Don't Pat the Wombat! Page 6

  Gently she rubbed Azza’s leg. ‘Does this hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has it ever hurt like this before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you know what I think?’ said Chook quietly. ‘It’s growing pains. I don’t know what causes them but they’re nothing to worry about. My Paul got them about your age. He’s twenty-two now, and plays footy for Dandenong. You’re just growing bigger, that’s all.’

  Suddenly there’s a roar and a blinding flash of light. ‘LISTEN YOU LITTLE VERMIN, WHAT DID I SAY? GET THAT TORCH OFF! AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE YOUNG LADY? GET BACK YOUR TENT!’ The light is on Chook. He thinks she’s one of the girls!

  Chook, eyes wide, gasps, ‘Brian!’

  The Bomb steadies himself on the tent pole and flicks his torch right into her face. ‘Oh...it’s you, Betty.’

  ‘Get that light off me. Mario’s got a sore leg.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it.’

  Chook bristles like an angry rooster. ‘Brian, you leave this to me. Why don’t you go and...(we silently add Drop dead. Fall off a cliff. Drown, Hang yourself. Blow up)...sleep.’

  The Bomb stumbled out, growling under his breath, tripping over Mitch’s stick.

  ‘By jingo,’ muttered Chook, ‘he’s the one that needs the treatment!’

  ‘My leg’s not so bad now,’ said Azza.

  ‘Good man,’ said Chook. ‘I could give you a Panadol, but I’m sure you’ll be fine in the morning. If it’s too sore, Jonah, you come and get me again. Now all of you. Off to sleep.’

  She left in a waft of the mum smell. It was dark and quiet again.

  ‘That old Chook...she’s not so bad,’ whispered Nicko.

  Mitch was already asleep.

  Next morning was a whole new day, and Azza was fine. Somebody overheard somebody who told Mitch that The Bomb said Jonah squealed on him to Chook.

  Nicko’s Dream

  Nicko’s mattress was tipped right off the bunk, and Nicko, who sleeps like a log, was gone.

  ‘He’s Nicko-ed off!’ said Mitch.

  ‘I found him!’ yelled Azza from down the hill. ‘He’s under a bush! Still asleep!’

  Nicko’s sheet sleeping bag, sleeping bag, pyjamas, arms, legs and everything were twisted in a sweaty knot, like stuff from the washing machine after a mega spin dry.

  ‘What happened, Nicko my man?’ said Mitch.

  ‘Oh gosh...oh gee...oh...ah...ahhh...oh...’ (Nicko takes a while to wake up.) ‘Oh gosh...I had this dream...I was in Time Zone. There was a free play on Primal Rage. It said, “Play if you dare!” Someone hadn’t taken it.

  ‘It was awesome. I was playing like a professional. To get energy you had to eat all these smaller dinosaurs, then a massive dinosaur comes on roaring, with teeth as long as my arm and two rows of huge spikes on its back. It clawed its victim then it rolled on it with its spikes. You could hear the bones cracking.

  ‘Then I smelt something strange. Blood! I looked down and my arm was missing and I was squirting blood from my shoulder. Suddenly the big dinosaur lunged at me with The Bomb’s glare in its eyes. I was fighting for my life. Both my arms were in the machine and my hands were claws. Lights were flashing, like in Gladiators.

  ‘I was still playing really well. And I got the highest score in the world on that game. And I put my initials on it. Then I woke up.’

  ‘Wow!’ goes Azza. ‘You shouldn’t read any more Goosebumps books, you should write them!’

  ‘Morning, Convicts. What’s happening?’ It was Miss Cappelli, Lisa and Mr Murphy.

  ‘Nicko sleeprolled!’ said Mitch.

  He looked such a fright, with sticks and grass in his hair, the adults cackled.

  ‘Oh, Nicko, don’t get yourself in such a knot!’ said Lisa.

  ‘When you’ve untied yourself, have a shower,’ said Miss Cappelli. ‘You’ll be late for breakfast, but we’ll save you a baked bean.’

  Bloody Leeches

  This morning’s activity was leech torture, although it was called a half-day hike to see a gold mine.

  I’ll tell you something about hiking, trekking and bushwalking — they’re fancy names for walking. Up front were Miss Cappelli, Lisa and Chook with a crowd of kids buzzing around them, and at the back, totally solo, was The Bomb. ‘Walk in a blob please, not a snake,’ said Chook.

