by Susan Berran
I don’t know why that matters but Mum’s always asking me.
We were TRAPPED and we knew it! With my stiff legs I couldn’t outrun a sleeping slug. And Jared was starting to walk like a gorilla with his heavy hands.
As we stepped onto the verandah, thoughts flooded my mind about what was behind that door. I was sure it would be like something straight out of a HORROR MOVIE. Sloppy dog poop landmines everywhere … COBWEBS for curtains … DEAD fish floating in green gungy water. Piles of plates everywhere and leftover food, thick with mould, and rats popping their heads up and running across the mess. The smell of years’ worth of dirty socks, undies, and old man sweat. And we’d probably have to sit on a damp lounge with yellow puddle stains from the dog all over it. MOLLY would probably herd us into OLD MR INDITE'S dungeon with walls of steel and no vents to let out our cries for help or the deadly old man smell!
As he opened the front door, it seemed to scream and moan. As if the house was in agony and trying to warn us not to go in. We stood at the doorway and peered into the dark … flick! A light came on and suddenly the whole room was flooded with bright light.
“Sorry about that, I don’t usually open the curtains. It fades the furniture,” OLD MR INDITE politely stated. He went to get us a snack from the kitchen, probably POISON. So I was going to let Jared eat first just in case. Wow … we gazed around the whole room. It was like some weird art gallery in there! The ceiling lights were bright pink flamingos in flight and there were strange shiny metal sculptures everywhere. Tables had carved, giant birds’ legs to stand on and each wall was painted a different but really bright colour.
When OLD MR INDITE told us to sit, we had absolutely no idea where, or what, was a chair. There was a tall, shiny, thin metal pyramid in the corner. But there was no way I was going to sit on that! Maybe the bright red doughnut on top of the metal ball … Ah Ha! A huge spring with a polished disc on top; that had to be a stool. We both spotted it at the same time and headed straight for it. Jared got there just before me and slid his backside onto the disc … and straight off the other side … THUMP … onto the floor. He looked up at me when … WHAM … WHAM … WHAM. The springy ‘stool’ was flinging itself from side to side and hitting Jared in the head on each return.
Just then OLD MR INDITE came back into the room. Without a word he stretched out a long bony hand and snapped his fingers on the disc like a deadly mouse-trap. He then calmly placed the food tray onto it … oh. “Nice table,” Jared said. Of course I knew that all along, I was just seeing if Jared did.
“Excellent stove,” OLD MR INDITE declared, placing my secret agent can stove up onto a shelf that looked like a duck. Then he sat down on what looked like a drum set and gestured to his piano.
“Sit,” he repeated. The ‘piano’ was actually a really comfy and wicked-looking lounge, the ‘drum set’ looked pretty cool too. And Jared really needed to sit quietly for a while. He had this massive black lump the size of a baseball coming up fast on his forehead. He’s such an idiot.
We spent the rest of the day recounting the whole story in minute detail. Of how we were toe-jammed and how we’d found the photos and stuff that led us out here to look for a cure. I thought that at any second now, OLD MR INDITE would jump up and call us crazy. But he just sat there and listened carefully to every word. He knew about all the stories about him and his ‘BEAR’. But that was just the way he liked it. It had kept away the busybodies, the salesmen and the kids, until now.
We’d been there so long that I was starting to feel a bit braver. So I thought I may as well ask him about his stiff leg. “Which war did you injure your leg in?” I asked. He stared directly at us, the creases above his eyes deepened, one corner of his mouth sneered and his eyebrows suddenly pointed down towards his squinting eyes. There was total silence. He didn’t say a word and he didn’t take his eyes off ours. It was as if he didn’t want to miss a second of our reaction. The gut-wrenching horror, the green faces as we hurled up our guts, when we saw whatever bits of mangled bone and peeling flesh were left for him to drag around for the rest of his life.
He didn’t even blink as he rolled up his trouser leg to reveal …
toe-jam!!
His entire leg from top to bottom was completely toe-jammed. It was a solid, pulsating mass of crusty mould. Almost like his leg had been dunked in concrete and glued all over with green gorilla hair. It looked sort of similar to mine, but a whole lot thicker and hairier. We could actually see it pulsing like a heartbeat. Mine was solid and above the knee but we all knew it was still growing. And Jared’s was no better either. His hands were like small bowling balls and he couldn’t move his arms from just below the elbows any more.
