The Astounding Broccoli Boy

  We were flicking through Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared together, looking for nemesis-crushing notions. ‘Look at this,’ said Ciara. ‘It says here that hippopotamuses kill more people than lions do. How depressing is that? I thought hippos were nice, but, no, violence is everywhere.’

  ‘I’m not being bullied by a hippopotamus. I’m being bullied by a bully.’

  ‘Anti-Bullying Suggestion Number Two – try to make friends with the bully. For instance, find out if he’s got a hobby or something and start a conversation.’

  I said, ‘He has got a hobby. His hobby is picking on me. We have lots of conversations about it. They go like this:

  ‘Me: “Please don’t rip up my homework/eat my lunch/snap my ruler/throw me off the bus.”

  ‘Him: “Try and stop me.”’

  ‘There’s got to be more to his life than that.’ She asked around at school and discovered that Grim did have a hobby.

  Kick-boxing.

  ‘Advanced kick-boxing, apparently. He’s really good at it. He’s the Under-Sixteen British Champion. Could you have a conversation about kick-boxing?’

  I tried that.

  Me: ‘Please don’t kick-box me with your killer feet.’

  Him: ‘Why not?’ Kick.

  Ciara had one of her brainwaves. ‘Let’s be logical about this – Grim nicks your food. What does that tell you about him?’

  ‘That he can do what he likes, due to his highly trained feet.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘That I’m always hungry. That I’m going to be the smallest in my class forever because of malnutrition.’

  ‘No, no. He’s hungry. Otherwise why steal food? He’s hungry. All you have to do is offer him some food before he asks for it. Hungry people will do anything for food.’ She makes some sandwiches.

  In the comic-book version of my life there was a picture of her making sandwiches with a slightly-too-pleased-with-herself expression. I didn’t notice this expression at the time.

  ‘If he’s going to eat your sandwiches, don’t let him take them. Go and give them to him. Show some style.’

  That lunchtime I walked right up to the Table of Fear – the table where Grim eats with his two nearly-as-big mates. I opened my lunch box and said, ‘Mind if I join you?’

  Tucked in next to the sandwiches is a Chocolate Frisbee. A nice little touch from Ciara. I love Chocolate Frisbees. I said a little prayer that Grim would hate that combination of light milk chocolate, crunchy biscuit and squashy marshmallow.

  Grim: ‘Chocolate Frisbee . . . I love that combination of light milk chocolate, crunchy biscuit and squashy marshmallow . . .’

  Curses.

  ‘But I don’t do sweet before savoury. Let’s see the sandwiches first . . .’ Maybe he’d be so full after the sandwiches he wouldn’t want the Chocolate Frisbee. He opened the top sandwich like he was defusing a bomb. Top layer of bread – thrown away. Crunchy fresh lettuce, in the mouth. Under the lettuce – ham spread with a thick layer of . . . what was that? A knife of cold fear stabbed my heart. I knew what that was. It was Dad’s Rocket Chilli Sauce. My gran sends a bottle over from Guyana every Christmas. It’s called Rocket Chilli because one tiny teaspoonful is enough to send you into orbit. One tiny teaspoonful is enough to spice up a big pan of curry. Ciara had spread it on the ham like jam. Ciara had made a lethal Ham and Chilli Rocket Volcano Nuclear Meltdown Sandwich.

  Me: ‘No . . . don’t eat that.’

  Grim: ‘I eat what I like.’

  Grim rolled the ham up, brought it to his mouth, chilli sauce leaking out of the sides like chemical waste. I could feel the heat of it, singeing my nasal hairs.

  ‘But . . .’

  Grim posted the chilli-smothered ham into his mouth.

  He chewed.

  His eyes narrowed.

  He stopped chewing.

  His eyes closed.

  Then they opened again.

  The pupils were tiny black dots.

  Then they were big black pools.

  His nostrils flared.

  Then he did the last thing I was expecting.

  He swallowed.

  He licked his lips.

  He took another bite.

  Eyes closed. Eyes opened. Pupils tiny. Pupils huge. Nostrils flared.

  Then . . . the rest of the ham vanished into the mouth.

  He opened his mouth, wafted a bit of air into it with his hand. ‘Nice.’ He nodded. ‘Do me another one like that tomorrow.’

