My Life and Other Stuff I Made Up Read online

  ‘Thirty-two dogs in five minutes for Maaaaaad Dooooooogggggggg. He’s on target for the world title!’ Fast Eddie called. I was only on dog 25. I was dropping further behind by the second and the dogs weren’t sitting right in my belly. I’d been watching this competition for enough years to know that seven dogs was an almost unbeatable lead.

  ‘What are you doing?’ my grandfather said.

  I nearly choked. I turned to my left and there was Pop, leaning over my shoulder again.

  ‘This was my dying wish, you nincompoop,’ he said. ‘Use the BLAM! I didn’t spend a year inventing it just to watch you throw the competition away!’

  I stopped chewing.

  He disappeared.

  I reached into my pocket. The jar felt cool. I looked up towards Fast Eddie. There was a Dog Eat official standing next to him, watching us carefully. Was BLAM performance-enhancing paste? I wondered. If I got caught for cheating, wouldn’t that be worse than if I lost fair and square?

  ‘Nincompoop,’ I heard again, so I dipped two buns in water with my free hand and jammed them into my gob. With my other hand I untwisted the cap on the jar, still in my pocket, and dug my finger into the moist paste. As soon as the buns went down my throat I ate the scoop of BLAM, then snapped and stuffed a two-dog chaser in.

  At first nothing happened – it just tasted like hot dog – but when the BLAM hit the back of my throat the flavour washed over me. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever tasted. Everything in my mouth and stomach fizzed all of a sudden, like a shook-up bottle of lemonade. Then, a few seconds later, my whole body went cold. Goosebumps everywhere. Meanwhile I stuffed two more soggy buns into my mouth. My arms and legs were freezing. My heart was beating like bongos.

  Then BLAM!

  Everything went hot and I started sweating. I took a big slug of water and snapped and jammed two more dogs in.

  That was when the amazing thing happened. The dogs just seemed to turn to water when they hit my throat. They went down so easily. I inhaled the bun chaser. All of a sudden I was knocking off dogs and buns at twice my regular speed. My body was still on fire but I was a dog eating machine.

  I was drinking them down like hot dog milkshakes. They were delicious.

  ‘Forty-seven dogs!’ Eddie Holmes called at the seven-minute mark. ‘Mad Dog’s on track to make world history right here, today.’

  Then the volunteer serving my dogs called out ‘This kid’s done 44!’

  ‘We have a competition on our hands! The skinny kid in the middle on 44 dogs is the grandson of Cliff Weekly, everybody.’

  The crowd cheered, nowhere near as loudly as they did for Mad Dog, but it still felt good. Pop had been loved in this competition and lots of people felt he should have won three years back, but he was robbed on a technicality. He hadn’t renewed his membership to the International Federation of Competitive Eating, so they stripped him of his crown.

  A chant went up. ‘Go Weekly. Go Weekly. Go!’

  I felt Mad Dog turn to look at me as his mouth harvested two whole dogs, buns and all. But I didn’t care. Having the crowd behind me made me lift my pace even more. Whatever BLAM was, it had turned my mouth into a food processor. I was a weapon of mass digestion. At the nine-minute mark Mad Dog and I were neck and neck on 62 dogs.

  ‘This is one dog-eat-dog competition!’ Fast Eddie howled.

  With 30 seconds to go it was all locked up at 65 dogs. I needed to chow down four in half a minute to break the world record, so I threw them back like they were French fries. I knew that BLAM would take care of them.

  But my body was starting to revolt. I felt like I had dogs right up to my throat, jammed in around my heart and lungs, filling up every spare space inside. My stomach felt as though it was ready to rip open. They were out to my shoulders and starting to creep into my legs, too.

  Mad Dog was groaning and sweating real bad, keeping one eye on me. He burped a repulsive, hot-doggy burp. I had 15 seconds to eat three dogs and my body started to convulse. It was giving up. Even with BLAM I had nowhere to jam more dogs.

