Digger Field (3 page)
Authors: Damian Davis
DAY 5: Wednesday
My skims: 0
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Days to becoming world champion: 34 (Need to get a wriggle on.)
Money made for tinnie: $10 ($725 to go.)
Wrigs and I decided to spend the morning trying to make money for the tinnie. We knocked on every door in my street offering to do odd jobs. No one was interested. We had almost given up when we knocked on the front door of the last house in my street.
Ms Burke is the oldest person in our street, if not the world. And it turns out she also has the biggest yard.
She said she’d pay us to tidy it up. Six hours later, we walked out thirsty, sunburnt and covered in sweat and scratches.
We’d been weeding, cutting, digging and carrying in thirty-five-degree heat, and all she’d given us was ten dollars. That worked out at eighty-three and a half cents each per hour. And we were lucky to come out alive. I saw a snake, which I swear was a brown snake and, when Wrigs was pulling out some lantana plants, he got swooped by two myna birds.
Ms Burke might be the sweetest old lady in the universe but she totally ripped us off.
But all was not lost. I found a heap of worms under her mulberry tree. An excellent plan sprung to my mind. Me and Wrigs would go into the silk industry. Silk is worth a fortune, so we should have enough money to buy a tinnie in no time.
Silkworms are baby moths that haven’t become proper moths yet. Silk is their spew. They vomit it out, then wrap it around themselves to make a cocoon.
Next time you hear someone boasting about having a silk scarf, remind them they are wearing moth vomit.
To start a silkworm farm you put the worms in a box in a dark place, like Wriggler’s bedroom. You feed them mulberry leaves until they spin themselves cocoons. Cocoons are pure silk. This should take about three days.
When the worms leave the cocoons they have turned into moths, but they can’t fly away. They just flap around in the bottom of boxes until they lay eggs. Then the eggs hatch and you have a new generation of silkworms.
It’s a money-making machine. We left Ms Burke’s garden with as many silkworms as we could find and headed straight for Wriggler’s house. When we got there we covered the whole of Wriggler’s bedroom floor with old cardboard boxes from his garage. Then we filled each box with mulberry leaves and heaps of silkworms.
We might have got ripped off by Ms Burke when we tidied her yard but in a few days we would be rolling in silk.
Then me and Wrigs tried to go skimming. But both of us were so sore from clearing out the yard we couldn’t lift our arms high enough to throw a rock.
DAY 6: Thursday
My skims: 14
Wriggler’s skims: 4
Days to becoming world champion: 33
Very weird day today. Feels like everyone is getting together to try and stop me getting this world record.
Money made for tinnie: $0 ($725 to go.)
Mum had an almighty go at me as soon as I got up. I must have left a bundle of stones in my pockets because when she washed my shorts she thought the washing machine was blowing up. It sounded like someone was firing a machine gun.
What Mum doesn’t understand is how hard it is to find the perfect skimming rock, so she threw them away. When we got to the river I had to spend ages looking for decent rocks. Most of the ones I found were too big or too pointy.
No one much goes down to the empty blocks of land where we skim so we had the place to ourselves. The patch of river we go to is at the bottom of View Street, which is a dead end. You wouldn’t know the blocks were there unless you knew. The land drops off from the end of the street to the river and there is only one way in. It’s a narrow pathway that winds through a whole lot of shrubs.
About ten metres in, there is a rock ledge which you have to climb down to get into the clearing. To your left, facing the river, is the vacant lot and to the right is the deserted house we hid in when we were being chased by the kayaker.
While we were looking for rocks in the long grass around the deserted house we decided to invent a language that only we could understand.
First we tried speaking backwards. But we sounded like we’d been brought up by gorillas in the jungle. ‘S … g … i … r … w … d … a … e … h … s … i … n … o … e … r … i … f.’
I thought my brain would explode. So I came up with Driggleish—half-Digger and half-Wriggler. To speak it, you just add ‘ig’ into the middle of every word.
If you want to say, ‘Wrigs’ head is on fire,’ you just say: ‘Wrigigs’ heigad iigs oign figire.’ Simple. ‘Look at that kid, his fly is undone,’ becomes: ‘Loigok aigt thigat kigid, higis fligy iigs unigdone.’
