Second Childhood

by Morris Gleitzman

  Mark looked back down at the concrete pipe at his feet. Greeny-black liquid trickled out of the pipe and into the water, where it spread out into an ever-larger murky cloud.

  I did that, thought Mark.

  Mrs Abrozetti had given up calling Pino in the mornings. It was like trying to wake the dead. She’d found a better way than shouting herself hoarse.

  Television.

  As she did each morning, she switched it on and turned the sound up.

  Pino opened his eyes. His bedroom door was open. Every night when he went to bed he closed it and every morning when he woke up it was open.

  And the television was blaring.

  He could see the screen from his bed. A fat man wearing leather shorts and braces was speaking German very slowly. Each time he said a word it appeared on the screen in print.

  Every morning, thought Pino. If Mum wants me to learn German why doesn’t she say so?

  Then he remembered he’d just woken up and he was meant to be looking for clues.

  On the screen the man was holding up a decorated beer mug.

  ‘Ein Stein,’ said the man.

  Ein Stein said the words on the screen.

  ‘Ein Stein,’ said Pino.

  His eyes widened.

  Rufus always slept with his head under the pillow.

  When Mum gave him his wake-up yell it made her sound as if she was in New Zealand.

  It meant, though, that when he opened his eyes he couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Rufus,’ yelled Mrs Wainwright, ‘you’re not going to school till you’ve cleaned up that pigsty.’

  Rufus opened his eyes. He couldn’t see anything. Then he remembered what he was meant to be looking for.

  He slid his head out from under the pillow, eyes wide open.

  The first thing he saw was red and flat.

  His school folder.

  Something was written on it.

  ‘Wainwright’.

  Rufus sat up, excitedly repeating the word to himself.

  ‘Wainwright, Wainwright.’

  Then his face fell.

  ‘That’s me.’

  Daryl walked across the city square holding a spoon out in front of him and slowly swinging it from side to side.

  This is dumb, he thought.

  He’d been doing it for days, ever since he’d seen Mark doing it.

  If Mark was going to turn out to have been a somebody in a past life, he was too. That’s if he could get this dumb self-hypnosis to work.

  Daryl stared at his reflection and swung the spoon faster. Suddenly he saw a flash of light and he was sitting on the ground and his head hurt.

  He looked up at the stone column he’d just walked into. On top of it was a statue of a fierce-looking woman in a long dress.

  Queen Victoria.

  ‘Jeez,’ said Daryl, ‘I’m a woman.’

  Pino and Rufus finally saw Mark sitting under a tree on the far side of the school oval. They ran over to him, shouting excitedly.

  ‘Smalley! Smalley! It worked!’

  ‘We know who we are!’

  ‘I’m Albert Einstein,’ yelled Pino, ‘the greatest scientist who ever lived. I invented the theory of relatives.’

  ‘I’m somebody Wainwright,’ shouted Rufus. ‘I don’t know what he did yet but he’s probably a relative of mine.’

  ‘You’re not the only one who’s going to cream the project in,’ said Pino as they reached Mark.

  They stopped dead and stared.

  Mark was tearing his Henry Ford project into little pieces.

  11

  Mark sat hunched in a cubicle in the school library video room and stared at the ancient black-and-white news film on the screen.

  He watched himself, middle-aged and still wearing the funny-looking suit, walking around a car factory inspecting old-fashioned cars on the assembly line.

  On the screen he looked very pleased with himself.

  In the cubicle he wasn’t pleased with himself at all.

  I should have known, he thought. I should have known what inventing car factories would lead to.

  Mark realised Annie was watching over his shoulder.

  ‘I should have known,’ he said.

  ‘You should have,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you tell when you looked in the bathroom mirror how daggy that suit was?’

  Mark glared at her.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I thought a joke might help.’

  Mark sighed. He wished it could.

  Annie sighed too.

  ‘You’re not the only one who should have known,’ she said, and went back to her cubicle.

  Mark followed.

  ‘I’ve had to live with this for three months,’ said Annie, ‘ever since it was on television.’

