Quick, Let's Get Out of Here Read online

  ‘How do you work that out?’

  ‘You, Harrybo, Timmy and Rodge,’

  she said.

  I thought for a moment…

  ‘Me, Harrybo, Timmy and Rodge?

  … 4!’

  I was just about to say,

  ‘But that makes 4 –’

  when suddenly I thought,

  ‘She has halves – HALF boyfriends!…

  … 2 halves make one? No. 3 halves plus 1… y

  ‘But, which ones are the halves?’ I thought…

  ‘and who’s The One –

  THE One?’

  I never dared ask her

  so I never found out.

  MAD MEALS

  Grilled cork

  Matchbox on toast

  glass soup

  roasted clock

  ping-pong ball and chips

  Acorn sandwich

  fillet of calculator

  trouser salad

  grilled lamp-post

  ice-cream(vanilla, soap or pepper)

  MAD DRINKS

  fizzy mouse

  hot petrol

  paint shake

  MYSTERY

  CRASH!!!

  DAD: What was that noise?

  SON: The bowl. I’ve broken the bowl.

  MUM: What bowl?

  SON: The one with lines on.

  DAD: How did you break it?

  SON: I was balancing it on my head.

  DAD: The boy’s mad.

  MUM: How else is he going to practise?

  DAD: Why were you balancing it on your head?

  SON: I was pretending it was a hat.

  DAD: Why do you need to practise pretending a bowl is a hat?

  SON: (NO ANSWER)

  I KNOW SOMEONE

  I know someone who can

  take a mouthful of custard and blow it

  down their nose.

  I know someone who can

  make their ears wiggle.

  I know someone who can

  shake their cheeks so it sounds

  like ducks quacking.

  I know someone who can

  throw peanuts in the air and catch them

  in their mouth.

  I know someone who can

  balance a pile of 12 2p pieces on his elbow

  and snatch his elbow from under them

  and catch them.

  I know someone who can

  bend her thumb back to touch her wrist.

  I know someone who can

  crack his nose.

  I know someone who can

  say the alphabet backwards.

  I know someone who can put their hands in

  their armpits and blow raspberries.

  I know someone who can

  wiggle her little toe.

  I know someone who can

  lick the bottom of her chin.

  slide their top lip one way

  and their bottom lip the other way.

  and that someone is

  ME.

  THIRTY-TWO LENGTHS

  One Tuesday when I was about

  ten

  I swam thirty-two lengths

  which is one mile.

  And when I climbed out of the

  water

  I felt like a big, fat lump of jelly

  and my legs were like rubber

  and there was this huge man

  there

  with tremendous muscles all

  over him

  and I went up to him and said,

  ‘I’ve just swum a mile.’

  And he said,

  ‘How many lengths was that

  then?’

  ‘Thirty-two,’ I said.

  And the man looked into the

  water and said,

  ‘I’ve got a lad here who can

  do ninety.’

  EDDIE IN BED

  Sometimes I look really tired,

  because you see

  when most people are fast asleep

  and I’m fast asleep

  I hear,

  ‘waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.’

  That’s the baby, Eddie.

  So I get out of bed and go into his room

  and he’s sitting up in bed

  and he has these nightmares.

  Not nightmares like you have,

  like Dracula biting your head off or something.

  He has nightmares about people taking food away from him.

  So one night I go in there

  and he’s sitting up in bed

  lifting his arms above his head

  and banging them down

  screaming,

  ‘I want my biscuits I want my biscuits.’

  Now if you can imagine that,

  you can also imagine

  that at this time he was sleeping

  in the same bed as his brother.

  Who was six.

  And you have to imagine his brother’s head

  is right next to Eddie’s hip.

  Think about it.

  Eddie’s hands go above his head and

  Wham

  down by his side

  right on Joe’s nut.

  ‘I want my biscuits I want my biscuits.’

  So Joe lifts his head and he goes,

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Wham

  ‘I want my biscuits.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Wham

  ‘I want my biscuits.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Wham

  ‘I want my biscuits.’

  ‘Stop it, Eddie’ – wham back

  ‘I want my biscuits.’

  Wham.

  ‘OK, fellas,’I say,

  ‘Cut it out.’

  And I lift Eddie up and I take him into our bed.

  What a stupid thing to do.

  You see

  most people sleep with their head

  on the pillow

  and their feet at the other end of the bed.

