by Damian Davis
Wrigs and I did some research on the internet. One of the most successful clips ever is two brothers sitting in a bath. One looks about four years old and the other is about one. The four-year-old splashes the baby with some bathwater. Then the baby jumps on the four-year-old and bites him on the shoulder. Really hard. The older brother screams. The baby watches his brother crying for a moment, then laughs evilly and says, ‘More.’
Two hundred and fifty million people have watched the clip and the family made a fortune out of it. They sell t-shirts with a photo of the baby laughing and the word ‘More’ on it. They sell fridge magnets, baseball caps and school lunchboxes. Anything they can jam the baby’s evil face on. The baby gets paid to go on TV ads and just look at the camera and say, ‘More.’ How brilliant is that?
It got me thinking about a clip we could make to become rich and famous so we’d be able to buy the tinnie.
As I mentioned before, everyone reckons Squid is really cute, even though he has a huge head and talks like a baby.
My idea was to film Squid kicking a ball against the garage wall in our front yard. Then Wriggler would walk in the front gate and say, ‘Kick it to me.’ Squid would kick the ball to Wriggler. Wrigs would completely miss it and the ball would hit him in the nuts.
At that point Wrigs would scream and collapse onto the ground in pain. Squid would walk over, look at him for a moment, then pick up the ball and say, ‘Again.’ Gold.
I started videoing and it was going well. Wriggler came through the front gate and said to Squid, ‘Kick it to me,’ just like we planned.
But I hadn’t reckoned on what a good shot Squid was. He timed the kick as though he was scoring the winning goal in the World Cup final.
The ball lifted off the ground and flew towards Wriggler like a heat-seeking missile. Wrigs tried to get away from it, but it smashed right into his jugglies, at about a hundred kilometres an hour. He screamed, clutched himself, then collapsed onto the ground. He was bawling his eyes out.
Squid walked over and looked at him for a moment. Then he laughed, picked up the ball and said, ‘Again.’
I was laughing so hard I was worried I was shaking the camera. Wriggler just stayed on the ground, crying. It was the funniest thing ever. Way funnier than I’d planned. When Wrigs finally got up, he grabbed the camera and stormed off.
I waited a couple of hours for him to cool down. Then I rang him to see if we could post the video on YouTube. He was still angry. He said he didn’t think there was anything funny about the film at all. Then he told me he’d deleted it.
Wrigs needs to get a sense of humour. That clip was rolled gold. We’ll never get the tinnie if Wrigs keeps stuffing up my money-making ideas like that.
When Mum came home I told her she should enrol Squid in the Pensdale Juniors Soccer Team.
CHAPTER 5
DAY 4: Tuesday
My skims: 0
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Days to becoming world champion: 35 (If it ever stops raining.)
No skimming. It was pouring (rain and wee).
Money made for tinnie: $0 ($735 to go.)
It rained so hard today there was no way we could go to the river. Not only have we not made any money for the tinnie but we are falling behind on the skimming record.
Worse still, Dean noticed the missing lemonade.
Even though Dean is freakishly tall and stupidly thin, he is the strongest person I know. He pinned me against the fridge and started giving me a face massage with his thongs.
When he does this, he uses the thongs like little bats and slaps my cheeks with them. Slowly at first, then faster and faster and harder and harder.
It is straight-out torture, worse than waterboarding, worse than being locked in a room and having classical music blasted at you twenty-four seven. He only let me go after I promised I’d buy him a bigger bottle of lemonade than the one we used.
But there was no way I was really going to do that. I have a tinnie to buy and we were still seven hundred and thirty-five dollars short.
When Dean went to the beach Wrigs and I found an empty soft-drink bottle in the recycling bin.
It was a lemon-squash bottle which was going to make it hard. Lemonade is easy to fake, it’s just water, sugar and bicarb of soda. We knew from Diggerade that colour is really hard to get right, and lemon squash is yellow.
