Problem Child

by James Roy

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Was it the one that went wee wee wee wee all the way home?’

  Then he looked really cross, and I said, ‘Don’t get peed off’, and he looked even crankier.

  ‘Do you know anything about this?’ he asked.

  And I said, ‘No, but I do know that it’s April Fools Day. Ha!’

  Then Mum said, ‘Max, I hope you haven’t forgotten that Triffin’s coming over later.’

  Cameron totally cracked up. ‘That’s great, Mum! Look at his face! Triffin’s coming over! Ha ha, ha ha! April fool, Maxine!’

  But it wasn’t an April Fools Day joke, even though I wished it was, and once Cameron realised that Nerdstrom really was coming over for some of the day, he started laughing even more, which made my knuckles start to clench and my nostrils start to flare in and out.

  Maybe it was this start to the day that led Mum to tell me and Cameron that once her party kicked off we weren’t to come into the living room under any circumstances. Mum told us this as she was getting ready to drive down to the shops to pick up a couple of bottles of wine. ‘Listen, I don’t want you two screwing it up for me, all right?’ she said. ‘Triffin is going to be here with you, and I want you to show him a good example, especially since Ulrika’s going to stay for the party. I don’t want any monkey-business.’

  ‘Who’s Ulrika?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘Nerdstrom’s mum,’ I said, and Cameron looked like he was going to start laughing all over again.

  Then Mum said, ‘I’m serious, boys. I need you to promise not to do anything terrible.’

  Of course we both promised, which is something that doesn’t really mean anything except, ‘Yes, Mum, we can see how important it is to you that you think we promise.’

  After that Mum sort of relaxed her face a bit and said, ‘Today is really big for me. I’ve got a couple of new people coming, and I really want to get to the next level before the big Nature way conference in Brisbane.’ This was a very unusual thing for her to say. She made her business sound like a computer game. The next level? Is that the one where you have to depong the monsters with antipong aftershave and treat all their zits with anti-zit loofa scrubs? Probably.

  The situation was very clear to me, and just as clear to Cameron once I’d explained it to him. Obviously our mother was embarrassed by her own kids! She would rather we sat in our rooms being bored out of our minds than risk that we would make her feel ashamed of us. This is twice as bad when you think that we’ve got a perfectly good 106-centimetre widescreen LCD TV down there in the living room, and a surround system, plus about a hundred DVDs that are achieving nothing while they remain unwatched in their boxes. Making us stay away from that part of the house on a Sunday is quite a bit like leaving a bottle of water just out of the reach of a man who’s dying of thirst. Or putting a locked glass case lull of chocolates in Gladys Mullholland’s bedroom.

  So to sum up, not only was our mother ashamed of her own children but she thought it was OK to torture them as well, just so she could get what she wanted.

  Anyway, me and Cameron weren’t very happy that we’d been banned from the room in the house that contained the most interesting stuff. There was a principle at stake. So we decided between us that a plan was required, especially since it was the first day of April, and since we had to set a good example for our guest.

  Cameron is not usually all that good at coming up with plans. He’s more of a follower. But this time he was the one with the big light-bulb going off above his head. He said, ‘Hey, Max, what’s the smelliest thing you can think of, apart from you?’

  I suggested all the usual smelly things, but he just smiled and shook his head, and kept smiling and shaking his head every time I suggested something, until I threatened to hold him down and pinch his nipples.

  ‘No, it has to be liquid, like perfume,’ he said. ‘You know, all yellow.’

  I resisted the urge to remind him about the hand-in-warm-water incident and instead said, ‘How about real perfume?’

  ‘No, stupid, just think about it. If someone got out a bottle of really expensive perfume and put some here and here …’ (and he pretended to dab some behind his ears, then on his wrists) ‘… and once they put it on they realised that it was actually something really stinky, like salad dressing…’

  ‘It’s not just perfume that Mum’s selling,’ I said. There were all these creams and things as well, all in their little tubes and tubs and stuff. And these were the tubes and tubs and stuff that Mum was going to use to demonstrate her products to the other ladies. And the plan was right there, staring us in the face.

