by Susan Berran
Then we grabbed some lollies and stuff and shoved them all into a backpack. I clipped on my awesome one-of-a-kind totally WICKED utility belt and yes, I put some clothes on.
Jared and me had been developing our utility belts for ages. We’d made all sorts of stuff. Like my Dart Gun in Disguise; it looks like an ordinary pen, but within seconds it becomes a dart gun. Shooting grains of rice like a bullet. We tried it out at school on the school ‘snotty nose’, Crabby Abbey. We followed her around all day shooting at her head. It was hilarious. She kept getting kids to check in her hair. A few times she tried to blame us, as usual, but we were just innocently writing in our books, ha ha ha. By the end of the day, she was going crazy. Her little suck-up slave, Dopey Sophie, picked out a grain of rice and thought it was a huge nit egg. Which of course, she then had to tell everyone about. So naturally all the other kids thought Crabby had super giant nits. Excellent!
Anyway, we’ve got heaps of other cool stuff ready to use as well. Like my incredible one-of-a-kind SINGLE SHOT OVER SHOULDER BOULDER HOLDER that I made from Gran’s undies. You can shoot a loaded nappy from my bedroom window at the girls as they ride past. You should hear them scream when they get hit, especially if it jams straight into the bike’s wheel spokes …
SPLAT … SPLAT … SPLAT …
Flung dung everywhere, awesome! But this was no time for ‘CRAP SPLAT’. We had to take off fast. If Mum caught me, I could get landed with Smelly Melly duty for the rest of the day. And anyone with a little sister in nappies knows how much fun that can be … about as much fun as spit polishing a toilet with a tissue!
Tossing the backpack out first, Jared crept back out the window. But just as I was about to scramble out, something caught my eye, Flipper! He was floating upside down, he was dead! But how? I fed him, I know I fed him. Yuk! He must have had some gross fish disease. Because he was covered right up to his gills, like a mummy in fungus and mouldy mud.
I wanted to cry. Flipper was pretty cool. He used to do underwater somersaults for food and splash Smelly Melly Prissy Pants when-ever she got too close.
I loved that little guy.
Oh well! I picked him up by the tail, swung him around my head a few times and tossed him from my bedroom door. He flew straight down the hallway, bounced off a stack of toilet paper, landing on the flush lever. As it slowly swung down, Flipper slid off and down the cistern front, bouncing right into the middle of the toilet bowl
… Splash!! SCORE!!
Then I dived out the window to join Jared. We leapt onto our bikes and rode off down the dirt driveway. We needed to figure out a plan . . . fast! And we needed complete privacy, to be away from prying eyes.
And I knew just the place.
Aunty Ree and Uncle Karl’s. They were the reason we’d moved to this ‘CRAP SHACK’ stuck in the middle of nowhere in the first place.
Aunty Marie … or Aunty Ree as I call her, is Mum’s identical twin, which can be really SPOOKY sometimes. And I reckon Uncle Karl is actually an alien living in a human body. His head is sort of SQUARE, he’s really short, overweight, and he’s totally bald. When he tips his head just right, he can pick up telly channels from China, Russia, Uzbekistan and Bulravia. He doesn’t say much, but when he does, it always seems to start with footy and end with cars.
They breed goats. Of course around Agnath it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes between the four-legged ones and the two-legged ones that have been here for a few too many generations.
I was so peeved when we moved to Agnath. I was happy in the city. But when my smelly little sister came along, little Mis Smelly Melly Prissy Pants, we had to move way out here. “Closer to family”, “More space”, Mum said, and other lame excuses like that. But I soon found out that living in Agnath was like living in a funeral home. It’s quiet, smells like disinfectant, it’s DEAD BORING, there are not many people around, and most of them seem to live in dark, CRAPPY little boxes.
At least I knew that the ‘rellies’ were away for a few days. They were at some, car-driving, footy game or something.
It took us ages to ride out to their place. But at least now I had clothes on. And I knew where they’d hidden the house key. I overheard Aunty Ree telling Mum yesterday. There it was, just like she said. Right by the door was a nice big bag of OLD MR INDITE'S FRESH COW MANURE, already open and half-used. We could smell it from half-way down the driveway.