  When Eddie comes into our bed

  he sleeps with his head next to Susanna’s head

  and his feet in my ear.

  And you have to imagine those feet

  sticking in my ear.

  And the toes.

  Those toes are going

  wiggle wiggly wiggly

  Down my ear.

  All night.

  So by the time I get up

  in the morning

  I’m very tired

  and very cross.

  But I can always get my own back on him

  in the morning

  cos he hates having his nappy done…

  GOING THROUGE THE OLD PHOTOS

  Me, my dad

  and my brother

  we were looking through the old photos.

  Pictures of my dad with a broken leg

  and my mum with big flappy shorts on

  and me on a tricycle

  when we got to one of my mum

  with a baby on her knee,

  and I go,

  ‘Is that me or Brian?’

  And my dad says,

  ‘Let’s have a look.

  It isn’t you or Brian,’ he says.

  ‘It’s Alan.

  He died.

  He would have been

  two years younger than Brian

  and two years older than you.

  He was a lovely baby.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Whooping cough.

  I was away at the time.

  He coughed himself to death in Connie’s arms.

  The terrible thing is,

  it wouldn’t happen today,

  but it was during the war, you see,

  and they didn’t have the medicines.

  That must be the only photo

  of him we’ve got.’

  Me and Brian

  looked at the photo.

  We couldn’t say anything.

  It was the
first time we had ever heard about Alan.

  For a moment I felt ashamed

  like as if I had done something wrong.

  I looked at the baby trying to work out

  who he looked like.

  I wanted to know what another brother

  would have been like.

  No way of saying.

  And Mum looked so happy.

  Of course she didn’t know

  when they took the photo

  that he would die, did she?

  Funny thing is,

  though my father mentioned it every now and then

  over the years,

  Mum – never.

  And he never said anything in front of her

  about it

  and we never let on that we knew.

  What I’ve never figured out

  was whether

  her silence was because

  she was more upset about it

  than my dad –

  or less.

  EDDIE AND THE WALLPAPER

  Eddie’s always asking me to sing to him

  and I’m hopeless at singing.

  He’ll find that out one day.

  So he goes,

  ‘Song. More.’

  So I go, ‘What song?’

  So he goes,

  ‘Song er man.’

  So I have to sing,

  ‘There was an old man called Michael Finnegan

  He grew whiskers on his chinnegan

  the wind came out and blew them in again

  poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again.’

  The bit that he likes best is that bit about

  whiskers on his chinnegan.

  If you could see my beard you’d know why.

  So I go?

  ‘There was an old man called…’

  and up come the fingers…

  ‘And he grew whiskers…’

  and he grabs hold of my beard

  and hangs on to it.

  It really hurts you know.

  ‘Stop it stop it. I won’t go on.’

  Then he lets go.

  I carry on

  and when I get to,

  ‘The wind came out and blew them in again…’

  he blows in my face with a great big

  ‘PHOOOOOR’.

  And you know babies are, all dribbly…

  DIS

  gusting.

  So the other day he says

  he wants a song about wallpaper.

  Now you may think

  why does he want a song about wallpaper?

  There’s a story behind it.

  You see, not long ago we did some decorating.

  When I say we did some

  I’m lying.

  Susanna did it and I just stood

  at the bottom of the ladder.

  Anyway, we were very pleased,

  we came downstairs to have a cup of tea.

  Eddie is off somewhere round the house

  he roams round the house on his own

  like a free-range gorilla.

  Sometimes you hear this huge crashing noise upstairs

  And you know that’s him jumping up and down

  on the settee.

  He doesn’t think it’s a settee

  He thinks it’s a trampoline.

  “Yippee yippee yippee.”

  Anyway,

  so we were there having tea

  and Susanna says,

  ‘Let’s go and look at the wallpaper upstairs.’

  So we go up there,

  open the door,

  and there’s Eddie,

  big smile on his face,

  and he goes, ‘Eddie helping.’

  Oh no.

  You know what that means…

  TROUBLE.

  It’s like when you’re putting tomato sauce

  on his chips and he goes, ‘Eddie helping,’

  and next minute he’s got hold of the sauce bottle

  splodge splodge splodge

  and you’ve got tomato sauce all over the table.

  Well I’m looking at Eddie

  and you know

  when you do the decorating

  you start at the top and you put the wallpaper on.

