Blacky Blasts Back

  WHAT THE REAL CRITICS HAVE TO SAY

  My gran bought me your book as a birthday present.

  I have no idea what I did to upset her

  – Lauren, aged 7, NT

  You have many things in common with Roald Dahl,

  but writing good stories isn’t one of them

  – Brendan, aged 14, SA

  I read your book while I was recovering

  from appendicitis in hospital. I’m not sure

  which experience was most painful

  – Gabrielle, aged 8, ACT

  My teacher caught me reading your book during

  Maths. She was going to give me a detention,

  but reckoned I’d suffered enough

  – Jasmin, aged 10, VIC

  Your new book is pitiful, pathetic and poorly

  written – a huge improvement on your last

  – Mya, still in the womb, NSW

  First published in 2010

  Copyright © Text, Barry Jonsberg 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone (61 2) 84250100

  Fax (61 2) 99062218

  Email info@allenandunwin.com

  Web www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Jonsberg, Barry, 1951-

  Blacky blasts back: on the tail of the Tassie tiger

  For primary school age.

  ISBN: 978 174237 223 5 (pbk.)

  A823.4

  Cover and text design by Bruno Herfst

  This book was printed in November 2009 at McPherson’s Printing Group, 76 Nelson Street, Maryborough, Victoria, 3465, Australia.

  www.mcphersonsprinting.com.au

  www.allenandunwin.com/kids

  For Freddi, Tris and Damien

  My name is Marcus, but you can call me Boris the Impaler.

  Hell child.

  Born-to-be-wild.

  Ripper-off-of-chooks’-heads-with-his-teeth.

  Or just plain Marc if you prefer.

  It was Monday morning and I sat at the breakfast table, glowering at my sister Rose. For some reason, Mum had neglected to provide a live chook whose head I could bite off, so I was forced to settle for a round of toast.

  I tore off a jammy chunk, drool dripping from my chin. Then I let out a low growl, my eyes hard pinpricks of pure evil. Wickedness ran through my veins. My muscles bunched and tensed. Fingers, itching for destruction, clawed at the tablecloth.

  ‘Are you okay, Marcus?’ said Mum, putting a milk jug in front of Rose. ‘You look constipated.’ I gave an icy chuckle, but then a stabbing pain shot through my ankle and I choked on my toast. Rose had kicked me under the table. She’d been doing that a lot recently. My chuckle turned into a strangled whimper. I coughed violently and a plug of bread exploded from my throat, travelled like a speeding bullet across the table, ricocheted off the milk jug and pinged Rose between the eyes.

  Mum shrieked.

  Rose slumped to the floor, eyes rolling back in her head.

  Amid the confusion, I grabbed my backpack and scuttled out the door.

  School beckoned and Boris had impaling to do.

  Assembly. A perfect opportunity for raising hell.

  It is the custom at my school for seven hundred kids to sit cross-legged on the gym floor and fall asleep while teachers drone on about nothing. Today Miss Dowling, our Principal, was the main event, so I waited while the warm-up acts finished their turns. If I was going to do something spectacularly bad – something gut-wrenchingly terrible – it would have to be when Miss D was in full flow.

  Words floated across the gym and died before they reached my ears. I was lost in my own head, planning. My first idea was to stand when the Prinny was slotting into top gear, and drop an amazingly loud and fruity fart. Trouble is, that’s not something you can produce on demand. I wasn’t confident I wouldn’t just strain, turn beetroot red and poop my pants.

  Nasty, yes. But more embarrassing than destructive. Not the behaviour of a devil child.

  Maybe I could just yell out something really offensive. Pull the pigtails of random year-seven girls. Projectile vomit on Miss Dowling’s shoes.

  I was running through the options when I realised the time had come. Miss Dowling had the microphone and was pacing the stage. I hadn’t even noticed her move into the spotlight. And I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. But what I did know was that this was the time to act. Just leap up and do something really, really bad. Trust my instinct. Let the evil work through me. Now or never. Do it, Marcus. Do it!