OLD MR INDITE had lived in Agnath forever. We’d heard all sorts of weird stories about him and his cows. He was supposed to be the tallest person anyone had ever seen and definitely the oldest; apart from my Gran. Some kids at school reckon he paints spots on the cows that don’t have enough, and when it rains he puts these big raincoats over their butts. Crabby Abbey told us that he’d been in every single war, ever, and that’s why he’s crazy. But Mum reckons he’s, “Just a bit eccentric”.
His ancestors had come to Agnath to mine for gold like everyone else. The trouble was no one found gold or anything else worth squat. But OLD MR INDITE'S family had found something. No one has ever found out what exactly but obviously something valuable. Because they put a two metre high steel fence around a couple of acres on his land. Then all the rest was fenced off with electric barbed wire. Crabby reckons there are booby traps all over the place just to blow up boys. And she said that OLD MR INDITE has this monster black grizzly bear that guards the place when he’s not there. They reckon it nearly killed a kid that got too close once. His cow manure farm is kind of like that famous chocolate factory … no, I don’t love to eat what he makes in there. I mean it’s all very secretive, no one ever goes in, but deliveries come out. Every weekend, OLD MR INDITE leaves to deliver a truck load of bagged, fresh cow manure, and he doesn’t return until the Monday. Mum says his manure goes all around the world because it’s so good.
I always thought CRAP was CRAP but there you go. Obviously some CRAP is CRAPPIER than other CRAP and some CRAP isn’t quite as CRAPPY as it’s supposed to be. But OLD MR INDITE'S CRAP was apparently the CRAPPIEST CRAP of all CRAP. Which made it awesomely fantastic CRAP.
We lifted the bag and put it to the side. There were about a zillion squashed cockroaches under there and the key had to be under one of them. There was no way I was going to peel them off the floor. So I told Jared that I have this rare and deadly disease … INSECTACITUS. He totally believed me when I told him that if I touch insect ‘BLOOD’ I could die. So Jared had to peel up every single icky cockroach looking for the key.
Wow, their guts were like stretchy yellow slime. They were sooo gross. But there was still no key. It had to be there somewhere. There were no other bags of manure lying around and Jared had peeled up every single flat cockroach under there. Surely they didn’t mean under the manure in the bag … could they?
After looking around for ages, that was the only option left. I wanted Jared to stick his arm into the bag. But he said that the stench of my toe-jam was so bad that by sticking my arm in a bag of fresh manure, I might actually improve my smell. I had to admit, by then the odour was pretty overpowering.
So it was up to me. I unfolded the top of the bag … pee eww! It was worse than I thought. Jared just about fell over backwards. The stench was suffocating me as I tried to keep my face upward. At first I just flicked a bit of manure around on top. But now I was going to have to stick my whole arm in up to the shoulder and sift through the entire bag. Desperately I tried not to breathe in as my face got closer and closer to the manure. I continued to fossick around, deeper and deeper, and then just as my nose was about to touch the crap, I found it, thank you! I whipped out my arm and dried it off with my T-shirt, fast.
We kicked off our shoes and left them by the front step. I knew Aunty Ree liked everything neat and tidy, and I didn’t really want them to know we’d been visiting. As soon as we walked into their house it felt odd. Everything was so incredibly neat and organised. Not a speck of dust or dirt could be seen anywhere. Every picture, every ornament and plant, seemed to be placed formi
ng a pattern around a pattern that had to be exact. So I told Jared to be careful and not touch or disturb anything.
We were both really hungry and I was sure they wouldn’t miss just a little snack or two and a couple of drinks. Just while we thought about what to do. We grabbed half a dozen of those humongous bags of chips and a couple of cans of drink each and relaxed on their huge, pure white, pillow lounge. For a minute there, I forgot all about my problem. We sat back and chucked our feet up onto the glass coffee table. Then we turned on the biggest plasma television you’ve ever seen and ripped off our socks …
oHh #?X?#!!
The stench of a thousand sweaty armpits rose from my feet. My toe-jam was heaps thicker and smellier than before. When I looked closer, I almost messed myself. Not only were my toes now completely covered, but it was starting to grow onto my feet as well!
