The Flea Thing

by Brian Falkner

  It was an extraordinary talent, and also extraordinarily useless. What good is it, everyone said, to be a cola-connoisseur? Of course Fizzer proved them all wrong a couple of years later. But that’s a different story.

  We parked our bikes in the big, grey, old-fashioned bike stand down at the boat ramp and chained them all together. We walked up into Manuka Park but had to wait there a while. Phil was chucking a Frisbee around with Emilio and Blocker, two of his mates. We didn’t want him to see us going into the Lost Park.

  ‘Getting in some practice, Danny boy?’ Phil sneered at me. ‘Just as well, you need it.’ I ignored him and we walked past. I don’t know why he had to be nasty all the time. Everybody had their own problems, I knew that, but I couldn’t see what Phil’s was. Jason gave him a Crazy Jason glare. That was when he did this thing with his eyes that made him look like a psychopathic axe murderer. It freaked most people out but Phil just ignored it.

  ‘I heard they’re starting a girl’s league next year at Glenfield. Maybe they’ll let you join.’

  I bit my lip and kept walking. No point in getting into a slanging match with a moron.

  ‘Or maybe you’ll just go back to ballet school.’

  That last quip was unfair. My mum had made me take up ballet three years earlier. I had stuck with it for a whole year. It actually wasn’t all that bad, but it was pretty tough on a kid from Glenfield to be taking ballet lessons and I had screamed and fought the next year not to go back. But the remark still stung and I just couldn’t help snapping back.

  ‘Keep talking, Junior Grader,’ I said with a mean smirk, ‘I’m going to play for the Warriors.’

  It was supposed to be a comeback, a put-down, but it didn’t work like that.

  ‘You! A Warrior!?’ Phil could hardly choke the words out, he was laughing so much, and his mates were laughing with him. ‘Keep dreaming!’

  ‘No …’ Fizzer started, but I shot him a shut-up glance. I had already said too much. Jason was looking a little hurt. Then it struck me that my friends were also Junior Graders. If I had put Phil down, I had put them down too. I can be really stupid like that sometimes.

  ‘The day you run on for the Warriors, I’ll fart the National Anthem before the game!’ Phil was really enjoying himself.

  Tupai said, ‘Come on, leave these snotrags alone, let’s go kick the ball around.’

  Phil glared at being called a snotrag, but there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t brave enough to take on Tupai. Tupai was the strongest kid in the school. He had once broken a fifty cent piece in half in his bare hands. Or so the story went. Really Fizzer and I had cut it in half in metalwork class and glued it back together with craft glue. It snapped really easily, but Tupai already had a reputation by that stage and the fifty cent piece just added a little more colour to the legend.

  ‘Come on, guys, we’ll leave the ballerina and his friends to their ballet practice.’ Phil tossed the Frisbee at Blocker and the three of them sauntered off, shirts untucked, hands in pockets.

  I shook off Phil with a short shake of my head and, as soon as he was out of sight, we ducked into the secret track.

  Manuka Park stretches from the boat ramp at the end of the road, all the way up to Kyle Bush. In the middle, in the flat bit, is where they built the playground, a yellow and red plastic thing that nobody plays on except for the young kids. It’s OK, I suppose. I mean it has swings and some short, curving slides, and this kind of overhead seesaw thing, but it’s all a bit, well, not dangerous enough for most of the kids I know. ‘Tame’ might be the right word for it.

  If you go past the playground and head straight up the hill, keeping the big seesaw thing in line with the lone pine on the other side of the boat ramp, you come to the track that leads to the Lost Park. I don’t know when it got lost, but I know when it got found. That was about a year ago, maybe a bit longer, when Tupai, Jason, Fizzer and I were practising goal kicking in Manuka Park.

  It was Tupai’s turn, and, although he wasn’t the most accurate kicker, boy did he have a mean boot on him. He lined up, took three paces backwards and one to the side, jiggled his hands like Andrew Merhtens, which always made us laugh, and launched himself at the ball.

  Jason reckoned that the ball shivered when it saw him coming, and I wouldn’t blame it if it did. Like I said, Tupai had a real mean boot on him. Anyway, the ball sagged to the side and Tupai caught it on the outside of his boot and the ball went flying up the hill into Kyle’s bush. Right in line with the seesaw thing and the lone pine by the boat ramp.