  I jumped to my feet and Miss Dowling paused in her flow of words. She looked straight at me. My knees trembled but I opened my mouth. I would have been fascinated to know what I was going to say, but I never got the chance. She spoke first.

  ‘Splendid, Marcus,’ she said. ‘What a good start to our School Community Project! Those pensioners will be so grateful for your help with their gardens. I hope the rest of you are as impressed as I am by Marcus’s selflessness. Five gold stars!’

  My mouth closed and opened again. I did a fabulous impersonation of a goldfish for a few moments. Then I sat down.

  Lunch. A perfect time for mayhem.

  Normally I take a packed lunch, but this morning I’d left it in the fridge. After braining Rose with the lump of half-chewed toast, I had made a hasty retreat. So I searched my pockets for shrapnel and came up with enough to buy a hot dog from the canteen. A double helping of tomato sauce dripped over my fingers. I chewed at the roll, but left the pale sausage intact.

  Miss Monkhouse was the teacher on yard duty. This was a stroke of luck. Miss Monkhouse is the scariest teacher in the school. She regularly chews up students and spits them out. She’s as tough as a sumo wrestler, only larger. She’s never smiled and doesn’t seem inclined to risk it. She can maim at fifty metres with one blow of her tongue.

  Miss Monkhouse leaned against a pillar at the side of the canteen, blotting out the sun and gazing at the kids in the yard. She had her back to me. I balanced the dripping hot dog in my hand and edged closer. The broad expanse of her neck made a perfect target. I couldn’t miss. I could imagine the moment of impact. The splat of the hot dog, the splatter of flying sauce, even . . . maybe, just maybe . . . the sausage sliding down her neckline and lodging in the small of her back. If her back had anywhere that was small.

  I took a deep breath and let my missile fly.

  You know how I said I couldn’t miss?

  I was wrong.

  The hot dog hit the pillar she was leaning against and rebounded. The impact must have drawn her attention, because she turned around. Just in time to see the hot dog bounce on the edge of a rubbish bin, teeter for a moment on the rim like a basketball making up its mind whether to be a basket or not, and then drop neatly into its depths.

  You could have practised that trick a thousand times and never pulled it off. Miss Monkhouse gazed at me.

  ‘Good boy, Marcus,’ she said. For a second I thought she was going to smile. I think she tried, but the muscles must have seized up through
lack of use. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many children just drop their rubbish on the ground. Well done. Five gold stars!’

  Science. Last lesson of the day. Perfect for mischief.

  Chemicals, Bunsen burners, test tubes. The Spawn of Satan couldn’t have asked for a better environment for creating havoc. No way I could fail. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.

  I’d learned something that day. KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yes, creating a bomb out of a chemical reaction might do the trick, but I’m not crash hot at Science. More likely I’d mix up some stuff and discover a cure for cancer. Incinerate Mr Scott’s desk with a Bunsen burner? Too time-consuming. Dissect a student? Too messy.

  So I decided to throw a beaker full of something nasty-smelling at the wall. A distant wall. I didn’t want anyone hurt by flying glass. It was absolutely foolproof. Suspension guaranteed.

  It all went according to plan. Up to a point. The teacher’s back was turned. My beaker was full of a bright purple liquid and smelled like a dunny at the annual Diarrhoea Sufferers’ Convention. I put my right foot behind me to get more power into the throw. But before I could release the beaker, a number of things happened:

  A Mr Scott turned round.

  B I caught my foot on a stool.

  C Tonia Niven, a small and exceptionally clumsy girl, reached over the Bunsen burner to pick up her beaker and set the arm of her dress on fire.

  D I lost my balance.

  E I fell on top of Tonia, my beaker dropping onto the bench where, miraculously, it didn’t break or even spill a drop of its contents.

  F Tonia and I rolled on the floor for a few horribly embarrassing seconds and when we got to our feet her sleeve was smoking gently.

