by Chris Miles
‘Where – where am I?’ groaned Mayor Perry-Moore. He squinted at Jack and the others in turn, gathering energy like an Egyptian mummy being slowly revived by dark sorcery. ‘Am I going crazy, or did somebody attack me?’
Jack’s mind raced. There was a chance the mayor would recognise Sampson. He might press charges. Anything could happen. They could all end up as accomplices. He had to think quick.
The mayor’s gaze drew ever closer to Sampson.
Suddenly Jack realised. There was a chance he could save the situation. He lunged for the open drawer in his dresser, hoping the thing he was looking for was there.
It was. It was always there. It always turned up, somehow.
Jack whisked the merkin from the drawer and slapped it onto Sampson’s chin.
Sampson staggered back, clawing at his face. ‘What the – ?’
‘It’s a disguise!’ Jack hissed. ‘Go with it!’
Philo frowned, and went to raise his hand. ‘Um –’
‘Not now!’ said Jack.
Mayor Perry-Moore squinted at Sampson. ‘You. You with the beard.’
Jack grabbed Sampson by the wrists.
‘It’s okay, he’s just a burglar. A big old beardy burglar. We caught him in the act, didn’t we, guys? Citizens’ arrest. We just have to get this hairy, bad guy down to the police station. We saw everything, we can give a statement, no need for you to get involved, Mr Mayor, sir.’
‘Jack Sprigley? Is that you?’ As he said it, Mayor Perry-Moore seemed to remember where he was. His cheeks reddened slightly, and a guilty, worried look crept onto his face.
Sampson, meanwhile, struggled free of Jack’s not-exactly-iron grip. His nose twitched and he screwed up his face. ‘What the hell is this made from?’
‘Um –’
‘Shut up, Philo!’
Sampson sneezed. The merkin unglued itself from his face and fell onto the floor.
The mayor’s eyes grew huge. ‘That’s no burglar! I remember now!’ He winced in pain. ‘One of you, help me up!’
Reese and Darylyn rushed forward and grabbed the mayor under his arms, helping him swivel out of bed.
‘I’m going straight to the police,’ he said. ‘I’m old college buddies with the superintendent. We play golf every week. Sweet lord, my head hurts.’
Vivi glanced at Jack, then they both glanced at Sampson.
‘Assault and battery,’ said Mayor Perry-Moore, clutching the side of his head. ‘Assault and battery against a city official! What’s your name?’
Sampson stuck his chin out stubbornly. ‘Like I have to answer your questions. What were you doing sneaking around the Sprigleys’ house?’
‘His name’s Oliver Sampson,’ said Philo, helpfully.
Reese glared at him. ‘Dude!’
‘Oliver Sampson,’ said the mayor. ‘Your parents, are they the Sampsons with the vineyard at Doubleknee Bend?’
‘M-maybe,’ said Sampson.
‘They are,’ Philo cheerfully confirmed.
‘Dude!’
‘Well,’ said the mayor, ‘you won’t be picking grapes this summer, that’s for damn sure. Picking up rubbish, maybe. That’s if you get away with a community service order. More likely you’re looking at a summer in juvenile detention!’
Everyone gasped.
Juvenile detention? thought Jack. In a way, it seemed a good fit for Sampson. He’d probably be top dog in the jailhouse before too long, just like he was king of the change rooms at school.
Sampson went ashen-faced. But a second later the chin was back out again, and he’d puffed his chest out along with it. ‘Y-yeah? W-well, I’d like to see you try.’
‘I won’t need to try,’ said Mayor Perry-Moore. ‘I’m the biggest man in town! I can do anything!’
‘Including creeping around ratepayers’ houses at eight p.m. on a Friday night?’ said Vivi.
Mayor Perry-Moore opened and closed his mouth. ‘It’s … it’s a new part of the Mayor for a Week program. A surprise one-on-one meet-and-greet from the real mayor while the junior mayor takes over.’
Sampson snorted. ‘As if. Tell everyone what you figured out, Sprigley.’
Jack glanced at the others. The mayor looked flustered. ‘The only thing you ought to be figuring out is how long you want to spend in detention! Because you’re all involved in this. Every one of you. He might be the ringleader –’ he glared at Sampson, ‘– but you’re all culpable.’
