My Life and Other Stuff That Went Wrong

by Tristan Bancks

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ she snapped as she pried back the metal smacker.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  Rarnald didn’t eat tasty cheese. He only liked Jarlsberg. But Mum did not need to know that.

  She checked the trap every morning for weeks. ‘Still hasn’t taken the bait. Maybe it’s gone,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe,’ I said, breaking a chunk of Jarlsberg off the wedge in the fridge and heading to my room.

  For a while, life was sweet. My friend was safe. I even built him a little hutch out of Lego.

  But, tonight, Bryce is over for dinner and I’m praying that Rarnald lays low. Bryce Smith is a ‘dental prosthetist’, a false-teeth guy. Mum, for some reason, really likes him, but I keep kind of messing things up for them. Like the time Bryce gave me a job at the denture clinic and I stacked the delivery bike, spilling teeth all over the road, which were then run over by a garbage truck. Tonight, Mum has threatened me with death if I do anything wrong.

  Dinner is going okay and Bryce has just begun a story about his recent trip to Hong Kong for a tooth conference.

  ‘I was flying over Hong Kong Harbour, reading a fascinating article about bees,’ he says, ‘when, quite to my surprise …’

  Mum is slicing up a lemon meringue pie for dessert at the kitchen bench and pretending to enjoy the story when she screams, drops the knife to the floor and leaps back.

  Standing there on the bench, on his two hind feet, watching her, is Rarnald.

  ‘Tom!’ she snips.

  ‘Yes,’ I squeak.

  ‘Come. And. Get. This. Raaaaaaargh!’

  Rarnald makes a run for it. He scampers past the fruit bowl, executes a perfect swan dive off the kitchen bench, grabs the curtains in his tiny claws, swings to the ground, dashes under the dining table, making Bryce jump (and squeal, I might add).

  Rarnald skids around the corner into the lounge room and slides, cool as anything, under the couch.

  I breathe a sigh of relief.

  Mum and Bryce stare, horrified.

  I am so proud of Rarnald. He’s a total action hero. I want to see it again in slo-mo.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Bryce,’ Mum says, glaring at me. ‘Would you like dessert?’

  Bryce swallows hard and politely says yes. He makes a joke about rat meringue pie, which I don’t find funny at all. Mum and Bryce eat a few bites, but I can tell that the night has turned sour. Then Bryce puts down his spoon and says, ‘Darling, would you like some help catching that rat?’

  Okay, two things:

  1. Bryce calling Mum ‘darling’ is weird and wrong.

  2. After he just squealed, I hardly think he’s in a position to offer to catch a rat as intelligent and nimble as Rarnald.

  Mum flicks a knife-like glance at me. She wants to say no to Bryce’s offer. She wants to forget it ever happened. I want her to say no. But she doesn’t. She says yes. Bryce stands from the table, claps his hands together and wiggles his bushy black-and-silver eyebrows.

  ‘Now,’ he says, heading into the lounge room as though he is about to Sumo wrestle my rat. ‘Help me move the couch please, Tom.’

  I look to Mum. Her eyes widen and she jerks her head towards the couch. She fetches the empty four-litre ice-cream container from beneath the sink.

  I grab one end of the couch. Bryce grabs the other. I move slowly and make lots of noise, giving Rarnald ample time and warning to make his escape. But, when the couch is out, there he is, plain as day, surrounded by three-centimetre-thick dust pocked with marbles and twenty-cent pieces and my missing shin pad. Rarnald appears to be gnawing something off his bottom.

  Mum closes in on her nemesis. Bryce moves in from the side. Slow and steady. I bump the coffee table and jingle the change in my pocket, but Rarnald continues to gnaw away on his backside like he’s performing a lifesaving operation.

  ‘This is it,’ Mum whispers. ‘Rarnald’s last stand.’

  ‘It has a name?’ Bryce asks.

  ‘Just focus,’ she snaps.

  Slowly, stealthily, she closes in, ice-cream container ready. Two metres. One metre. Fifty centimetres. She is ten centimetres away from my friend, and I know that I have to do something.

  I cough loudly.

