Digger Field (10 page)

I took some elastic from Mum’s sewing kit. I told Wrigs to go home and grab some cotton and string, and then meet me at the bottom of View Street.

I rang Tearley. ‘The world record attempt is back on,’ I told her. ‘Me and Wrigs are going to build an early warning system, so if Mr Black turns up, or the police, we’ll know and we’ll have enough time to hide.’

When we got to the river, we started making our early warning system straight away. The entrance to the path is not very wide. It’s just a gap between a couple of grevillea bushes, which is why it’s so hard to find. We found a small rock and tied a piece of cotton to the end of it. Then we stretched the cotton between the bushes. You couldn’t see the cotton but you couldn’t walk down the path without walking through it. Once it had been touched it would trigger the early warning system (or the EWS as we called it).

The rock at the end of the cotton was holding down a piece of elastic. The elastic was attached to a tin can full of gravel. The tin can was hanging by a string from a branch of a tree.

So when someone set off the EWS, the tin can would be released to swing through the air and crash into a bit of corrugated iron that had been dumped in the bushes. It would make a huge noise, which gave us fifteen seconds to hide in the bushes.

Of course, if we had a tinnie, we could jump into that and power off down the river. But we didn’t.

We skimmed rocks all afternoon, knowing we were being protected by our perfect EWS. We were pretty proud of it. I wondered if we could sell the plans to buy the tinnie.

Wriggler said that throwing left-handed still hurt too much, so he invented a new skimming technique. He lined up a whole lot of rocks on the shore, then ran up and kicked them in.

It didn’t work. Only one rock bounced once.

It was a stupid idea.

CHAPTER 25

DAY 23: Sunday

No skimming today.

Money made for tinnie or Tearley: $14.50 ($810.50 to go—at least we’re getting closer.)

Tearley came around after breakfast with a couple of buckets and rags.

‘I know how you can make some money to pay me back for the camera.’

‘How?’

‘Mum was speaking to this nice woman yesterday who said she would pay for someone to clean her house.’

‘I hate cleaning,’ I said.

Wrigs turned up and saw the buckets. ‘We’re not going to do that windscreen thing again, are we?’ he said.

‘No, house cleaning,’ said Tearley.

‘I hate cleaning,’ he said.

‘The three of us can do it,’ Tearley said. ‘Mum said she used to get fifteen dollars an hour when she was a cleaner.’

Fifteen bucks an hour. We’d make a killing as cleaners. Maybe we could still get the tinnie.

‘We could knock on other people’s doors and see if we can do their houses, too,’ I said.

‘This lady’s house is just up the street,’ said Tearley.

We walked up the road until there was only one house left.

‘Ms Burke,’ said Wrigs. ‘There’s no way I’m going to help that witch out. She’ll pay us nothing.’

‘C’mon, Wrigs,’ said Tearley.

‘Nah, I’m outta here,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got all the scabs on my legs from when Digger and I tidied up her backyard.’

Wrigs stormed off.

‘You still owe me seventy-five bucks,’ Tearley said to me.

I had no chance of getting out of it.

The house smelt of old people. Musty and humid. It was stuffed full of hundred-year-old couches and dressers and faded carpets. The curtains looked liked they hadn’t been opened in decades. Every surface was covered with photos of old and probably dead people.

And everything was covered by a centimetre of dust. We spent ages cleaning and dusting and vacuuming.

I accidently knocked over a whole lot of photos that were standing on top of an old wooden cabinet. Tearley came and helped me put them back up. She pointed at one of them.

‘Look who it is,’ she said.

It was a teenager grinning at the camera. His front tooth was gold.

‘That’s Mr Black,’ I said. ‘The photo must be fifteen years old.’

‘I wonder what Mr Black’s got to do with Ms Burke?’ said Tearley.

Ms Burke walked back in at that moment. She had on a long white glove and was running her index finger along the top of the surfaces we’d cleaned. She was checking for dust.

‘Who’s this, Ms Burke?’ asked Tearley pointing to the photo.

‘Why do you ask?’ said Ms Burke.

‘Is he your son?’ I asked.

‘My son? Good heavens, no,’ she said. ‘He used to do odd jobs for me but I had to get rid of him when I caught him stealing. I don’t even know why I still have his photo here.’

‘He looks familiar,’ said Tearley.

