So Sick!

by J A Mawter

  He’s outta there! Like a homing pigeon Luke heads for the Wallaroo’s special tree.

  ‘Talk about scared!’ gasps Zac, swinging up into a branch some twenty minutes later.

  ‘Nearly pooped myself!’ agrees Karl as he climbs up, too. He stretches. ‘Boy, am I sore. Any longer in that barrel and I’d’ve turned into a stiff.’

  ‘What happened?’ asks Luke.

  He hears how Mrs Sully, single-handedly, picked up each sack of chook poo and lugged it back to her car. One by one she carried them, completely ignoring the commotion she had caused.

  ‘By now there’s cars queued up from Simpson to South Australia!’ Zac sweeps his hand depicting an imaginary highway line.

  ‘And that’s not the end of it!’ says Karl.

  ‘Tell me!’ insists Luke, absent-mindedly flicking off pieces of bark.

  Karl drops his voice. ‘She comes back … ’

  ‘Was she coming to get you?’ asks Luke, his voice full of awe.

  ‘Uh, uh,’ says Karl. He squirms, then drops his gaze.

  ‘What?’ asks Luke, grabbing Zac’s arm.

  ‘You sure you want to know?’ asks Zac.

  Luke pushes him in exasperation. ‘Of course, I want to know.’

  Zac looks at Karl. ‘Tell him,’ he says.

  Karl nods. ‘She comes back,’ he whispers, ‘for the hanky!’

  Karl could have said she came back with a gun and it would have had the same effect. All colour drains from Luke’s face. His pupils are black pits. He is aware of having to work to breathe. He pictures the white hanky — Luke Bladen printed in black laundry marker along one seam. ‘Dad!’ is all he says.

  Sure enough, that night, the phone rings. Luke’s dad lumbers to get it. Luke sits at the dinner table, mashed potato stuck in his throat. He can hear the politeness in the voice start to fade leaving in its wake, a sharp edge.

  Luke’s heart is beating a rap. It’s saying, Mrs Sully. Mrs Sully. Mrs Sully. He wonders if he should hide then thinks, what’s the point? He’ll find me anyway. He remembers that the show is tomorrow and curses his bad timing.

  Luke’s father stands at the door, his face like thunder. Luke puts a hand to his forehead. He can feel it twitch, the blood pounding in his veins like waves. He watches his father cross the room …

  ‘Cold callers!’ says his father, thumping the table. ‘Always asking for money!’

  Luke sags in his chair, the pounding in his chest and head ease to a mere tugging. ‘Blood suckers,’ he says in agreement.

  His father chuckles. ‘That’s right, Lukey. Leeches!’

  When Luke wakes up the next morning his heart is light. He hums as he climbs out of bed and pulls on his clothes. Thoughts of Hamish and chook poo hide in the recesses of his mind because today is the day of the show! As Luke steps out from his door, the glare of the sun turns to gloom. Hope it’s not going to rain, he thinks to himself as he squints at the sky. But it’s not rain that hides the glare.

  It is hundreds of pigeons, gliding and swooping together in a great tapestry of flight. The pigeon race has started.

  Wonder which one’s Pretty Boy? thinks Luke watching the flock of birds, the white ones stark against a sea of grey.

  Pretty Boy. Pretty Boy means Mrs Sully. And Mrs Sully means …

  Luke shivers and pulls his jacket tighter.

  Chapter Five

  ‘Six shots for two bucks! C’mon boys, show us what you’re made of.’

  Luke looks at Zac. ‘Time for another gnome?’ he asks.

  Zac’s pulling out his money before Luke’s even got to gnome. ‘Sure,’ he says. It’s one hour later.

  ‘I’ve had enough!’ says Luke. ‘Let’s go.’ His pockets are lighter and the two gnomes he’s won he has given to Zac.

  Karl lies on the ground, resting against the tent pole with his hat over his face. Luke is pacing up and down like a dingo at a boundary fence.

  And Zac?

  Zac’s won rent-a-crowd. He has Sleepy and Sneezy and Dopey and Bashful. Happy and Grumpy are there, too.

  ‘Time,’ says Luke.

  Zac swivels around. He puts his hands up as if to beg. ‘Not yet, please. There’s only one Doc left. I just wanna win that Doc, then I’ll be done.’

  ‘Broke, more like it!’

  Just then, Hamish, Eli and Oscar wander up.