  Grim Komissky has asbestos taste buds. Astounding.

  What can a big sister, or a dad, or a mum, really do against someone who can’t feel pain even with his tongue?

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘for the light milk chocolate, crunchy biscuit and squashy marshmallow of the Chocolate Frisbee.’

  Jordan Swash said, ‘Tommy-Lee! No!!! You said lunch was Cheestrings and apple. You can’t eat the Chocolate Frisbee.’

  ‘’S a present,’ said Grim Komissky, ‘so it doesn’t count.’ He slotted the entire biscuit into his mouth.

  ‘Don’t swallow,’ said Jordan.

  ‘I,’ said Grim, shrapnelling crumbs and chocolate flakes, ‘swallow what I like.’

  SLURP.

  He swallowed the Chocolate Frisbee.

  YUM.

  In my comic-book life story the next picture was an ambulance screaming on to the playground. WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH. Worried faces would be looking out of the school windows. People were standing on benches to get a better view of Grim Komissky being carried out of the building on a stretcher, with an oxygen mask over his face. Within minutes of eating my Chocolate Frisbee he had turned bright blue because he couldn’t breathe. It turns out that Grim Komissky has a serious nut allergy.

  Ciara came and stood next to me as the ambulance drove away. ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘you really crushed your nemesis.’

  ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t know he had a nut allergy.’

  ‘The chances of you accidentally giving traces of nuts to someone with a nut allergy must be less than one per cent. You hit the bullseye. You should be proud. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Like all arch-villains, Grim Komissky has henchmen. As you hurt their leader, I’d say that there’s a solid ninety-eight-per-cent chance that Kian and Jordan will come after you for . . .

  Revenge!’

  Oh.

  Great.

  Revenge of the Henchmen

  Dad keeps all his Amazing Spider-Man comics in a box under his bed – each one in its own little plastic folder. In The Amazing Spider-Man #8 Peter Parker is still at school and a football player called Flash Thompson keeps picking on him and calling him ‘Puny Parker’. They end up having a boxing match and Flash Thompson is completely confused because he can’t land a punch on Peter Parker due to Peter Parker’s Amazing Spider Speed. Then – WALLOP! – Peter hits Flash with his Amazing Spider Punch and sends him flying out of the ring. Peter Parker is the new hero of Midtown High School. All the kids give him a rousing cheer, as he walks to his locker.

  Is this what happened to me when I defeated my nemesis? Did I get a rousing cheer as I walked to my locker?

  No.

  Everyone thought I was a poisonous little snake who had tried to kill poor Grim Komissky with a biscuit.

  In fact no one called him Grim Komissky any more. From then on everyone in school called him ‘poor Tommy-Lee’.

  ‘You tried to kill poor Tommy-Lee with a biscuit,’ said Kian Power, blocking the entrance to the boys’ toilets. ‘He has a chronic nut allergy.’

  ‘I was trying to be friendly. I didn’t know he had a chronic nut allergy. I didn’t even know that Chocolate Frisbees had nuts in.’

  ‘Traces of nuts,’ said Kian. ‘That’s all it takes. Just traces of nuts. We have lunch with him every day to make sure he doesn’t eat a nut by accident. We all eat the same lunch so he doesn’t feel left out.’

  ‘We haven’t eaten a nut, or a trace of a nut
, all year,’ said Jordan.

  I said, ‘He never told me he had a nut allergy.’

  ‘So you’re trying to blame him now!? You’re saying it’s his fault he’s sick? Are you saying we should go and beat him up just because he’s got an allergy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who do you want us to beat up then?’

  ‘I don’t think you should beat anyone up.’

  ‘He’s our mate. We have to beat someone up.’

  ‘And that someone is you,’ said Kian. ‘We’re not going to do it yet though. We’re going to make you wait in fear. You won’t know the time or the place.’

  ‘And then,’ said Jordan, ‘we’ll get you the Monday after next in Columendy.’

  The Columendy ‘It’s Great Outdoors’ Centre is where we were going for our Year 7 Trip. When our geography teacher, Ms Stressley, gave us the final details about the trip she said, ‘Sadly poor Tommy-Lee won’t be joining us for this trip. Thanks to the after-effects of the recent attempt on his life, he has now been transferred to a special hospital.’ She gave me a dark look and asked that everyone remember Tommy-Lee in their prayers.

