Million-Dollar Mess Down Under Read online

  “Doesn’t that damage their tires?”

  Kasey gave a hard laugh. “They’re not exactly Einsteins, Socks.” She slid to a halt next to the entrance to the stadium. “It’s great, hey?”

  I nodded. “It’s, um, got character.”

  FYI, “It’s got character” is code for “This place needs knocking down.”

  Close up, Golden Blades Stadium looked terrible. I hadn’t read that Sydney had ever been a war zone, but I’d clearly missed something because the place looked like something on the news. Big chunks of broken brick, gaping holes, shattered glass, patched-up windows—you get the picture. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to see a reporter wearing a flak jacket and helmet, hunkered down next to the entrance gate.

  “The lease on this place runs out in a couple of months’ time,” Kasey said. “If we don’t raise some serious funds to renew the lease, we’re gonna be homeless. They’re putting a freeway right across here.”

  I made a sympathetic face. What else could I do?

  “And you know what makes it worse? Every time I see Cory Tamworth-Blythe around St. Mungo’s, it reminds me.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “His dad owns the company that’s putting in the freeway. TB Construction. Tamworth-Blythe Construction.”

  Just when I thought it was impossible to hate Cory Tincan-Buttockface any more than I already did, something would pop up to take it to another level.

  WHILE BOTH OF us thought about creative ways we’d like to see Tincan-Buttockface suffer, we scooted across to the stadium entrance.

  Outside, there were six or seven cars parked in the shade of a rickety-looking tin roof that ran the length of one wall, along with a monster truck with tires that reached my shoulder, two motorbikes, and a couple of bicycles. Muffled shouts and bangs echoed from somewhere inside. A whistle blew.

  “C’mon!” Kasey hissed. “They’ve started!”

  We scuttled through the entrance and into the concrete guts of the stadium. Kasey ran up a flight of steps with me right behind and I got my first glimpse of a roller derby.

  While the Golden Blades Stadium wouldn’t win any prizes for beauty, it sure looked like it meant business. I’d been in a boxing gym once (long story) and that had the same feeling—kind of sweaty and beat-up, scruffy, and exciting.

  The stadium was basically a big hall. On four sides were rows of grandstand seats facing a wooden oval track—the kind you see in the Olympic cycling events. (I found out later that was exactly what it was, except the Sydney Spitballers had taken it over for roller-skating). A bunch of girls and women were skating round and round. They all wore helmets and knee and elbow pads and looked tough.

  “Hey, Kase!” one of the skaters shouted. “Nice of our star jammer to show up!”

  “Sorry!” Kasey shouted as she put on her helmet and fastened her pads. She slid smoothly onto the track and bumped fists with a couple of the skaters. One of them looked up at me and waved. I looked closer and, as I waved back, saw it was Miss Bennett. She looked waaay different.

  Finding a seat in the stands, I took my sketchbook out of my backpack and settled in to find out exactly what roller derby was all about.

  After ten minutes, I’d figured it out. Roller derby was fighting on skates.

  Judging by the booming growls and clangs coming from deep in the bowels of the Colosseum, something massive, scary, and completely terrifying was being slowly brought up from the dungeons. As whatever it was got closer to the surface, each approaching footstep shook the ground beneath my bare feet. I looked down and watched tiny pebbles dance in the dust.

  A roar that turned my guts to mush thundered from behind the iron bars of the gate guarding the entrance to the arena. It ricocheted around the stadium and produced an answering sound from the bloodthirsty crowd.

  RAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOAAAWWWOOOOOARGH!

  If I hadn’t been lashed to a stake in the center of the arena, I’d have dropped to my knees. Instead, I watched in trembling horror as two muscle-bound slaves (who looked A LOT like Miller the Killer, now I come to think about it) heaved back the iron gates and bolted for safety.

  For a few seconds, nothing happened. Everyone inside the Colosseum (but especially me) gazed at the unprotected black tunnel and held their breath.

  RAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOAAAWWWOOOOOARGH!

