I went back to the house and sat in the sitting room. Sis grinned at me and raised her eyebrows. Ah-ha! Maybe she wanted to reward me for getting the letter back. Of course she did! That’d be the normal thing to do. She jerked her head towards the door. I followed her up to her room for my prize. She was waggling and gaggling, just like goose-girl normal.
She shut her bedroom door and turned into her normal bossy self. She told me I was still her slave, until the end of the day. ‘Friday isn’t over, remember.’
I nodded. Just what silly thing was she planning now?
Then she told me to swallow the letter.
‘No!’
She ripped the letter into a zillion pieces and told me to chew them to a pulp.
‘No!’
I sat on her bed, on the lumpiest bit.
‘Miiiaaaaaoooooooowwwwwwww!’
‘So that’s where Pus is!’
‘Fluffy!’
‘Pus!’
‘I’m hiding him for you,’ she said. ‘If the vet had found him, the cat wouldn’t be here at all!’
True. Sis said we’d have to share Fluffy/Pus or she’d take him straight to the vet.
‘OK,’ I said. It’s hard arguing with a goose.
‘Now, eat it!’
She pushed the pieces of letter at my face. In a last effort to stop her making me eat the paper I said, ‘Hey, Sis, d’you want me to tell Darrin Egan you’re not on with B4?’
‘Darrin Egan!’ She spat the words out. ‘That creep! I’ve gone off him majorly.’
I was so surprised my mouth dropped open. She stuffed the pieces of letter in and held my mouth closed. I nearly suffocated. All that tickly paper at the back of my throat. I felt I was about to be sick. I wrenched myself away from her hands and coughed and spat. I couldn’t help it. The bits of paper, now wet and sticky, exploded out of my mouth all over her duvet. She screamed.
I grabbed Pus and ran out to the garage. Spiders and ants were easier to understand compared with sisters.
OK, Sis. I’ll give you a week or two, but then watch it! I’m going to get my own back!
The Big Bug Blast
1
I woke up in the middle of the night and felt something slimy running down the side of my cheek. I turned my head. On the pillow were five eggs. Just the eggs. Not the shells around them. The sixth was the one dribbling down my face. Obviously a feeble trick of Sis’s. She always overdoes everything. One egg would have been plenty.
I’d been a goody-goody since I’d rescued Sis from B4, the biggest bully around. After B4 got his, I was a home hero. I chose the TV channel. I chose the meals. But then it got boring. Something was wrong. I was wrong. I wasn’t being me, Monster, the Supreme Trickster of the Known Universe. I was being a geek instead. Something had to be done. And here was Sis, waking up the trickster in me. Time I played a trick on her.
I got dressed, stuffed my teddy in the bed to look like me, and crept down to the laboratory where I concocted my most wicked potions and tricks. Some people, like Mum and Dad, called it the garage. Who cares? In the dead of night, with the glow from one cobwebby light-bulb, and the sound of big insects and small mice scuttling about, and the strange smell of sheep-pellet compost mix and old tuna tins full of oil, the garage was my laboratory. It was where I went when I had to dream up one of my very special tricks, the kind that no one else had ever thought of.
I’m not super-mean. It’s just that my sis deserves what she gets. She’d been playing tricks on me forever. She’s four years older than me and when I was a baby she’d often looked after me. It was torture. She’d wheeled me down to her friends’ places and she and all her girlfriends used to undress me, powder me, and dress me up. That was way back when I couldn’t walk. I was so disabled I’d had to put up with her torture. All I could do was wail ultra-loud all the time and fill my nappies.
When I was a bit older she used to ‘care’ for me after school. I’d had to hang around with her giggling gaggle of girl friends. It was like being surrounded by lemonade. Fizz fizz, pop pop, gurgle gurgle. That’s how they talked all the time. I couldn’t stand it. Yeah, she deserved all the tricks I played on her.
I sat on a pile of sheep-pellet compost mix and concentrated.
