I heard a movement behind me and whirled around. It was Bloat. I don’t know how he got under the house. But I do know he was carrying a new bone, and wanting to add it to his bone pile. Ah, I’d got that wrong.
Then I heard Purple Nose.
After they dragged me out, Sylvie went into the kitchen and came back with steaming coffees and teas, and yummy, chewy biscuits.
I’m real glad I’d invited Brad. He stopped me from being murdered on the spot. He reckoned I was a born director. He raved on about my sense of style, story, drama. I wish I’d recorded his rave.
We sat around the fire and Mildew told the story of her life. How Fred had been a mountaineer and had died on one of his rare visits home. He’d slipped on a banana skin and fallen down the steps in the shopping centre. Mildew had been teaching a class of little kids at the time. That’s thirty alibis for Mildew. Sylvie remembered how it had affected the shopping centre. How the town had almost closed down.
Mum tried to comfort Mildew, but only Purple Nose could do it properly. He sat beside her on the couch and patted her face with his purplish fingers. Mildew and Purple Nose went outside on the veranda to get cold and have a cuddle to get warm. Mum and Sylvie started clearing up. Brad and Princess were dancing around the sitting room to music playing on the laptop. Bloat was chewing another bone. No one was taking any notice of me, as usual.
I got the plate of Mildew’s genuine sprouts, which were still sitting under my dining-room chair. I whizzed upstairs to my room and opened the window.
When Mildew and Purple Nose started kissing, I was going to pelt them with Brussels sprouts.
Mildew might not be a murderer, but she sure was a terrible cook. So fair’s fair.
But Sis crept up behind me and spoilt it. She grabbed a sprout that looked just like Squelchy and pressed him down the back of my neck.
Then she said that when we got home she was going to get her own back.
‘About what?’
‘Ruining my Bebo page. Or had you forgotten?’
She galloped downstairs.
I had forgotten. Completely. And I knew my Sis. I was seriously worried. Suddenly I didn’t want to go home.
I watched everyone gathering outside to say goodbye. Sis rushed out to join them. I knew she was going to point out where the plops of dead sprouts on the path had come from. I grabbed the last sprout and hurled it out the window. It was a good throw, with a bit of spin on it. It got Sis right on the top of her head.
‘Take him home,’ laughed Mildew.
The B4 Battle
1
Until my hair grew back and I stopped looking and feeling like an egg, I was as good as good. So good that no one even noticed me. It got boring, then very boring, then too boring. Months passed. I got sick of Sis giggle-gaggling on her mobile with her girl friends. One summer afternoon I decided to play a small trick on her, just to liven things up a bit.
I call her friends a gaggle because:
They make me gag.
They giggle-gaggle all the time.
I found the word in some homework. A gaggle of .
I filled in ‘girls’. It was meant to be ‘geese’. So? What’s the difference? Sis’s friends are all like geese: they have big feet, they wiggle their bums, and they hiss at me.
After a bit of brilliant thinking I came up with the sunbathing-in-the-rain trick.
The easy part was climbing our big apple tree. The hard part was hauling a bucket of water up after me. A full bucket of water, you understand. Full when it was sitting there on the lawn with the rope attached to the handle. Still full when I got it to the top of the tree. I had eighteen goes.
By the time I got it up there, wedged in the join of two branches, the lawn under the tree was so wet that no one would sunbathe there unless they wanted a mudpack as well. I climbed down the tree and waited. With a good trick you have to be patient.
I waited three days. At last the sun was shining and the lawn under the tree had dried out. I put a deck chair out there, exactly under the bucket. I wandered around the house after school saying ‘It’s so hot!’ and ‘I think I’ll sunbathe in Dad’s pride-and-joy garden.’ Sis pretended not to listen. But I knew my Sis. I only had to wait three minutes this time.
Sis went upstairs to lather herself in sun cream. I ran across the lawn and climbed up the tree. I hid in the leaves. Out she came, wearing what looked like two horizontal bandages. I didn’t look down again. I just sat up there, occasionally batting away insects. The tree was full of them. I heard Sis plonk herself down in the deck chair.
