‘Is he dead?’ Jack asks.
‘No, he fainted, you idiot!’ I watch Lewis carefully. ‘At least I think he fainted …’
I lean down and place my hand on Lewis’s chest. It moves up and down, so I grab the camera and start filming as a few claws emerge from beneath the saucy hair blanket. A very large nit scuttles down Lewis’s face and onto his chest. Then another and another and another. They scatter onto the floor. They are at least the size of my thumb now. I stare into one of the nits’ eyes, and it almost looks intelligent. Lewis’s head is a churning sea of lice claws, jaws and pincers.
‘It’s the sauce,’ Jack says. ‘What’s in it?’
‘How am I supposed to know?’ I say. ‘Nan says it’s her “secret recipe”. It tastes disgusting.’
I keep filming. It is the most disturbing thing I have ever seen on a camera screen. Even more disgusting than the time I filmed my sister Tanya sleeping so that I could prove to her that she snores when she drinks too much milk.
A head louse runs over Jack’s foot, and he squeals and flicks it off. The louse flies through the air with a very faint scream and slams, headfirst, into Lewis’s bedroom wall. It explodes and red and green goo drips down towards the carpet.
Jack splats three or four more head lice into the carpet. There are a hundred or so nits scurrying across the floor now.
‘Let’s go!’ Jack shouts.
‘What about Lewis?’
‘What about Lewis?’ he asks. ‘They’re his nits. Let’s save ourselves.’
‘Grab his feet,’ I tell Jack. I unclip the camera from the tripod and hang it around my neck, still filming. I shove my hands under Lewis’s armpits. There is an almost electric connection when we touch. Nits surge from Lewis’s body, up my arms and onto my shoulders. I feel them nibble at the nape of my neck and I flick off as many as I can. Jack backs towards the door.
‘Grab his feet!’ I scream. ‘We’ve got to wash the sauce off him.’ I’m panicking because there are hundreds of nits blooming from Lewis’s scalp now. Lewis’s body is covered with them and, now, so am I. I think I read somewhere that head lice won’t live anywhere south of your eyebrows. I think they’re trying to get to my head.
The ones on the floor are still covered in sauce, and they just seem to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Some of them are the size of small guinea pigs now.
Jack stomps across the room, splatting huge head lice beneath his size six shoes. The nits erupt, spraying the carpet with meaty head lice chunks. Jack grabs Lewis’s legs and lifts. We move quickly across to the bedroom door. I take one last look back. The floor is heaving with thousands of mini-beasts, growing larger by the second, scurrying in every direction. They follow us as we move out the door, like they can smell the delicious blood pumping through our veins.
We walk as quickly as we can down the hall and into the bathroom. I kick the door closed, crushing a pair of nits between the door and frame.
‘Sorry,’ I say to them. Lewis would be very upset if he had seen that. He loves his pets. I kick the door again and it clicks closed, snapping one of the bigger nits in two.
‘Quick, wash him off!’ I tell Jack.
We drop Lewis into the bath and Jack leaps in after him, clawing at his own neck, face and head. He squeals like a piglet, flicking off 30 or 40 thumb-sized nits.
I flip on the tap and water gushes over Lewis’s scalp. I start to scrub the sauce and nits out of his hair. It’s like massaging a nest of tarantulas. I have to look away in order to keep the baked bean toastie that I had for afternoon tea down. Jack jumps out of the bath when he sees the plump head lobsters raining down from Lewis’s head.
The water splashing Lewis’s face starts to wake him, but I force his head back under the tap until I can scrape most of the sauce and nits off. The camera around my neck still has the red record light on, and it’s pointing right at Lewis. I pray that it’s in focus and capturing this disaster as it unfolds. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I hear the words, ‘Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Tom Weekly.’
‘Lemme up,’ Lewis says groggily, like a boxer pulling himself up off the mat.
Most of the nits have been prised from his scalp, so I help him out of the tub. The lice try to climb up the side of the bath, but it’s too slippery. I rip the little bloodsuckers off my arms and throw them in with the others. Then I notice something amazing. The nits that have been hit by the water, that have had the sauce washed off, have shrunk. They are so small they’re being washed down the plughole. Lots of them are now the size of regular nits.
