Spaghetti Legs

by John Larkin

  ‘Fantastic,’ yelled Eric, forgetting Grandma Underwood’s hip. ‘Do I have to stay with Auntie Dot though? Can’t I stay here?’

  ‘You can at the weekends. We’ll fill up the freezer before we go, and you can have Stephen stay over a couple of times if you like. But you are to stay with Auntie Dot during the week!’

  After dinner Eric went into his bedroom to do some thinking. They were going away for four weeks. The damage he could do to the place in that time was immense. He had already begun to think about wild parties and all-night Freddy Krueger video sessions with Stephen Brown. But just when his overactive mind reached fever pitch, he checked himself. He knew that there was a far better plan out there. A plan that would catapult him to stardom in the eyes of his classmates. But what?

  Despite his victory over Billy Nelson and Greg Fern, Eric was positive that he would still be a gangling, introverted misfit at school.

  He had written to Iggy a few weeks earlier, and asked him how he could become more popular. Iggy replied saying that Eric should change and read more.

  Eric took Iggy’s letter out of his bottom drawer and read those words again, ‘You should change and read more…’, ‘You should change and read more…’ His family were going away for four weeks, ‘You should change…’, ‘You should change…’ Four weeks by himself, ‘You should change…’, ‘You should change…’

  The idea circled the house, ‘You should change…’, ‘You should change…’, made its way into his bedroom, ‘You should change…’, hovered above his bed, ‘You should change…’, ‘You should change…’. Wham. It hit him.

  Dear Iggy,

  Thanks for your letter which I got last week. I’ve thought about your suggestion but I reckon that thirteen year olds read Paul Jennings and Roald Dahl rather than Jean-Paul Sartre, but I’ll think about it. Your other suggestion about changing myself though was great.

  I’m sitting on my bed writing this letter having just found out the rest of the fam are going to Yorkshire for four weeks to visit my grandma who’s not very well.

  They’ve arranged for me to stay with my crazy auntie but I’ve already figured how I can get out of that and stay here by myself.

  I haven’t quite worked out everything yet, but for the four weeks they’re gone, I’m going to change, a metamorphosis I think you called it, didn’t you?

  I’m sorry this letter is so short but I’m really excited and I want to start work changing myself as soon as possible. See you at Christmas. (I’m coming over to see you at Christmas.)

  Regards,

  Eric

  With the family booked to fly out on the Saturday, Eric busied himself for the remainder of the week making plans.

  When Saturday morning rolled around Eric got everybody ready quick smart. As soon as they got to the airport he ushered them through the departure gates and brushed off their feeble complaints that there were still three hours to go before the scheduled flight time. Although Eric wanted desperately to be a pilot when he grew up, he had bigger fish to fry and watched only a couple of arrivals before leaping excitedly into a taxi and heading home.

  When he got home he jumped onto his bike and rode round to his Auntie Dot’s house. He explained that he would be staying at a friend’s house rather than with her. Eric’s father always said that they should put her into a home for the prematurely bewildered. It was not that she was losing any of her smarts, but rather because she was always so busy she simply forgot to do things like put out the cat, the garbage, and the fire when she left her electric blanket on all day. She was fairly gullible, and had a spare room full of Avon to prove it. When Eric told her that he would not be staying with her, she seemed more interested in tracking down the source of a high-pitched whistling sound that seemed to be coming from the kitchen. ‘Oh, so you are staying with Stephen Brown. That’s nice, dear. Come around for tea sometime. Who’s doing all that whistling?’

  ‘It’s the kettle, Auntie Dorothy. I’ll see you later.’

  When Eric got home he raced round inside the house with Kitty and Basil, used his parents’ waterbed as a trampoline, played his Cure CDs at full volume, and generally went berserk. He had to force himself to eat a family block of dark chocolate and a whole tub of Neapolitan ice-cream before he finally settled down.

  When his stomach thawed out he started putting his metamorphosis together.

  He took some ice cubes out of the freezer and the bottle of black hair dye, that he’d bought a few days earlier, from under his mattress. He got a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer and his mother’s typewriter from on top of her wardrobe. He then set about Jenny’s Sex Pistols T-Shirt and his jeans with the scissors.

