3
I shrank in just one week to a tiny, sad person, shrivelled and depressed. For a whole week I did so much dishwashing at Aunt Mildew’s that the skin was almost rotting off my fingers. Sis did the drying, and she always returned stuff to the water, saying it wasn’t done properly. For a whole week Sis pinched me and kicked me and put plastic bags of water in my bed. For a whole week I didn’t complain to anyone because no one ever believed me.
‘It’s always a trick with you,’ they said. But this time it wasn’t.
‘I’m watching you,’ Aunt Mildew said every time I looked at greens on my plate. ‘Don’t think you can trick me.’ I didn’t try to trick her any more. I didn’t have any tricks left in me.
‘Seen anything unusual?’ Sis asked me whenever grown-ups were close by.
‘Wouldn’t tell you if I had.’
And for a whole week The Watcher kept watching me. I hadn’t seen any more blue lights or onion-headed aliens. It was just a feeling I had. I wished I’d never tricked Sis by dressing up as an alien and scaring her in the middle of the night a month ago. I was paying for it now.
Soon I was faced with another torture.
‘Get in the car. Don’t annoy your sister.’ It was going to be a bad drive back home: sitting in the back seat with pinching, kicking Sis for hour after hour of fighting for my life, or terminal boredom, depending on whether she was reading a book or not.
If I was strapped in, unable to stand up, unable to move, I would suffer sensory deprivation. I’d be so bored my heart wouldn’t be bothered to pump blood up to my brain any more. I’d start yawning. My feet would get heavier and heavier with all the blood filling them. My brain would dry out like a dried-out kitchen sponge with curled-up edges.
After we turned onto the motorway, Dad said, ‘Shit.’
This was very unusual. Mum looked at the side of his head. Sis and I looked at the back of his head. We couldn’t see anything that would make him say that. Then I looked into the rear-vision mirror and saw his eyes staring at me. What had I done now?
‘Get down!’ he yelled.
Hard to do when you’re belted in. Sis and I managed to squirm around and look out the back window.
A very wide, yellow car, with lots of flashing lights all around the bottom of it, was hooning up towards us. Fast as. I mean, caning it. I thought it was a plane at first. Or a planet that had got tired of circling the sun. I ducked my head. But it didn’t take off and roar over our heads. It swerved out and shot past us. I looked up and I saw something that made me gasp: an onion sprout sticking up out of the driver’s head. I couldn’t be sure. It was so fast. Our car trembled. I thought it might fall apart. Then we heard a siren. A cop car was following the yellow one. It accelerated from a dot on the horizon, changed into a car, and tore past us. Our car bounced around in the slipstream. We were nearly blinded by the flashing lights and deafened by the siren. Then it was all over. Both cars had disappeared.
‘Wow! Did you see that?’ I whispered. No one answered. Mum and Dad were in a state of shock. Sis seemed to think it was cool.
For the next 200 ks, all the way home, I was stirred up by the sight of that speeding car. It was like a new world opening before me. Ideas for tricks just churned around in my head like a milkshake machine. But they weren’t just tricks. I’d moved way beyond tricks. They were real inventions!
I invented a car with no back seat, a car in which kids could be on equal terms with their parents.
‘You’re very quiet, Monster.’ That was Dad.
‘He’s scared of that alien that speeded past us.’ That was Sis.
So Sis thought it was an alien, too. Interesting.
‘Up to something.’ That was Mum.
I tried to explain my invention about no back seats.
‘Shut up!’ said Sis.
Typical. They interrupt you because they don’t like the big silence from the back, then they tell you to shut up.
What’s more alien, this strange world or another planet? Answer: this world, and my family in particular.
I went back to thinking up my invention.
The ideal car would have no back seat. It was that simple. Instead of a mum and dad in the front and the kids crammed in the back where their growing feet were jammed against the back of the front seats, there would be four front seats in a row.
Benefits for traffic:
shorter traffic jams,
shorter parking spaces because of shorter cars.