  We knew that we had to move quickly. I mean, the wine shop that Mum was going to was a fair way away, and she had a few other things she had to pick up from the supermarket as well, but we didn’t want her walking in to find us scraping out her tub of defoliating facial scrub and filling it with hommus (which is the garlicky paste that Mum likes on her crackers instead of Nutella). And speaking of Nutella, we thought about using that to replace the jojoba rejuvenating face mask, but the colour was a bit wrong, plus it would have been a waste of good Nutella, so in the end we went with Vegemite. And once you’ve squeezed out a tube of moisturising exfoliant skin toner, it’s amazing how hard it is to get satay sauce back in through the little hole. But we managed.

  And the perfume? Well, that was easy, after everything else. We used a dribble from the half-finished bottle of homebrewed beer that Dad had left in the fridge. It was the right colour and everything.

  We really wanted to be nearby to watch the carnage that was sure to unfold, but we’re not complete idiots. We knew that Mum would be suspicious if we were hanging around, especially because Cameron giggles when someone’s about to discover one of his pranks so in the end we decided to enjoy the experience from the safety of our rooms.

  Me and Cameron went into my room, where we played some games on my Playstation, and a bit later, when I was about halfway through that level of Martial Law IV where the drug dealers drive into the alleyway in their black Mercedes and start shooting wildly, I heard a car door slam.

  ‘They’re here,’ I said.

  And Cameron said, ‘So start shooting back!’

  ‘No, I mean the perfume ladies are here.’

  I paused the game and we went over to the window. There was a red car out the front, and two ladies got out. One of them was skinny and a bit sharp-looking around the edges, and Cameron said, ‘She looks like she needs some Vegemite on that face of hers,’ which totally cracked me up.

  As they were walking up the driveway, looking around at the garden in the way people do, another car pulled up. It was a silver four-wheel-drive, and two more ladies got out. The other two, who were almost at our front door by then, turned around, and they must have known the new arrivals, because they were all kissy kissy and going, ‘How are you, darling?’ (which was probably rhetorical, since they didn’t wait to hear the answer).

  All of this made Cameron go, ‘How are you, darling?’ and try to kiss me, which was creepy and random and actually quite scary. So I pushed him away and he kind of fell over the end of his bed, and that was when he punched me really hard in the chest, which hurt.

  Then the doorbell rang downstairs, and we snuck out into the upstairs hallway and to the top of the stairs so we could hear better, and of course once Mum went and opened the door all the kissy kissy stuff started all over again and me and Cameron were thinking that this was the dumbest, most embarrassing display we’d ever seen.

  Then we heard another voice at the door, which was Mrs Nordstrom’s, and she was saying, ‘Hello, Julianne, how lovely to see you. Thank you so much for inviting me to stay.’

  For a minute I thought that maybe Ulrika had forgotten to bring Nerdstrom along, which would have been fantastic, but then I heard Mum say, ‘The boys are upstairs, Triffin. Up you go. Max’s room is the second one on the right.’

  ‘Great,’ I said under my breath, and I heard Cameron stiflin
g a giggle. ‘It totally wasn’t my idea,’ I said.

  The next thing we knew, Nerdstrom was coming up the stairs. He looked a bit like an apprentice lion tamer about to confront his first lion, and I guess we looked a bit like the lions.

  I said, ‘So you came then.’

  Nerdstrom grunted something.

  Cameron said, ‘I’ve got some maths I need help with,’ and I thumped him, while Nerdstrom just kind of blinked a bit. ‘Hi, Cameron,’ he said.

  ‘So do you remember each other?’ I asked.

  ‘How could I forget?’ Nerdstrom replied.

  Cameron said, ‘You look a bit flushed.’

  A quick, tense smile flickered across Nerdstrom’s face. ‘Yes, I remember you used to say that two years ago. It really does get more hilarious every time I hear it.’

  And even though I thought that was pretty funny I didn’t want to show it, and when Cameron made a seriously threatening face I started to think that Nerdstrom’s visit might not last all that long after all, because he was probably going to run crying downstairs and beg his mummy to take him home.

