Attack of the Alien Brain

by Steve Hartley

  My stomach and as I scanned the wall of faces. I saw Bobby Bragg grinning at me, expecting to have a good laugh, as usual.

  I don’t know why I said what I said. It just came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  ‘It was a life or death brain operation … and I saved the patient’s life!’

  Some of the kids gasped. The look of surprise on Miss Wilkins’s face was excellent! Her eyebrows shot so high they nearly flew off her face, and her mouth opened and shut so many times she looked like my goldfish, Tango.

  ‘Oliver,’ she spluttered, ‘that can’t be true!’

  I was in trouble. Should I admit it was a BIG FAT FIB, and get laughed out of the classroom? I wondered …

  WHAT IF … all the other doctors and nurses had got stuck in a massive traffic jam on the motorway, and couldn’t get to the hospital in time?

  ‘Mum had to operate on the brain of a top rocket scientist called Professor Hugo van Boomberg,’ I told the class. ‘His brain had swelled up with all the secret thoughts inside it, and his head was about to unless she did the operation straight away.’

  Bobby Bragg snorted with laughter, ‘Liar! Liar! Your pants are on fire!’

  ‘DEFENDERS OF PLANET EARTH SECURITY?’ laughed Hattie Hurley. ‘D-O-P-E-S spells dopes!’

  Deafening shrieks of laughter boomed in my ears, as though a funny-bomb had exploded in the classroom. Why hadn’t I come up with a different name? It was too late now; I carried on quickly with my story.

  ‘We scrubbed up, and Mum cut the top of the scientist’s head off with a huge can opener …’

  ‘EUGHHHHH!’ groaned the class.

  ‘As she lifted the processor’s skull off, there was a sound – hisssssssssssss – like someone letting air out of a tyre,’ I told them. ‘And there was the brain, all red and wet and wrinkly, bulging out of his open head.’

  ‘EUGHHHHH!’ groaned the class once more.

  Hattie Hurley’s face went a strange greeny-grey colour.

  I was enjoying myself now, and I could see that Bobby Bragg was really cross that someone was doing a more interesting SHOW AND TELL than him.

  ‘Brains aren’t red, they don’t fall out of heads and they don’t wobble,’ he sneered. ‘I’ve seen them on telly.’

  ‘Well, this one did,’ I replied. ‘Because … because … this brain … was ’

  The class gasped again.

  ‘Really, Oliver!’ said Miss Wilkins.

  ‘The brain wriggled from my hands and jumped on to the scientist’s chest,’ I said. ‘It sat there, like a big, lumpy raspberry jelly, then suddenly sprang on to the floor.’

  ‘How could it move?’ asked Toby Hadron.

  Tricky question. Think! Think! Think! I stared at Toby, and put my hands into my pockets. Luckily, I’d brought a couple of jelly babies to munch on at break, and the feel of the soft, squishy sweet sparked more pictures in my head.

  ‘The brain changed shape,’ I replied. ‘It grew a body, and arms and legs. It looked like a slimy, red jelly baby, but with a thin black slit for a mouth, and two evil yellow eyes.’

  I did the brain’s voice in a creepy, croaky, alien-type growl, which made the class giggle.

  How was I going to get out of this? Miss Wilkins sat there smiling at me. She knew I was making it all up.

  ‘How big was it?’ asked Peaches, trying to help me out.

  ‘Not as big as this fib!’ yelled Bobby Bragg. The class giggled.

  ‘The brain was brain-sized – obviously,’ I said, but I was panicking now.

  I tried to remember what was in the hospital, and I thought about the storeroom, with all the toilet rolls, boxes of paper towels and bottles of disinfectant.

  WHAT IF … ?

  The classroom was hushed now: the kids were hooked on my BIG FAT FIB.

  But what now? I remembered the girls’ toilet.

  WHAT IF … ?

  ‘What were all those brains doing in the jars?’ asked Bobby Bragg.

  ‘They’re more aliens,’ I replied.

  ‘But why were they there?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘I didn’t ask them!’

  ‘And what happened to the rocket scientist your mum operated on?’ asked Toby Hadron. ‘How did he survive without his brain?’

  This was a really tricky one. ‘Mum did a brain transplant,’ I said. ‘She put an old monkey brain into his head, and glued his skull back on. He can’t work on rockets any more, but he can swing from a tree and eat a banana at the same time.’

