Near Extinction

by R. A. Spratt

  ‘Tyrannosaurus rex did not have an upright posture,’ said Fin. ‘Their bodies were horizontal, like a chicken’s.’

  ‘They weren’t covered in bird poo either,’ said April grumpily, there was a large dry spatter of bird poo streaked down the side of the dinosaur’s face. It made it look like the T-Rex was crying.

  April didn’t even want to look at the dinosaurs. Like so many things, dinosaurs made her angry. You didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out why. Their mother was a dinosaur scientist. Being a dinosaur scientist was the cover for her double life. Having a double life as an international super spy led to her getting captured. And that had left them motherless. So of course, April hated dinosaurs.

  To be fair, she had hated dinosaurs even before their mother disappeared. Mum loved dinosaurs so much, April resented them. She was jealous, so April actively hated them to irritate her mother. The most irritating thing was, her mother didn’t know that April hated dinosaurs because she was so wrapped up in them herself that she didn’t notice.

  Fin was at the other extreme. He had always sought their mother’s love by learning everything he could about dinosaurs. And Fin had a gift for retaining obscure, tedious facts so he knew a lot. Now he was desperate to impress Loretta with his expert level of knowledge. This may sound strange. But he was only thirteen and he had no idea how else to appeal to a girl’s heart.

  ‘The tail was used as a counterweight so that the main body could pivot on the hind legs,’ said Fin. ‘They never stood tall like that.’

  ‘What if the Tyrannosaurus wanted to change a light bulb?’ asked Loretta.

  Fin was confused, ‘They didn’t have light bulbs seventy million years ago.’

  ‘I was making a joke,’ said Loretta. ‘You know, how many Tyrannosaurus rexes does it take to change a light bulb?’

  ‘But they wouldn’t be able to do it,’ said Fin. ‘Their front arms are too short.’

  ‘That’s why the joke is funny,’ said Loretta patiently.

  ‘Plus their heads would smash through the ceiling first if they climbed a ladder high enough to reach,’ added April.

  ‘So then they’d be able to see daylight and wouldn’t need to change it after all,’ concluded Loretta happily. ‘So the answer is one, plus a step ladder.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Fin.

  ‘Jokes seldom do,’ said Loretta.

  Fin decided to revert the conversation to safer ground, correcting people. ‘The jaw line is all wrong too. Fossils of T-Rex jaws show that the jaw to head ratio was much bigger, to accommodate all sixty teeth. There’s no way that statue has sixty teeth.

  ‘That’s because it’s a statue,’ said April. ‘And it’s made of fibreglass.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean,’ said Fin. ‘I’ll show you.’

  ‘Please don’t,’ said April. ‘You know you’re not impressing Loretta with your unending pedantic facts about dead lizards.’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ argued Loretta. ‘I find all the peculiar things boys say endlessly fascinating.’

  ‘What’s that button?’ asked April. There was a control panel built in to the leg of the Tyrannosaurus. The panel had a green button in the middle.

  ‘I think if you press that button the dinosaur is meant to do something.’ Loretta looked up at the twelve-metre tall statue.

  Fin leaned forward to press it. Just as his hand was about to touch the button April yelled out, ‘Stop, it could be a bomb!’

  Fin flinched. April burst out laughing. ‘Scared you.’

  Fin glowered at her, then hit the button anyway. There was a grinding sound of mechanics struggling to move. The neck and head of the T-Rex shuddered for a moment. And a tinny strangled roar emerged from a voice box deep within the chest of the model.

  ‘Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more pathetic,’ April scoffed.

  Fin shook his head. ‘Dinosaurs didn’t roar. Their vocalisations were more likely to be similar to a birds squawk.’

  Fin stepped forward so he was directly underneath the Tyrannosaurus’s head. He squatted for a second then leapt up. Fin was not a tall boy, but he had an impressive leap, especially as he was trying to dazzle Loretta. He just managed to grab hold of the dinosaur’s bottom jaw, and then, as he was so skinny it wasn’t too hard for him to pull himself up while walking his legs up the T-Rex’s neck. ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Fin. He pulled himself forward until his whole head was inside the dinosaur’s mouth. ‘Just as I suspected. The molars are totally . . . Aaaggghh!’