  I pushed one more in and somehow managed to get it down, taking me to 67 dogs. Before I could get to 68, Fast Eddie’s bell rang, heralding the end of the competition. I covered my face. I was one dog shy of equalling the world record, two dogs shy of beating it. Pop was right. I was a nincompoop. Mad Dog did another real bad hot dog burp. The stench nearly knocked me off my chair. Then the crowd started chanting, ‘Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom!’

  I looked up slowly.

  ‘Sixty-seven dogs for Tom Weekly,’ Eddie Holmes called. ‘Sixty-six dogs for Morgan! We have a new cham-pion!’

  The crowd went crazy for me. I wanted to smile but all I could do was groan and try to swallow the last bit of doughy bun in my mouth. Then I saw the woman who had been counting how many dogs Mad Dog ate. She was tall and blonde, wearing a yellow volunteer’s T-shirt. She rushed over to Fast Eddie and whispered something in his ear. She was looking my way. Eddie Holmes looked down the row of dog eaters, frowning.

  He walked across the stage and stopped next to me. I looked at him. He leaned in and whispered something to me. My head dropped. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the jar, still with its lid off. He smelt it and gagged. It did smell pretty bad.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked.

  All I could say was, ‘BLAM!’

  That night I sat by myself at the dining table. Mum was up in town getting a DVD and chocolate to make me feel better. My sister was in her room. I was trying to eat a lettuce leaf. Pop always said to eat water-rich foods after a competition to help digestion. I could taste BLAM in my throat. I still couldn’t put my finger on what it tasted like, though. The phone rang. I panicked. I let it ring. And ring. After about six rings I hit the ‘talk’ button.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Tom Weekly,’ said the deep voice of Eddie Holmes.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, waiting. I was prepared for the worst. I’d done the wrong thing and I knew I had to pay for it.

  ‘We have had the paste tested.’

  I hung my head. I’d been dreading this all afternoon.

  ‘It checked out okay,’ he said.

  ‘Really?’ I straightened in my chair.

  ‘Really. Which means you stole Mad Dog’s crown. Congratulations. You’ll be on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.’

  I felt Pop leaning over my left shoulder again. I could see his reflection in the back window of the house and he was happy. He was very happy. Twenty-six years he’d been working for this, and I had brought it home. Then he was gone again. That was the last time I saw my grandfather.

  ‘That is so good. Thank you!’ I said.

  ‘There was something that I wanted to talk to you about, though, son,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘This BLAM. I don’t think you should eat any more of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. BLAM was the reason I’d won. I figured that if I ate some at the beginning of next year’s competition, rather than halfway through, I could take out the world title, easy.

  ‘It has some very odd ingredients,’ Eddie said.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, they’re legal. There’s nothing in the rules that says you can’t eat them, but I just don’t know that you would want to eat them.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, a little scared, knowing that Pop had been experimenting with some pretty weird stuff.

  ‘Your grandfather didn’t tell you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ began Holmes, ‘the paste is made up of three key ingredients. One is green grass.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘There’s lemonade …’

  ‘That’s not too bad,’ I said, sort of tasting the grassy, lemony flavour in my mouth.

  ‘It’s the last ingredient that’s a bit strange,’ he said.

  ‘What is it? No, let me guess. Is it cauliflower? Or cabbage? That’s what it sort of tastes like.’

  ‘No,�
� he said. ‘No, it’s neither of those.’

  ‘Is it fish? It sort of maybe tastes a bit fishy.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘yes, I would say there’s probably fish in it, but –’

  ‘I give up,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  There was silence on the line for a moment. He cleared his throat. ‘It was a small amount of vomit. Cat vomit, we think.’

  I screamed in his ear. Then I started choking.

  ‘Tom?’ he said.

  My body jerked. I scratched at my tongue, trying to scrape the BLAM off. Then I dropped the phone.

  ‘Tom?’ I heard as I ran. ‘Tom?’

  But I was gone. I bolted to the bathroom, and I don’t even want to tell you what happened when I got there.

