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“A few months maybe. But only a couple a day.”
“If he says a couple, he means at least five or six,” Mum snorts.
“No, I don’t!” I shout. “I mean a couple!”
“Don’t raise your voice to me!” Mum roars back.
“Easy,” Dad begins, but Mum goes on as if he isn’t there.
“Do you think it’s clever? Filling your lungs with rubbish, killing yourself? We didn’t bring you up to watch you give yourself cancer! We don’t need this, certainly not at this time, not when–”
“Enough!” Dad shouts, and we both jump. Dad almost never shouts. He usually gets very quiet when he’s angry. Now his face is red and he’s glaring — but at both of us, not just me.
Mum coughs, as if she’s embarrassed. She sits, brushes her hair back off her face and looks at me with wounded eyes. I hate when she pulls a face like this. It’s impossible to look at her straight or argue.
“I want you to stop, Grubbs,” Dad says, back in control now. “We’re not going to punish you–” Mum starts to object, but Dad silences her with a curt wave of his hand “–but I want your word that you’ll stop. I know it won’t be easy. I know your friends will give you a hard time. But this is important. Some things matter more than looking cool. Will you promise, Grubbs?” He pauses. “Of course, that’s if you’re able to quit…”
“Of course I’m able,” I mutter. “I’m not addicted or anything.”
“Then will you? For your sake — not ours?”
I shrug, trying to act like it’s no big thing, like I was planning to stop anyway. “Sure, if you’re going to make that much of a fuss about it,” I yawn.
Dad smiles. Mum smiles. I smile.
Then Gret walks in the back door and she’s smiling too — but it’s an evil, big-sister-superior smile. “Have we sorted all our little problems out yet?” she asks, voice high and fake-innocent.
And I know instantly — Gret grassed me up to Mum! She found out I was smoking and she told. The cow!
As she swishes past, beaming like an angel, I burn fiery holes in the back of her head with my eyes, and a single word echoes through my head like the sound of ungodly thunder…
Revenge!
→ I love rubbish dumps. You can find all sorts of disgusting stuff there. The perfect place to go browsing if you want to get even with your annoying traitor of a sister.
I climb over mounds of garbage and root through black bags and soggy cardboard boxes. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to use, or in what fashion, so I wait for inspiration to strike. Then, in a small plastic bag, I find six dead rats, necks broken, just starting to rot. Excellent!
Look out, Gret — here I come!
→ Eating breakfast at the kitchen table. Radio turned down low. Listening to the noises upstairs. Trying not to giggle. Waiting for the outburst.
Gret’s in her shower. She showers at least twice a day, before she goes to school and when she gets back. Sometimes she has one before going to bed too. I don’t know why anybody would bother to keep themselves so clean. I reckon it’s a form of madness.
Because she’s so obsessed with showering, Mum and Dad gave her the en suite bedroom. They figured I wouldn’t mind. And I don’t. In fact, it’s perfect. I wouldn’t have been able to pull my trick if Gret didn’t have her own shower, with its very own towel rack.
The shower goes off. Splatters, then drips, then silence. I tense with excitement. I know Gret’s routines inside out. She always pulls her towel down off its rack after she’s showered, not before. I can’t hear her footsteps, but I imagine her taking the three or four steps to the towel rack. Reaching up. Pulling it down. Aaaaaaaaannnddd…
On cue — screams galore. A shocked single scream to start. Then a volley of them, one running into another. I push my bowl of soggy cornflakes aside and prepare myself for the biggest laugh of the year.
Mum and Dad are by the sink, discussing the day ahead. They go stiff when they hear the screams, then dash towards the stairs, which I can see from where I’m sitting.
Gret appears before they reach the stairs. Crashes out of her room, screaming, slapping bloody shreds from her arms, tearing them from her hair. She’s covered in red. Towel clutched with one hand over her front — even terrified out of her wits, there’s no way she’s going to come down naked!
“What’s wrong?” Mum shouts. “What’s happening?”
“Blood!” Gret screams. “I’m covered in blood! I pulled the towel down! I…”
She stops. She’s spotted me laughing. I’m doubled over. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
Mum turns and looks at me. Dad does too. They’re speechless.
Gret picks a sticky pink chunk out of her hair, slowly this time, and studies it. “What did you put on my towel?” she asks quietly.
“Rat guts!” I howl, pounding the table, crying with laughter. “I got… rats at the rubbish dump… chopped them up… and…” I almost get sick, I’m laughing so much.
Mum stares at me. Dad stares at me. Gret stares at me.
Then —
“You lousy son of a–!”
I don’t catch the rest of the insult — Gret flies down the stairs ahead of it. She drops her towel on the way. I don’t have time to react to that before she’s on me, slapping and scratching at my face.
“What’s wrong, Gretelda?” I giggle, fending her off, calling her by the name she hates. She normally calls me Grubitsch in response, but she’s too mad to think of it now.
“Scum!” she shrieks. Then she lunges at me sharply, grabs my jaw, jerks my mouth open and tries her hardest to stuff a handful of rat guts down my throat.
