'What?' I said.
Paul looked at his watch. 'Open your ears, dipstick. It's nearly 6:40. You're never going to get anything up by eight. Which means Cat wins. Which means we don't have to solve the case of the missing camera and we don't have to get the bike in the air tomorrow. Which means I'm going home. Bye.'
He headed outside and grabbed the scooter. It was way-rusty and standing next to the jump from Sunday.
'Can I take this?' he said.
'Stop, man.'
He turned to me, shoving his glasses up his nose.
'I got an idea,' I said.
He groaned.
'Give me till eight o'clock,' I said.
'Give it up,' Paul said and jumped on the scoot.
'Eight,' I said.
'Give–'
'You want to be back flippin' festy beefburgers for backpackers next week or you want a shot at something better?' I asked him.
He stopped a few metres up the dirt path, hung his head and let out a whine. 'Your mum better be keen to adopt.'
31
A Very Long Night
'What are you boys up to?' My ma was standing in the doorway of the workshop. It was dark outside behind her. Nearly 9:00 p.m. and she'd just finished teaching a fire-twirling class. She looked tired.
Paul and I were attaching wheels. Denson was holding the trike steady. He'd dropped by an hour earlier to say he'd seen the kitesk8boarding piece on the Coolhunters site and to see if we needed help. And we seriously needed help.
'Hey Ma, this is Denson,' I said.
'Hello, Denson.'
'Hi.'
'Paul, I don't mean to pry but does your mum know you're here?' she asked.
'Um,' he said.
I was impressed. I'd never heard them have such a long conversation.
'Hmmmm,' she said. 'Maybe you should head off home. Why're you working so late anyway?'
I didn't answer, pretending I was concentrating on wheel alignment.
'Mac?' she said.
I looked up. She knew right away.
'You didn't film something tonight after we met with Paul's mum, did you?'
I nodded. We had. It wasn't much but it was something. Enough to keep us alive till 8:00 a.m. Friday when our fate was decided. We'd been over to Jewels' place to front her but her Dad reckoned she was sick in bed. Yeah, right. We knew she'd done it but I still had big trouble understanding why she'd sell us out like that.
So we recorded a voiceover on Paul's mobile. Then we nabbed the computer at Mr Kim's that has the scanner and scanned a whole bunch of photos and sketches and stuff from our inventions over the years. We used stills of us swinging on the clothesline with teatowels around our necks when we were kids and me standing on top of the bus ready to make my head-first leap into the compost bin. We showed a shot of Paul's house that he had on his phone and we spent ten minutes shooting footage of the Arts Estate and our bus and even the chicken factory next door. We nabbed a Google Earth image showing where in the world Kings Bay was. It was this whole mess of weird stuff that told people who we are. It showed how Paul was from a straight family and I was from a kinda loose one and how our inventions were like a crazy collision of those things – the patience to plan and engineer something (Paul) and the dream and guts to make it happen (me). It was rough and spur-of-the-moment and risky but there was something about it I liked. Anyway, it was all we had.
'Well ... when does this trial end?' Mum said, walking through the doorway, watching what we were doing.
'Tomorrow night,' I said.
'If you win, let's sit down and talk about it. With these Cool people. And Paul's mum. And we'll see what they have to say. And if you have to travel, who would go with you and so on. Because I love you and I want you to make your own choices but I'm not packing you off to New York by yourself no matter what you say, OK?'
10:25 p.m.
Denson had called it a night. Paul and I were working on the solar panels. Kind of hard to test in the middle of the night. I couldn't believe I was going to be expected to test this bodgy invention in the morning
'G'day,' said a rich, gravelly voice from the door. I looked up. It was my dad.
'Your mother called me,' he said. 'Mentioned you could do with a hand.'
Mum and Dad hardly ever spoke.
'Yeah. But after this morning, I didn't think y–'
'Forget this morning. I'm here now,' he said, kind of gruff, but probably not meaning to be.