‘What happened?’ Lewis asks.
‘The sauce,’ I tell him. ‘There’s something in it. The longer the sauce is on them, the bigger they grow. They’re like gremlins.’
There is a loud gnawing sound. Lewis and I both turn to see 15 to 20 head louse snouts chewing on the bottom of the door. The lice that these noses belong to must be as big as possums, or maybe even wombats now. They are making an increasingly large pile of sawdust and wood chips on the floor.
‘They’ll eat us alive,’ Jack says. ‘We need weapons.’
‘Water,’ I say. ‘We need to spray them.’
I turn to the shower and twist the tap on, but it’s such a gentle spray – it’ll never make it to the door.
‘The sink tap!’ I say to Jack and he twists it on, using his thumb to direct the water, but the spray only reaches halfway to the door.
So Jack opens the cupboard beneath the sink and pulls out rolls of toilet paper and bars of soap. ‘There’s no bucket,’ he says. Then he holds up a green bottle of conditioner, the same brand Mum uses to get rid of my nits.
‘NO!’ Lewis says.
‘YES!’ Jack replies. He goes to the door and sprays the conditioner all over the louse snouts. They pull back and squeal, momentarily stunned, but then they take to the door with even greater gusto.
Jack returns to the cupboard, grabs the mould cleaner and starts to squirt, but Lewis knocks it out of his hand.
‘What’re you doing, nit boy?’ Jack snips.
‘We don’t hurt them,’ Lewis says firmly. And Lewis doesn’t speak firmly very often. ‘No one lays another foot or finger on my nits, got it?’ We both glance down at Jack’s sneaker, which is spattered with red and green guts.
Jack swallows hard. You can tell he’s scared of Lewis’s quiet, fiery determination. The lice are seriously woodchipping the door now. The left-hand side has a giant bite out of it.
Jack looks around frantically. ‘The window,’ he says.
High over the bath there’s a very small window, about 40 centimetres wide and 30 centimetres high. It would be big enough for Lewis, maybe Jack, but I doubt whether it’ll be big enough for my gigantic head.
There is an explosion of timber and dozens of pit-bull-terrier-sized head lice explode through the door. They are covered in Nan’s tomato sauce and they look angry, rabid and hungry for human blood.
Jack and I scream ‘GO!’ and scramble for the window. While I give Jack a boost, Lewis just stands there, rubbing his hands together as the lice charge towards him, their feet slipping on the tiles.
‘What’re you doing, you maniac?’ I shout.
Jack is already halfway out the window. The nits are seconds from taking Lewis down.
‘I’ll talk to them,’ Lewis says. ‘I understand them. They’ll listen to me.’
I grab him by the collar and drag him up onto the edge of the bath. As soon as Jack’s feet disappear, I boost Lewis up to the window. ‘Wait!’ he protests. ‘Let me talk –’ As his head disappears outside, a murderous mutant louse sinks its fine, jagged teeth deep into my ankle.
Click here to see what happens next.
* * *
Here’s a true tale by one of my friends, Indigo. She’s twelve years old, lives in Canberra, and her story was so good I had to include it in my book.
* * *
‘Don’t Sit Where You Knit’
‘Get in the car!’ Mum shouted.
She was not in her best mood. I flung my knitting bag, containing my double-pointed sock-knitting needles, through the car door and leaped in after it. Onto my knitting bag!
My bum hurt, but I didn’t make a sound until I looked behind me and saw one of my needles sticking out of my left buttock.
I screamed until Mum raced out to the car. Then she screamed. I kind of wished she would do something to help instead of screaming. I really wasn’t up for having a knitting needle poking out of my bum, and a headache.
Mum started to pull. I could feel my bum skin holding on tight. We both knew it wasn’t about to hand over that needle. So Mum slammed the door, jumped into the front seat and sped down to the Medical Centre. I had to face the rear window with my backside in the air. When we arrived, I struggled to get out of the car, bottom first.
