Muffin Top

by Andrew Daddo

  Lotus River Bodhi

  Peace, Love and Mung Beans

  Contents

  Cover

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  What’s that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That!’ said Kylie, grabbing a handful of the flesh above my waist. We were dancing. Don’t worry – it’s not normal for me to get down with my sister. I was only doing it because I had my school formal in a week and Kylie said she was trying to save me from embarrassing myself.

  ‘You don’t want to look like Stephen Woddleton!’ she squealed when she got home from her school dance. ‘He was actually rap-dancing. He’s such a geek!’

  And I didn’t believe she was trying to help me, either. I don’t believe much of anything Kylie says. She’s an eighteen-year-old attitude trapped in a thirteen-year-old body that watches way too much Dancing with the Stars. She tapes the show every week and tries to learn whatever dance the soapie star does. Her favourite’s the cha cha.

  More than anything, Kylie wants to be famous. She says it’s absolutely no coincidence that her name is Kylie, and if she could just get on TV like the real Kylie did, she’d be a dancing star too.

  She dances with Mum, mostly. Never Dad. He does watch Dancing with the Stars, even though he always says he hates it, but he reckons the problem with the show is that real guys don’t cha cha or rumba. And they definitely don’t tango. I reminded him that the guys on the show were real guys, and that was why they were such bad dancers, but Dad said, ‘Ashton. They are not real guys, they’re celebrities, and I spell that S-E-L-L. You know what I mean.’

  I didn’t – not really. After one of his huge sprays about the footballer who seemed to take his shirt off every week, I said, ‘Why don’t you watch the girls instead of the guys, Dad?’ He winked at me. I was catching on.

  Kylie was getting aggro with me for not taking this dance practice seriously.

  I didn’t want to go to the formal – not to dance, anyway. And if I did dance, I’d just do air guitar the way Dad does at the end of every family barbecue we’ve ever had. I’d even make the dopy faces and play all the lead breaks right up the air guitar’s neck. I wouldn’t dance with anyone the way Kylie was trying to get me to dance with her. I couldn’t see myself wrapping an arm around Stephanie Gilbert’s waist and holding her hand.

  Okay, maybe I could. But I knew I’d die. And if they made me dance with her, I’d put as much distance between us as possible. Kylie had the DVD on pause and was showing me that we had to have our bodies together: as in actually touching from shoulder to hip. It was totally off.

  ‘Caaarmon, Ash. Get serious! It’s the rumba!’ She was wrestling me towards her, and that was when she grabbed the handful of flesh above my hip. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Ow!’ I growled, pulling away from her.

  ‘Ashton!’

  ‘What?’

  And she gave it a squeeze. ‘Muffin top!’

  I karate-chopped her hand and tried to get free, but she was onto me as soon as I turned. She grabbed me around the waist and steered me over to the good couch. It was as if we were in a scrum and I was a lazy front-rower needing a shove. She had me pinned: my face buried between the cushions, butt up. Then she lifted my t-shirt and started wobbling. ‘It’s fat – that’s what it is!’

  ‘Lemme go!’ I squawked into the cushion.

  ‘Oooooooh-eeeeehh! Chunkus-bunkus!’ Her cackling drove me crazy.

  I kicked and thrashed and she gave me a last shove deep down into the couch, where there were crumbs and sand, and I came up spitting. My t-shirt had ridden halfway up my body. ‘That is fat, mate. Look!’

  I pulled my t-shirt down and said, ‘You’d know.’

  ‘What?’ she hissed. ‘I’d know what?’

  ‘You’ve got enough of it!’

  She looked as if she was about to have an asthma attack. I pointed at her bare stomach. She was dressed for soccer, but had her top tucked up under her training-bra so it looked as if it was a midriff dance number. ‘I’d be careful who you call muffin top. Muffin top.’

  It was enough to get her breathing again.

  Then, bang! It was on. Swing, and a miss! She lunged at me, but I was too quick. I ran for the kitchen – and I was in socks, so my grip wasn’t great. I’ll never know why kitchens don’t have carpet. Dad was propping up the bench with Mum. They were making easy work of a sticky bun for afternoon tea.