Pretty soon we sounded like we’d been talking Driggleish all our lives.
Then Wrigs said, ‘Whigo iigs thigat duigude?’
A man dressed in a black suit and black sunglasses and carrying a black briefcase strode down the pathway. He was talking quickly into a phone, which was also black.
We couldn’t work out what he was saying but we could tell he was really angry. He was stomping around and whisper-shouting into the phone. Whisper-shouting is when you’re shouting but you don’t want anyone to hear you, so you whisper and shout at the same time. It’s really hard to do.
The man hung up on whoever he was whisper-shouting at and put his phone in his pocket.
He went to the doorway of the house, then carefully paced out six steps and put the briefcase down to mark the spot. He went back to the door, pulled out a tape measure from his other pocket and measured the width of the doorway. He then disappeared inside.
‘Whigat’s hige doiging?’ said Wriggler.
‘Mayigbe hige iigs aig buigilder,’ I said.
‘Hige looigks migore liigke aig gaigngster.’
The man reappeared at the doorway. Wrigs was right. He did look like a gangster. He was about thirty, not very tall, but his dark hair was slicked down and he looked like he had been born with sunglasses on. He pressed the button on his tape measure and the tape got sucked back into its case.
Then he saw us and just stopped. Dead still. He seemed furious that someone else was there. He just stared at us. Then his phone rang again and he answered it and started whisper-shouting, twice as quickly and twice as angrily as before. He turned around and disappeared up the path. He left the briefcase sitting there. In between us and the pathway. Between us and the only way out.
‘Whigat’s iign thige caigse?’ Wriggler was panicking.
‘Giguns?’
‘Moigney?’
The black briefcase looked like something a businessman would carry around. It had huge gold locks and a padlock around the handle.
‘Mayigbe iigt’s aig bigomb.’
‘Aig bigomb?’
‘A bomb.’
Wriggler looked at me for a moment, then bolted past the briefcase and up the path towards View Street. I waited exactly 1.27 milliseconds, then followed him.
We sneaked back down to the river a couple of hours later but there was no sign of the man in the black suit or his briefcase. And no bomb crater.
As me and Wrigs walked home, we tried to work out who the man could be. We had no idea what he wanted with our skimming spot, but we reckoned it wasn’t good news for us.
Wrigs still thought he was a gangster looking for a hideout. I reckoned he was a real estate agent wanting to sell the property.
Either way, he wouldn’t want us hanging around. It wasn’t looking good for the world record.
DAY 7: Friday
My skims: 0
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Days to becoming world champion: 32
No training today: hottest day in history.
Money made for tinnie: -$10 ($735 to go—again.)
It was the hottest day in the history of the world, and we got in the most trouble in the history of the world, just for trying to stay out of the heat.
My house is not that different from most of the other houses on our street. It’s an old fibro place with a big front yard. The backyard is tiny. All that fits in it are Mum’s little vegie patch and the chicken coop Dad built.
Dad has six chickens that run around the backyard, pooing and squawking and getting in the way.
Dad always says, ‘We don’t have much but we have as many eggs as we want.’ Which in my mind is exactly none. I hate eggs. I don’t like chickens either.
The front yard is where everything happens. There’s a lawn that slopes down to the street. There are a few steps going up to the front door. There’s a front verandah and, on a hot day, it’s the coolest part of the house.
Wrigs and I were sitting out there.
‘It’s too hot to skim today,’ Wrigs said.
‘Let’s make some money then,’ I said.
‘Nah, too hot.’
He was right. What Wrigs and I do when we’re really bored is try and outdo each other.
‘It’s so hot I saw a bird fall out of the sky,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah? It’s so hot I saw a plane fall out of the sky.’
‘It’s so hot my sister burnt her lips on her braces.’
‘It’s so hot my grandma’s false teeth melted.’
‘It’s so hot I sat in the oven to cool down.’
‘It’s so hot I stuck a chilli up my bum to cool down.’
Wriggler didn’t have a good comeback to that one so he said we should go to Tearley’s house.