  Well, Eddie started at the bottom

  and took it off.

  He had ripped the wallpaper off the wall.

  I think he thought it was like toilet paper.

  He sometimes goes into the toilet

  and he sees the toilet roll there

  and he thinks,

  well, that toilet roll looks dead boring

  all rolled up there.

  So he gets hold of one end of it

  and he starts pulling it.

  A bit more a bit more

  and he’s pulling and pulling the paper off the roll.

  ‘Yippee yippee yippeee,’

  until he’s pulled the whole toilet roll out

  all over the floor

  and you go in there ten minutes later

  and he’s up to his neck in toilet paper

  with his little head poking out the top.

  Swimming.

  So that was why he wanted a song about wallpaper.

  Maybe he thought wallpaper was a kind of

  coloured toilet paper you stick to the wall.

  THE WATCH

  My mum and dad gave me a watch.

  Not a posh watch

  Good enough to tell the time by, though.

  And it went well enough

  until one day at a camp

  we were playing smugglers and customs

  over the sand dunes.

  I was a smuggler

  and I had to get £20,000

  through the customs

  for us to win the game.

  £20,000 written on a piece of paper.

  There were three ways to get past

  the customs.

  One – by running so fast

  the customs couldn’t catch you.

  Two – by going creepy-crawly so they couldn’t see you.

  Three – going through the customs

  with it hidden somewhere.

  I chose three.

  I chose to hide it on me somewhere.

  But where?

  ‘I know,’ I said,

  ‘I’ll stuff it in my watch,’

  and I took the back off my watch

  folded up the piece of paper

  with £20,000 written on it

  and clipped the back of my watch on.

  So then I went creepy-crawly over the sand dunes.

  They saw me

  they grabbed me

  and they searched me.

  They looked in my pockets

  they looked in my shoes

  they looked in my socks

  they looked up my jumper

  down my jumper

  down my shirt

  in my armpits.

  They even looked under my watch

  but they never thought to look

  in my watch, did they?

  So they let me go –

  and when I got to the other end

  where the other smugglers were

  I said,

  ‘Hooray, I got through.’

  I opened up the back of my watch

  and there it was –

  £20,000.

  I took it out – handed it over

  and we had won the game.

  I snapped the back of my watch on –

  looked at the time and –

  my watch. It had stopped.

  It was broken.

  I had broken it.

  That evening I told my brother all about it

  and I said,

  ‘Don’t tell Mum or Dad about it

  or I’ll get into trouble.

  I’ll get it mended secretly.’

  So there we were, tea-time

  and my brother suddenly goes,

  ‘What’s the time, Mick?’

  an
d I went all red and flustered

  and I go,

  ‘er er,’

  and I look at my watch

  and I go,

  ‘er er about six o’clock.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ says my dad.

  ‘It’s seven o’clock,’

  and he sees me going red.

  ‘Is your watch going wrong?’

  ‘Er – no.’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  ‘Let me have a look. It’s stopped,

  it’s broken. How did it get broken?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know.’

  My brother was laughing all over his big face

  without making a sound.

  So then I told my dad

  all about the smugglers and customs

  and hiding the money in my watch.

  He was furious.

  ‘We gave you the watch

  so you could tell the time

  not for you to use as part of a secret agent’s

  smuggling outfit.

  Well, don’t expect us to buy you

  presents like that again.’

  I was so angry with my brother

  for getting me into trouble.

  Inside I was bubbling.

  So –

  as soon as tea was over

  I went down to our backyard

  where there was an old cherry tree

  and I broke a twig off it.

  It was all prickly and flakey

  and covered in a kind of grey slimy muck.

  So then I took this twig back upstairs

  into our bedroom

  and I’ll tell you what I did with it.

  I shoved it into his bed.

  And as I shoved it into his bed

  I thought

  ‘This’ll pay him back.

  This’ll pay him back.

  This’ll pay him back.

  He’s going to get into bed tonight

  after I’m asleep

  and his feet

  are going to get all

  prickled up

  and covered in grey mucky slimy stuff.’

  Well, later that evening

  I was doing some homework

  and I had some really hard sums to do.

  I couldn’t do them.

  I was stuck

  and my brother – he sees me

  scribbling out all these numbers

  and the page is a mess

  so my brother, he says,

  ‘What’s up? Do you want a bit of help

  with your sums?’