We had to move to a new fish tank because of the damage that Tommy-Lee had done to the plasterwork. He put a framed photograph of a woman in kick-boxing gear on top of the cabinet next to his new bed. The woman was looking at us over her shoulder, with her back to the camera. On the back of her jacket were the words ‘All-England Female Kick-Boxing Champion’, written out in metal studs. I asked him who it was, ‘That,’ said Tommy-Lee, ‘is my mum.’ He seemed really proud of her. You couldn’t see her face, just her foot, which looked as if it was about to smash into the camera. There are no pictures of my mum doing this. He also had twenty-one ‘I’ve-Been-Brave’ certificates Blu-tacked to the wall above his bed, three rows of seven.
‘You’ve been brave a lot,’ I said. ‘What have you been doing? Bullfighting?’
‘You’ll find out,’ said Grim.
After we’d finished moving our stuff, it was time for more blood tests. I gave Dr Brightside my thumb. She took another blood sample. Gave me another I’ve-Been-Brave certificate and trilled that it was Tommy-Lee’s turn now.
‘Don’t want to,’ grunted Tommy-Lee.
‘Don’t be silly. I need to test your blood.’
‘Don’t stick things in my thumb.’
‘It doesn’t have to be your thumb.’ Dr Brightside smiled. ‘I’m quite happy to stick it in your bum. And if you’re uncooperative, I’m quite happy to call for a general anaesthetic.’
Very slowly Grim put out his thumb. He looked away while she got the needle ready. When she tried to stick it in him, he yanked his thumb away so quickly she ended up sticking the needle in the back of her own hand.
‘Ow!’
‘See? It hurts, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’ She put a bit of cotton wool over it. ‘Can you hold that in place, Tommy-Lee? While I get a plaster.’
He put his thumb on her cotton wool, but instead of getting a plaster she whipped out another needle and jabbed it into his thumb.
‘Ow! Ow! Ow! That’s cheating.’
‘It would be if this was a game. But it’s not. It’s me trying to cure you.’
‘If going green hadn’t destroyed all my confidence, I’d’ve thrown you out of the window for stabbing me.’
‘Then it sounds as if you’re a much better person without your confidence.’ Dr Brightside smiled again. Then – of all the unbelievable things – she gave him an I’ve-Been-Brave certificate.
‘What!?’ I said. ‘He’s getting a certificate for that?!’ I was completely scandalized. How could she give him a bravery certificate when he was crying like a baby? ‘He’s not been even a bit brave!’
I’d somehow forgotten who I was talking about. When Grim swung his head around and gave me his Bad Look though, I remembered. I stopped talking, but the thought didn’t go away: Grim Komissky is big but he’s not brave. And if someone’s not brave – how can they be scary?
‘You weren’t brave yourself,’ said Grim, as if he could read my thoughts, ‘when I chucked you off buses. You screamed and moaned and cried. Want me to do it again?’
‘Now, now,’ said Dr Brightside. ‘We are here to fight the problem. Not each other. Tommy-Lee, you have to understand – your best hope of getting better is Rory. And Rory, your best hope of getting better is Tommy-Lee. You need each other.’
‘He tried to kill me with a biscuit,’ grumbled Grim.
I thought about Grim’s gallery of I’ve-Been-Brave certificates – twenty-one of them, Blu-tacked to the wall – and realized they were meaningless. Grim Komissky had never been brave. He had only had some blood tests. Twenty-one blood tests. Did that mean we were going to have twenty-one blood tests per day? ‘How long exactly,’ I asked, ‘have you been here?’
‘Two weeks, two days and thirteen hours.’
‘Two weeks? And you’re still not better?’
I’d been thinking that we would be going home tomorrow.
‘Two weeks and two days and thirteen hours,’ said Grim.
The biscuit thing reminded Dr Brightside about allergies. ‘Do you have any allergies, Rory?’
‘No.’
‘I want you both to think about food and tell me what your most-favourite and least-favourite foods are. Talk about it together. Let’s see if we can find a pattern.’
I told her that Grim really liked ham-and-tomato sandwiches, but not cheese and tomato.
‘How do you know?’ asked Grim.
‘When I have ham-and-tomato sandwiches you always take them off me and eat them, whereas when I have anything involving cheese you take them off me and stamp on them.’
‘Cheese has traces of nuts, that’s why.’
I pointed out that if he didn’t want the cheese ones, he could just have let me eat them.