  Luke frowns. What’s Hamish doing here? ‘Aren’t you meant to be grounded?’ he asks Hamish.

  ‘What Mum doesn’t know won’t hurt.’ Hamish narrows his eyes to slits reminding Luke of a pig dog.

  ‘Six,’ says Hamish, holding out two dollars to the man. He turns to Zac. ‘Pretty good stash you’ve got there.’ He gets down on his haunches to inspect the gnomes then asks, ‘What are they? The seven dwarfs?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Zac. ‘All I need is Doc.’

  ‘Doc, huh?’

  ‘Then I’ve got the set.’

  Luke nudges Zac to shut up.

  Karl is on his feet, looking as uneasy as Luke. ‘Let’s go,’ he says in a quiet voice and goes to grab Zac’s arm.

  Hamish pushes between them and reaches for the rifle. He aims, then fires six shots in quick succession. Six ducks topple over.

  The man in the gallery whistles, then grins. ‘Not bad,’ he says. He points to the shelves of prizes. ‘What do you want?’

  Hamish laughs, a hair-raising laugh. To Luke it sounds like a finger in an electric pencil sharpener. Hamish inspects the prizes. He rubs his chin, pretending to make up his mind. He takes his time. Eventually, he says, ‘I’ll have — Doc.’

  ‘No!’ Zac stands there, looking like he’s won the lottery, then lost it all on one bet.

  Hamish reaches for Doc. ‘Ooops!’ he says, in a voice as fake as vinyl. Plaster shatters everywhere.

  Doc’s hat lands at Luke’s feet. Luke sees Hamish wink at Eli and Oscar. He can’t believe it! But then again, he can.

  ‘No-o-o!’ wails Zac, bending down to pick up the pieces.

  Luke grabs Zac’s arm. With a gentle voice he says, ‘Don’t bother. It’s no good.’

  Karl reaches for a plastic bag to start packing the other gnomes away. ‘Let’s go,’ he says as he picks up Dopey.

  But Dopey never makes it to the bag. Dopey gets halfway when he is launched from a Hamish boot to the buttock.

  ‘Oops, sorry,’ says Hamish. ‘Must’ve tripped.’

  Dopey hits the tent pole. His body slides against the stand but his head goes west.

  Zac looks like he’s about to cry. Hamish looks like he’s about to laugh. And Luke? He looks like he wants to smash something. He lunges at Hamish who steps out of the way. Luke swings around to face him.

  ‘Hey, fellas,’ interrupts the gallery man. ‘Take your business elsewhere.’ He makes cluck, clucking sounds with his tongue and quickly shuts the flaps of the shooting gallery.

  Hamish snatches Dopey’s head and hurls it at Luke who ducks and collides with a popcorn machine. The popcorn machine starts spewing. The popcorn lady races to stop the machine but trips and knocks over the fairyfloss stand. Fairyfloss flies through the air. Zac grabs a handful of popcorn and chucks it at Hamish who promptly chucks some back.

  Not again!

  It’s hard to tell who is who and what is what. Popcorn and gnomes and boys covered in fairy floss tussle in a heap when suddenly a hose is turned on them.

  Luke is the first to get away. He stands to the side laughing as Hamish tries to escape the cold blast. It takes Luke a while to register who is holding the hose. She looks strange without a pigeon in her hair. Luke feels a sting on his cheek. He swipes and inspects the imaginary insect. He is surprised to find his hand covered in blood. Luke looks around. He sees Hamish — Hamish who managed to escape the blast is now smashing gnomes, deliberately stomping them into the ground. A shard of flying plaster has cut him.

  Zac is yelling and Mrs Sully is yelling.

  Hamish opens his mouth to yell, too. He starts his war cry, the thumping, stomping, bum
ping war cry of the Warriors. He throws back his head and opens his mouth — wide …

  Then, all of a sudden the most wonderful thing happens. The most marvellous thing that Luke could wish for.

  The war cry dies.

  Why’s Hamish stopped? wonders Luke.

  The air rumbles, the sky darkens and he looks up. Racing pigeons are coming in to land.

  Luke notices that Hamish has started up again, but this time the war cry is different. Hamish is yelling and prancing about, making gargling noises and swiping at his mouth. Luke peers closer. What’s happening? He looks at Hamish’s face. It is smeared with brown and white!

  ‘Aaaagh!’ says Hamish, wiping at his face — swipe, swipe, swipe.