  When his clothes had the look of being caught in the middle of a fight between a shark and a crocodile he took the hair dye into the bathroom, looked at himself hard in the mirror and said, ‘Goodbye, Eric.’

  About an hour later when he emerged from the bathroom there was not a blond hair to be seen. Despite the fact that he got most of the dye on the floor and vanity unit, he didn’t do a bad job. Unfortunately, by the time he got back to his metamorphosis kit on the coffee table, the ice cubes had melted and he had to get more.

  He numbed his left ear with the ice for about twenty minutes before sticking a sterilised sewing needle through it. When he had finished running round the house yelping in pain, he inserted one of Jenny’s earrings into the freshly made hole. Jenny had taken most of her earrings to England, but Snoopy would do until he could go out and buy either a cheap sleeper or a stud from the chemist.

  Eric gazed at himself in the bathroom mirror. His aim was to look like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and Robert Smith from the Cure, and although he looked more like Jana Wendt, he was still quite pleased with the result. ‘Not bad, not bad. I’ll get my hair cut short up the back on Monday morning and put on some mascara and eyebrow pencil,’ said Eric to the new head in the mirror, ‘and nobody at school will recognise me.’

  When his hair had fully dried he went and put on his newly torn jeans and T-shirt, sat down at the typewriter, collected his thoughts and began to lie on paper.

  Dear Miss Hardy,

  My Eric’s English grandmother has fallen down several flights of stairs and is in the local infrimi ifir hospital. We are all quiet quite upset about it that’s why there are so many mistakes in this letter.

  Could you please excuse Eric from class for the next for four weeks as we have gone are going to visit her.

  He won’t fall behind because he’s very smart and we’ve insisted that he take his books.

  Yours sinccerl sinceer faithfully,

  Mr & Mrs Underwood.

  He was more than pleased with the letter and felt sure that Miss Hardy would believe it. He realised though that the letter introducing his cousin would have to be mistake free. If it wasn’t, Miss Hardy might get suspicious.

  The next stop was a name, a name that would reflect his new image. A name that said here’s someone who’s intelligent, thoughtful, opinionated, well read, and obviously a member of Greenpeace. The name was clearly going to need a hyphen or two. Finally, after experimenting with a name that had seven hyphens, he came up with the character of Jean-Paul Ramsbottom and hoped that Mr Sartre and Mrs Suede wouldn’t mind too much him nicking their names.

  Dear Sir/Madam,

  My son Jean-Paul will be attending your school for the next four weeks while we are visiting Australia. Unfortunately I am not able to make it to his enrolment as I am going to Canberra to chain myself to an embassy gate in order to get the United States to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

  We once took Jean-Paul to a numerologist and she said his letter is ‘V’. Because of this he usually works better when he sits next to someone whose name begins with ‘V’. I hope you have someone in your class called Vladamir or Veronica or something. I will be happy to discuss any of these issues with you when I return from jail.

  Regards,

  Joan Ramsbottom
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br />   Eric was happy with the start of this letter, even if he did get most of the facts from one of the local papers. He realised however that the second paragraph was taking things to about 9.8 on the Richter scale of bullshit and got rid of it with whiteout. He would have to find another way of getting close to Veronica Roberts.

  After finishing his letter he went and took another look at himself in the bathroom mirror. He almost had to take a cold shower he was so excited.

  A knock on the front door caused the bulge in his jeans to deflate slightly.

  Eric hoped and prayed that it wasn’t Auntie Dot. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Veronica Roberts. Let me in, Eric, I want you badly.’

  ‘It is not. It’s you, Stephen.’

  ‘Well, have you done it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘C’mon then, let me in! I want to see what you look like.’

  ‘Okay. But close your eyes till you’re inside.’

  Eric opened the front door and led Stephen to the lounge room.

  ‘Can I open my eyes yet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Stephen slowly opened his eyes and looked at Eric. ‘Wow. I mean, Wow.’

