‘And I don’t approve of hats at the table.’
I had to change the subject. ‘If you get curly hair from eating sprouts, what happens if you already have curly hair?’
‘You haven’t.’
She looked down at the whitish goo from her pie which was running all over her plate.
My chance! Bye-bye, Soggy.
I threw Soggy as far as I could. I tried for the window, which was really dumb because it wasn’t even open. I hit the big photo of Mildew’s dead husband. Soggy landed wham on one of his eyes and slowly slid down his cheek. When Soggy got to the frame, by Uncle Fred’s hands, he stuck there. Uncle Fred looked as though he was holding Soggy like a bouquet.
I heard Mildew spluttering.
I didn’t dare look at her. I started tittering, then laughing really loudly, then gasping for breath. I had to push my chair away and stand up straight.
Then I bent over double and laughed more. My cap fell off and the uncrushable wig sprang up and shook itself wildly at her.
Mildew leapt up in the air, clutching her heart. ‘Your hair! Your hair!’ she shrieked.
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t get my breath. She looked at me, then marched into the kitchen, grabbed a wet cloth and came stomping back. I thought she was going to gag me and so I stopped laughing very quickly. But she marched over to the portrait and wiped off poor Soggy.
In the sudden silence we glared at each other, enemies for life.
‘I don’t need to eat any more Brussels sprouts,’ I said. ‘I’ve got curly hair now. I just looked at that sprout and—magic! I could feel my hair twisting and writhing like snakes!’
Then I ran. Mildew cornered me in the hall. She knew the dark house better than I did. She yanked the bright pink and green wig off my head. I didn’t wait to explain. I saw the stairs and bolted up them to the safety of the attic room.
But was it safe? I was trapped up there, with the sheer drop from the window two storeys to the ground. I’d seen the fierce look in Mildew’s eyes. I was scared.
5
On Tuesday morning, four sprouts leered at me through the plastic container in the fridge. I grabbed the milk and poured it over my cereal. The milk hit a bend in a cornflake and splashed all over the bench.
‘Monster! You are so messy! Get outside!’
That suited me just fine. I took the longest route. As I walked through the kitchen then the hall and the dining room, I counted the number of rows of nails in the floorboards which showed where the under-floor joists were.
‘Hurry up!’ she called.
‘I’m going,’ I said.
Outside, I found a small, wooden door that led under the house. The bolt was rusty and cobwebby, so I guessed the door wasn’t used much. I started twisting the bolt back and forth. I heard breathing; heavy, ragged breathing. I whirled around. Behind me, an unfit man was coming around the corner of the house. He was wheezing and panting and carrying a tool bag. His face was blotchy and he had a huge, purple nose. The strange thing was that the super-unfriendly Bloat ran up to him and licked his hand.
‘Hi,’ I said.
The man got a real fright. He obviously wasn’t expecting to see me. He said something like ‘Didn’t think you’d arrived yet’, and wheezed and puffed his way back along the path and out the gate. He left his tool bag behind. He must have been some sort of workman, but why didn’t he want me to see him?
Bloat’s snuffly nose sniffed in the bag. Expertly, he took out a sandwich wrapped in paper. He wolfed it down, paper included. Maybe there was another sandwich. I examined the bag. Just tools. Useless, inedible tools.
Then I saw a hand drill.
Just what I needed for my sprouts escape plan.
I hid it in the hedge.
Later, after a lunch of slimy parsnip-pie leftovers, I tied Bloat up and crawled under the house with the torch from Mildew’s car boot. It was dusty under there. Mice scampered about. I couldn’t see much, but I heard the telephone ring up above in the house.
‘You can’t come around when my nephew’s here. It wouldn’t be right. He’s a nosey so-and-so. Doesn’t miss a trick.’
Who was Mildew talking to? And why?
I crawled forward, looking up at the beams instead of ahead. My hand touched something hard and smooth, and very cold. I swung the torch out in front.
I was staring at a pile of bones. Big bones, some with knobs on the end. Leg bones. Full-grown leg bones. I couldn’t look any longer, but there were certainly more than two of them.