  Some kids saw leeches waving themselves near the path, in a frenzy.

  ‘You’d wave, too, if you were a leech,’ said Mitch. ‘How would you like hanging around in the bush waiting for breakfast for yonks and yonks? I bet there are thousands of leeches who never even get their first suck of blood before they die.

  There’s a lot of bush and a lot of leeches and not many creatures.’

  ‘Millions of leeches, leeches for me,’ sang Azza, juggling a stick.

  ‘Wonder if leeches suck other leeches in desperation?’ said Nicko. ‘Say there’s this lucky leech and he gets a good half-an-hour on the leg of this muscly sports teacher. Man, he is one fat roly-poly leech. He’s feeling fabulous. How are all the skinny little leech dudes going to feel? Do they do leech peer support? Is the fat leech going to say to the little skinnies, “Hey guys, do you want some? Dig in.”?’

  It started sprinkling rain, slowly getting us soaking wet. Perfect leech weather. We plodded on. If The Bomb caught up, Jonah dropped back, if The Bomb dropped back, Jonah caught up. If The Bomb was on the left of a bunch of kids, Jonah was on the right. Maybe nobody else noticed, but Miss Cappelli did. She gave us a wink.

  We reached the gold mine, which was a hole in the hill with blackberries growing over the front. The rain was getting a bit heavier now.

  Fifty-one juicy, saturated city kids come to a halt. We are sitting ducks! Leech bait!

  Every leech for 50 kilometres hears the leech cry, ‘KIDS AT THE MINE! FRESH KIDS! FRESH KIDS!’ A wave of leeches starts looping full pelt towards us.

  Only fifteen kids at a time can go into the mine. You have to crouch down, holding onto the jumper of the person in front, and shuffle along with your knees bent. It’s pitch black, and you keep bumping into people. Someone said there were black widow spiders hanging off the roof. And glow worms. I saw them, but their batteries were flat.

  Then we got to a dead end and everyone sat on top of each other in the dark. Chook shone a torch and told us it was the end of the mine. This was pretty obvious because we were looking at a wall of rock. It was a bit sad, really, because we were looking at where the miner ran out of hope and said, ‘I give up’.

  Meanwhile, outside in the rain, the leech feast had begun! Leeches on cheeks, down necks, on boots, on socks, on lips, on legs, waving and looping. Some of them are skinny, like fine threads, some of them are swelling blobs.

  ‘Hey guys, look at this!’ yells Nicko. A leech is sucking from an artery on the back of his hand. He pumps his hand and he’s pumping up the leech! Awesome! You can see the leech swelling!

  Then, out of the dripping bush stumbles The Bomb. He sees Nicko. ‘Stop that, you stupid idiot.’ He whacks the pumped-up leech off Nicko’s hand and it splatters a bloody mess over his pale brown parka.

  The Bomb would like to splatter Nicko the way he splattered the leech. Fortunately, Chook’s mob comes out of the mine in the n.ick of time. The Bomb slips and slides down to the creek to wash off Nicko’s blood.

  Mrs Pumps-Vital, who’s looking pretty anxious herself, keeps saying, ‘It’s all right! It’s all right!’ in a voice that sounds like, ‘It’s not all right! It’s not all right!’

  Kids are crying. They want to be home sitting on Mummy’s knee in front of the telly with a hot Milo, but they’re here with leeches waving off them.

  Girls are screaming like car alarms, kids are jumping round trying to look on their backs, shaking their hands, doing this Michael Jackson leech dance. They are flicking, scraping, pulling, brushing, screaming: ‘GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!’ You flick it with one hand — it sticks to the other hand. You can’t get them off. You know
what? Leeches stick like leeches!

  Jonah is calm. He has about five kids around him and he’s picking off their leeches, not worrying about his own.

  ‘Leeches are really interesting,’ he says. ‘Australia used to export leeches from the Murray River. They were sold in chemists. If you put a leech on a bruise, it takes down the swelling.’

  ‘Dudes, we are being seriously annihilated here,’ says Azza.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Wormz, ‘we’re going to need three helpings of dessert to make up for lost blood.’

  I got a leech on my ear.

  ‘Hey, dude, what’s that groovy earring you’ve got on your ear?’ said Mitch.

  ‘My leech.’

  ‘Cool ring,’ said Azza, putting one on his nose.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Wormz, ‘we’re Leech Boys.’