Cindy Tearle lives two streets away from me, and my mum and her mum are best friends. Tearley and I have been in the same class ever since preschool and I can’t stand her. She is my archenemy. She thinks she’s really smart. But, she does have one of the only swimming pools in Pensdale and it was the hottest day in history.
We decided to ride to Tearley’s. I still have the same hopeless bike I got when I was seven. It’s painted with all these stupid designs and it has a big sticker on the frame that says ‘Street Rad’. It might as well have one saying ‘This bike is lame but we’ve tried to hide that fact by painting some really sad lightning bolts on it and giving it a name we think makes it sound really cool, but really just makes it sound even more pathetic than it already is’.
Wriggler’s bike is called ‘Screamer’, which describes the noise he makes when he hits the front brake too hard and goes flying over the handlebars.
To get to Tearley’s house we rode down my street, Phillip Avenue, turned left into George Street and then left again into Elizabeth Road. It was so hot we were both dripping with sweat by the time we got there.
Tearley’s house is a little bigger than ours, and a bit newer. But only a bit. Hers is from the seventies. It’s got shag pile carpet on the floor and a weird indoor rock garden just inside the front door. You have to take your shoes off before going in. It’s not that the house is especially nice or anything, it’s just that Tearley’s mum is Chinese and everything has to be feng shui, which means the furniture is arranged to encourage positive thoughts. She starts shouting if anything is out of place.
When we arrived Tearley made us go around the side of the house, so we wouldn’t disturb the air inside, or something.
When we got to the pool I whispered to Wrigs, ‘Liget’s jigust igignore higer aignd mayigbe sheig’ll gigo bigack inigside aignd ligeave uigs aligone.’
Tearley must have heard me because she said, ‘Shigut uigp, yigou idigiot. Yigou’re siguch aig nonghead, Dribbler.’ Then she dived into the pool.
I don’t know how she worked out our language so quickly. And I hate that she always calls me nonghead and Dribbler. She’s not that smart, though—she should have said ‘nongighead’ and ‘Drigibbler’.
After we’d been swimming around for a bit I thought it would be really cool to have something to float on. The only thing I could think of were the beanbags in Tearley’s tele room.
The beans in beanbags are polystyrene balls. That’s the white stuff that they put in packing boxes so that things don’t get broken. The good news is that polystyrene floats, so the beanbags floated excellently. It was like sitting in armchairs on the top of the water.
Then I had such a brilliant idea I fell off my bag. Beanbag surfing. You put the beanbag in the middle of the pool. Then you get out of the pool, take a run-up, jump on the beanbag and see how long you can stand on it before you fall off.
Tearley was the first to have a go. She ran up and jumped on her beanbag and it cruised right into the middle of the pool. It hardly sank because she was so light. She stood there until it completely stopped moving, then she dived back into the water. It’s a big advantage to be small like Tearley when you’re beanbag surfing.
Wrigs completely missed his bag and almost cracked his head open on the side of the pool.
I nearly made it right across the pool on mine but the beanbag wasn’t strong enough to hold my weight. It started to sink, and it must have split because little white balls started escaping. As the split got bigger, more and more balls came out.
All the little balls floating on the water made me think of a snow dome. Y’know, one of those ornament things people give each other as presents. A model of Santa, or the Eiffel Tower, or something, inside a plastic dome. When you shake it, white stuff floats around the model and is supposed to look like snow.
We emptied the rest of my beanbag into the pool, but the balls floated and wouldn’t sink, so we couldn’t turn the pool into a proper snow dome.
‘Let’s make waves,’ I yelled.
We started doing bombs and splashing so the balls would get caught in the wake and get pushed underwater. But they would only stay under for a moment before they popped back up. You had to dive under at just the right time. When you did it right, it felt like you were in your own private snow dome.
I was underwater when Tearley’s mum turned up. Even though I was looking up at her through a million balls, I could tell she was mighty angry. Let’s just say it was the last time we’ll be swimming in Tearley’s pool this summer. It might be the last time we see Tearley, too. I think she’s grounded until she’s twenty-two.
The good news was that by the time we had been kicked out of Tearley’s place the day had cooled down. And I had the best idea ever. Even better than the snow dome, because it involved making money.
