So Gross! (14 page)

To Ian his behaviour was quite sickening.

‘I,’ said Annabel with a booming voice, ‘have dissected a rat!’ She paused, letting the words sink in.

‘Ooohhh,’

Ian looked at Mr Scruby. The cheeriness had left his face.

‘I’ve laid it out on this board and labelled everything. You,’ she pointed around the class, ‘will be able to see every little organ — so much like our own.’ She smiled as she held everyone’s attention. ‘Liver, kidney, heart. I’ve shown them all. Stomach, bladder and intestines — these can all be clearly seen.’

‘Aaaahhh.’

Annabel beamed. ‘And here it is.’ She pulled the board from the sack.

A shriek rose from the front row, quickly taken up by the rest of the class.

Annabel looked aghast. This was not what she had expected. She glanced at Mr Scruby, noting with alarm the stricken look on his face.

‘What the hell?’ began Mr Scruby, leaping to his feet.

What was going wrong? Annabel looked at her rat. Looked for the neatly displayed organs. They were all there.

‘You’ll regret this,’ roared Mr Scruby.

Annabel examined her beautifully disembowelled carcass. Then she noticed something. Someone had added a label. Only one word. But it was enough.

PETIE.

Annabel dropped the board in horror.

‘How could you?’ cried Mr Scruby, racing over and shaking her.

Annabel started to sob. ‘I didn’t,’ she kept saying over and over again. ‘It’s not Petie.’ But no one bothered to check whether she was telling the truth. Girls were screaming. Boys were shouting. A projectile vomit landed on Mr Scruby.

This was the final straw. ‘Your parents are going to be notified about this, Annabel. To the principal’s office. Get out of my sight.’

Annabel turned to go. ‘Don’t forget this,’ said Ian, helpfully pulling the tail from the binder and holding it up.

‘You…’ said Annabel. ‘You …’ She was lost for words.

So was Mr Scruby. He lay prostrate over the carcass, whispering, ‘Petie. Petie. Petie.’

‘I believe,’ said Ian, quietly leaning forward so that only Annabel could hear, ‘the saying is — You dirty rat.’

My first job was as an armpit sniffer for a deodorant company, but I got fired for coming to work with a cold. My second job was as a sniffer in a mouthwash factory called Sisotilah (that’s their attempt to reverse halitosis), where I worked for many years making comments like: ‘This mouth smells like an outhouse!’ But my meteoric rise to the depths really began when I worked for a bedpan cleaning company. I ran a small cockroach breeding business on the side in some unwashed bedpans and sold the cockroaches for scientific research. From there I plumbed the depths even further and wrote
So Gross!

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