  Wonder if you can train leeches?

  Chook produces two packets of Minties and we squelch off back to camp. Four kilometres of soggy, slippery, bush track sustaining heavy continuous leech bombardment. There’s stacks of nature, like tree ferns, and fungi, but we’re too busy fighting off the attack of the brown slinkies.

  Back at camp we Number Off to see how many kids have survived the ordeal.

  ‘I’m zero,’ goes Miss Cappelli.

  ‘I’m dead!’ goes Mitch.

  Everyone survived.

  The Bomb is throwing stones at a stump. He misses four times. Pretty pathetic for an archery ace.

  Mrs Pumps-Vital looks like a drowned duck.

  Lisa’s wet hair makes her look like one of the Addams Family.

  Mr Murphy is getting the total plot of Star Trek: The Next Generation from Tak.

  Mitch goes, ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a leech!’

  We jumped under the showers. I was still washing the mud out of my ears when I found a cute little baby leech under my arm. So I called him Terminator and stuck him in my empty shampoo bottle and took him home as a pet.

  I wonder how you breed them? For my next free-choice project I’m going to do: The Life of a Leech’.

  The Feather

  On the hike, Jonah found a feather. It was long and strong, like the ones they wrote with in medieval days. He said it was from an eagle. One of the wing-tip steering feathers that you see spread out like fingers in the wind.

  Jonah got his pocket knife (which you weren’t supposed to have on school camp), cut two small holes in his black hat and stuck the feather through.

  It looked so cool.

  Up comes The Bomb. ‘Get that stupid feather off your head.’

  Jonah didn’t move.

  ‘We’re not in school uniform now, Mr Cromwell,’ goes Azza.

  ‘We’re on camp.’

  ‘I said get that stupid feather off your head.’

  Still Jonah did nothing. Didn’t even look at The Bomb.

  Nicko pipes up, ‘It’s cool, Mr Cromwell. We can wear anything at camp as long as we’re sunsmart. Actually, it’s an eagle’s feather from the end of the wing,’ thinking he could change the subject with facts.

  The Bomb glared at Jonah. Jonah didn’t look at him. I thought The Bomb was going to grab the feather and chuck it, but he turned and walked off.

  Ten minutes later, as we were filing into the dining hut for lunch, The Bomb stood just inside the door. Jonah saw him a split second too late. The Bomb grabbed the feather, cracked it and chucked it in the bin. ‘Get your hat off!’ he snapped at Jonah.

  Other kids came in and didn’t take their hats off until they were sitting at the table, and The Bomb didn’t say anything to them. ‘Rotten slime bucket orang-outang!’ goes Mitch under his breath.

  But after lunch, Jonah appeared wearing the broken feather in his hat. He’d fished it out of the bin, washed it and stuck it back in his hat. And there it stayed.

  Miss Cappelli called him Brave Broken-Feather, and the nickname stuck.

  ‘Listen to this!’ goes Nicko in a shout-whisper, waving madly at me. We were going round the back of the teachers’ hut to our tent to get our camp books.

  ‘Goodness gracious!’ said Chook.

  ‘This is school camp!’ We could hear Miss Cappelli’s voice getting louder and angrier. ‘It’s supposed to be fun! It’s the one time of the year when we all go away together. We learn things and we enjoy ourselves. Stop picking on him.’

  Mr Murphy muttered something.

  Mrs Pumps-Vital, for the first time in her life, was quiet.

  The Bomb’s voice, deeper than usual, muttered something.

  You’re wrong!’ I heard Lisa say.

  ‘...needs to smarten his act up...the boy’s a gutless little wimp.’

  ‘No Brian, he’s strong,’ said Miss Cappelli, ‘like you!’

  Then we shot off because someone opened a door.

  A bit later The Bomb made Jonah sit by himself on the steps of the cookhouse, for some reason. Mary happened along and sat down, too, for a chat — about animals, I bet. The Bomb couldn’t tell her off for talking to him!

  Stick-and-Spud Spinning

  In the afternoon we had to pick between spinning, blacksmithing, making damper and making butter. We chose blacksmithing.

  Suddenly Miss Cappelli appeared and said in a don’t-ask-me-why voice, ‘You Convicts are spinning.’

  ‘Guess what activity The Bomb’s in charge of.’ said Nicko.