It really was growing!!
If you’ve ever seen cheese that’s been out way too long, it grows this greyish- green mouldy stuff all over it. Well, that’s what it looked like on top of the moist, crusty layers on my feet.
We leapt up so fast that Jared knocked our cans of drink onto the floor, where they burst on impact. The soft drink ERUPTED like a row of angry volcanoes, spraying the walls and right across the front of the TV. The sweet red liquid rained down all over the furniture to create a masterpiece of art. Droplets flew into my eyes, stinging as if hit by a dozen darts. I fell backwards onto the sticky lounge and landed right on top of the bags of chips. They instantly POPPED like cannon fire and filled the room with a gentle snow storm of fine, crushed, chip crumbs. As I fell back, my arm knocked a plant-stand that naturally had a huge crystal plant vase sitting on top. As it swayed from side to side, Jared made a desperate dive to save it … but missed. It shattered on impact with the floor, spraying dirt across the carpet in every direction. It mixed in with the drink and chips to form a great new chunky, muddy look. I leapt to my feet with crumbs and drink still falling from the ceiling all about me. But I slipped on one of the empty cans and tried to grab Jared for balance. All he saw was my toe-jammed foot coming straight at him. So of course he jumped back, not wanting me to infect him and went shoulder first into the telly. It teetered on the edge for a moment, I looked at Jared, he looked at me … we both lunged forward to try and save it … too late. It went through the glass table like snot through a cheap tissue.
I looked around with eyes as wide as a hippo’s butt. And as I stared in horror at the disaster before us, one word was all that managed to slip from my mouth.
“We’re DEAD meat!!”
Our brains were working harder than a hamster on pep pills running around in one of those little wheels … well mine was anyway. Sometimes I think Jared’s curly red hair isn’t just growing on the outside of his head, if you know what I mean. Suddenly it came to me …
“Goats!” I yelled. Jared’s eyes welled up with tears and his lips began to quiver. “Yeah I know we are but you don’t have to be nasty,” he said.
“No, Aunty Ree’s and Uncle Karl’s goats, ya turkey,” I said. “We can blame them for the mess.” As we worked out our plan to leave the back door open and herd in the goats, I noticed that Jared wasn’t really listening any more. I looked up into his face; he was pale and had a look of pure fear in his eyes.
“I helped you scraping out your toes … ” his voice trailed off. He lifted his hands. And as he slowly turned them over, we both zoomed in on his fingernails … Aaaahhh!!!!
He’d been INFECTED.
Sprouting from under the fingernails of his hands was the tell-tale sign of toe-jam mould.
In total panic, he began running backwards, trying to get as far away from his own hands as possible. Climbing and falling over the lounge and the rubble that we’d already created. Knocking over everything in his path. Pictures on stands fell, plants were destroyed, and the fish tank sent a small tidal wave across the floor. Anything that had survived the first ‘WAR’ now came crashing down to create an even worse bomb site. When my Aunty Ree and Uncle Karl get home, I’M DEAD! Completely and utterly DEAD! Send me to prison, sit me in the electric chair and I’ll pull the switch myself. We stood there surrounded by chaos, in silent panic, wondering what to do first, when I noticed something in the rubble of the coffee table. It was a DVD disc, it must have been taped to the back of the television, but why? It had to be pretty important to be hidden like that. There was a faint pencil marking on the disc. I couldn’t understand the writing properly but the first word was clear … ‘G o l d’.
We’d obviously found something really valuable, why else would it be hidden? Maybe a treasure map with lost clues from hundreds of years ago to the only gold, and it was somewhere around here.
Maybe having toe-jam wouldn’t be too bad after all … if we were rich!
Taking the disc, we left the destruction of the lounge room and headed to Uncle Karl’s office. I knew he had a computer in there that we could play the disc on.