  Miss Wilkins coughed. ‘Well, what an interesting Friday afternoon you had, Oliver. And what have you brought to show the class, to prove that this happened?’

  Uh-oh … I hadn’t thought of that. I could feel my face getting hot and flushed. Then I remembered the jelly baby in my pocket.

  I squashed it between my fingers and thumb, then held out the red, squishy mess on the palm of my hand.

  ‘This,’ I said, ‘is a lump of the brain that fell off as it bashed into the toilet door.’

  ‘EUGHHHHH!’ groaned the class again.

  Hattie Hurley threw up.

  Bobby Bragg shouted, ‘You’re not Oliver Tibbs, you’re

  Miss Wilkins was a bit cross about my story, and me showing the jelly-baby-brain-blob that made Hattie Hurley sick. She took two SHINE TIME points from my score (which meant I now had -1) and gave me playtime detention.

  My first detention ever! I was getting more interesting by the day.

  The empty classroom echoed with the loud ticking of the clock, the rustling of paper as Miss Wilkins marked our history workbooks and the scratching of my Agent Q pen as I wrote down the BIG FAT FIB.

  At lunchtime, Peaches slid her lunch tray on to the table and sat down next to me. ‘Ollie, what were you doing at SHOW AND TELL?’

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ I explained. ‘The fib just popped out.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you just pop it back in again?’

  ‘Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop,’ I replied. ‘It was great being DABMAN, the Dynamic And Brave alien brain-chaser. I enjoyed playtime detention too. Miss Wilkins made me write down my fib – I mean my story. It was fun.’

  ‘Detention’s not supposed to be fun,’ said Peaches. ‘It’s supposed to be a punishment.’ She rolled her eyes at me, and shook her head. ‘There’s no need to make things up; you should just be happy being Oliver Tibbs.’

  ‘But Bobby’s right: I’m Dull And Boring.’

  ‘You’re not! You’re a trillion times nicer than him,’ she said, ‘and you eat spicy pizza.’

  After school, our nanny Constanza arrived to pick me up, ten minutes late (as usual), shouting, ‘ll traffico! Terribile!’

  She sat with Miss Wilkins and they spoke in whispers. I caught the occasional word of their conversation: naughty … worrying … mamma mia! and pork chop. Every now and then, they would stop talking and just look at me. Constanza was like she was in training for the World Championships.

  She marched me to the car, babbling all the time in Italian. My twin sisters Emma and Gemma were in the back seat, their long blonde hair scraped back into tight knots on the tops of their heads. As usual, they were too busy talking about ballet stuff to say hello.

  They do that all the time. They’re like one person in two bodies: they look alike, they dress alike and they talk alike. They do everything and go everywhere together, and they gang up on me together.

  As we made our way home, Constanza spoke to the twins in Italian. She can speak English, but she’s not allowed to. Mum and Dad say that if she only speaks to us in Italian it’ll help us learn another language. It’s working with my brother and sisters, but I can’t understand a word she says.

  She must have told Emma and Gemma about my BIG FAT FIB, because they stared at me like I’d let off a STINK BOMB in the car.

  ‘We’ve never had detention!’ said Emma.

  ‘We’ve never got into trouble!’ added Gemma.

 
Then they got bored with me and changed the subject – back to ballet, of course.

  ‘Eugenia Lovelace’s grand plié is anything but grand if you ask me,’ said Emma, turning back to Gemma. ‘She bends like an old woman.’

  ‘Her grand jeté is even worse,’ agreed Gemma. ‘She dumps like an old sheep.’

  When we got home, Mum and Dad were terribly worried about me. We sat around the kitchen table for ages while they grilled me about why I’d fibbed.

  ‘Why, Oliver, why?’ asked Dad.

  I shrugged. ‘It was fun.’

  ‘I hope you’re not like that Peter Cowper,’ said Mum. (That’s how she said it – like the words had capital letters.)

  Mum and Dad are always talking about Peter Cowper. He’s the boy next door. He started out Good, but then and turned to a life of crime, paying two kids three Snik-Snak bars every week to do all his homework for him. Mum says Peter is ‘a ’ and ‘a ’. He’s got millions of pimples and he wears his cap back to front, so I suppose he must be.

  ‘It could be even worse than that,’ said Dad, giving Mum a meaningful look.

  Mum gasped. ‘You don’t mean … ?’