They were back to outbigging each other, Jack realised. Sampson and the mayor, both frightened and embarrassed. Both trying to hide it by being the bigger man.
‘What about you?’ said Sampson. ‘Sprigley here could have you arrested for trespassing if he wanted to. Couldn’t you, Sprigley?’
‘Trespassing? I’m not a trespasser! I’m the blooming mayor! I can do what I like. And that includes locking thugs like you away for the rest of your high school years, if you’re not careful!’
The situation was getting out of hand. Jack needed to think of something to defuse it, fast. And then the solution came to him in a flash of brilliance.
‘You’ve got it wrong,’ said Jack loudly.
Everyone turned to look at him. Jack looked at Sampson and then at Vivi. He took a deep breath and stepped forward, eyes locked with Upland’s five-time mayor, Councillor Neville Perry-Moore.
‘Sampson wasn’t the one who attacked you.’
He stuck out his chin and his chest.
‘It was me.’
Mayor Perry-Moore frowned. ‘What did you say?’
‘That’s right,’ said Jack. He jabbed at his own unconvincing excuse for a chest with his thumb. ‘It was me who knocked you over. I found out about you and my gran sexting each other and I was super pissed about it.’
Vivi and the others swapped confused (and slightly grossed-out) glances.
Jack swallowed nervously. Somehow he didn’t think juvenile detention would be quite as easy for him as it would for Sampson. High school was hard enough.
‘So …’ Jack went on, ‘So I was all, like, “Yeah, I’m going to smack that old man-whore across the head!”’ He flashed Neville Perry-Moore his meanest glare. ‘I took you down, yo!’
The mayor looked Jack up and down. ‘You? Don’t be ridiculous. You’re … you’re so small.’
Bingo, thought Jack. It was exactly the reaction he’d wanted.
‘Yeah, and I still took you down. “There’s Neville Perry-Moore,” they’ll say. “He might’ve been the big man in town once upon a time, but then he let himself get smacked down by a kid.” I mean, dude … I haven’t even got pubes yet.’
There were gasps. (Not-very-shocked gasps, Jack couldn’t help noticing.)
‘So, sure,’ he said. ‘Press charges if you want. That is, if you want everyone in town knowing you couldn’t even defend yourself against pubeless Jack Sprigley. In which case: I’ll see you in court!’
There was an awkward silence.
‘O-o-o-r,’ said Vivi, side-eying Jack, ‘another reason you might not want to press charges, Mr Mayor, is that your “special lady friend” might not be so keen to swap texts with the man who sent her grandson to jail?’
Right, thought Jack. Clearly a far superior tactic. Which meant he’d just confessed to being a pubeless freak in front of everyone for nothing. ‘Y-yeah,’ he said. ‘That, too.’
Mayor Perry-Moore glared at Vivi for a moment with narrowed eyes. Jack held his breath.
‘Well,’ said the mayor eventually, ‘maybe I was a little hasty. But don’t think you’re completely off the hook. You might be able to throw a lucky punch, but it’s obvious that you still have a lot of growing up to do.’
‘Hmm,’ said Darylyn, cocking her head slightly. ‘That alarm you can hear? That would be the Hypocrisy Scale hitting the big 10 point 0.’
Jack relaxed a little. Darylyn was right. Mayor Perry-Moore had just demonstrated his distinct lack of maturity in the way he handled the whole situation – but at least he’d stopped
talking about pressing charges.
Sampson, meanwhile, was looking at Jack in complete awe of what had just happened. Not that Jack had long to savour it. Neville pushed past him and was hobbling out of the bungalow.
Reese reached after him. ‘Dude, are you sure you’re okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ he grumbled. ‘I fell off the ferris wheel at the opening of Sultana World World and lived to tell the tale. I think I can cope with a black eye. I’m a man.’ He drew himself as tall as he could. ‘A red-blooded, stout-hearted man.’
Vivi took out her phone. ‘We’ll call you a taxi.’
‘Yes please,’ whimpered Neville. He limped gingerly down the bungalow steps and headed down the side passage to the front of the house.
Jack and Vivi and the others followed after him.
‘Tidy work, stepping in to save Sampson’s bacon,’ Vivi whispered.
