And whatever they could find.
The crowd went wild, ‘You gruesome child!
For leering at the dead!’
A lady picked her crutches up
And crunched me round the head.
We passed the local hospital
With patients on their trolleys
I beamed at all the invalids,
They pelted me with lollies.
A nearby busker played guitar
And sang a bluesy song
About the tragic life he’d led
Where everything went wrong.
His mother never wanted him
His father called him names
His sister played with matches
So their house went up in flames.
And every single line he sang
Was sadder than the last
The people gave him money
As, respectfully, they passed.
Alas, my grin got bigger still
Despite his tragic rhymes
And when the busker swore at me
It echoed several times.
The busker didn’t care for it,
He lifted his guitar
And showed me how convenient
For whacking things they are.
Police pulled up and collared me,
The cause of all the fuss
‘Does someone own this grinning child?’
My parents said, ‘Not us.’
‘You’re lying!’ the police declared,
‘It’s absolutely clear.
You’d better make him wear a bag
And get him out of here.’
We couldn’t find the hypnotist
Who’d started all the strife.
‘He can’t go out like this,’ said Dad.
‘We’re stuck with him for life.’
As usual, my dad was wrong.
I’m very pleased to say
I broke the dreaded Yay Boo spell
By shouting out ‘Boo Yay!’
And now my face is beautiful,
I promise that it’s true
And if you don’t believe me
Then to you I say, ‘Yay Boo!’
This is a true story. It is a horrible story, the kind that makes you want to hide your head in a bucket whenever someone mentions it. It is the type of story where names are changed to protect the innocent. But since we were both guilty, I am not going to change our names. There was my brother Toby, and there was me. Toby was eight, and I was ten. There was also our brother Samuel, and although he wasn’t even one year old, everything that happened was his fault.
Every Christmas our mum took us on holiday to a beach far away – we would drive three days to get there, which wasn’t too bad as long as I got the front seat and wasn’t stuck in the back with Toby’s GI Joes. We would sleep in caravan parks and have fish and chips for lunch. Travelling was good, but arriving was better. At the beach, we stayed in the same motel every year. The motel was called Santa Fe: you pronounced Fe not like fefi-fo-fum but so that it rhymed with ‘death-ray’. Santa Fe was two storeys high, and its apartments were arranged like a three-sided square. In the middle of the square was a shining blue swimming pool. Planted in the garden surrounding the pool were yellow hibiscus, and frangipanis whose flowers looked like dresses for dolls. Living in the garden were tiny black-and-copper skinks. On the lawn were flamingos made of concrete, and curvy swans made from car tyres. Everything that didn’t already have a bright colour of its own was painted pink. The apartments, their front doors, the office sign and even the footpaths were PINK as sunburn, PINK as Barbie’s lips. Being at Santa Fe was like living in a ball of fairy floss. Toby and I loved it more than anywhere in the world.
In the summer that I’m talking about, there were not only flamingos and frangipanis waiting for us when we arrived at Santa Fe: our grandma and grandpa were there, and so were our uncles, Bernie and Kelvin. Grandma and Grandpa were our mum’s mum and dad; Bernie and Kelvin were her younger brothers. We visited them at home all the time, and now they were visiting us on holiday. Our grandparents were staying in one apartment, our uncles in another, and we had one for ourselves. The rooms were on the second storey, and we could see the beach from the windows. The ocean was pretty, and at night you could hear its nice sound – but the waves were full of jellyfish, and Toby and I had been stung when we were little, and now we were too nervous to swim in the sea. It didn’t matter: we liked the glittering pool at Santa Fe. We liked floating about on the li-los that Father Christmas gave us each year. We liked chasing skinks and playing table tennis and making ice-cream sundaes. Some summers we made friends with other kids who were staying at Santa Fe. But the summer I was ten, all Toby and I wanted to do was lurk in the shadows of Uncle Bernie and Uncle Kelvin.
