Digger Field (2 page)

There was a bottle of lemonade in the fridge. It was Dean’s, but I was sure if we paid him a small percentage of the profits he wouldn’t mind us using it. If he did mind, I’d tell Mum he had nicked off to the beach when he was meant to be looking after Squid.

The secret to a great sports drink is the colour. It’s got to scream, ‘
Drink me and you’ll feel good.
’

I had a look for some food colouring in the pantry but I couldn’t find any. So I got Squid to grab a tomato from the vegie patch.

We squashed it then poured the juice into the lemonade. It sank straight to the bottom. It looked really lame. It was just a red blob at the bottom of a bottle, like a broken version of one of those lava lamps where coloured bubbles of oil go up and down.

There was nothing else in the kitchen that would work, so we went looking around the house. I found a jellybean that Squid had been saving in his secret hiding place under the cushion at the back of the couch. It was green—completely the wrong colour—so I ate it. Luckily Squid didn’t see me because he would have got upset.

I grabbed his favourite orange crayon and attacked it with a cheese grater, which he did see and he did get upset about. Quite a lot really. Wrigs had to hold him back while I grated the whole crayon and we ended up with a big pile of orange shavings. We put them in the bottle but all they did was float down and join the red blob of tomato at the bottom.

The only thing that our sports drink was screaming was, ‘
It’d be better to die of thirst than drink this.
’

Then …
whacko
! An idea hit me like a ball to the back of the head. Dad is a car freak. He has a thirty-year-old, two-door, bright orange Ford Falcon 351. He pulls it out every weekend and polishes and buffs and drools over it. He always has a tin of orange touch-up paint around in case the car gets scratched.

I found the tin in the garage and brought it back to the kitchen.

We strained the lemonade to get as much of the tomato and crayon out of it as we could, then poured the lemonade back into the bottle.

Then we added the orange touch-up paint slowly, a little bit at a time. The paint mixed with the lemonade and spread through the bottle. A little shake, and it was perfect. It was the exact shade of orange that screamed, ‘
Drink me now.
’

Diggerade, the Choice of Champions
.

It looked great but you couldn’t drink it of course. The paint was poisonous. The drink company would have to work out a drinkable non-poisonous version.

The only other problem was that all the pouring and straining had made the lemonade go a bit flat. Sports drinks need to be really fizzy to work. We needed to make it as fizzy as we could.

I once saw a trick online where a kid put a mint into a fizzy drink and it exploded like a volcano. Wriggler had a flip-top box of little mints in his pocket, so I thought we should give it a crack.

Wriggler didn’t want to. He said the drink would go everywhere. I pointed out that he had mini-mints which are about a fifteenth the size of normal ones.

We took the bottle out onto the front lawn. Squid and I stood back while Wriggler dropped one of his mints in, very carefully. The mint started dissolving at the bottom of the bottle and a few more bubbles came up.

Then the bubbles stopped, so Wriggler poured the rest of the mints into the bottle.

Nothing happened for a second. Then there was a rumble and the bottle started shaking. The drink frothed up and a torrent of dark orange blew the top off the bottle and sent the Diggerade into the air like it had been fired out of a cannon.

I think my next invention will be something that gets stains off clothes. And skin. And Wriggler’s teeth. At least he’s got red hair, so you can’t really notice where the drink splashed on his head. The orange paint will grow out some day.

CHAPTER 4

DAY 3: Monday

My skims: 14

Wriggler’s skims: 7

Days to becoming world champion: 36 (Easy-peasy.)

Excellent day. I got 14 skims. Wriggler reckons it was only 13.

Money made for tinnie: $0 ($735 to go—we already have $15.)

It says in the laws of Guinness World Records that you need video evidence to prove you’ve broken a record. So whenever Wriggler and I go skimming we take it in turns to film each other’s throws. That way when we break the record we’ll be able to prove it. When I say
we
break the record I’m being polite. What I really mean is, when
I
break the record.

Video evidence is not perfect though. Wriggler is pretty hopeless on the camera and he missed my throw when I got the new record of fourteen. He reckons it was only thirteen so it’s his word against mine. Fourteen it is.