  And now the beast came thudding in and we could see the five-headed creature clear in every horrific detail: the slavering mouths filled with razor-sharp teeth; the pitiless, deep set, totally uncaring eyes of a school principal; the huge scaly tail whipping from side to side; and (perhaps worst of all) the leather-bound rule book strapped to its pockmarked back.

  “Please, no!” I moaned. “Anything but that!”

  The creature stepped forward, growling and drooling. It put the biggest and ugliest of its faces close to mine. I tried to pull away but couldn’t. My nostrils filled with the creature’s foul breath and I glimpsed the remains of other poor souls who’d been wedged in between its canines. The creature stood upright, threw back its heads, and roared once again, this time louder and wilder than before.

  RAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOAAAWWWOOOOOARGH!

  The crowd fell silent as the noise faded and, in that silence, I heard a small child’s voice. “What is that horrible thing, Daddy? I’m scared!”

  I twisted around and saw a man holding an infant close to his chest.

  “That?” the man said in an awed whisper that carried clear across the arena. He extended a finger at the creature. “That’s … that’s Monday, son.”

  BWHAAAWHAAAWHAA!

  BWHAAAWHAAAWHAA!

  In case you were wondering, that is the sound of me crying bitter tears of reality.

  The weekend was officially over, it was raining heavily (natch), and I had to survive another Kasey-less week at St. Mungo’s High-security Unit. I didn’t rate my chances. Although that last chapter in the Colosseum was (obvs) a load of imaginary baloney, in truth, the harsh reality at St. Mungo’s wasn’t much better.

  The day began with my usual collection of demerits from assorted teachers. A language demerit here, a uniform demerit there. I was beginning to think of demerits as small furry animals for some reason. I mean, there must have been someone somewhere keeping score of all these demerits, but so far I couldn’t see what they were for.

  Anyway, after getting the demerits, I turned up for the first lesson of the day.

  Rugby.

  Okay, here’s the thing. I didn’t know what a rugby was. Now I do. And I can tell you this: I never want to rugby again, if that’s all right with you. Like, NEVER—NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. Is that enough nevers? NEVER.

  St. Mungo’s kids play a lot of sports. As those of you who have been reading all my books will know, sport is not something R. Khatchadorian does well. I mean, there was that one freaky time back at HVMS when I semi-accidentally became halfway good at football, but that lasted about eleven seconds.

  It’s not that I don’t want to be good at sport. I do. People who are good at sport are usually popular. They usually get an easier time at school than people like me. So I really wanted to do good rugby.

  The eeny weeny teeny tiny problem was this: have you seen the size of the kids who play rugby?

  “GO AND STAND out on the wing, Khatchadorian,” Mr. Lafoulis, the sports teacher, said. “You’ll get into less trouble out there.”

  I looked at him blankly. Less trouble sounded good, but I had no idea what a wing was. Hospital wing? Chicken wing? Airplane wing?

  “The wing?” Mr. Lafoulis said, as though repeating the word would make me suddenly understand. He looked at me again, held a hand to his forehead, and muttered something in French. (Mr. Lafoulis was actually French. It wasn’t like he was speaking French for some weird reason.) “Out on the edge of the field? You’re from America, right?”

  I nodded and Mr. Lafoulis gave me two demerits for not answering properly.

  “Rugby is a bit like your America
n football, Khatchadorian. In the unlikely event of you getting hold of the ball, try to run toward those posts.” Mr. Lafoulis pointed at two posts with a crosspiece about fifty yards away.

  “Like a touchdown?” I asked.

  Mr. Lafoulis nodded. “Yes, like a touchdown. One demerit for no use of ‘sir’,” he said automatically.

  I mentally herded another little demerit into the pen to join its buddies, then jogged out through the downpour to where I thought the wing was.

  A kid who was smaller than me and who was shaking like a leaf stopped me as I ran past. “You’re new here, right?” he hissed, his eyes darting one way and then another.

  I nodded.

  “A word of advice,” he said. “Get injured—as soon as you can. I mean, like a broken wrist/leg/face kind of injury. Maybe lose an eye? Trust me, Lafoulis won’t let you leave for anything less,” he said. “It’s the only way you’re gonna survive.”