Was Aunt Mildew a murderer? And that purple-nosed man hanging around—was he her accomplice? It would certainly explain why her husband had died so young.
Then I had another thought. The Brussels sprouts, waiting for me to eat at dinner: were they laced with cyanide? Was I going to be the next victim? Were my bones going to sit on top of that pile, too?
I needed to see ordinary, safe people. I decided to go for a walk. I even decided to take Bloat for protection.
‘Bye, Aunt. I’m taking Bloat for a walk.’ I rattled Bloat’s chain and lead. I was as cool as a can of Coke out of the fridge. As I left I looked over my shoulder: through the window I saw Mildew reaching for the phone. Who was she phoning? And why?
I had a feeling she was saying ‘Coast’s clear. He’s out.’ It was a strange feeling.
Bloat spat and wheezed along beside me. He sounded and looked like a sausage about to split open in a frying pan.
We stopped by a massive whamming machine, like a crane except it was dropping a ginormous lead weight from a great height onto the ground, and then lifting it and whamming it down again. The ground shook.
‘What yer doin?’ I asked one of the guys standing around, splattered in mud.
‘Ramming the earth so we can build on top of it.’
I nodded my head slowly. The guy bit into this really tasty-looking bread roll he was holding. I was starving. Bloat wee’d up against the guy’s gumboot, and the guy kicked him away. This annoyed Bloat. He growled, showing his yellow teeth. Then he sprang into the air and grabbed the bread roll. Gulp. Gulp. It was gone. The end of the workman’s morning tea.
We ran for it. I was scared the big whammer was going to come down on my head. We ran all the way to the edge of the forest. By then I was my old trickster self again, and my mind had planned a new trick. A wonderful trick. No one was going to poison me. I had invented a Brussels-sprout whammer.
All I had to do was make sure you couldn’t see the crushing going on, and the resulting slime. With bread and plastic I could do that. Easy.
Someone was approaching. I ducked into a hedge and pulled Bloat in with me. It was the same ugly man with the amazing purple nose I’d seen in Mildew’s garden. He was walking very quickly, and I knew just where he was going.
So what? Leave them to it. They were probably plotting to be rid of me by the next day. Tough. They wouldn’t succeed. I was too smart to end up as a pile of bones under the house.
My stomach rumbled. I turned along the track to Sylvie’s house.
‘My aunt confiscated your wig. You’ll never see it again,’ I said.
We were sitting in Sylvie’s warm kitchen. She was sipping tea and I was chomping my way through a rolled-up chocolate log cake, with oozy cream inside and chocolate hail on the outside. I didn’t tell her about Mildew the murderess, and the pile of bones. Didn’t want to look stupid. I knew what adults would believe and what they wouldn’t. And anyway, I could handle old Mildew and Purple Nose. But as my stomach used its whamming crusher mechanism to deal to the chocolate log, I told her about the wig.
‘No worries about the old wig,’ she laughed. ‘How about dreadlocks? My daughter, Adele, is a trained hairdresser. She’d do it for you.’
‘Nah,’ I said. My hair was quite long, because last time Mum had made me go to the hairdresser to get a haircut I’d done exactly what she said and no more. I’d got one hair cut. One hair. It was one at the back. I’d made the hairdresser wrap it in cling film
and give it to me so I could prove to Mum I’d had a haircut. She was angry, especially as I’d gone to a very posh hairdresser and the minimum charge was $25.
‘Nah. I’ll think of something else.’
Just then the door opened and in came this princess—long, bouncy, yellow hair, big brown eyes with little emerald-green lights in them. She had furry eyelashes and this smile that—I’m not joking—had a laser effect. It dissolved all the chocolate cake inside me.
‘Hi, I’m Adele.’
‘Hi. I’ve come around to book an appointment for dreads.’
I never miss an opportunity, even if I’ve been lase-rzapped.
My whole skin seemed to be wrinkling and sliding off me and filling my shoes, socks and ankles.
‘Come to the hairdresser’s in the shopping centre tomorrow morning at nine.’
‘You bet.’
6
Dinner!’ shouted the murdering Mildew, intent on slowly poisoning me with cyanide-laced Brussels sprouts.
