Spaghetti Legs Read online

  Brushing off the dirt that was caused by rolling around on the ground in fits of laughter, they hid the mag in a better spot, wandered over to the gum tree and poked their heads down into the hole. Because it was too dark they couldn’t see how far down it went. Ian said that it would be perfectly safe to go down into the hole as, judging by its dimensions, the only living thing that could have created it would have been a three-foot-wide tick, and as one of that width had not been found, even in America, they would be perfectly safe.

  Eric and Ian raced home and each of them fished his father’s torch out of the shed. Eric’s father was a clerk and Ian’s a research scientist, but they both had the old Eveready Dolphin torch.

  Ten minutes later they turned on their torches and clambered down into the tunnel, Eric behind Ian. After scrambling on their hands and knees for about twenty metres they found themselves in a huge cathedral-like cave. After Eric’s eyes adjusted he couldn’t help but notice that the walls were writhing in a way that he was not sure he liked. He was about to say something stupid about moving walls when Ian calmly said, ‘Bats.’

  ‘Vampires!’ screamed Eric. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  Ian blocked the exit and informed Eric that they were not vampire bats but fruit bats, and even if they were, vampire bats only attack cattle.

  They moved on through the cave. Eric kept one eye on Ian, who led the way, and another nervous eye on the bats. Eric never had any reason to doubt him. Ian was always right. But just in case, he made a conscious effort not to make any mooooing noises as they moved about.

  Despite the bats, Eric felt rather safe in the cave, sealed off from the outside world. No one could bully him, no one could pick on him, and no one could call him ‘spaghetti legs’ or ‘stinky’.

  Eric was tall, thin and seemed to have legs that stretched up to his chest, but despite that, he felt the only reason some of the other kids at school called him ‘spaghetti legs’ was because they were jealous of his athletic ability. ‘Stinky’, though, was a home-grown nickname and came from his reluctance to take showers. His older sister, Jenny, had once convinced him that a man lived down the drain and one day when she was having a shower he had put his hand up and tried to pull her down. Fortunately she managed to fight him off with her toothbrush and curling wand. For some reason this scare left her emotionally scarred and strangely short of cash. So to ease her torment she made Eric give her his pocket money each week. In return she wouldn’t tell their mother that when Eric went into the bathroom all he did was turn on the shower and make fake cleaning noises. Using this technique Eric could often go two weeks at a time without washing. After this his socks would begin to defy gravity and the dog would start following him around. When this happened his mother would order him into the bath and threaten to scrub a layer of skin off him if he didn’t come out sparkling clean.

  All this was long before he’d won Sunflower Fox’s heart. When that happened he didn’t care what horrors the shower held, he was determined to smell nice for his girlfriend, but even years later the nickname was hard to shake.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Ian, breaking into Eric’s thoughts. ‘It’s getting late, we’ll come back tomorrow and spend the whole day exploring.’

  They emerged from the tunnel, and covered the entrance with branches and leaves. Ian was certain the bats used another entrance, and as they’d never heard stories of bats dive-bombing a gum tree, he was probably right again.

  After dinner, Eric went to bed and played tunnelling games under his doona, in the wardrobe, and under the bed. He imagined that the bowels of the cave contained unbelievable wealth, fantastic treasure, and some interesting fossils for Ian and his dad. Deep, deep into the cave there would be an underground river with sailing boats that would take them to far-off lands where men in baggy satin trousers with huge swords would look at them in dangerous ways.

  The following day it rained, so Eric stayed in his bedroom. He kept himself amused playing computer games with the cat.

  It rained solidly for a week. Eric heard that someone tried to cross the flooded bridge in their car and had been swept away. Toongabbie was on the evening news. This only seemed to happen when somebody died. Eric was just glad that the camera crew did not reveal the whereabouts of their cave.

  The rain eventually eased and the creek returned to its passive self.

  The next day Eric waited for Ian at the entrance to the cave with his torch, a packed lunch, and some garlic--he still wasn’t entirely convinced that they weren’t vampire bats. But Ian didn’t come.