Now! I was just about to tilt the bucket over when I heard her talking. ‘Hi! Great to see you.’ I heard a mumble. Who could that be? It wasn’t a goose giggle. More a low hum, like bees or a jet a long way away. Then she did a real unusual giggle. She was talking to someone in the flesh, not on the phone.
After lots more giggles I heard someone else arrive, and her voice suddenly changed: ‘Hey, who invited you? Get out.’
Then a boy’s voice I didn’t know said, ‘Get lost, Bad-Bum.’
I waited until Bully-Boy Bad-Bum—the worst bully in the known universe—had slouched off. I counted to ten, then I tipped the bucket over. Instead of goose screeches and hisses from Sis, there was this bull’s bellow, then ‘I’ll get that damn brother of yours!’
Too late I recognized the voice. Darrin Egan. My heart freeze-dried immediately.
The tree shook. Someone was climbing up! Not just anyone, but Darrin Egan, the best athlete and fighter in the whole school. I was trapped. When you’re up a tree, there isn’t any way out unless you’re a bird. You can wish for the tree to suddenly suck a juicy piece of dog poo up its roots and do a growth spurt that will whoosh you up into the upper atmosphere, then the stratosphere, through the ozone hole and into a much safer place than the planet you share with an angry Darrin Egan. But wishing doesn’t help. I was stuck on the end of a bendy branch. I didn’t own a Superman cape.
I was totally dead meat.
I gave myself up. Egan let me have it good and proper. He has no mercy. I crawled into the house to die. Sis thought it was so funny she texted every single one of her girl-gaggle.
She and Egan patted each other dry with a bath towel. It was sickening. He left. She went into her room.
When Mum and Dad came back from work, she flung the door open, flapped and waggled down the stairs towards them, head swaying, wings out. It was one of her great performances.
Mum said this trick was bad news. It was a sign I was sliding back into my old, bad ways.
Sis gloated. Mum and Dad both agreed punishment would be decided at a family conference.
2
Next day I hibernated in the garage before the family conference.
A conference wouldn’t be so bad if they knew what they were talking about, which is Me. Or if they decided I should have my own rally car, flat-screen TV, laptop, or iPhone.
But because they don’t know me at all, they always choose mega-horrendous punishments for me instead of presents that might make it worthwhile for me to behave.
I did my hibernating sitting on a pile of sheep-pellet compost mix. For something to do I examined the purple and orange bruises Egan had given me.
‘Hi,’ I said to the spider hanging a few inches in front of my left eye. She jiggled up and down on her thread.
Screeeeeeech! The noise of a boy-racer car braking outside the garage, right outside the door. The spider shot up the thread and disappeared. I rolled up the garage door. In front of it, just the width of a spider’s thread away from the door post, was a jeep. Getting out was a man with one of those faces that doesn’t move at all, a face born with its own Botox.
This was Stone Face! My new teacher. Mum must have invited him for the family conference. Muggeridge, my mate, says Stone Face only became a teacher because he was turned down as a prison warden for being too cruel.
It must be time for the conference.
Stone Face took no notice of m
e, a mere child, and marched up the path to the front door. I said goodbye to the spiders and waited to be summoned. Last time we’d had a family conference, I’d been sent to Aunt Mildew’s place and force-fed Brussels sprouts and all my hair fell out. What would it be this time?
‘Monster, we’ve decided,’ Mum sighed, followed by a long pause. Dad did his echo sigh, then Mum continued. ‘We don’t know what to do with you.’ Dad did another echo sigh.
Stone Face cut in: ‘This lad needs a good shaking up, and that’s what he’ll get in my classroom. Don’t you worry. He’s been running wild for too long.’ He banged a scabby, brown fist on Mum’s table. The table was brown with peeling varnish. The table and the fist matched perfectly, except for one thing. Tufts of ginger hair sprouted out between the knuckles on each of his fingers. I stared at them. Then I stared up at his stony face. He had matching ginger tufts sprouting out of his nostrils, making them look like vacuum-cleaner attachments for hard-to-reach places.