  She pressed the play button and an old black-and-white film appeared on her screen.

  It was a horse race. The Melbourne Cup, 1930. At first all Mark could see was a confusion of horses, all galloping like crazy. There were lots of shots of spectators getting excited, most of them looking as though they bought their clothes at the same shop as Henry Ford.

  Then there was just Phar Lap, galloping to victory with great muscular strides.

  Mark wished he’d looked that good in his past life.

  He’d just started to wonder why Annie was looking so depressed when a reporter’s voice started up on the video.

  ‘Australia, they say, is in the grip of a gambling addiction,’ said the reporter. The screen showed modern-day people queueing to place bets at a TAB. ‘Experts believe,’ continued the reporter, ‘the habit often starts when a harmless once-a-year bet comes in a winner. By that reckoning, it seems safe to say that Phar Lap created more gambling addicts than any other Australian sporting champion.’

  Annie stopped the tape.

  ‘I should have known too,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d jumped the fence and run off to a paddock somewhere instead of winning all those Melbourne Cups.’

  Mark looked at her distraught face and wished he could say something to make her feel better. But all he could think of was that he wished he’d gone to the pictures instead of inventing the Model T Ford.

  ‘Oh no!’

  The shout had come from the next cubicle.

  Mark and Annie peered in.

  It was Pino, staring at a screen that was showing nuclear explosions and black-and-white cities with not a single building standing, and modern missiles being loaded into submarines.

  ‘Without Einstein’s principles of nuclear physics,’ the voice-over was saying, ‘there would have been no destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no arsenal of nuclear weapons for nations to aim at each other.’

  Pino stopped the tape.

  They all looked at each other.

  None of them knew what to say.

  Rufus broke the silence, running in with a volume of an encyclopaedia.

  ‘There’s a Wainwright!’ he said excitedly. ‘Enoch Wainwright. I can’t look. What do you think he’ll be, a genius, a billionaire or a sporting legend?’

  None of the others answered, so Rufus opened the encyclopaedia and read out loud.

  ‘Enoch Wainwright. In 1593 he invented . . . tarpaulin.’ Rufus stared at the page. ‘Tarpaulin?’

  He looked at Mark, Annie and Pino, crushed.

  ‘Well, this is a busy little group.’

  It was Mr Cruickshank, smiling broadly.

  ‘Wainwright and Abrozetti, doing research. Well done. Your new-found enthusiasm must be catching, Smalley. Keep it up. I’ll be expecting something very special from all of you.’

  Still smiling broadly, he went out.

  Mark, Annie, Pino and Rufus looked at each other glumly.

  At the end of the afternoon, as they walked out of school, they were still lost in their own gloomy thoughts.

  It was Pino who broke the silence.

  ‘Let’s try and be positive,’ he said. ‘Forget about the bad stuff. There’s heaps of good stuff to put in the project.
What brand of toothpaste we used, stuff like that.’

  ‘Where would the world be without tarpaulin?’ said Rufus. ‘No tents, nothing.’

  ‘Let’s do the project, get the best grades we can and stop being dags,’ said Pino.

  Mark was about to answer him when Daryl came running up waving a book about Queen Victoria.

  ‘Mark! Mark!’ he said, wide-eyed with alarm. ‘This reckons I invaded Africa, India and China and killed thousands of people and took slaves and broke up families and made everyone read the Bible. I didn’t, did I?’

  Mark had always been proud of how he could be a solid big brother when he had to be. When Daryl’s first tooth had come out early and Daryl had panicked and thought the Smurfs were taking him apart at night, it had been Mark who had put him at ease.

  Now, though, Mark opened his mouth to say something reassuring and nothing came out.

  Pino grabbed the book and scanned the back cover.

  ‘You weren’t all bad,’ he said to Daryl. ‘As well as being Queen of England for most of the 1800s you were the greatest empress of modern times. You had hundreds of millions of subjects.’

  But Daryl had seen the expression on Mark’s face.