That summer was different for another reason, too: it was the first summer that Samuel was part of our family. And Samuel was sick: he had colic, which makes a baby knot its fists, arch its back, turn purple as pudding, and SCREAM. Samuel shrieked from morning till night, and then he shrieked all night. Because she wasn’t getting any sleep, our mum was cranky. Our grandparents were cranky too, because they had the apartment next to ours and they could hear the baby’s howls through the wall. They couldn’t sleep, and they couldn’t hear their TV either. The only grown-ups who weren’t cranky were our two uncles. Their apartment was on the other side of the motel, far from Samuel’s bellowing.
Bernie and Kelvin were happy, and Toby and I trailed them like ducklings, watching TV on their couch, eating lunch in their kitchen, begging them to play Human Cannonball with us in the pool. Bernie would stand at one end of the pool, and Kelvin would stand near the other. Bernie would scoop Toby or me out of the water, lift us over his head, and THROW us across the pool to where Kelvin might catch us, or might let us plunge into the water. You could never guess which he would choose. I remember my brother tumbling through the air, a tangle of arms and legs, the sky very blue behind him, the pool sparkling below. When it was my turn to be the Cannonball I used to wish I would never come down, that I could stay in the sky forever. I wished the Christmas holidays would not end, that we’d never make the long journey back to the ordinary world. I wished that Santa Fe was my home, and that I could spend my life chasing skinks and picking frangipani and soaring through the air.
And then came the gruesome day, which I am going to tell you about even though I don’t care to, even though my face will go Santa Fe pink. Whenever I think of Christmas holidays now, I think about this day. And sometimes I smile, and sometimes I need to hide my head in a bucket.
For most of that day, everything was normal – Samuel was crying, Mum was fussing, Grandma and Grandpa were angry, Toby and I were bothering our uncles. We raced them up and down the swimming pool, and persuaded them to buy icy-poles. Everything was good until the afternoon, when Bernie and Kelvin announced they were going into town and wouldn’t be home until late. No children were invited on this outing – and when they said children, they meant Toby and me. We watched, grief-stricken, as our uncles walked away. They were wearing their best clothes and had brushed their hair. They were out to impress the ladies, abandoning us. When they disappeared around a corner, Toby and I looked at each other. For the first time all holiday, we had to amuse ourselves.
If Samuel hadn’t been crying, we could have watched TV. If Mum hadn’t been stuck with the baby, she might have played table tennis with us. If Samuel’s shrieking hadn’t given my grandparents the irrits, they might have taken us to the Splash ‘n’ Ride. But because His Little Horrible Highness was sick, Toby and I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. So even though it was me who thought up the idea, what happened that day can, if you look at it the right way, be blamed on Samuel.
Toby and I climbed the stairs to our uncles’ apartment. Leaning against the balcony banister, we looked over the lawn and the swimming pool, past the flamingos and the swans, to the door of our apartment. It was closed against the afternoon sun, as
was our grandparents’ door. No one was out sunbaking; the manager wasn’t raking leaves. Nobody was watching us. Our uncles had left their apartment key under the doormat. I fished it out, and we slipped through the door like mice. Nobody saw.
My brother and I had been in our uncles’ apartment many times: it was full of interesting items like cufflinks and cigarette lighters and coins dropped on the floor. Toby and I set to work immediately. We opened the dresser drawers and tossed our uncles’ clothes around the room. We put their shoes in funny places, on the windowsill and dangling from the ceiling fan. We hid knives and forks in Uncle Kelvin’s bed, and short-sheeted Uncle Bernie’s. We took cups and plates from the shelves and arranged them on the couch. We emptied the kitchen cupboards and put cereal in the shower, detergent behind the television, bread under the beds. We hung teabags from the light switches and ate our uncles’ chocolate, leaving the silver wrapper behind. I filled the bath with water and emptied the fruit bowl into it. Some fruit went straight to the bottom, and some of it bobbed around. Toby poured shampoo into the toilet, and covered the bowl with plastic wrap. I used shaving cream to draw smiley faces on the mirror, and talcum powder to write mysterious squiggles on the floor. The smell of the powder and the cream mixed together was delicious and sweet. Toby smeared butter on the handles of taps, and mustard on the doorhandles. We sprayed the lounge room with deodorant and flyspray, and the spooky mist settled on the furniture. We untuned the radio and lost the picture on the TV. Every new invention made us clamp our hands over our giggling mouths. Kelvin and Bernie were going to cack themselves when they switched on the light and discovered what we had done. That will teach us for leaving the children! they’d say. We won’t do that again! Toby opened a bedside drawer and found money folded in a metal clip, and we argued about it in whispers. He wanted to sticky-tape the money to the ceiling, but we didn’t have any sticky-tape; so we emptied a bottle of lemonade down the sink, put the money inside the bottle and screwed the cap back on. We sat the bottle on the middle shelf of the fridge. It looked nice and interesting, and we both thought people should put money in bottles more often.