We sat down, one of us at each end of the dining-room table, for Tuesday’s Battle of the Brussels Sprouts. I had nothing to fear. I was going to use my whammer trick.
When I’d set the table I’d put a circle of cling film where my plate was going to go. I’d stretched it so smooth that you couldn’t notice it. When Mildew handed me a plate of runny mince glop I very quickly, like a magician, took a slice of bread and slid it under my plate on top of the cling film. I was ready. My weapon was loaded.
Mildew pushed the see-through container of deadly Brussels sprouts down the table towards me. She didn’t say anything. She just used her electric-drill eyes. I’m sure the black bits in the centre were revolving at high speed.
The container was covered in tiny droplets of water. The four sprouts were misty humps of green through the plastic.
I peeled the lid off and did a huge breathe-out. Hi, Squelchy, Slimy, Oozy and Glaucous.
None of them moved. Squelchy was sagging on top of the others. He looked as though he was about to disintegrate into slime.
I had to breathe in. I turned my head, but even so the horrible smell went straight up my nose. I shuddered.
‘If you’re cold, put on that lovely mohair jersey.’
Then she peered more closely at me. ‘Where is that lovely mohair jersey?’
I stabbed my fork into Squelchy. He hissed and collapsed like an old balloon. Green slime seeped out of him.
‘Where is it? If you’ve lost it, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll murder you.’
I needed all my concentration to get Squelchy from the container to the edge of my plate. I’d cleared a no-go zone there, away from the runny mince. I didn’t look at Mildew. But she’d said it: I’ll murder you. And I had lost the jersey. Inside I turned as cold as Squelchy.
‘You are not a pleasant child, Monster. Get that dinner down you. What will your mother think if you haven’t eaten any greens, and you go back constipated?’
Good question. Would Mum prefer me alive and so constipated I weighed as much as a gold bar, or would she rather have me dead and unconstipated, with a green glow to my skin because I’d eaten so many sprouts?
‘Get that dinner down you!’
Mildew watched as I introduced Squelchy to the mince glop. ‘I love sprouts cold. This one looks yummy,’ I said.
Mildew smiled and bent her head to scoop up a dripping forkful of glop. Quick as a frog’s tongue, my fingers whizzed Squelchy under my plate and onto the bread. By the time she looked up, with a bead of glop on her chin, I was pretending to chew. I was also pressing down hard on the plate, hoping the bread would absorb all the green juice.
I concentrated. Press. Pretend to chew. Press. It seemed to work. I didn’t get a green slime waterfall in my lap. Squelchy had disappeared under my plate. Squelchy was no more.
I had to clear the table after dinner. Mildew reckoned it was good discipline for me. I knew, really, it was a way of keeping me busy while she went into the bathroom for a secret smoke. I’d sussed that one out the very first night.
I started clearing the plates. I left my one, the one that was poor Squelchy’s tombstone, until last. Hurry up and go, Mildew! She just stood there, arms folded, and watched me. Why was she hanging around tonight? Had she given up smoking?
Finally, there was just Squelchy’s tombstone plate sitting on the table. ‘Oh, hurry up!’ she cried. ‘Why are you so slow?’ She swooped down on Squelchy’s tombstone, picked it up and carried it into the kitchen.
I held my breath. In the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, just when I started asking Mildew—pleading with her—to look at the amazing patterns the light-bulb made on the ceiling, the bread fell off the bottom of the plate.
Errrrrfff!
It landed on her foot. ‘Eeek!’ she screamed, like a baby mouse that’s just bitten into a garlic clove in the vegetable basket.
She looked down. ‘What is that?’ she bellowed. We both looked at the green sponge-thing lying across her foot.
‘Careful, Aunt!’ I shouted. ‘It’s an alien life-form. A fast-growing mould that can take over your body. I’ll get it off!’ I bent down and whammm! I batted Squelchy and the sucking bread through the air. They landed—errrrrfff—in Bloat’s bowl. Gulp. They were gone.
Bye-bye, Squelchy.
Mildew glared at me. She knew she was dealing with the best private investigator, a master trickster. She knew I had seen through her plan to murder me. She had finally met her match. Her number was up.