  In the evening Eric rode his bike round to Ian’s house but found it deserted. There was a vandalised ‘FOR SALE’ sign in the garden.

  Three weeks into the summer holidays and despite what the forecasters said, the rain, which had returned the day after Ian Champion’s family left, showed no signs of abating. The climatic conditions only made Eric’s gloom worse--he was sure that the low pressure front was centred directly over his bed.

  The holidays were not going well at all. He had lost his girlfriend, his best friend, and to make matters worse his sister was going out with a complete moron named Stevo the Rev.

  Eric’s father was also in a dangerous mood. Apart from the fact that he couldn’t get out and enjoy his one passion of gardening, Stevo the Rev had left the Monaro ticking over for far too long the previous night. Mr Underwood had bitten his lip for a while but after listening to a purring V-8 get drowned out by Guns ‘N’ Roses for an hour, he burst out and told Stevo just where he was going to stick his twin exhausts if he didn’t turn the bloody engine off immediately.

  This had greatly upset Jenny Underwood. She had gone crying to her mother, who agreed that, with the exception of Stevo the Rev, all men were bastards.

  The mood in the Underwood household the following morning could not be described as pleasant. The women weren’t talking to the men, nobody appeared to be talking to Eric, even Eric’s five-year-old brother Paul was throwing his Lego around with a little more anger than usual.

  After breakfast Eric retreated to the relative sanctuary of his room and spent the morning watching music videos. He only got up twice: once for M.C. Hammer, and a little later on for Black Box. He honestly believed that if Sunflower Fox could see him dance she would leap back into his arms.

  Three boring songs later Eric drifted back into the zzzzzzz zone and was having a great dream that he and Sunflower were married and they were on their way to visit Ian in his lab where he had just invented a gigantic plug for the ozone layer, when Jenny stormed into his bedroom. She was wearing a look of ‘don’t mess with me, matey’ on her face.

  Jenny’s teenage wardrobe had long ago burst at the seams and she had simply moved all of the clothes that weren’t in the first team into Eric and Paul’s. The wardrobe was just about off limits for hide ‘n’ seek nowadays, as it was stuffed full of Jenny’s things.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Eric, smacking his lips together.

  ‘My jeans if it’s any of your business, snothead. Anyway, what are you sooking about?’

  ‘I’m not sooking, it’s raining so I can’t go out.’

  ‘That’s not it at all. Mum said you were sooking because you broke up with your girlfriend and your weirdo mate Ian moved.’

  ‘Get out, grease-monkey!’

  Eric knew that he was taking a risk by calling his sister a grease-monkey, but she had hit the first low blow and although she was seventeen and much stronger than him, well, if she wanted a piece of the action he reckoned that he could give her and her revhead of a boyfriend heaps.

  ‘Mum!’ yelled Jenny. ‘Eric’s just called me a grease-monkey.’

  Eric could hear his mother’s slippers clomping dangerously through the house.

  ‘What’s going on in here, you pair?’

  ‘He called me a grease-monkey, Mum.’

  ‘Yeah, but she said that I broke up with Sunflower and Ian had moved.’

  ‘Well you have and he did.’ />
  ‘But she said I was sooking because of it.’

  ‘You are. And there’s nothing wrong with a girl being a mechanic, you were the one who bought Jenny and Stevo matching oil rags for Christmas, remember? Now apologise to your sister!’

  ‘But she…’

  ‘I don’t care what she. You apologise!’

  ‘Oh all right. I’m sorry, Thing.’

  ‘ERIC!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jenny.’

  ‘With sugar on top.’

  ‘That’s enough, Jenny! Get whatever it is you’re getting and leave Eric alone.’ Mrs Underwood should have been working for the United Nations.

  An angry silence hung in the air as Jenny kept looking for her jeans. Eventually they turned up.

  ‘No wonder you couldn’t find them,’ said Eric, ‘there’s more hole than jean, who are you going out with? Freddy Krueger?’