By now we had been in the apartment for quite a while, and Mum was probably wondering where we were. We stood side-by-side and proudly surveyed our handiwork. Nothing was broken, nothing was missing (except chocolate and lemonade), but the apartment looked like a doll’s house that had rolled down a street. Clothes flopped on the floor like exhausted ghosts, the dining chairs stood on their heads, the newspaper was torn into a thousand pieces of confetti. The dresser drawers hung out like tongues, the kitchen cupboards were gasping mouths, the bathroom was completely shell-shocked. Foamy faces grinned from the mirror; all the pictures hung upside down. The beds looked harmless, hiding their surprises. Kelvin would yelp when his toes touched the cold cutlery beneath his sheets. Bernie would think it was hilarious, until he discovered his own sheets didn’t reach the end of his bed. It would take our uncles hours to put everything back the way it had been – we wondered if they would start work immediately, or fall asleep in the mess. Tidying up would be like a game of hide-and-seek for them, they would never know what they’d find next. They would marvel at our cleverness, and also at our mischievousness. They would try to be cross, but really they’d be chuckling and shaking their heads the way adults do when something makes them mad but also makes them laugh. We shut the curtains before we left the apartment because it would be a shame if someone saw the chaos and cleaned it before our uncles came home.
Back in our own apartment, Sam had finally stopped crying. Mum put him in his pusher and took us window-shopping and then for a picnic on the beach. I stopped thinking about our escapade in our uncle’s room, and maybe Toby forgot, too. I forgot about it all night, and even when I woke up the next morning, I didn’t remember it straightaway. I was thinking about one of my teeth, which was wobbling and doomed to fall out that day. I pushed away my blankets and went to the kitchen and found Mum at the table, nursing Sam. I showed her my teetering fang and she liked it, and then she said that the police had come to Santa Fe in the middle of the night. Burglars had broken into my uncles’ apartment, and made a shocking mess.
I nearly swallowed my wobbly tooth, my tongue and both my ears as well. I slunk back to my bedroom, my eyes rolling inside my head. Burglars? BURGLARS? Wasn’t it immediately clear to anyone that the shocking mess in my uncles’ apartment was the work of lonely children? It was a PRACTICAL JOKE. Only DUMB people wouldn’t understand that! SMART people would LAUGH, not CALL THE POLICE! The police! The very idea of being in trouble with the police made my stomach swirl like the sea.
I sat in the corner and pinched myself, trying not to cry. Somehow I had to weasel out of this awful situation. I would tell whatever lies were necessary, as many as I had to. I absolutely DID NOT WANT to talk to the police. I was ten years old! Which was too young to go to prison, I knew. But if people discovered the truth, they would be angry at me, and I could not bear being in trouble. I hugged my knees and sucked my tooth and blinked away tears. I felt furious with Samuel, whose crying had led me to this. I was furious with my uncles and my mum and my grandparents and the motel manager and the police for not seeing that it was a prank and it was funny. But mostly I just felt:
STUPID.
Because only someone stupid would expect anyone to guess that children had made the mess in my uncles’ apartment. A proper person would look at the chaos and think of burglars, and telephone the police. It seemed perfectly obvious, as obvious as one plus one equalling two. But it hadn’t been obvious yesterday, when I was filling my uncles’ kitchen sink with green cordial.