  ‘There aren’t hundreds of millions of subjects,’ said Daryl glumly. ‘There’s only maths, English, geography . . .’

  Mark put his hand on Daryl’s shoulder.

  ‘We’re all in the same boat,’ he said. ‘We’ve all done crook things. I should have known what inventing car factories would lead to.’

  ‘You should have known what feeding my guineapig curried prawns would lead to,’ said Rufus, ‘but that didn’t stop you.’

  ‘I should have known what people betting on me would lead to,’ said Annie to Daryl. ‘When people get addicted to gambling, they’ll gamble with anything, even the planet.’

  ‘I’m not listening to any more of this,’ said Pino, ‘I’m getting on with the project. Did they have toothpaste early this century?’

  ‘We can’t ignore it,’ said Mark. ‘We did this stuff. We’re responsible.’

  ‘Easy for you,’ said Pino. Suddenly he was on the verge of tears. ‘You just invented a few car factories. I’ve brought the whole planet to the brink of nuclear destruction.’

  Annie put her arm around him.

  ‘You weren’t to know,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve got to make up for what we’ve done,’ said Mark.

  There, he’d said it.

  He’d been thinking it for hours but it had taken this long to actually say it.

  The others stared at him.

  ‘Oh, right, okay,’ said Pino, ‘I’ll just pop over to America and Russia and tell them they can’t use my principles of nuclear physics any more.’

  ‘I’m serious,’ said Mark. ‘We’ve got to make up for what we’ve done.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Annie.

  ‘How?’ said Daryl.

  ‘How?’ said Rufus.

  12

  The proprietor of the Punjab Indian Restaurant hung the Closed sign on the door and walked slowly over to the till where his wife was massaging her feet and counting the night’s takings.

  ‘You go to bed, dear,’ said the proprietor, ‘I’ll do the washing up.’

  ‘Thanks, love,’ said his wife with a tired smile.

  The proprietor walked wearily towards the kitchen, mentally preparing himself for the mountain of curry-crusted pots, pans, plates and cutlery.

  He pushed open the kitchen door and his jaw dropped.

  Stacked neatly on the table were the pots, pans, plates and cutlery, all washed and dried and sparkling clean.

  Pinned to the drying-up cloth was a note.

  The proprietor picked it up and read it.

  His jaw dropped even further.

  ‘Sorry,’ it said, signed ‘Queen Victoria.’

  Outside in the yard behind the restaurant, Mark and the others crouched behind garbage bins and peered into the kitchen window.

  ‘He’s reading it,’ said Pino.

  ‘He’s shaking his head in astonishment,’ said Rufus.

  ‘He looks happy,’ said Annie.

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Daryl. ‘My arms are killing me and I’ve ripped Mum’s rubber gloves. Fair go, I only invaded two continents.’

  Mark watched as the proprietor smiled and scratched his head and sat down and read the note again.

  ‘It’s not much,’ said Mark, ‘but it’s a start.’

  The Japanese tourists stood in front of State Parliament House, smiling and chatting as they took photos of the building and each other and their tour leader.

  Mark, Annie, Pino, Rufus and Daryl stood nearby, watching.

  ‘Remember,’ said Mark, ‘relaxed and natural.’

  Pino blew his cheeks out several times like he’d seen someone do once on World Championship Wrestling just before they went into the ring against The Detroit Killer.

  ‘Straighten your hair,’ said Rufus.

  Pino ran his fingers through his hair.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Annie.

  ‘Relaxed and natural,’ said Mark.

  Pino blew his cheeks out a few more times, then walked over to the Japanese tourists. Mark and the others followed a few paces behind.

  ‘Greetings,’ said Pino loudly. ‘I come in peace.’

  Mark and Annie swapped a pained look.

  The tour leader looked at Pino with a puzzled expression.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, in Japanese.

  ‘Look, er, it’s like this,’ said Pino. ‘Ages and ages ago I came up with some principles of nuclear physics, and . . . well, I didn’t know they could be used for making bombs and things so I showed them to other people and they did and they . . . dropped them on you.’

