The Toilet Rat Of Terror and Other Naughty Stories for Good Boys and Girls
Page 3
And then it happened. Suddenly, Drake went quiet. He started to look a bit green.
You see, Drake had been reading in a bus that was going along some windy roads.
Drake was feeling sick. Very sick.
Straight away, I leant over and whispered in Drake’s ear:
Well, I’ve seen some barfs before, but this one would have to have been a world record. Drake spewed all over himself, all over the seat and all over Candice. Isn’t it funny how there’s always a bit of carrot?
It’s also funny how Candice doesn’t even talk to Drake these days. In fact, she’s back with me. I’ve even spoken to her, too. By my calculations, that puts me in front by exactly thirty-two percent — wouldn’t you agree?
‘Yellow maggot custard, Dead dog’s lick, All washed down with A cup of cold sick!’
Wally Watson was the most fantastic kid I’d ever known. He was great at football and cricket, brilliant at video games, popular with girls, tough if he had to be and easily the smartest kid in class. But never a suck. He could reach the ceiling in the boys’ toilets, do monos for as long as he wanted and kick a footy over the library roof.
He was awesome at music, too. Blurter music. You know how some people can make a really good trumpet sound by pressing their wet mouths against the backs of their arms and blowing really hard? Wally was a natural. For a laugh during class, he could even do really wet, stinky-sounding blurters.
He’d also worked out that he could change the sound by blowing or pressing in different ways, and he got so good that he learnt how to blurt the national anthem. He offered to do it into the microphone at school assembly, but our principal said no.
As I say, you couldn’t meet a better kid than Wally.
That is, until the accident.
A whole gang of us were hooning around at the local pool — bombing girls, running when we shouldn’t on the wet concrete, flicking each other’s bums with towels — when someone yelled, ‘Hey, watch this!’
There was no problem getting us to watch, because flying through the air was a bare bottom. It was Wally, doing a reverse somersault with full moonie.
SPLASH!
We all laughed so much that no-one noticed Wally was taking a long time to come up. Too long.
Wally had hit his head on the bottom of the pool. And broken his neck.
Wally Watson would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
Wally was a mess after the accident. I’ve never seen anyone so sad. The fact that he could never run again, or hoon around at the pool, or play cricket… it seemed to him like the end of the world.
Eventually Wally started back at school. He did his work well enough, but gone was the spirit, the sense of fun, the cheek. That was when I spoke to him. For the first time as just the two of us, really. You see, although I knew Wally, I was never one of his best mates. Not because he didn’t like me — it was just that he was so good at everything, and I wasn’t. I was never part of the main gang.
You know how at school there’s always a special bunch of good guys that everyone wants to be like? Well, I was on the outside, looking in.
The day I talked to Wally, we were going up to the top of a hill that overlooked the sports oval, to watch the school cross-country finals. Wally would’ve been in one of the races for sure, before the you-know-what.
The hill was pretty steep and Wally seemed to be having trouble wheeling himself to the top. So I asked if he wanted me to give him a push.
‘What do you think I am?’ snapped Wally. ‘A cripple?’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘maybe you could give me a push. I’m stuffed.’ And with that, I sat on his lap.
Wally wasn’t quite sure what to do. But he didn’t get a chance to decide, because suddenly we were rolling down the hill at a million kilometres an hour. Then across the oval and down another hill and straight through a door into the girls’ change rooms! And guess who was inside?
Girls! Lots of them. Without a single thing on.
Do you think Wally and I weren’t popular after that? With the other boys, anyway. The questions came so fast my head was spinning. Wally and I loved it. We told some terrible lies, too.
After that, Wally and I became the best of friends. Wally said I’d shown him that at least some of the time, life could still be fun.
One day, for a brief moment, I thought I might’ve even given him some hope of walking again. I was telling him how Mum and Dad only let me watch my rubbish TV if I saw some good things as well. They’d made me watch a show about how scientists can grow new skin and give injections of stuff to fix nerves and maybe spinal chords and…
‘Stem cells,’ interrupted Wally. ‘Already done it. And look at me.’
‘But they said it would take time to work,’ I said hopefully.
‘Got plenty of that,’ replied Wally, with a sad smile.
Wally still did a lot of sad smiling. Although he had his good times, he had some terrible ones as well. Sometimes, I’d see him crying so hard I thought he would never stop.
When Wally had his bad times, he’d sometimes ask me to wheel him to the top of a hill overlooking our town. We lived in the country and the whole town wasn’t that big, so you had a great view.
It was a grassy, lonely sort of hill, and always windy. But from there, Wally could see everything that reminded him of the good times. The football ground where he won a game with a kick on the siren. The swimming pool where summer seemed to go on forever. The old shed where he’d made a secret fort. And the exact spot where Charlotte Reed helped him to his feet and softly held his hand after he fell out of the tree.
Wally and I would talk for hours about the old days, re-living things over and over again. And then one day, something came to me. I said, ‘Wally, if we can remember things and get excited all over again, even more excited than we were at the time…then maybe we could use our minds to get excited about things that we haven’t done yet. Like, if you could imagine running or playing footy again, maybe it could be just as much fun. You’ve lost your legs, Wally, but you haven’t lost your head.’
But Wally didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.
‘And don’t forget the stem-cells treatment you had,’ I said. ‘You said it didn’t work, but maybe in your head you haven’t given it a fair go.’
And then it happened.
Wally’s foot moved.
‘Wally, your foot! I gasped.
But still, Wally just kept looking at me. And then a smile spread across his face.
I can’t explain what happened next. Wally gripped the arms of his wheelchair and slowly stood up. He took his hands away, wobbled a bit, found his balance, and took one very small step forward. Then another step, and another, and then started jogging. Then he ran — slowly at first, then flat out —down the hill, with the wind in his face, screaming, ‘Yes!’
Did Wally really get up and run that day? Or was it just in our imaginations?
I say he ran.