‘Yeah,’ said Jack. He glanced back at Sampson, who was dawdling behind them, looking sheepish. ‘I thought I’d finally found a way of making the “late bloomer” thing pay off. Your plan was better.’
Vivi shrugged. ‘Better. But not as brave. Anyway, he never would have pressed charges. Not unless he was willing to explain to the police what he was doing at your house.’
Reese leant over to Jack. ‘Dude. Sexting? Really?’
Jack nodded. ‘Being a weirdo pervert runs in the family, I guess.’
‘You’re not that much of a weirdo pervert,’ said Darylyn.
It was one of the nicest things anyone had said to Jack in a long time.
Philo frowned at his phone. ‘This stupid thing doesn’t even have a sexting button.’
Ahead of them, Neville paused briefly at the window to Jack’s old room. It was dark inside. Jack figured his mum and Hallie were still at the hospital, dealing with the fallout from Marlene’s hormonal rampage.
Vivi reached down and picked up the roses Jack had trodden on earlier. Jack picked up the smashed phone, then turned to the mayor. ‘Why were you sneaking around out here, anyway?’
Neville reached out for the crushed flowers, staring sadly at them for a moment. ‘Marlene and I were supposed to meet at the river for a moonlight picnic. We’ve been texting and talking for months, ever since I came and spoke at one of her retirees’ lunches. But she never arrived. She’s been so unlike herself lately. Typing her messages in capital letters, that kind of thing.’
Philo nodded. ‘It was probably the side effects. You know, from the tes–’
Jack was about to tackle Philo to the ground when the side passage was flooded with light as a car pulled into the driveway. The sound of the car engine rumbled away into silence and the headlights flicked off. Jack’s eyes adjusted to the darkness again.
It was his mum’s car. With his gran in the front passenger seat.
Jack and the others spilled out of the side passage and into the carport. Neville limped out after them.
‘Mum!’ said Jack. ‘Gran!’
‘Marlene!’ Neville cried.
Adele stepped out of the car, looking exhausted. Marlene sat frozen for a moment, a dressing on her forehead, her hair sticking out in all directions.
She looked like a lipsticked werewolf on the morning after a full moon.
‘Jack? Shouldn’t you be at the festival?’ Adele noticed the mayor standing next to Jack and the others. ‘Wait a minute, why is – ?’
But before Adele could say anything more, Marlene had burst out of the car like a freshly cuffed perp trying to make a break for it. She’d seen the mayor too – and was tearing straight towards him.
‘No!’ Jack cried.
Marlene pounced on Neville in what seemed to be a doomed attempt to wrap her legs around his waist. His legs instantly buckled underneath him and they both toppled backwards. Neville’s skull was about to hit the concrete for the second time that night when Sampson caught him under the arms and lifted the writhing mass of geriatric lust upright. Marlene snapped back to reality and clambered down from Neville again.
Adele looked on in shock. ‘Is someone going to explain why the mayor is at our house? And why my mother has just attempted to grind him?’
Another flood of headlights washed over them all as a bright-green hatchback pulled into the driveway. Nats and Hallie got out. Jack swallowed nervously. Here he was, face-to-face again with the girl he’d hoped to fool the world into thinking was his girlfriend.
‘Oh my god,’ said Hallie. ‘Is that Mayor Perry-Moore?’
Jack racked his brains, trying to think of a clever lie to tell his mum and Hallie about why the mayor had visited Gran – some innocent explanation that would spare Marlene and Neville from having to confess to their telephonic tryst. Because you weren’t supposed to be sexting at sixty. Just like you weren’t supposed to be pubeless at fourteen.
‘Things don’t always happen when they’re supposed to,’ said Jack, shrugging. He turned to Marlene and Neville. ‘You should tell her.’
‘I can’t deal with this,’ said Adele. ‘Whatever’s going on, I don’t want to know about it. I’ve just had to convince a taxi driver not to press charges against my mother for nearly breaking his arm.’
‘I thought he was attacking me.’
‘He was helping you into the taxi.’ Adele glanced at the roses Neville was holding. Her eyes grew wide. ‘Mum, have you been secretly dating the mayor?’
Neville put a hand on Marlene’s shoulder. Jack wasn’t sure if he was trying to lend her the strength to be honest, or just trying to keep himself steady after the onset of a mild concussion.