  The tour leader and her party stared at Pino, brows wrinkled with incomprehension.

  ‘World War Two,’ said Pino. ‘Bombs. Atom bombs. Nuclear.’

  The Japanese tourists looked at each other and shrugged.

  ‘Einstein,’ said Pino.

  The Japanese tourists repeated this to each other, mystified.

  Pino realised he wasn’t getting through. He made an explosion noise and threw his arms up in the air.

  The tour leader’s face lit up.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘fireworks. Very pretty.’

  ‘Hiroshima,’ said Pino desperately. ‘Nagasaki.’

  The Japanese tourists looked suddenly grave and murmured among themselves.

  ‘Please,’ said the tour leader, putting her hand on Pino’s arm. ‘You too young. Not your fault.’

  ‘No, it was, it was, and I want to make it up to you,’ said Pino.

  The tour leader was looking mystified again.

  Pino decided to try using shorter sentences.

  ‘Make,’ he said. ‘It. Up. To. You.’

  The tour leader still didn’t understand.

  Mark stepped forward.

  ‘We’d like you to come with us,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  Once Mark and Annie and Pino and Rufus and Daryl had persuaded the tour leader to climb through the hole in the fence, the rest of her party followed.

  Annie saw a couple of the Japanese tourists throwing nervous glances back at their tour bus parked at the kerb.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘it’s Sunday. No parking cops on Sunday.’

  Mark led them across the demolition site, thankful that Dad and his mates weren’t doing weekend overtime.

  He stopped by a half-demolished old building, picked up a sledgehammer and handed it to Pino.

  Pino waited till the Japanese tourists had gathered round, then swung the sledgehammer into the wall, knocking out a couple of bricks.

  The Japanese tourists looked at each other, mystified.

  Mark took the sledgehammer from Pino and handed it to the burliest of the male tourists.

  ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki,’ said Pino. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  The burly Japanese tourist looked pu
zzled. He glanced at the tour leader. She looked puzzled too.

  Pino and Mark mimed swinging the hammer into the wall.

  The burly Japanese tourist swung the hammer into the wall. Part of it collapsed.

  The other Japanese tourists applauded.

  The burly Japanese tourist grinned.

  He swung the hammer again and another piece of wall fell down.

  The others applauded loudly.

  And suddenly they all wanted a go. Mark, Annie, Pino, Rufus and Daryl gathered up all the hammers and picks they could find and pressed them into eager hands.

  Rufus handed a pick to an elderly man.

  ‘Have you ever had any major disasters in Japan involving tarpaulin?’ he asked hopefully.

  The man looked blank. ‘Tar-pau-rin?’ he said.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Rufus sadly.

  Soon the demolition site was ringing with excited shouts and the crash of falling bricks.

  Pino, beaming, appeared through the clouds of dust and gave Mark a punch on the arm.

  ‘Great, eh?’ said Pino.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mark.

  It’s still only a start though, he thought.

  13

  Mark and Annie stood on the front doorstep of a small suburban cottage.

  Annie rang the bell.

  ‘Do you speak any Russian?’ asked Mark.

  ‘Mrs Karpovsky speaks English,’ said Annie. ‘She used to clean our house before communism ended in Russia.’

  ‘Why did she stop?’ asked Mark.

  ‘Dad reckoned Russians weren’t persecuted any more, so he hired a single mother.’

  The door opened and a plump elderly woman saw Annie and beamed.

  ‘They’re American,’ said Mark.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Pino.

  ‘She’s got California written on her cap,’ said Mark. ‘Come on.’

  He and Pino went over to the American couple photographing the art gallery.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mark, ‘would you like some soup from the Russian people?’

  The Americans stared at him.

  ‘What say?’ said the man. ‘Soup?’

  Mark and Pino pointed to where Mrs Karpovsky, Annie, Rufus and Daryl were standing with the refreshment trolley that Pino’s dad hired out for weddings. A steaming metal tub stood on the trolley, and a sign saying ‘The Russian People Greet The American People – Free Soup.’