  As soon as I saw them I tried to straighten up, but I was skidding like a TV dog on floorboards. Kylie’s bare feet gave her perfect traction and she almost had me as I rounded the bench. I grabbed Dad for support or shelter, he grabbed Mum as he came down with me and the three of us ended up in a pile on the floor. Mum’s stool collected her on the knee.

  Kylie stood over us, panting. Seething. ‘No one calls me “Muffin Top”!’ And she lashed out with a kick.

  She scored – and punched the air as she ran away.

  2

  Mum and Dad and I got back on our feet. After the ranting and the lecture and the what-the-hell-are-you-two-doings, Dad said, ‘What’s a muffin top?’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ said Mum. ‘It takes one to know one – and you should know.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’m one too. We all are.’ Then she pulled up her shirt and showed us her belly. It seemed to hang over her pants the whole way round, but maybe that was because her tracky dacks were a bit tight. It was a weird thing for her to do, because we all knew she spent most of the time sucking her gut in. ‘See? This here –’ And she grabbed a handful that hung over the elastic waistband. ‘The pants are like the paper that holds the muffin, and this bit’s the top – only it’s not crunchy. Don’t you listen to the makeover shows?’

  Dad shook his head. ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m no muffin top,’ barked Kylie, as she opened cupboard doors and banged them shut. It was a wonder she didn’t add, ‘Der, Dad!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Mum. ‘I don’t want to be one, and I definitely don’t want you to be one, but you know how it is. Two kids and all that –’

  ‘Count me out,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dad. ‘Ash is just waiting for a growth spurt. Give him a break. He’s only eleven. He’s normal.’

  I nodded. It sounded good to me.

  ‘Normal’s not what it used to be, honey.’

  ‘Oh, please. Ash, show us your abs.’ And then Dad lifted his t-shirt to show us his.

  Mum squinted. ‘That’d be a sesame seed and hair muffin top. Hmmmm. Yum! Let me at it, babe!’

  Dad pushed her hands away and sucked his gut in, but it didn’t help much, so he dropped his shirt.

  ‘Come on, Ash, your turn. Give us a look.’

  ‘Daaaaaaaaaaaaad.’

  ‘Give it up, mate. Fair crack. Let’s see ‘em.’

  I grabbed a bit of bun – not the piece closest to me, like I’d been taught to take whenever we had visitors, but the piece with the most icing. ‘It’s like Dad said. I’m just waiting to grow. I’m normal, okay?’

  ‘Muuuuuuuuuum, stop gutsing yourself! We’re going to be late.’ Kylie had her soccer top where it should have been all afternoon. She gave me a you’re-the-bad-smell-under-my-nose
look, spun round dramatically and headed for the door.

  ‘Oops,’ said Mum as she tied her hair up in a scrunchie. I hadn’t even noticed she was in her jazzercise outfit. ‘At least I’m trying to get rid of mine.’

  ‘Cheap shot,’ said Dad, taking the last bit of bun.

  ‘See you, stud-muffin,’ Mum said to me. Or him. We both smiled.

  Kylie poked her bum out at me.

  ‘Let’s see if there’s any sport on the telly,’ said Dad. ‘That always makes me feel healthier.’

  3

  When Mum came home from jazzercise, she was either buzzing or in a flap.

  She normally spent the dregs of Saturday afternoon pooped on the lounge, but this time she was different and even Kylie was revved up. She’d obviously had some game time at last. She and Mum were all giggles and noise, and with that carry-on it was pretty much impossible to enjoy the end of the footy.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Dad.

  ‘Nothing.’ Kylie flipped her fringe.

  ‘Nothing’s never sounded so loud.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve just had an idea,’ giggled Mum, ‘for the paper. More of a feature than a column, actually.’

  Kylie looked as if she’d wet herself laughing, but didn’t want to leave in case she missed anything.

  ‘As well as the pet care column you’ve already got?’ asked Dad.

  ‘This’ll be better,’ said Mum. ‘It’s still pets – guinea pigs this time – but human.’ Our family had always thought it was strange that Mum wrote a column for the local paper about pets when we hadn’t ever owned one. Our house was a flea-free zone, and that was the way she liked it. ‘Just make sure you’re home next weekend – or the weekend after. And switch that thing off!’