  ‘Be original, loser! Been listening to Dad again?’

  ‘Where’s Stevo taking you anyway? A tyre screeching exhibition?’

  ‘Hey Eric?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You stink.’ And with this parting shot she slammed the door shut and went back to her room to change.

  ‘I don’t stink any more,’ yelled Eric across three rooms.

  ‘I think we had our three kids too far apart,’ Mrs Underwood said to her husband as they read the papers.

  ‘I think we had three kids too many,’ he said. They both burst out laughing and offered to make each other a cup of coffee.

  Eric sat quietly fuming in bed. Why couldn’t people just leave him alone? As far as he was concerned, everyone was entitled to a bit of sulking every now and again. Even Gandhi must have had the odd sulk or two.

  Eric looked at the poster of Gandhi on his wall. It wasn’t really Gandhi, but some English actor dressed up to look like him. He’d put it there after he and Iggy Suede had watched the film a couple of years ago. They both thought he was great.

  Ten minutes later, Eric was walking down the road in the pouring rain. He decided that he’d had enough family life for one day, and what he needed was a bit of Iggy Suede’s philosophy to cheer him up.

  Iggy Suede was a seventeen-year-old contradiction. He was a complete set of conflicting emotions, attitudes, looks, and pimples stuffed into a flannelette shirt. He was heavily into Iron Maiden and Vivaldi which explained, in part, the black T-shirt and violin earring. When he didn’t have his head buried in a heavy metal magazine, it was between the pages of the collected works of great European writers. This confused his teachers. They were used to their male students making verbal references to footballers. It came as a bit of a shock when they heard someone quoting Chekhov and Kafka at them. They didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and to cover their embarrassment they usually suggested that he shut up.

  Iggy hated stereotypes. He felt that being brainy was not enough reason to go out and buy a backpack and start covering his books with plastic. He thought his duffle bag was good enough for carting his belongings around in and that heavy metal posters made ideal book covers. Iggy had been in Jenny Underwood’s year at high school, but she left to do a tech course in motor mechanics. That’s where she met Stevo the Rev. Iggy, on the other hand, was determined to get into university and to study English literature. The rejection heaped upon Iggy by his teachers and fellow students left him with plenty of time to study, and he topped year eleven in both English and History.

  Just when people thought they had Iggy’s personality worked out, he would do something unexpected like go to a rugby league match and cheer the ref.

  Like Eric, Iggy was a loner. But whereas Iggy was a loner by his own choosing, which gave him more time to read and listen to his Madonna and Metallica CDs, Eric would have liked to be part of the crowd. It’s just that he didn’t have a crowd to be part of. His circle of friends appeared to be shrinking daily. Pretty soon he would have to stop calling it his circle of friends and start referring to it as a triangle.

  Eric liked Iggy because he was so together he didn’t care what people thought about him. Iggy liked his young neighbour because ‘the little dude was so intense’.

  Iggy’s mother answered when Eric knocked. She was a small woman of forty who, like Sunflower Fox’s parents, looked like she lived in a time warp. Any minute she might have been about to reach for a tambourine and burst into a chorus of some old Beatles’ song like ‘All you need is love’. Her skin was so white she had obviously spent a lot of time looking for fossils in Arctic caves. She looked permanently confused, which could have been caused by living alone with Iggy. He seemed to confuse everybody except Eric.

  ‘Iggy’s not in, Eric. He’s gone to see Madonna.’

  Eric didn’t know that Madonna was in town. If he did he would like to have gone too.

  ‘Where is she playing, Mrs Suede?’ asked Eric, who could not bring himself to call her Rainbow-Fish despite being told to several times.

  ‘Over umm, let me think. Iggy did tell me. Umm, it’s over there,’ she said, pointing towards the linen closet.

  Eric felt that it was unlikely that Madonna or anybody else for that matter would hold a concert anywhere in Toongabbie. And despite the natural acoustics that the venue obviously offered, he doubted very much that Madonna would be doing a gig in the Suedes’ linen closet.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember: Paris.’

