Exercises
‘The expected guest.’
Cousin Georgina was coming to stay. It was a surprise. For my tenth birthday. So I prepared.
I short-sheeted her bed. but she asked Mum if we could swap beds.
I locked her in the bathroom.
But she climbed out the window, down the drainpipe, and landed in Mum’s petunias.
I hid a dead fish in her clothes bag.
So she found some old prawns and stuffed them in my pillow.
And then things really began to get nasty.
I decided to tell her about my best friend: Hamish.
Hamish’s mum is a taxidermist. Or — I should say — she’s learnng to be one. She brings home dead heads: horses, sheep, even kangaroos, and stakes them over an ants nest. The next day — she has a clean skeleton to study. To pickle. To stuff.
So I told Georgina that one day, Hamish’s mum had tied a live animal to the stake. Just to see what would happen. I told her it was a sheep. Didn’t want to scare her too much. Georgina looked at me and nodded, and I could tell she was thinking. She thought long and hard.
That night, she tied me up in bed. Then she wrapped me in a blanket and rolled me downstairs. I’ll never know how Mum slept through he racket. Then she straddled me across the handlebars of the bicycle and peddled all the way to Hamish’s place.
I knew I shouldn’t have told her.
She left me tied at the stake. She was just testing me, she said. Just to see if I was telling the truth.
And that’s how come I don’t have any legs.