OLD MR INDITE stood up and went to get us another drink. We could see he was in deep thought. As soon as he left the room we tried to figure things out.
“He’s alive!” Jared suddenly blurted out.
“Well, derrr!!” I replied.
“I mean he’s not dead … like the sheep and the goats in the pictures. You know, toe-jammed to the neck!”
“I knew that … ” I replied quickly … “but I mean, how do you know he’s not dead? He could be some toe-jammed brain-sucking zombie.”
Jared looked at me really seriously for a moment, and said …
“I know, we could accidentally cut him to see if he has blood in his veins or slime.” We played ‘rock paper scissors’ to see who was going to accidentally cut him, but we kept tying. So in the end we just decided that even though he’s really, really old and wrinkled, we were pretty sure that he was still alive.
“So he must have a cure!!” we both said at the same time, realising for the first time that there had to be an answer.
As soon as he returned to the room, it was obvious that he’d read our minds.
Well … he’d read my mind anyway. I don’t think Jared has enough in there to read an ‘on-off’ switch sometimes.
“I suppose you want to know how I got toe-jammed ?” OLD MR INDITE said calmly. Instantly I wanted to jump up and slap him with a soggy sponge! NO, we want to hear how you keep your carpet so clean … Of course we want to know how you got toe-jammed, what else?! OOPS, was that my inside-the-head-voice, or my outside voice … yep inside-voice … phew!
We sat and listened quietly while pigging out on the bickies as he told us his story.
“Richard INDITE bought this land after coming here to look for gold like everyone else,” he began. “He was as poor as the next man and came here with a can of baked beans, a pairs of undies and socks, and a dollar in his pocket. With that dollar he bought a patch of land and a spoon. The patch of dirt was only a couple of metres square but back then the men were tough. They used cactus branches for toilet paper, millipedes on a stick for a toothbrush and barbed wire wrapped around their feet for shoes.
Richard dug his mine shaft with chop sticks that were a gift from a Chinaman for saving his life and his spoon. It was slow, painful, hard work. Hundreds of men living side by side, belching, all farting and sweating like unshorn sheep in the desert. All hoping to strike gold. But none ever did. The ground was hard and dry. They had to scratch their way through rocks and boulders, and all they ever bought up from the mines were buckets of the deep red soil. No one had ever seen anything like it and they figured it was a good omen for gold.
But before long it was seen as a bad omen, cursed ground, red with the blood of the dead. Stray cats, goats, birds and even horses, were dying from some weird disease. It was a strange crusty mould that slowly consumed the animal from the feet up, making it harder and harder for the animal to walk. They tried scraping it off, only to find it returned thicker and smellier. Then finally it would grow to the neck and harden, making it impossible for the animal to breathe. People tried to wash the disease away but that only seemed to make it grow faster.
Men were leaving the town fast and open shafts were left all over the place. Some of those who stayed behind had a little money left and bought a few
goats or sheep to start farming for a living. They brought the animals from a great distance to make certain they weren’t infected with the strange disease. But it didn’t take long before those animals too got the cursed disease and died. People had swarmed to Agnath almost overnight, like worms to a compost pile, in the great rush for gold. Then just as fast, they were gone. It was a rush to get out of here. Panic set in, what if people started to get the deadly disease too? They deserted absolutely everything; tents, mining equipment, everything. And of course, once property had been deserted it could be claimed by anyone who was brave enough to hang around. And that’s just what Richard did. He claimed this land. You see, he knew something that the others didn’t, he knew his poop ”
PPTTHHHH … pttt pttt pttt …
Oh yuk! MOLLY rolled over onto her back and let go a ripper fart. WOW! That dog’s butt could be used as a deadly weapon. I wanted to rip off my eyebrows and shove them up my nostrils. Her tongue rolled right out of her head like the red carpet at some grand opening. It slapped to the floor covered in slimy, frothy drool. The weird thing was though, OLD MR INDITE didn’t flinch; he didn’t even seem to notice the smell at all. We figured he must have a cast iron nose from being around all that cow poop.