The workshop light was starting to fade and it cast a weird glow on his face. He was dirty, like he'd been fixing a tractor or a generator or something. His feet were grubby and bare. He looked like he'd been roused from a winter sleep. I knew it was a major event to get him down off the hill. I still hadn't spoken to him about prison and stuff. And I still felt a bit scared of him or something. Like going to jail must have changed him somehow.
'What have you got an engine on the thing for?' he asked, moving towards the trike.
'To get speed up for take-off,' I said.
'It's about air speed, not ground speed. If it's not going to propel you in the air, forget about it,' he said.
'Yeah, but you said we'd kill ourselves with a prop.'
'You will,' he said. 'You're better off just finding a big hill. No prop. You got any light in here?' he said, squinting towards the generator bike. 'Still got that thing?' he said. Dad had helped us build the bike years ago. I was surprised he remembered.
I jumped on the bike and pedalled hard. The light started to warm up. It was funny with my dad. Even though I didn't see him much, I always wanted to please him. Sometimes I'd think he didn't want to know me 'cos he never got in touch, and I'd get pretty angry, but then I'd see him again and all I wanted to do was make him happy. Even more than I did with my mum. It didn't make sense.
So Dad started working on the trike with us. He stripped the solar panels and engine off. He replaced some of the heavier trike parts with lighter ones from our abandoned bikes. He showed us how to attach the wing harness properly.
'Who's gonna fly it?' he asked.
'Me,' I said.
'Tomorrow afternoon, you reckon?'
I nodded.
'We'd better do a test in the morning then,' he said. 'You ever flown since we did it years ago?'
'Not exactly,' I said. He knew that that meant 'no'. 'Do you think it's dangerous?'
'Statistically ... Hold that and pull tight when I say,' he said to Paul. Paul just looked at him. 'You hear me?' Dad said. Then he lay down on the ground underneath the trike and bolted the harness into place. 'OK, pull.' Paul pulled up hard.
'Statistically,' he said again, standing and checking the top of the harness. 'It's safer than riding a motorbike and less safe than driving a car. We'll do some test runs. You'll be fine.'
Paul stood and watched my dad work. He couldn't take his eyes off him. Which was weird for a dude who said he had gerontophobia. Usually even the sight of someone over forty brought acid up from Paul's belly. But not tonight. He looked like a little kid watching Santa or something.
Just before the witchin' hour the third parent of the night showed up at our workshop door. Paul's dad. He was wearing short stripy pyjamas and thongs. He had a bored, grey look on his face and didn't say anything. Neither did Paul.
'See you guys tomorrow,' Paul said.
'Don't bank on it,' said Paul's dad. He gave me and my old man a tired glare and left.
'Nice bloke,' Dad said.
We spent the next couple of hours testing instruments and making final adjustments. We worked mostly in silence. I went to ask him a couple of times about prison but I chickened out. I was wrecked. Whenever I'd say something like, 'I don't feel like I've seen you in ages,' he'd say something like, 'Can you pass me the Phillips head?'
We finally quit just before 2:00 a.m., my eyelids stinging, too braindead to think straight.
The test flight was scheduled for first light – 5:30 a.m. on the big hill down to McMasters. Do or die t
ime.
32
Flow
I was up over the trees. Gliding. Arms out. Everything super-green below. Half a kilometre away was the Pacific Ocean, stretching out forever.
I'd had flying dreams before but never this real. I flew over my school. Kids, teachers, cleaners were just specks bumping around in this mass of green dotted with buildings. It was like Google Earth in full-colour, motion picture reality.
I heard the bell ring but it was as if I was listening to it through a tunnel. Then all the specks moved on command and were sucked inside the buildings. I came to where Cat and her group were hugging each other and I hovered there, a hundred metres above. I didn't feel anything for her – like, hate, nothing. From up there, the most powerful kid in our year was just a dot like everybody else. Teachers and bullies, jocks and emos, the 'A' groupers and the 'Z' groupers, geeks and weight-lifters were all the same. And nothing mattered to me – not Jewels or Paul's mum or their rat dog Molly or grease traps or who was cool or solar panels or living in a bus or New York or Dad or stolen cameras or Speed and Tony. From up there, there was no cool or uncool. There was just me and the air.
