Snot Chocolate

by Morris Gleitzman

  Archie saw that neighbours were starting to assemble along the front fence. He could hear the distant sound of a police siren, coming closer.

  Rosco gave the neighbours a glance.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Archie. ‘My parents spend their whole time re-decorating the house. People’ll think they’ve just decided to go one step further.’

  The big metal ball smashed into one of the downstairs rooms. Fragments of antique furniture, sections of lime-bleached floorboards, parts of designer lamps and bits of genuine original oil paintings flew across the lawns.

  Archie could hear the police siren getting closer.

  ‘Arch,’ called Noel from the cab of the truck. ‘You’d better pop off home. I’ll finish up here. Been nice working with you.’

  He gave Archie a wave.

  Archie waved back, said thank you to Noel one last time, and turned to head home.

  Rosco blocked his way. And grabbed him. Not by the nose this time. By the hand.

  ‘Thanks for saving my family,’ Roscoe said to Archie, shaking his hand emotionally. ‘When I get a new gang headquarters, you’re invited.’

  Mum and Dad were both watching the TV news when Archie came in.

  On the screen was the Kruger house. Which was strewn all over the Kruger garden. Neighbours and police and State Emergency Service teams were milling around.

  Mum and Dad looked at Archie.

  ‘That’s the Kruger place,’ said Dad.

  ‘Rosco Kruger,’ said Mum. ‘Isn’t he the boy who’s been bullying you?’

  Archie didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ said Dad gently. ‘That’s the deal, remember.’

  Archie did want to say something.

  ‘Mine was a Fairy Demolition Contractor,’ he said.

  Mum and Dad both nodded slowly, as if they weren’t surprised to hear this given what they’d just seen on the news.

  Archie saw they were trying not to show their feelings, which didn’t look like very happy ones.

  ‘I suppose Rosco Kruger deserved it,’ said Dad. ‘But still, to knock his whole house down . . .’

  ‘No Dad,’ said Archie quietly. ‘The bullying wasn’t why Rosco’s house got knocked down. His cubby, yes, but not the house.’

  Mum and Dad weren’t hiding their feelings now. They were both looking very puzzled.

  ‘Rosco wanted the house knocked down,’ explained Archie. ‘His parents were so obsessed with it, they didn’t have any time for him. I reckon that’s why he bullied me. He was jealous of what great loving parents I’ve got.’

  Mum and Dad swapped a glance.

  ‘So even though Rosco had hurt you, you gave him one of your three wishes?’ said Mum.

  ‘I gave him two,’ said Archie. ‘His dad’s a workaholic. Prefers a car dealership to his own son.’

  Archie pointed to the TV screen, where the news reporter was standing in front of the wreckage of a car sales yard.

  Mum and Dad swapped another look.

  Archie was pretty sure he knew what they were thinking. This was the moment he’d been dreading. Having to confess and tell them the truth. That he hadn’t been able to do the most important demolition of all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to them. ‘Noel and me went to the insurance building and . . . I tried, I really did, for both of you, but . . .’

  Archie could hear how small and sad his voice had got.

  ‘But it was full of people,’ he whispered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He felt even worse now that Mum was reaching for a tissue and was dabbing her eyes.

  ‘It’s OK, son,’ said Dad.

  Archie suddenly felt a stab of indignation at how unfair it all was.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why I got a dumb Fairy Demolition Contractor when if I’d known about this whole fairy thing, what I’d really have wanted, a million times more, is a Fairy Leg Surgeon for Mum.’

  ‘Oh, love,’ said Mum.

  She blew her nose and looked at Archie.

  ‘We’re glad you got a Fairy Demolition Contractor,’ she said.

  Archie wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. She said it again. Archie still didn’t understand.

  ‘Because,’ said Mum, ‘it’s reminded me that there’s something more important in life even than being able to walk.’

  ‘Or having a job,’ said Dad.

  Archie still didn’t understand.

  ‘It’s knowing that your son has a wonderful heart,’ said Mum.

  She beckoned Archie towards her, and just before her arms wrapped around him, he saw on her face something he hadn’t seen there for a very long time.