  Rarnald looks up, sniffs the air, then blazes a trail through the dust. Mum slams the container down, catching his tail. Rarnald squeals almost as loudly as Bryce. Mum lifts the container and Rarnald escapes – under the couch, across the floor, under the dining table, into the kitchen. We give chase, and I just manage to see him commando-roll under the fridge.

  ‘Move the fridge!’ Bryce orders, marching past me.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Move. The. Fridge,’ Mum says.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  I grab one side. Bryce grabs the other. Mum is poised with the container. This is terrible. Imagine if giant rats, twenty times our height, were hunting us down, sniffing us out, trying to trap us in enormous ice-cream containers. It isn’t fair.

  We wheel the fridge out. There he is again. Rarnald the Rat. Plain as day. Sitting in among the dust bunnies, roach baits and a couple of petrified vegetables. He is nibbling on a long-dead carrot, like he has all the time in the world. Has he lost his little rat-mind? I want to scream at him, tell him to wake up to himself, slap him across his furry snout. Why is he acting like this?

  Mum moves in with the ice-cream container. Quiet. Careful. She holds it over Rarnald and, ever so slowly, lowers it. He has no idea, the poor little guy. I have to warn him.

  I whack the side of the fridge and Rarnald finally drops the carrot. He looks up just as Mum brings the container down. He spins and slides, low to the ground, like a martial arts master. Rat-kwondo, maybe. As the container hits the floor, he runs right over Bryce’s expensive Italian shoe. Bryce squeals again. Mum dives, faceplants on the kitchen tiles and misses him. I swallow a laugh as Rarnald scurries into the pantry.

  ‘Bryce!’ Mum hisses, peeling herself off the floor, wild and unhinged. ‘Are you a man or a mouse?’

  ‘A man?’ he replies.

  ‘Well, help me catch this rat! And if I hear you squeal again, you’re out, okay?’

  Bryce nods.

  Mum flicks on the pantry light, ice-cream container ready. She scans the lower shelves, shuffles boxes and cans out of the way with her foot. I’m nervously hoping that Rarnald has an escape hatch at the back of the cupboard. Then, right down the bottom, I see a tail poking out of a hole in a giant pumpkin that has been there forever. Maybe Rarnald is hollowing it out for Halloween. The good news is that the pumpkin looks too big for Mum’s ice-cream container.

  She opens the fridge, grabs a piece of cheese. It is Jarlsberg, Rarnald’s favourite. And it’s a slice. I am going to be sick. Rarnald cannot resist Jarlsberg slices. He loves them even more than he loves chunks. Mum scooches down and leaves the cheese outside the hole in the pumpkin. She waits, container positioned right over the cheese. This is bad. Really bad. If he goes for the cheese he is gone. Gone-zo. Gorgonzola. And, if I know Rarnald, he will go for that cheese. His tail disappears inside the pumpkin and his tiny nose pokes out, twitching. The delicious smell is too much for him. Apart from diving in front of the container or grabbing the pumpkin and hurling it out the window, there is not much I can do. Rarnald’s whole head is out of the pumpkin now. He is smelling that wonderful, wonderful cheese. He crawls down onto the floor. Beautiful grey fur, pink nose and ears. Can he not see my mother with her makeshift anti-rat contraption?

  He crawls towards the cheese. This is it. Goodbye, my friend. Au revoir. Auf Wiedersehen. Ciao.

  Mum brings the container down, signalling the end of Rarnald’s five years on the run, when, suddenly, nine tiny rats jump out of the pumpkin to join Rarnald at the cheese.

  Mum breaks the Guinness World Record for Loudest Human Scream. She leaps a metre in the air, drops the container and flees to the lounge room. Bryce beats her there.

  Rarnald has babies. Cute little wubbzy rat-ba
bies. I watch them devour the cheese, then I stuff the entire family into my hoodie pockets and take the hallway exit down to my room. I squeeze the family of rats into Rarnald’s Lego hutch and, as I do, I’m pretty sure he gives me a wink. Although I am now thinking that ‘he’ is probably a ‘she’, so I have started calling him, I mean her, Rarnalda.

  The next morning I am grounded for ‘aiding and abetting’ a rat. I sell the baby rats at school for a dollar each. I explain to Rarnalda that I don’t have space to keep nine mature rats safe and fed under my bed, and that they went to very good, rat-loving homes. I even ran background checks for snake owners. She understands.