I stop laughing instantly — a mouthful of rotten rat guts wasn’t part of the grand uber-joke! “Get off!” I roar, lashing out wildly. Mum and Dad suddenly recover and shout at exactly the same time.
“Stop that!”
“Don’t hit your sister!”
“She’s a lunatic!” I gasp, pushing myself away from the steaming Gret, falling off my chair.
“He’s an animal!” Gret sobs, picking more chunks of guts from her hair, wiping rat blood from her face. I realise she’s crying — serious waterworks — and her face is as red as her long, straight hair. Not red from the blood — red from anger, shame and…fear?
Mum picks up the dropped towel, takes it to Gret, wraps it around her. Dad’s just behind them, face as dark as death. Gret picks more strands and loops of rat guts from her hair, then howls with anguish.
“They’re all over me!” she yells, then throws some of the guts at me. “You bloody little monster!”
“You’re the one who’s bloody!” I cackle. Gret dives for my throat.
“No more!” Dad doesn’t raise his voice but his tone stops us dead.
Mum’s staring at me with open disgust. Dad’s shooting daggers. I sense that I’m the only one who sees the funny side of this.
“It was just a joke,” I mutter defensively before the accusations fly.
“I hate you!” Gret hisses, then bursts into fresh tears and flees dramatically.
“Cal,” Mum says to Dad, freezing me with an ice-cold glare. “Take Grubitsch in hand. I’m going up to try and comfort Gretelda.” Mum always calls us by our given names. She’s the one who picked them, and is the only person in the world who doesn’t see how shudderingly awful they are.
Mum heads upstairs. Dad sighs, walks to the counter, tears off several sheets of kitchen paper and mops up some of the guts and streaks of blood from the floor. After a couple of silent minutes of this, as I lie uncertainly by my upturned chair, he turns his steely gaze on me. Lots of sharp lines around his mouth and eyes — the sign that he’s really angry, even angrier than he was about me smoking.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.
“It was funny,” I mutter.
“No,” he barks. “It wasn’t.”
“She deserved it!” I cry. “She’s done worse to me! She told Mum about me smoking — I know it was her! And remember the time she melted my lead soldiers? And cut up my comics? And–”
“There are some things you should never do,” Dad interrupts softly. “This was wrong. You invaded your sister’s privacy, humiliated her, terrified her senseless. And the timing! You…” He pauses and ends with a fairly weak “…upset her greatly.” He checks his watch. “Get ready for school. We’ll discuss your punishment later.”
I trudge upstairs miserably, unable to see what all the aggro is about. It was a great joke. I laughed for hours when I thought of it. And all that hard work — chopping the rats up, mixing in some water to keep them fresh and make them gooey, getting up early, sneaking into her bathroom while she was asleep, carefully putting the guts in place — wasted!
I pass Gret’s bedroom and hear her crying pitifully. Mum’s whispering softly to her. My stomach gets hard, the way it does when I know I’ve done something bad. I ignore it. “I don’t care what they say,” I grumble, kicking open the door to my room and tearing off my pyjamas. “It was a brilliant joke!”
→ Purgatory. Confined to my room after school for a month. A whole bloody MONTH! No TV, no computer, no comics, no books — except schoolbooks. Dad leaves my chess set in the room too — no fear my chess-mad parents would take that away from me! Chess is almost a religion in this house. Gret and I were reared on it. While other toddlers were being taught how to put jigsaws together, we were busy learning the ridiculous rules of chess.
I can come downstairs for meals, and bathroom visits are allowed, but otherwise I’m a prisoner. I can’t even go out at the weekends.
In solitude, I call Gret every name under the moon the first night. Mum and Dad bear the brunt of my curses the next. After that I’m too miserable to blame anyone, so I sulk in moody silence and play chess against myself to pass the time.
They don’t talk to me at meals. The three of them act like I’m not not there. Gret doesn’t even glance at me spitefully and sneer, the way she usually does when I’m getting the doghouse treatment.
But what have I done that’s so bad? OK, it was a crude joke and I knew I’d get into trouble — but their reactions are waaaaaaay over the top. If I’d done something to embarrass Gret in public, fair enough, I’d take what was coming. But this was a private joke, just between us. They shouldn’t be making such a song and dance about it.
Dad’s words echo back to me — “And the timing!” I think about them a lot. And Mum’s, when she was having a go at me about smoking, just before Dad cut her short — “We don’t need this, certainly not at this time, not when–”
What did they mean? What were they talking about? What does the timing have to do with anything?
Something stinks here — and it’s not just rat guts.
→ I spend a lot of time writing. Diary entries, stories, poems. I try drawing a comic – ‘Grubbs Grady, Superhero!’ – but I’m no good at art. I get great marks in my other subjects — way better than goat-faced Gret ever gets, as I often remind her — but I’ve all the artistic talent of a duck.