I wanted to feel like that all the time. Even when I'd landed and I was back down in amongst it all, I wanted to feel like none of the things that usually bent me out of shape mattered.
I decided to get a closer look. I swooped down and in through the side doors near the art rooms. I cruised right over the top of the feral mess of heads below – kids swarming in every direction. I was speeding right over them, five centimetres above their heads. I nearly smacked into James Campbell, a gigantic year eleven basketball guy, but I managed to swerve at the last moment. The amazing thing was that no one could see me. I flew through the halls from one end of the school to the other. Past woodwork and English, Maths and Social Science, right up the ramp towards the biology labs. And even in there, in amongst it all, I still felt good.
I shot past the office and out the front doors and was swept up into the sky. I was high above the trees again. I kept racing upwards and as I felt moist clouds touch my ears I woke up. It was 5:15 a.m. Mr Kim was shuffling bins around outside. My head felt heavy and it seemed like I'd been dreaming that one dream all night.
33
Test Flight
5:58 a.m. Helmet on. Top of McMasters Hill. Perfect wind conditions. Sun hot already. Butterflies in stomach.
We'd already aborted two take-offs. One for crossed lines leading to my wing. Another for a car reversing out of its driveway and nearly cleaning me up. I guess people don't expect to find three-wheeled flying machines tearing down the hill outside their place before six in the morning.
Paul had snuck out again. He was making last-minute tweaks. My dad? Nowhere to be seen. He meant well but being in a certain place at a certain time just wasn't his gig. The sun was climbing and we had to go before the traffic got heavier or anyone from Cat's place saw what we were doing. She was only three doors up from where we'd be launching over the sand dune. We needed a spectacular spot for tonight's flight. The plan was to fly right over Cat's party. Maximum impact.
I took a deep breath and focused on the runway stretching ahead – the long, steep hill down to the top of the dune at the northern end of McMasters. Once you hit the dune the road curved around to the right and along the beachfront past Cat's place. But I was going straight ahead off the sandy slope. At the southern end of the beach there was a little cliff but a screw-up off there spelt almost certain death. The dune meant that if I couldn't get up, I only had a little way to fall to the soft sand that sloped gently down to the beach. Still, a million other things could go wrong.
I started to feel calm. I often got that feeling when one of our inventions was finally going to succeed. But I deleted the thought. I didn't want to jinx myself.
The trike felt good underneath me, a thousand times sturdier than a two-wheeler. I looked behind me. The wing was laid out on the road like a deflated parachute. It was being whipped around by the breeze blowing up the hill. Paul reckoned the air speed was about seven knots.
He patted the top of my helmet and I strapped it up.
'We better go before the lines tangle again,' he said.
'Wish we had our camera to shoot this, just in case I'm not alive for tonight.'
'Yeah,' Paul said.
'You're not supposed to agree, idiot.'
'Well, the fact is you could get toasted, man. Just like –'
'Yeah, I know. Like Icarus.' Paul had wanted to call the trike Icarus after the mythological dude who flew too close to the sun with his wax and feather wings and got burnt, falling to his death. I talked him out of it.
'I better do this,' I said.
'Break a leg.'
'What do you mean "break a leg"?' I asked him.
'Isn't that what you say?'
'No, man. That's exactly not what you say.'
'Just go,' said Paul. 'Before the wind dies or Cat busts us.'
I squeezed the grips.
'Go or I'll kill you myself,' Paul said.
So I let out the brake and started pedalling.
'Be scary!' Paul shouted.
I rolled forward and started to build speed. The wing filled with air. I pumped hard on the pedals. I only had about forty metres before I hit grass in front of the dune and I needed lift by then. The wind in my face was good. McMasters often had an onshore breeze. Not great for surfing. Brilliant for what we needed.
