Monstrosity

by Janice Marriott

  ‘Sit down, Brewster.’ I sat down on a hard wooden chair.

  The young person who looked old turned out to be a psychiatrist. This was all starting to get way too heavy. I looked at the windows. They were shut. And they had smeary bits of dead moths and flies in the bottom corners.

  Stone Face, my teacher, started first. ‘Your behaviour, Brewster, is unacceptable.’

  ‘Your behaviour,’ said the doddery young psychiatrist, ‘is alien.’

  He must know what he was talking about. He had a job so difficult you couldn’t spell it without serious study.

  Skim Milk just looked at Sis. He wouldn’t look at me.

  ‘You’re off this planet,’ Sis shouted at me.

  There was no ‘Have you got anything to say?’

  There was no ‘Why did you do it?’

  There was no ‘What’s the matter, dear?’

  There was no ‘We’ll give you a second chance.’

  There was no talk of turning myself around.

  There was no talk of pulling myself together.

  There was no talk of straightening myself out.

  There was no talk of shaking myself up.

  This was serious stuff. No jokes allowed.

  Mum said I was being sent away to some place that toughened kids up and taught them discipline. It was a very long, long way away.

  ‘Away?’ I creaked. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You will not come home until your behaviour improves.’

  ‘And until you leave school,’ butted in Stone Face, who was longing to get me out of his classroom.

  I tried to process the data in my brain, but my brain crashed and it spat the disk out.

  ‘Don’t stick your tongue out!’ said Dad.

  ‘I wasn’t!’

  ‘This child has a great deal of re-learning to do,’ trembled the doddery young psychiatrist.

  ‘Boarding school will knock the old learning out of him,’ said the bulky cop.

  Boarding school! Prison! Finally, I’d processed the information. I knew what sort of place that school was.

  It was tramping in mud—not just once a year, but every single day. And before breakfast. Followed by cold showers. No TV. No late nights. No snacks. No private bedroom with a duvet you could wrap around yourself like a magic cloak when you were dreaming up tricks. No dreaming. No tricks. No tricks at all. Absolutely no tricks.

  I couldn’t go there. I’d die there, slowly, starting with my brain, then my heart, then my soul.

  That was no place for me, Monster. I needed—

  ‘A special boarding school,’ said Skim Milk, ‘for disturbed young people like you.’

  What? How dare Skim Milk accuse me of being disturbed! Surely none of the others thought I was disturbed.

  I looked around for Pus, my cat. She didn’t think I was disturbed. She was purring on the table. No one took any notice of her.

  I got up to speak. No one looked at me. They all looked at Mum.

  Mum said, ‘Go to bed now. Your father will drive you there in the morning, at dawn. The drive will take all day.’

  ‘Your father’ meant Dad. Was this a trick? Why was she changing his name?

  The bulky cop said, ‘Don’t try to escape. We have the house surrounded.’

  I felt jellyish inside. I looked around, desperate for something to stop me crying. Having a major boo-hoo would destroy my image totally.

  I saw Sis smile at Skim Milk. That wasn’t fair! How could she! Somehow this outrage gave me courage. I opened my mouth and this time the words poured out.

  ‘I am the greatest pre-inventor the world has ever known. I am about to transform your planet. I will cover the Earth with wide roads and wide cars. I will open your minds to the possibilities of speed travel.’

  ‘Go to bed,’ Mum repeated, softly but firmly. Everyone round the table nodded their heads then stared at me. Dad seemed to have tears in his eyes. The psychiatrist was writing notes.

  I grabbed Pus and raced up those stairs and plunged into my duvet. I had to think. I had to wrap the duvet around myself and think harder than I’d ever thought before. I had several things to think about.

  I was never, ever going away to a prison school a long, long way away. That was for sure. I had to think about how to get out of that. Another thing I was thinking about was: was I really going mad?