My sister spends most of her time texting, arranging meetings with her friends, or in front of a mirror arranging her hair. Maybe I could smear her phone with superglue? No. Boring. And she guards her phone all the time. What else does she have that no one else uses? I thought and thought. I screwed up my face, picked my scabs, shook my head and pulled my hair. The answer came, just like that. Her hair drier!
Dad rushes off to work with wet hair and a woolly hat on his head. Mum tried the drier once, held it over her head and donged herself on the forehead. I would never use anything as rude as a hair drier.
Luckily, the hair drier was kept in the dining room. (There was no way I’d go into her room. That’d be trespassing. She wouldn’t come into mine either. We had a truce on that.)
It was kept in the dining-room cupboard because Sis always used it in the dining room when she watched American Idol on TV. You might think it’s odd she watched her fave programme and dried her hair at the same time, because you can’t hear the music with the drier on. But she reckoned you didn’t have to hear the music. It’s not the point, she said. That’s how dumb she is.
The hair drier it had to be. What could I do? Give her an electric shock so her hair stood up on end for days? Hmm. I didn’t want to be on a murder charge. I wanted her living so I could trick her again another time.
Make the hair drier suck rather than blow so her hair would get sucked up, slurrrrp, into the hair drier and the only way to get it out would be to cut it off? That was a distinct possibility.
I crept back to the house, got the hair drier and started to work on it. I was trying to reverse the fan inside it. Trouble was, after hours of trying I couldn’t find a way of making the fan suck rather than blow. And I nearly lost two fingers.
But I didn’t give up. No way. A great trickster never gives up.
I moved outside to the woodpile to take a break, because this was hard brainwork. That’s when I saw this ginormous weta. A weta looks like something out of a nightmare. It’s actually the ugliest insect in the world. It’s like a scorpion crossed with a lobster.
This one was about ten centimetres long, as fat as a finger, with black-and-gold stripes around its body so it looked like a rugby player. It had massive antennae waving around and evil-looking spiky legs.
I’m not exaggerating. It was huge. One type of weta, according to my book of world-class insects, is the heaviest insect in the whole wide world. Maybe this one, waggling its antennae and spiky legs at me, was the very heaviest of them all. It was possible.
Just looking at it gave me an idea, a beaut idea, an idea I’m sure made my ears light up.
I rushed back to the garage, put Mum’s gardening gloves on, and Dad’s welding goggles, and charged back across the lawn to nab the weta. I shut my eyes as my rubber-clad fingers picked up the weta’s body. Its legs waggled at me. The spiky legs at the front end were menacing.
I ran back across the garden to the garage. I put the weta in a glass jar that had nails in it. Then I had to be super brave. I had to kill the weta. Never mind, weta, I said, you die in a good cause. Your life has not been in vain.
I took down Dad’s pruning saw and carefully wiped oil along the rusty blade. With one hand I held the saw just above the bench. With the other I unscrewed the lid of the jar and lay it on the bench. I waited. After millions of micro-seconds the weta decided to check out the scene. Just as it lumbered out of the jar my saw came crashing down on it. I sawed its head off with about twenty backward and forward movements of the pruning saw. The legs waggled the whole time. Then I covered the corpse with an oily rag Mum uses to check the car’s oil. I went outside and took a few deep breaths. I felt a bit sick.
I went back inside the garage and finished the gruesome busi
ness of preparing my mega-trick. I stuffed the weta into the barrel of the hair drier. I tilted the hair drier. A leg fell out. I stuffed it back in, much more carefully. I waggled the hair drier around. Nothing fell out. Great. I wiped the outside of the hair drier on Mum’s oil rag and casually walked into the house with it under my jacket. Coast clear. I put the hair drier back in the cupboard very, very carefully.
I had to wait all day, until Sis washed her hair in the evening.
2
That evening we had an extra nice dinner of roast chicken followed by ice cream and hot chocolate sauce. Mum told me she was pleased I’d turned over a new leaf, whatever that meant.
Dad came in real late. He was a bit depressed because a new patient had come in who was bald.
I should explain. My dad’s a barber in an old people’s home. He reckons he knows every hair on the heads of every patient because there are so few. Hairs, not patients. He cheered up when Mum put the crunchy chicken down in front of him.
