My Life and Other Failed Experiments Read online

  Beryl slices the cake and passes the plates along to the other judges.

  I can’t believe how heartless my grandmother is being. It makes me feel as though she might be in on this. Are she and Sue partners in crime? Did Beryl try to steal Pop away, too? From where I sit, I can’t quite see what they found so irresistible about her.

  Beryl hasn’t discovered the secret ingredient yet. Sue leans forward on her granny cart, eyes glued to the stage. Her hands clasp the steering wheel tight as Beryl and the other judges delicately raise the cake to their mouths.

  ‘What if she kills all four of them?’ I whisper.

  Nan presses her lips together. She looks up to the stage, nervous. She’s ready to stand and say something. But then she doesn’t.

  I can’t take it anymore. If I do nothing, Nan’s cake might win but innocent people will die. As the cake touches Beryl’s lips I leap to my feet and scream, ‘STOP!’

  The judges look up, mouths open, forks frozen in front of their lips. The hall is silent. Two hundred old, agitated faces stare at me.

  ‘What is it, young man?’ Beryl croaks into the microphone.

  I turn to Sue, who scowls and combs her wispy moustache with her fingers.

  ‘There’s razorb …’ I begin.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Beryl asks.

  I look down at Nan and then I step forward. ‘There are razorblades in that cake,’ I say in a loud, clear voice.

  Everyone in the hall murmurs.

  ‘QUIET, please,’ Beryl says into the microphone. ‘What do you mean, “razorblades”?’

  ‘Sue Danalis,’ I say, pointing at her. ‘She put razorblades in the cake.’

  There are gasps around the hall.

  ‘I knew she was a bad egg,’ a man in the row behind me whispers to his wife. ‘A big bad ostrich egg.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Beryl says.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I tell her.

  I climb the small set of stairs.

  ‘Get him off that stage!’ Sue calls out. ‘He’d better not lay a finger on that fruitcake.’

  ‘The boy’s mad,’ someone else shouts.

  I take Beryl’s fork and dig into the cake, pulling it apart. Sue is granny-cart-speeding down the side of the hall, knocking into chairs. ‘Get your rotten little hands off my cake!’

  I work faster, mashing the cake with the fork, squashing it into the plate to reveal the razorblades and thwart the evil plan. The cake is a pile of rubble now. I’m searching through the crumbs, but I can’t see a single razorblade.

  ‘Look what you’ve done, you silly boy, ’Beryl snips.

  I turn to Nan in the front row for an explanation. Audience members shout some not-very-nice things at me, like, ‘Fruitcake hater!’ Nan beckons me with one bony finger. Sue’s hot-pink granny cart turns the corner at the front of the hall with a squeal of tyres on polished floorboards.

  ‘Excuse me for one moment,’ I say to Beryl.

  ‘This had better be good!’ she growls.

  I slink off the stage, down the wobbly wooden stairs and over to Nan.

  I sit down next to her. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well …’ she whispers.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘The thing is …’

  ‘Nan!’ I warn.

  Sue is speeding along the front of the hall towards us. People in the front row pull their feet back to stop their toes being squished by the huge, chunky tyres.

  ‘I only told you there were razorblades so you’d help me steal the cake, you dingbat, ’Nan whispers.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I only –’

  ‘I heard what you said! Why would you do that? You said, “Girl Guides’ Honour”.’

  ‘I was never even in the Girl Guides, nitwit,’ she snaps.

  Sue’s cart is almost upon us so I jump to my feet, run in front of it and clamber onto the stage. Nan scuttles away down the aisle to escape.

  I grab the microphone from Beryl and clear my throat.

  Sue’s cart pulls up next to the stairs.

  The crowd falls silent. They look like they may want to rip my guts out.

  ‘Um … sorry about that,’ I say. ‘My bad.’

  Shouts from the crowd.

  Sue lowers her enormous frame down off her cart and mounts the stairs to the stage.

  I quickly attempt to mould the pile of crumbs into something that looks a bit like a cake.

  ‘There you go. Good as new,’ I say, forcing a smile. I look to Nan for help but she’s disappeared.

  Sue reaches the top of the stairs, glaring at me, wheezing from the effort.