  7

  I couldn’t sleep. Of course I couldn’t. Even though I hadn’t slept the night before, either. I was worried about being locked away in a school for disturbed boys in the middle of nowhere. I was worried about not having my duvet and my bedroom. And I seemed to be all speeded up, with heaps of energy and a wicked lot of ideas for tricks. Normally I would have liked that, but Mum and Dad and Skim Milk and the psychiatrist and the cops wouldn’t let me do anything with the ideas. It was terrible.

  I covered myself with my duvet, hoping this would dampen down the ideas so I could get some sleep. It didn’t work. I paced up and down. I scribbled plans in all my exercise books. Some of them, most of them, I couldn’t understand. I had to face it. I was going gaga.

  Suddenly I had this powerful urge to move. Not just rolling over in bed. Not just getting up and leaping around: I needed a major move. I needed to escape.

  I listened to hear if anyone was still up and awake. No sound. Nothing.

  I listened to hear if an army cordon around the house was changing guards. Nothing.

  I opened my bedroom door and checked to see if there was a giant security guard outside it. I planned to suffocate him with my dust-mite-infested teddy bear. No one.

  I looked out the bathroom window and the landing window. No ring of cops or the Army waiting to pounce. The coast was clear. The bulky cop must have been bluffing. Typical.

  I said goodbye to my duvet and took my life savings out of my piggy bank. Heavily laden with ten-cent pieces, I crept downstairs, out the back door into the moonlight, and away.

  ‘Bye-bye, house,’ I whispered. Then I gulped. ‘And goodbye Mum, Dad and Sis.’

  I really lost control. ‘Goodbye, Pus,’ I howled.

  As I walked past Skim Milk’s house I got that feeling again, that feeling that I was being watched.

  At first I liked walking along in the moonlight. Yep, if this was running away it was cool.

  But after a mile or so I began to worry. For a start there didn’t seem to be too many places to run away to. It wasn’t like a running race where you can see the finish line. How much longer would I have to walk along this boring old road?

  I slogged along the road out of town, in the cold, with no Superman or Spiderman skills, and with very few cars whirring past. I just wanted to be an ordinary human being, with a family who liked me and a bedroom of my own where I could curl up in my duvet and listen to my music. Hey! That was weird! Real weird because all my life up until now that had been the last thing I wanted to be, because it was boring as!

  If I was this confused, what was going on? My stomach rumbled and shrivelled up like a dead balloon. I was hungry. For the first time in my whole life I hadn’t had breakfast. Maybe, I thought, brushing tears off my cheeks, I’m feeling low because I’m starving. I’ll be back to playing tricks when I’ve had pancakes and a milkshake.

  That thought cheered me up for a couple of blocks until the road ran out of houses to pass. Then I stopped. I wasn’t going to find pancakes and milkshakes on this road to nowhere. And the further I walked out of town, the further I’d be from pancakes and milkshakes.

  I turned around and tramped back, into the wind, into town.

  Then I remembered I didn’t have much money. And it was all in ten-cent pieces. It wasn’t my style to unload a piggy bank on the counter at McDonald’s. It’d look loser-ish. And I’d hold up the whole queue while the guy counted all the ten-cent pieces and swept them into his big hands. Nah, I couldn’t do that.

  I trudged on and on. The wind polished the tears into my face until I looked as shiny as Mildew’s furniture. My face i
tched. My nose dripped. I kept on walking, getting closer to the bright lights and the warm shops. Then I stopped. Town without money wasn’t a good place. If I was surrounded by shops and had zilch money, I really would feel alien.

  Without a word (there was no one to talk to), I turned around and started trudging out of town again. The wind was now boring a hole in the back of my head.

  I might have given up right there and then, but I forced my mind to think about my invention of the car with no back seats. I forced myself to think about nothing else.

  I reckon, I told a power pole I was passing, no one has re-designed the car since the wheel was invented. No one has thought about making cars for kids. I could see this car in my mind. It had—

  A car stopped. I actually thought this bright, yellow car was the egg-shaped, wide-bodied car of my dreams. And I thought I’d seen it somewhere before. Then it changed its shape to normal, with flat sides and seats in the back. I kept my head down, pretending not to notice it. The driver could be a psychiatrist who’d see through my thin human disguise and know I was an unacceptable alien. He’d dob me in to the cops. Off I’d go to prison school where you don’t get a feather duvet and you have to march up mountains of mud all day.