Then an idea hit me like a football to the goolies. I heard somewhere that if you’re in the desert with no water the best way to survive is to drink your own urine.
Wrigs and I set up a water-drinking competition. We filled up all the glasses in the house and laid them out on the kitchen table. Then we told Squid that we were having a race to see who could drink the most water in two minutes. Even though he is only little, Squid reckons he can beat everyone at everything.
I told him he couldn’t be in the race because he was too young. He begged and begged. It was all part of my plan. The more he begged, the more he wanted to prove he could beat us.
By the time I finally said he could join in, he was so keen he drank two glasses to every one of ours. He drank six big glasses before the two minutes were up.
As soon as he was finished, we pushed him into his bedroom and held the door shut to trap him inside.
About fifteen minutes later he started screaming. He was busting to go to the toilet. He smashed and bashed at the door. He was so desperate to get out, me and Wrigs both had to hold onto the doorhandle to keep the door shut.
‘I want to wee,’ Squid screamed.
Wrigs grabbed the empty lemon-squash bottle from the kitchen. I opened the bedroom door just wide enough to pass the bottle to Squid.
‘Do it in that and then we’ll let you out,’ I said.
There was silence for a while. Then we heard the sound of wee hitting plastic. Wrigs and I high-fived. The weeing kept on going and going and going.
‘Hurry up, Squid,’ I said.
He kept weeing.
‘We’ll have to get another bottle,’ Wrigs said.
‘We don’t have one,’ I said.
‘How about a bucket?’ said Wrigs.
I started to worry Squid would never stop.
‘Are you all right, Squid?’ I asked.
The weeing stopped. Squid groaned.
Then the sound of wee hitting plastic started again.
After what seemed like ages, Squid yelled, ‘Finished!’
We pushed our way into his bedroom and grabbed the bottle. He’d filled up nearly a third of it. That’s half a litre of wee.
We topped the bottle up with water, sugar and some bicarb of soda and shook it. It looked exactly right.
When Dean came home he went straight to the fridge.
‘Where is it?’ he said.
‘Had to get you squash, they didn’t have any lemonade,’ I said.
Dean grabbed the lemon-squash bottle, ripped off the lid and took a swig.
‘It tastes like cat’s whiz,’ he growled.
‘Probably because it’s not cold enough,’ I said. I couldn’t look Wrigs in the eye in case we both cracked up laughing.
Dean had another sip and swished it around his mouth. I had to jam my mouth shut to stop a snort coming out.
Squid chose that exact moment to walk in.
‘Why are you drinking my wee?’ he asked Dean.
Wrigs and I both fell over laughing.
Dean stared at us.
We bolted up the hallway and out the front door. I took the front steps two at a time but I wasn’t quick enough. I got pegged in the back with the bottle of wee. It bounced off my back and into the air, spun around and sprayed wee all over Wrigs. He was covered from head to foot.
CHAPTER 6
DAY 5: Wednesday
My skims: 0
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Days to becoming world champion: 34 (Need to get a wriggle on.)
Money made for tinnie: $10 ($725 to go.)
Wrigs and I decided to spend the morning t
rying to make money for the tinnie. We knocked on every door in my street offering to do odd jobs. No one was interested. We had almost given up when we knocked on the front door of the last house in my street.
Ms Burke is the oldest person in our street, if not the world. And it turns out she also has the biggest yard.
She said she’d pay us to tidy it up. Six hours later, we walked out thirsty, sunburnt and covered in sweat and scratches.
We’d been weeding, cutting, digging and carrying in thirty-five-degree heat, and all she’d given us was ten dollars. That worked out at eighty-three and a half cents each per hour. And we were lucky to come out alive. I saw a snake, which I swear was a brown snake and, when Wrigs was pulling out some lantana plants, he got swooped by two myna birds.
Ms Burke might be the sweetest old lady in the universe but she totally ripped us off.
But all was not lost. I found a heap of worms under her mulberry tree. An excellent plan sprung to my mind. Me and Wrigs would go into the silk industry. Silk is worth a fortune, so we should have enough money to buy a tinnie in no time.