‘It’s because Monster’s turned over a new leaf,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s nice and quiet around here these days.’
I smiled at Sis.
Soon, Sis, you will see what you get for playing tricks on me.
After dinner I offered to do the dishes. Dad called me a ‘trooper’, whatever that meant. We did the dishes together. I heard Sis yell out, ‘Don’t turn on the taps. I’m having a shower.’ I smiled. After I figured she was well and truly in the shower I turned the hot tap on and waited for the inevitable scream. If you turn the hot tap on in the kitchen it makes the shower upstairs run cold. A cold shower would do my Sis good.
‘Yeeeeeeeeeow!’ It sounded like someone treading on a monkey, but I knew it was only Sis. She should think herself lucky I hadn’t turned on the cold tap. She would have got scalded. Shows what a nice guy I am, underneath.
‘Good lad. You’ve done a great job there,’ said Dad, meaning the dishes.
In the dining room I took up an excellent viewing position at the table. I really, really wanted to see Sis’s face when she got the weta’s blast. I waited.
‘You look pale, Monster. Are you ill?’ asked Mum.
‘I think I’ll pull through.’
At last Sis came downstairs looking like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, dripping water every where. She took the hair drier out of the cupboard.
‘Monster’s not well, dear. Perhaps you could do that noisy drying in your bedroom.’
‘Too cold up there,’ she pouted.
‘It’s OK, Sis. I don’t mind,’ I said.
‘It’s nice to see you two getting on so well,’ said Mum.
‘Makes a change,’ said Dad.
‘Come on,’ said Mum to Dad, ‘let’s leave them to it.’ They left the room.
Sis plugged in the drier and stabbed the switch to On. The drier whirred, then stopped. She put her hand up to the barrel. No air was blowing out. She shook it. She switched it off.
She peered down the barrel, switched it back on and…Wwwhhhirrrrr, Splat! Two zillion pieces of blow-dried weta sprayed into her face.
She screamed, threw the hair drier across the room and tore at her face with her fingers. Bits of weta were stuck all over her face, even in the corners of her eyes and in the corners of her lips. When she gasped and suddenly breathed in, weta bits went up her nose. Sis felt the tingle in her nostril, went white, then fainted on the carpet. Crash.
Mum and Dad had rushed into the room when she screamed. They saw their precious daughter with brown crusty stuff on her face. They saw the hair drier lying broken on the floor. And unfortunately they saw the back of my foot as I tried to disappear out the door and up the stairs.
‘What happened?’ That was Mum.
‘Monster! Get back in here.’ That was Dad.
‘I think she had a fit,’ I started to explain.
‘What’s that brown stuff?’ asked Dad.
‘Dunno.’
‘Where’d it come from?’
‘I think it’s caused by an insect explosion,’ I said. ‘Apparently there is an epidemic of kamikaze insects at the moment and—’
‘Enough! Go away!’ Typical.
Sis moaned. Mum rushed around with water and a face cloth.
I skipped out into the darkness and walked slowly down to the garage.
That had been the ultimate trick. I felt this glow inside me. I might be useless at school projects, but boy, I was mean as at revenge! No one in the whole world could mess with me.
It was pitch dark in the garden because Dad’d never got around to installing a sensor-light system. I wandered into the garage and talked to my pet spiders living in the corners of the windows. I sat on the sheep-pellet compost mix sacks and smiled to myself.
‘OK, spiders,’ I said, ‘You’re looking at the inventor of the jet-propelled weta fragmentation device. You don’t see one of those every day of your spider life.’
Suddenly Dad loomed in the doorway. ‘There you are! We’ve been looking every where for you!’ That figured. After all, they’d only told me to get out and go away a while ago. Typical parent double-talk. Enough to make you loony.
‘It’s time for another family conference, Monster. Before you go right off the rails. We’re going to nip this in the bud.’
‘Nip what? What bud?’
‘Get back inside!’ he boomed. ‘Now!’
In the dining room all the evidence of the amazingly successful joke had gone. The hair drier had disappeared. The floor had been vacuumed. I wondered who was going to empty the vacuum cleaner bag. It sure wasn’t going to be me. That was definite.