  A smile.

  The hug lasted for ages, with Dad joining in. Mum cried some more. Soon all three of them were wet, and Archie noticed that Mum’s mascara was making his school shirt look like a year-one art project.

  Archie didn’t mind.

  He wouldn’t have stopped her tears of happiness for anything, not even if he had a McDonald’s bun.

  We’re so anti-bacterial at our place.

  Mum and Dad hate bacteria big time. Their main hobby is killing them.

  I’m glad bacteria are just very tiny microbes the human eye can’t see, because if they were any bigger we wouldn’t be able to move at our place for the dead bodies.

  ‘Callum,’ Mum and Dad are always saying to me, ‘wash your hands before dinner, then spray the bathroom. And after that, spray your bedroom, and your shoes, and the next-door’s cat’s bottom.’

  We are the most anti-bacterial family I’ve ever met.

  Here’s what happens if you come to visit us.

  You ring the doorbell by pressing a button that gets sprayed at least once a day with anti-bacterial bell-spraying fluid.

  Mum answers the door using a handle that gets wiped more than a bum. You follow her down the hall on a carpet Dad cleans with an anti-bacterial shampoo that me and my brother Troy aren’t even allowed to touch in case it kills us and turns our fingernails green.

  Dad’s in the kitchen, wiping. Mum does some wiping too, then offers you a cup of tea. Don’t have it, the cups taste of chemicals.

  Why is Mum looking at you like that? She wants you to take your clothes off so she can run them through the machine using a laundry detergent that’s soft, fragrant and very very anti-bacterial.

  Get the picture?

  Except it’s not the whole picture. Because sometimes Mum doesn’t want you to take your clothes off. Sometimes instead she clutches her tummy.

  ‘Ow,’ she says. Then she says it again, louder. ‘Ow. Ow. Ow.’

  Mum gets a lot of bad tummy pain.

  Dad says it’s not fair. We live in a house that’s a death-zone for bacteria. In other parts of the world bacteria tell each other scary stories about our house. Yet Mum still gets terrible pain from tummy bugs.

  I hate to see Mum in such pain. So do Dad and Troy. But we don’t know what to do, so we just do more wiping.

  Dad says it’s a mystery, scientifically speaking.

  I’m not a scientist, not yet. But I’ve been thinking that maybe it isn’t such a mystery.

  Look at my friend Newt.

  His house isn’t anti-bacterial. I had tea at his place last week, and there was a lump of dried snot stuck to the dining table. OK, it might have been creamed spinach, but it definitely wasn’t anti-bacterial.

  His fridge has furry jam in it. So does his bathroom, on the taps.

  His bedroom is like a sandstorm when you jump on the bed. It’s mostly dandruff, but some of it’s mouse poo from his pets, you can tell from the taste.

  Newt’s house must be the most bacterial place on the planet. But his mum never gets tummy pains, and nobody there gets headaches like Dad gets, and Newt doesn’t have anxious dreams at night like me and Troy.

  Ms Easton at school has just said something amazing.

  She reckons some people are too anti-bacterial.

  ‘Ha
ving a few of those bad bacteria around is good for us,’ says Ms Easton, which sounds crazy but it’s got to be right cause she’s a teacher. ‘They give our immune system something to practice on.’

  ‘What’s an immune system?’ says Newt. ‘Have I got one?’

  Ms Easton gives him a look. She nods.

  I think she’s been to his house.

  ‘We all have one,’ she says. ‘It’s an important part of our body cells. The part that keeps us alive. Protects us against infection and disease.’

  This is very interesting, scientifically speaking.

  Specially to me.

  ‘You said having a few of those bad bacteria is good,’ I say to Ms Easton. ‘How many’s a few?’

  ‘With those bad bacteria you don’t want too many,’ she says, glancing at Newt’s hands. ‘A billion. Two billion tops.’

  That sounds like quite a lot to me.

  Which is why I’m putting all the different bacteria things I can find into this health shake for Mum, so her immune system can get some practice at keeping her healthy.