Sitting on the floor of my bedroom, tears dropping out of my eyes, I suddenly saw something I had never seen clearly before. I saw that I was just a kid, and that a kid’s world is small and simple. But there is a world that kids don’t see, and things are different there. That other world is big and complicated: nonetheless, I wanted to live there, where everything was sensible, where there were answers to all the mysteries. I wanted to be a smart and proper person, I wanted to know everything, I wanted to stop making mistakes.
While I had been crying, I had also been wriggling my tooth. It slipped out of my gum with a taste of metal and blood. I held up the tooth and considered it. A lost tooth meant fifty cents under my pillow, though I didn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy.
I knew I wasn’t clever enough to lie to the police. I had no choice but to confess. I would tell my mum what I had done, and I’d take my punishment with dignity. I trudged very slowly down the hall – and, as I walked, I heard a familiar sound. It was the sound of Toby laughing and water splashing: it was the sound of Human Cannonball!
I started to run, down the hall, through the lounge, out onto the balcony. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Uncle Bernie and Uncle Kelvin were in the swimming pool, flinging my brother into the air. Toby was laughing, his scrawny limbs going mad. I watched Kelvin catch him and hoist him, sending him hurtling back to Bernie again. My uncles were grinning, calling out to each other, whistling and clapping their hands. I stared at them in wonder, my heart beating hard.
Mum came to stand beside me. Samuel was asleep in her arms. She said, ‘Toby told me what you two did yesterday.’
Toby! DOBBER! I should have remembered he could NEVER keep a secret. And yet, in that moment, I felt melty with love for him. ‘It was supposed to be a joke,’ I said, pitifully.
‘Yes,’ said Mum, ‘I know.’
‘Are we in trouble?’ I asked.
Mum said, ‘Only if you do it again.’
‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘I never will.’
‘I believe you,’ Mum replied.
I opened my fist and we looked down at my fang. ‘Another baby tooth,’ Mum sighed. ‘Soon you’ll be grown up.’
‘Good,’ I said stoutly. ‘I can’t wait.’
And my mum answered me, ‘Don’t say that. You’re only young once.’
I closed the tooth inside my hand. I felt l
ike I was floating, like maybe I could fly. I wanted to be a Human Cannonball while I was still little enough to be thrown through the air. I ran down the stairs and across the green lawn, past pink concrete flamingos and white tyre swans, past coppery skinks sleeping on sunny rocks, past hibiscus flowers scattered on the grass, and leaped over the blue water, into my uncle’s arms.
Bryn Scarfel had been in sticky situations before. He’d always managed to escape either through quick talking, quick thinking, or quick running. So when he was arrested as soon as he crossed the border, he wasn’t too worried.
He was relaxed as the soldiers dragged him into the council chamber in Wolpen Castle, in the middle of Wolpen Town, in the land of Wolpen. A dozen greyrobed, grey-haired men stared at him with what Bryn decided was a mixture of relief and curiosity. He gazed at the rich tapestries and the glorious stained-glass windows, taking mental notes. This would make a fine addition to Bryn’s Guide to Dangerous Adventures in Far-Off Magical Lands, the book he was planning to write when he finally arrived home after his travels.
When one of the grey-robed figures cleared his throat, Bryn was totally at ease. After all, hadn’t he talked his way out of the clutches of the Mad Emperor of Yod?
‘I am Cardello,’ the grey-robed figure said. His beard reached nearly to his chest and he had the most interesting eyes Bryn had ever seen. They were very, very dark green, almost black. ‘I am the leader of the Council of the Wise, and you are a stranger.’
‘That’s correct. I’m Bryn Scarfel, a humble traveller in your wonderful land, and I’m sure there’s been some mistake. If you just untie me, I’ll entertain you for an hour or so with tales of far-off places and then I’ll be on my way.’
Bryn was confident. He had hundreds of stories from the year he’d spent travelling across the world. Some were funny, some were frightening, some only made sense to the Mad Emperor of Yod, but he’d learned early on that the content of a story wasn’t as important as how it was told.
Things a Map Won't Show You Page 9