  Is this a new version of the Warrior War Cry? wonders Luke. He decides that maybe it is. In the old one Hamish never did back flips! Or windmill arms. And he never spat.

  Luke looks at Mrs Sully. There’s something different about her. She is doubled up with laughter. He looks back at Hamish. Hamish is on his hands and knees, now. He is dry retching on the ground, moaning and shaking and putting on such a show that people passing by start to throw money.

  What’s going on? Luke can’t work it out. He looks at Hamish going ballistic. He looks at Mrs Sully, holding her sides she’s laughing so much.

  Then he looks … into the yellow eyes of Pretty

  Boy!

  Pretty Boy — The Racing Pigeon Who Brought One Home. Who dropped his load …

  Right in Hamish’s mouth!

  The Smelling Bee

  Chapter One

  Mr Epeler is speaking. He’s our teacher.

  ‘By the end of this term we’ll all have worked like such busy little bees on our spelling … ’

  Spelling! That word. It’s a hot-needles-under-your-fingernails sort of word.

  ‘… that we’ll all be able to spell Amorphophallus … ’ Amor, what? I think we did amour in Italian in Grade 3. Or was amour in French in Grade 4? Whatever.

  ‘Amorphophallus titanum!’ Mr Epeler beams around the room like a wayward asteroid. ‘It’s a flower, by the way.’

  Oh, a flower, I think to myself. Of course! ‘Amorphophallus titanum. I want you to learn that word.’

  Amor … A morph … I give up. I can’t even remember the word, let alone spell it. Something to do with phallus. Or was that tit?

  ‘Please copy this into your spelling books,’ says Mr Epeler. To show how clever he is, he starts to write it on the board. All I can think of while he is writing is, thank God I’m tall!

  Tall means I get to sit up the back of the class. Tall puts as much distance between Mr Epeler’s armpits and me as is humanly possible. Let me explain, Mr Epeler is the sort of person who blanks out when the deodorant commercials come on TV. The sort of person who has a force shield around him that even flies won’t step into. The sort of … nah! You’ve got the picture.

  Mr Epeler is still writing. One, two, three, four … I start counting letters. And give up at nine. Spelling should be banned. Don’t you agree? I’m thinking of starting up a petition. I mean, who needs it? It’s not like we haven’t invented spell check.

  ‘I’ve sorted you into groups,’ says Mr Epeler holding up colour-coded sheets of paper.

  Don’t tell me, red is for the dummies (‘r’, ‘e’, ‘d’ — three letters) and aquamarine is for the brains (can’t tell you how many letters), and yellow is somewhere in between.

  We start with aquamarine. ‘Angus, Madeline, Francesca … ’

  Then yellow. ‘Kobi, Verity, Levon

  Red. ‘Jake

  Red! Knew it.

  ‘Kieran … ’

  Hah! Kieran’s with me. At least I learnt to spell my name in kindy.

  ‘Adam.’

  Someone else who’s brain’s gone walkabout. Jake. Kieran and Adam. It’s always the same. Red for reading, Red for maths and Red for spelling.

  Osheen and Jung Sian are in Red for spelling, too. At least they have an excuse. They’ve only been speaking English for a few months. Osheen speaks four languages. I, on the other hand, only speak one. How’d I get to be so dumb? Grandad says I must’ve been at the back of the line when the spelling brains were handed out. He says he was, too. Only in his day, if you couldn’t spell at school they’d have given you the strap! I would’ve nicked off. They probably would’ve belted you for that, too. Grandad says he once got six cuts with the cane because he got his b’s and d’s mixed up. When I mix them up I pretend I’ve done it on purpose — mirror writing.

  ‘Everyone look at your list.’ It’s Mr Epeler, again. ‘There’s twenty words that are compulsory … ’

  Twenty! A kick in the goolies would be more kind.

  ‘… and five that are optional.’

  Optional? Let me tell you about optional. Optional is only for kids whose names aren’t Madeline, or Francesca, or Angus. It’s hard to believe, but with a double serving of brains those kids still haven’t worked out optional.

  I look at my list: because . . . Yes! Betty eats cake and uncle sells eggs! My sister taught me that. their. They always throw in a their. But is it a there there or a their their. And where’s my favourite? Ah, second from the bottom, which. Which which is that? It’s meant to help but it only confuses me more. Mum says to look for the ‘t’. The ‘t’ is meant to look like a cross, which is meant to remind me of a cemetery, which is meant to remind me of a witch. Witch. ‘t’. Cross. Get it? But I keep forgetting what everything’s meant to remind me of. I mean, it’s not like I hang out in cemeteries. Come to think of it, it’s not like witches do, either.

