Puppy Fat (6 page)

Please.

The bedroom door stayed shut.

Come on, pleaded Keith silently, you've been in there for hours. Anyway, you shouldn't sleep too long directly after a long flight, you can get leg clots, it's a known fact.

The bedroom door stayed shut.

Tracy, continued Keith urgently, Mum'll be going to work in a sec.

‘Keith, I'll be going to work in a sec,' called Mum from the bathroom.

Keith sighed.

Tragic.

A whole day of Mum being perked up going to waste.

Well not if I can help it, he thought.

He headed for the bedroom door.

If he could get Tracy to cheer Mum up for just a couple of minutes now, Mum's posture would almost certainly improve a bit and male motorists were bound to notice while she was writing out their parking tickets.

‘Keith,' called Mum, ‘here a sec.'

Keith sighed and went into the bathroom.

Mum was brushing her hair in the mirror. Keith watched her sadly. On telly when women did that it made their hair thicker and bouncier. When Mum brushed hers it made it flatter.

‘When Tracy and Bev wake up,' said Mum, ‘make sure they have everything they want. The chocolate fingers are in the medicine cupboard.'

Keith looked at her.

She opened the bathroom cabinet and pointed to the top shelf.

Keith stood on tiptoe and could just see the chocolate finger box.

Fair enough, he thought, they are a type of medicine.

‘I put them up there so you wouldn't scoff them all,' said Mum.

Keith decided not to argue.

If he reminded her that she was the one with the chocolate finger problem it would probably make her hair even flatter.

‘Don't forget to clean your teeth,' he said to her, and hurried to the bedroom.

Tracy was stretched out on his bed asleep, still in her jeans and T-shirt.

Beside her on the pillow was the half-eaten sausage and onion sandwich.

He shook her gently.

She mumbled and turned over, still asleep.

‘Tracy,' said Keith, ‘it's urgent. I need you to tell Mum about your dad's cousin Phil.'

Tracy opened her eyes and stared at him blearily.

‘Uh?' she mumbled.

‘You know,' continued Keith, ‘about how he got trampled in that rodeo and had to have thirteen metal pins surgically implanted in his body which gave him good posture for the first time in his life plus greatly improved TV reception.'

Tracy rolled over.

‘Not now,' she moaned into the pillow. ‘I need more sleep. Aunty Bev didn't stop yakking the whole flight.'

Keith watched as her body went limp and her breathing became heavier.

Poor thing, he thought.

Normally she'd swim through wet cement to finish a sausage and onion sandwich and here she was, too tired to even pick out the fried onion.

‘It'll only take a couple of minutes,' he said, ‘then you can go back to sleep.'

She didn't stir.

Keith was debating whether to give her another shake when Mum appeared in the doorway.

‘I'm going now love,' she said. ‘Bye.'

‘Mum, wait,' said Keith.

‘What is it love?' she said.

Tracy started snoring.

‘Doesn't matter,' said Keith.

Mum went.

Keith sighed, picked up the sandwich and took a bite.

Oh well, he thought, one more day won't kill her.

He opened his wardrobe and pulled out a blanket. While he was spreading it over Tracy he noticed something.

She was wearing the jeans she'd ripped crawling under a cane harvester to rescue a frightened blue-tongue lizard.

He saw how short they were on her now.

That day in the cane field they'd fitted her perfectly. She'd tucked them into her socks so snakes wouldn't crawl up her legs.

Now, only four months later, they stopped halfway down her ankles.

Keith stared.

Blimey, he thought. Swollen spinal fluid couldn't make that much difference. Either she's grown or those jeans have shrunk.

He glanced down at his own jeans and saw he was wearing the pair he'd ripped that day.

Just like old times.

Except his were still a perfect fit.

Which come to think of it was a bit strange.

He tried to think how his jeans could have got stretched. A power surge at the laundromat? Mum hanging them to dry over the bath with marbles in the pockets?

Then another possibility hit him.

Keith stared into Mum's bathroom mirror.

As usual all he could see was the top two-thirds of his face.