I imagined him on his hands, with Mum holding his legs off the ground, and pushing him into those horrible musty, dusty, dirty places like the back of the couch, and in the corners of the food cupboard where the mouse dirt is. She’d press down on his ankle. He’d sniff in and—suckasuckasucka! All the muck would go into his lungs and—
‘Monster! Did you hear what I said?’ Mum was staring at me, red in the face.
‘No.’
Sis groaned. Mum sighed. Dad sighed. Stone Face sighed like a vacuum cleaner about to burst.
‘We’ve decided,’ said Dad, very slowly, ‘that Sis can choose your punishment because you were so nasty to her.’
‘I was not! It was just a trick. She plays tricks on—’
‘Don’t answer back,’ said Dad.
My parents would prefer me without the powers of speech. I’m sure they’d rather have a hamster or a guinea pig as their son.
Sis gleamed her teeth at me and said my punishment was—
My mind went into a spin. When that happens my ears cut out. I didn’t hear anything at all. I thought of medieval tortures like being pinned to a cartwheel and rolled through town, being placed in the stocks and people hurling hot, sticky pizza at me. That’d be Sis’s idea of punishment. She has no mercy and she isn’t original.
I looked up. She was still smiling. I could see one crooked tooth the orthodontist had missed. Maybe I should point this out to her.
‘Well?’ she gloated.
‘Didn’t hear.’
Mum sighed. Dad sighed. The vacuum cleaner in need of a new bag sighed, too. I noticed little bits of stuff clinging to the ends of his nose bristles.
‘I’m not afraid of your stupid punishments. So there.’
Sis looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘This is a repeat. You can be my permanent slave.’
Silence.
I was trying to work out whether I was in a nightmare or if this was really happening.
‘What?’ asked a squeaky voice I’d never used before.
‘My slave.’
No! Anything at all other than that. ‘I’ll work on a sewage farm. I’ll cut up dead bodies to find out what killed them. I’ll clean public toilets. I’ll find lost pieces of Lego. I’ll—’
They didn’t listen. Sis steamed with satisfaction, like a fresh dog turd on a frosty pavement.
Mum looked at me. My whole face was tumbling down.
‘We’ll keep that as the ultimate punishment, dear,’ said Mum to Sis. ‘We should choose something more…er…sensible.’ She smiled around at the others.
The problem with my mum and dad is that they never, ever can make up their minds. They are not into decision-making. Maybe that’s why I’ve turned to a life of tricks. That way, I make things happen. The way they live their lives, nothing ever happens.
Mum was just about to sigh again when Stone Face leapt in with a decision. ‘I will expect perfect behaviour at school at all times. If you fail to meet my high standards, I’ll have you—’
It wasn’t just me who didn’t hear the rest. No one heard the rest because Sis exploded. She’d been given a chance to punish me, suggested her punishment, and the adults had ignored it.
Sis was not having that. She screwed up her face like a dirty pair of knickers, raised her shoulders like a T-shirt pegged on the line, and screamed at me: ‘He will so be my slave!’
Mum looked terrified. Dad looked embarrassed. Stone Face looked as though he had a wad of chewing gum stuck up his nose.
Mum said, ‘Maybe Sis is right.’
Dad said, ‘Perhaps a part of the punishment.’
Slowly, ever so slowly, they inched towards a decision. I shut my eyes. I couldn’t watch.
‘He can be my slave for a week. So there,’ pouted Sis.
‘A day. Maybe,’ sighed Mum.
‘Five days, Monday to Friday,’ crowed Sis.
‘OK, dear.’
They all turned to me. For five days I had to do what Sis said, and if I didn’t she’d tell Mum and Dad and they’d…
‘What’ll yer do if I don’t?’ I mocked Sis.
‘Then, dear, you’ll have to go back to Aunt Mildred’s,’ said Mum. She flopped back in the chair, astonished by her decisiveness.
3
Monday morning, Sis told me I was her guard dog. I had to walk beside her all the way to school, carrying her bag as well as mine. The worst part of being her slave was that she talked to me. She said she didn’t want to go to school. She reckoned Bully-Boy Bad-Bum would hang around her all day.
‘Course he won’t. No one wants to hang around you all day. Get real!’ I didn’t want to go to school either. But I didn’t say.
