Читать книгу Toe Jamm'd - Susan Berran - Страница 12

I slammed my hand into the alarm clock and sent it crashing to the floor.

What a NIGHTMARE! I woke up sweating like the armpit of a hippie crossing the desert in the middle of summer.

Reaching across and taking the shoe box from the table, I felt more than a little nervous. Of course I knew it was in there, where else would it be? There was no need to look inside. Well maybe just a quick peek. Lifting the lid just a crack, I put my eye against the box …

Nooo!! It wasn’t in there!

I threw back the bed cover, grabbed my leg and pulled it up towards me … Aaaaahhh!!

It was back!!

There it was, right between my toes. Moister, smellier, FLUFFier and even bigger than before. I panicked, I didn’t know what to do … Jared!

Grabbing the walkie-talkie, I called Jared straight away.

“Get over here … now!! ” I screamed. He was still in bed but he could tell by the urgency in my voice that I meant business.

I slipped on a pair of socks so the shock wouldn’t be too much for him. He’s a big wuss when it comes to ‘yucky’ things. Like when we were building our skate park. We were piling the hay when a rat ran up his trouser leg and started chewing on his undies. He screamed like a girl whose just found her first zit. His arms and legs were flipping about everywhere, like an octopus trying to dance on ice wearing roller-skates. Anyway by the time he got to my place, I was totally freaking out.

“What’s going on?” he said, looking more confused than usual. Jared then sat on my bed in silence as I replayed the last few days’ events in every detail. Right up until the moment I’d called him. His face showed no emotion as he listened intently to my every word. When I finished he sat motionless for a moment, as if in a trance or something. Then, without a word, he suddenly threw himself backwards onto the bed and broke into fits of laughter, like some loony hyena on pep pills.

“Good one Sam,” was all he managed to splutter out as he held onto his sides and continued to roll about uncontrollably.

Calmly I sat down on the bed beside him … “Ok,” I said pulling my knees up and resting my feet on the cover … “I tried to tell ya.” And with that I yanked off my socks. As Jared began to wipe away the tears of laughter from his eyes, he caught a blurry glimpse of my feet …

Aaaahhhh!!!

He leapt back so suddenly that he fell straight off the other side of the bed … THUMP!! … landing on the floor, flat on his back with only his feet poking up.

And he wasn’t laughing any more.

A few seconds later he peeked up over the edge of the bed cover. But only just enough to sneak another look at my feet. “Wow!! ” was all he kept saying. And he definitely looked green and pale. So I thought I better leave the joy of smelling them until later.

He eventually pulled himself together. “S-s-so what d-d-do you want me t-t-to do?” he said with a nervous stutter. “Help me get rid of it of course,” I said. Boy, sometimes Jared could be thicker than a stale loaf of bread buried in concrete.

I went and ‘borrowed’ Smelly Melly’s toothbrush and Mum’s eyebrow tweezers for the job. Then we both sat down on the bed, face to face and worked out our plan of attack. Jared thought it would be as simple as picking a runny nose; but he was wrong as usual, very wrong.

Holding my first two toes apart, Jared dug in with Mum’s tweezers. But it just seemed to moosh in further. Then he tried scrubbing it out using the toothbrush. But that just seemed to push it about. Finally he managed to scrape a whole heap out using his own long, thin, bony fingers. His fingernails were like little BULLDOZERS and actually worked pretty well. He had chunks of my toe-jam under just about every fingernail on his hands by the time we’d finished. It seemed to take hours. It was like the toe-jam didn’t want to come out. It seemed to be almost … hanging on somehow. But finally with one foot done and clear, I placed it down onto the floor. Then I pulled up the other foot to go through the same process. Jared stuck his finger between my toes . . . ouchh!!

He shoved that toe-jammed finger straight into his mouth and started sucking it like a baby as he just about fell off the bed again.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It bit me!”

“Don’t be an idiot Jared, it’s toe-jam.”

“I’m not kidding!” he said, sounding more than a bit spooked.

“It’s probably a bit of hay in the cow manure. You know, like a splinter,” I said. We both decided it was probably easier to try the tweezers again anyway. So Jared tried grabbing it with them again, but the toe-jam just wouldn’t budge. It just kept mooshing up and moving around. We had another go at scrubbing it out with Miss Prissy Pants Smelly Melly’s toothbrush but it wouldn’t even flake.

“I don’t get it. Your other foot wasn’t that bad,” said Jared, now starting to sound very nervous.

We figured it just had to be really good quality sweat and cow dung in there. And probably the easiest way to shift it would be to get a bucket of water and soak it out. I slipped on a sock and then lifted the other foot off the floor to put that sock on when … ooohhh crap!

Crap was right. My toe-jam was back!! The foot we’d already cleared was packed solid with toe-jam again. But now it wasn’t just wedged between my toes, I couldn’t move them at all. The moist but crusty toe-jam covered in mouldy green fluff had formed a solid web between all of my toes. I could barely move them at all!

Jared gingerly reached over and touched the

‘new’ toe-jam …

“oww!! It bit me again!”

“Oh bull!” I said nervously, now starting to secretly worry. Maybe if I just used the tweezers to pull off some of the green fluffy stuff on top …

Zzzzap! An electric shock went right up through my arm. Jared was staring at me like I was some sort of experiment for ugly cream or something.

“What?” I asked him, just so he’d close his mouth to stop the dribble flowing down his chin. He said nothing, but his eyes were so wide that I thought they’d just drop right out of their sockets and roll about on the floor like two little ping-pong balls. I knew we were both thinking the same thing … there was something desperately wrong with my toe-jam. But neither of us wanted to say it out loud.

I tried to convince myself that maybe the zap was static electricity and Jared was on the same track.

We looked at each other. And without a word uttered between us, we both stretched out a finger as if they were some sort of long poisonous poker heading gingerly towards my toes. Closer and closer, slowly we edged ever nearer to the toe-jam. Then with less than a millimetrewards before contact …

Zzaaapp!!!

We both jumped higher than a kangaroo being poked in the butt with a lava-tipped javelin.

We were outta there!!