  I’m putting in old orange juice that’s gone fizzy. Blue bits off some cheese I found in my camping bag. Milk that’s had a furball from a cat soaking in it. Some stuff from under my fingernails. Some other stuff Newt kindly gave me.

  There, all nicely blended.

  I’ll give it to Mum now before it curdles.

  That didn’t go very well. Dad says that what Mum just did, scientifically speaking, is called projectile vomiting.

  ‘You said it was a heath shake,’ wails Mum.

  ‘It was,’ I say. ‘And it would have totally perked your immune system up big time, if you hadn’t projectile-vomited it on Dad.’

  ‘What’s in it?’ says Dad, peering suspiciously at his very messy shirt.

  ‘Just some orange juice and cheese and other stuff,’ I say. ‘Stuff that’s good for immune systems.’

  ‘That’s mouse poo,’ says Troy, sniffing Dad’s shirt. ‘You can tell by the smell.’

  I hate it when younger brothers try to be scientists.

  ‘And what’s this?’ says Dad angrily. ‘It looks like snot.’

  ‘It could just be spinach,’ I say. ‘Or some other creamed leafy green vegetable with bacteria on it.’

  But nobody hears me because Mum is clutching her stomach and moaning loudly. Her face is squished with pain.

  Poor Mum, it’s never been this bad.

  I’ve got an awful feeling that part of it might be my fault.

  We all hold her hand and stroke her arm and look anxious, and some of us say sympathetic things and some of us (me) say apologetic things, but it doesn’t make her feel better.

  Dad calls an ambulance.

  The ambulance men gave me rude looks, and so did some of the other people here at the hospital. Cleaners mostly, because when they heard what I did, they sympathised with Mum and Dad. What Mum and Dad do for a hobby, they do for a living.

  Dad has hardly spoken to me since we left the house.

  I don’t blame him. I’d be furious too if I had a son who’d poisoned his own mother.

  I’m very worried about Mum. The emergency doctors and nurses took her away as soon as we arrived, straight after I confessed. We haven’t seen her since, and that was hours ago.

  One of the emergency doctors is coming back now.

  Dad jumps up.

  ‘How is she?’ he says to the doctor.

  Dad is pale with worry.

  I know why. When Mum was a girl, she nearly died. Her immune system went seriously cactus and she had to spend weeks in hospital in an anti-bacterial ward.

  People couldn’t even bring her grapes.

  Not even washed ones.

  She got better in the end and was allowed to go home, but I think that’s when she started wiping door knobs.

  ‘She’s asleep,’ says the doctor to Dad. ‘A couple of the tests we gave her required a minor anaesthetic.’

  I can see Dad wants more information, but I get in first.

  ‘Is she going to be OK?’ I say. ‘From the bacteria poisoning?’

  The doctor looks at me.

  I make a silent promise that if Mum gets through this, I’ll be the most anti-bacterial person in our street. The germs won’t stand a chance. Door knobs, carpets, next door’s cat, I’ll wipe and spray them all ten times a day. I’ll stay home from school to do it. Ms Easton won’t be able to stop me, not after her advice nearly killed my mum.

  The doctor puts her hand on my shoulder.

  I go very tense.

  Can doctors arrest people for being badly informed and slightly too bacterial?

  ‘You weren’t totally off the beam, Callum,’ the doctor says. ‘If you’d given your mum the right kind of bacteria, it would have helped her, because some bacteria are good.’

  I look at her, confused. I turn to Dad.

  He’s staring at the doctor, gobsmacked.

  ‘Good bacteria?’ he says.

  We’re both struggling with the idea.

  ‘It’s a bit complicated, scientifically speaking,’ says the doctor. ‘But basically there are good bacteria and there are bad bacteria. Your teacher was right, we need a few bad bacteria around so our immune systems don’t get lazy. But to be really healthy we need billions of the good bacteria living inside us.’

  That is amazing.

  Wait till I tell Ms Easton.

  Dad is open-mouthed, which I don’t think is just so that good bacteria can find their way in.