  ‘Do I look different?’

  ‘I reckon!’

  ‘Can you tell it’s me?’

  ‘If you look close you can see that it’s your face, but even I had to look twice.’

  ‘Nobody looks at me once usually, let alone twice, so I should be okay. Do you reckon I could get away with being somebody unrelated? Or do you still think I should be my own cousin?’

  ‘McManus and Whittle would be stupid enough to believe it. But Miss Hardy and Miss Livingstone are pretty cluey. Play it safe. Be a cousin!’

  ‘What about an injury? Do you think I should walk with a limp or something?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll say I’ve been bitten by a shark?’

  ‘Don’t bullshit too much. People won’t buy everything. Did it hurt when you pierced your ear?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s still throbbing a bit. Are you staying over tonight?’

  ‘You bet.’

  To celebrate the arrival of Jean-Paul Ramsbottom, Eric and Stephen decided to have a party. They danced to Eric’s Cure CDs, played full contact musical chairs, which consisted of placing one chair in the middle of the floor and then running and diving at it from opposite sides of the room. And just generally went crazy.

  When daylight faded they played hide and seek in the dark before sending out for a large pizza and slumping down in front of the tv to watch a film. It was the best party either of them ever had.

  They finally got to bed around midnight after falling asleep in front of the tv for a couple of hours. And as cool night breeze drifted in through the bedroom window, some 33,000 feet above Southeast Asia, Eric’s mother bought another bottle of duty free perfume while his father tried in vain to get himself out of a toilet that was moving at about 900 kilometres an hour.

  Eric nervously edged towards the classroom like a whale approaching the coast of Japan. He tapped on the door gently and was quite surprised to hear a familiar booming voice tell him to come in.

  He opened the door and a loud gasp sounded through the room. Eric wasn’t sure whether it was because they recognised him or they were shocked at his appearance.

  ‘If you want St Vincent de Paul’s,’ said the teacher referring to Eric’s heavily slashed jeans, ‘it’s out the gate and ten kilometres on the right. You can’t miss it, it’s full of people buying safari suits for fancy dress parties.’

  ‘I’m new here, Sir.’ Eric hoped his accent was somewhere between London and Paris. Although he didn’t realise it, his accent put him just to the west of Ireland. But neither the teacher nor his classmates were very good with accents and wouldn’t have been shocked if they were told that the new student came from Paraguay and spoke in a forgotten Danish dialect.

  Eric handed the teacher his note.

  ‘They told me to come here, Sir, to take Eric Underwood’s place. He’s my cousin. We’re looking after their house while they’re away in England,’ said Eric, lying through his teeth. He hadn’t gone to the administration office at all. He’d brought the note straight to his English class. ‘I’m a refugee,’ he added when he felt the teacher was not digesting the note.

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘War-torn France.’

  ‘France isn’t at war, is it?’

  ‘Oh umm, it’s not a very big war, it didn’t even make the local papers in Paris.’ Eric reckoned he could pull off the lie because Mr Lawrence had been away for quite a while.

  ‘Eric never told us he had a French cousin. Then again, Eric never told us much about anything unfortunately. Okay Jean…’

  ‘That’s Jean-Paul, Sir, with a hyphen.’

  ‘Okay, Jean-Paul, do you think you could possibly manage to wear the school uniform while you are with us?’

  ‘We’re not very well off,’ said Eric, trying to pull Veronica Roberts’ heart strings. ‘My parents believe in bread before threads.’

  Stephen, who handed Mr Lawrence Eric’s first note, couldn’t believe the lies Eric was coming out with. He sat visibly cringing at his desk.

  ‘I think you could manage a pair of grey jeans and a white shirt. If not, borrow some of Eric’s clothes,’ said Mr Lawrence.

  ‘Well, class, it’s quite a day today. My first day back, Eric Underwood’s off to England and now his cousin Jean-Paul has joined our humble hall of learning. Please take a seat, Jean-Paul.’

  And as Eric limped to his desk, Stephen buried his head in his hands. He couldn’t believe that they’d pulled it off.