As usual the bottom of the mirror chopped him off under his nose like a badly-framed photograph.

Just like it had the first time he'd stood in front of it, three months ago.

He remembered how on that occasion he'd decided the previous tenant must have been a giant, or a circus artiste who liked to wear his stilts around the flat, and that was why the bathroom cabinet was so high on the wall.

The thought had made him smile, which had made him look strange in the mirror because he hadn't been able to see his mouth, just his twinkling eyes.

He still couldn't see his mouth.

Not even a bit of it.

Not even three months later.

And his eyes weren't twinkling at all now.

Keith burst into his bedroom at Dad's and gasped air into his aching lungs.

He'd never run non-stop from Mum's before.

But then he'd never had anything this urgent to double-check before.

Still panting, he went over to the boxes of tinned pineapple stacked beside the wardrobe.

Here goes, he thought.

He stood with his back against the boxes and ran the palm of his hand over the top of his head.

It was as he'd feared.

He was exactly the same height as the stack.

He turned desperately and counted the boxes.

The stack was still only four boxes high.

Exactly as he and Dad had made it three months ago because Dad had reckoned a kid shouldn't have piles of tinned pineapple in his room that were taller than he was, partly because of the danger of them falling on him and partly because of the scary shadows big stacks throw at night.

Keith felt more scared now than he ever had from tinned pineapple shadows.

Because this confirms it, he thought, heart pounding.

I've stopped growing.

‘Aunty Bev, wake up.'

Keith tried the door again but it was definitely locked.

He wondered if Mum would mind him forcing her bedroom door open with the bread knife seeing as this was an emergency.

Before he could decide, he heard Aunty Bev moving around inside the room.

‘Hang on,' she called.

Keith heard what sounded like the rustle of tissue boxes and the hiss of spray cans and the click of plastic lids.

Then Aunty Bev opened the door.

‘G'day Keith,' she smiled.

Even though Keith was nearly frantic, he couldn't help gawking.

He'd never seen anyone who'd just been asleep for five hours in such good shape.

Her hair wasn't sticking out.

There were no pillow creases in her face.

He couldn't even see any dried dribble at the corners of her mouth.

Perhaps beauticians are trained to sleep sitting up, he thought, like camels.

‘Anything the matter?' asked Aunty Bev.

Keith hesitated for a moment.

He felt a flash of embarrassment at the thought of blurting out his problem to someone he'd only met twice.

It's OK, he told himself. She's a professional. It's like going to the doctor.

‘What can stop a person growing?' he asked. ‘A person my age?'

Aunty Bev looked at him and frowned.

Keith hoped she wouldn't want to examine him physically.

‘Hormones,' she said. ‘If they're out of balance they can play havoc with your growth patterns.'

Keith knew that couldn't be it because he didn't have any hormones yet. Hormones made your voice go funny like Dennis Baldwin's and his voice was still normal.

‘What else?' he asked.

‘Food,' said Aunty Bev. ‘The more food you have the bigger you get. If you stop eating, you stop growing.'

Can't be that, thought Keith. I get heaps of food with Dad being in the business. Plus I'm pretty sure most of the major food groups are present in chocolate fingers.

‘Anything else?' he asked.

Aunty Bev frowned again.

Keith hoped she wasn't going to say too much exercise. Not with the amount of running he was having to do between Mum and Dad's places.

‘Stress,' she said. ‘Tension, worry, anxiety, it can all bugger the metabolism.'

Something clicked in Keith's brain.

‘You mean,' he said, ‘the sort of worry you feel when your parents have let themselves go so badly nobody wants to ask them out?'

Aunty Bev gently led him over to the settee.

‘Keith,' she said, ‘is there something you want to tell me?'

*

Keith was still glowing with happiness when he got to Dad's place, even though he felt a bit sick from drinking so much carrot juice.

Every time he thought about his chat with Aunty Bev, he glowed even more.

She'd been great.

‘No problem,' she'd said after he'd told her about Mum and Dad. ‘You won't recognise them soon.' She'd patted herself on the chest. ‘Not now they've got their own personal grooming and fashion adviser. So you can stop worrying and go back to growing.'