“Over the next few years,” he went on, “Richard raised the barbed wire fence to keep everyone out and a steel fence around a smaller area inside that to hide his poop. Everyone thought he was crazy. They all knew that wherever the red dust had touched the earth, only desert was left, nothing grew, not a blade of grass, not even a weed; nothing. Well, that’s what he wanted them to believe anyway. He’d noticed something that no one else had. In the middle of a red sand hill, a tiny purple sprout appeared. So while he began building the fence, he nurtured and cared for the seedling. When it was large enough, he took the seed pod and soon had a crop of the lush purple bushes. He bought a few cows and before long, he was knee-deep in poop.”
While OLD MR INDITE kept rabbiting on about poop and plants, I was trying to work out something in my head … was Richard OLD MR INDITE'S father, his grandfather, or his great-grandfather? Not that I really cared, I thought it was pretty cool having a relative who was smart enough to get rich off CRAP, that was awesome!
I looked over to Jared, it looked like he was holding up a mouldy, muddy bowling ball with four or five biscuits stuck to it like long, flaky fingers, all pointing in different directions. He was tenderly nibbling at each one in turn but trying to keep his face as far away as possible from the toe-jam and the smell. I guess there’s some advantages to having toe-jam hands after all. I reckon the sticky hands would be great to eat chips a lot faster; just shove the big glob into the bowl and roll it around. I wonder what the last bit tastes like though?
I hated to interrupt but we were running out of time, we needed a cure.
“So how did you get toe-jammed and how come it stopped way below your neck?” I interrupted.
“Well,” he said. “Richard was working really hard digging out the hillside, building this place, and trying to grow the cow-crap crop. He’d finished his baked beans the week before, there was nothing else left. He used the empty bean CAN and his spoon to dig out the hillside on Mondays and Tuesdays. Wednesdays and Thursdays he used the CAN to mix and form mud bricks to build this house. While on Fridays and Saturdays he washed his undies and socks in the very same CAN. And to stop himself from going crazy, he played ‘kick the CAN in the red dust on Sundays. The only breaks he had was to run the three kilometres to the creek and back, seven times a day to fill the same CAN with water for the plants. But on the very last run to the creek each day, he’d use the CAN to scoop up a fish, then sit it in the fire to cook his meal. Afterwards he had a nice warm CAN of fish water to drink before lying down on … yep, the same CAN. It was a warm pillow to rest his head on every night …” His voice trailed off as he looked up to the shelf where he’d sat my stove can. Right there beside it was a rusty, dented, old baked beans CAN.
WOW, talk about a hundred and one uses.
“Anyway,” said OLD MR INDITE, suddenly realising that his mind had wandered off. “He’d been sweating more than a fat turkey invited over for Christmas dinner and it was wash day, so he had bare feet … that was all it took. He stepped in some cow poop and got infected. It took off, over his foot and up his leg. That was when he hit on the idea of ‘butt-plugs’ for the cows. Of course it took quite a lot of experimenting to get it right. He tried using smooth rocks for a while. He could get them in ok, but every time a cow hiccupped, the rock SHOT out of its butt like a deadly bullet. Then there was the trial of lemons, but that just gave the cows sour milk. He also tried to mould butt-plugs by compressing hay and cow poop together in his baked beans CAN … just before he cooked his fish in it. That actually worked ok. Until one day when a firefly flew too close to a cow’s butt just as it farted … whooshhh!! The cow flew across two paddocks with a rocket of flame coming from its butt … ptt, whoosh … All through the herd as each cow farted, ptt, whoosh … its butt-plug caught fire. There were flying cow rockets with flaming butts going in all directions. It was like New Years’ Eve fire-works. But he finally found the answer, the old baked beans CAN … naturally.”
Jared and I looked at each other, we definitely didn’t want to know how and we definitely weren’t going to ask. But obviously the latest butt-plug nappies were OLD MR INDITE'S invention.
For the first time I noticed something interesting as I looked around the room. There were no family photos around. A few of a young guy on a horse, that had to be RICHARD INDITE, but no happy snaps. You know, kids playing, wedding shots, that sort of thing.
