Louis Beside Himself Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANNA FIENBERG

  Number 8

  Horrendo’s Curse

  The Witch in the Lake

  Power to Burn

  Ariel, Zed and the Secret of Life

  Dead Sailors Don’t Bite

  Wiggy and Boa

  FOR YOUNGER READERS

  The Magnificent Nose and other marvels

  Madeline the Mermaid

  The Hottest Boy Who Ever Lived

  The Tashi series

  Minton Goes! series

  First published in 2012

  Copyright © Anna Fienberg 2012

  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) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 994 4

  Cover illlustrations by Adam Carruthers

  Cover and text design by Ruth Grüner

  Set in 11.3 pt Minion Pro by Ruth Grüner

  This book was printed in June 2012 at McPherson’s Printing Group,

  76 Nelson St, Maryborough, Victoria 3465, Australia.

  www.mcphersonsprinting.com.au

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  CONTENTS

  1 THE TOMBSTONE

  2 THE DEMON

  3 THE FRIEND RAP

  4 THE PHENOMENON

  5 THE CURSE

  6 THE BURGLAR

  7 STRUCK DUMB

  8 THE LIE

  9 TENTLAND

  10 THE CLOTHESLINE MOVE

  11 THE DREAD

  12 THE GATE FIX

  13 BESIDE OURSELVES

  14 THE PLAN

  15 PICK YOUR STREET

  16 BREAKING IN

  17 THE TOP ROLL MOVE

  18 UP AHEAD

  19 AGOG

  20 THE FOREVER MOVE

  21 THE TROUBLE WITH SPAIN

  22 THE END

  1

  THE TOMBSTONE

  ‘Come on, Louis, didn’t you hear me?’ yelled Dad from the living room.

  I sighed. Dad was singing The Undertaker’s entrance theme.

  ‘Remember to tighten your abs, and spring up with your knees!’

  ‘But I’m nearly up to the last page. The best part.’

  Dad was standing on the wrestling mat, cushions carefully strewn around to break our falls. ‘Get ready for The Tombstone!’ he called. He was working on his shoulder deltoids. His eyes were wide and enthusiastic, instead of dead, which was how you’re supposed to look for The Tombstone.

  When doing this signature move, performed by the world famous wrestler, The Undertaker, you should look totally deceased and vampirishly evil. The Undertaker does this by rolling back his eyeballs to show the whites, sticking out his blue, incredibly long tongue, and scowling like a serial killer.

  ‘I’m not in the mood,’ I said, picking up my book again. I was reading Gus Attack for the twenty-sixth time. Gus has lived under my pillow since Grade 4, and used to come with me like a teddy when I stayed at friends’ houses. When I’m an old man, completely dead and kaput like The Undertaker, I might even be buried with him.

  Dad dropped his arms. ‘What do you mean, not in the mood? That’s exactly when you should practise. Shake yourself up. Sharpen your reflexes. You never know when you’ll need them.’

  That’d be right, I thought. A person in these quiet leafy suburbs could be set upon just walking out of the 7 Eleven, or buying the Herald for his father.

  But how can you argue with a dad so eagerly flexing his biceps while he waits for you to leap?

  I tightened my abdominals, flexed my calves, and ran at him like a hurled grenade.

  He caught me around the waist and lifted me up to his shoulders. This was where I was supposed to spring away, but the sudden pressure on my stomach and the sight of his bald head from this height made me forget. My arms went slack and my abdominals loosened and I dangled there, thinking about male baldness and whether I too would end up this way.

  ‘Wake up!’ roared Dad, like The Deadman himself.

  His voice gave me such a fright, tearing me out of my REVERIE, that I’m sorry to say I let go of an enormous flatulence. That is to say, I passed wind. Well, it was more of a stink bomb, really.

  ‘Oh phew!’ spluttered Dad.

  A powerful smell wafted up between us. It was so thick, you could taste it.

  ‘Last night’s curry!’ I said, wonderingly. ‘Can you smell those mushrooms?’

  ‘You win,’ said Dad in disgust. He tried to hang on for a minute more, but the smell just seemed to bloom.

  He let me down slowly, as if any sudden movement might trigger more lethal gas. When he pulled his T-shirt up over his nose, he looked like a bank robber hiding from the media. You could only see his eyes. They were no longer wide open and eager. They were disappointed.

  ‘You’re not supposed to carry a concealed weapon,’ he muttered, turning away.

  I stood there alone, watching his back retreat up the hall. That is, I wasn’t really alone. I was still accompanied by the odour. Its presence was so powerful it had a personality, like a clingy best friend with mushroom-breath. But I felt alone. Have you ever noticed how sometimes when you get what you want – in my case, to be left in peace, to go back and finish my book – you actually don’t feel as sensational as you thought you would?

  ‘Hey, the smell’s gone now!’ I called, lying in sudden desperation. ‘Why don’t we try The Walls of Jericho instead or . . . ?’ My voice faded a little. The Walls of Jericho was very tiring.