  “O-kay,” I said, moving out of range. There was a wild look in the kid’s eyes that I didn’t like. Broken face? Lose an eye? How bad could rugby be? They don’t even wear helmets. I figured it might all be Australian exaggeration.

  And then I saw the dude playing opposite me.

  He looked about twenty-three years old. He had a beard and weighed 300 pounds—all of it solid muscle. His name was Greg. I found this out because Greg mushed me into the mud so many times that we were on first-name terms before the end of the first quarter, or half, or whatever way a game of rugby gets divided.

  To make it worse, I didn’t lose an eye.

  TUESDAY WASN’T MUCH BETTER.

  That’s it.

  No—wait—there was something else worth mentioning among all the other lousy stuff.

  I was slouching past the Great Hall on the way to class when I noticed the board displaying the names of all the past captains of St. Mungo’s. There were more than a hundred and forty of them, and I remembered what Mr. Ato had said back in Hills Village about Uncle Grey having been one. I worked out the years and followed the list of names down toward 1958 and found …

  Nothing.

  There was no mention of Khatchadorian anywhere. See?

  1956: Williams, S.

  1957: Harper, D.

  1958: Tamworth-Blythe, H.

  1959: Mills, F.

  I frowned. That was weird. Why would Uncle Grey pretend to have been school captain? I mean, who was he trying to impress?

  It was typical that there’d be a Tamworth-Blythe on there—it was probably Cory’s grandfather—and typical that his name was that bit shinier too. Poor old Mills, F. and Harper, D. were faded in comparison. Close up, the wooden board was paler under Tamworth-Blythe’s too, as though a name had been scrubbed out and a new one painted over. I moved to one side so that the light caught the board and there, hidden underneath “Tamworth-Blythe,” I could see the faint outlines of “Khatchadorian, G.”

  Uncle Grey had been rubbed out.

  Literally.

  RUBBED OUT!

  It was an outrage! After all he’d done for the school, Khatchadorian, G. had been airbrushed from history!

  I didn’t actually know that Khatchadorian, G. had done diddly for St. Mungo’s … in fact, now I came to think about it, I didn’t know much about Uncle Grey, period. What? I never said I was a detective. Plus, there has been a ton of really difficult stuff I’ve had to do since arriving in East Fudge. Digging around some old relative’s past hasn’t exactly been high on my list of priorities. But that wasn’t the point. He’d been given the role of school captain and deserved to be remembered. There was definitely something fishy going on.

  I was so wrapped up in The Mystery of the Disappearing Name that I didn’t hear the tik-tak of claws on wood before it was too late.

  “Loitering in the corridors, I see, Mr. Khatchadorian,” a familiar reptilian voice hissed.

  I whirled around to find myself face to face with Principal Winton and, as always, his faithful enforcer, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and her equally faithful mustache.

  “Guilty, he is!” Mrs. Fitzpatrick cackled. “Eighteen thousand demerits!” She lunged at me, snapping her jaws together. “Twenty thousand demerits!” The ends of her mustache whipped my face.

  “Easy, Fitzie, easy,” Principal Winton whispered, and Mrs. Fitzpatrick pulled back, snarling.

  Principal Winton turned his hooded reptilian eyes toward the board and then back to me. “Was there something of interest you were looking for?”

  That little warning bell sounded inside my head. “I was, er, admiring the lettering, sir,” I said. “Very, um, good lettering, sir.”

  It wasn’t exactly smooth, but it was the best I could do at short notice. Have you ever tried lying convincingly to a velociraptor? Didn’t think so.

  “A calligrapher, eh?” Principal Winton murmured.

  “I enjoy painting, sir,” I said. “Like my uncle.”

  Principal Winton’s eyes flashed. For a horrible, long moment I thought he was going to lean forward and bite my head clean off.

  “Uncle?” he repeated.

  I nodded. “My great-uncle Grey,” I said. “He was a painter, Your Sirness. That’s why I’m at St. Mungo’s. Uncle Grey must have been very proud of St. Mungo’s. Of course, he was here a long time ago, sir. Before you, I mean. And before Mrs. Fitzpatrick. Basically, he was here before everyone. Sir.”

  I was babbling. I closed my mouth.

