Mucked Up (7 page)

And in the big war with the Nazis, these brainy English geeks built the first proper computer to read secret war-messages that the Nazis were sending each other – the computer was called Colossus and helped kill lots of Nazis and beat Hitler. When they weren’t using it to kill Nazis and beat Hitler, I wonder if they used it to go on Instagram and stuff. Probs.

My little ball is still spinning, this computer is so old and slow it’s probably the next version up from Colossus. Here we go: desktop’s just coming up now. Open my account, type in my password.

F - L - U - F - F - Y

Name of our cat. It’s the only good reason to have a cat: so you’ve got a password for stuff.

On my screen there is a file called
Me In 30 Seconds.
mp4
.

This is our video term-project that we’ve been working on for the last three weeks and it’s due next week – we have to make a 30-second multi-media presentation with photos and video and music about how we see ourselves, what our interests are, who are the most important people in our lives. But it’s hard to do a movie about yourself when you have the kind of me-life that’s not worth telling anyone about.

Taleeesha Monk’s computer is up and she has opened her movie file and I can see what she is doing if I lean a bit sideways. She is playing her Me In 30 Seconds movie and it is pretty good. It starts with a pic of her when she was a baby sitting in a highchair with cake all over her face and under the pic is a caption that says ‘
WHAT A GREEDY GUTS!!!!!
’ Then there’s a pic of her with her grandparents: she’s like five or something and she is holding a guinea pig with a caption under it that says ‘
BEST XMAS PRESENT EVVVVA, THANKS NONNA AND POP6!!!!!!!!!!
’

The pics go through her whole life and there are lots of captions with lots of exclamation marks like ‘
LOVING THE SNOW!!!!!
’ and ‘
WHITE-WATER RAFTING IN BALI WITH MY MUM AND STEP-DAD!!!!
’ The pics go all the way to today with a pic of her and Cayleb Bukor at a party, sticking their tongues out at the camera and doing rock-fingers: ‘
ROCKSTARZZZZZ!!!!!!!!
’

Cayleb is her boyfriend, he’s in Year 10, and they’ve done stuff together apparently, that is the rumour. Hard to believe I am sitting so close to someone who has actually, like possibly
DONE
stuff.

What is interesting about her Me In 30 Seconds movie is that she has chosen a Hilltop Hoods song in the background, a really violent one. It’s about corpses and pouring petrol over a lake and it shouldn’t go together with the happy pics, but it works, it’s really good and I even make a little hmmmmm noise which makes her turn to look at me and I have to turn away fast so she doesn’t think I’m peeking.

On the other side of me, Wiggy is working on his Me In 30 Seconds movie. Lots of footy pics from all the footy games he’s played. Wiggy is a quality footy player who won the regional under-15’s best and fairest award so he’s got pics of him going hard at tackles and taking flying speckies and his team all jumping around happy cos they won the grand final.

All the way through there’s an Adele lovesong playing in the background, really soft and nice and vom-lovely, and it shouldn’t really go with the footy shots but it kind of does in a weird way, it makes it very emotional.

At the end is a short vid of him with his mum at some footy awards. He’s holding a massive trophy and his mum is crying and Adele is singing about how when she’s far away, she’ll keep being in love and flarp, it makes me almost cry. I make a little sniff and Wiggy looks over so I quickly go back to my computer and lean forward and look like I’m concentrating hard on my work.

Wiggy’s Me In 30 Seconds movie really tells you everything about Wiggy. How he’s all opposites, like shy and quiet in normal life but he’s full-on confident when he plays footy. And how he’s dark and Aboriginal but he has like yellow blond hair on his head. And how he is a boy but he likes Adele songs. Lots of opposites in one person, that makes me like him.

Better get started on my 30 Seconds of Me movie, double click on my file and it opens. Here, have a look. Okay, this is what I have been working on all term. Here we go …

Black screen …

Titles slowly fade up …

ME IN 30 SECONDS

And fade to black.

That’s it. Three seconds done. Twenty-seven seconds to go.

It’s not easy making a movie about your life when you don’t really have a me-life. I haven’t really travelled anywhere outside of the city. Haven’t really done any interesting things. I’m flarping crap at sport. Never won a trophy. Never won a ribbon. Don’t have a girlfriend. Never done stuff with a girl. Don’t celebrate Christmas and get presents from grandparents. Don’t even have a face that looks good in photos: it’s a bad face with a big freckle on my nose that looks like an ant walking up it. Sometimes people even try to squash it, it’s pretty awkward for everyone.

What am I supposed to put in the twenty-seven seconds left of my Me In 30 Seconds movie?

Do I put in a pic of Mum and Dad taking me bowling at Moorabbin Bowls with my little sis because I have nowhere else to go on Saturday night? A pic of me holding my Certificate of Participation I got for participating in the Maths Olympiad? A pic of me standing round wearing crap clothes that came from the op-shop and have the word BOY on the front? A pic of sad Dad sitting round in his undies all day? – he used to be a sound-effect composer who wrote sound-effects for TV shows but now he’s an out of work lamer who just watches Ahhhhh Bra ads on the TV shopping channel. A pic of sad Mum working part-time in a lightbulb shop because she has to make all the money for us? – she used to be an artist who painted these weird little Japanese ladies holding fans, but now she has to stand round all day explaining to people that an 18-watt eco-bulb is equivalent to 90 watts in the old-fashioned bulb system.

