DAY 6: Thursday
My skims: 14
Wriggler’s skims: 4
Days to becoming world champion: 33
Very weird day today. Feels like everyone is getting together to try and stop me getting this world record.
Money made for tinnie: $0 ($725 to go.)
Mum had an almighty go at me as soon as I got up. I must have left a bundle of stones in my pockets because when she washed my shorts she thought the washing machine was blowing up. It sounded like someone was firing a machine gun.
What Mum doesn’t understand is how hard it is to find the perfect skimming rock, so she threw them away. When we got to the river I had to spend ages looking for decent rocks. Most of the ones I found were too big or too pointy.
No one much goes down to the empty blocks of land where we skim so we had the place to ourselves. The patch of river we go to is at the bottom of View Street, which is a dead end. You wouldn’t know the blocks were there unless you knew. The land drops off from the end of the street to the river and there is only one way in. It’s a narrow pathway that winds through a whole lot of shrubs.
About ten metres in, there is a rock ledge which you have to climb down to get into the clearing. To your left, facing the river, is the vacant lot and to the right is the deserted house we hid in when we were being chased by the kayaker.
While we were looking for rocks in the long grass around the deserted house we decided to invent a language that only we could understand.
First we tried speaking backwards. But we sounded like we’d been brought up by gorillas in the jungle. ‘S … g … i … r … w … d … a … e … h … s … i … n … o … e … r … i … f.’
I thought my brain would explode. So I came up with Driggleish—half-Digger and half-Wriggler. To speak it, you just add ‘ig’ into the middle of every word.
If you want to say, ‘Wrigs’ head is on fire,’ you just say: ‘Wrigigs’ heigad iigs oign figire.’ Simple. ‘Look at that kid, his fly is undone,’ becomes: ‘Loigok aigt thigat kigid, higis fligy iigs unigdone.’
Pretty soon we sounded like we’d been talking Driggleish all our lives.
Then Wrigs said, ‘Whigo iigs thigat duigude?’
A man dressed in a black suit and black sunglasses and carrying a black briefcase strode down the pathway. He was talking quickly into a phone, which was also black.
We couldn’t work out what he was saying but we could tell he was really angry. He was stomping around and whisper-shouting into the phone. Whisper-shouting is when you’re shouting but you don’t want anyone to hear you, so you whisper and shout at the same time. It’s really hard to do.
The man hung up on whoever he was whisper-shouting at and put his phone in his pocket.
He went to the doorway of the house, then carefully paced out six steps and put the briefcase down to mark the spot. He went back to the door, pulled out a tape measure from his other pocket and measured the width of the doorway. He then disappeared inside.
‘Whigat’s hige doiging?’ said Wriggler.
‘Mayigbe hige iigs aig buigilder,’ I said.
‘Hige looigks migore liigke aig gaigngster.’
The man reappeared at the doorway. Wrigs was right. He did look like a gangster. He was about thirty, not very tall, but his dark hair was slicked down and he looked like he had been born with sunglasses on. He pressed the button on his tape measure and the tape got sucked back into its case.
Then he saw us and just stopped. Dead still. He seemed furious that someone else was there. He just stared at us. Then his phone rang again and he answered it and started whisper-shouting, twice as quickly and twice as angrily as before. He turned around and disappeared up the path. He left the briefcase sitting there. In between us and the pathway. Between us and the only way out.
‘Whigat’s iign thige caigse?’ Wriggler was panicking.
‘Giguns?’
‘Moigney?’
The black briefcase looked like something a businessman would carry around. It had huge gold locks and a padlock around the handle.
‘Mayigbe iigt’s aig bigomb.’
‘Aig bigomb?’
‘A bomb.’
Wriggler looked at me for a moment, then bolted past the briefcase and up the path towards View Street. I waited exactly 1.27 milliseconds, then followed him.
We sneaked back down to the river a couple of hours later but there was no sign of the man in the black suit or his briefcase. And no bomb crater.
As me and Wrigs walked home, we tried to work out who the man could be. We had no idea what he wanted with our skimming spot, but we reckoned it wasn’t good news for us.
Wrigs still thought he was a gangster looking for a hideout. I reckoned he was a real estate agent wanting to sell the property.
Either way, he wouldn’t want us hanging around. It wasn’t looking good for the world record.