‘He moved away from here years ago,’ she said. ‘He was a bad egg.’

She took the photo into the kitchen and it sounded like she threw it in the bin.

She walked out again and asked, ‘Have you finished?’

‘Yes,’ said Tearley.

Ms Burke gave us her best weak-old-lady smile and dropped a couple of two-dollar coins into Tearley’s hands.

Four dollars! We’d been cleaning her house for two and a half hours. It was even worse than when we did her backyard. Wrigs was right, we should never have come here.

I was about to walk out when Tearley said, ‘Thank you, Ms Burke. Are you happy with the job?’

Ms Burke looked around the house and said, ‘I think you have done
quite
well, thank you.’

‘I’m glad you’re pleased,’ said Tearley, sweet as pie. ‘Now, the going rate for a cleaner is fifteen dollars per hour and Digger and I have been going for five hours between us. That’s seventy-five dollars.’

Ms Burke sucked in her cheeks. She was about to say something, but Tearley went on. ‘However, I know you’re a pensioner, so we’ll discount it to ten dollars an hour. That means you only owe us fifty dollars.’

Ms Burke opened and closed her mouth a few times, but no sound came out. I don’t think anyone had ever spoken to her like this before.

‘And as a special introductory offer,’ Tearley continued, ‘we’ll only charge you seven dollars an hour, to say thank you for trying us out. That makes a total of thirty-five dollars, which is a saving of forty dollars.’

Ms Burke opened her purse. There were so many banknotes jammed into it, it looked like it was going to burst.

‘I’ve only got twenty-five dollars,’ she lied.

‘That’ll do,’ said Tearley and took the notes from her.

So we walked out with twenty-nine dollars all up. The twenty-five dollars in notes and the pair of two-dollar coins. Fourteen dollars and fifty cents each.

If we keep making money like this, we’ll still be able to buy the tinnie before Uncle Scott puts it on eBay.

CHAPTER 26

DAY 24: Monday

My skims: 17

Wriggler’s skims: 0

Tearley’s skims: 14

He’s back. Mr Black.

Money made for tinnie or Tearley: $0 ($810.50 to go.)

Not sure we can sell the plans for the EWS just yet.

We were all back at the river skimming when a voice behind us said, ‘Hello, kids. You well, yeah?’

‘Er … yeah,’ I said.

Mr Black had somehow got past our early warning system.

‘I’ve just come back from America,’ he said. ‘Very quick trip, yeah. Beautiful place. Very fat people, yeah. Have you been looking after my place for me?’

‘Oh, you own it?’ said Tearley.

‘No, no. It just feels like it, yeah. We’re the only ones that ever use it, so it’s our place in a way. Yours and mine.’

‘S’pose,’ I said. I had no idea what Mr Black was getting at.

‘You’re not sure, yeah? Have other people been coming here?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘That’s good, yeah. It’s our secret place. Have you broken the world record yet?’

‘No,’ Tearley said. ‘Are you Mr Bayoumi?’

‘Who? Bayoumi, yeah? Never heard of him,’ Mr Black said. ‘Keep practising. You will be champions soon, yeah. See ya later.’

He strode back up the path. He didn’t set off the EWS on his way out, either. Wrigs went up to see why it hadn’t gone off.

Tearley said, ‘Well, at least we know why he’s been talking to us. He wants to find out if anyone else has been down here.’

Wrigs came back down and said, ‘Freaky. He got through the EWS without breaking the cotton.’

‘Do you still think he’s a ghost?’ I asked.

‘He might be,’ said Wriggler.

‘Why would a ghost go to America?’ I said.

CHAPTER 27

DAY 25: Tuesday

A midnight trip to the river. Stupid.

Mum thought we were mad. She stopped chopping the onions for dinner.

‘You haven’t done that since you were six.’

‘It’ll be fun,’ I said.

I grabbed the cutlery from the drawer and started setting the table. It wasn’t even my turn but I thought it might soften Mum up so she’d let us camp on our front lawn.

‘Tearley’s bringing over her tent, so she’ll sleep in that one and Wrigs and I will sleep in my one,’ I added.

Squid looked up from the jigsaw puzzle he was doing on the floor. ‘Can I camp, too?’ he said.

‘Good idea,’ said Mum. ‘Squid can stay with you.’

