So Gross! (2 page)

The bell rang. It was time for assembly.

The children were seated in rows on the floor and chairs had been lined up at the sides for the parents. There was a microphone on stage for Inspector Constable, as well as a table and two rows of chairs for the headmaster and staff.

When there was silence the teachers filed in. Plunger’s mum, as president of the P&C, had the honour of opening the proceedings, and sat with importance beside Mrs Popov. Mrs Popov was the school safety officer and wore her yellow safety warden’s helmet with pride.

All began well. Mrs Patterson welcomed them to the first school safety assembly and thanked the parents for making such delicious cakes. Inspector Constable showed some interesting slides and talked about safety houses in their area.

Plunger watched carefully. Nothing was happening. Teachers and parents were smiling and nodding and seemed to be enjoying themselves.

Inspector Constable talked about crossing the road with safety and safety when riding a bike.

Still nothing happened.

But when Inspector Constable started to talk about fire safety, some of the teachers began shifting around in their seats. By the time he got to stranger danger, others were crossing and uncrossing their legs. One or two were crumpled over, inspecting the dust on the floor.

A little cloud of blue rose from behind the headmaster’s chair.

He didn’t seem to notice.

Others followed suit.

Soon all the teachers were sitting in a blue mist. Mrs Popov had completely disappeared — except for her hat. Parents were trying to fan away the telltale signs, waving their arms behind their bottoms, desperately hoping to look casual at the same time.

Josef Abboud ground his bum against the floor to block out the flow. It backfired. Spurts of blue came out of his mouth and nose, making him look like he was about to blow up. Josef shook his head furiously, triggering a tremendous explosion from down below which launched him into the air.

The children began to giggle.

Inspector Constable got quite carried away and started telling jokes.

Giggles turned to guffaws until finally great gales of laughter echoed throughout the hall.

Mrs Patterson’s face looked like she’d woken up in the middle of sleepwalking naked through a crowded supermarket. Wafts of blue kept rising from her behind like Indian smoke signals. She stood up and was jet-propelled off the stage.

Mrs Popov tried to bring some order back to the assembly, but nobody would listen to a talking hat.

Josef was booed out of the room, Plunger’s wink the last thing he saw before stumbling outside.

Plunger felt an eensy bit sorry for them, but then he remembered how much he’d been teased for that very same problem and was glad at how things were turning out.

The school was closed for the rest of the afternoon. There just weren’t enough toilets to go round.

Plunger chuckled all the way home, stopping at the corner shop for a milkshake to celebrate.

In the two days it took for the air to clear, Mrs Patterson stayed in hiding. On the afternoon of the third day, Plunger opened the kitchen cupboard and grinned. Real food lined the shelves. There were chips and noodles and pasta and sweets, popcorn and bread and jam. There was jelly and tuna and muesli and rice, cheese sticks and nuts and ham.

Grabbing the peanut butter, Plunger started to make a sandwich.

Sometimes you hear about people who are just like their names. Mr Bottomley who’s got a big bottom or Mrs Booby with the huge bazookas. Sometimes a Miss Clues might be a policewoman or a Mr Nuss might have a first name beginning with ‘P’.

So I suppose Tom R. Oach was destined.

Some said the ‘R’ was short for Rupert or Reginald or something just as embarrassing, but Tom wouldn’t let on.

Me? My middle name is Vincente, after my dad. Eduardo Vincente Pirini. Ed or Eddie to my mates. Edward to Mrs Sher, our teacher. Eduardo only to Nonno and Nonni, my grandparents. All in all, a pretty safe name.

But with a name like Tom R. Oach, poor Tom didn’t stand a chance.

Bugged for life.

Not that he seemed to mind. He loved bugs. This is a story about something that happened to Tom and me a while back. I swear it’s true.

It all started on the day of the school fete.

Well, maybe it didn’t start then, ‘cause of Tom’s destiny and all, but it was that day that sticks in my mind.

It was a really hot summer’s day. The fete was meant to raise money to buy Christmas presents for underprivileged kids, the ones that you see on the posters at the railway station. Every class had to have a stall at the fete. Ours was having problems. None of the parents could be bothered to co-ordinate it. We were getting desperate when Tom came up with this great idea.

Worms.

For the compost.

I told you he was mad about bugs. Well, one of his ‘things’ was to have a worm farm under the house. In this huge plastic tub. There were thousands of them. He sold them round the neighbourhood for one dollar a bag. Twenty worms to a bag. Made a bit of money on them, he did.

Tom offered to sell them to the school for fifty cents a bag. That way when we got a dollar for each bag we were making a fifty-cent profit. Pretty good of him ‘cause he was only making half as much as he usually did.

We all thought it was a great idea. It meant we didn’t have to collect junk, or make tizzy little craft things, or cadge prizes off anyone.

Mrs Sher wanted to have lucky dips but we gave her heaps till she finally agreed.

She made it quite clear that her job was to handle the money and
not the worms
.

Most of us kids were pretty cool about holding worms. Even the girls.

Except Samantha Saunders.

She said she’d hold the plastic bags but if anything slippery or slimy touched her she wouldn’t be responsible for the consequences. Somehow I couldn’t see Samantha Saunders all touchy feely with a worm either.

We made big posters for our stall saying things like ‘Environmentally Friendly Pets’ or ‘See if you can
worm
out of this one,’ or ‘Have you got worms? Well, you should.’

That was my idea, that one.

Tom’s dad agreed to lug the breeding bin to school on the back of his work truck and we all found plastic bags to put the worms in.