I waddled into the waiting room with my bum sticking out behind me like Donald Duck. My face was red and blotchy. It does that when I cry. An old lady with a bandaged nose stared at me. Her mouth hung open wide enough to stuff a pair of socks in. A boy with a broken arm tried to nudge his sister to get her to look at me. He didn’t have much control over his arm and he missed, hitting a man with long red hair instead. The redhead stared at me for far longer than was polite and then began to laugh! When he saw me looking, he pulled his newspaper over his face and continued to shake with laughter.
I didn’t have to wait, not that I could have sat down anyway. No one complained about me jumping the queue. The doctor thought the needle may have hit a nerve. He gave me a local anaesthetic and cut a slit right next to the needle to investigate. I could actually feel him slicing into my bum. He discovered that the needle wasn’t touching the nerve, but it was millimetres away. If I was just a kilogram heavier …
I went home that day with four stitches in my bum and a bloody, double-pointed knitting needle. We measured how far it went in. SEVEN AND A HALF CENTIMETRES!
My bum throbs just thinking about it. My knitting teacher said that I could keep that set of needles.
Death by Clown
‘Hey Tom.’
Oh no.
It’s her.
On the phone.
Talking to me, Tom Weekly.
Why would she want to talk to me? I’m so nervous I want to throw up. This is the worst day of my life. I’m–
‘Tom?’
‘Yeah?’
Sasha. The cutest and smartest girl in Australia.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
What do you say to someone with eyes like blue sky, a voice like a mango smoothie and fresh, minty breath like an Arctic breeze? Not that I can smell it right now, but I can imagine it. So minty.
‘Tom?’
She sounds a bit annoyed. I can’t mess this up. I always mess things up with Sasha. Like the time I told her I was attacked by a giant feral guinea pig, who bit off my toe. Why am I such a –
‘We’ve got a spare front-row ticket to the circus tonight because my brother has to go to karate and Thalia and Leilani and Sophie and Brittany are busy. So do you want to come?’
Circus.
‘Tom?’
‘Huh?’
‘I’m asking you to the circus.’
‘Um …’ I’m sweating. I try to tell myself that it’s just because Sasha has called my house for the first time in our long on-again, off-again relationship. But I know that’s not it.
‘Mum’s calling me,’ Sasha says. ‘I’ve got to get ready. Do you want to come or not, Tom?’
My head froths with fear and panic – white-faced, red-nosed, fuzzy-haired, polka-dotted panic. But this is Sasha, my kryptonite.
‘Yes,’ I whisper.
‘“Yes” you’ll come?’
‘Yes,’ I say again, slightly louder, my voice breaking in an awkward way.
‘Great,’ she says. Although she doesn’t sound so sure now. ‘We’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.’
‘Fifteen,’ I repeat.
‘See you soon.’ Sasha hangs up.
‘I’m dead,’ I say to the beeping phone line. I have front-row seats to my own death.
I press ‘End’ and place the phone on the kitchen bench. I have never admitted this to anyone other than my mother, but I have a morbid fear of clowns. And when I say ‘morbid’, I mean ‘psychologically unhealthy’. And when I say ‘psychologically unhealthy’, I mean they freak me out. I can’t be near them. But, in everyday life, that’s fine. I just avoid little kids’ birthday parties, certain fast food outlets … and circuses. I have my coulrophobia (fear of clowns) under control.
Or at least I thought I did. Until about 17 seconds ago.
Mum comes into the kitchen, takes a bag of baby peas from the freezer and pours them into boiling water on the stove. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks.
‘Sasha,’ I say.
‘What about her?’
‘She asked me out,’ I say.
‘Really! That’s great. I think you’re going to marry her one day.’
‘No,’ I say.
‘You’re not going to marry her?’
‘No. Circus.’
‘You’re not going to marry her at the circus?’
‘She asked me to go to the circus. In 15 minutes.’
‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘Did you say no?’
I shake my head.
‘Well, it’s probably about time you got over it. You were three years old, Tom.’
I think back to the painting that Mum did. She hung it on the wall over my bed on the night of my third birthday. It still smelt like oil paint. I don’t think it ever really dried. The picture was of a tall, skinny clown in a blue polka-dot suit, red bow tie, fedora hat and evil diamond eyes.