  ‘Paris? Iggy’s gone to Paris?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s gone to see Chekhov’s grave as well.’

  ‘But Iggy said that’s in Russia.’

  Eric walked back home very unhappy. He sloshed up the hallway to his bedroom.

  ‘Eric, your shoes are soaking wet!!!’ yelled his mother.

  A couple of kilometres away, a cow that was standing alone in a field looked round, confused, and wondered where all the noise was coming from.

  After Eric had put his shoes outside and mopped the polished wooden floor, he slid back up the hall in his socks. Unfortunately he underestimated his speed, whizzed past his bedroom and crashed into the telephone table. The impact brought down his mother’s favourite painting, which was hung by the laundry door.

  ‘Eric Underwood, I’ve just about had enough of you for one day. Why don’t you go into your room and read Iggy’s letter?’

  Eric quickly untangled himself from the telephone cord and slid excited into his room. He didn’t stop to think that there weren’t any mail deliveries on Saturdays and that Jenny had obviously been hiding his letter for the past couple of days. Iggy had sent him a letter. That was the only thing worth considering.

  Dear Eric,

  How’s it going little bro’? You’re not going to believe this, dude, but I’m in Paris. I came to say goodbye but you were down the creek with Ian and I couldn’t find you.

  Paris is great, it’s full of people who look like they’re about to finish their coffee and go off and write a Pulitzer prize winner. I’ve never seen so many cafes in my life, caffeine addiction must be a real problem in this city.

  I can’t believe the size of my hotel room. I have to drop breadcrumbs behind me to find my way back to it each day. I feel a little bit guilty about being an expert on the rise of the proletariat while at the same time staying in such opulence, but I’ll get over it.

  I’m going to Moscow the day after tomorrow to visit some famous graves but I’ll be back a couple of days before school starts.

  Gotta go, I’m a bit short of cash so I’m going to go and withdraw some money from the Left Bank (ha ha ha).

  See you in two weeks.

  Regards,

  Iggy

  Iggy’s letter sent Eric’s mind racing.

  Not being a big fan of actually doing things, Eric would often just send his mind off on adventures while he was tucked safely under his doona with a comic and a packet of Tim Tams. The adventures always included journeys through backless wardrobes, bottomless wishing wells, and turtleless drains. His free floating imagination wo
uld always arrive back from the ends of the universe with a million stories to tell and claiming to have met Mr Spock.

  With Sunflower and Ian gone, and Iggy traipsing around European cemeteries, Eric realised any entertainment before school went back was up to him.

  He also realised it was time to start making some career choices. Iggy was obviously going to be a novelist and Ian was sure to invent something incredibly useful, but what about him? His mother and father never really took much interest in his school work. As long as he didn’t burn down the classroom and arrived home alive each day, as far as they were concerned he was doing okay.

  At the start of year 6, Mr Underwood asked Eric what he wanted to be when he grew up. Being a big fan of Batman, Eric said that he wanted to be just like the caped crusader, or failing that he would like to become a spy.

  Due to the fact that an exciting advertisement appeared on tv in the middle of their conversation, Mr Underwood never got to voice any disapproval of this career choice.

  Although the cold war was well and truly over, Moscow still conjured up images of cloaks, daggers and secret documents.

  Eric put Iggy’s letter in his bottom drawer. And after watching the exploits of Boris and Natasha on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, decided that he would definitely become a spy.

  Being a realist he was well aware that he would need to get some practical experience before he could apply to the government for a job.

  A few days later, after reading his sister’s diary and sabotaging his brother’s massive Lego construction so that the roof imploded when touched, Eric had pretty well exhausted the possibilities for spying in his house and had to look further afield.

  He discovered to his immense surprise that Basil the dog had bones buried in the backyard. This would not have caused too much interest in most households, but when you looked at them from the air (on top of the carport roof) the burial markings formed what appeared to be part of a pattern. Basil was accused of sending messages to enemy satellites, put under heavy surveillance and had his Meaty Bite intake closely monitored.