  ‘Hi,’ shouted the driver. ‘Want a ride?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Hop in. I’m going there, too.’

  I tried to look at the driver. He wore a hat and wrap-around sunglasses, so I couldn’t see much of his face. He had rubbery skin and looked quite friendly.

  ‘I’m really going nowhere,’ I said. ‘I’m an alien.’

  The guy roared with laughter. He said that was the best thing he’d heard in years. He patted the seat beside him. It was a very comfy-looking seat, with arm-rests.

  His voice sounded normal. In fact it reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who.

  I got in. OK. I know you shouldn’t, but I’d been abandoned, I was cold and, well, the car was so classy. It was a model I’d never seen before with lots of headlights and tail-lights and strangely curved doors with lights along them, too. Must be a one-off some car nut had made. I was being driven around town in a designer car and no one was there to see it. Just my luck. My mate, Muggeridge, would never believe it.

  The car was amazing. And so was the driver. He seemed to understand everything I was feeling, everything I was trying to say. I tried to tell him what had happened to me. He wasn’t like a parent. He wasn’t like a teacher or a psychiatrist or a bulky cop or a nice cop. He was like nothing on this Earth. At last someone understood me!

  I’ll give you an example of what I mean by understanding. I told him I was running away from my family. I said, families hold you back.

  ‘I’ve never had one,’ he said.

  Wow! Can you imagine any grown-up saying that? It was incredible. Total understanding.

  I told him about my jokes and tricks. He said he could help me make amazing tricks.

  ‘Watch this,’ he said. The car spun around! Just like that. It whirled around. Did a complete donut. No braking noises. No skids.

  ‘How’d you do that?’

  ‘Not telling.’

  I understood. He didn’t want to tell about his best tricks. Fair enough.

  ‘I’m real good at keeping secrets,’ I said.

  ‘That right? Well, how’s this for a secret, Monster? I’m an—’

  ‘Hey! How d’you know my name?’

  He pulled his hat off. On top of his bald head was a sprout of hair sticking straight up.

  ‘Er…I’m an alien,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been watching you.’

  8

  I didn’t know what to say. Was he really an alien? Was he a nutter? Was I a nutter? Was I an alien? Was I really Monster, an ordinary kid who happened to be the first intelligent human to communicate with an alien?

  If so, I was going to be real famous. No doubt about that. This was THE big news story of the millennium.

  I decided to keep him talking. I’d be a spy for Planet Earth. My mission was to find out as much about him and his quest as I could before he caught onto what I was doing. I planned my next sentence carefully.

  ‘You know, on Earth we get hungry about once every two hours. How about some McDonald’s? D’you have any money?’

  ‘Fine. I don’t need to eat, but I’ll watch you. I have a bag of nutrients. When it gets stale, I empty it and get another one.’

  ‘But do you have money?’

  ‘Sure. I have it in another bag. How much do you want?’

  In McDonald’s I ordered pancakes, a strawberry milkshake and fries. If I was going to spy for Planet Earth I might as well do it in style, like James Bond.

  ‘You have to pay,’ I said. ‘You need six large gold ones, one big silver one and one very small silver one.’

  He jiggled the coins around in his hand. They seemed to grow right out of his palm.

  ‘I can never understand why it’s so important to get the number and colour and size exactly right,’ he said.

  I counted the coins out for him. ‘See, you’re not the only intelligent life form. So there.’

  We settled into a corner booth, far away from ordinary, boring people who wouldn’t know an alien from an onion.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I whispered.

  ‘So you can fill your internal food bag.’

  ‘No. Not why are you in McDonald’s. Why are you here on Planet Earth?’

  ‘I have to find one special human.’

  ‘Will you go back when you’ve got him, or her?’