Squid! That would be a total disaster. The whole camping idea was just a cover so we could sneak down to the river and video Mr Black going into the deserted house.

None of us wanted to go back inside the house at night. So instead we were going to wait on View Street and video Mr Black as he went down the path towards the house. Then we’d wait until he came back out and follow him as far as we could, to see where he came from. We were going to play Shadows for real.

‘No way,’ I said to Mum. ‘That will wreck everything. We’re going to stay up all night telling horror stories. They’ll be too scary for Squid.’

Mum put on the most
mum
-est voice ever. ‘All I’m saying is, if you were five going on six, the most exciting thing you could do is go camping with your big bro for the night. Isn’t that right, Squidy?’

Squid had forgotten the jigsaw puzzle and was stuffing his face with the bread I had just put on the table.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘But, Mum, if you were eleven going on twelve, the worst thing you could do is have your little brother hanging around when you had your friends over.’

Mum just gave me that look that said, ‘Don’t even bother, you’ve lost.’

So Squid had to stay with us.

Tearley and Wrigs came around just before it went dark. We set up our tents on the front lawn. I had to think of a way of getting rid of Squid, otherwise there would be no way we’d be able to go down to the river to video Mr Black.

As soon as night fell, we all crammed into one tent. I decided to tell Squid the scariest story I could think of.

I told him about a little boy who went camping in his own yard. The boy had a great time but about a week later he started to get headaches. They got so bad, he found it hard to think or even keep his eyes open. His parents took him to the doctor but she couldn’t find anything wrong.

It got to the stage where the boy’s head hurt so much he thought he would die. It felt like the whole inside of his head was moving around. He scratched the top of his forehead, just where his hair started, and something crawled onto his finger. It was a little bug, like a small beetle. He felt again and another bug crawled onto his finger.

Then he noticed there was blood on his finger. He felt again and found a little hole in his skin. Blood was oozing out of it. Then a bug came through the hole. And another one. And another one.

The boy’s mum rushed him to hospital and the doctors had to open up his head. It turned out that, when he was camping, an insect had burrowed into the top of his head and laid eggs. Hundreds and thousands of them.

As the eggs hatched, the newborn bugs started to crawl around and look for food. They were eating the boy from the inside out. There was nothing the doctors could do.

Squid jumped up and ran back into the house.

Then Wrigs bolted as well. As he pushed past me I saw the veins in his neck popping out. Total Wrig-out. By the time Tearley and I got out of the tent, we could see Wrigs running up the street towards his place.

I chased after him. When I got to his house, he was sitting on his front balcony.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘I just had to go to the toilet,’ he said.

‘You could have gone at my house.’

‘I wanted to use my own,’ he said.

‘Bull. You got really scared.’

‘Did not.’

‘You did, and that was just a kid’s horror story,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t scared. I had to go to the toilet.’

Tearley finally caught us up and came running up the front steps. ‘You’re such an idiot, Wrigs,’ she said.

The veins in Wrigs’ neck popped out again. It looked like we were about to see a double-Wrig-out.

‘Am not,’ said Wrigs. ‘Nothing scares me.’

Tearley said, ‘You’re so weak, there’s no way you would have followed Mr Black tonight, you would have chickened out.’

‘Oh yeah?’ he said. ‘Well, I bet
you
wouldn’t go down into the deserted house in the dark.’

‘When?’ said Tearley.

‘Now,’ said Wrigs.

Tearley looked like she didn’t want to answer.

‘I will,’ I said.

As soon as I said it, I felt sick. I remembered the noise of something scraping, scratching, trying to get out, last time I was there at night.

Wrigs and Tearley were both looking at me. It was too late. I had said it. I had to do it.

‘I’ll go if you go,’ I said to Wrigs. ‘You reckon you’re such a tough guy.’

‘Okay,’ he mumbled.

‘This is the deal,’ I said. ‘Me and you have to go into the house and touch the manhole.’

Wrigs looked like he wanted to run away, again.

‘And just to make sure, we have to video it.’

‘All right.’

I could hardly hear him.

So Tearley grabbed Wriggler’s camera and the three of us headed down to the deserted house.

We got to the pathway just before midnight. There was a full moon so it wasn’t as dark as last time I was there at night. We were all trying to act cool but we were pretty edgy.