I would have got more but I accidentally pegged a kayaker with a rock. One thing I’ve learnt in life is that kayakers don’t have a sense of humour. It wasn’t like I was aiming at him. I didn’t even notice him until I let go of the rock. It was such a good throw I reckon if the kayaker’s head hadn’t got in the way I would have got twenty skims.

The other thing I learnt was how quickly a kayaker can move when he’s angry. Well, at least how quickly this huge, sandy-haired bloke could. We had to run and hide in the old falling-down house until he went away.

The old house stands next to the vacant lot where we go to skim. It’s a deserted sandstone place that no one has lived in for hundreds of years. It’s just a shell of a house really.

All the windows have been broken and most of the roof is missing. The floorboards are rotten and most are cracked. Some of them are missing completely. You need to be careful where you step. The whole place is covered in dirt and dried mud.

Everyone I know reckons the house is haunted. All the locals tell horror stories about what happened to the boy that lived there. Some say he was killed by robbers, others reckon his grandfather went mad and strangled him because he thought the boy was the devil. Wriggler reckons that the kid was ripped apart by feral dogs. The only thing everyone agrees on is that the kid’s ghost still hangs around. If you listen closely you can hear weird noises, like water dripping when it isn’t even raining, or wind howling even though it’s a still day.

Wrigs didn’t want to hang around by the river in case the kayaker came looking for us, so we headed back to my house. When we got there we realised we had the whole day ahead of us and nothing to do.

Until I came up with the most excellent money-making plan ever. Everyone knows the best way to get famous is by posting something on YouTube. All you need to do is get a video camera, push someone over and make it look like an accident.

Wrigs and I did some research on the internet. One of the most successful clips ever is two brothers sitting in a bath. One looks about four years old and the other is about one. The four-year-old splashes the baby with some bathwater. Then the baby jumps on the four-year-old and bites him on the shoulder. Really hard. The older brother screams. The baby watches his brother crying for a moment, then laughs evilly and says, ‘More.’

Two hundred and fifty million people have watched the clip and the family made a fortune out of it. They sell t-shirts with a photo of the baby laughing and the word ‘More’ on it. They sell fridge magnets, baseball caps and school lunchboxes. Anything they can jam the baby’s evil face on. The baby gets paid to go on TV ads and just look at the camera and say, ‘More.’ How brilliant is that?

It got me thinking about a clip we could make to become rich and famous so we’d be able to buy the tinnie.

As I mentioned before, everyone reckons Squid is really cute, even though he has a huge head and talks like a baby.

My idea was to film Squid kicking a ball against the garage wall in our front yard. Then Wriggler would walk in the front gate and say, ‘Kick it to me.’ Squid would kick the ball to Wriggler. Wrigs would completely miss it and the ball would hit him in the nuts.

At that point Wrigs would scream and collapse onto the ground in pain. Squid would walk over, look at him for a moment, then pick up the ball and say, ‘Again.’ Gold.

I started videoing and it was going well. Wriggler came through the front gate and said to Squid, ‘Kick it to me,’ just like we planned.

But I hadn’t reckoned on what a good shot Squid was. He timed the kick as though he was scoring the winning goal in the World Cup final.

The ball lifted off the ground and flew towards Wriggler like a heat-seeking missile. Wrigs tried to get away from it, but it smashed right into his jugglies, at about a hundred kilometres an hour. He screamed, clutched himself, then collapsed onto the ground. He was bawling his eyes out.

Squid walked over and looked at him for a moment. Then he laughed, picked up the ball and said, ‘Again.’

I was laughing so hard I was worried I was shaking the camera. Wriggler just stayed on the ground, crying. It was the funniest thing ever. Way funnier than I’d planned. When Wrigs finally got up, he grabbed the camera and stormed off.

I waited a couple of hours for him to cool down. Then I rang him to see if we could post the video on YouTube. He was still angry. He said he didn’t think there was anything funny about the film at all. Then he told me he’d deleted it.

Wrigs needs to get a sense of humour. That clip was rolled gold. We’ll never get the tinnie if Wrigs keeps stuffing up my money-making ideas like that.

When Mum came home I told her she should enrol Squid in the Pensdale Juniors Soccer Team.