  The animatronics suddenly lurched into motion. The Tyrannosaurus’s head swung to the side and the jaw clamped shut.

  ‘Aaaagggghhh!’ screamed Fin.

  ‘Cool!’ said April.

  ‘Arf, arf, arf!’ barked Pumpkin, jealous to see another creature biting Fin.

  Loretta leapt forward and pulled open the control panel. There was a red button inside. She hit it and the animatronics came to a laboured halt.

  ‘Are you all right?’ April called up to her brother.

  ‘Noooo!’ cried Fin. His legs waggled about in the air as he desperately tried to free himself. ‘Get me out of here!’

  ‘Well at least we know he’s not a paraplegic,’ said April. ‘Or he wouldn’t be able to wave his legs about like that.’

  ‘Help me!’ yelled Fin.

  ‘Why?’ asked April. ‘This is the only good thing to happen all day. We’ve got three hours to kill. We should set up a picnic and watch you.’

  Joe was more sympathetic than April. Even though he was a hundred metres away looking at a Pteranodon with Daisy, as soon as he saw Fin’s head get clamped in the dinosaur’s mouth. Joe dropped Daisy in the dirt and ran over to help his brother. There wasn’t much he could do. But he could grab Fin’s legs and support him so his body weight wasn’t hanging on his neck.

  ‘What’s going on?’ demanded Mr Lang as he hurried over too.

  ‘Fin tried to impress Loretta by sticking his head in a dinosaur’s mouth,’ said April. ‘Then the dinosaur came to life and bit him.’

  ‘What?’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘This sort of thing happens to me a lot,’ explained Loretta. ‘It’s the hormones. Boys feel a biological imperative to try to impress me. Because I’m beautiful.’ She smiled demonstrating just how devastatingly attractive she could me. Mr Lang flinched. Her beauty was almost like a shock wave. ‘It can be distressing for them. But on the bright side. It’s never dull for me.’

  ‘Get me out of here, please!’ begged Fin. He had his hands pressed against either side of the dinosaur’s jaw and was pushing hard, trying to release himself. His legs were still waving about in the air. Pumpkin could not resist. He jumped up and bit one shoe. ‘Ow!’ cried Fin.

  ‘Hang in there, Fin,’ Joe called up to his brother.

  ‘Of course, he’s going to hang in there,’ said April. ‘His head is stuck. He hasn’t got any choice.’

  ‘Ow,’ cried Daisy from where Joe had dropped her. ‘I think I’ve sprained my other ankle.’

  ‘Puh-lease,’ said April. ‘No one believed you the first time. Except for poor, dense, Joe. So no one is going to believe you sprained a second ankle.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Loretta. ‘Munchhausen’s syndrome is funny when it doesn’t harm anyone. But we’ve got a real problem to deal with now, so be a dear and cut it out.’

  Daisy was angry and mortified. But the most humiliating part was, clearly no one cared. They were all just staring up at Fin wondering what to do with him.

  ‘Wh-what should we do?’ asked Joe. He was used to being able to solve problems with brute strength but he didn’t see how that would help here. He couldn’t crash tackle the dinosaur.

  ‘Lubrication,’ said Loretta.

  ‘What?’ asked Mr Lang.

  ‘So we can slide Fin out,’ explained Loretta. ‘Do we have anything slippery we could rub on his head?’

  ‘We could drain motor oil out of the bus,’ said April.

/>   ‘No, no one is tampering with the bus,’ said Mr Lang. ‘It’s decrepit enough. It barely runs with oil, so it’s not going to run without it.’

  ‘What about b-b-butter?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Did you bring a tub of butter?’ asked April. She had to ask because Joe was a hungry boy so it was not beyond the realm of possibility.

  ‘No, b-b-but there’s butter in our sandwiches,’ said Joe.

  ‘You want us to rub our sandwiches on the dinosaur’s teeth?’ asked Loretta.

  ‘M-m-maybe,’ said Joe. He was rarely confident enough to give an outright positive answer.

  ‘It’s worth a try,’ said Mr Lang.

  A short while later they had collected up all the sandwiches from all the children. Well, all the children who hadn’t already eaten their sandwiches on the bus ride there. But it was no use. Despite smearing the butter on Fin’s head and the dinosaur’s teeth, they couldn’t get him out. And they tried everything. Rotating him sideways, slow jiggling, sudden tugging, five or six teenagers pulling on each leg . . . But nothing worked. Fin was well and truly stuck.