  ‘You destroyed my cake,’ she huffs. ‘Now I destroy you.’ She grabs my arm but I twist out of her grasp and scurry across the stage in front of the cake table. Just as I go to leap down the stairs, on the far side I hear cries of ‘No!’ from the audience.

  I turn and I’m smacked in the face by a whole fruitcake. It’s hard as a brick and knocks me off my feet. The cake lands on the stage with a thud and splits in two. My face tingles. Blood trickles from my nose.

  The audience is on their feet now, outraged that Sue has thrown someone else’s cake. So I do the natural thing. I get to my feet, pick up a cake from my end of the trestle table and frisbee it at her. It carves through the air and hits her right in the guts. She doubles over with an oof.

  Sue’s not down for long. She grabs the nearest cake, winds up and pitches it at me. I sidestep and it hits the male judge standing behind me in the neck, then explodes off the wall at the side of the stage.

  ‘Right!’ he says and snatches up another cake, pegging it at Sue. It’s an amazing shot. She cops it right in the forehead and the cake detonates, sending big, brown fruity chunks flying everywhere.

  Only two cakes remain. One of the bakers, Fay Crabtree, who used to own the newsagency, storms the stage and seizes her cake. ‘Hands off!’ She scampers away, almost getting hit in the crossfire as Sue picks up the last cake and hurls it into the crowd, shouting, ‘Eat that, haters! I know none of you like me, and I’m glad!’

  People jump to their feet, screaming and throwing lumps of cake back at Sue. The room is a zoo.

  ‘Everybody!’ Beryl calls into the microphone as a cake nugget flies past. ‘Please settle down.’

  Sue tries to duck and weave the cake bombs but she’s not that nimble. She leans forward and overbalances. She swings her arms in circles, trying to hang onto the air, but air has no handles. She howls as she topples from the stage. There’s a lady and man standing on the floor below her. It’s Fay Crabtree and her husband, gently placing the last remaining cake into a Tupperware container. They look up and raise their arms, trying to protect themselves from the wrecking ball, but it’s no good. Sue lands on top of Fay, her husband and the last surviving cake, squishing all three of them into the floor.

  At the back of the hall, the shadowy figure of Nancy Weekly slips out into the sunshine.

  Fay Crabtree is awarded an honorary first prize for the fruitcake bake-off, even though her entry was more like a pancake when they peeled it off the floor. The judges thought the prize might speed her and her husband’s recovery down at Kings Bay Memorial Hospital.

  The president of the Kings Bay Show gives me two weeks of afternoon community work at the Scout hall to ‘think about what I’ve done’. Packing up chairs and tables, sweeping and wiping, painting, cleaning toilets. It stinks.

  I don’t speak to Nan during that time. I’m pretty angry with her. I figure I’ll give her some time to think about what she’s done. On my final afternoon of community service, I drop by her place to give her a piece of my mind. Someone has to tell her that she can’t just go around stealing and lying and cheating people. As I head around the back of her house I start to get cold feet. I guess I don’t want to be too hard on her. She must feel pretty bad after everything that’s happened.

  I find her in the kitchen, blinds drawn, hunched over the dining table.

  ‘What are you doing?�
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  ‘Studying,’ she says.

  ‘Studying what?’

  ‘A map.’

  ‘A map of what?’

  ‘The nursing home. I think our mistake was waiting till the cake was on the window sill. Next year, we’ll break in and steal it right out of the oven.’

  ‘I’m gonna get you, Weekly. This is your fault, ’Brent Bunder croaks, pointing one of his big, fat sausage fingers at me. I don’t like it much when Brent points his sausage fingers at me. Besides, it’s not my fault at all. Brent chucked the pear and broke the window, not me.

  ‘I shall be next door in the staff room attending an important meeting,’ says Mr Skroop. He’s standing at the front of the classroom. Skroop is a beanstalk of a man and has a long nose with hairs sticking out of it. Our projects on ‘Crime and Punishment’ are on the wall behind him. We’ve been studying the legal system and thinking about what should happen to people who break the law. I’m not a fan of Skroop’s brand of punishment at all.

  ‘If any of you move, speak or breathe too heavily I will know about it and you will all be back for lunchtime detention tomorrow. Do I make myself clear?’