  Tupai shrugged and went off up the hill to get it, and when he hadn’t come back a few minutes later, we all went up to help him look for it.

  He was just standing there with the ball tucked under one arm. ‘Look at this,’ he’d said. So we looked. The ball had landed on a couple of concrete steps. But what were steps doing in the middle of the bush? We figured that if there were steps, they must have been part of a path, and if there was a path, then it must have led somewhere. So we kind of crashed through the bush in the direction the steps were pointing.

  We pushed our way down a small gully to a creek and, to our immense surprise, over the creek there was an old, wooden, and mostly rotten bridge. The track was more clearly formed on the other side of the creek, the bush hadn’t reclaimed it quite as badly. The track led over a small ridge and out into what we now call the Lost Park.

  It’s an amazing place, the Lost Park, and it’s our secret. Jason called it the Park that Time Forgot, although I think really it is the park that the City Council forgot. I can only guess at what happened. Once upon a time Manuka Park must have been a much bigger park with a bush section in the middle, joined by the track. Maybe one year the entrance to the track got a bit overgrown and the council workers missed it when they were cutting back weeds and stuff. Then, over the years, it got completely overgrown and disused.

  It’s quite big, the lost park, about half the size of a footie field, but not that shape. It has no shape really, just like a big ink blot. In the park is a playground, but it’s a playground like none you’ve ever seen anywhere else. It’s a playground from the days before they started making everything out of red and yellow plastic with rubberised landing mats in case you fall off.

  There’s this fort thing, a huge wooden structure with three different levels. There are ladders and firemen’s poles to take you from one level to the next, and a drawbridge that you can actually raise from inside the fort to keep out any enemies. Just along from the fort is the tractor. A real tractor! Not a working one, the engine is just a big block of rust and the tyres are filled with concrete, but it’s a real tractor that had once hauled hay around some farm somewhere.

  But the pride and joy of the park is further along again, mounted on the crest of a small bump in the ground. The Spitfire. We all called it the Spitfire. It isn’t, it’s a Hawker Hurricane. I know because I looked it up on the Internet. But when we first found it we called it the Spitfire and the name kind of stuck. It’s a real airplane. Maybe it had really flown in the Battle of Britain. It had been mounted on a circle of concrete and its skin had been replaced with aluminum. A hole had been cut in the bottom of the cockpit so you could climb into it and pretend you were flying. It was the best thing.

  I guess that this is what parks were like when my dad was a kid. Not tame at all. In fact I’m sure it was downright dangerous. We loved it.

  We kicked the ball around and practised passing for a while, just for fun. Then Fizzer wanted to take on Tupai in a wrist-wrestling match to see if he could beat him. We all knew he couldn’t, Tupai was the strongest kid in the school, and possibly the world, but Fizzer had been secretly practising for weeks with a machine he’d built out of some bits of wood and rubber from an old inner tube. We knew he couldn’t beat Tupai though. Nobody could beat Tupai in a wrist-wrestle, so Jason and I went to play in the Spitfire.

  I climbed up first and got the Messerschmitt out. I had found a picture on the Internet of
a Messerschmitt 109 and printed it on my dad’s printer. Jason had stuck it to a bit of wood and cut it out with the jigsaw in woodworking class. Then he had mounted it on an old-broom handle.

  I handed the Messerschmitt down to Jason and sat in the rusty old seat. I grasped the joystick and shouted ‘Chocks away!’ It is amazing how much your imagination can fill in if you give it a head start. The rusting old cockpit of the plane lost its age and funny, old, brown colour. It grew shiny and new before my eyes. The green grass of the park all around turned to fluffy, white cumulus clouds, and suddenly I was soaring, the motor screaming dangerously as I climbed into the sun, scanning the horizon for any sign of the Heinkel bomber fleet the radar had picked up.

