by Susan Berran
Jared stuffed some rags under the closet door to stop any babies from escaping. Then we tried to figure out a rough timeframe. Given they breed so fast, by our calculations we’d have some cockroaches as big as a dog in about eight and a half weeks. So for the next couple of weeks we brought in food scraps from home; apple cores, potato peels, corn cobs, banana peels, basically any leftovers we could nick from the kitchen garbage bin on the way out the door each morning. Then at school we’d open the closet door, just a crack and toss the scraps in on the way to class each morning. We reckoned it was going really well until the school holidays came around.
We tossed a few extra bucket loads of scraps into the closet to get them through the couple of weeks that we’d be away, but of course then we forgot all about them pretty much straight away.
On the first day back to school after the holidays everyone stood in assembly as Mr Penniless unlocked the schools main door. He yanked it open and instantly turned a deep yellowy green. As he stumbled backwards towards the assembly he began to make PUFFY cheeks and a loud deep heaving sound. His face continued on through every shade of green and then on to the blues as he swayed like a FEATHER in the breeze.
Then it HIT the rest of us.
The SMELL of a thousand sweaty armpits, wearing the undies of a footy team, soaked in the mould of a hundred year old cheese left out in the middle of the desert on the surface of the sun.
It was gut-wrenchingly disgusting!
TOFFEE squealed like a girl, as usual. WHEEZY started sucking like mad on his asthma puffer. Crabby immediately grabbed her nose with one hand and Dopey Sophie with the other. She pulled her in close and got Dopey to start fanning her like crazy with one of her fanciest hankies. A heap of the other kids instantly hunched over, hanging onto their guts as if they were about to burst through their jumpers and they began groaning and throwing up. Booga Boris was the only kid still standing on his spot with this weird dopey grin on his enormously round face and a long thick line of drool flowing from the corner of his mouth. At first we thought he’d just sucked up the DEADLY smell and died standing on the spot, but he later told us that he just thought it smelt like his grandmother’s home made chutney, cheese and chocolate pizza (which is actually really disturbing and scary).
Me and Jared straight away reached for our totally awesome and wicked utility belts the moment we got a whiff. We took out our homemade Bulravian Instant Aroma Stoppers made from a pair of undies, dental floss and some bluetak, and pulled them straight on over our heads.
Meanwhile, Mr Penniless’ face was still rolling through various colours and had moved on to shades of grey now. He was desperately trying to convince Miss Croonarc to go in and explore the school building for signs of where the mysterious stench was coming from, but she had problems of her own. The dozen littlest kids had all run straight to her for comfort and then promptly thrown up once they’d reached her. So now she was standing there, knee deep in a puddle of pee-wee puke, trying to calm them all down whilst trying to keep her own breakfast down at the same time.
It was up to Mr Penniless.
He scanned the assembly area, which was now looking more like a battlefield of badly diseased SOLDIERS lying DEAD and DYING around the school grounds. There were kids holding their stomachs and sitting on the ground groaning as they rocked back and forth. Others were hunched over, throwing up in the grass and some were wandering about the grounds ‘pale and icky’.
Then, taking a large handkerchief from his pocket, Mr Penniless mopped up the sweat from under one hairy armpit, then the other, then he wiped the handkerchief across his pale, soaking, wet face and wrung out a bucket-load of hot, sticky sweat. As he stepped forward to enter the building, his foot splashed in the puddle of revolting liquid that had come from his own body. His feeble legs were shaking uncontrollably as he tried to stride off boldly through the door and down the corridor. His face twisted into all sorts of weird scary shapes as he stuck his nose up in the air and sucked in huge sniffs, causing him to almost hurl each time as he tried to track down the disgusting culprit.
We strained our necks to try and see where-abouts he was heading and what gross, disgusting thing he might find.
He paused at the door to the teachers’ staff-room . . .