  ‘Thanks, Jonah,’ said Mitch.

  It had stopped raining, but everything was damp. Mary sat on the verandah of the rec hall. The first settlers had to carry their belongings a long way,’ she said. They decided very carefully what to bring with them. They could still spin, without a spinning wheel, as long as they had a stick and a potato. Get me that stick by the tree please, Matos.’

  Mary picked a spud from the bucket beside her, stuck the stick through it, and showed us how to spin

  You grab a lump of Mintie’s wool and fluff it out and comb it with the bed-of-nails bats. We worked in pairs. One person is the teaser-outer and the other is the spud-spinner.

  Then, when it’s fluff fluff fluffy, you twist it onto the thread from the spud, and you spin the spud and feed the fluff out.

  Jonah and I couldn’t get the knack at first. Our thread kept breaking, then it was too lumpy. ‘Tease it more,’ said Mary.

  We got the knack.

  We thought spinning would be boring, but it was cool fun. Mary told us about her sister who was in a race to shear a sheep, spin the wool and knit it into a jumper. It took nine hours!

  Jonah said the fishermen of Aran wear the same jumpers all their lives, and if they drown and a body is washed up, people can tell who it is by the pattern of their jumper. ‘They’re bad news for the fashion industry!’ laughed Mary. Jonah smiled at her.

  First Jonah spun the spud, then we swapped.

  ‘Let’s make it really fine,’ said Jonah. ‘Twist slow and steady’ He fed out the wool. We got it thin and even, like a real thread of wool.

  Then the ship’s bell rang and it was time for duty groups.

  Jonah pulled off our finest piece of thread and stuck it in his overalls pocket. I’d been thinking I would take it home to show Mum. I didn’t say anything, but I was annoyed.

  More Trouble Than the Early Settlers

  There were shouts from the Swaggies’ tent: Thornton Primary’s done a wee on Christianna’s pillow!’

  ‘And Little Petal’s eaten my...oh, nothing!’

  Naomi lugged Thornton Primary out and put him down on his four stumpy legs. ‘Guilty!’ she said.

  He scratched a wombat flea and headed back to the Swaggies’ tent.

  ‘No you don’t!’ said Naomi.

  There was a big blow-up about the Swaggies still having lollies. Renee’s bag was ripped.

  Then there was the medicine bottle smash.

  Before camp your parents filled in a form about asthma, wetting the bed, etc. If you had to take medicine it was kept in the teachers’ fridge and they supervised it.

  ‘I have to take my medicine now,
’ said Sarah to Miss Cappelli, who was helping with cooking duty group.

  ‘Good, Sarah, go and get it. I trust you.’

  She was standing outside the teachers’ hut when The Bomb yelled behind her, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  She dropped the bottle and it smashed on the concrete step.

  There was a big fuss.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m nearly better,’ said Sarah. ‘Honestly, I could do without the last of it.’

  ‘No,’ goes The Bomb. ‘You have to take the lot. I caused her to drop it. I’ll go and get the replacement.’

  So he drove off to the next town, which is a fair way.

  ‘He’ll get some medicine from Auntie Boozer as well!’ said Mitch.

  Then everyone tucked into the apples. Matos, the show-off, took his apple core to Sinbad, the horse, and like a dumb idiot he horsed around with the horse. Sinbad bit Matos on the nose!

  Matos was groaning in agony. Mary, Lisa and Miss Cappelli ran to him.

  ‘The one time we really need that man, he isn’t here,’ said Chook. The Bomb had just driven off in the in-case-of-emergencies car.

  ‘I’m not waiting till he gets back,’ said Miss Cappelli. ‘He could take ages. This boy’s in agony. He’s got to see a doctor.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mary. ‘Helmut’s got my car. We’ll have to take him in my bus. I think Doctor Connor is our best bet. That’s about thirty ks.’

  As well as horse-drawn carts, wagons, funeral- and dunny-can carts, Mary had an old school bus.

  Chook made some phone calls, then Mary hopped up behind the big steering wheel and started up her old bus. Miss Cappelli sat beside poor Matos who was holding an icepack on his nose and clutching a box of tissues.

  ‘Good luck!’ we yelled as the massive old bus with two little passengers bumped off down the drive and swung onto the highway.

  ‘I know it was a terrible misfortune,’ said Wormz. ‘I know it hurts Matos like mad, but gee, that was funny!’