  It was a thoroughly humiliating experience for him. All his life people had accused Fin of being a ‘big head’. And they didn’t just mean he was a know-it-all. He literally had an unusually large skull and now that fact was his undoing. He could feel people manhandling him as they shook him and tugged on his legs. He didn’t even know who was doing it. He just hoped none of them were Loretta. It would be so unfair if Loretta was manhandling him and he didn’t even realise.

  ‘It’s hopeless!’ said Mr Lang. Being out in the desert had apparently eroded his professional training to be a positive influence in the lives of children.

  ‘Need tools,’ said Neil. He was not a chatty boy. But it was widely known that he knew how to fix broken stuff. His parents were circus performers, so Neil never got new things, if he wanted something he always had to fix a broken version to get it.

  ‘Couldn’t you pry the dinosaur’s jaws open with a plank of wood? You know, using it as a lever,’ suggested Loretta. ‘After all Archimedes did say, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”.’

  ‘Actually,’ Fin’s muffled voice could be heard from within the dinosaur’s head, ‘Archimedes was Greek so he would have said, “Dóste mou éna mochló arketá kai éna ypomóchlio gia na to topothetísete kai tha metakiníso ton kósmo”.’

  ‘Even when he’s stuck in a giant plastic dinosaur, he still takes time to be annoying and correct people,’ said April.

  ‘There are no planks of wood,’ Neil pointed out.

  ‘You mean we’re going to have to drive all the way back to Currawong just to get tools?’ complained Kieran.

  ‘On the bright side,’ said April, checking her watch. ‘At least we get to end the excursion early.’

  ‘I was enjoying it,’ said Kieran. ‘I learned a lot of facts from the placards.’

  ‘All the facts on the placards are wrong,’ Fin’s muffled voice came from within the dinosaurs head.

  ‘Says you,’ said Kieran. He wasn’t a great raconteur.

  ‘No, says science,’ said Fin.

  ‘Yeah, well I’m not going to listen to a science lesson from a boy whose head is stuck in an oversized plastic dinosaur,’ said Kieran.

  The other students laughed. It was a good burn.

  ‘Not plastic, fibreglass,’ said Fin.

  ‘There’s no difference,’ said Animesh.

  ‘There is a lot of difference,’ retorted Fin. ‘Fibreglass is made of fibres of glass. Plastic is a petroleum bi-product. And the replica is not oversized, it is a full-scale model.’

  ‘You know if we all get on the bus and drive away we won’t have to listen to him talking,’ said April.

  ‘You can’t leave me here!’ panicked Fin. His head was so sweaty. It was surprisingly hot inside the head of a model dinosaur. He was starting to become delirious.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Mr Lang.

  Joe had been holding Fin up for quite a while already. It wasn’t that easy. Particularly as Fin kept wriggling. Joe was getting pins and needles in his shoulder where Fin was standing on him. He let go of Fin’s calf for a second to shake his arm out.

  ‘Hey, don’t let go!’ yelped Fin. ‘My ears will rip off.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’d be better looking,’ said April. ‘Your ears stick out too much anyway.’

  ‘I can stay and hold him up while you go for help,’ said Joe.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Mr Lang. ‘I don’t like to leave you alone.’

  ‘I’ll wait with Joe,’ said Loretta.

  ‘I suppose that’s all right,’ said Mr Lang. ‘You are his sister now.’

  ‘What does that make me, chopped liver?’ demanded April.

  ‘Do you want to wait here with your brothers while we go for help?’ asked Mr Lang.

  ‘No,’ said April. ‘I don’t like either of them.’

  ‘There you go then,’ said Mr Lang. ‘Miss Viswanathan can stay.’

  ‘I’ll stay too,’ offered Daisy.

  ‘NO!’ shouted Joe in horror.

  ‘You said you’ve got two sprained ankles,’ April reminded her. ‘We should be rushing you back to town for immediate medical attention.’