. . . maybe the cleaner had a heart attack and died when she was cleaning at the start of the holidays and her body had been left rotting on the floor for the last couple of weeks and had gone all gross and gucky.
He sniffed again before walking on.
He paused at the door of a classroom . . .
. . . maybe SKIDMARK MARK, he’s in the grade below Jared and me, has been hiding his undies at school all year just so his mum wouldn’t find out about his ‘little secret’ and the stench had built up because the windows were all locked tight for the holidays.
We call him ‘SKIDMARK’ because every time we see him coming out of the dunnies he grabs the front of his trousers in one hand and the back of them with the other hand, then he pulls up the front, pulls up the back, pulls up the front, pulls up the back. Its kind of like a see-sawing motion. He doesn’t use any toilet paper, he’s actually using his UNDIES to wipe his butt.
Mr Pennyless sniffed again before walking on.
Then he paused outside his own office . . .
. . . maybe a possum tried to sneak in and got stuck in the air conditioner and its rotting carcass was going mouldy and being eaten away by a gazillion maggots.
He sniffed again before walking on . . .
. . . he stopped!!
He stopped at the door right beside his office. The door to the broom closet . . . the door to the broom closet that we had been breeding our cockroaches in . . . Uh-ohH!
Aarrrhhhh!!!
Mr Penniless had barely touched the doorknob when the door suddenly burst open and zillions of cockroaches came flooding out, swamping him in an enormous black tidal wave of shells and legs that stretched all the way to the ceiling. He was suddenly swept off his feet and carried down the corridor by a raging river of the spindly insects. Somehow he managed to fight his way back up onto his feet for a split second, only to be swept back off them almost instantly as he continued to battle his way back towards the entrance. Every kid had now zoomed in to the show that was unfolding before their very eyes.
Miss Croonarc was frozen to the spot, her mouth wide open in disbelief as the principal came speeding towards us, surfing like a crazy man on the black flowing floor of live bugs. The clicking and clattering of millions of pairs of legs echoed towards us mixed only with the crunching of shells as they were being squashed below Mr Penniless’ body.
Yep! With each clumsy movement Mr Penniless was smooshing a heap of the crunchy critters and mashing their bright yellow guts into the brand new cream carpet. It was as if someone had taken a water pistol full of yellow slime and was squirting it in every direction possible. Dotted slime lines criss-crossed the walls and zig-zagged across historic paintings from centuries ago. Splashes of yellow flew across the ceiling and dripped down onto faded silver trophies on the hallway shelves and slithered down framed certif-icates to leave strange yellowy ‘snail trails’. Everywhere we looked a heap of the splotches had tiny black legs sticking out of them like hairs on a wart, giving one last final tiny twitch before dying. It was a scene of total and utter CHAOS as the black flood of cockroaches flowed out the main door, swept over the edge of the steps and quickly disappeared beneath the building. Leaving Mr Penniless sitting in a crunchy yellow puddle by the entrance.
There were cockroaches crawling out from beneath his shirt and around his neck. Even more were falling out from his trouser legs and scut-tling off into the safety of the darkness beneath the school. Mr Penniless’ face was fire engine red and every millimetre was dripping with sweat. We could see every vein in his forehead popping out and pulsating like they were at some little rock concert or something.
But as he began picking tiny body parts of thousands and thousands of cockroaches from his
hair, we suddenly realised that Mr Penniless wasn’t just looking all around any more. He was staring straight at me and Jared. His eyes were like some ALIEN, DEATH, HEAT RAY that was trying to bore a hole right through our heads.
Miss Croonarc reckoned that the cockroaches must have snuck in over the holidays when they’d smelt the rotting food scraps, then probably set up home because it was dry, warm and there was obviously plenty to eat. But for some strange reason Mr Penniless thought me and Jared had to have had something to do with it. He did ask us if we had any clues why the cleaner would be storing compost in the broom closet.
Of course we had absolutely no idea how those food scraps got in there, but Miss Croonarc reckoned that the cleaner probably just forgot to take her lunch leftovers home.