Then, before she'd gone back to sleep, she'd told Keith how vegetable juice was full of growth vitamins and didn't make you fat, which was really good of her because he hadn't even asked.

‘Hello Keith.'

Dad was in the kitchen, putting instant coffee into a mug.

‘Hello Dad,' said Keith.

If he hadn't been so happy he'd have sighed.

Nine-thirty and Dad was already in his pyjamas.

Keith hoped that when Aunty Bev finished advising Dad on personal grooming and fashion and Dad started going to nightclubs, he'd remember to change out of his pyjamas first.

‘What's that on your fingers?' asked Dad.

Keith saw that the fingers of his right hand were stained orange.

‘Carrots,' he said. ‘They were the only vegetables Mum had. I grated them for juice. It took three hours.'

‘As long as it's not nicotine from cigarettes,' said Dad. ‘Smoking'll stunt your growth and you wouldn't want that, would you?'

‘No Dad,' said Keith wearily.

He watched Dad fill the coffee mug from the hot tap and slouch back to the telly.

Keith sighed.

All the personal grooming and fashion advice in the world wouldn't be any use unless Dad perked up first.

OK Tracy, thought Keith, it's up to you.

Tracy stood next to Mum's fridge, eyes shining.

‘A whole kitchen, seventeen storeys above the ground,' she breathed. ‘Unreal.'

She went over to the sink and gazed out the window.

‘There's another twenty-one kitchens above this one,' said Keith.

‘Can we go up to the top floor?' said Tracy excitedly. ‘It'll be really good practice for when I go to Nepal.'

‘Nepal?' said Keith.

He wondered if he'd heard her right. Foreign words could be a bit hard to understand sometimes, specially if the person saying them had a mouthful of egg, sausage, bacon and onion sandwich.

Tracy swallowed and took another big mouthful.

‘You must know Nepal,' she said. ‘It's just to the right of Afghanistan.'

Keith remembered Tracy's travel brochure collection at her place in Australia and how in the Campsites With Views bundle Nepal had even more brochures than New Zealand.

‘Highest mountains in the world,' said Tracy wistfully, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. ‘It's gunna be great. They've got mountains there so high you need oxygen to get to the top. You dream about that when you come from a place that's three metres above sea level.'

Keith grinned.

He remembered how Tracy had climbed onto the roof of the post office in Orchid Cove to see if she could see Brisbane.

Then a thought hit him and he stopped grinning.

‘When are you going?' he asked anxiously. ‘You are still here for ten more days, aren't you?'

Tracy grinned.

‘Course I am, you dope. I wouldn't come all this way and only stay for the weekend. We've got a stopover in Nepal on the way back.'

Keith felt weak with relief.

To do what he was about to ask her to do she'd need everyone of those ten days, evenings included.

And she'd need all her strength.

‘More to eat?' he asked.

‘No thanks,' she said. ‘I don't want to guzzle all your mum's food.'

‘We've got tons,' he said. ‘Do you feel like some sugar cane?'

Before she could answer, Aunty Bev came into the kitchen.

Keith realised he was staring.

He didn't mean to but he'd never seen anyone wearing a tracksuit that tight before.

It was like she'd been sprayed with bright green paint.

He looked away in case she thought he was staring at her personal bits.

Which he had been.

I knew it, he said silently but triumphantly. I knew it was possible for an adult to have a body without a single sag, droop or wobble.

‘Mum's on early shift,' he said to her. ‘Would you like some boiled peanuts?'

‘Thanks mate,' said Aunty Bev, ‘but I don't eat breakfast.'

Keith was amazed.

‘Don't you get faint around eleven and start feeling sick?' he asked.

He realised Aunty Bev hadn't heard him.

She was looking at Tracy, who was licking the crumbs off her sandwich plate.

Without taking her eyes off Tracy, Aunty Bev slowly lifted one bright green arm.

For a moment Keith thought she was going to hit Tracy.