  Bryce does not return to the house for a while. My mother says that he is ‘a big wuss’. I laugh when she says this, and she growls at me. Mothers are sometimes difficult to understand.

  Rarnalda and I still exercise together. We still make each other laugh. We still perform tricks. Yep, Rarnalda the Rat is my best non-human friend.

  When Jack stays over at my place, we stay up late playing ‘What Would You Rather Do?’. It’s a game where you are faced with two impossible choices, but you have to choose one.

  What would you rather do …?

  - Kiss a dog or a cat?

  - Have a finger chopped off or a toe?

  - Get locked in a cage with a hungry boa constrictor or an angry gorilla?

  - Eat a Ziploc bag full of your grandfather’s toenails or eat a cereal bowl full of your cousin’s scabs?

  - Give a speech at school assembly naked or climb Mt Everest wearing only underpants?

  - Be eaten by a dinosaur or a dragon?

  - Have chicken-pox for three months or nits for a year?

  - Go over Niagara Falls in a barrel or fight Spain’s toughest bull?

  - Spend an entire year at school doing only your least favourite subject or spend a week in a jail for insane clowns?

  - Eat dog poo or cat vomit?

  - Get dropped into a pit of snakes or spiders?

  - Drink a warm tuna milkshake or a tall glass of your own wee?

  - Wear a T-shirt to school that says ‘I love my mummy’ or accidentally poo your pants at the beginning of a two-hour maths test that you are not allowed to leave?

  OR

  All of the above?

  ‘I’m going to climb Mt Everest,’ Nan says one afternoon at her kitchen table.

  I look her in the eye. She does not look like she is joking. This worries me. My nan is a frail biscuit of a woman.

  ‘Take a look at this,’ she says, sliding a newspaper towards me and pointing to a small article at the bottom of page seventeen.

  The headline reads: ‘73-year-old Japanese Woman the Oldest Female to Climb Everest.’

  ‘I’m seventy-five,’ Nan says, grinning, ‘which means I can beat her.’

  ‘But it’s the world’s tallest mountain. And you get tired baking a fruitcake,’ I say. ‘Look, it says here that this woman had climbed it before, that she broke her own record.’

  ‘I’ll train,’ Nan says. ‘You’re never too old to learn something new, young man.’

  I want to say, ‘Well, sometimes maybe you are too old,’ but I chicken out. Instead, I say, ‘How will you get your walking frame up there?’

  ‘Don’t be a smart alec.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can see that look in your eye. You don’t think I can do it, do you?’

  I pause for less than a second, then say, ‘Yes.’ But she knows I’m lying.

  ‘I thought as much. You think I’m old and crazy, but let me tell you something, buster: seventy-five is the new sixty-five. If that woman was seventy-three then my body will, technically, be eight years younger than hers, but I will still be the oldest woman to climb Mt Everest, according to my birth certificate.’

  I think about this for a long time.

  ‘I want you to help me train,’ she adds. ‘We start at five tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Five? Why five?’

  ‘Because, you ninny, that’s when old people get up. I go to bed at six. You can’t expect me to sleep more than eleven hours, can you? That’s called being dead.’

  ‘Um … I guess not. Can I have an iceblock?’

  ‘Of course you can. Can you get your nan a Cornetto? That’s a good boy.’

  I slip out the back door, jump off the back veranda and head into the garage, to Nan’s freezer full of iceblocks and meat.

  I know I have to stop her. She’ll kill herself.

  I tell Mum about it that night while she is ruining dinner. My mum is good at lots of things. Cooking is not one of them. Every night is a lottery. It’s exciting. And scary.

  ‘She’ll kill herself,’ Mum says.

  ‘I know. But she sounds really serious.’

  ‘If I say anything she’ll just dig her heels in. So you should just go along with the training and gently steer her away from the idea. Make her feel old. Offer to walk her across the street. Turn her hearing aid down. Tell her I’ve been thinking about sticking her in a nursing home if she keeps doing crazy things.’

  ‘That’s not very nice,’ I say.

  ‘Neither is letting her freeze to death on the side of a mountain at eight thousand metres, or whatever it is.’

  Click-clack-click-clack-click-clack.

