Lick'd. Susan Berran

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      Now whenever we give the secret signal for, ‘Mrs D is coming’, I simply flick over the inside front cover to hide our plans. Hey presto, we’re doing school-work.

       DISASTER averted.

      Our secret hideout at Jared’s place was perfect. There was heaps of stuff to build with and no one knew anything about it. It was way out in the back paddock and couldn’t be seen from his house. To everyone else it just looked like a bulldozed hay shed with the roof half collapsed, old tractors and heaps of old rusted-out machinery. But underneath it all there was a huge cavity. That’s where we’d built our very own hideaway that we could survive in for weeks if we wanted to. We’d been sneaking food and drinks from home for ages and storing them in an old fridge, that looked very similar to an accordion. But best of all was that none of the other kids would dare to come anywhere near it. We’d all been totally banned from going to within a mile of it. Ever since Jared’s spectacular NEAR-DEATH skateboarding accident, down the roof and over a tractor and straight into a really, really big tree.

      So it was perfect!!

      Our bikes were hidden by an old car bonnet and the entrance was just a quick crawl through the crumbling concrete pipe … under the over-turned truck tray that was squashing lower every day …

      . . . a belly slide between the two tractors teetering dangerously on top of each other …

      … between the fifty or so razor-sharp harvester blades …

      … through the rusted-out, half-squashed, steel water tank and you’re in … simple!

      The hideout was our idea of heaven. NO adults, NO school-work and NO horse-shearing, sheep-riding, cow-tossing kids. And definitely NO SOOKY SIBLINGS!

      We opened the rusted fridge door and took out a warm can of soft drink each. Then we went to work on our newest recipe for pooper-shooting ammunition.

      I figured that Fluff Butt just might be useful after all. Because every time that I’d wipe her butt, I felt like chucking up, it stank so badly. We’d been trying cow pats and garlic, horse dung and onions, pig poop and mint, but there it was right in front of us; Fluff Buttus poopus. I’d collected a nice big bag of Fluff Butt crap from the yard ready to ‘cook up’. The texture wasn’t so good but the smell … awesome!!

      As we rolled the new ‘maxi-smell’ slime-covered festering stomach juice cannon balls of dung between our hands, Jared started having a huge whinge about their newest addition to their family … guinea pigs. Once that pet shop had opened up, his brothers had all sucked up massively to their mum for a pet. One of his brothers is a year younger; he wanted rabbits. The twins, DUFAS and DORKY are a year older and they were sucking up for mice. The other two are a couple of years older than Jared and of course they wanted some sort of massive bird of prey that could rip your arm off.

      Jared was so peeved. Just because we’d been helping the environment by recycling and reusing manure, his mum thought he shouldn’t get to have a say in what the family pet would be. Just because apparently, the only thing he was interested in was the quality and quantity of dung that it produced anyway. So what did she come home with … guinea pigs?

      Apparently the pet shop owner was a tall French guy who wore white overalls. He’s REALLY ugly and has a humongous shnoz with thick square glasses balancing on the end of it and a really poxy looking blonde wig. He couldn’t speak a word of English but had still somehow talked her into the guinea pigs, just like he’d talked my mum into the Fluff Butt. And it wasn’t just us. It seemed that every kid in school had a pet all of a sudden, whether they wanted it or not. Peacocks, goats, cockatoos and heaps of other pets were popping up in every home around here. Jared was whinging on and on about the guinea pigs and how he thought the only thing they were good for was taping to the end of a stick and using as a toilet brush.