  ‘One of the tests we did on your wife,’ says the doctor to Dad, ‘involved putting a tiny camera inside her. It lets us see what’s going on. What we saw was lots of swelling and inflammation. So we did some other tests which told us she’s hardly got any good bacteria inside her at all.’

  Dad doesn’t say anything.

  I can see what he’s thinking.

  Somebody has to say it.

  ‘Is it cause our house is too anti-bacterial?’ I ask the doctor.

  The doctor frowns.

  ‘Probably not,’ she says. ‘Your poor mum’s got something that’s called inflammatory digestive-tract disease. You can be born with it or you can just develop it, but it’s always made worse by stress.’

  ‘There’s a lot of that in our house,’ says Troy. ‘Anti-bacterial stress.’

  I love it when younger brothers back you up.

  ‘Try not to worry,’ says the doctor. ‘We’ll work out the right medicine for your mum and she shouldn’t have the pains any more. And you can help by making her some yoghurt health shakes. Be sure to get the yoghurt with the good bacteria in it.’

  I give Dad a nervous look.

  I know he was planning to tell me that if I ever made Mum another health shake, he’d have me arrested.

  Dad is frowning, which he does sometimes when he’s thinking.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ the doctor says to him. ‘What Callum did with the mouldy cheese and the mouse poo was a scientific experiment. Even when scientific experiments go wrong, they can still help us discover important things for the future.’

  ‘I agree,’ I say. ‘And we’ve discovered something very important for Mum’s future, bacterially speaking.’

  Dad is staring at me, and he’s still frowning.

  But he’s starting to look just a little bit proud.

  We are so bacterial at our place.

  We love bacteria big time. Our main hobby is making millions of yummy drinks with them. I’m glad bacteria are just tiny microbes, because if they were any bigger we wouldn’t be able to fit them into our blender.

  Or into our mum.

  I told Ms Easton everything the doctor said, and she was very interested.

  I told Newt too.

  He was even more interested. He’s planning to be a billionaire when he grows up, so he’s always looking for business opportunities to get him started. He reckons this is a top opportunity.

  He’s invited kids from anti-bacterial homes round to his
place to give their immune systems a workout.

  He even put a sign in his front yard.

  Germ Gym.

  His mum made him take it down, but the anti-bacterial kids are still paying him two dollars a visit.

  When I tell Mum, she laughs a lot and her tummy doesn’t hurt even a tiny bit. She gives me a squeeze, and then she says something I’ll never forget.

  ‘I’m glad you don’t want to be a billionaire,’ she says. ‘I’m glad you want to be a scientist. Because one day I reckon you’ll do some experiments that won’t just make one person’s insides a better place, they’ll make the whole world a better place.’

  Dad and Troy are listening.

  And nodding.

  For a few moments I have inflammation of my whole body, but in a good way.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  Then we all sit down and watch TV, and we don’t wipe the remote, not once.

  Walking to school, May wondered if she would be hit by a truck.

  It didn’t seem likely.

  May was pretty sure trucks hardly ever came down Dumaresq Street, because of the speed bumps and the lollipop lady and the lack of truck-stop fuel and refreshment facilities.

  So as usual she felt happy and safe. The sun was shining gently between the houses. The bamboo steamer she was hugging to her chest felt pleasantly warm inside its tea towel.

  May wished Nan was here.

  ‘See, Nan,’ she’d say. ‘Ancient Chinese wisdom isn’t always right. We don’t always have to be on guard against bad things. The lotus flower of happiness doesn’t always have the slug of misery chomping away at it. And most days the truck of doom is miles away, stuck in a traffic jam.’

  Actually she wouldn’t say that. Nan got furious when she thought people were disrespecting ancient Chinese wisdom. And when Nan was furious, sometimes she used her knowledge of ancient Chinese swearwords.

  May grinned.

  Poor Nan.

  She wished she could cheer Nan up with some traditional Australian wisdom. Dad was great at that. For a Chinese bloke his knowledge of traditional Australian wisdom was awesome.

  ‘It’s Friday,’ Dad would probably say to Nan. ‘Best day of the week, Friday. Thursday’s over and the weekend’s whistling at ya.’