Yep! We were beginning to like Miss Croonarc a lot more. Like we were going to tell Mr Penniless that we were trying to breed a world record sized cockroach . . . NO WAY!
We were pretty disappointed though . . . we didn’t even see one cockroach that was bigger than a mouse.
Yeah, we missed Mr Penniless. Our mums probably didn’t miss all the ‘talks’ they had to have with him about us though. Now they had to get used to the same old talks, but with a new principal. A principal that seemed to have eyes everywhere, making our lives even more difficult.
We decided to spy on the girls first, after all, they never stop talking. I think wind was invented just to push air into a girl’s lungs just so they don’t die of oxygen starvation. Otherwise with all their non-stop talking for hours and hours without taking a breath they’d just drop dead for sure.
Day after day we listened in from the bushes behind the crumbling school out-house and took NOTES. They rambled on and on . . . and on . . . and on . . . and ON! But the only stuff we found out about was useless.
Like we heard how Crabby Abbey is planning to sneak up in the dark and kiss Jared’s brother, DUFAS, when we’re away on the school excursion . . . GROSS!! We could warn him, but it’ll be way funnier if we don’t. The only time Tia Tantrum seemed to open her mouth was to whinge and sook, as usual, about anything and everything, from her parents having bigger and better toys than her, to her crappy annoying brother, TOFFEE THOMAS going into her bedroom and wearing her makeup. Which was a fair call, because she really needed all the makeup she could get. Actually the makeup she really needed for her face was concrete, steel wool and a chisel and hammer.
And apparently Dopey is a serious ‘lolliaholic’.She even dips her braces in maple syrup when her parents aren’t looking.
It was so hard not to laugh, our sides were bursting badly.
Apart from that, all they yapped on about was lipstick, music, clothes and the safest way to plait a horse’s tail when it has diarrhoea . . . talk about BORING!
So we were pretty sure that the girls didn’t know anything about the town treasure, or maybe they just didn’t want to break a nail looking for it, but surely the guys would know something. They were always raving on and on about how they’d go out into the dirt paddocks on some poxy wind-up tractor with their dads. Usually to check the sheep’s butts for worms or cow dung for parasites. There always seemed to be some sort of bug that burrows its way under the skin, or into the poop that needed to be hunted down and destroyed.
We tried listening behind the boys’ dunnies, but that was a total waste of time as well. While the girls seemed to have daily meetings in their loos, the boys were completely different. They were in and out of there in five seconds flat, they didn’t even waste time washing their hands. Except TOFFEE THOMAS, he takes forever in there. Me and Jared reckon he’s secretly redoing his makeup that he’s pinched from his sister. We kept hearing him talking to someone every time he was in the loo and it took us a couple of days to figure out that he was actually just talking to himself in the mirror, because there was never anyone else in there with him. He kept rambling on and on to himself about how his dad loves his motorbike more than him. Then he starts saying over and over . . .
“I am not a sook, just sensitive, I am not a sook, just sensitive.”
WOW is he fooling himself.
We needed to find out what the guys knew. We needed to go undercover, deep undercover. We needed to infiltrate their circle, break their silence, penetrate their wall, breakdown their barriers, enter their inner sanctum, shatter their silence, get into their heads, disrupt their thought, burst their bubbles and so on and so on . . . you get the picture.
But if they weren’t talking in the dunnies, then where were they talking?
For the next week we spent heaps of time trying to be all friendly to the guys. The teachers thought it was great that we were finally mixing in with the locals.
Yeah sure we were . . .NOT!
We just needed the guys to think we wanted to get to know them.
FIRST we started to chew on grass.
SECOND, for each break at school, me and Jared just stood in the same spot leaning against the fence, staring at our feet and kicking up dirt.
THIRD, whenever one of the other kids did say a couple of words to us, we just kept on looking down at the ground and grunted the answer . . . “yep” or “nah”.