  I did pray that he wouldn’t die. But even in my prayers I couldn’t call him Poor Tommy-Lee. He was still Grim to me.

  Monday Morning

  . . . It’s a bright autumn morning. A group of innocent schoolchildren is crowding excitedly on to a bus bound for the countryside. One boy stands a little apart, less excited than his classmates . . .

  I stayed at the back of the queue. Everyone had to wipe their feet on a disinfectant mat – to help defeat Killer Kittens – before getting on the bus to Columendy. When the last person had done that, the driver asked me to help him get the mat on to the bus.

  ‘Thanks, son,’ he said as I shoved it on board. Then he closed the door in my face and drove off without me.

  I was saved!

  Until Ms Stressley pulled up in her little Fiat and accused me of trying to dodge the trip. I told her the driver didn’t see me.

  ‘You should make yourself more obvious. Get in.’

  She was following the bus in her car so we would have a vehicle for emergencies when we got there.

  We did have an emergency in the end.

  But it was too big for a Fiat.

  I opened my sandwiches so I could eat them before Kian and Jordan could take them. ‘Those look nice, Rory,’ said Ms Stressley.

  ‘Thank you, miss. Made them myself. Cheese and ham and tomato.’

  ‘My favourite.’ She kept looking at them instead of looking at the road. In the end I decided to give her one in order to prevent a fatal car crash. She shoved it into her mouth more or less whole and put her hand out for another one.

  ‘When we get there,’ she said, spitting bits of tomato everywhere, ‘you’ll be split into groups. Each group will be named after their dormitory. There’s Badger Dormitory, Fox Dormitory, Falcon Dormitory. You’ll be in Bat Dormitory. That’s way up in the roof, up a rickety old staircase, on the far side of the house. Nice and quiet. That’s why it’s called Bat Dormitory. You’ll be in there with Kian Power and Jordan Swash.’

  ‘What?! No!? Please, miss! No! Why?’

  It turns out that we were all supposed to write down the names of anyone we’d like to share with and no one had written me down, except Jordan and Kian. She said, ‘They might be very hurt if you said you didn’t want to share with them.’

  I said, ‘Someone will be hurt, miss, but I don’t think it will be them.’

  ‘This is your chance,’ she said, ‘to show some remorse for trying to kill Tommy-Lee Komissky.’

  No, I thought, this is his henchmen’s big chance to get revenge.

  When we arrived, a man in a bobble hat gave us a talk about making sure we washed our hands in disinfectant after any contact with the animals, and about avoiding any contact with cats or cat-like creatures due to Killer Kittens.

  Bonnie Crewe said, ‘Apart from cats, what creatures are cat-like?’

  ‘Lions, leopards, lynxes, pumas, tigers, cougars . . .’

  ‘Do they have lions in Wales?’ asked Kian.

  ‘Not as a rule, but you can’t be too careful.’

  ‘What about tigers?’

  ‘No. As I say, big cats are not indigenous.’

  ‘Leopards?’

  ‘That’s right. No big cats. Usually.’

  Then he explained the emergency procedures – what to do if someone broke a leg or similar.

  Kian whispered in my ear, ‘You should listen to this. You’re probably going to need emergency procedures.’

  The first activity at the ‘It’s Great Outdoors’ centre was kayaking. The man in the bobble hat led us on a walk up the river to where the canoes were kept. On the way he pointed out various geographical features. ‘Here is where the river meanders,’ he said. ‘Come back in a couple of hundred years and you’ll probably find these meanders have turned into an oxbow lake. Course, you’ll probably be dead by then.’

  ‘Or before then,’ said Kian, digging me in the ribs.

  The kayaks were about a mile upriver where the water – said Bobble Hat – was ‘a bit more exciting but not too exciting’. Kian and Jordan stayed one on each side of me, walking more and more slowly and closer and closer to the bank as we got further up the hill. Soon we were way behind the others and right on the edge of the water.

  ‘Ready for your bath?’ asked Kian. So they were going to dump me in the river. Fine. I wasn’t scared of getting wet. I could swim. I could just swim away from them. I could swim upriver to where the kayaks were, and when they asked me what I was doing just say I preferred swimming to walking – especially in exciting water. It would actually be cool. I might even look like some sort of hero.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Kian. Jordan was looking around all over the place. He seemed to have lost interest in hurting me.