  We all nod. No one has admitted to smashing Skroop’s office window with the pear, so the whole class has been given detention. Everybody knows it was Brent but they’re too scared to say, on account of him being four times the size of a normal human child. And the fact that he could snap us in two with his big toe if he wanted to.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ Skroop says, a hand cupped to his ear.

  ‘YES, MISTER SKROOP!’ we all say, trying to deafen him. I was, anyway.

  He strides to the door. I swear he says ‘imbeciles’ under his breath. I didn’t know what an imbecile was till I met Mr Skroop. Now I’ve been called an imbecile at least 45 times, as well as ‘twit’, ‘delinquent’ and ‘idiot’. Not that I’m counting.

  Skroop leaves the door open and slithers up the hall.

  Sasha knows I was involved in the Pear Incident and she gives me a filthy look, which jabs me in the heart. I’m pretty young to have found the woman I’m going to marry but, when you find the one, you just know. Sasha and I are going to have three kids and a labradoodle and a house overlooking the ocean with secret passages and revolving bookcases. I haven’t mentioned this to Sasha yet. I’m waiting for the right time. Probably not now.

  ‘Who wants to have some fun?’ Jack says, getting up from his seat.

  ‘Sit down, Jack,’ Sasha warns.

  ‘Skroop won’t come back,’ Jack says. ‘Relax. Teachers just say all that “Don’t speak. Don’t breathe” stuff to make you think they know everything.’

  Jack goes to the whiteboard on wheels at the front of the room. He starts to draw a picture, beginning with a long nose that looks suspiciously like Mr Skroop’s. He draws long hairs sprouting from it and gets a few laughs.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’ says a voice from the doorway.

  It’s Mr Skroop.

  Jack gulps.

  ‘Lunchtime detention for all of you, tomorrow,’ he says.

  ‘Good one, Jack!’ Brent hisses and throws a pen at him.

  ‘Who threw that?’ Skroop demands. ‘Who threw that missile?’

  Brent puts up his hand. Finally, he’s admitting to something.

  ‘It was Weekly, sir,’ Brent says.

  ‘What?’ I spit.

  ‘That’s another detention on Wednesday,’ Skroop announces. ‘We’re going to have some very sad, very hungry children by the end of the week, aren’t we, Weekly?’ He glares at me and heads off down the hall again.

  No one says a word but the whole room stinks of dirty looks. Most of the stench is aimed at me.

  I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn to see that Stella Holling has dropped a note down the back of my seat. She flutters her eyelashes.

  I choose to ignore it. Stella Holling is always passing me notes and fluttering her eyelashes. When will she get the message? This boat has floated. This plane has flown. This train has left the station. Sasha and I are a sure thing. Just as soon as I get up the courage to ask Jack to ask Sasha’s friend Sophie if she thinks that Sasha will go out with me again.

  After a minute I’m bored, and I’m also worried that someone else might snatch Stella’s note and read it out to the class, so I reach around and grab it. It’s on pink paper and stinks of perfume.

  Jack leans in to read it with me.

  Dear Wolfy, it begins. She’s taken to calling me Wolfy since the school performance of Little Red Riding Hood, where I played Mr Wolf and she tried to trick me into kissing her in front of the entire school.

  Dear Wolfy. I believe you when you say that you didn’t throw the pear. And I saw Brent throw the pen. Please turn around once you’ve read this. Kiss-kiss. Your future wife, Stella.

  Jack laughs. ‘I bags being best man.’

  I ball the letter up in my fist. The palm of my hand is stained with Stella’s perfume. It smells like rotten strawberries and vinegar. I turn slowly, my eyes rolled so far up into their sockets that they might slip over into the back of my skull.

  Stella launches herself forward and smacks a kiss right on my lips in front of everyone.

  ‘Ooooooooo!’ half the class choruses. ‘Shhhhhhhh!’ the other half whisper.

  Within seconds Skroop is at the door.

  ‘Detention!’ he snaps. ‘Thursday. What was that ruckus about?’

  I wipe my lips on the collar of my school shirt.

  ‘Tell me now. What was that disturbance about?’

  I silently pray that no one will tell him that Stella kissed me.

  ‘Weekly kissed Holling, sir,’ Brent offers.