Marlene looked up at Neville, then turned and reached out towards her daughter.
‘Adele,’ she said. ‘Love. We didn’t … I just didn’t think it was fair. For me to be happy. When you …’
Adele covered her mouth with her hand. ‘I am happy,’ she insisted.
Marlene shuffled forward and took Adele in her arms.
Jack relaxed. Everything was out in the open. Everyone could start behaving like grown-ups.
Or at least pretend to.
The next day of the 14th Annual Upland Hot-Air Balloon Festival dawned with a balloon flight over Lake Meridian. Four-wheel drives and minibuses were parked at the terminus of the access road, just beyond the shore. Half a dozen balloons were already in the air, ready to catch the first light of the new day.
Jack and the others had arrived earlier in near darkness, taking a shuttle bus together from the Bernadino Mall. As the dawn lightened, the spindly silhouettes of the scrub trees at the edge of the lake took form against the backdrop of a blue morning sky.
It had been Delilah’s idea to film the morning balloon ride to replace the failed balloon race of the night before. She said they could fudge the details and splice it into yesterday’s footage, and no-one would ever know the difference. But Jack and Sampson had refused to re-run the race for the cameras. They would ride in one balloon, together. Delilah had taken some convincing – it wasn’t the big ending she’d been expecting. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly the ending Jack had been expecting, either.
Sampson and Philo were the first to climb aboard the balloon. It was, Jack noted with relief, a balloon that sported the traditional reverse-teardrop shape, as opposed to looking like a pair of shrivelled grapes or an overblown rocket ship emblazoned with bulging avocados.
There seemed to be little danger of mistaking this balloon’s alternating light-green and dark-green stripes for the furrows and grooves of a giant scrotum.
Reese and Darylyn climbed in after Sampson and Philo. The balloon operator sent a few blasts of heated air up into the balloon.
Vivi turned to Jack. ‘You go first.’
Jack shook his head. ‘No. I’ve done too much cutting ahead lately. After you.’
‘I insist.’
‘So do I.’
Vivi sighed. ‘Look, let’s just get on board. Everyone else is in there already. Why are we arguing about this?’
In the end, Jack went last. He put
his foot into the lowest of the zigzagged rungs cut into the side of the basket. Reese, Philo and Sampson helped him over the edge.
As the balloon pilot got ready for take-off, Jack glanced back to the shore. Delilah and her crew looked bleary-eyed and pasty-faced. This was the last piece of filming on their schedule before they flew out of Upland.
Delilah went to tap something into her phone, then screwed up her face in disgust, as though she couldn’t bring herself to even touch the screen.
Jack couldn’t help smirking to himself. Part of the reason Delilah was so reluctant about the ending to Jack’s Bigwigs story was that she was still mad about what had happened the evening before. When he’d stormed away from the balloon festival, Delilah’s first instinct had apparently been to go after Jack and chase the drama. But Vivi, Reese and Darylyn knew the score now. They knew Delilah had set Jack and Sampson up against each other. Why she’d done it, they weren’t sure. They’d just known that the last thing Jack needed at that moment was more Bigwigs.
Reese had acted first. Noticing that Todd was wearing a Twisted Antlers t-shirt, he managed to hold the crew up for at least ten minutes by launching into an intense discussion about Scandinavian death metal.
Then Vivi, up on the bandstand giving the launch speech, went off script and told everyone at the festival that Delilah and her crew were filming a documentary called ‘Fifteen Minutes of Me’. Anyone who wanted to be on camera could go up and talk about themselves for fifteen minutes.
A crowd circled the camera immediately, trapping Brett like a lone survivor in a zombie movie.
When Delilah took out her phone, apparently determined to get her footage any way she could, Philo whisked it out of her hand and – for reasons known only to Philo – dashed off into the crowd with the phone stuffed down the front of his pants.
Eventually, as the opening night wound down, Delilah had got her crew back. She’d got her phone back too – still operational despite the slightly-more-humid-than-recommended environment it had just been subjected to. Delilah threatened to follow Vivi and the others to Jack’s house when Darylyn whipped out a counter-threat: either Delilah backed down, or they’d all withdraw their consent from the filming that Bigwigs had done so far, leaving her with no footage at all.