Benefits for parents:
They wouldn’t get sore necks turning around to tell kids off.
Benefits for kids:
(I had a list of these a mile long. Here’s just one.)
No one would sit swaying in the back seat when the car went round corners, so there wouldn’t be kids’ vomit all along the highways.
The road would have to be modified—each lane would have to be twice as wide as it is now. That’d be easy enough. Have you noticed how much unused countryside there is out there? I glowed with the idea. It was like being in an idea bubble that radiated golden light.
‘Want a lemon barley-sugar, Monster?’ Sis was being super-nice all of a sudden. She passed me the bag. It was empty, stuffed with dirty tissues and sweet wrappers. Ha, ha.
It didn’t worry me at all. I had bigger things to think about.
We arrived home. We gathered in a bunch on the doorstep while Dad fumbled with the keys.
‘I am so looking forward to spending the evening in our comfy sitting room,’ said Mum.
‘It’s great to be home,’ said Dad. He opened the door. We poured in—then we all stopped, in the hall.
‘What’s that horrible smell?’ wailed Sis.
That’s when I remembered my interior-design trick, my living-carpets trick. Had it worked? I never knew mustard and cress seeds stank so much.
‘Warm, wet wool,’ I said. ‘I mean, I think it is.’
Everyone looked at me. ‘Monster?’
Mum opening the sitting-room door. A warm, foggy cloud sailed out.
‘Poo!’
‘What the—’
Everyone beat the fog away and stared in.
‘Look at that!’
‘The carpet’s moving!’
‘It’s alive!’
They all turned on me at the same time. ‘Monster!’ all three roared.
The grey sitting-room carpet was now two inches taller and green. It looked real pretty. Green shag-pile. Exciting. Amazing. It’d worked!
Mum and Dad didn’t see it that way. They said the carpet was ruined. They said they were sick of me. They said they thought I’d learnt my lesson before. I obviously hadn’t.
‘What will we do with him?’ Mum asked.
‘I’ll mow the sitting room. Once a week. Two bucks.’ I was trying to be helpful.
Dad said I wouldn’t do anything of the sort. Usually he’s begging me to mow the lawns.
‘We could camp on it,’ I said. ‘This is our own camping ground. No more boring car journeys to get to camp spots.’
‘Shut up!’ they all yelled at me.
Dad was trembling with anger. ‘We will deal with you tomorrow,’ he said.
4
I couldn’t sleep. It was the middle of the night. My new duvet, all puffed up and warm like one of Sylvie’s chocolate cakes, didn’t help at all. Nor did the lumpy puddle of marmalade my big toe found in the bottom left-hand corner of my bed. That’s the sort of feeble trick Sis plays. I just covered it with my old T-shirt and ignored it.
I lay there, twisting and turning, obsessing about my dream car which would be wide rather than long, with a huge, curved front windscreen and a dashboard four seats wide.
Pus, my cat, clawed me.
Maybe I’m not a trickster. Maybe I am a brilliant genius inventor having to undergo a childhood before I grow into my brainpower. It’s possible. Inventors have always led tricky lives. There was this guy who steamed all the wallpaper off the kitchen walls messing around wit
h kettles when he was a kid. He was probably just playing a trick, giving his sister a wallpaper-paste sauna. Then, when he was older, people reckoned he’d invented the steam engine.
I could hear Mum and Dad moving furniture around downstairs and shouting at each other.
Dad reckoned I should be ‘put away’, whatever that meant. I thought of trying to fold myself up like a clean T-shirt and spending the night in my drawer.
Mum reckoned I just needed ‘a firmer hand’. I checked out my hands. They both seemed pretty firm. Maybe I should do hand aerobics or wear a baseball mitt.
I heard them getting angrier and angrier. I knew they would spend the night planning a total punishment package for me. Maybe I should try running away. Nah. The duvet was too comfortable.
Lying there, in my humble little bed, I knew I’d outgrown mere tricks. I wanted to invent things now that would change every single kid’s life on the planet. I imagined myself accepting the grand prize for Supreme Inventor of the Century.