  But there was fun to be had, so I said, ‘OK, cool it down, you guys. Nerdstrom, the excitement is about to begin.’

  ‘What excitement?’ he asked, all nervous, like I meant that the fun involved bulldog clips and him.

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ I said, and I told him about how we’d swapped the face creams and things. I think he did find it a bit funny. Not really funny, mind you. But he lay down on the floor at the top of the stairs with me and Cameron and waited for the fun to begin. I made sure that I was in the middle, for Nerdstrom’s sake. I didn’t want Cameron making him squeal and giving us away.

  Of course the ladies didn’t get down to looking at the products straightaway. Guys would. Guys would go, ‘So, where’s this facial cleanser you’ve been yapping on about?’ All we could hear was female voices saying, ‘I just love what you’ve done with the kitchen’, and ‘It’s a lovely street’, and ‘This is gorgeous dip, Julianne!’, and all that rubbish.

  And me and Cameron were just like, ‘Come on, look at the face stuff,’ under our breath. Nerdstrom didn’t say anything. Maybe he was a bit scared. But none of the ladies was going near the face stuff, and I was starting to feel a bit guilty and sick inside as I thought about what we’d done.

  Then something happened that made me stop feeling guilty. One of the ladies said to Mum, ‘Julianne, this cheesecake is beautiful. Did you make it?’

  That was when Mum said, ‘There’s a funny story about that cheesecake. Did I tell you about it? No? Well, a couple of weeks ago Max’s class went on an excursion to the Aunty Shirley’s Kitchen factory.’

  The other ladies made noises like ‘Oh!’ and ‘Really!’ and ‘Lucky devils!’ and that kind of thing.

  Mum kept going, even though it would have been very easy for her to stop right there. She said, ‘The thing is, I gave Max some money to buy a couple of cheesecakes from the factory outlet shop.’ (Which isn’t what the shop is called, but I think she thought that it would make her sound cheap if she admitted that she’d sent me to the seconds store to buy cakes for her party.) She went on to describe the incident, complete with details that she couldn’t possibly have known, since she wasn’t even there, like how much cake me and Jared had eaten, and how sick we were, and how our faces went green because we felt so sick, and how I threw up. And when she talked about that she even did a little impression of what I sounded like when I vomited. The ladies were laughing, and the whole time I was thinking that I wasn’t even a bit sorry about the satay sauce in the face cream tube any more.

  I looked at Nerdstrom. His face was totally blank, but Cameron was cracking up, so I got him back for the punch in the chest he’d given me before. I think I might have hurt him quite a lot, because his face went a bit purple and I thought he wasn’t going to be able to breathe. But I reckon he totally deserved it, and from the look he gave me once he started breathing I think he knew it.

  Finally Mum finished her really hilarious story and said, ‘OK, everyone, let’s take a look at some of these wonderful products I’ve got for you. I’ll just put them out on the coffee table and I’ll tell you about them one at a time.’ And that was when Cameron kind of giggled, which meant that he was also about to blow everything. I threatened to punch him again and he stopped, because even though he’s older than me, he’s also a bit more frightened of me that I am of him.

  Mum started going on about some of the different creams, and if I hadn’t known that something heaps funny was about to happen I would have probably gone to sleep. It was so boring, with all the stuff about how this one moisturises without causing your skin to go all pimply, and this one here is really good when you aren’t getting enough walnuts in your diet, and this one is good for vegetarians because it hasn’t been tested on rabbits, even though I can’t think why you’d want to remove all the fur from a rabbit’s armpits to begin with. Even though I was as bored as anything, I could tell that Mum was doing a pretty good job, with the other ladies asking questions and making all sorts of agreeing kinds of noises.

  Then Mum asked, ‘So who’d like to try this one? It’s the avocado and palm oil facial scrub.’

  One of the ladies went, ‘Oh, yes, I’ll give that one a go.’ Me and Cameron held our breath. Then we heard the lady say, ‘It’s got an interesting fragrance, Julianne.’

  ‘Yes, it’s the palm oil, I believe,’ Mum said.