  Dad sucked his teeth, shook his head and turned up the volume.

  ‘You’ll be sorry,’ clucked Kylie. ‘Won’t they?’ She got herself a glass of water from the tap and a carrot from the fridge. I let it go. If Kylie wanted to be a carrot muffin, that was her business.

  Mum was Mrs Strango all week – happy and chirpy and busy. She wasn’t usually busy and happy at the same time, so this was weird. There were no sticky buns after school. No hot chocolates. No cappuccinos or babycinos or milkshakes. And there were definitely no muffins. She went the green tea and seaweed biscuits and I almost lost it when she made my lunch with rice crackers instead of bread. By Friday the local Yellow Pages looked as if it had been thumbed and the fridge had lost its war against her post-it note reminders.

  Things were happening.

  But Mum was the only one who knew what. Kylie pretended to know, but when I pressed her, I realised she knew nothing. She couldn’t piece together the clues in the post-it notes any better than I could.

  All week we had the spring-clean-Mum, the one that comes into my room and holds things up, and says, ‘This? And this? Ashton, pay attention. What about this? And this one?’ And my job is to decide whether it’s junk or not and where to put it, because if I can’t find a spot immediately, whatever it is gets junked. Last spring, she chucked my favourite tennis ball, the one without any fluff, and all the old action figures I hadn’t played with for years but meant to again – whenever ‘again’ was. I’d said that to her, but she didn’t buy it.

  This time, though, the spring-clean was different, because she was obsessed with the kitchen – especially the fridge.

  Then she booked cleaners to come to the house on Friday and on Thursday night she went completely psycho, running around the place to make everything tidy. It didn’t make sense. I couldn’t figure out why she’d want to tidy the house herself when she’d made such a show about paying other people to do it. And Dad was with me.

  ‘We’ve never had a cleaner before,’ he barked over his shoulder as he lugged an armload of washing up the hallway. ‘If we’re going to spend the money, we should be making a mess for them to tidy up – not tidying the mess up for them. What are they going to do? They’ll be bored. Would you dig a hole for the swimming pool guys if they were coming to put a pool in? Of course you wouldn’t. Would you clean the windows for a window cleaner? Would you lay bricks for the bricklayer? Or wash your clothes before dropping them off at the laundromat or take bread to the bakery? No. It’d be stupid.’

  Mum was starting to fire up. Her lips were thinning and her eyes were squinting. She’s got a top squint; one of the best. ‘All right, Brainiac, Mr-man-with-all-the-answers. Let me ask you this: do you clean your teeth before going to the dentist?’

  It was Dad’s turn to squint. ‘Aaaaaaaargh! That’s different. Of course I do. Everyone does. It’s an unwritten law: you clean your teeth and you don’t eat garlic, lollies, drink beer, wine or coffee. If the dentist smells alcohol he thinks you’re a derro, coffee-breath stinks and it’d be too embarrassing if he found a lump of something between your teeth. Der, darl!’

  ‘Well, double-der to you, daaaaaaaaaaaarl. I don’t want people to see what a pigsty we live in. If it helps, imagine this house is my mouth and the cleaner is my dentist,’ she grunted. ‘What’s this? Parsley? Stinky coffee? Oh – it’s junk? Get rid of it, Ashton.’

  ‘It’s my brand new second-hand tennis racquet.’

  ‘Well, hide it. Look at this dump! Aren’t you embarrassed?’

  ‘Hardly.’ Dad came back into the living room, still holding the armload of washing. ‘What’s going on, anyway? And what’s that suitcase doing on the bed? Are you leaving me, or am I leaving you? Or are we both leaving Kyles and Ash?’

  ‘Very funny, Len.’ Mum glared at him.

  ‘So we are leaving the kids?’

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Kylie.

  ‘Can we come too?’

  ‘Well done, darling!’ Mum hissed at Dad. ‘Now they know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Dad, Kylie and I said it together.

  ‘About the surprise.’ We all shook our heads. For about the seven-hundredth time this week, Mum wasn’t making sense.

  ‘That we’re going away. Remember?’

  ‘Cool,’ said Kylie.