I play lots of games of chess. Mum and Dad are chess fanatics. There’s a board in every room and they play several games most nights, against each other or friends from their chess clubs. They make Gret and me play too. My earliest memory is of sucking on a white rook while Dad explained how a knight moves.
I can beat just about anyone my age – I’ve won regional competitions — but I’m not in the same class as Mum, Dad or Gret. Gret’s won at national level and can wipe the floor with me nine times out of ten. I’ve only ever beaten Mum twice in my life. Dad — never.
It’s been the biggest argument starter all my life. Mum and Dad don’t put pressure on me to do well in school or at other games, but they press me all the time at chess. They make me read chess books and watch videotaped tournaments. We have long debates over meals and in Dad’s study about legendary games and grandmasters, and how I can improve. They send me to tutors and keep entering me in competitions. I’ve argued with them about it – I’d rather spend my time watching and playing football — but they’ve always stood firm.
White rook takes black pawn, threatens black queen. Black queen moves to safety. I chase her with my bishop. Black queen moves again — still in danger. This is childish stuff – I could have cut off the threat five moves back, when it became apparent — but I don’t care. In a petty way, this is me striking back. “You take my TV and computer away? Stick me up here on my own? OK — I’m gonna learn to play the worst game of chess in the world. See how you like that, Corporal Dad and Commandant Mum!”
Not exactly Luke Skywalker striking back against the evil Empire by blowing up a Death Star, I know, but hey, we’ve all gotta start somewhere!
→ Studying my hair in the mirror. Stiff, tight, ginger. Dad used to be ginger when he was younger, before the grey set in. Says he was fifteen or sixteen when he noticed the change. So, if I follow in his footsteps, I’ve only got a handful or so years of unbroken ginger to look forward to.
I like the idea of a few grey hairs, not a whole head of them like Dad, just a few. And spread out — I don’t want a skunk patch! I’m big for my age — taller than most of my friends — and burly. I don’t look old, but if I had a few grey hairs, I might be able to pass for an adult in poor light — bluff my way into 18-rated movies!
The door opens. Gret — smiling shyly. I’m nineteen days into my sentence. Full of hate for Gretelda Grotesque. She’s the last person I want to see.
“Get out!”
“I came to make up,” she says.
“Too late,” I snarl nastily. “I’ve only got eleven days to go. I’d rather see them out than kiss your…” I stop. She’s holding out a plastic bag. Something white inside. “What’s that?” I ask suspiciously.
“A present to make up for getting you grounded,” she says, and lays it on my bed. She glances out of the window. The curtains are open. A three-quarters moon lights up the sill. There are some chess pieces on it, from when I was playing earlier. Gret shivers, then turns away.
“Mum and Dad said you can come out — the punishment’s over. They’ve ended it early.”
She leaves.
Bewildered, I tear open the plastic. Inside — a Tottenham Hotspur shirt, shorts and socks. I’m stunned. The Super Spurs are my team, my football champions. Mum used to buy me their latest kit at the start of every season, until I hit puberty and sprouted. She won’t buy me any new kits until I stop growing — I out-grew the last one in just a month.
This must have cost Gret a fortune — it’s the brand new kit, not last season’s. This is the first time she’s ever given me a present, except at Christmas and birthdays. And Mum and Dad have never cut short a grounding before — they’re very strict about making us stick to any punishment they set.
What the hell is going on?
→ Three days after my early release. To say things are strange is the understatement of the decade. The atmosphere’s just like it was when Gran died. Mum and Dad wander around like robots, not saying much. Gret mopes in her room or in the kitchen, stuffing herself with sweets and playing chess nonstop. She’s like an addict. It’s bizarre.
I want to ask them about it, but how? “Mum, Dad — have aliens taken over your bodies? Is somebody dead and you’re too afraid to tell me? Have you all converted to Miseryism?”
Seriously, jokes aside, I’m frightened. They’re sharing a secret, something bad, and keeping me out of it. Why? Is it to do with me? Do they know something that I don’t? Like maybe… maybe…
(Go on — have the guts! Say it!)
Like maybe I’m going to die?
Stupid? An overreaction? Reading too much into it? Perhaps. But they cut short my punishment. Gret gave me a present. They look like they’re about to burst into tears at any given minute.
Grubbs Grady — on his way out? A deadly disease I caught on holiday? A brain defect I’ve had since birth? The big, bad cancer bug?
What other explanation is there?
→ “Regale me with your thoughts on ballet.”
I’m watching football highlights. Alone in the TV room with Dad. I cock my ear at the weird, out-of-nowhere question and shrug. “Rubbish,” I snort.
“You don’t think it’s an incredibly beautiful art form? You’ve never wished to experience it first-hand? You don’t want to glide across Swan Lake or get sweet with a Nutcracker?”
I choke on a laugh. “Is this a wind-up?”
Dad smiles. “Just wanted to check. I got a great offer on tickets to a performance tomorrow. I bought three — anticipating your less than enthusiastic reaction — but I could probably get an extra one if you want to tag along.”
“No way!”