  The lady said, ‘It actually smells more like garlic.’

  Mum sounded a bit confused then. ‘It shouldn’t smell like garlic. Let me have a smell … Yes, you’re right. I hadn’t noticed that before.’

  Then someone else said, ‘What’s this one, Julianne?’

  ‘Oh, that’s the face scrub. Would you like to try that one, Kate?’

  Me and Cameron held our breath again. It wasn’t long before the Kate person said, ‘Is this meant to be jojoba? It smells like something else.’

  Mum said, in a voice that was starting to sound a bit stretched, What does it smell like, Kate?’

  ‘It actually smells like Vegemite or Promite or something, but it couldn’t be … could it?’

  Then someone else said, ‘This perfume—’

  And Mum kind of snapped, ‘It’s an Oh de Toilette, actually.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is, it’s very unusual.’

  Someone else must have sniffed it too, because a voice said, ‘It actually smells quite a lot like beer.’

  And that was it. I heard Cameron kind of wheeze, like he was about to explode, and I couldn’t hold it in another second, and we both spluttered as we tried not to laugh. And that was when we heard Mum go, ‘Boys?’

  We could hear her footsteps coming across the floor towards the bottom of the stairs, and we jumped up and tried to escape back to Cameron’s room, but we weren’t fast enough. We got as far as the bedroom door and turned around, and Nerdstrom was there at the top of the stairs, right next to Mum, looking like he didn’t know where he should be standing.

  Man, did she give it to us! Right there in the hallway, while Nerdstrom stood quietly to one side. She wasn’t shouting or anything, but she was angrier than I could ever remember her being, and her face went quite a few colours I didn’t know faces could go. She told us off for ages, and would have kept going if one of the ladies hadn’t come up the stairs and cleared her throat and said, ‘Uh, excuse me, Julianne, but where’s your phone? I think we need to call an ambulance.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It’s for Grace. That skin toner – does it have peanuts in it?’

  And Mum said, kind of impatient and cranky with this woman, ‘Why would it have peanuts in it?’

  ‘Because Grace has put some on, and her face is all swollen up, and she’s finding it hard to swallow. And the only thing that makes her do that is peanuts. You know, peanut butter, satay sauce, that kind of thing …’

  I don’t remember much after that except for the am
bulance coming to our house and the ambulance guys giving the lady with the puffy face and fish-lips an injection and loading her into the back of the ambulance and driving off with the lights flashing. All the other ladies said goodbye to Mum, and Nerdstrom and his mum left, and Mum came back up the stairs with her lips so tight that her mouth was just a thin line, plus she had tears in her eyes. And her voice was so stretched that I thought it was going to snap like an old rusty guitar string.

  I actually felt pretty bad. Very bad. But I’m learning that sometimes people get so cross about something that they don’t say it’s OK even when you say sorry and really mean it. They just say, ‘It’s all too late, boys. It’s all far too late for that. I wish you’d known how much I needed this, and I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.’

  Yeah, I guess I felt pretty bad, especially when I thought about what Dad was going to do when he got back from his Army Reserve weekend.

  21 DAD RUNS OUT OF IDEAS

  When Dad got home at about nine o’clock that Sunday night, he said that he didn’t know what he was going to do with us, which I thought was a weird kind of thing to say. I mean, usually people don’t admit that they don’t know what to do next. Imagine if the ambulance people who came to pick up the fish-lips lady had said, ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do with her or her puffy lips.’ She might have died, if what Dad told us was true.

  Once this writer guy came to our school and said that it was heaps easy to get ideas for stories, and if you couldn’t find an idea anywhere then your brain must have stopped working altogether. So that might be what happened to Dad, because he said, ‘Boys, I’ve run out of ideas. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, I really don’t. This could have been life-threatening for poor Grace.’ Was this our fault? It would have been helpful to know about Grace’s allergy beforehand. There’s not much point in telling us that satay sauce is going to make someone’s face swell up after it’s happened. It would be much more useful to know that kind of thing before it happens. Because if we’d known that before, we would never have done it. Obviously.