  ‘My ankles feel better,’ said Daisy.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about your ankles,’ said April. ‘I was talking about your brain. You need to see a psychiatrist if you think anyone believed for one second that you weren’t faking the sprained ankles.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mr Lang, checking his watch. ‘It will take us two hours to get back to town. Half an hour at least to arrange help. Then another two hours for whoever that is to drive back here. Will you be okay?’

  Joe looked about. He was going to have to spend four and a half hours holding his little brother up by his waist, while being kept company by the most disturbingly attractive and sociopathic girl he had ever met. He would have dearly loved to run away screaming, but he couldn’t do that to Fin. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life feeling guilty that his brother had no ears.

  ‘Yeah f-f-fine,’ lied Joe.

  ‘I’ll attend to all his needs,’ said Loretta.

  Joe prayed he could wait four and a half hours without going to the bathroom.

  Most of the kids were relieved to get back on the bus. Four year olds may find dinosaurs enthralling but teenagers do not. Admittedly teenagers don’t find anything enthralling. Except themselves, and the typical adolescent mating rituals that girls spend so much time giggling over. Life-sized fibreglass dinosaurs were never going to be their idea of a fun day out. There was much more scope for social anthropology on the bus ride.

  April slumped down on a seat close to the front, Pumpkin jumped up on her lap. All the other kids hurried past her towards the back of the bus. No one wanted to be stuck sitting next to April. She was bad enough in a classroom setting, but at least if she exploded at school April could storm off and take her anger out somewhere else. Inside a bus there was nowhere for her anger to go. The bus was like a pressure cooker. April’s rage would build and build until it exploded and there would be no escaping for the rest of them. That’s why everyone wanted the back seat, the further they could get from ground zero the better.

  Only one student had no idea who he sat next to when he plopped down and that was Tom, the only vision-impaired student at Currawong High. Although he did make up for his lack of sight by being extremely good at hearing, smelling and making sarcastic comments. So perhaps he intentionally sat next to April. Who knows the complicated, or rather breathtakingly simplistic, workings of an adolescent boy’s mind?

  Either way, Neil was crushed when he clambered onto the bus last, only to see the love of his life sitting next to the annoying lanky blind kid. Neil glowered. Unfortunately, his face was so inexpressive there was no visible difference to an outside viewer, so no one noticed. Especially not Tom, being vision-impaired. Neil wo
uld have dearly liked to kick Tom in the foot as he walked past, but his grandmother, the Cat Lady, had brought him up to behave like a gentleman (an inarticulate emotionally stunted gentleman but a gentleman none the less), so unlike April he couldn’t bring himself to kick a blind boy.

  April was on some level worried about Fin, and even Joe. It’s not every day your brother gets his head stuck in a dinosaur and you have to leave him and your other brother behind in the desert. But April was so emotionally crippled that there was no way she could identify what her agitated emotions meant. She certainly couldn’t deal with them appropriately.

  April’s brain was like an internal combustion engine. An engine takes petrol and converts it into momentum. Her brain took all emotions and converted them into rage. She looked quiet and calm as she stared truculently out the bus window, but if anyone had been brave enough to come close and observe her they would have seen she was quivering.

  She may have started off quivering out of anxiety for her brothers, but that emotion was quickly converting to fear of abandonment. She had a deep well of that inside her since her mother had disappeared. The quivering was actually a dam wall of fear that was strained to capacity and about to burst out as a tsunami of rage. This was a terrible time to try and make small talk with April.

  Being vision-impaired, Tom had no chance of picking up any of these warning signals. He had no way of knowing that just sitting down next to April was an incredibly foolhardy thing to do. It was equivalent to poking an angry bull in the butt with a barbecue fork, then waving a red rag in its face.

  April turned and glared at Tom, and since that didn’t have any effect she snapped rudely at him, ‘You’re taking up too much space.’

  ‘I can’t control the volume of space I fill,’ said Tom. ‘What do you want me to do? Shrink?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do,’ said April. ‘I want you to take up less space. It’s what considerate people do. You can’t use being vision-impaired as an excuse for being endlessly rude.’

  ‘You are accusing me of being rude?’ asked Tom. ‘Well that’s the pot calling the kettle black.’

  ‘You can’t say that, it’s racist,’ said Matilda butting in. She was sitting across the aisle next to Neil. She loved telling people they were wrong. She particularly loved telling teachers when other people were wrong. She was a proud and devoted tattletale.