… Mum and Dad must’ve been totally blind AND anosmic!
Maybe they couldn’t smell it because they’d already had their nostrils totally burnt out by the smell of little Miss ‘Bugle-Butt’ Melly .
But yep, we still moved into our tiny little crap shack! Which was like a stale loaf of bread … REALLY crumby. And the rest of town isn’t much better either. When Mum and Dad first said there was a general store and a pub in Agnath, I thought, ‘oh thank you, at least there’s a real town hiding somewhere around here’. But I was sooooo wrong. There wasn’t some grand, huge mall hidden just over the next hill, not some large shopping centre a few kilometres away, not even a small shop down the road. No, no. They looked like they were the most ANCIENT two buildings in the southern hemisphere. Possibly even the entire world. They had to be kidding. But they weren’t. Unfortunately the store and pub were it: the whole town! Nothing more, nil, nada, nought, zip, ZERO, ZILCH!
So, of course when I first saw it I just figured the outside of the shop was so incredibly crappy, because the owner was so incredibly cheap and only wanted to spend money on the inside of his shop. Yeah that had to be it. He probably just didn’t want to waste his money on the outside, so that he could spend every cent on all the best ‘modern stuff’ on the inside of the shop.
I was betting that just on the other side of that worn, rotting, scraped and scratched ugly door, there was a shiny new counter that ran all the way around the wall. Lollies - every colour of the rainbow - flowing from a giant tap in the centre of the store. Barrels of every flavour ever made of chewing gum and fountains of rich, yummy chocolate, squirting into the air and flowing into tall cups for kids to drink … for FREE!
AND I WAS RIGHT! Nah, just kidding. I’ve obviously seen a certain film way too many times.
He didn’t care about the outside, or the inside. The outside had its peeling paint, cracked windows and termite-infested posts that seemed to say, ‘WORLD’S CRAPPIEST SHOP HERE – COME ON IN’. But inside … well, inside seemed to say ‘LUXURY COCKROACH AND BLOWFLY ACCOMMODATION AVAILABLE. ENQUIRE WITHIN.’
I was just hoping for a nice cold ice-cream on our first day in Agnath.
It was a stinking hot day and the air-conditioner wasn’t working, of course. So when Dad pulled up out the front of the store we all leapt straight out of the car and slammed the doors behind us.
SLAM! CRACK … CRASH!
A rust-eaten, weathered length of gutter from the store’s verandah-roof, directly above me, suddenly flashed past my eyes and slid down my arm. I just about peed myself on the spot. The jagged edge of the gutter scraped a four-centimetre path, straight down the length of my arm, shaving off every single little hair. It looked like someone had tried to MOW my arm. I staggered and fell backwards, throwing out both arms to grab at one of the four verandah posts and save myself from slamming into the ground. But it was like grabbing a snotty tissue. Either that, or I was suddenly Superman. The post just disintegrated in my hand until there was hardly anything left of it. I opened my hand to let the dust and splinters of wood fall to the ground and blow away in the town’s stinky breeze. I looked up to see that where I’d grabbed at the post, there was now only about a toothpick-worth of wood left holding it up.
Oops!
Well it wasn’t my fault.
At the same time, Dad stepped up onto the weathered, crappy, old wooden verandah, but just as he reached out to push open the shop door … CRACK, CRASH! His foot smashed straight through one of the rotten floorboards, throwing up a huge cloud of dirt and dust from below. He just about tore his leg to shreds going through the stupid thing.
THUD! And his foot slammed through the gaping hole. He fell forward, sending his face straight into the middle of the thick dust cloud… COUGH , COUGH , COUGH , SPLUTTER , SPLUTTER … Dad’s whole head completely disappeared, as he hacked and coughed, and choked on the thousand-year-old dirt that had been released from under the verandah. A split second later, his face reappeared through the other side of the cloud and continued falling forward, fast, coming to a dead halt on the only solid thing in his way; the store door. His face smashed into that door like a wrecking-ball smashing into a marshmallow… SMACK! BOING!
Instantly, a whole heap of swear-words came flying out of Dad’s mouth at the top of his lungs … Mum, straight away, turned to cup her hands over little Miss ‘pain-in-the-butt’s ears, but twisted on her ankle and accidentally shoved her fingers right up Mel’s nose instead …
##*#!! Mel yelled in her squeaky little voice. Wow … that shut everyone up! Mum then spent the next hour whinging at Dad that “Melly’s language was one of the reasons that we left the city.” Rant, rant, blah, blah, blah, blah …
What I want to know is … how come if I swear, I get into trouble? Melly swears and Dad gets into trouble? Not fair. That sucks!
Anyway, as Dad started bleeding and moaning, the store door groaned and slowly crept its way open. Dad stood there with one leg down the hole and both eyes still spinning, in different directions, with squiggly lines of bright red blood, winding their way down his leg like a roadmap. He had the most awesomely massive, purpley, blueish lump coming up right SMACK in the middle of his forehead like an enormous third eye. Cool!
Inside the store it was dull and quiet with the smell of mildew and mould hanging over it. The windows were so grotty that there was barely any light able to come through them at all. I scanned the store, starting to wonder if it really was open for business, or whether the sign was still just hanging there from a hundred and fifty years ago. Cobwebs hung all about the room, like delicate silk chandeliers, heavy with dust and the sucked-out hollow corpses of moths and blowflies, decorating them like disgusting Christmas ornaments. On the few shelves that were still unbroken, stood cans of food with really faded, worn and tatty labels in some weird foreign language. So I kinda figured that if we went by the faded pictures on the cans, then it seemed that the shop probably had plenty of ‘Camel Stomach Casserole’ and ‘Goat Buttocks Soup’ and a few tins of ‘Fish-Eye Chocolate Pudding’.
Dad was just about to order some fish and chips for lunch … until he saw the dead rat frozen in the brick of yellowy fat in the deep fry basket . . . and I could swear I saw it blink. Freaky!
That’s when Mum suddenly piped up and told the shop guy that “We’re just looking” and “a pub meal with meat and veggies was what we really needed.”
Yeah