  There was no answer.

  ‘Hey, Dad,’ I went on calling, ‘did you know The Undertaker is also called The Phenom? I guess that’s short for PHENOMENON, meaning incredible event, but why anyone would want to shorten such an amazing word I just can’t understand. Say it, it has four whole syllables!’

  I held my breath to hear if Dad was saying it under his breath, but there was just the whirr of the fridge.

  ‘Come on, Dad, as if The Phenom would be frightened of a little fart! He’s been set on fire, locked in caskets, buried more times than a dog bone!’

  I waited, listening to the pant of my pathetic breath. But the silence was like a grave.

  I slouched back into my room. The smell accompanied me. It wasn’t consoling. I got under the covers, even though I had my school uniform on. I picked up my book. Gus would know how I felt. He’d had more lonely times than curries cause flatulence.

  I read the last page, all the way to The End. But when I got there, I realised I hadn’t taken any of it in.

  Now I wonder if anything – being perfect at The Tombstone or The Walls of Jericho, or just keeping my reflexes sharpened – could have prepared me for the most shocking events that were about to engulf me.

  ONE thing you’d better know before I tell you what happened this summer, when I came face to face with PERIL, is that I like words. I respect them enorm
ously, the way other people respect money in the bank, or mountain climbing. If you’re like me, which you’re probably not because Dad says my kind of hobby is extremely rare, then you can open a word bank account. You don’t need a salary or personal references to start one, you just need to get yourself a notebook and a new pen that won’t run out in the middle of an excellent word.

  In my opinion, those small yellow notebooks with the spiral binding are your best buy. They’re cheap and portable. You can keep one in your pocket without anyone knowing, and use it to jot down any interesting words you hear. Beware of people with secrets, though. Secretive people don’t like being watched, they think you’re spying on them. So just say you have to go to the bathroom or something.

  You can build up your word bank account simply by keeping a record of all the new words you collect each day, and writing down what they mean. That last bit is important because otherwise you can find yourself spending words extravagantly and even quite mistakenly. Take the other day, for example, when I was dying to use this new word called LIVID, which actually means angry or furious, and the nice old lady who lives next door asked me about my holiday. ‘It was actually very livid,’ I promptly replied, and she said ‘What?’ looking at me all BEWILDERED, which means confused and a bit panicky. She hobbled back inside then and shut the door, and I felt bad because she’s old and worried about her hearing and obviously didn’t like to ask me to repeat the strange word, which wasn’t really a good word for a holiday, I admit and confess.

  So what I’m saying is: open a word bank account, get rich by all means, but use your power SAGACIOUSLY, that is, wisely. If I’d communicated properly with Mrs Next Door about the word livid, she would have understood me and maybe even smiled. I know she gets livid too when the cat from up the road comes into her yard and wees on her mat, making it stink. So see, we could have shared livid.

  If you want, you can look up my LOUIS MONTGOMERY WORD BANK at the back of this book. See, I think the more words you collect, the more chance you get to choose exactly the right one, and the more powerful a communicator you will be. That’s what my primary school principal, Mr Mainprize said. ‘Life is all about communicating,’ he said. ‘Life is a never-ending emergency. You must say what you mean to the people you care about in the short time you have allotted. And you, Bobby Thornton, should learn to use your words instead of your fists!’

  Last year I would have lent Bobby Thornton my notebook, or even purchased him one, if I thought it would have helped. But some people are just incapable of hearing what you have to say. At least that’s what I used to think, before this summer – before everything changed, and the world turned upside down and inside out like Bobby’s eyelids when he folds them back almost up to his eyebrows like The Undertaker.

  Of course just saying whatever comes into your mind all the time, even if there are impressive words involved, is not good communicating. Mr Mainprize would agree for sure. ‘It’s always possible to tell the truth,’ he says, ‘if you tell it with kindness and consideration.’

  And don’t be one of those people who uses the art of communicating to sell shonky stuff to other people who don’t need it. When my dad decided he ought to remarry so we kids could have a mother, he bought a full hair-regrowth product that set him back a hundred dollars and it never even worked and made him feel even worse about being bald. No, what I like about words is that if you use them well, you can tell people about yourself and what you’re interested in so that they can understand you. Have you ever done that? Do you like it when people do get you? And you get them?

  My dad would agree with all this improving your communication skills business if I really pressed the point. But he’d do it reluctantly, without putting any OOMPH into it. (‘Oomph’ is not really a word, it’s an old-fashioned expression meaning energy or enthusiasm.) Dad would nod wearily, and sigh at me sadly over his glasses, as if I’d just lost an Indian arm-wrestle.

  We wrestle practically every night after dinner. He’s often disappointed by my performance but tries to be encouraging, even if I lose within the first five seconds and my arm drops to the table like a dead magpie. He wants to build up my self-confidence, as well as my muscles.