  ‘All news to me,’ said Dad. He had his hands on his hips. Sometimes I got the feeling he didn’t know much about anything at all.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mum. ‘So thanks for wrecking the punchline.’

  4

  Mum picked us up from school at the normal time, but with a carload of suitcases and the neighbours’ dog steaming up the back window. She was Mrs Happypants again.

  When her phone rang, she turned into Mrs Happypants with sugar on top. She said ‘sweetie’ and ‘darling’ and gushed and giggled. Then she hung up with a short, wistful sigh.

  ‘Sorry, kids. You weren’t supposed to hear any of that.’ I wasn’t sure what we had heard. Then she rang Dad and gave him an address that he had to be at half an hour ago. ‘I’m not asking you, Leonard,’ she said. She never called him that.

  We stopped at a church and she pulled on the handbrake. ‘We’re here,’ she sang.

  ‘The surprise is going to church?’

  ‘It’s not a church anymore. It’s a photographer’s studio.’

  ‘For models?’ said Kylie. She didn’t only want to be a famous dancing star.

  ‘And other things – but models, too,’ said Mum, enjoying the way Kylie sounded as if she was about to pee herself.

  ‘I’m going to be a model? Oh, Mum. This is the best surprise ever!’ Kylie squealed. ‘I’ve always wanted to be a model. Or a movie star. Oh – cool. Heaps of models become movie stars. Even the ones who can’t act.’

  ‘Tch-yeah! Especially those ones,’ I said, cocking an eyebrow. ‘You’d be a model loser, more like it!’

  Whack!

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Right, that’s it!’ said Mum. ‘Do you kids want your surprise or not?’ The sun visor was down and she was right up close to the make-up mirror with her eyes half shut, because she was putting gobs of black stuff on her eyelashes. She didn’t even look at us. ‘It’s not often you get a free kick in life,’ she sai
d. ‘And believe me, this is a free kick.’

  ‘It’s not a modelling school, is it? I mean, I’m actually modelling, aren’t I? Does this mean I pass model school, collect my $200 and go straight to work? Mandy Newton’s graduating from the Barbizon School of Etiquette, Modelling and Department. I told her that was a waste of money. I never even knew what department was, because I was so jealous – but now I really do. Know, you know? Oh, Mum, tell me I’m doing sportswear!’

  ‘Unh-huhnh!’ said Mum. She had her lips pulled tight against her teeth so the colour could work its way into the cracks as well. ‘And it’s deportment.’

  ‘Whatever. Departed, deported, who cares? Hey, Mum, was that Unh-huhnh yes? Or Unh-huhnh no – about the sportswear? Do we get paid? You know I don’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars.’ Kylie fluffed her hair and pouted.

  ‘Oh, puh-leaaaaaaaase! What do you reckon?’ I said to Kylie. But I was curious, too, and Mum had made it pretty clear that this surprise was for the family – not just Kylie. Even Dad was part of it. And the borrowed dog – I’d have to remember to ask her about that. Maybe I was going to be a model, as well. I’d seen those clean kids with the straight hair and perfect teeth in the magazines and on TV. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t wondered what it would be like to see myself all glossy and smooth like that. But I’d never admit it out loud.

  Mum sucked her lips together and made that mzuck noise women do when they’ve finished painting their lips. But she didn’t do it once; she did it a bunch of times. Mzuck, mzuck, mzuck, mzuck! and then mmmmmmm as she pressed her lips together before one final, mighty MZUCK! ‘Where’s your father?’ she said. ‘He should be here by now.’

  ‘Am I modelling or not?’ whined Kylie.

  ‘Yes, darling.’ She sounded so casual she was obviously lying, to make Kylie feel better. But what if she wasn’t?

  I wanted to ask if that meant I was, too, but if Mum and Kylie knew I was even slightly into it they were going to laugh as hard as we all did at Andre Evis. He was the boy model at our school, who smiled at us from every crappy catalogue stuffed into our letterbox. He’d even done underwear: a white singlet tucked into white undies. Tucked in! What a weed. And a pratt. His hair was so neat and he never played footy or anything to get his hands or nails dirty because he said – just once – that his mum would kill him. We all laughed then, but I reckon half of us wanted to be like him.