Maybe I could put a pic of my little sister Abie in it: she’s adopted from Vietnam and she’s twelve and she’s pretty cool. We play
BeastHunter
together but she beats me every time cos she is like a profesh gamer. She even had to help me go up a rank by getting me a double metal axe and a double silver axe.

Got to put in something, got to get this finished. Maybe I should try different titles, get it exactly right so at least I look busy.

ME IN 30 SECONDS

Nah.

ME IN 30 SECONDS

Don’t mind that.

ME IN 30 SECONDS

Nah.

ME IN 30 SECONDS

ME IN 30 SECONDS

ME IN 30 SECONDS

Out the corridor-window Mr Pooks is still in the corridor. King Bozz the Yard Guy has come with his bucket and rag. Pooksy is pointing at the plops.

ME IN 30 SECONDS

King Bozz gets down on his knees to clean it up and now I can’t see him anymore. Muck Up Day must be the worst day of the year for him, having to clean up pig plops. Normally he can just sit in his maintenance shed and drink alchie because there’s nothing to do.

ME IN 30 SECONDS

What about this …

ME IN 30 SECONDS

Bigger?

ME IN 30 SECONDS

Actually might go back to my original.

ME IN 30 SECONDS

Wish I could be like Wiggy and put stuff in my movie that I’m actually proud of, but everything I’m interested in is kind of embarrassing and I wouldn’t show or tell anybody about it. Like I really want to be a movie director but I wouldn’t tell people about that. Last school hols I made a movie called King Kong Junior with my little sis Abie in it – I shot it on Mum’s camera so the quality’s crap but it’s pretty funny. I got Abie’s stuffed monkey and I pretended it was King Kong and it attacked her in the backyard while she slept in the hammock. Bloody hilarious, it was really well shot and had these great camera angles where the monkey ran through the grass and the camera was low down following the monkey really fast. I wish I could put that bit in my Me In 30 Seconds movie but if Carruthers or Brincat saw me and my little sis and a stuffed monkey running through grass, they would beat my arse f’sure.

King Bozz just finished cleaning up the plops and walks off with his bucket and rag but Pooks stays in the corridor, just looking at nothing.

Can’t put pics of me playing guitar either.

I’m a bit of a freak at guitar actually. Dad taught me how to play when he used to play guitar lots – we used to play our guitars together and it sounded pretty good – but then he stopped wanting to play when he lost his job and got all sad and I just play by myself now. I know a ton of chords and I can do bar-chords which are painful – you have to hold your finger straight over all the strings and it kills like hell, even Wiggy would find it painful.

One day I want to be a singer-songwriter like Thom Yorke from Radiohead. Wish I could put some of my songs in my Me In 30 Seconds movie, with pics of me sitting on my bed, playing guitar and singing, but that’d be an arse-beatingly stupid idea.

I’m secretly writing a rock opera at the moment, true dat, a real rock opera that could go in a theatre one day. Wish I could put that into my Me In 30 Seconds movie but writing a rock opera would be punishable by death.

It’s called HumanKind and I got the name because ‘humankind’ has actually got two words in it … ‘human’ and ‘kind’. HumanKIND. Get it? Like HUMANS are supposed to be KIND to each other. So when I realised this, I got an amazing idea which was to write a rock opera about a guy who needs more kindness and love in his life. It’s a pretty serious rock opera, not funny. It’s like if Thom Yorke of Radiohead wrote a rock opera, it’s heavy like that and is going to be massively famous all around the world, I’m sure of it.

I don’t know what the story is about or what the ending will be, I’m just making it up as I go. That’s called impro when you do that. But it’s about this guy who goes through life without love or happiness and I have started writing the first song which starts with an empty stage, there’s no one there, it’s all black. Then the lights come up slow and there’s a line of singers wearing black so you can only see their heads. A sad guitar starts playing, just soft and nice, but really sad.

And here’s the good bit, the chords jump out of D and go to, of all places, F-sharp, F FLIPPIN’ SHARP; that’s hard to play on guitar, you gotta do a bar-chord which bloody kills so not many guitar-composers use it.

Reckon it’s a pretty massive chord-change, and the words are good compared to boring stuff you hear normally in rock operas. It’s just a tiny bit ripped off from a song by a band that Dad likes called The Beatles and the song is called ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but I actually think my song is better than—

Pook-sy - is - a - dick-y - dick

A weirdy lady-voice just said that in the classroom and it came from the double-desk next to the window where Angus Smits and Dougy Mansour are sitting. They’re piss-laughing.

- who - steps - in - piggy - plop.

Angus is typing rude stuff into Google Translate then making the Google Translate lady-voice say it. Everyone’s laughing because it’s such a dense thing Google-lady is saying but her voice says it all robo-serious like it’s real important.