  It’s been a few days now since the competition. We’ve been over at Nan and Pop’s, helping Nan pack some of Pop’s stuff into boxes. I keep asking myself the same questions over and over: Knowing the ingredients in that paste, will I do it again next year? Will I eat BLAM and go for the world title? Will I do it for my pop?

  It makes me physically sick to say it … but I think I will.

  Would you?

  ‘What’re you doing, Freak?’ Jack asks, coming in through our back door.

  I flick open the window flap of the large cardboard box that I’m sitting in. The box is in the middle of the lounge room floor.

  ‘It’s a teleporter,’ I say, letting the flap close again.

  ‘It looks like a cardboard box covered in foil.’ He lifts the flap and stares in at me. He’s holding a soccer ball.

  ‘The reflective coating is actually a heat shield to protect the machine as it zings through space,’ I explain.

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Jack snorts as he runs his eye over the ingenious machine that I’ve spent all morning on. ‘How’s it work?’

  ‘Well, you type in where you want to go and you disappear, reappearing in that place.’

  He looks at me. ‘I know what a teleporter does, but this is a cardboard box. I want to know how a box does that.’

  ‘Whatever.’ I pull a string, closing the cardboard flap, locking him out. I prepare for teleportation. He’ll see who the freak is when I disappear.

  Jack lifts the flap again to find me punching letters into the keypad.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Inputting my destination,’ I say. I click the intercom button. ‘Teleportation to commence in T minus three minutes.’

  ‘So you’re telling me you can type a location into a keypad drawn on a box in orange texta and then the box –’

  ‘The teleporter,’ I say.

  ‘The teleporter,’ he says, ‘will take you there.’

  ‘Correctamundo. But you’ve got to believe.’

  ‘As if.’

  ‘You coming?’ I ask. ‘We can go somewhere where there’s food if you like. They reckon there are awesome pizza pies in Chicago. And in Bavaria they have Black Forest cake.’

  Jack doesn’t look too happy but he pulls open the door and gets in.

  ‘You should be more thankful to someone who’s taking you to Bavaria,’ I say.

  ‘I just want to play soccer.’

  My eyes light up. ‘Where? London? Wembley Stadium?’

  ‘Bonehead.’

  I tap ‘Wembley Stadium’ into the keypad. ‘Please fasten seatbelts, ensure seatbacks are in the upright position and tray tables are stowed away.’

  ‘Get on with it!’ he says.

  ‘Please arm doors and cross-check,’ I say quietly.

  Jack shoots me a look.

  ‘Ten … nine … eight … seven …’

  He shakes his head. ‘This is baby stuff, man. If anyone from school saw us doing this …’

  ‘… three … two … one … ’ Then I make these awesome noises like an explosion and something flinging through the air at the speed of light. My sound effects are so real that I can actually feel the heat and electricity of teleportation as we make our maiden voyage.

  ‘I reckon this is how Thomas Edison felt when he made the first phone call,’ I say to Jack in a loud voice. ‘And how Doc from Back to the Future felt when he invented the time machine.’

  Suddenly there’s silence. I wait, listening.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ Jack asks.

  ‘You check.’

  Jack opens the door and steps out, taking in the surroundings. I step out after him. I’m amazed. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’

  ‘No,’ Jack says. ‘It’s not cool. It’s your lounge room.’

  ‘Can’t you see the crowd?’

  He looks around. ‘I can see a really ugly painting of a horse that your mum did.’

  ‘But what about the lights?’ I tilt my face up, closing my eyes, grinning, bathing in the golden glow of a Wembley night game.

  ‘Australia versus England. Half-time’s over,’ I say, eyes still closed. ‘It’s all locked up at 1–1. World Cup match. Crowd going nuts, chanting in the stands. You can feel the English winter on your skin. Your nose is red and running a bit. Your jersey’s sticking to your body, damp from the fog enshrouding the field.’

  ‘Enshrouding?’ Jack says.

  ‘Your toes are numb in your boots from the icy dew on the field.’

  I open one eye and notice that Jack’s got his eyes closed, and he’s wiggling his toes a little. He rubs the skin on his arms.

