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