Jack the Robot

by Karen Goldrick

Jack was an ordinary boy. He did ordinary boy things. He swam underwater in the mushroom pool, searching for treasure. He sought out demons and monsters in the lounge room, and immobilised them with his stun gun. He designed and built tall castles.

Jack lived in an ordinary house in Five Dock. He lived with his ordinary father, who built houses, and his ordinary mother, who mended broken animals, and his ordinary little sister, who didn’t do anything much, but she was only three.

Everything about Jack was ordinary ... until the day he started big school.

His mother bought him new shorts, and a new shirt, which was scratchy. He had black shoes which pinched his little toe, and a bright blue sunhat. She called it a Legionnaire’s hat, and it had such a long brim he couldn’t see the sky without tipping his head right back. She made him get dressed, and smile for the camera. Twice. Then they walked to big school.

Jack wasn’t sure if big school was ordinary or not. There were lots and lots of kids, all dressed in light blue and dark blue. Some teachers, and chairs, and tables, round boxes full of pencils, hooks for bags and hats, magic bubblers which squirted water all over yur face if you weren’t careful, purple girls toilets, and blue ones for boys.

Jack knew one thing. He didn’t want to be ordinary. He wanted to be:

EXTRAORDINARY!

At 3 o’clock, while it was still light, his mother collected him from school. As they walked home she asked him too many questions about the kids and the teachers and what he had leant. Jack was busy thinking about Extraordinary. Planning it. Visualising it.

Then he saw something.

Glinting in the bright hot sun.

A small piece of metal.

It was quite small. But not too small. Sort of a U shape (Jack already knew the letter U). It was tucked in the gutter under a few brown leaves.

“Where are you going, Jack?” asked his mother.

“Just to get this,” he replied.

“Jack the Collector,” his mother sighed.

When he picked it up it felt cold, like ice. He almost dropped it down again. But straight away it warmed. Until he almost couldn’t feel it. And as it warmed it changed from a dark almost black colour, to a colour lighter than his skin (which was usually light pink, but now somewhat light brown from the sun.)

“C’mon Jack,” his mother implored.

But Jack sat down in the gutter. “There’s something in my shoe,” he said.

It wasn’t a lie. There was something in his shoe. Two somethings. There was a sock. And a foot. Jack pulled back the velcro strap of his black school shoe, and took it off. He removed his sweaty smelly sock, and slipped the metal U over the big toe on his right foot. Now there really was something in his shoe.

The rest of the way home he thought about being Extraordinary. And the more he thought about it, the bigger steps he took. With his right foot. Big steps with the right foot, then small steps with the left. Like a frontwase walking crab. Such big steps that his mother couldn’t keep up.

“Slow down Jack,” she puffed, and Jack tried to slow down, but his right foot wouldn’t slow. He almost stepped in the cracks.

At home his dad made a noise on his electric guitar and sang that everybody he knew thought he was nuts.

“How was school?” he asked Jack.

His mum practised bellydancing in the kitchen while cooking the sausages.

“You still haven’t told me about school,” she said.

His little sister didn’t ask. She just watched TV.

Jack lay on his bed and pulled off his shoes and socks. His foot looked the same. It felt the same. But deep down he knew it was different.

Perhaps…it was…extraordinary.

Each day, on the way to school, and on the way home again, Jack searched for more metal.He now knew what to look out for. Each piece had to be a dark grey colour, and cold to touch. But it should warm up in his hand. For a while he thought each piece should be shaped like the letter U, but he found all kinds of shapes.

“Jack the Collector,” his mother said, as he slipped a piece shaped like the letter C up his right elbow (Jack also knew the letter C).

Soon most of his body was covered in small pieces of metal, each fitting together like a jigsaw. There was even a piece shaped like a small cup, which fit comfortably over his wee-pipe. In fact, the only part of him still naked was his left arm.

He could take enormous steps with both feet. He could do handstands on his right hand. He could smell all the ingredients in his mother’s cooking, including the carrot she snuck into the pasta sauce. He could see that everything around him was in fact made up of gazillions of tiny dots. And he could hear that his dad’s electric guitar was ever so slightly out of tune.

“You’ve grown. Mac-the-knife,” his dad said one day, as he hauled a large bathtub onto the roof with a long rope.

“Dad the collector,’ thought Jack. His little sister, Briony, playing in the sandpit underneath, scooped a spadeful of sand onto Jack’s foot.

“Doofus,” said Jack.Then he looked at the rope. He looked at the small threads which twisted to make the rope. The tiny dots which made up the threads. And he noticed the dots moving apart. The rope had stretched too thin, and started to break.

“Watch out Briony,” Jack yelled, but it was too late. With a loud crack the rope snapped and the bath fell back to the ground. Right over the sandpit.

Jack took two ginormous strides, then reached out his hand (fortunatley the right hand) to stop the falling bath.

“C’mon Briony,’ he said, puffing and sweating with the strain.

“OK,” she said, and stepped out of the samdpit. Then Jack let go and the bath tumbled down on top of it.

“Extraordinary!’ said his dad.