  ‘It does feel a little cool,’ he says.

  ‘The fans are heaps crazier than an Aussie crowd. They live in England so soccer’s the only thing they’ve got to live for. The whistle goes.’

  I open my other eye and grab Jack’s ball out of his hands, drop it onto my right foot and pass it to him. He flicks it back to me. I move up-field. ‘Players are closing in, left and right. I’m in all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘Gimme the ball,’ Jack says.

  I fire it across. He dodges around one defender, the coffee table, and then past the teleporter.

  ‘The crowd are booing,’ I say. ‘There’ll be a riot if the Aussies score this early in the second half. If we win, England is out of the World Cup, beaten by convicts. Tonight, though, you’re unstoppable, Jack Danalis. You’re on fire.’

  ‘I’m on fire!’ he says, getting serious.

  ‘The young hot shot is on his first outing with the Australian team. The kid with the golden boots. He’s toying with the ball, like he’s got it on a string. What’s he gonna do? He dodges left, then right.’

  I can tell Jack’s getting into it now. ‘He can feel the crowd, the lights, the pressure.

  A nation’s hopes and dreams rest on this kid’s shoulders. Pass!’ I yell, but Jack, psyched up, decides to shoot. He kicks the ball as hard as he can. I stop and watch it rise off the boot, flying through the air like a small black-and-white missile. It looks beautiful up there, spinning around and around.

  ‘It’s got to be a goal. This thing can’t miss,’ I scream.

  But I quickly realise that there is no goal. We’re not at Wembley Stadium. This is my lounge room, and the ball is either going to smash the window or the TV. Jack screams, ‘Nooooooooooooo!’ and covers his face with his hands.

  SLAM! It hits the new plasma. The flatscreen wobbles on its small, black stand, rocking back, then forward, teetering on the edge of the cabinet. I want to run and catch it but my feet are solid concrete. I stand and stare, mouth open, as it finally tips forward, plunging to the floor, ripping the wiring out of the wall. There’s a BANG, a small shower of orange sparks, a sharp white light, an electrical fizzing sound. The screen is face down on the floor.

  I look to Jack. He’s still holding his head in his hands. I can hear cicadas, a truck reversing, the bark of a dog.

  I groan in pain.

  ‘Did that just happen?’ Jack asks.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It just happened.’

  ‘This is your fault,’ Jack says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You got me all fired up. “Wembley Stadium”? “Young hot shot”? “Golden boots�
��? “Ball on a string”? You did this,’ he says, pointing a finger at me. But I can tell by his eyes that he’s scared. He knows my mum will lose it, big time. This is worse than when he hit a cricket ball into the garden and smashed Buddha’s head off. It’s worse than the time a magic trick went wrong and he spilt red ink all over Mum’s rug.

  At that moment I hear the most terrible sound in the whole world – Mum’s car driving up our street. It’s still maybe a couple of hundred metres away, but I know her gear changes. At Christmas time I trained myself to know when she was approaching so that I could snoop for presents.

  The engine growls.

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Let’s hide it,’ Jack says.

  ‘It’s like the centrepiece of the whole room. And it’s new. She’ll know.’

  ‘Well, flip it over. Let’s have a look. Maybe it’s not too bad.’

  We grab an edge of the screen each and lift.

  We stare.

  The cracks are like a giant spider web, filling the screen.

  My mum’s car pulls into the driveway.

  I want to cry.

  We rest the corpse of the TV back on the floor.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Jack says.

  ‘Where to? Out back?’

  ‘No.’ Jack climbs into the teleporter. ‘New York, Egypt, Jamaica – wherever, dude.’

  I stand outside the box, looking at him through the cardboard window flap. My mum’s car door slams.

  ‘It’s a box covered in foil!’

  My mother walks along the front path.

  ‘I know that,’ he says, ‘but it’s also a teleporter. The reflective coating is a heat shield to protect the machine as it zings through space. That’s what you said.’ He’s getting desperate now.