  It’s dark and we’re surrounded by thick fog as Nan charges full-speed (for her) up Cemetery Hill, pearl necklace rattling against her walking frame. This is the second-longest and steepest hill in Kings Bay. Ponka, her dog, runs along behind her, attached to a red lead. Ponka barks occasionally at shadows in the fog.

  ‘Careful. You’ll have another heart attack,’ I say, strolling casually beside her, but Nan keeps charging. Click-clack-click-clack.

  ‘I’ve got three months,’ she wheezes. ‘If I don’t push myself I’ll never be ready to scale the south face in the Nepalese spring.’

  In the distance there is a hum-buzzing noise that sounds familiar, but I can’t remember where I know it from. The sun makes a feeble attempt to rise as Nan’s wheezing grows louder.

  ‘Nan, I really think you should take a rest.’

  The hum-buzzing is loud now. I turn to see headlights through the fog.

  ‘Car!’ I call out, and Nan, Ponka and I move to the edge of the road. But the vehicle sounds too small to be a car. And it’s going too slow. As it emerges from the fog I identify the noise. A motorised granny cart. With monster-truck wheels. It’s hot pink. The numberplate reads ‘SUE’. There’s a screech of rubber on tar as the cart pulls up next to us. My best friend Jack’s nan is sitting about two metres above the road in the hotted-up beast.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ she says. ‘What are you doing out this early, Nancy? Shouldn’t you be inside drinking a cup of tea with a blankie over your legs, listening to the wireless?’

  Jack’s nan is at least ten years younger than my nan – and twelve times larger. She is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt the size of a parachute with ‘Save the Whales’ on the front. She has a tattoo of a lizard on her arm. Last time they met, Nan somehow managed to beat Sue in a back-alley brawl down near the nursing home.

  ‘I’m training for Everest,’ Nan announces.

  Jack’s nan laughs so hard she nearly topples off the cart. I take a couple of steps back. The fog slithers around and through my legs.

  ‘You?’ she scoffs. ‘You must be a hundred and two years old. You’ll be lucky to make it up this hill.’

  ‘I’m seventy-five as it happens,’ Nan says and starts walking again.

  ‘Which is the new sixty-five,’ I add.

  ‘If you’re going to climb Everest, I’ll beat you there,’ Sue says, driving along next to Nan.

  ‘You’re not as old as I am. You won’t win the prize as the oldest woman.’

  ‘I don’t care. I only care about beating you. That’s my prize.’

  ‘You’re on, you great heffalump,’ Nan says.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘Nan, no! You’re not climbing Mt Everest.’
/>   ‘How about a little pre-Everest challenge?’ Sue asks.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. Cemetery Hill. First to the top and through the boneyard gates wins.’

  I look at Nan, shaking my head. ‘Let’s just –’

  ‘Two weeks today. Five am sharp. Bottom of the hill,’ she says.

  ‘You’re on,’ Sue agrees.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘But you can’t drive the cart in the race,’ I stammer.

  ‘Watch me!’ Sue barks.

  ‘It’s fine, love,’ Nan says. ‘I’ll beat her anyway.’

  I shake my head. Jack’s nan drives off.

  ‘She’ll smash us!’ I groan.

  ‘Maybe that’s enough for today,’ Nan wheezes. ‘It’s quite steep, isn’t it?’

  Nan is in the garage with her head in the freezer when I arrive at five the next morning.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Acclimatising,’ she says, her voice muffled. She pulls her head out of the freezer. She has icicles hanging from her brows and her face is blue. ‘It can drop to minus-sixty degrees Celsius at the summit.’

  I take her inside, wrap her in a blanket and make her a cup of tea.

  She guzzles it and says, ‘Let’s hit the gym. Bet I can beat you on the bench press.’

  Nan lifts the barbell off the rack.

  ‘Spot me,’ she says.

  ‘You sure that’s not too heavy?’

  She’s lying on a weight bench made out of milk crates in the garage. She slowly lets the barbell down to her chest. I’m scared she is going to drop it and her guts will squish out of her ears. I try to help her lift it again.

  ‘Let go!’ she snaps. So I do.

  She raises it, then brings it down again. This time she really strains to lift it. Her eyeballs swell and I worry she’s going to drop it, but she doesn’t. She presses it up to full arm’s length, then down again. And up. And down. I smile.