  ‘But look how well-built my vocabulary is!’ I say, flexing a few well-chosen adjectives. And he replies, ‘That’s good, Louis,’ but he gets that sad expression on his face, which is rather long and LUGUBRIOUS anyway, like mine. We both look like depressed giraffes, my sister Rosie says. Well, she looks like a panda, especially on Sunday mornings when she’s forgotten to take off her mascara the night before.

  No, Dad might say he agrees about the communicating thing but really he’s more interested in teaching me to perform the right wrestling move in case someone suddenly gets me in a stranglehold. He tries to provide me with a variety of moves like The Tombstone, but really, The Walls of Jericho is his specialty, made famous by the wrestler Chris Jericho. It’s a simple but forceful submission move, originally called The Boston Crab, probably because the victim ends up looking like a confused crustacean caught in a net. Dad likes this move as it involves the full-body flip and is just the sort of thing a serial killer or a robber won’t be suspecting. Which actually brings me to what happened this summer.

  But before we go there, you need to know some more stuff about my family and my friends, who all happened to be near but far at what felt like the most PERILOUS event of my life.

  2

  THE DEMON

  If I tell you something, you don’t have to feel sorry for me or anything. But the reason my father is so obsessed with wrestling is that I don’t have a mother. Of course, I had a mother originally – it’s not as if I’m some weird glow-in-the-dark alien born without a belly button or something.

  My mother died when I was just eight months old, so I don’t remember her at all. The way I see it, when you grow up without something, then you don’t know what it’s like to be with it. At least, you can’t miss something you never had. You can feel sorry for my sister Rosie if you like, because it definitely must have been worse for her. She was four, and she remembers our mother’s hugs, which smelled of banana cake. There are photos of our mum, and you can’t smell the banana cake but you can see how she was built for hugging. Rosie says she used to push her face all the way into the pillows on mum’s chest and breathe her in. But now Rosie is seventeen and in Year 11, so she has pillows of her own.

  Maybe it was worst for Dad. I don’t know. You can’t really compare other people’s sadnesses, even with words. I mean, if someone says they’re sad, do they mean lonely or despondent? Or just a bit empty, like that feeling before lunch? The thing is, my sister and me, we still have our whole lives to live and find someone to marry and share our words with, whereas Dad already did that and he hasn’t found anyone he likes enough to marry since. Sometimes, late at night, he keeps the television on ‘just for company’. When I think about that I get sad in the despondent way, and I have to think about something else.

  To understand about the wrestling thing, you need to know a bit about Dad. I bet you’d be astounded to discover that his dad was a professional wrestler, like his father before him. To look at our dad, who is comfortably overweight on the bottom half and thin on the top half, with a shy, pale philosopher’s beard framing his lugubrious face, you’d never know he was brought up in a house full of professional wrestlers. My dad grew up to be an accountant, which means he helps people to organise their money and pay their tax on time, and he doesn’t have any gangsters or wrestlers as clients – well, only one old wrestler, and that one doesn’t really count on account of his being retired now. No, my father just advises mild people like Mrs Next Door, who say he is the best, most considerate accountant they’ve ever had.

  Sometimes I think Dad wishes he’d chosen wrestling, just like his father. Whenever he’s about to demonstrate a new wrestling move, his face goes all wistful as if he’s just heard about a great TV program that he missed. But when I asked him why didn’
t he do wrestling for a job if he loves it so much, he said, ‘Well, Louis, I just never had that killer streak in me.’ He doesn’t mean it LITERALLY. His father never killed anyone. Wrestlers are all great showmen, actually, who plan their moves together with the same care and precision as dancers in a ballet (although the wrestlers look more like serial killers).

  No, what Dad meant was that, even if you are not literally a killer, you need to be incredibly ambitious and competitive to be a professional. You have to put wrestling above everything else. You need to be strong as an elephant, agile as a monkey, so you have to train like mad and plan your whole life around it.

  Dad was never that focussed. He likes to potter. But that’s not all of it. He reckons he was never encouraged to be a wrestler. In fact, he was actively discouraged. His father, the professional wrestler, was always telling him to use his words instead of his fists and to get a good education and to look after his long lugubrious face rather than get it all smashed up. But he probably didn’t use the word lugubrious. Not many people do.

  So why is Dad obsessed with wrestling? Maybe it’s because he didn’t do it back then and he regrets it now. I don’t know. I can only SURMISE, which means guess and wonder.

  I do know of one giant regret looming over Dad. And it involves wrestling, that’s for sure. Something happened with his father when Dad was thirteen, something huge, as big as the longest word you’ve ever heard.

  He tried to talk to me about it once. ‘You know, Louis,’ he said, ‘your grandfather was a champion, one of the greats in wrestling circles. He was called The Demon – he could jump from the ropes clear across to the other side of the ring! But when I was thirteen – my first year of high school – The Demon quit wrestling forever. He planned to travel, go to Spain to see the bullfights. And that’s when . . . well, this thing happened . . . oh, if only I’d been able to . . .’ Dad’s voice thickened, and stopped. He peered off into the distance, frowning, as if gazing into the great blank mist of history.