‘As high as I want to.’ Flinty floated up to the ceiling. Then he flew around the room, just like a cloud.
Giffen knew that he had to get the Strap-Box Flyer. It was worth a fortune. He could make a lot of money if he had it.
6
‘Why are you showing this to me?’ Giffen asked Flinty.
‘Because you are a great inventor,’ said Flinty. ‘You have invented Giffen’s Great Glue. I am an inventor too. I have invented the Strap-Box Flyer. We could be partners. You could help me make the Strap-Box Flyer. And I could help you make the glue.’
Giffen did not say anything. He was thinking. He wanted the Strap-Box Flyer. But he couldn’t stay in Horsham. Once four hours was up his glue would stop working. The things that people had mended would start falling to bits. They would come looking for him. He could even end up in jail.
‘Have you got another Strap-Box Flyer?’ Giffen asked.
‘Yes,’ said Flinty. ‘I have one more. You can try it out if you want to. But first I will have to assemble it. I will have to screw the strap onto the box.’
‘That will take half an hour,’ said Giffen. ‘I will go and get my truck. Then I will be back to try out the Strap-Box Flyer myself.’ Giffen went off. He had decided to steal the Strap-Box Flyer. He wanted to have the truck nearby for a quick getaway.
Giffen could not believe his luck. Once he had the Strap-Box Flyer he would find out how it worked. Then he would make more of them. He could sell them for thousands of dollars each. He would make a fortune. Everyone would want one.
He ran back to his truck. Then he drove to Flinty’s house as fast as he could. The Strap-Box Flyer was ready. There would just be time for a quick tryout and then he would have to leave town.
Flinty put the Strap-Box Flyer onto Giffen’s arm. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘All you have to do is to think of where you would like to fly to.’
Giffen thought that he would like to fly over to his truck. It worked. He went gently flying through the air and landed on the roof of his truck. Flinty floated over and joined him. ‘Great,’ said Giffen. ‘Really great. How high can we go with these things?’
‘As high as you like,’ said Flinty. ‘As high as you like.’
7
Giffen forgot about everything except the Strap-Box Flyer. He forgot about the time. He forgot about Giffen’s Great Glue and he forgot about getting out of town quickly.
‘Let’s go up to the clouds,’ he said to Flinty. And so they flew together. High into the sky. When they looked down the people looked like tiny ants. It was wonderful to fly so high.
Time passed quickly. Hours went by. It started to get dark. Giffen decided that he would wait until it was night. Then he would be able to get away from Flinty. He would just fly off and lose Flinty in the dark. Then he would drive off in his truck and never come back. He could take the Strap-Box Flyer to bits and find out how it worked. Then he could make a lot more of them. And sell them. Then he would be rich.
Flinty flew over to Giffen. ‘We are very high,’ he said. ‘We can’t go much higher than this. There will be no air to breathe.’
Giffen looked down. They were so high that he could not see the ground. They were above the clouds.
‘I have only made two Strap-Box Flyers so far,’ said Flinty, ‘and yours is the best of the two.’
‘Why is that?’ asked Giffen.
‘Because I joined it together with Giffen’s Great Glue.’
Giffen was just in time to see his Strap-Box Flyer break into bits. Then he started to fall.
He screamed all the way down.
Skeleton on the Dunny
All right. So you want to hear the story of the ghost on the dunny. Everybody wants to know about it, so I am going to tell it for the last time. I will put it on this tape recording.
Someone else can write it down. My spelling is not too good. And anyway, I haven’t got the time for a lot of writing.
I am giving you a warning: this is not a polite story. If your feelings get hurt it will be your own fault. I call a spade a spade. And I call a dunny a dunny.
If you live in Australia, you know what a dunny is. It is a toilet. A lavatory. Other names for it are throne, loo, WC, jerry, and thunder box. I have heard it called other things, but I won’t mention them here. I am not a rude person; I just get to the point.
Some dunnies are outside. An outside dunny is usually at the bottom of the garden, a long way from the house. If it rains you get wet. If it is night time you have to get a torch and go there in the dark. When you have finished you have to pull a chain to make it flush. There are no buttons or anything flash like that.
2
Anyway, I must get back to the story. It all started when I was fourteen years old. My parents died in a car accident and I went to live with my Aunty Flo. She lived in the country, at Timboon.
I was pretty broken up – miserable, in fact. One minute I was as happy as Larry, with a mother and a father, living in a big house in the city. The next minute I was with Aunty Flo in the bush.
Aunty Flo was nice. It wasn’t her fault; I just felt low because of what happened. That sort of thing is very hard to take.
My new home was very old. It was a big wooden house with a verandah all around it. It had a tin roof; you could hear the rain falling on it at night.
Inside the house it was very dark. Gloomy. Every doorway had wooden beads hanging down on strings. There were old photos all over the walls, pictures of glum men staring down at you. In the hall was a tall clock, a grandfather clock. It ticked loudly. The house was so quiet that you could hear the ticking in every room. For some reason you always felt like whispering. It was like a library.
School had finished; it was the holidays. There wasn’t much to do. I didn’t know anybody in the town, so most days I went hunting rabbits. Or snakes.