  There was a stunned silence. Mr Scott rushed up and examined Tonia’s arm. Then he turned to me.

  ‘Marcus. That was the bravest thing I have ever seen.’

  ‘But sir . . .’

  ‘No modesty, Marcus. I saw it all. Tonia could have been badly burned. But you didn’t hesitate. Just threw yourself onto her and put out the fire. Twenty gold stars, Marcus! And that’s just for starters. Miss Dowling will know about your heroism.’

  Things couldn’t get any worse.

  Tonia gazed into my eyes. Hers were shining with a sloppy, gooey sludge of emotions.

  ‘You’re my hero, Marcus,’ she breathed through buck teeth. ‘Will you be my boyfriend?’

  I was wrong. Things could get worse.

  It was a depressed Boris the Impaler who trudged home from school that afternoon.

  How could it all go so horribly wrong? How could I stuff up so monumentally? My plan had been simple enough. Get a reputation for being a top-notch drongo, a prize-winning dropkick, a grade-A loser. Instead, I was probably going to be made Head Boy and crowned Young Australian of the Year. Obviously I couldn’t get anything right. Or do I mean ‘wrong’? Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless.

  I opened my front door, screamed and fell to the floor clutching my ankle. I didn’t get time to rub at the fire raging there, because two hands grabbed my left wrist and gave it a vicious Chinese burn. Now two parts of my anatomy were throbbing.

  Rose’s face loomed before me. You’d think I’d suffered enough.

  ‘Try to blind me, would you, Mucus?’ she hissed. ‘I’ll teach you to try to blind me!’

  But she didn’t give me the promised lesson in blinding. She simply sawed away with renewed vigour at my wrist, gave my ankle another kick in exactly the same place as before and left me on the floor, writhing in pain.

  All in all, it had been a great Monday.

  I need to explain.

  Let me start with a confession. Nobody calls me Boris the Impaler. My real name is Marcus Hill, a.k.a. Marcus the Sook. I’m just an average Year Seven student and I never get in trouble at school. Not even when I try. So you’re probably wondering why I went to such lengths to cause trouble. The answer lies in a conversation I’d had the previous Friday with the Principal . . .

  ‘But Miss Dowling, I want to go!’

  The Principal sat behind her desk and cradled her chin on interlaced fingers. She wore a brightly coloured dress and a kind expression.

  ‘I understand, Marcus,’ she said, ‘but this school camp isn’t open to everyone. I’ve already explained that. It’s only available to our special boys unit. And it’s not really going to be fun, if you want to know the truth. It’s all about developing leadership skills, building resilience and taking responsibility for your own actions. There will be hardship involved. Survival techniques. Tough bushwalks. Camping out in harsh conditions.’

  She had explained this. The special boys unit is composed of six or seven students in my year group who have severe behavioural problems. The kind of boys who act first and think afterwards. A long time afterwards. Sometimes not at all. My mate Dylan is one of them. He was a nightmare at primary school. He’s a nightmare in secondary school. But he’s also the best friend anyone could have.

  I tried the goody-two-shoes sook approach.

  ‘But Miss Dowling,’ I whined. ‘I’ve never been to Tasmania and I really want to go. How about if I promise to be very, very good?’

  ‘You’re missing the point, Marcus. The boys on this special camp are going precisely because they aren’t very, very good.’

  ‘Okay. I promise to be very, very bad.’

  Miss Dowling brushed a speck of dust from the shining surface of her desk and got to her feet. This meeting was drawing to a close.

  ‘I’m sorry, Marcus. I really am. But the funding for this project – which is provided by the education department – is very specific. Only the special boys group. And you are not part of that.’

  I’m average boys group, I thought. It’s not fair. If you’re bad you get rewarded. If you’re average you get zilch.