CHAPTER 5

DAY 4: Tuesday

My skims: 0

Wriggler’s skims: 0

Days to becoming world champion: 35 (If it ever stops raining.)

No skimming. It was pouring (rain and wee).

Money made for tinnie: $0 ($735 to go.)

It rained so hard today there was no way we could go to the river. Not only have we not made any money for the tinnie but we are falling behind on the skimming record.

Worse still, Dean noticed the missing lemonade.

Even though Dean is freakishly tall and stupidly thin, he is the strongest person I know. He pinned me against the fridge and started giving me a face massage with his thongs.

When he does this, he uses the thongs like little bats and slaps my cheeks with them. Slowly at first, then faster and faster and harder and harder.

It is straight-out torture, worse than waterboarding, worse than being locked in a room and having classical music blasted at you twenty-four seven. He only let me go after I promised I’d buy him a bigger bottle of lemonade than the one we used.

But there was no way I was really going to do that. I have a tinnie to buy and we were still seven hundred and thirty-five dollars short.

When Dean went to the beach Wrigs and I found an empty soft-drink bottle in the recycling bin.

It was a lemon-squash bottle which was going to make it hard. Lemonade is easy to fake, it’s just water, sugar and bicarb of soda. We knew from Diggerade that colour is really hard to get right, and lemon squash is yellow.

Then an idea hit me like a football to the goolies. I heard somewhere that if you’re in the desert with no water the best way to survive is to drink your own urine.

Wrigs and I set up a water-drinking competition. We filled up all the glasses in the house and laid them out on the kitchen table. Then we told Squid that we were having a race to see who could drink the most water in two minutes. Even though he is only little, Squid reckons he can beat everyone at everything.

I told him he couldn’t be in the race because he was too young. He begged and begged. It was all part of my plan. The more he begged, the more he wanted to prove he could beat us.

By the time I finally said he could join in, he was so keen he drank two glasses to every one of ours. He drank six big glasses before the two minutes were up.

As soon as he was finished, we pushed him into his bedroom and held the door shut to trap him inside.

About fifteen minutes later he started screaming. He was busting to go to the toilet. He smashed and bashed at the door. He was so desperate to get out, me and Wrigs both had to hold onto the doorhandle to keep the door shut.

‘I want to wee,’ Squid screamed.

Wrigs grabbed the empty lemon-squash bottle from the kitchen. I opened the bedroom door just wide enough to pass the bottle to Squid.

‘Do it in that and then we’ll let you out,’ I said.

There was silence for a while. Then we heard the sound of wee hitting plastic. Wrigs and I high-fived. The weeing kept on going and going and going.

‘Hurry up, Squid,’ I said.

He kept weeing.

‘We’ll have to get another bottle,’ Wrigs said.

‘We don’t have one,’ I said.

‘How about a bucket?’ said Wrigs.

I started to worry Squid would never stop.

‘Are you all right, Squid?’ I asked.

The weeing stopped. Squid groaned.

Then the sound of wee hitting plastic started again.

After what seemed like ages, Squid yelled, ‘Finished!’

We pushed our way into his bedroom and grabbed the bottle. He’d filled up nearly a third of it. That’s half a litre of wee.

We topped the bottle up with water, sugar and some bicarb of soda and shook it. It looked exactly right.

When Dean came home he went straight to the fridge.

‘Where is it?’ he said.

‘Had to get you squash, they didn’t have any lemonade,’ I said.

Dean grabbed the lemon-squash bottle, ripped off the lid and took a swig.

‘It tastes like cat’s whiz,’ he growled.

‘Probably because it’s not cold enough,’ I said. I couldn’t look Wrigs in the eye in case we both cracked up laughing.

Dean had another sip and swished it around his mouth. I had to jam my mouth shut to stop a snort coming out.

Squid chose that exact moment to walk in.

‘Why are you drinking my wee?’ he asked Dean.

Wrigs and I both fell over laughing.

Dean stared at us.

We bolted up the hallway and out the front door. I took the front steps two at a time but I wasn’t quick enough. I got pegged in the back with the bottle of wee. It bounced off my back and into the air, spun around and sprayed wee all over Wrigs. He was covered from head to foot.