  Dad nodded. ‘Oliver could turn out like Black Jack Tibbs.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ I asked.

  ‘The black sheep of our family,’ answered Dad. ‘He lived over two hundred years ago. He was a and a , and we don’t like to talk about him. When he died, Black Jack vowed that he would haunt this family forever, and since that day every generation of Tibbs has produced a .’

  Dad stared at me with wide, worried eyes. ‘Maybe this time, Oliver, the is you.’

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought, Cool. I couldn’t wait to tell Peaches about Dad’s theory.

  Mum glanced at the clock. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep Madame Snooté waiting – she’s making Princess Chelsea’s wedding dress when the twins’ swan costumes are done.’

  Dad stood up. ‘Is that the time?’ he said. ‘Algy will be late for his chess match.’

  ‘Oliver,’ said Mum sternly, pointing a finger at me, ‘you are not to . You are OFFICIALLY GROUNDED for a week as punishment for being put in detention.’

  Emma and Gemma were standing in the doorway, and I heard them gasp.

  ‘We’ve never been grounded,’ whispered Emma.

  ‘We’ve never ’ added Gemma.

  Mum and Dad picked up their car keys and rushed out of the house, with my brother and sisters hurrying behind.

  Constanza stared at me and shook her head. she said.

  I thought this was odd, because we haven’t got a cat.

  ‘I say bad boy in Italian,’ she explained, pinching my cheek. ‘You want some ice cream?’

  Constanza got some raspberry ripple from the freezer and we ate it straight out of the tub. Then we sat together on the sofa and read CAVE OF THE RED SCORPION. Constanza said it was much better than the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY comics she used to read when she was a kid.

  Actually, being grounded was great – it meant that I didn’t have to sit for hours watching my brother or sisters doing all their things. I was forced to stay in my room every evening, which gave me loads of time to read my Agent Q comics.

  On Tuesday evening, there was a massive storm. All the lights went out, so I turned on my torch and carried on reading. I was halfway through and had just got to the part where Agent Q fights the two-headed clawman. With all the thunder and lightning going on around me, it was awesome!

  WHAT IF … it wasn’t thunder and lightning, but a battle between the D.O.P.E.S. star-fighters and the invading Zygon fleet?

  On Wednesday evening, I was just settling down to read for the thirtieth time, when Emma and Gemma burst into my room.

  ‘What have you done to our ballet slippers?’ they wailed, each waving a pair of pink pumps at me.

  ‘You could have ruined our pas de deux!’ yelled Emma.

  ‘You could have destroyed our pas de chat!’ yelled Gemma.

  I gawped. I gasped. I giggled. Their feet were covered in glowing green slime.

  ‘Well … ?’ they demanded.

  ‘I haven’t touched your ballet slippers,’ I replied. ‘And what’s that on your feet?’

  ‘As if you don’t know!’ said Emma.

  ‘As if you didn’t do it!’said Gemma, snatching a pot of Slimy Stuff from the desk under my bedroom window, and yanking off the lid.

  ‘Ha!’ they cried together.

  The pot was empty.

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ I told them.

  ‘You’ve ’ said Emma.

  ‘You’ve ’ said Gemma, hurling the empty pot at me.

  ‘It wasn’t me!’ I protested.

  ‘Do anything like this again, and you’re toast,’ said Emma.

  ‘Do anything like this again, and you’re beans on toast!’ said Gemma.

  They turned and stomped out, leaving behind a trail of green slime on the bedroom carpet.

  ‘But … it wasn’t me,’ I repeated to the empty room.

  WHAT IF … the Slimy Stuff was actually a tub of mutant bacteria that had been blasted by radioactivity, and was spreading Bothersome Itchy Foot Rot disease across the world?

  On Thursday evening, I cleaned out the goldfish bowl. It was getting so green and gungy, I could hardly see Tango swimming round and round inside.

  WHAT IF … WHAT IF … WHAT IF … it was just a filthy fishbowl?

  Just as I’d finished, and put Tango back in the clean bowl, there was a knock at my bedroom door. It was Algy. He’d just got back from a chess tournament.

  ‘Ollie, I lost again!’ he said, and I could see his eyes filling up with tears.

  ‘But that’s the second match you’ve lost this week,’ I said.

  Algy nodded unhappily. ‘It’s because you’ve not been there watching,’ he said. ‘I never lose when you’re there. You’re my lucky mascot.’ Algy wiped his face with his sleeve. ‘Ollie, please. Don’t get grounded again. Please don’t .’

