DAY 31: Monday
Skims from anybody: 0
Chances of ever getting the tinnie: None.
Out of one bit of trouble, into a worse bit.
I woke up determined to find a way to fix the driveway. Everything depended on it. The tinnie. The world record. Catching Mr Black.
I rode down to the hardware superstore first thing. Mum had agreed to lift my grounding as long as I went straight there and back. No stopping.
I walked into the superstore, which is a warehouse about a kilometre long with about seven hundred and fifty aisles of shelving stacked full of tools and boxes and hinges and taps.
I had no idea where to start looking. I didn’t even really know what I was looking for.
None of the staff looked interested in talking to an eleven-year-old. Not even one whose whole existence depended on finding something that would fix a concrete driveway.
Just as I was about to give up, around the end of an aisle came Mr Black. He was carrying a huge pair of bolt cutters. The kind you could use to cut through padlocks. Or fingers. He didn’t see me.
I ducked down another aisle and raced to the other end of the warehouse. Mr Black came around the corner just after me. I dashed across to another aisle and five seconds later he came around the corner of that one, too. How many Mr Blacks were there? Maybe Wrigs was right and Mr Black was a ghost.
I couldn’t get away from him. I was pretending to look at some orange pipe things when he came up and stopped behind me.
‘Hello, yeah, are you doing some plumbing?’
‘No, I’m looking for something to fix up concrete,’ I said.
‘Ah, yeah, these won’t work. What do you need to fix?’
I told him about Squid and the coins and the driveway. He started laughing. His laugh was so loud it shocked me. His mouth was wide open. His gold tooth flashed in the light.
When I told him about the sledgehammer he started snorting. He sounded like a donkey.
‘Your little brother, he is very smart, yeah. Did he get the coins?’
‘No, and I got into trouble.’
‘Too funny, yeah,’ he said. ‘What you need is a combined quick-set cement and sand. It’s down in the aisle next to all the paints.’
‘Do you work here?’
‘No, but I’m here so much maybe I should, yeah,’ he said. ‘Come, I’ll show you where it is.’
We walked down to the right section. ‘You’re in big trouble, yeah?’ he said.
‘Kind of,’ I said.
‘We all make mistakes, yeah,’ he said. ‘Not because we’re bad, it’s just what happens, yeah. And people look at it and think, he’s bad, yeah, but you’re not, it just looks like it. You just made a mistake, that’s all. You know what I mean, yeah?’
We stopped in an aisle and he pulled off the shelf what looked like a huge bag of flour. It was the quick-set cement and sand.
‘What you need to do, yeah, is clean out each hole. Make sure there’s no dirt in them, yeah. Then you get some of this stuff and mix it with water, like it’s a cake. Only do enough for one hole at a time, right? Then you put it in the hole and use a trowel to smooth it out. Easy, yeah? Make sure no one walks on it for twelve hours.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘And stop looking so worried, yeah, worse things happen. See ya, yeah?’
Mr Black left. The cement and sand mix cost twenty dollars. I rode home and told Mum about it. She said she would lend me the money as long as I cleaned out the chicken coop every weekend for the next three years. Man, I wish Dad would get rid of those birds.
I rode back to the superstore and bought the mix. Then I spent the rest of the day cleaning, mixing and cementing.
It worked. And it was easy, yeah. The world was looking up.
I rang Tearley to tell her about Mr Black. I told her how I was worried that maybe we had got carried away in thinking he was an animal trafficker. He seemed too nice.
‘I’m not sure whether putting the clip on YouTube was the right thing to do,’ I said.
‘Bit late,’ she said. ‘I just checked and it’s had two hundred views.’
It had gone viral. Two hundred views. Mr Black may have been one of them.