  ‘I’m keeping an eye open,’ he said. ‘For lions.’

  ‘That gnome man just told you,’ said Kian. ‘There are no lions in Wales.’

  ‘He said you can’t be too careful.’

  ‘Don’t worry about lions and leopards,’ I said. ‘All you’ve got to do is make yourself look as big as you can. Stand on tiptoe, stretch your coat out. Spread your legs. Anything. Lions hate to waste energy. If you look like you might be hard to kill, they’ll leave you alone. Besides, if I’m with you, the lion would go for me and leave you alone, because I’m the littlest.’ They looked at me. I shrugged. ‘I read it in a book.’

  ‘Great. I feel a lot better now, thanks,’ said Jordan. ‘What are we going to do? Drown him?’

  ‘Yeah. Come on. Let’s do it.’

  ‘Lions aren’t a problem anyway,’ I said. ‘Hippos kill a lot more people than lions do.’

  ‘Hippos are vegetarian,’ said Kian, grabbing me. ‘Come on – get his other arm, Jordan.’

  ‘Being vegetarian doesn’t make you gentle,’ I said. ‘If you scare a hippo, it will trample you and possibly bite you in two. You don’t even have to scare it on purpose. If you stand between a hippo and the water, that is an emergency situation as far as a hippo is concerned. And in an emergency situation, a hippo does not roll up in a cute little ball, or change colour. It bites you in half. There’s no point trying to reason with a hippo, because the hippo is three metres long and weighs as much as fifty men.’ This was all in Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared. By now Jordan was anxiously scanning the horizon for signs of hippo activity. He was worried, and as long as he was worried, he wasn’t dumping me in the river. All I had to do was keep him worried.

  Kian wasn’t worried though. ‘There are no hippos in Wales,’ he said. ‘Someone would have mentioned it.’

  I pointed out that there were six hippos in Conwy Zoo. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I checked.’

  ‘Exactly. In the zoo. Behind bars.’

  ‘Yeah, but how did they get there? They weren’t born there. They didn’t swim to Wales from Africa. Someone brought them. In a lorry p
robably. For all you know, the roads of Wales are stuffed with lorries taking hippos up and down the country. And lorries can crash and hippos can escape. There could be hippos in this very river.’

  ‘Yeah? What’s the chance of that?’

  ‘Small. Maybe ten per cent. You could risk it. I’m just saying, that means there’s a ten-per-cent chance of us ending up with a lot of empty kayaks and loads of bitten-in-half kids, going, “That hippo attack was ninety-per-cent unlikely.”’

  Jordan scanned the water anxiously. ‘I just wish poor Tommy-Lee was here,’ he sighed. ‘I never worried about hippos when Tommy-Lee was here.’

  ‘But he’s not here, is he?’ snapped Kian. ‘And why is that? Because he put him in hospital, that’s why.’ He poked me in the chest as he said this, then poked again, and each poke shoved me a little bit nearer to the edge. ‘Are you trying to scare us? Are you? You don’t scare us! We scare you! Understand? Do. You. Under. Stand?’ One last poke and I was in the water.

  My nostrils filled up with water. It was so cold inside my nose I couldn’t think of anything else. I tried to stand up. But I was the wrong way up. I banged my head on a rock. The water gurgled around me. It was like being swallowed by a polar bear. I rolled over. At last I could hear something other than water. Laughter. Kian and Jordan laughing their heads off as they ran off up the hill.

  I managed to get up on my knees. I breathed in.

  The next page of my comic-book life story was a half-page picture of me on my knees in the middle of the river. There was no way I could swim up to where the kayaks were. The water was too shallow, too fast, too cold and too full of rocks. There was no way I could actually look quite cool because I was dripping wet and muddy and shivery.

  But I wasn’t drowned.

  No one was trying to kill me. The bite of the cold water was a good feeling once you got used to it. I liked the sound of it churning in and out of the glacial meander. I even liked the sound of the shouting that came from my year group up the hill. Kian and Jordan had reached them now – they were pointing down the river and waving their hands. They were probably telling everyone that I’d just fallen in, making out that they had been trying to save me. There were shadows of clouds chasing over the hill. The birds were twittering overhead in the blue, blue sky.