Silkworms are baby moths that haven’t become proper moths yet. Silk is their spew. They vomit it out, then wrap it around themselves to make a cocoon.
Next time you hear someone boasting about having a silk scarf, remind them they are wearing moth vomit.
To start a silkworm farm you put the worms in a box in a dark place, like Wriggler’s bedroom. You feed them mulberry leaves until they spin themselves cocoons. Cocoons are pure silk. This should take about three days.
When the worms leave the cocoons they have turned into moths, but they can’t fly away. They just flap around in the bottom of boxes until they lay eggs. Then the eggs hatch and you have a new generation of silkworms.
It’s a money-making machine. We left Ms Burke’s garden with as many silkworms as we could find and headed straight for Wriggler’s house. When we got there we covered the whole of Wriggler’s bedroom floor with old cardboard boxes from his garage. Then we filled each box with mulberry leaves and heaps of silkworms.
We might have got ripped off by Ms Burke when we tidied her yard but in a few days we would be rolling in silk.
Then me and Wrigs tried to go skimming. But both of us were so sore from clearing out the yard we couldn’t lift our arms high enough to throw a rock.
CHAPTER 7
DAY 6: Thursday
My skims: 14
Wriggler’s skims: 4
Days to becoming world champion: 33
Very weird day today. Feels like everyone is getting together to try and stop me getting this world record.
Money made for tinnie: $0 ($725 to go.)
Mum had an almighty go at me as soon as I got up. I must have left a bundle of stones in my pockets because when she washed my shorts she thought the washing machine was blowing up. It sounded like someone was firing a machine gun.
What Mum doesn’t understand is how hard it is to find the perfect skimming rock, so she threw them away. When we got to the river I had to spend ages looking for decent rocks. Most of the ones I found were too big or too pointy.
No one much goes down to the empty blocks of land where we skim so we had the place to ourselves. The patch of river we go to is at the bottom of View Street, which is a dead end. You wouldn’t know the blocks were there unless you knew. The land drops off from the end of the street to the river and there is only one way in. It’s a narrow pathway that winds through a whole lot of shrubs.
About ten metres in, there is a rock ledge which you have to climb down to get into the clearing. To your left, facing the river, is the vacant lot and to the right is the deserted house we hid in when we were being chased by the kayaker.
While we were looking for rocks in the long grass around the deserted house we decided to invent a language that only we could understand.
First we tried speaking backwards. But we sounded like we’d been brought up by gorillas in the jungle. ‘S … g … i … r … w … d … a … e … h … s … i … n … o … e … r … i … f.’
I thought my brain would explode. So I came up with Driggleish—half-Digger and half-Wriggler. To speak it, you just add ‘ig’ into the middle of every word.
If you want to say, ‘Wrigs’ head is on fire,’ you just say: ‘Wrigigs’ heigad iigs oign figire.’ Simple. ‘Look at that kid, his fly is undone,’ becomes: ‘Loigok aigt thigat kigid, higis fligy iigs unigdone.’
Pretty soon we sounded like we’d been talking Driggleish all our lives.
Then Wrigs said, ‘Whigo iigs thigat duigude?’
A man dressed in a black suit and black sunglasses and carrying a black briefcase strode down the pathway. He was talking quickly into a phone, which was also black.
We couldn’t work out what he was saying but we could tell he was really angry. He was stomping around and whisper-shouting into the phone. Whisper-shouting is when you’re shouting but you don’t want anyone to hear you, so you whisper and shout at the same time. It’s really hard to do.
The man hung up on whoever he was whisper-shouting at and put his phone in his pocket.
He went to the doorway of the house, then carefully paced out six steps and put the briefcase down to mark the spot. He went back to the door, pulled out a tape measure from his other pocket and measured the width of the doorway. He then disappeared inside.
‘Whigat’s hige doiging?’ said Wriggler.
‘Mayigbe hige iigs aig buigilder,’ I said.