Aunty Flo was very good to me. She liked me. ‘Bob,’ she would say, ‘you need fattening up.’ She made jam tarts and little cakes with icing, and set them up on the table with neat napkins. She was a very good cook, and very old. She didn’t know much about boys. She let me go wherever I liked. She only had one rule. ‘Be home for tea on time.’
I liked Aunty Flo. But I didn’t like her outside dunny.
3
One day Aunty Flo took me aside. She was waving a bit of paper and she looked very serious. ‘It is very sad about your parents, Bob,’ she said. ‘I am worried about your future. If I die there will be no one to look after you.’
She was a good-hearted old girl. A tear ran down her face. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I have made some plans. This is my will. It tells what will happen to my things if I die. I have left everything to you. If I die you will get the lot: the house and my money.’
I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my shoes. She kept talking with tears in her eyes. ‘The only thing you won’t get is a painting I used to have. You can’t have it because it is gone. Stolen. It was in my family for a long time. It was worth a lot of money – very valuable. It was a painting of this house. I wanted you to have it.’
I pretended not to notice her tears. ‘Who stole it, Aunty?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I went away to England for two years. A man called Old Ned lived in the house and looked after everything for me. But when I came back he was dead, and the painting was gone.’
I asked Aunty Flo how Ned died. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I found him on the toilet at the bottom of the garden. He had been there for a year. There wasn’t much left of him – just a skeleton, sitting on the toilet.’
4
Well, that was nice. That was very nice. Now I had to go and sit in an outside dunny where someone had died.
I didn’t like going to that loo at the best of times. You had to walk down a long path, overgrown with weeds. Trees stuck out and scratched your face. When you got inside it was very dark – there was no light globe. There were cobwebs. And no toilet paper, just a nail on the wall with newspa
per hanging on it. It wasn’t even worth reading the paper. It was only the Age. Very boring.
Those cobwebs had me worried too. There could be spiders – redback spiders. Redbacks are poisonous. I knew that song about redbacks on the toilet seat. It wasn’t funny when your pants were down, I can tell you that.
Redbacks, cobwebs, stories about skeletons and no one around. I didn’t like sitting there with the door closed, especially at night. At night it was creepy.
One day I was in the dunny paying a visit. There wasn’t much to do. I started counting holes in the wall. A lot of knots had fallen out of the wood. They were little round holes that let in a bit of light. I had counted up to hole number twenty when I saw something that made my hair stand on end.
An eye was looking at me. Staring at me through the hole.
It was not just any old eye. I could see right through it. I could see the trees on the other side of it. It was not a human eye.
I pulled up my pants fast. No one has ever pulled up their pants that fast before. I ran up that path and back to the house like greased lightning.
I told Aunty Flo about it, but she didn’t believe me. ‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘There is nothing down there. It’s just your imagination.’
5
You can imagine how I felt. Very nice. Very nice indeed, I don’t think. I was not going down there again. No way. Just think how you would feel at the bottom of the garden, in the dark, sitting on a dunny where someone had died. Not only died, but turned into a skeleton. Then there were cobwebs, redback spiders and eyes. Eyes looking at you through holes in the walls.
I made up my mind. I wasn’t going down there again. Ever.
I didn’t go there for a week. Then I started feeling a bit crook. I felt terrible. ‘You’re not looking well,’ said Aunty Flo. ‘You’ve not been regular, have you, dear? You’d better have some medicine.’
The medicine fixed me up all right. I got the runs. I spent most of the day sitting down there. But what I was really worried about were the nights.
Sure enough it happened: I had to go to the loo in the night. I took a torch and went slowly down the dark path. The trees were rustling and something seemed to be moaning. I told myself that it was a bird. I hoped that it was a bird. It had to be a bird.
At last I reached the dunny. I went inside, shut the door, and locked it. I had no sooner sat down than something terrible happened. The torch slowly went out. The batteries were flat – as flat as a tack.
I think I should tell you what happens to me when I get scared. My teeth start to chatter. They go clickety click. Very loudly.
So there I was, sitting in the dark with my teeth chattering. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. You must have been able to hear the noise a mile away.
I started to think about creepy things. Eyes. Bats. Vampires. Murderers. I was scared to death. I wanted to get out of there. My teeth were chattering louder and louder.
Then the moon came out. Moonbeams shone through the space on top of the door. I felt a bit better – but only for a second. I looked up and my heart froze. A face was looking at me. An old man’s face. He had a beard and was wearing an old hat. He just stood there staring at me over the top of the door. And even worse, much worse, the moon was shining right through him. I could see through him. He didn’t block out the moonlight at all.
6
I couldn’t get out. The old man was on the other side of the door. I was trapped. I started screaming out, ‘Aunty Flo, Aunty Flo. Help! Help! A ghost!’
The face looked startled. Then it disappeared. I didn’t waste any time – I kicked open the door and ran out. But I fell flat on my face. I had forgotten to pull my pants up.
When I finally pulled up my pants the ghost had gone. I tore up the path screaming out for Aunty Flo.
Aunty Flo didn’t believe me. She knew I was scared. But she didn’t believe there was a ghost. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘there are no such things as ghosts. I have been going down there for sixty years, and I have never seen one.’