But she was a fighter. ‘If you think you can get away with not eating those sprouts, you are wrong.’
She said this very quietly, but the words were like bullets.
‘I have to go out,’ she said a bit later when we’d both said nothing to each other all evening. She was wearing lipstick. I think it was an attempt at disguise.
From my bedroom window, high up under the roof, I watched her walk down the lane. Where was she going? There was one street lamp at the corner. It made her shadow very long and spooky. Someone stepped out of the hedge and joined her. Who?
I couldn’t think any more about what she was up to, because I, Monster the Invincible, was also up to something and the time for doing it was now or never. Because my whammer trick had been detected, I had to put Plan B into action. And Plan B involved going under the house again.
I trampled around under the hedge to find the drill. Then I opened the small door, which I’d oiled the day before, and crouched down.
It was much scarier under the house at night. Not even one stray beam of light came through the rotting lower weatherboards. I crawled along, keeping one wooden beam above my head, the one I knew led to under the dining room. I fingered my way along the dusty ground. My eyeballs prickled with cobwebs. I told myself I was not afraid. Each time I dragged myself forward I didn’t know what I might touch.
By my calculations, I was under the dining room now. I tapped on the bottom of the floorboards trying to find the place where I’d put an upturned iron bucket by my seat. The idea was that this spot would make a different sound when tapped and that’s where I’d have to drill my Brussels sprout escape-hatch hole. I put down the torch, reached for the drill, and touched something hard and very cold. Not bones this time. Something flat and made of metal. My heart stopped beating.
I shone the torch on the cold thing: it was a tin trunk. The lid was shut but it didn’t seem to have any locks. I was scared. I counted to ten, then I pushed up the lid.
Nothing leapt out at me. I shone the torch in. It was hard to see into the trunk because the floorboards were just above my head when I crouched. I reached my hand in and felt around. Something like a jacket. Was I brave enough?
Yes, I was. I pulled everything out and shone the torch on it. There was an old jacket, a hat—clothes of the dead! There was a pick-axe thing, vicious-looking. Obviously a murder weapon. I didn’t dare touch it in case it got my fingerprints on it and I got convicted.
There were things that looked
like seat-belts sewn together to form a harness. And horrible-looking hooks that closed into circles when no weight was on them. Worst of all, there were dagger things, lots of them, horrible, pointed metal things like giant tent pegs. I knew what they were—instruments of torture.
Well, I wasn’t letting her torture me. I left the tin trunk where it was so she wouldn’t know that I knew it was there, then I drilled the poisoned Brussels sprout escape-hole in the dining-room floor, under the table, just where I’d calculated my chair was standing. Sprout battle. Bring it on!
I turned around to make my way out from under the house. A door slammed. A floorboard creaked. Then another. She was home already!
7
On Wednesday morning I woke up from a nightmare and remembered how I’d sneaked in the back door and removed the bucket from the dining room just as Mildew was going up the stairs to see if I was in bed. I got to my room ten seconds after she did, and pretended I’d been to the toilet. I said the bucket was because I felt sick.
It had been very close. But there was no time to worry about that. Today I had a hair appointment with a princess. That was going to be the meanest. And it fitted with my plan: to attack Mildew on all fronts.
As I was leaving, Mildew yelled, ‘Taking Bloat for a walk?’
I had to say yes, and I had to take Bloat with me. To the one place I most dreaded taking him: the shopping mall.
I prayed he wouldn’t cock his leg on a shop window and send a stream of wee across the pavement. I prayed he wouldn’t suddenly squat down and refuse to move. I’d found out by now that when he was pooing you couldn’t stop him even if you pulled on the lead so hard you almost yanked his head off.
I tied him to an A-shaped signboard on the pavement outside the hairdresser’s. The sign said Trainee hairdresser at work. No Charge. No guarantees.
I floated in the door, knowing that the princess was going to be running her fingers through my hair in a few minutes’ time.
It was heaven. She had a chair that tilted backwards to the basin, and she massaged my head. Bliss. It ended suddenly, though, when she sprayed my face with hot water by mistake, but that was OK. She was only learning after all.
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