The office was completely different to the rest of the house. Actually it used to be different. Now it was pretty much the same. It was a total mess. There were newspaper clippings and old sketches of the town from a hundred years ago hanging all over every centimetre of wall. Maps lay across his desk, along with hundreds of scribbled notes and letters. It was amazing, the sketches showed men mining for gold by hand; obviously the town in its old glory days. But the pile of newspaper articles showed that the glory had been very short-lived …
were on top of the pile. There were maps of the town from all different years, with markings all over them to show where everyone lived and where the mines had been. And there were some really gross photos of dead animals all dried up and wrinkly. There was something familiar about them, but I just couldn’t quite remember what.
As we looked around the walls at the pictures, we noticed that there seemed to have been quite a few mines marked on OLD MR INDITE'S place. They appeared on the really old maps, but they’d been deleted from the newer ones. Like someone didn’t want anyone to know they’d ever been there to begin with. And by the looks of it, there was a mine just around here too. Most of them had been filled in or were way out in paddocks, fenced off. Some of the farmers use them as rubbish holes to chuck old car bodies and stuff in, but they were still marked on the maps.
Now we were getting really curious about the DVD.
Pushing aside the paperwork, we found the computer keyboard buried underneath. Under the desk we wiped away thick cobwebs to turn on the computer and slipped in the disc. Then, dusting off the monitor, we waited.
Damn, it wasn’t a map. Just really, really old black and white film of horses and carts, full of dirt, miners, tents and … it was Agnath. I recognised the hills and the valleys leading in. There didn’t seem to be anything interesting or worth anything on the disc after all. It was just short bits of news, all mooshed together. Some were hardly visible at all. Then a few really old news clips came on … “Mysterious Killer Disease Strikes Fear”, “Animals Infected, Cause Unknown,” said the news reader, “More Stock Feared Dead”. Then they showed some dead animals, just like the ones we’d seen in the old newspaper photographs. It was definitely weird.
Wow, it looked like a hundred years ago this place might have actually been interesting. Not like the dust bowl of yokel locals now, swapping recipes for steamed cow’s tongue and boiled sheep ears.
We both agreed that we needed to get back to the toe-jam problem. And more importantly, figure out just how we could get the goats into the house so that they’d get blamed for the DESTRUCTION.
As we headed outside Jared had an idea … wow that doesn’t happen very often. I was impressed!
Grabbing a bucket from the laundry on the way out, Jared suggested we try something sensible … just for a change.
We sat on the front step of Aunty Ree’s and used a hose to fill the bucket. Everyone knows that dry cow crap and the rest of the garbage between my toes should just dissolve away in water, right?
> Yeah, that’s what I thought too.
So I plunged both my feet into the bucket, submerging them halfway up to my knees. Instantly my legs disappeared as the water turned a disgusting greeny-browny colour and gave off the worst smell ever! It was kind of like sticking your head under the doona to sniff your own fart and the armpits of a big hairy hobo that’s never heard of soap. But no matter how bad it was, I just had to sit there and wait … and wait.
I could feel the water getting thicker and thicker with the disgusting colour and smell. And I could see that Jared was getting impatient for his turn to get rid of the toe-jam under his fingernails.
“Come on Sam, hurry up,” Jared kept repeating while still staring at his hands. Taking my feet from the bucket, I was ready to finally get rid of that crap. But as I pulled them out of the murky, thick, smelly water, I didn’t know whether to Cry or SCREAM. Not only was it still there but the water had made it grow even more! Both feet were now half-covered in a layer of the greeny-greyish, furry, mouldy and crusty toe-jam. In total panic, Jared grabbed the hose from the bucket and poured water onto his hands as he tried to rub and dig out the toe-jam from under his fingernails. Right before our eyes, the toe-jam mould grew. It crept out from under Jared’s nails, thicker and smellier than before. We watched it as it slithered up and over the ends of his fingers to the first knuckle, covering them with the same furry, crusty layer of toe-jam that I had.
Now we knew that we were in ‘deepus poopus’, or in other words, serious trouble. And we had no idea what to do next.
We figured this was a good time to herd the goats in. At least that would be one problem out of the way.
Leaping onto our bikes, we headed off into the paddock and started doing wheelies all around the goats. We tried to lasso them like the cowboys in those really old shows that Grandpa watches. We tried chasing them, we tried hypnotising them, we even tried asking them. Nothing worked until … they got a whiff of the toe-jam. Suddenly we were being chased by the goats!