  ‘That’s a lie!’ I explode.

  ‘Did too. Look, you can see her pink lip stuff on his collar.’

  I look down. It’s true. My white collar is smeared with ‘pink lip stuff’.

  ‘Another detention for you all!’ Skroop shouts. ‘There will be no kissing in my classroom, Weekly, do you understand?’

  Sasha glares at me. I hang my head in shame. I’m going to need a lip replacement before the wedding day.

  I want to tell Skroop that Stella hurled herself at me, that I’m irresistible to her – the Weekly Vibe is just too strong. But if I’ve learned one thing about Walton Skroop, it’s that it’s better to say nothing.

  ‘Yes, Mister Skroop.’

  ‘If I have to leave my meeting to come back into this room one more time, it’s detention for the rest of the term for all of you! Are we clear?’

  ‘Yes, Mis-ter Skroop,’ we all groan.

  He slides out of the room again.

  ‘Hey, girls,’ Brent whispers. I turn and he’s looking directly at me and Jack. ‘Wanna play catch?’ He holds up an old brown pear. Is he kidding? Does he have a pear farm in his bag?

  ‘Don’t you dare, Brent,’ Sasha says. ‘That’s what got us into this trouble in the first place.’

  ‘Are you saying I done it?’ Brent asks.

  ‘Everyone knows you did it,’ Sasha snaps.

  Sasha’s braver than I am. Brent’s a scary guy. He once tried to stuff me in the rubbish bin … the one under the teacher’s desk.

  ‘If Weekly hadn’t ducked, that pear would have hit him in the head instead of smashin’ Skroop’s window. So it’s his fault.’

  Jonah, Brent’s snivelling best friend, laughs a blocked-nose snort that turns into a cough.

  ‘Here’s a little present for you, Weekly. ’Brent hurls the pear across the classroom at me. I can’t believe this is happening for the second time today. I’m a pear magnet. Pears love me. They are the Stella Hollings of the fruit world.

  It’s sailing towards my head. I’m ducking but it’s still coming. There’s no way I’ll get lucky a second time – but I do. WHOOM. It soars past my ear and hits the wheelie whiteboard, exploding on impact. It spatters the Crime and Punishment projects. The judge in the middle of mine is now wearing a pear-covered wig. It’s all over the teacher
’s desk, on the carpet, everywhere.

  We all sit up straight, listen and wait for Skroop, knowing that the end is nigh.

  No footsteps.

  No shout of, ‘Detention!’

  We wait for thirty seconds, a minute.

  Still nothing.

  I turn to Brent, who’s smiling his broken-toothed smile. I see how angry Sasha and a bunch of the others are with what he’s done. We’re going to be ready to retire before this detention ends.

  I decide that I’ve had enough of being blamed and scared and pushed around by this oversized toddler with facial hair. I’m tired of him ruling our year. If Sasha can stand up to him, I can too. I go to the board and start scraping together the spattered pear.

  ‘Don’t, Tom,’ a few kids say, Sasha among them.

  I continue to scrape. I can think of three good reasons not to do what I’m about to do with the remains of this pear:

  1) Skroop

  2) Sasha

  3) Brent.

  But I don’t care. It was Brent who broke the window and blamed it on me, Brent who threw the pen and blamed it on me, Brent who told everyone that I’d kissed Stella. And now this.

  I can hear Brent mouth-breathing up the back of the room. I can smell his fishy aroma. And I know it’s time. I pat together a roughly pear-sized ball of fruity goo and turn to my nemesis.

  ‘You better not be doin’ what I think yer doin’, Weekly,’ Brent says.

  I rear my hand back, ready to throw. A gentle grin washes over my face. Goo drips from between my fingers and onto the floor. Every other kid between me and Brent hides beneath their desk.

  ‘If you throw that, Weekly, I’m gonna flatten you like a … piece of toast, y’hear me?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t hear you. This is for everything you’ve done to all of us.’

  And I throw.

  ‘Weekly, what is going on?!’ says Skroop from the doorway. But it’s too late. The pear mush has left my hand and is soaring across the room. It holds together pretty well until about halfway. Then it starts to break apart and there are suddenly three, then nine, then eighty-one pear missiles heading towards Brent Bunder.