Читать книгу Chomp'd - Susan Berran - Страница 12

… Mum and Dad must’ve been totally blind AND anosmic!

Maybe they couldn’t smell it because they’d already had their nostrils totally burnt out by the smell of little Miss ‘Bugle-Butt’ Melly .

But yep, we still moved into our tiny little crap shack! Which was like a stale loaf of bread … REALLY crumby. And the rest of town isn’t much better either. When Mum and Dad first said there was a general store and a pub in Agnath, I thought, ‘oh thank you, at least there’s a real town hiding somewhere around here’. But I was sooooo wrong. There wasn’t some grand, huge mall hidden just over the next hill, not some large shopping centre a few kilometres away, not even a small shop down the road. No, no. They looked like they were the most ANCIENT two buildings in the southern hemisphere. Possibly even the entire world. They had to be kidding. But they weren’t. Unfortunately the store and pub were it: the whole town! Nothing more, nil, nada, nought, zip, ZERO, ZILCH!

So, of course when I first saw it I just figured the outside of the shop was so incredibly crappy, because the owner was so incredibly cheap and only wanted to spend money on the inside of his shop. Yeah that had to be it. He probably just didn’t want to waste his money on the outside, so that he could spend every cent on all the best ‘modern stuff’ on the inside of the shop.

I was betting that just on the other side of that worn, rotting, scraped and scratched ugly door, there was a shiny new counter that ran all the way around the wall. Lollies - every colour of the rainbow - flowing from a giant tap in the centre of the store. Barrels of every flavour ever made of chewing gum and fountains of rich, yummy chocolate, squirting into the air and flowing into tall cups for kids to drink … for FREE!

AND I WAS RIGHT! Nah, just kidding. I’ve obviously seen a certain film way too many times.

He didn’t care about the outside, or the inside. The outside had its peeling paint, cracked windows and termite-infested posts that seemed to say, ‘WORLD’S CRAPPIEST SHOP HERE – COME ON IN’. But inside … well, inside seemed to say ‘LUXURY COCKROACH AND BLOWFLY ACCOMMODATION AVAILABLE. ENQUIRE WITHIN.’

I was just hoping for a nice cold ice-cream on our first day in Agnath.

It was a stinking hot day and the air-conditioner wasn’t working, of course. So when Dad pulled up out the front of the store we all leapt straight out of the car and slammed the doors behind us.

SLAM! CRACK … CRASH!

A rust-eaten, weathered length of gutter from the store’s verandah-roof, directly above me, suddenly flashed past my eyes and slid down my arm. I just about peed myself on the spot. The jagged edge of the gutter scraped a four-centimetre path, straight down the length of my arm, shaving off every single little hair. It looked like someone had tried to MOW my arm. I staggered and fell backwards, throwing out both arms to grab at one of the four verandah posts and save myself from slamming into the ground. But it was like grabbing a snotty tissue. Either that, or I was suddenly Superman. The post just disintegrated in my hand until there was hardly anything left of it. I opened my hand to let the dust and splinters of wood fall to the ground and blow away in the town’s stinky breeze. I looked up to see that where I’d grabbed at the post, there was now only about a toothpick-worth of wood left holding it up.

Oops!

Well it wasn’t my fault.

At the same time, Dad stepped up onto the weathered, crappy, old wooden verandah, but just as he reached out to push open the shop door … CRACK, CRASH! His foot smashed straight through one of the rotten floorboards, throwing up a huge cloud of dirt and dust from below. He just about tore his leg to shreds going through the stupid thing.

THUD! And his foot slammed through the gaping hole. He fell forward, sending his face straight into the middle of the thick dust cloud… COUGH , COUGH , COUGH , SPLUTTER , SPLUTTER … Dad’s whole head completely disappeared, as he hacked and coughed, and choked on the thousand-year-old dirt that had been released from under the verandah. A split second later, his face reappeared through the other side of the cloud and continued falling forward, fast, coming to a dead halt on the only solid thing in his way; the store door. His face smashed into that door like a wrecking-ball smashing into a marshmallow… SMACK! BOING!

Instantly, a whole heap of swear-words came flying out of Dad’s mouth at the top of his lungs … Mum, straight away, turned to cup her hands over little Miss ‘pain-in-the-butt’s ears, but twisted on her ankle and accidentally shoved her fingers right up Mel’s nose instead …

##*#!! Mel yelled in her squeaky little voice. Wow … that shut everyone up! Mum then spent the next hour whinging at Dad that “Melly’s language was one of the reasons that we left the city.” Rant, rant, blah, blah, blah, blah …

What I want to know is … how come if I swear, I get into trouble? Melly swears and Dad gets into trouble? Not fair. That sucks!

Anyway, as Dad started bleeding and moaning, the store door groaned and slowly crept its way open. Dad stood there with one leg down the hole and both eyes still spinning, in different directions, with squiggly lines of bright red blood, winding their way down his leg like a roadmap. He had the most awesomely massive, purpley, blueish lump coming up right SMACK in the middle of his forehead like an enormous third eye. Cool!