I’d mumble, ‘I just did it for the kids. They needed me.’
I turned on my lamp. I got a pencil out of my school bag and started scribbling diagrams into my maths book.
The car with four front seats could be modified to suit personal taste. Instead of one wide car, the whole thing could be two separate modules. Kids and parents. Then there could be another model with dual controls, so the driving parent couldn’t stop at the wrong petrol station or drive past the best swimming beach. The kid would have a special override function. Yeah!
I had this golden, glowing thought bubble around me. I knew I was a pre-famous inventor. I felt all-powerful.
But just bobbing around in this huge idea bubble wasn’t enough for me. I’ve never been the sort who just thinks: I like action.
In the dead of night I knew what I had to do. I knew where I had to do it. I even heard the right sort of stirring car-advert music in my head. I put on my tiger slippers and dressing gown and picked up my maths book with the plans. The great, glowing, golden idea bubble seemed to roll along with me in it. I glided down to the garage. I felt on top of the world.
5
The garage was dark, with all those huge spiders’ webs hanging there, catching the occasional shot of moonlight. Anyone else would have been spooked. I felt at home. This was the place I always came to when I needed to work up a trick.
‘Hi, spiders,’ I shouted. All the real spiders ran for cover into the cracks around the windows. The stuffed paper ones stayed put, glaring out from their fluoro-red painted eyes. I’d decorated the garage like a house of horrors weeks ago.
I got to work. I laid my maths book open on the bench. What I needed was a prototype of the Monster Mach One, the world’s first wide-bodied family car. That’s what engineers build: a prototype.
They showed people with too much money how it worked, and begged mega-bucks off them. Then they set up a factory and made squillions of them.
Question: How could I make a prototype? And Question Two: Where were the people with mega-bucks?
I had a small problem. I didn’t know anyone with spare dollars. I didn’t know anyone with many dollars at all.
I brushed the big sticky ropes of my homemade spiders’ webs out of the way and looked around in the gloom. Sacks of sheep-pellet compost mix. Gardening tools. One ancient lawn mower. Some old wooden crates. Dad’s car.
Ah, well. I’d have to start somewhere.
I ripped slats off the wooden crates and pulled the lawn mower into the centre of the floor, under the light. My plan was to build four wooden seats on top of the lawn mower. I grabbed a fistful of nails and started banging the wood together in seat-shapes. It splintered. The wood didn’t want to join in seat-shapes. The nails bent when I whammed them. Then I whammed my thumb. It was painful as. I danced around holding my thumb. I realized what Mum meant about ‘a firm hand’. Mine definitely weren’t firm enough. I hurled the hammer into a corner.
This couldn’t be the way you made a prototype. The tools were wrong. The wood was wrong. And the idea was wrong.
Now, what was it I really wanted? It was a prototype car with four front seats. A car. I blinked. I wiped a spider’s web out of my hair. Now where could I get a car?
I looked up. Of course! There it was, sitting in front of my own eyes. Stupid me! Dad’s car! It would be perfect. And he wouldn’t mind. It wouldn’t be a trick—this would be a prototype.
Dad would be so proud of me. We’d make a fortune. And he’d never, ever have to cut bald men’s hair again. And if he got sick of helping me make Monster Mach Ones, he could always sell the prototype to a museum and retire to Las Vegas with the cash.
What would I use to turn Dad’s useless car into a prototype? We didn’t have heaps of tools and I’d already lost the hammer. A saw maybe, to cut the car in half? I grabbed the pruning saw, and stood on a stool.
‘Bye-bye, car,’ I whispered. ‘It won’t hurt.’ I sawed away at the top, in as straight a line as I could, but nothing happened.
I grabbed the axe. Thwack! I crashed the rusty old axe down on the roof. I hoped the roof would split where I’d sawed a silver line with the pruning saw. Like those instructions to tear-along-dotted-line.
Nothing happened.