“So what happened to Richard?” I asked OLD MR INDITE politely. “Did he marry and have twelve kids who all ran away to the circus to get away from poop farming? Did he go away to every war and come back with some horrible gross deformity, like hooks for hands, that made his family all run away? Or did he hideously murder his family and grind their bodies in with the cow poop to make family manure?” OLD MR INDITE was sitting there, staring at me with his mouth wide-open and a weird look on his face.
“No!” he said strongly. “Richard never married, he never had any children, and he doesn’t have any other relatives left alive.” For the first time, Jared looked up from his enormous ‘lollipop’ hand of toe-jam covered in biscuits.
“Then how … ” I began
“I’m Richard,” cut in OLD MR INDITE.
ERRR … PTT PTT PTT, YUKK!!
I spun my head around to see Jared trying to spit out some mouldy poop that he’d just accidentally nibbled off his boxing glove of toe-jam. A huge dob of the stuff landed on the floor, right in the middle of the room. MOLLY instantly rolled over onto her back and flung her tongue up and over her face. It landed right on the lump of spat-out poop. Her tongue had to be half a metre long. Then, with the poop attached, it rolled back into her head and the tasty treat was gone. “I’ll be one hundred and forty-three next month,” OLD MR INDITE declared happily. “What!!” I said, almost falling off my seat.
“So how come I’m walking around with two stiff legs like I’ve just pooped my pants and Jared’s got boxing glove hands … and they’re still growing?” I asked.
“HAVE YOU ASKED IT TO STOP”OLD MR INDITE asked, with this weird dorky grin on his face.
Both Jared and I stared straight into his eyes to see if they were spinning around because he’d definitely gone loopy. But all he did was give us that weird dopey smile again. Like Mum does when you’ve done something really stupid and she says … “Don’t worry, everyone makes mistakes,” but she’s actually thinking … You idiot!
We followed his eyes down to his thick, pulsing, toe-jammed leg. Then, almost in a whisper he said, “why do you think it has a pulse?”
As he said those words, something small moved halfway down his leg. Something flickered then opened properly, right there, right in the middle of his toe-jam covered leg.
An eye!!
We couldn’t be
lieve it, it was ALIVE.
I thought I was going to throw up every meal I’d eaten in the last week right there on the spot.
AAARRRHHH!!! Jared screamed and leapt to his feet, whacking his fists together over and over, crumbling the last of his biscuits. He was trying to get as far away as he could from his own hands.
“IT’S LOOKING AT Me!!” he yelled.
Yep, an eye had opened on one hand and was looking all around the room as Jared continued to leap around, squealing like a girl. OLD MR INDITE'S toe-jam eye was squinting at me, like it was smiling. In an instant I knew what it meant.
Very calmly and slowly I looked down to my toe-jammed leg. Jared was still doing circuits of the room, backwards. And there it was, an EYE looking straight back at me. It seemed pretty damn happy too. All of a sudden, it was like some toe-jam jamboree. “When I got toe-jammed,” OLD MR INDITE started, “I knew from the animals that water wouldn’t work, so I tried the opposite; heat. I covered myself up, except for my leg, and laid out in the sun with sheets of tin angled at the toe-jam. But by the time I’d figured it out, it was all the way up my leg. I even tried scraping it off but it ‘bit’ me. Anyway, one day it was starting to sizzle under the heat, bits of toe-jam like scabs started to drop off my leg, when this eye opened up and that’s how I met Rupert.”
OLD MR INDITE told us how his toe-jam,
‘RUPERT’ had come from just the right mix of red dust, cow poop and one other very important ingredient … salty, human, body sweat. While we’d been stewing in a hot bath of body sweat, toe-jam was sucking up the juices like a slug in a salad bowl. It had grown on certain animals to survive, but when the animal died, so did the toe-jam. It hadn’t meant any harm, it just didn’t know that the animals needed to breathe.
So while Jared was still falling over furniture and squealing like a pig being swung through the air by its tail, I was supposed to just ask the toe-jam nicely if it wouldn’t mind awfully not strangling me. Yep that sounded pretty simple, NOT!! My toe-jammed leg was pulsating really strongly now. It was getting so tight that it was starting to cut off the circulation. Apparently OLD MR INDITE had come to some agreement with Rupert. He gets to live an extra couple of lives and Rupert only uses one leg to live.