Inside the store it was dull and quiet with the smell of mildew and mould hanging over it. The windows were so grotty that there was barely any light able to come through them at all. I scanned the store, starting to wonder if it really was open for business, or whether the sign was still just hanging there from a hundred and fifty years ago. Cobwebs hung all about the room, like delicate silk chandeliers, heavy with dust and the sucked-out hollow corpses of moths and blowflies, decorating them like disgusting Christmas ornaments. On the few shelves that were still unbroken, stood cans of food with really faded, worn and tatty labels in some weird foreign language. So I kinda figured that if we went by the faded pictures on the cans, then it seemed that the shop probably had plenty of ‘Camel Stomach Casserole’ and ‘Goat Buttocks Soup’ and a few tins of ‘Fish-Eye Chocolate Pudding’.

Dad was just about to order some fish and chips for lunch … until he saw the dead rat frozen in the brick of yellowy fat in the deep fry basket . . . and I could swear I saw it blink. Freaky!

That’s when Mum suddenly piped up and told the shop guy that “We’re just looking” and “a pub meal with meat and veggies was what we really needed.”

Yeah … that was until she saw the pub!

Man, I thought our place was a crap shack, but this place made our place look like the Queen’s palace. WOW! It was like someone had actually taken the world’s largest port-a-loo, shook it like a milkshake and dropped it into the middle of a dry, dead paddock and then shoved a sign on it saying … ‘PUB’.

The owners were even admitting how crappy it was! They’d whacked this great big sign right in the front window that said: ‘TOILET INSIDE - CLEAN’ and they were absolutely right. It did look like the inside of a toilet that needed cleaning. Yep, the pub was definitely the worlds largest port-a-loo.

It didn’t matter how many times or how hard I pinched myself, I wasn’t dreaming. We’d definitely moved from the city to Agnath; from the gazillions of bright city lights, to the blue bug-ZAPPER lights.

ZZAPP . . . ZZAPP! We’ve got them hanging all over the place, like GIANT, blue Christmas lights, because the mozzies around here are the size of chooks … and that’s inside the house! Yep, from awesome skateboard parks to dirt piles, from wicked water slides to cow pat slides, from concerts in the park to karaoke in the paddock. Agnath SUCKED!

Of course Mum reckoned I just needed to settle in, get to know some kids and explore the countryside. FINE MUM! Hmmmmm, should I explore the dirt paddock covered in cow poop, or the dirt paddock covered in sheep poop? Orrr, maybe I should check out the dead grass hill with just one live tree, or the live grass hill with one dead tree. No. No, I think I’ll explore the rock-covered hill, because it has THREE trees on it and that would be waayyy more exciting.

And get to know some of the local kids …

let’s see. There’s RATTY HARRY, his hair is this yucky grey colour and sticks up like bits of tangled barbed wire. It looks like someone has taken a few dead rats and beat the living snot out of them and then glued them all over his head. Then there’s TOFFEE THOMAS, the sookiest and most spoilt kid around. He bullies the smaller kids and then sooks when they tell on him. Mum reckons bullies and sooks have been running in his family for generations anyway.

The other couple of kids that actually live around here don’t talk much, they just GRUNT. Unless you want to talk about cows or sheep, then they won’t shut up. All they ever seem to do is go cow racing, or horse shearing, or sheep tackling. They’re totally WEIRD.

And just as my brain was beginning to go mouldy with boredom and turn into a sludge pit of useless information - like the correct shade of yellowy-green for healthy cow pee and the correct shape and amount of moisture in sheep poop for really shiny wool - Jared and his family moved in up the road.

Jared was forced to move all the way out to Agnath, because his mum was all gooey and crazy about the countryside as well!

What is it with parents … are they all NUTS? YES! Or, are they just secretly trying to totally bore us to death? YES!

At least Agnath was almost bearable after Jared arrived.

Jared and me did just about everything together. His family didn’t go to too many places, or on any sort of good holidays, so when Mum said we were heading to the coast, up near the top of Australia for a holiday, I decided to ask her if maybe Jared could come with us. It took a fair bit of sucking up and I had to promise that we’d help out with Little Miss ‘dung-daks’ Melly, but I finally got Mum to say it was ok. Wicked! At least I wouldn’t have to put up with Miss Pussy-poopy-Pants, Smelly-Melly all on my own.

WE COULDN’T WAIT! City, sand, surfing and swimming. Cairns was definitely going to be the most AWESOME wicked holiday EVER! We knew it’d be pretty hot up there, because it’s really close to the equator, but me and Jared just kinda figured that meant we’d get in heaps more surfing and swimming and stuff.

Soon as we knew we were going, from then on, the days seemed to drag by PAINFULLY. Every minute seemed like an hour, every day seemed like a week. Time was going slower than a DEAD SLOTH on a backwards treadmill. It was taking forever as we counted down the days until it was finally time to rinse the red dust out of our lungs and get out of this flea-infested, butt-scratching, dung-smelling town.