  I levelled off and cruised in a south-easterly direction. If they were heading for London I should intercept them on that heading … Messerschmitt! Where had he come from? A sleek and deadly 109 angling in from five o’clock. They were fast, the 109s. Not as fast as a Spitfire though, and not as manoeuvrable as my trusty Hurricane. I flung the plane to the left and pulled it into a circle, but Jerry stuck to me like glue. I barrel-rolled and dived, then flipped over into a hard figure eight that I knew he couldn’t match. There he was, three o’clock, diving for the ground. I dropped my right wing and banked hard on to his tail.

  Rat-a-tat-a-tat, a plume of smoke and the dive became a plunge. I followed him long enough to see the crash in an empty paddock, then pulled up, waving to the farmhands cheering in the fields below.

  ‘Daniel,’ Jason said. ‘Gizza go.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said. ‘Your turn.’

  I ran around with the Messerschmitt for him for a while, then both of us joined Fizzer and Tupai who were lying on their backs on the long grass trying to find shapes in the clouds.

  ‘Who won?’ I asked, just to be polite.

  ‘Tupai,’ Fizzer said. ‘But I nearly had him this time.’

  I looked at Tupai, who smiled.

  Fizzer asked, ‘Do you reckon that one looks like Santa Claus?’

  I couldn’t see it, so I said nothing, but Jason nodded and Tupai said, ‘Absolutely.’

  Jason burst out laughing.

  ‘What?’ asked Fizzer.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Jason said. ‘That’s not a real word. That’s one of those words grown-ups use when they don’t want to say no. Like, “Dad, can we go to Disneyland for our next holidays?” “Sure son. Absolutely.” But you never do.’

  Then Jason said, quite out of the blue it seemed, ‘It’ll be a shame not having you around.’

  I looked at him, to make sure he was talking about me, which he was.

  ‘Don’t be such a spoon,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ll be around just as much.’

  ‘How do you reckon that?’ asked Jason. ‘You’ll have training. A lot of training. And when the season starts you’ll be playing every weekend.’

  ‘I’ll be around,’ I said. ‘You’ll hardly notice I’m gone.’

  I kind of believed it when I said it, but I was wrong of course. Tragically wrong.

  SIX

  TRAIN LIKE THE WIND

  My first day of training with the New Zealand Warriors was almost my last day of training with the New Zealand Warriors, but big Henry Knight saved my life.

  Training, for me at least, was every day after school from four till seven. Dad took me to training that first day, leaving Mum in charge of the small art gallery they ran together. He didn’t come to watch, just sat in the car doing something called ‘inventory’ and ‘stock lists’. That was his way, I guess, of making use of the time.

  Training was hard. Harder than I would have believed, and even though Frank made certain allowances for me because of my age, it was still tough going.

  There were wind-sprints. That’s a ten metre dash across to a marked line, touch the ground, then a ten metre dash back to where you started from, touch the ground, dash back to the line, and so on. We did lots of wind-sprints.

  We did wind-sprints and push-ups, and wind-sprints and star-jumps, and wind-sprints and weight-training. Did I mention wind-sprints? We did a lot of those!

  A good part of the training session, just when we were exhausted from all the wind-sprints, was combinations. That’s where Frank would line up two teams on the field, one defensive and one attacking, and try out various attacking combinations against various defensive combinations. Combinations are set moves, planned in advance, that are supposed to open up holes in the opposition’s defensive line. All teams do them. In a way they are like little dances where everybody knows what they are going to do next. So maybe rugby league does have something in common with ballet after all. Just don’t tell Phil Domane!

  We all did a lot of broken play training. Broken play is where things haven’t gone to plan for one team or the other and the attacking and defensive lines are all at odds and ends. Some players are terrified of broken play, others thrive on it. I loved it. I loved it at the Glenfield Giants, and I loved it at the Warriors.

  Players all over the park and the ball loose on the ground. I’d scoop it up one-handed and almost always score a try. I ran around them, I ran through them, if they fell over I ran over them. I even ran under them if their legs were apart, like Henry on that first day.

  Dad’s car was parked right alongside the training ground and once, after I had scored a training try, he looked up, and I thought he had noticed. But he just frowned and looked back at his books. Henry noticed. He was patting me on the back for the try and he saw where I was looking and, I guess, he saw the hopeful, then disappointed expression on my face.