  He was reluctant to answer this one. It was obviously top secret. ‘The trouble is we miscalculated one small thing and I’m trapped here. I’ve been here for seven years. It seems to me a very long time.’

  ‘Seven years! That’s aeons. Seven years. That’s how long I waited for a decent duvet. It’s forever. I’ve got one now.’

  ‘I’ve completed my mission.’ He wasn’t interested in my new duvet. ‘I’ve learned the ways of the Earth people. I am now bored. This place is a black hole in the backside of the universe.’

  ‘I know! I know! I’ve always said that,’ I said. This guy really was on my wave-length. ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked. ‘Why are you trapped here? Maybe I can help.’

  ‘To launch myself into space again I need a runway that’ll let me reach 200 ks an hour. But with your thin atmosphere and gravity weighting, and the shocking state of your pot-holey roads, it takes quite a while for my craft to accelerate to over 150 ks. I have to make the attempts on your motorways. They are the only suitable surface. I keep getting speeding tickets and I never get airborne before I’m chased by your police, who’ve picked me up on their radar and speed cameras. If I get another speeding ticket I’m in danger of being arrested.’

  I leant back in the seat and offered him a French fry. He smiled and patted his stomach.

  ‘No thanks. I got a new bag today,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about your place. Home, I mean.’

  ‘Plongo is very beautiful. We are an egg-shaped meteorite of gigantic size. Our surface is covered in lovely tarseal. I miss it dreadfully.’

  ‘So you never have to climb muddy mountains and camp in mothy forests?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘I had to do that recently.’

  His planet sounded bliss, apart from the absence of food.

  ‘What d’you think of humans?’

  ‘Humans are unadventurous,’ he said. ‘They started out well. Some very nifty tree huts were built in the hairy era. But their brains haven’t developed at all since their hair dropped out and they started walking on two legs. Now their senses are atrophying.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Shrivelling up.’

  ‘I know what that feels like,’ I said, patting my stomach.

  He took no notice. ‘Humans are lazy. They only use five per cent of their brains. That is crazy! If all 100 per cen
t of humans’ brains were used and all humans focused their thoughts on the task, they could think this little planet out of its going-nowhere orbit into the inter-galactic skyway to infinite possibility.’

  ‘Wow!’ And here was me thinking I was so clever inventing a back-seat-free car. These guys on Plongo were way ahead. Way ahead.

  I sipped a lumpy bit of strawberry shake and looked around. Then I had another thought: why would we want to change our orbit when we were perfectly safe here, on Earth, in well-lit, comfy takeaway-food places?

  ‘I don’t mind going around in circles,’ I said.

  We were both quiet for a while. I was thinking. I knew he was thinking, too, because under his hat his sprout thing kept twitching. It looked like his hat was moving.

  ‘Hey, you guys—I mean, hey, you are a guy, aren’t you?’

  ‘On Plongo we have neither sex nor violence. We are more civilized than you people. I am neither man nor woman.’

  ‘Wow!’ I thought that was the most sensible thing I’d heard for ages. There’d be no censor’s classification on films. You could watch anything! And no girls! No sisters!

  ‘I’ll call you Herm, like him and her joined together.’

  ‘You may call me whatever you want.’

  ‘About your mission,’ I asked casually. ‘You haven’t told me about the special human you’re looking for.’

  ‘I need to find the right kind of young human to add to our gene stock on Plongo.’

  Jean stock. I thought of piles of folded Levis in the clothes shop and Mum getting mad at me because I wanted stone-washed ones which she said were too expensive.

  ‘What’s the right sort of human? I could find one for you.’ I thought of the doddery young psychiatrist or the bulky cop, or maybe Sis.

  ‘A bright, lively-minded human, as yet undeadened by family life.’

  ‘Ah.’ I felt sure the doddery young psychiatrist didn’t have a family. He’d be ideal.

  ‘I will take him—or I would if we could take off—to our nomadic home, Plongo, which cruises the outer limits of the known universe searching for the perfect radio waves—’

  ‘What will you do when—’