As I gained speed I could feel the wing rise into the sky. I steadied it with my hands. The front wheel of the trike was locked and I was careering ahead without touching the handlebars. I just had to keep the wing steady. This is where I'd gone wrong on Sunday. No control over unexpected gusts.
I heard a weird 'sssssssshhhp' sound in the wing above.
Then I felt it pulling me up. On Sunday I'd fought this lift until I hit the jump but riding the kitesk8 board and working with Dad had taught me that I didn't need a jump. All I needed was enough air speed to give me lift.
A surfer sitting on his board beyond the breakers gave me a 'Whooooooooo!' and threw his fists in the air. I so wished we had a camera shooting this. With ten metres to run I felt the wheels lift off the road and that familiar buzz all over my skin. The weird noise from the wing above was getting louder. I'd never heard anything like it and I took a quick glance up. It was super-bright but I thought I could see a little rip in the wing on the right-hand side.
I had ten metres before I hit the edge of the dune and I was about thirty centimetres off the ground when I heard a tearing sound and I felt the right side of the wing collapse. I either had to risk it, fly out over the dune and hope for the best or ground the trike and see if I could stop before I hit the dune without stacking badly. Either way was dodgy.
Paul screamed something that sounded like 'Stop!' so I grounded it on the edge of the road. Two wheels hit a rocky ditch, bounced and I rose into the air again. I had three metres of grass before the top of the dune where the ground would drop away from me. I landed again, hit the soft sand. The wheels bogged, the wing went flying forward and then tore me down the dune. I braced for the trike to flip. Somehow I managed to land the wing and then the trike tipped onto its two right-hand wheels, leaving me with a mouth, a nose, two eyes and an ear full of sand. I stayed that way until Paul reached me a couple of minutes later, saying 'What happened?'
I wanted to scream at him and say, 'A gigantic rip in the wing is what happened. Me almost dying is what happened,' or something like that. But instead I said, 'Can you help me up? Please.'
All I knew was that I wasn't in the air. I was upside down on the sand. And if we couldn't get it up on a test run and we had a massive tear in the wing, there was no way we were gonna make our first flight at the party in about thirteen hours' time.
34
Assembly
'Please give our coolhunters a warm round of applause,' said Mr Debnam, school principal. Cat walked confidently up the stairs and onto the stage. Paul
and I had to squeeze past about fifty kids then walk all the way down the centre aisle from the back of the hall. I was kind of sore from the stack on the dune.
They'd sprung this on me in rollcall. Cat wanted to do some self-promotion at assembly so they asked me to speak, too. I don't know what she was thinking. Speaking at assembly was so the opposite of cool. She would never have done this before. I guess she was feeling the heat.
'Now, Catherine, can you please tell the students about your experience on this multimedia project,' Debnam said.
'Yeah. Hi, everybody,' she said, cute, with a smile. There were whistles and cheers from everywhere. 'You liking my vlog?' More whistles and cheers. 'You going to vote for me tonight?' More whistles.
Mr Debnam leaned in to the mike. 'Those year nine boys whistling, you know what the policy is. Any more and I'll see you after assembly. Just get on with the report, please, Catherine.'
Paul and I made it onto the stage and Cat grimaced at us like we were vomit. Things had not gone well for her overnight. She'd done her vlog video-diary style, head and shoulders, straight into camera, no other images, launching a vicious attack on me, saying, 'I don't mean to be rude or anything but, seriously, do you want your "cool" served up by a guy who lives in a bus? I mean, I went over and saw it with my own eyes and it's so gross in there. And I just wonder if Mac can honestly spend his time finding the coolest stuff on the planet when he's living, like, two kilometres below the poverty line. And the people around that Arts Estate are scary. Like, they send shivers up my spine. All these people who totally don't wear deodorant and they, like, stink, and they all hug each other for, like, ten minutes. Not like my group do, but in a gross way. Seriously, you should think twice about choosing him. It's time to vote this backwater hippie off the island.'
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