I tried to make the best of it. I smiled. A weak smile, but a smile. Aunty Flo did not smile back. She was staring at me. Her mouth was hanging open. ‘Bob,’ she shouted. ‘Bob. One of your teeth is missing. One of your beautiful teeth.’
I put my hand up to my mouth. Sure enough a front tooth was gone – broken clean off. I knew what had happened. My teeth had chattered so hard that the tooth had broken. That ghost had done it now. I was starting to get mad with that ghost.
Aunty Flo was upset. ‘You must have done it when you fell over,’ she said. She put some new batteries in the torch. Then we went to look for the tooth. There was no sign of it. There was no sign of the ghost either.
The next day we went to the dentist. He had bad news for me. ‘You’ll have to have a plate,’ he said. ‘The tooth is gone and the piece that is left is split.’
‘What’s a plate?’ I asked.
‘Like false teeth,’ he told me. ‘But you will only have one tooth that is false. And you will have to look after it. They cost a lot of money, so don’t lose it. Clean it every night and put it in water when you go to bed. And don’t break it by biting string or hard objects.’
The plate cost two hundred dollars. Can you believe that? Two hundred dollars. Aunty Flo had to pay up. It was a lot of money. She made sure I looked after that tooth. I had to clean it every night and every morning. She checked on it when I was in bed. Every night she looked at the tooth in the glass of water. If the plate wasn’t clean she made me do it again. She wouldn’t let me take it out of my mouth in the day. She thought I might lose it.
That ghost had caused a lot of trouble. I had lost a tooth. And Aunty Flo had wasted two hundred dollars.
7
I didn’t see the ghost again for about a month. I stayed away from the bottom of the garden at night time. I only went in the day. He didn’t come in the day any more. All the same, I made my visits very short.
I did a lot of thinking about that ghost. Who was he? Why was he hanging around a dunny? I asked Aunty Flo about Old Ned who had died down there. ‘Aunty Flo,’ I said one day. ‘You know that old man who lived here when you lost your painting? What did he look like?’
She looked sadly at the place where her lost painting used to hang. And then she said, ‘He always wore an old hat. And he had a beard. A long grey beard.’
I knew at once that the ghost was Old Ned. I felt a bit sorry for him. Fancy having your skeleton sitting on a dunny for a year.
All the same, I wished he would go away. I didn’t want to see him again. But of course I did.
One night I just had to go. You know what I mean. I got my torch out and I went out into the dark, down to the bottom of the garden. I was scared – really scared. My teeth began to chatter again. They were really clacking.
I was worried about my plate. With all the clacking it might break. I took it out and held it in my hand. There I sat, tooth in hand, and my real teeth chattering enough to wake the dead. I left the dunny door open. If Old Ned showed up I wanted to get away quickly. I didn’t want to be trapped.
I did the job that I went for. Then I pulled up my pants. I reached up and pulled the chain. As I did so I could feel someone watching me. My hands started to shake. Badly. The plate slipped out of my hand and into the dunny. In a flash it was gone, flushed down the loo.
When I turned around I saw Old Ned standing there. I could see right through him – through his hat, through his beard, through his hands and his face.
He looked very sad – very sad indeed. I didn’t run. I didn’t feel quite so frightened now that I could see him properly. He was trying to say something. His mouth was moving, but no sound came out. And he was pointing. Pointing to the roof of the dunny. I looked up, but there was nothing to see. Just a rusty old roof.
‘What do you want?’ I heard myself say. ‘Why are you hanging around this loo all the time?’
He couldn’t hear me. He just kept pointing at the roof of the d
unny. Then he started to fade. He just started to fade away in front of my eyes. Then he was gone – vanished.
I walked slowly up the path. I wasn’t scared any more; not of the ghost. He looked harmless. But I was scared of something else. I was scared of what Aunty Flo was going to say when she found that my plate had gone.
8
The next morning I jumped out of bed early. I wrote a note for Aunty Flo. It said:
Aunty Flo
Gone for a ride on my bike.
I will be back for tea.
Bob.
I set out to look for my tooth. I wanted to find it before Aunty Flo knew that it was gone.
I knew where the sewerage farm was. It was twenty miles away to the north. My tooth had gone north.
It was a long way. The road was very dusty and hot. The paddocks were brown. All the cows were sitting under trees in the shade. There was no shade for me, but I kept riding.
By lunch time I could tell that I was getting close to the sewerage farm. I could smell it. It was a bad smell – a terrible smell. As I rode closer the smell got worse.
At last I reached the farm. It had a high wire fence around it. Inside were a lot of brown ponds. In the middle of all the ponds was a hut. Inside the hut I could see a man. He was writing at a desk.
That man had the worst job in the world. He was sitting down working in the middle of a terrible stink – a shocking stink. But he didn’t seem to mind. I held my nose with one hand and knocked on the open door.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
He was a little bald man with glasses. He looked friendly. He didn’t seem to care that I was holding my nose. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Have you seen a plate? Has a plate come through the sewer?’ It was hard to talk with my hand holding my nose. It sounded as if I had a cold.
Unreal! Page 3