I walked up and down in my golden bubble, thinking. Whoops! This was hard to do, standing on a stool. I got off the stool. That’s when I saw it. The chain saw. On a high shelf. Covered in cobwebs.
I managed to reach it by standing on top of piled-up sacks of sheep-pellet compost mix. It was a very small chain saw, useless for chopping trees down, but I thought it could help me. I plugged it in and switched it on. It roared. The noise was really something. I walked slowly towards the car that I was about to transform. If I managed to cut it in half, I’d drag the back half round to the side and weld the car together so it had four front seats and no back seats.
I didn’t know how to weld, but prototypes didn’t have to be finished. The idea was the important thing, and what an idea! I saw myself in a few years’ time, mega-rich, cruising around in a wide Monster Mach One car on wide roads that covered the whole country.
The saw was getting louder and louder. My ears were growing as big as elephants’ ears. I got on the stool with it and tried to gently lie it along the roof. I took a deep breath. I practised my Nobel Prize speech: ‘Well, it all started one night in my father’s humble garage. There I was, surrounded by dangling spiders’ webs, alone, toiling in the dead of night, when—’
A huge hand grabbed the chain saw and turned it off. I fell off the stool and hurt my ankle. Another pair of hands grabbed my arms and pinned them behind my back. My hands weren’t firm enough to stop him. A third cop turned all the lights on. A two-way radio crackled.
‘It’s just a kid!’ said one.
‘What the hell is going on?’ another roared.
‘It’s Monster!’ said the last one. I knew him. I’d met him before, about a month ago at the family conference.
In the bright light we all stared at the quite major mess I’d made of Dad’s car. The top was dented and scratched. The side, between the doors, was scratched, too. I had this feeling I was really in for it now.
One of the cops told me I must never, ever play with my father’s power tools.
‘Power tools,’ he said, ‘can cut your arms and legs off, easy as slicing salami.’
He made me promise I would never, ever touch them again. He was shaking. ‘You’re damn lucky we found you while you still had arms, legs and a head,’ he said.
I could see the sense in what he said. I was shaking, too.
I blamed the golden-bubble thinking mood I’d been in. It seemed to take over.
The bubble had now popped. I had shrunk back to normal. I just wanted to go back to bed.
Mum and Dad staggered into the garage guided by a nice woman cop. They were wearing pink striped dressing gowns and red polka-dot looks of outrage. Sis stood behind them. Even she looked shocked.
Yep. I was
in for it all right.
I looked up and thought I saw Skim Milk hovering in the doorway, but I might have been wrong.
6
No one spoke to me all day. I had to stay in my room, a prisoner. This wasn’t too bad because I had my new duvet. But I figured with all the silence around the place a major grovel was required. While Mum and Dad rolled the sodden meadow up in the sitting room, I practised apologizing in my bedroom.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…
By the evening I was fairly good at it.
That’s when they called me. ‘Come down to the dining room!’ I was in for yet another family conference.
I limped past the sitting room. The carpet had gone. The floorboards were green. I noticed the wallpaper looked a bit wavy. Mum stomped past me to answer the front door.
‘Mum,’ my grovel started. ‘I’m really, really, really sorry you don’t like mustard and cress and I promise—’
‘Get into the dining room.’
I limped into the dining room. They’d pulled the extra bits out at each end of the dining-room table. They usually only did that at Christmas when Gran and Grandad arrived from Queensland. This family conference must be going to be big. Not a family conference so much as a summit conference. Ah well, I thought, at least I’ll be able to put it on my CV: attended summit conference.
Should be useful if I apply for the job of President of the United States.
In through the door came eight people:
Skim Milk, the supervisor at the last camp I’d been sent to, and who is my neighbour
Stone Face, my teacher
a strange young person who looked very old
the bulky policeman who’d been phoned when Dad heard a chain saw going in the middle of the night in his garage
the nice policewoman
and Mum, Dad and Sis.
At least Aunt Mildew wasn’t there with her uneaten Brussels sprouts.
At least the reporters and camera people weren’t in the house.
Monstrosity Page 14