  And that’s when the idea popped into my head. If you had to be a drongo to get on this trip, then a drongo I’d become. It couldn’t be too hard. The members of the special boys group found it a cinch. Didn’t have to put in any effort at all.

  As I left Miss Dowling’s office, my mind was made up. I was going to join the ranks of the nightmare kids.

  Boris the Impaler was born.

  And he died the very next school day.

  I dragged his aching body into my bedroom and closed the door. Then I hopped to my bed and examined my swollen ankle. Rose might be the sister from hell and a total loser, but she’s a precision ankle-kicker. That was three times today. And all on the same spot. I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. My plan had seemed so foolproof and now it lay in tatters. How was I going to get on the camp?

  You see, it wasn’t just a question of wanting to go. I had to be there. I just had to. And time was running out. The ferry trip to Tassie was the coming Thursday. Three days away. I had to do something, and do it now. But the more I thought, the more hopeless it seemed.

  A rattle of stones on my window drew me from the start of a doze. I hobbled over to the window and opened it.

  Dylan slid in.

  I’ve already mentioned Dyl. My best mate. A small, wiry kid with a serious cola addiction and no discernible fear. Dyl could have knocked on the front door, but he doesn’t do anything normal. He just likes throwing stones at breakable things. There was a time when Mum wouldn’t let him into the house at all. She regarded Dylan as a small but powerful weapon of mass destruction. But he came with us on holiday last Christmas and since then Mum has taken a shine to him.

  Dyl pulled a cola can from his jacket pocket, popped the ring pull and took a deep swig.

  ‘Wassup, Marc?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing good, mate,’ I replied. ‘Nothing good.’

  I explained how my day had gone. Dyl isn’t in any of my classes. Since we both started at secondary school he spends his days with the other members of the special boys unit in a classroom at the far end of the school, where the screams and sounds of breaking objects can’t be heard by the rest of us. I’ve asked
Dyl what they do in there all day, but he can never remember.

  I read something once about some subatomic particles existing for only one billionth of a second. They still last longer than Dyl’s memory.

  Anyway, judging by his teacher’s appearance, the main area of the special boys’ curriculum involves inducing nervous breakdowns in adults. Mr Crannitch used to be young, dark-haired and energetic. Like us, he joined the school at the start of the academic year. But after one term of dealing with Dyl and the others, he’s now a shambling, grey-haired, drooling dude who mutters to himself and twitches constantly.

  I didn’t spare Dyl any of the hideous experiences I’d been through.

  ‘Wow,’ he said when I was done. ‘So are you going to be Tonia’s boyfriend? She’s kinda scary, man.’

  ‘Of course not, ya dill,’ I replied. ‘That’s not the worst thing to have happened today.’

  ‘You sure? I can’t imagine anything worse.’

  ‘Dylan,’ I said with a sigh. ‘The worst thing is that I can’t see any way to get on that school camp with you. Miss Dowling won’t hear of it.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Dyl. ‘I’ve got it! Why don’t you just act really badly at school? You know, get into trouble, get transferred to the special boys unit with me.’

  I sighed again. When Dyl’s your best mate you do a lot of sighing.

  ‘Don’t you ever listen, Dyl? I’ve just finished explaining that that was what I was trying to achieve today.’

  ‘Sorry, mate. What did you say? I wasn’t listening.’

  I sighed.

  There’s something else I need to explain and I must warn you the next bit is difficult to believe. You see, there was a good reason why I needed to get to Tasmania within the next few days. Possibly you thought I wanted to be with my mate, but that’s not the case at all.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’d do anything for Dylan and he’d do anything for me. But I could live without him for a week, which was how long the camp was lasting. It’s not as if we’re joined at the hip. Plus, the other kids who were going weren’t exactly a barrel of laughs. For example, there was John, a specimen with the build of a basketball player and the personality of a serial killer. His speciality was torture. Other kids if he could get them, but failing that, any passing butterfly would do. Then there was Brodie. He made John look like a candidate for sainthood. And then there was Kyle . . .