  Halfway through the lesson Mr Lawrence left the class to go to the staff room.

  ‘Oi, spikehead,’ said Billy Nelson. ‘Are you really a Frenchy?’

  ‘No. I was born in England, but my parents travelled all over Europe and I’ve lived for years in France.’

  ‘Well, I reckon French kids stink. All you Frenchys do all day’s sit round eating garlic and perving at chicks.’

  Some of the class started to laugh and Eric felt that he’d better answer before the mood swung against him.

  ‘One more word from you, Nelson, and I’ll knock your teeth so far down your throat you’ll have to stick your toothbrush up your backsi…’

  ‘That will be quite enough, Jean-Paul!’ Mr Lawrence was back.

  ‘How’d you know my name, Frog-legs?’

  ‘Eric told me all about you, and how he kicked your backside.’

  ‘Thank you, Jean-Paul,’ said Mr Lawrence.

  ‘Listen, Froggy…’

  ‘Billy Nelson, keep your lips together or I’ll come up there and staple them shut,’ said Mr Lawrence. ‘Just for a change, Billy, just this once, just to see how you fare, why don’t you try being nice to people? If it doesn’t work out you can always go back to being a moron.’

  ‘Eiffel Tower-head started it, Sir.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe, Billy.’

  ‘Well he did.’

  ‘Okay Billy, I’m not going to call you a liar directly. I’ll let the rest of the class do that. Hands up those who think Billy started picking on Jean-Paul.’

  After Eric had given Billy Nelson a sound beating the previous week, the rest of the class no longer lived in fear of him and slowly but surely their hands went up.

  ‘Thank you, class. Now hands up those who think Jean-Paul started the exchange.’

  Greg Fern’s hand shot up. The only one.

  ‘That’s detention this afternoon for you Billy, and you too, Greg.’

  ‘What did I do, Sir?’

  ‘Well, it’s either you or the rest of the class that’s lying to me. I’m going with the numbers.’

  Eric could not believe how well it was going. He was actually in the class as Jean-Paul and he could feel them all looking at him. He’d won them over. Now all he had to do was start showing everybody how clever and witty he was and a fan club would be formed f
or sure.

  ‘…so you see class,’ Mr Lawrence was digressing from the English lesson as usual, ‘war very rarely solves anything…’

  ‘But it’s sometimes unavoidable,’ interrupted Eric.

  ‘Explain yourself, Jean-Paul.’

  ‘The Nazis had to be stopped.’

  ‘Agreed, but continue.’

  ‘Umm ahhh, although pacifism helped remove the British from India and the peace activists are always singing “Give Peace a Chance”, it sometimes takes more than a bunch of flowers and a guitar to stop a war. Sometimes you have to fight for peace,’ said Eric, quoting from one of his father’s deeper moments. He hoped Mr Lawrence would not continue too much longer. Apart from a bit about the Second World War, the pacifists of India, and the Gulf War, all memorised like a parrot from his father and Iggy, Eric knew hardly anything about the history of world conflict.

  ‘I agree, Jean-Paul. Sometimes you have to cut out a cancer with a knife. But, isn’t it better to stop the cancer from starting in the first place?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘Take the Gulf War for instance. Probably the most avoidable war in recent times. Well, it was billed as a battle of David versus Goliath…’

  ‘But Goliath won,’ said Eric, interrupting.

  ‘That’s because the biblical Goliath did not have laser-guided missiles. War is the law of the jungle I’m afraid, only the sticks and clubs of our ancestors have been replaced by technology. We turned Baghdad into a place that Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone wouldn’t have set up home in, all to give the people of Kuwait their freedom. What about the people of Baghdad? What about their freedom? Is it their fault they’ve got a fruitcake for a leader?’

  Eric was saved from having to answer when the bell went for the end of the period. And although he felt he had lost the debate, he was sure that he’d put in a pretty good showing and earned Mr Lawrence’s respect.

  The class was packing up. ‘Good job Jean-Paul. I enjoyed our little verbal battle. Billy and Greg, as this is my first day back I’m going to let you off. But I do not want a repeat performance.’