  ‘You are to learn your list for Friday,’ says Mr ‘Sadist’ Epeler. ‘On Friday, we will have a spelling bee.’

  ‘Great,’ says Angus.

  ‘Goodie, goodie …’ says Madeline.

  ‘Gumdrops,’ Francesca finishes for her.

  Where does she get off?

  Mr Epeler stands there with a grin that reminds me of Smirk the Berk. ‘We will start the spelling bee with each child spelling Amorphophallus titanum.’

  Luckily, the bell cuts him off. Torture session Number 1175 is finally over. Funny, I might not be good at maths but I can tell you that we go to school about 39 weeks a year, give or take a few days for public holidays and pupil-free days. So, that’s 39 lots of 5 days. Times that by 6 years, plus 5 days — ‘cause it’s Monday of Week 2 in Grade 6 — gives 1175.

  I start to walk home, thinking that Friday is going to be a major burner. I pass Madeline and Francesca and Angus going into the library. Bet they’re going to read their dictionaries.

  ‘Hey, Jake,’ calls Angus. ‘Wonder who’s going to be the first kid in the spelling bee to get out?’

  I pull my escaped loony face. ‘Don’t know,’ I answer. ‘Don’t care.’

  But I do care. On Friday the what’s-between-Jake’s-ears? jokes will be flying. Just as I get to the front gate I see Ivy Tan. I begin to feel better. Ivy Tan is the only person I know who spells worse than I do. When spelling brains were handed out she wasn’t at the back of the line, she was missing from it altogether. Ivy’s sitting at the bus stop pretending to read. I say pretending because although she’s sitting there with this great fat book on her lap, she rarely turns a page, and when she does, she turns them in chunks!

  No one teases Ivy. In fact, no one speaks to Ivy much. I think that’s worse than being given a rollicking. It’s as though she doesn’t exist.

  Kieran’s waiting for me out the front.

  ‘What’s the long face for?’ he asks. ‘You look like you’ve scored a detention.’

  I shake my head and say, ‘Nah. It’s nothing like that.’ I let out this long sigh, big enough to blow out a hundred candles.

  ‘Tell us,’ says Kieran, giving me a nudge — a nudge so gentle I almost ram into Mr Epeler who’s on bus-line duty.

  It’s not Mr Epeler’s angry face that helps me to find my feet and back off, it’s the arm he puts out to catch me. Steady … Enough with the arm
… That armpit’s ripe for nuclear fusion.

  ‘Watch where you’re going!’ exclaims Mr Epeler.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Epeler,’ I mutter. With the spelling bee looming the last thing I need is to get on his bad side.

  Chapter Two

  Getting on Mr Epeler’s bad side is exactly what I do the next morning when I collide into him coming out of the classroom as I am going in. But, it’s a different sort of bad side. I manage to find myself wedged under his pecs. Far too close to the dreaded armpits. The smell’s so bad I can taste it. ‘‘Sguse be,’ I manage to say as I wrench myself free and stagger to my seat.

  ‘Don’t forget that Epeler loves classroom etiquette?’ whispers Kieran. ‘Pull that stunt again and you’ll be dead meat.’

  Dead meat. That’s it! That’s exactly what his armpits remind me of. Dead meat and Tinkerbell. Tink was my mouse. She’s dead now. We found her wedged under the toaster ten days after she went missing. I tell you, toasters aren’t good for mice. For days we teased Mum that her cooking was so bad she could even kill toast.

  My mind wanders. I am thinking mouse. A tiny little mouse that would like to build its nest in Mr Epeler’s warm underarm hair. It could snuggle down, all cosy like, in its burrow. It could eat the bacteria that bred there and drink the moisture. Did I say moisture? I mean sweat. Uggh!

  Which reminds me … Have you ever drank sweat? I have. Once. Not intentionally. It was last year in Mrs Weston’s class. She wouldn’t let me get a drink, even though it was hot enough to make your teeth blister. Anyway, Adam says he wants to go to the can and Mrs Weston says, ‘Yes’. So Adam leaves but winks when he comes back. As he goes past my desk he drops this wet hanky in my lap. Straight away I pounce. You see, wet means water. I squeeze the hanky into the palm of my hand and take a big slurp.