

  When I reached home I went up to the bathroom. I scrubbed the plate. I scrubbed it and scrubbed it. It got a lot cleaner but it was still the wrong colour. The tooth was not white enough. Next I boiled it in water, but it was still a bit grey. That was as clean as I could get it.

  I put it on the table and looked at it. I looked at it for a long time. Then I picked it up and closed my eyes. I shoved it in my mouth very quickly.

  9

  Old Ned had a lot to answer for. He had caused a lot of trouble. But all the same I felt sorry for him. It couldn’t be fun hanging around a toilet. I wondered why he was there, and why he looked so sad. I decided that I would go and see him to have a talk. I wasn’t scared of him any more.

  I waited until Aunty Flo had gone to bed. Then I took out my torch and set out for the dunny. It was very windy and wild. Clouds were blowing across the moon. The trees were all shaking. Leaves blew into my face. It seemed a long way to the bottom of the garden.

  When I reached the dunny it was empty. There was no sign of Old Ned. It was cold out in the wind, so I went inside and sat down.

  I waited for a long time. The wind started to get stronger. It blew the door shut with a bang. The moon went behind a cloud. It was very dark.

  The dunny started to shake. The wind was screaming and howling. Then the walls started to lean over. The wind was blowing the dunny over with me in it. There was a loud crash and the whole thing collapsed. It fell right over on its side. Everything went black.

  When I woke up the wind had stopped. My head hurt. But I was all right. No broken bones. Someone was bending over me. It was Old Ned.

  He was just the same as before. I could see right through him. But he was smiling. He looked happy. He was pointing at the roof of the dunny. It was all smashed up. I went over and had a look.

  Under a piece of tin was a picture frame. It was Aunty Flo’s missing painting, the stolen painting.

  I picked up the painting and put it under my arm. Aunty Flo would be glad to get it back. Very glad.

  I started to say thanks to Ned. But something was happening. He started to float up into the air. He was going straight up. He looked happy. Happy to be leaving the earth.

  He floated up towards the moon. He grew smaller and smaller. At last I couldn’t see him any more. He was gone. I knew he wouldn’t be coming back.

  10

  Aunty Flo was very pleased to get her painting back. She was so happy that she cried. She hung it on the wall in its old spot. She kept looking at it all the time.

  I didn’t tell her about Old Ned. She wouldn’t believe it anyway. But I think I know what happened.

  Old Ned stole the painting. He hid it in the dunny roof. When he died he was in Limbo. He was not in this world because he was dead. He could not go to the next world because he had done something bad.

  So he had to hang around the outside loo, hoping that Aunty Flo would find her painting. Now that she had got it back he was free to go. When he floated off into the air he was going to a happier place. Wherever that is.
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br />   Aunty Flo put in a new toilet. An inside one. It was all shiny and clean. A push-button job. No cobwebs, spiders or ghosts.

  Well, that is just about the end of the story. Except for one thing.

  One day I was looking at Aunty Flo’s lost painting. It was a painting of her house in the old days, when it had just been built. It had no trees around it. Out the back you could see the outside dunny with the door open.

  I looked very closely at that dunny in the picture. Someone was in it! Sitting down. I went and got a magnifying glass and looked again.

  It was Old Ned, with his hat and his long beard. He looked happy. He had a smile on his face, and one eye closed.

  He was winking at me.

  Snookle was delivered one morning with the milk. There were four half-litre bottles; three of them contained milk and the other held Snookle.

  He stared sadly at me from his glass prison. I could see he was alive even though he made no sign or movement. He reminded me of a dog on a chain that manages to make its owner feel guilty simply by looking unhappy. Snookle wanted to get out of that milk bottle but he didn’t really expect it to happen. He didn’t say anything, he just gazed silently into my eyes.

  I placed the three full bottles in the fridge and put Snookle and his small home on the table. Then I sat down and looked at him carefully. All I could see was a large pair of gloomy eyes. He must have had a body but it was nowhere to be seen. The eyes simply floated in the air about fifteen centimetres above the bottom of the bottle.

  Mum and Dad had already left for work so I wouldn’t get any help from them. I gave the bottle a gentle shake and the eyes bounced around like a couple of small rubber balls. The gloomy expression was replaced by one of alarm and the eyes blinked a number of times before settling back to their original position.