Spud - Learning to Fly (2 page)

The atmosphere in the green Renault station wagon was at best gloomy and at worst murderous. Just before leaving home, Mom caught Dad on his stepladder peeping over the fence as our new neighbour was taking her afternoon swim. Mom accused Dad of being perverse and blamed Frank for putting funny ideas into his head. Our new neighbour goes by the name of Amber and because of her being blonde, thin and divorced, Mom has taken an instant dislike to her. Dad pleaded that he was only checking the alignment of the hedge and not being a peeping tom. Mom hasn’t spoken to him since, besides barking orders and complaining about finding a tick in the bed.

Further bad news was that the windscreen wipers stopped working soon after driving into a huge electrical storm near Cato Ridge. Dad was livid, and kept lunging out of the window with his jersey to furiously wipe at the windscreen to improve his visibility. He then set off on a long tirade about Renault being infiltrated by commies and said that the French were spending too much time bonking and not enough time at work. Mom snorted loudly to herself but didn’t say anything else. I slipped on my Walkman and allowed David Bowie to take me back to school instead.

19:15 I dragged my trunk up the final stretch of Pilgrim’s Walk towards the grand old red brick buildings accompanied by the loud chorus of frogs and crickets celebrating the rain. I felt twitchy and nauseous and my trunk was heavier than I can ever remember. A thick mist had descended over the school, muffling all the sounds and the hesitant trickle of Pissing Pete standing alone and miserable in the school fountain. Once in the quad I gazed up at the second storey of the house where all the dormitory lights were blazing neon and in each window frame there was a buzz of movement. I looked along towards the third year dormitory at the far end of the building. In the first window I could see a hand repetitively bouncing a ball on a cricket bat, the second window was closed and the third revealed the outline of a very large boy eating something greedily out of an ice cream tub.

Fatty must have seen me approaching because there was a loud bleat, and then the strident voice of Boggo shouting, ‘Hey, okes, here comes the resident house lesbian!’ There was a chorus of laughter followed by more bleating and a few wolf whistles. I pretended not to hear the mockery and heaved my trunk through the house door. Vern came galloping down like he was running away from a fire and screeched to a halt in front of my trunk at the foot of the stairs. ‘Hi, Vern,’ I said. Rain Man saluted with a flourish and shouted, ‘Spud!’ before picking up the handle on the other side of my army trunk. We carried my trunk up the stairs in complete silence and then opened the door to my new home … and a new member of the Crazy Eight.

And there he sat, perched like a goblin on the end of his trunk, wolfing down a bar of chocolate. It soon dawned on me that everybody was munching a bar of chocolate and staring at me like
I
was the stranger in the dorm. The new boy jumped up and marched towards me holding out his hand. It was pleasing to see that he was a good few inches shorter than me.

I didn’t immediately say anything because I was distracted by how pink his face was and realised that the short curly hair on his scalp was glowing like an orb in the neon light. It was so white that it looked like he had been dragged on his head across a halfway line.

‘Hello,’ he said with a goofy grin. ‘You must be Spud Milton.’

‘Hi,’ I stammered.

‘I thought so!’ he shouted in a high-pitched voice.

The new boy looked thrilled that he knew who I was before I even had a chance to introduce myself.

‘My name is Garth Garlic,’ he said, pumping my palm with a vigorous handshake. I immediately sensed that this must be a devious Crazy Eight set-up and that I was about to embarrass myself, so I played things cool and said nothing.

‘I come from Malawi,’ Garlic continued. His eyes then widened into blue circular pools and he asked, ‘You ever been to Malawi?’

I shook my head.

Garlic looked heartbroken and his big eyes narrowed again. ‘You would love it,’ he continued. ‘Lake Malawi is the most beautiful place in the world and they don’t mind if you drink beer there under age.’

Then he said, ‘Gee, it’s awesome to meet you, Spud Milton. I’m feeling really proud to be a member of the Secret Seven!’

There was a shocked silence around the dorm before Fatty stepped in. With one arm around Garlic’s shoulders and eyes that were gleaming with delight, he opened a mouth full of chewed chocolate and said, ‘That’s the Crazy Eight, buddy – you probably don’t want to make that kind of mistake again …’ He then gave me a wink and announced, ‘His old man’s the MD of Nestlé Malawi.’ Fatty then swallowed greedily before saying, ‘The oke’s class.’ With that he patted the beaming Garlic on the back and returned to his cubicle where a stack of Nestlé products waited for him slap bang in the centre of his bed.

Boggo was quite obviously sulking. Apparently Rambo had arrived early and immediately welcomed Garlic to the dormitory without discussing the matter with anyone else. Boggo and Fatty were appalled that a stranger could be installed as a fully fledged member of the Crazy Eight without passing a series of worthiness tests that ranged from burping on demand to a graphic description of the females in his family tree. When Boggo complained, Rambo accused Fatty and Boggo of behaving like twelve-year-olds and said the whole Crazy Eight thing was childish and embarrassing.

Unfortunately for Boggo, that was the moment when Fatty discovered that Garlic’s dad was the boss of Nestlé Malawi and immediately switched sides before turning viciously on his former comrade and best friend. Boggo clearly wasn’t impressed with the way everything had gone, because he spent the rest of the evening scowling into the mirror and exploding his numerous zits into a white tissue.

Rambo is also behaving bizarrely. He hardly said anything the entire evening and is acting like we’re all complete strangers.

I watched Rain Man pull out his notebook and sketch a very lifelike picture of Garlic’s face. He furiously wrote GARLIC underneath the picture, and then snapped his notebook shut and slid it back under his mattress. He then crouched low on his bed and watched Garlic for the entire evening through the bars of his towel rail.

Garlic has verbal diarrhoea – after crapping on about Lake Malawi for over an hour, Boggo snapped at him and told him if he wanted to be a part of the Crazy Eight then he had to talk far less and preferably not at all. Garlic’s face flushed and tears sprang to his eyes. He then said, ‘Sorry, guys, I know I talk too much, it’s like I have a loose wire between my head and my brain sometimes and I just like say things that I’m thinking, but that I don’t really like fully mean. You know what I mean?’