‘How about . . .’ said the doctor, ‘. . . I leave you two with this big piece of paper and a pen and you make a list of your favourite foods?’
‘Do you have to leave us alone?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got blood to test.’ She waggled the test tubes of our own blood at us.
At school, whenever one of the teachers asked if we had any questions, Grim would always put his hand up and say, ‘Who would win in a fight between a badger and a rattlesnake?’ or ‘a vampire and a zombie’. It turned out he was the same about food. In Grim’s head all the different foods in the world are at war and you have to choose sides. ‘What about prawn crackers?’ I said.
Prawn Crackers versus Snack a Jacks took hours and involved him punching the wall and kicking the air.
The Snack a Jacks versus Prawn Crackers Showdown was nothing compared to the Battle of the breads - Naan versus Pitta.
Chicken Tikka versus Scampi Wings was more or less the Third World War.
Custard versus Ice Cream was nuclear meltdown.
Anyway, here’s the final list . . .
Thin-and-crispy Pizza with pepperoni
Chicken Tikka (I couldn’t believe that Scampi lost!)
Fish fingers
Special Nut-Free Supplements that help kick-boxers get bigger muscles
Snack a Jacks (Salt & Vinegar only)
I’m not saying it took a long time to agree this menu, but it might have been quicker to grow up, go to catering college, then go to sea in a trawler and catch some fish and sail back home and cook them.
Dr Brightside read the list, nodding her head. ‘This,’ she said, ‘has given me the idea for an experiment.’ The word ‘experiment’ made me think of Magneto firing bullets at various X-Men to see if they were really, really indestructible. Dr Brightside’s experiment was different.
Ages and ages after we gave Dr Brightside the list, Nurse Rock came in with a food trolley, parked it in the middle of the room and said, ‘Enjoy.’
The plates had metal covers on. I couldn’t wait. I pulled the cover off mine and underneath was . . . not a pizza. It was something – but it didn’t look like food. Someone must have thought it was food because it had a knife and fork next to it, but it very much did not look like food. In fact it very much looked like frogspawn. Frogspawn with dead beetles on top.
I tried speaking into the intercom.
‘Yes?’ said Nurse Rock.
She could hear me! ‘I think there’s been a bit of a mix-up.’
‘Yes?’
‘I ordered pepperoni pizza, thin and crispy.’
‘This is a hospital, not Pizza Hut. You don’t order food. Food comes and you eat it.’
‘Dr Brightside told us to make a list of our favourite food. Thin-and-crispy pizza with pepperoni came top.’
There was a sound like bits of paper being rubbed together. I realized after a while it was the sound of Nurse Rock laughing.
Dr Brightside explained the food situation.
‘What if you’ve got an allergy?’ she said. ‘What if that’s what’s making you green? The best way to find out is to put you on a very simple diet, of food you wouldn’t normally eat. That way the reaction might fade away quite quickly.’
So that was her experiment – a diet. Not Magneto firing bullets.
‘Wait,’ said Grim. ‘You mean if we eat this, we might get better?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
Without even tasting it first, Grim shovelled the frogspawn into his mouth. After the first three mouthfuls he paused and glared at me. ‘Eat your food,’ he growled.
‘It looks vile.’
‘It tastes vile,’ agreed Grim. ‘Now eat it. Do what the doctor says.’
At school I always did as I was told. Grim Komissky never did anything unless he wanted to do it. His motto was: ‘No one tells me what to do.’ But here he was, doing everything the doctor told him – even eating frogspawn and cockroaches without asking what they were.
‘There is every possibility,’ said Dr Brightside, ‘that your greenness is diet-related. Green turtles are green because all their food is green. The chlorophyll dyes their body fat.’
I said, ‘Can I just point out that scientifically speaking I’ve been eating pepperoni pizza for years and never once turned green?’
‘Hmmm,’ said Dr Brightside. ‘Good observation. Maybe you’ve eaten so much pizza over the years it’s turned you green incrementally. We have to look into every possibility.’
By the time she’d answered my question, my plate was empty. Grim was licking his lips.
Our skin colour had changed but nothing else had changed. He was still bigger than me. He was still eating all my food.
The frogspawn by the way is called Quinoa. It’s pronounced ‘Keeenwa’. They spell it differently from the way they say it in a pathetic attempt to disguise it.
The cockroaches turned out to be roasted peppers that had been roasted too much.