Mum was sitting on one side of the dining-room table. Sis was sitting on another side. Sis’s hair was wrapped in a turban. She had this hard, angry look in her eyes. She looked like a crazed Indian magician who was about to levitate and glide across the room on her cushion of high-octane anger.
Dad came in and sat down. There we all were, sitting around the table.
‘Right, Monster. We’ve all had a guts-full.’ Dad shouted so loud the light-bulb above the table hummed. Wow! This was really some thing.
‘Sometimes I think you’re an alien,’ said Mum.
Sis screamed with laughter. It was the funniest thing she’d heard in years. She was high as a kite because she knew I was about to be punished.
‘We are too upset to discuss your nasty trick with you right now. We will all meet in here again on Friday evening. Family conference. Yes, mmm.’ Dad petered out.
‘Is that clear?’ barked Mum. I grinned. ‘And when you are not at school, you are limited to your room.’
I was about to argue about my need to use the toilet occasionally and to order my room-service breakfast, but she cut in. ‘No talking!’ I couldn’t believe it.
‘What’s a family conference for if I don’t talk? I’ll need to practise.’
‘I’ll do the talking,’ said Dad. ‘Not you.’
I slumped back in the seat. Did that mean I wasn’t part of the family any more? Had my annual subscription lapsed? Was I being booted out?
Sis looked up at the light-bulb, let out a howl, then gasped and started a major boo-hooing session. Mum patted her on the back, rubbing round and round as though Sis was a baby. I waited for Sis to do a huge baby burp, but she didn’t.
‘And,’ said Sis, gloating, ‘Aunt Mildred’s coming to the family conference. So there.’
I stared like a possum in a torch beam. Not Mildew! She couldn’t be coming. She never, ever left her creepy, dark house in the country.
‘’Snot true,’ I said.
Sis hummed with delight.
‘And until then,’ said Dad, ‘remember you are in your room, not allowed out, and I will tell your teacher that you are up to your old tricks again.’
Old tricks? I’d never done the weta fragmentation device before.
Sis ran up the stairs, pretending to cry her eyes out. At least it finished the grilling. I was free to go.
&
nbsp; I walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. She was hanging over the banister, puckering up her lips and making her cheeks go in and out. She could have been preparing to kiss someone in the soap opera she was always pretending she was in.
She could have been imitating a cow chewing its cud.
She could have had an itch under her nose and be trying to scratch it without using her fingers.
She wasn’t doing any of these. I knew my Sis. She was preparing to spit on my head. The thing about Sis is that her revenges have no class at all.
I ducked under the stairs. Splurp! It landed on the wooden floor.
‘Monster!’ called Mum. ‘Empty the vacuum cleaner before you go upstairs.’
3
I was banished to my tiny room, a prisoner in my own house. I tried flashing SOS out the window to a guy who looked as though he was moving in next door. He squinted up at my torch and then glared through a big puff of cigarette smoke. Useless.
I’ve always hated my room. The worst thing about it is that it’s smaller than Sis’s. That is not fair.
I looked out the window again. The new neighbour was bossing the movers into carrying his things right around the house and in the back door. He was short and weedy-looking, with thin, whitish hair, a thin, whitish face and thin, whitish hands.
He looked like skim milk in human form to me. Probably because of the cigarettes he chain-smoked as he stumped around the corner of the house behind the moving guys. He was carrying an exercycle. Boring. Not the sort of neighbour who would brighten up my day.
I planned to escape. My family wasn’t the cruel type. Unlike in folk tales and legends. I didn’t get sent out into the forest, starving, to gather firewood. And my parents didn’t lock me in when they made me stay in my room. But they did expect me to stay there. If I tried to go downstairs, Sis would raise the alarm.
I spent the evening watching Mr Skim Milk sitting on his deck drinking beer. He drank four bottles and never stopped smoking. He didn’t sort out his house. He just sat there, scratching his stomach, sometimes picking his nose, doing nothing. No friends to have a moving-in party with. A loser.
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