  ‘Don’t worry, Algy. I won’t.’

  He smiled. ‘Dad says if you’re good you can come and watch me in the European Championship Qualifiers on Sunday.’

  ‘Awesome!’ I replied, trying to sound as excited as I could. ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Thanks, Ollie,’ he said, and turned to leave.

  ‘Algy,’ I asked gently, ‘why did you put Slimy Stuff in the twins’ ballet slippers?’

  He blushed and closed the bedroom door. ‘Because they get on my nerves,’ he whispered. ‘Going on all the time about pliés and passés and piqués.’

  ‘And tutus and tendus and tombés!’ I laughed.

  Algy giggled. ‘I thought now would be the best time to do it: everyone thinks you’ve , so I knew you’d get the blame. You’re OFFICIALLY GROUNDED anyway, so I didn’t think it would matter.’

  I grinned at him. ‘You’re even sneakier than the evil Doctor Devious, in .’

  Algy frowned and looked serious. ‘Do you think I’m too?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And neither am I. Fancy a game of snakes and ladders?’

  ‘Dad says I need to study my new book, ,’ replied Algy. He opened the door, but then hesitated. ‘But I’d rather play snakes and ladders!’

  At lunchtime the next day, Peaches pointed at a brightly coloured poster pinned to the noticeboard on the wall nearby:

  ‘Shall we enter?’ asked Peaches. ‘I’ve not been to the zoo for ages.’

  ‘They’ve just got a duck-billed platypus,’ I said. ‘I’ve always wanted to see one of those.’

  I glanced over at the table. They were looking at the same poster pinned up on their side of the hall, and Hattie Hurley had already started to write down loads of ideas.

  I put my shoulders back and stuck my chest out in a heroic pose. ‘The playground is under threat, Special Agent Peaches,’ I said. ‘This is a job for … DEFENDERS OF PLANET EARTH SECURITY.’

  Peaches grinned, and undid the straps of her shoulder ba
g. She chose a pen and pulled a 100 per cent recycled-paper notebook from one of the zip pockets inside. ‘Now, what do we want in our new playground?’

  We sat quietly for a minute …

  ‘A slide,’ suggested Peaches, and wrote that down.

  ‘A climbing frame,’ I said, and Peaches added that to the list.

  ‘Hopscotch!’ she said excitedly. ‘We’ve got to have hopscotch!’

  ‘The trouble is, we’ve already got all those things,’ I said.

  ‘I know that,’ answered Peaches. ‘I’m just saying we need to keep them. OK, so what else?’

  We didn’t speak for a minute.

  Peaches tapped her teeth with the end of her pen.

  We didn’t speak for another minute.

  The kids were making a lot of noise. Jamie Ryder and Melody Nightingale were waving their arms around. Toby Hadron and Bobby Bragg were talking excitedly. They were having so many ideas that Hattie Hurley was already on to her third piece of paper.

  We added ‘sandpit’ and ‘comfy benches’ to our list.

  ‘We’ve already got those too,’ I sighed.

  We agreed to think about it over the weekend and add to the list on Monday. Just as the bell went for afternoon classes, Millie Dangerfield sneaked up to me and said, ‘Have you had any more exciting adventures this week, Oliver? Did you catch that alien brain?’

  Was she winding me up?

  A little frown creased her brow, and her eyes were wide with worry.

  ‘I’ve been having scary dreams about it,’ she whispered, glancing around the playground to make sure no one could hear her. ‘Do you think the aliens are taking over everyone, or is it just rocket scientists they’re after?’

  ‘Rocket scientists first,’ I told her. ‘Then the rest of us.’

  Millie gasped.

  ‘But don’t worry,’ I said. ‘If anyone can save the world, DABMAN can.’

  Should I do it? I wondered. Should I tell just one more ?

  No, I couldn’t.

  Could I?

  Good news: Algy’s in the European Finals! Maybe I am a lucky mascot after all.

  Bad news: I still had to go through PAIN AND TORTURE time on Monday morning.

  Bobby Bragg told everyone that he’d learned how to chop a brick in half with one blow of his bare hand. He’d even brought a brick in to school so he could show us. I had to admit it was awesome. He warned us all not to try it ourselves. As I needed telling – I may be Dull And Boring, but I’m not