  Principal Winton’s eyes were now so hooded he looked as if he was asleep. “Khatchadorian—that’s an unusual name,” he said. “And I have an almost photographic memory. I think I would remember if someone with a name like that had been here before you.” The Velociraptor drew closer and lowered his voice to a nasty whisper. “I don’t believe your uncle was ever a student at St. Mungo’s.”

  I knew enough to keep quiet. I didn’t want my head bitten off. I liked my head. It was the only one I had. “Can I go, sir?” I asked. “I’m late for, um, lacrosse practice.”

  I didn’t have a clue what lacrosse even was. Something to do with nets? Plus, I was pretty sure St. Mungo’s didn’t even play lacrosse, but help came from an unexpected direction.

  “I LIKE LACROSSE!” Mrs. Fitzpatrick screamed so suddenly that both Principal Winton and I jumped. “YES, I DO!” She turned bright red and went back to chewing her mustache.

  Principal Winton threw back his head and made that click-clack sound velociraptors make (the ones in the movies, anyway).

  “So, I’ll just go,” I said, creeping toward the exit.

  Once I’d reached the door, I looked back and saw Principal Winton hop up onto a nearby table, his claws held out in front of him while Mrs. Fitzpatrick gnawed on a chair leg.

  St. Mungo’s was one seriously messed-up school.

  Or, possibly, I was exaggerating again.

  BY WEDNESDAY I’D figured that my fake FBI letter had done the trick. My sneaky scheme must have worked because CTB and the rest of The Winners Club hadn’t so much as dropped a cheese sandwich in my hair since. So when I opened my locker and ANOTHER MASSIVE FLAPPY BAT flew straight into my face, it was (to put it very mildly) a big shock. It went something like this:

  I opened the locker. Bat flew into face. R.K. collapses onto floor. Cue mucho hilarioso from everyone at St. Mungo’s.

  I lay on the ground, watching the bat flap off into the distance.

  A face came into view. Great.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. “My favorite Australian bully.”

  “How are you feeling, Oleg?” Cory snickered. “Hope whoever put that bat inside your locker knows mixed martial arts. I wouldn’t want you to hurt anyone.”

  I could hear The Winners Club laughing but didn’t have the energy to respond. This was just like being back in Hills Village except I was wearing long socks with purple tassels, which meant—obvs—it was much, much worse.

  I’LL SPARE YOU the horrors of what happened on Thursday and Friday. All you need to know is that The Winners Club were winning big when i
t came to doing battle with me.

  On Friday night, with Georgia around at one of her HUGE number of new best friends’ places (how did she do that?), and Mom at the gym (she didn’t say she was going to the gym, but she’d left the house wearing sports clothes, so that was my guess), I spent as much time as I could in the attic at 322 Lorikeet Drive. St. Mungo’s was proving to be world class when it came to bullying, but there was one way I could forget all about Cory and his cronies.

  Up in the attic, I painted and drew like I’d never done before.

  Maybe I was mad. Maybe the ghost of Uncle Grey was working my arms. Who knows? All I did know was that my painter’s block was well and truly over.

  My mojo was back.

  As the painting took shape, I had time to think about stuff. When it’s going well, painting has that effect on me. I can sort of concentrate on the important things and block out all the other bits that just get in the way. While I was painting in the spirit of Uncle Grey, or maybe John Olsen, or both, I could see things clearly. And I decided I would:

  1. See out my sentence at St. Mungo’s so we could sell 322 Lorikeet Drive and take our million bucks back to Hills Village, where we’d live like emperors for the rest of our days. Or something like that.

  2. Keep painting this painting.

  3. Find out more about the Big Spaghetti Splodge and figure out what the connection was between John Olsen and Uncle Grey. Had Uncle Grey really painted Lake, or was I barking up the wrong tree and Olsen had definitely painted Lake AND some (or all) of the paintings in 322 Lorikeet Drive?

  4. Work out exactly why Uncle Grey’s name had been scrubbed off the St. Mungo’s board.

  5. Keep being friends with Kasey aka “Lola the Roller” and her cool Spitballers for as long as I could.

  6. Get revenge on Cory Tamworth-Blythe.