And FOURTH, but most importantly, if we really, really had to talk, we . . . talked . . . really . . . really . . . really . . . really . . . really . . . s l o w l y .
The other guys just stood there in the same position, as always, leaning against their spot on the fence. All looking down at the ground, kicking dirt and chewing on their piece of grass, but every day, me and Jared moved along the fence just a little bit more at a time. Getting very slowly closer and closer to the ‘HERD’ of dorks.
It was like trying to sneak up on a group of SUPER sensitive hypo chooks. We knew that if we moved too fast, or accidentally looked them straight in the eyes we’d s P O O k them, they’d scatter and we’d have to start the whole process all over again.
It took DAYS, but it was working!
Slowly but surely we’d worked our way into the ‘HERD’ of local boys. Once we were in though, we didn’t want to give ourselves away. We definitely didn’t want them to know that we were looking for the town treasure. If they had any idea that we were searching for it, or even knew anything about it, we’d never be able to get the information we were after.
We needed to gain their trust and try to slowly pluck their tiny brains for the bits of info that would give us a starting point. At least then we’d have somewhere to begin our search; if we could just get enough pieces to start putting the puzzle together. We were going to have to carefully and ever so gently probe the guys so that we’d be able to gather every bit of information that mattered. Somewhere inside the dusty dried out mazes where their brains should have been, there had to be something useful. ANYTHING, aside from how to scrape animal buttocks clean and how to remove blood sucking ticks that had burrowed completely under the skin of an animal’s butt cheeks, using only your fingernails.
To try and extract any tiny fragment of knowledge from them was going to take some very delicate work. We’d have to tip-toe around the few words that they did use and nit-pick through the few thoughts that they had. Picking up on hints and listening for clues in amongst their very short discussions, but making sure that we never ever mentioned the lost treasure for fear of alert-ing them to our master plan.
Yep, this was going to take timing, precision and some of my most brilliant and cunning . . .
“Hey Wheezy, where do you reckon the lost treasure is hidden?” Jared suddenly blurted out in front of everyone.
WHAT!? I couldn’t believe it! All my incredibly clever planning, all that amazing work . . . GONE! I’m telling you, inside Jared’s head there is no brain! It’s just storage space for all of his future boogers. When they were handing out brains they obviously thought his head was a pillow and STUFFED IT! His head is obviously just a vast vacuum of empty space, I should . . .
“The caves”
Huh. WHEEZY REESE just spoke.
WOW
I’d never heard him say anything before, other than grunting noises.
“The caves on Thomas’ place” WHEEZY continued as he chewed on a long, dead and now very sloppy piece of grass.
That was it? We had it? It was all true?
We knew there had to be treasure around here. And now WHEEZY had fallen right into our, well, my incredibly clever trap.
We took off outa there straight away. We didn’t want to hang around them for a second longer than we had to, because if I heard about just one more sheep story about how many different parasites and worms can have a party in a sheep’s butt . . . I was going to hurl, and it would definitely be a world record-breaking HURL.
So now all we had to do was find the old bushrangers’ caves that were hidden somewhere amongst the thick forests of head-high weeds that covered the dirt and boulders up in the hills. We’d already explored heaps of ground on TOFFEE'S family property, but it was still only one small part of a very big place. It could take forever to climb every hillside and cut our way through the vicious, thorned weeds to search behind every single boulder looking for the right cave. There had to be a quicker way.
We spent the rest of lunchtime drawing up maps, diagrams and lists of stuff to bring for another weekend of exploration. Of course we’d be needing our incredibly AWESOME one-of-a-kind utility belts. All our best inventions were in there and we figured we’d be needing some extra special gear for the trip. The biggest problem by far was still how to find the right caves.
We decided that we’d have to make the ultimate sacrifice, the most painful decision ever. Worse than watching Booga eat, worse than emptying Smelly Melly’s loaded nappies, even worse than the town loonies facial warts.