  ‘What’s wrong with your dad?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, more cheerfully than I felt. ‘He’s just really busy and I guess it’s a pain to give up three hours every evening.’

  ‘Why does he stay if he’s not going to watch?’

  ‘Well, we live all the way over in Glenfield, and it takes about forty minutes to get here. So, if he dropped me off and came to pick me up later, he’d spend most of the time driving.’

  Henry nodded.

  I continued, ‘He’s not really a rugby guy, anyway. Dad and Mum are more into arty things. Mum used to be a dancer and they run a small art gallery.’

  ‘Cut the chatter, kid!’ Frank called from the sideline. Henry winked at me and ran back into position. More broken play. The ball bounced in front of Ainsley, who tried to toe it forward but he missed it and just knocked it sideways. It skittered along the ground a way, just out of Fuller’s reach, and ended up in front of me again. I picked it up, side-stepped Brownie who was charging in for a tackle, and bounced and hopped my way down to the try line for another try.

  Frank was shaking his head and clapping his hands slowly at the same time. I’m not sure what that meant, but I guess it was good.

  ‘He’s like a little flea, hopping all over the place,’ Michaels said with exasperation. I’d ducked and weaved around him not once but twice on my way to the goal line. Most of the players laughed. Ricky glared at me.

  ‘Come over here, Flea,’ Frank called, and they all laughed. The name was mine from then on. ‘OK,’ Frank continued, ‘you can attack. But what on earth are you going to do when you’ve got someone like Henry charging at full steam towards you and you’re the only person between him and the try line? You’ve got to be able to defend if you want to get on the field, and I just don’t see how you can do it.’

  There was a bit of a silence as I thought about this. I’d been thinking about it a lot, and I had a few ideas, but I knew they were about to be tested.

  ‘In judo,’ I said eventually, ‘they teach you to use your opponent’s strength against him.’

  Frank nodded. ‘I practised judo for more than ten years, I know the …’ He stopped suddenly and looked at me strangely. ‘But you already knew that, didn’t you?’

  I smiled. I did know that. I had read Frank’s autobiography.

  ‘Yes,’ Frank continued, ‘you already knew that. Don’t try to be too clever
with me, kid. I may be an old front rower but I’ve still got a few brain cells left. Now tell me how a flea is going to stop a charging elephant.’

  Henry made a noise like an elephant trumpeting, and everybody laughed. Frank threw him the ball. ‘Henry, squash the Flea for me.’ He smiled at me though, so I knew he wasn’t angry with me.

  The other players cleared off the field and Henry went up to halfway and stood there for a moment tossing the ball from one massive hand to the other massive hand. Then he began to trot, then to run, then to charge. It looked like a freight train was coming at me without brakes.

  I stood my ground right in front of him, but when he was nearly about to roll over me like a steamroller he suddenly broke stride and pulled to a halt.

  ‘I can’t do this, coach,’ he said. ‘He really will get squashed.’

  Frank looked at me. ‘Flea, it’s your call. Do you want to do this?’

  I looked Henry straight in the eye as I said, ‘You bet.’ Then I said quietly so only Henry could hear me, ‘Don’t chicken out this time.’

  Henry shook his head and trotted back to halfway. Then he came at me again. Forget the freight train, this time he was an asteroid on a collision course with earth.

  Once again I held my ground, right in front of him and at the last moment feinted into a tackle. Henry prepared for the impact, but I was doing the Thing and I had no intention of tackling a monster like Henry head on. I skipped to one side and ankle-tapped him from behind as he ran past. Ankle-tapping is easy if you’re in the right position, you just push one of their ankles to the side so that it hits their other ankle as they try to run. If you’ve ever tried to run with your shoelaces tied together, that’s pretty much the same thing. Your body keeps going forward but your legs stay still.

  The bigger they are, the harder they fall, as the saying goes, and Henry hit the ground hard. He had the ball tightly tucked under one wing, but there’s an enormous jolt when you hit the ground at speed and, at that moment, the ball is as loose as it will ever be, no matter who is carrying it. Henry didn’t lose the ball, well, not by himself. I just ran up alongside as the behemoth began to topple and just as he hit the ground I nudged the ball out with my toe.