The fete started at ten but Mrs Sher made us get there at nine so we could start filling the bags. She must’ve thought there’d be a bit of a rush, but whoever heard of a worm frenzy?

Things started off all right.

Each kid grabbed a plastic bag, carefully counting in twenty worms before they sealed it, then put it on the table for sale.

Tom was real careful of his worms, insisting there was an umbrella up to give them some shade (they hate the light) and squirting a bit of water into each bag before they were sealed.

Despite this they didn’t seem too happy. They writhed around, their bright pink bodies throbbing with blood as they looked for somewhere to bury themselves.

I felt sort of sorry for them.

What if families were being separated? You know, mothers and fathers from their babies. I said something about this to Tom and felt a right knob when he explained to me that in Worm World you’re both the daddy and the mummy. You make the sperm and have the babies. Not at the same time though. You do have to mate with a partner, but that partner could be a boy one minute and a girl the next.

Confusing, eh?

In a future life I hope I never come back as a worm.

By ten o’clock we were ready for business. We’d even had a customer. Mr Rogers, the school handyman, bought two bags, saying they’d taste great with a bit of pepper on toast. Mr Rogers is weird at the best of times. He has these great conversations with someone called Ted.

But Ted’s never there.

Even Mrs Sher seemed reluctant to hand over the bags.

People started arriving in hordes and by ten-thirty we’d already sold twenty-three bags. At times they were queuing. We couldn’t fill up the bags fast enough. People were shouting for service and complaining about having to wait.

And that was the beginning of all our problems.

The customers started yelling out and pushing, so we really had to get a wriggle on.

We started hurrying so fast that David Winegarten accidentally flicked a worm on Samantha Saunders. Samantha naturally screamed and jumped backwards, and that would have been okay, but she knocked over Katrina Britton, who fell into the arms of Dave Gray. Dave caught her very smoothly, I felt, but she completely freaked out at the thought of Dave’s boy germs and flung her arms up in the air, knocking over our display table and sending our entire Worm World slithering across the playground.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if everyone hadn’t panicked, but of course they did.

There was a mini stampede. A tidal wave of worms. Kids clawing at each other to get out of the way. Mrs Sher making these noises like a stranded whale. Samantha Saunders still screaming and crying, all at the same time.

And in the middle of it, thousands of worms, slithering and sliding and getting smashed to smithereens.

Blood and guts everywhere.

Tom R. Oach was as white as tripe. He didn’t dare move his feet in case he squashed more. He stood there with these lead feet, scooping his precious worms into his lap, looking like someone had tipped a giant plate of pink noodles over him.

You had to feel sorry for him.

They were like family, you know.

In the end Mr Rogers got the hose and swooshed them all across the playground into the flowerbeds. At first he turned it on too hard, sending a second wave of worms spraying up into the air but then he got the water pressure just right. There were lots who didn’t make it into the flowerbeds. If you stood real still you could see bits of the playground on the move.

That’s until someone trod on them.

Sometimes it was a mistake but sometimes, especially for boys like Alexander Poll, it was a game. Who could jump across the playground landing on the most worms?

The playground looked like there’d been a massive spaghetti fight.

I was trying to help Tom but it was hopeless. He stood there, copping an earful from Mrs Sher about how this would never have happened if they’d stuck with lucky dips. You could tell that he was trying not to cry.

I really felt for the guy.

We saved about a hundred. Enough for Tom to start breeding again.

But he didn’t.

Reckoned he could never look a worm in the eye again. If they had one. An eye, that is.

I’ve gotta say this for Tom. He doesn’t stay down for long. He just moves on to something else. Which is how he got started on his true vocation. Went on to bigger and better things.

Well, that’s
my
opinion.

You be the judge.

It was getting further into summer and we’d had all this rain and heat.

Perfect conditions for breeding, Tom noticed.

If you’re a cockroach.

In no time at all he’d built up a pretty impressive collection of cockroaches. From the big, juicy Australian bush ones, to the smaller, more golden German numbers, to the eensy black ones with white stripes across their backs that look like beetles from a distance.

He kept them in a fish tank and used a piece of glass with a brick on it for the lid. They were fed every two to three days, usually scraps from his lunch box. They loved Vegemite sandwiches the best.

Of course, Tom never told his mum. She’d’ve freaked.

The cockroaches lived under the house, hidden behind this brick pylon. Tom would crawl under there with his torch, feed them, watch them for a while, then crawl out, all the while thinking of ways to make a bit of dosh, seeing as he’d retired from the worm business.

One day he made me a proposition. In the playground. At recess.

‘I’ve trained my cockroaches to do tricks,’ is what
he said. ‘You an’ me, Eddie, should go into business together. You scam up an audience and me and my cockroaches will do the rest.’

‘Get outta here.’

‘I’ll show you.’

Tom put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a glass jar. An old Vegemite one with tiny holes punched through the lid.

‘This is Bertha,’ he said, introducing me to this whopper of a cockroach, like I was about to shake its hand. ‘She an’ I are mates. I’ll show you.’

He unscrewed the lid and carefully gripped Bertha by the sides. By the look of those legs flying around, this wasn’t Bertha’s idea of a good time. I took a tiny step back. It wasn’t my idea of a good time either, being this close to a cockie.

Tom held Bertha up to his lips.

For a second there I thought he was going to kiss her, but he didn’t.

He whispered in her ear. I’m not kidding. I couldn’t hear what he said but she stopped wiggling for a minute so she must’ve liked what she heard. Then he got Bertha and gently sat her behind his ear.

I held my breath.

Was he for real?