‘Hige looigks migore liigke aig gaigngster.’
The man reappeared at the doorway. Wrigs was right. He did look like a gangster. He was about thirty, not very tall, but his dark hair was slicked down and he looked like he had been born with sunglasses on. He pressed the button on his tape measure and the tape got sucked back into its case.
Then he saw us and just stopped. Dead still. He seemed furious that someone else was there. He just stared at us. Then his phone rang again and he answered it and started whisper-shouting, twice as quickly and twice as angrily as before. He turned around and disappeared up the path. He left the briefcase sitting there. In between us and the pathway. Between us and the only way out.
‘Whigat’s iign thige caigse?’ Wriggler was panicking.
‘Giguns?’
‘Moigney?’
The black briefcase looked like something a businessman would carry around. It had huge gold locks and a padlock around the handle.
‘Mayigbe iigt’s aig bigomb.’
‘Aig bigomb?’
‘A bomb.’
Wriggler looked at me for a moment, then bolted past the briefcase and up the path towards View Street. I waited exactly 1.27 milliseconds, then followed him.
We sneaked back down to the river a couple of hours later but there was no sign of the man in the black suit or his briefcase. And no bomb crater.
As me and Wrigs walked home, we tried to work out who the man could be. We had no idea what he wanted with our skimming spot, but we reckoned it wasn’t good news for us.
Wrigs still thought he was a gangster looking for a hideout. I reckoned he was a real estate agent wanting to sell the property.
Either way, he wouldn’t want us hanging around. It wasn’t looking good for the world record.
CHAPTER 8
DAY 7: Friday
My skims: 0
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Days to becoming world champion: 32
No training today: hottest day in history.
Money made for tinnie: -$10 ($735 to go—again.)
It was the hottest day in the history of the world, and we got in the most trouble in the history of the world, just for trying to stay out of the heat.
My house is not that different from most of the other houses on our street. It’s an old fibro place with a big front yard. The backyard is tiny. All that fits in it are Mum’s little vegie patch and the chicken coop Dad built.
Dad has six chickens that run around the backyard, pooing a
nd squawking and getting in the way.
Dad always says, ‘We don’t have much but we have as many eggs as we want.’ Which in my mind is exactly none. I hate eggs. I don’t like chickens either.
The front yard is where everything happens. There’s a lawn that slopes down to the street. There are a few steps going up to the front door. There’s a front verandah and, on a hot day, it’s the coolest part of the house.
Wrigs and I were sitting out there.
‘It’s too hot to skim today,’ Wrigs said.
‘Let’s make some money then,’ I said.
‘Nah, too hot.’
He was right. What Wrigs and I do when we’re really bored is try and outdo each other.
‘It’s so hot I saw a bird fall out of the sky,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah? It’s so hot I saw a plane fall out of the sky.’
‘It’s so hot my sister burnt her lips on her braces.’
‘It’s so hot my grandma’s false teeth melted.’
‘It’s so hot I sat in the oven to cool down.’
‘It’s so hot I stuck a chilli up my bum to cool down.’
Wriggler didn’t have a good comeback to that one so he said we should go to Tearley’s house.
Cindy Tearle lives two streets away from me, and my mum and her mum are best friends. Tearley and I have been in the same class ever since preschool and I can’t stand her. She is my archenemy. She thinks she’s really smart. But, she does have one of the only swimming pools in Pensdale and it was the hottest day in history.
We decided to ride to Tearley’s. I still have the same hopeless bike I got when I was seven. It’s painted with all these stupid designs and it has a big sticker on the frame that says ‘Street Rad’. It might as well have one saying ‘This bike is lame but we’ve tried to hide that fact by painting some really sad lightning bolts on it and giving it a name we think makes it sound really cool, but really just makes it sound even more pathetic than it already is’.
Wriggler’s bike is called ‘Screamer’, which describes the noise he makes when he hits the front brake too hard and goes flying over the handlebars.