At nine o’clock, I crept into Stone Face’s class room. Stone Face was saying he was a new broom, sweeping out the old ways, and—I didn’t hear any more, because I started thinking of Stone Face the broom, or the vacuum cleaner, with me controlling the on/off switch on his ankle and pushing his nose into a three-week-old spilt yoghurt.
I nearly choked with the giggles swelling up in my wind-pipe. Muggeridge had to hit me hard on the back, otherwise I’d have got so full of giggle bubbles I’d have floated away up to the ceiling and never come down.
‘Thanks, mate,’ I tried to say to Muggeridge. Unfortunately it came out as one long, humungously loud belch of giggle bubbles.
‘Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’
Stone Face leapt to attention. ‘Who did that?’
No one spoke. Stone Face’s eyes blazed out from his statue body and saw a class of stiff-faced, give-nothing-away kids, except for one face which was purple and red and pink, and shiny with sweat, all because of the build-up of giggle pressure which wasn’t just in my windpipe now. It was in my nose and behind my eyes.
‘Brewster!’ No one calls me Brewster, so I looked around with everyone else to see who he was talking to. Then he was standing over me, his ‘whiteboard-pointing cane’ softly tapping up and down in one of his hands. ‘Was it you?’
I didn’t say anything in case I belched again.
Then Daisy said, ‘None of us kids could do one that loud.’
Muggeridge said, ‘You’d need lungs like bagpipes.’
‘Or hot-air balloons,’ said Craig.
‘Enough!’ roared Stone Face. ‘Get back to your work.’
No one said a word until the bell went.
As soon as Stone Face strode across the play ground to the staff room for his cup of tea, we cracked up. Several kids wanted lessons. I told them it was an art form that required breath control like those yoga freaks who can be buried alive for weeks. I said I’d learnt it from the greatest teacher of them all, my Aunt Mildew, who has lived her whole life buried alive. Then we rushed outside to get the best end of the field for tackling practice.
I wanted to do tackling practice, but my bruises hurt so much I gave up and walked back to the cloakroom for a preview of my lunch. Lunchtime was a whole hour-and-a-half away. The cloakroom was deserted, just jackets and school bags hanging on pegs.
<
br /> I opened my lunch box and checked out the same boring luncheon-sausage sandwiches I always got. I heard the rustling sound that jackets make. I whirled around, ready to defend my lunch to the death.
There was no one there. I heard a whimper, a sniff. ‘Come out of hiding!’ I bellowed. No one. Nothing.
I crept along the row of jackets, down to the other end where the little kids hung all their junk. There it was again. That whimpering sound. Snuffle. Sniff. A lunch thief with a cold? I sneaked around the corner of the row, into the next row and—my heart nearly leapt out of my T-shirt, I got such a fright. Inside one of the hanging jackets was a little kid’s face!
I rushed up to it. The poor kid had been crammed into her jacket, arms in the arm holes, zipped up, and the jacket hung on the peg. I got the kid down and she cried like I’ve never heard before. She couldn’t say anything at all. I cuddled her and there-there’d her, but she just kept crying, covering my T-shirt with snot.
A teacher appeared out of nowhere. Stone Face. ‘You again! Bullying the littlest kid in the school, eh? That your style?’
Hey, that was unreal. ‘Me? Bullying little kids? You must be off your head!’ I shouted at him. The kid yelled more. Another teacher came in and took her away. That left Stone Face and me, alone.
‘I rescued her—’
‘Expect me to believe that? I wasn’t born yesterday.’
‘She’d been hung on a peg.’
‘Enough! I’ll phone your parents this afternoon. And the police. This is a serious attack on a young child. Meantime, go and clean all the old chewing gum off the under-sides of the lunch benches so the caretaker can paint them.’
That was ultra-unfair.
As I lay on the ground under the lunch benches in the playground, Muggeridge sneaked out and gave me the info. The little kid in the jacket was Kirsty Egan, sister of Darrin Egan who’d beaten me up yesterday because I’d got him with a bucket of water.
‘Darrin’s taken her home in a taxi. He’s swearing revenge on you. You’d better lie low.’
Monstrosity Page 5