Every night from the age of three till I finally ripped the painting down when I was eight, he would slither out over the frame and into my bedroom. Some nights he would drop juggling balls onto my head for hours. Or strum an out-of-tune ukulele till four in the morning. Or sit right next to my ear and squeakily twist balloons into the shapes of werewolves, llamas and baboons.
I try to shake the clown from my thoughts, but there’s no way out of this. Girls like Sasha don’t just call up every night and ask guys like me to go out with them. My pop always said, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ I never knew what he meant. But maybe this is it – not that Sasha is a horse. Although she does have kind of a long face and she sometimes has sliced apples for morning tea.
What if I’d said no and she asked some other guy like Zane Smithers? They would start going out together. They would end up getting married and having three kids and a labradoodle and a house overlooking the ocean with secret passages and revolving bookcases. All because I’d said no to going to the circus.
Over my dead body will I let that happen.
Dead body.
Mine.
The lights go down. Excitement swells – cheers and whistles and howls. Five hundred excited people are seated around the circus ring under the big top. Correction: 499 excited, one terrified.
‘What are you excited to see?’ Sasha asks, popping a piece of purple popcorn into her mouth. ‘I love the tightrope and the hula hoops, but I can’t wait for the clowns. They’re so funny. My favourite clown is …’
I tune out. Even the mention of the word ‘clown’ dries out my tongue and dampens my armpits. I squinch my eyes closed. I should be happy. I’m sitting next to Sasha. I can smell her minty breath, hear her mango smoothie voice, and our knees even touched a few minutes ago.
Yet I am filled with dread. The clown from the painting over my bed slithers back into my mind. Wherever I would go in my bedroom his eyes would follow. Sometimes I’d feel him watching me in other rooms, too. And at school. Even on holidays at the beach. There’s a phobia called anatidaephobia, which is the fear that – no matter where you are – a duck is watching you. Maybe that’s what I have, except with clowns. No matter what I said, for years Mum wouldn’t take the painting down. ‘Don’t be silly. Kids love clowns,’
she would say. ‘Don’t you like my painting?’
BOOM!
There is an explosion and a burst of flame that sends shockwaves through the crowd. My heart leaps into my head. Ten trapeze artists swing down from the big top. Five let go and the other five catch them in midair. Water fountains erupt all around the ring. A long-haired motorbike stunt rider soars over a jump and comes to land in front of us. She skids to a stop on the sawdust floor, rips off her helmet and raises her hand for silence.
‘Ladieeeees and gentlemennnnn! Welcome to Dingaling Brothers Circus, the most extraordinary display on Earth!’
‘That’s amazing,’ Sasha says, squeezing my hand.
It is. For the next hour, we are dazzled by unbelievable magic, stunts and acrobatics. And you know what? Not a single clown. That is, until the lights go down after the human cannonball and I hear the honking sound of a cheap rubber horn. Every hair on my body stands to attention.
The lights snap on again. Not a slow fade but a violent snap.
A clown emerges from between the tall velvet curtains on the far side of the ring. He’s driving a tiny, kid-sized fire truck, his knees up around his ears. He waves to the crowd and blows his horn over and over again. As he moves closer and closer, I start to realise who he is. He is not just any clown. His hair is black and he wears a blue polka-dot suit, a red bow tie and a fedora hat. He is the sweaty, demonic clown from my mother’s painting.
I wet my pants. Not a lot, but definite leakage.
‘I have to go to the toilet,’ I tell Sasha, panicking. I stand and start to leave.
‘Nooo, this is my favourite part. I love the clowns. Please stay.’ She grabs my hand and pulls me back down. Clown-fear and Sasha-love battle to the death in my chest.
The crowd all around me is cracking up. As he zooms towards us I see that his truck has ‘Giggles’ written on the side. Giggles the Clown. He comes to a stop in front of us, his fire truck skidding in the sawdust. He falls out of the truck onto his face. The crowd erupts with laughter.
My Life and Other Exploding Chickens Page 3
