DAY 4: Tuesday
My skims: 0
Wriggler’s skims: 0
Days to becoming world champion: 35 (If it ever stops raining.)
No skimming. It was pouring (rain and wee).
Money made for tinnie: $0 ($735 to go.)
It rained so hard today there was no way we could go to the river. Not only have we not made any money for the tinnie but we are falling behind on the skimming record.
Worse still, Dean noticed the missing lemonade.
Even though Dean is freakishly tall and stupidly thin, he is the strongest person I know. He pinned me against the fridge and started giving me a face massage with his thongs.
When he does this, he uses the thongs like little bats and slaps my cheeks with them. Slowly at first, then faster and faster and harder and harder.
It is straight-out torture, worse than waterboarding, worse than being locked in a room and having classical music blasted at you twenty-four seven. He only let me go after I promised I’d buy him a bigger bottle of lemonade than the one we used.
But there was no way I was really going to do that. I have a tinnie to buy and we were still seven hundred and thirty-five dollars short.
When Dean went to the beach Wrigs and I found an empty soft-drink bottle in the recycling bin.
It was a lemon-squash bottle which was going to make it hard. Lemonade is easy to fake, it’s just water, sugar and bicarb of soda. We knew from Diggerade that colour is really hard to get right, and lemon squash is yellow.
Then an idea hit me like a football to the goolies. I heard somewhere that if you’re in the desert with no water the best way to survive is to drink your own urine.
Wrigs and I set up a water-drinking competition. We filled up all the glasses in the house and laid them out on the kitchen table. Then we told Squid that we were having a race to see who could drink the most water in two minutes. Even though he is only little, Squid reckons he can beat everyone at everything.
I told him he couldn’t be in the race because he was too young. He begged and begged. It was all part of my plan. The more he begged, the more he wanted to prove he could beat us.
By the time I finally said he could join in, he was so keen he drank two glasses to every one of ours. He drank six big glasses before the two minutes were up.
As soon as he was finished, we pushed him into his bedroom and held the door shut to trap him inside.
About fifteen minutes later he started screaming. He was busting to go to the toilet. He smashed and bashed at the door. He was so desperate to get out, me and Wrigs both had to hold onto the doorhandle to keep the door shut.
‘I want to wee,’ Squid screamed.
Wrigs grabbed the empty lemon-squash bottle from the kitchen. I opened the bedroom door just wide enough to pass the bottle to Squid.
‘Do it in that and then we’ll let you out,’ I said.
There was silence for a while. Then we heard the sound of wee hitting plastic. Wrigs and I high-fived. The weeing kept on going and going and going.
‘Hurry up, Squid,’ I said.
He kept weeing.
‘We’ll have to get another bottle,’ Wrigs said.
‘We don’t have one,’ I said.
‘How about a bucket?’ said Wrigs.
I started to worry Squid would never stop.
‘Are you all right, Squid?’ I asked.
The weeing stopped. Squid groaned.
Then the sound of wee hitting plastic started again.
After what seemed like ages, Squid yelled, ‘Finished!’
We pushed our way into his bedroom and grabbed the bottle. He’d filled up nearly a third of it. That’s half a litre of wee.
We topped the bottle up with water, sugar and some bicarb of soda and shook it. It looked exactly right.
When Dean came home he went straight to the fridge.
‘Where is it?’ he said.
‘Had to get you squash, they didn’t have any lemonade,’ I said.
Dean grabbed the lemon-squash bottle, ripped off the lid and took a swig.
‘It tastes like cat’s whiz,’ he growled.
‘Probably because it’s not cold enough,’ I said. I couldn’t look Wrigs in the eye in case we both cracked up laughing.
Dean had another sip and swished it around his mouth. I had to jam my mouth shut to stop a snort coming out.
Squid chose that exact moment to walk in.
‘Why are you drinking my wee?’ he asked Dean.
Wrigs and I both fell over laughing.
Dean stared at us.
We bolted up the hallway and out the front door. I took the front steps two at a time but I wasn’t quick enough. I got pegged in the back with the bottle of wee. It bounced off my back and into the air, spun around and sprayed wee all over Wrigs. He was covered from head to foot.