Near Extinction Page 2

  ‘Yeah I did,’ said April. ‘Geography sounded like the easiest subject to pass. You’ve just got to memorise a bunch of imports and exports, and know how to read contour lines and it’s an automatic A. Much better than physics or something where they try and get you to think.’

  ‘Heaven forbid,’ said Fin.

  The door swung open and Mr Lang, the school counsellor, bounced in to the room. It was so rare to see him happy. His job had not been easy since the Peski kids had arrived at Currawong High. Something very good must have happened. ‘I have wonderful news,’ said Mr Lang smiling happily. ‘The annual geography excursion to observe erosion in an agricultural environment has been cancelled!’

  All the geography students erupted into cheers, whoops and cries of delight.

  April and Fin were baffled.

  ‘There was meant to be an excursion to observe erosion?’ asked April.

  ‘Yeah, they do it every year,’ said Kieran. ‘It’s the easiest trip to organise. They drive us out to Old Lady Barty back paddock and we look at the dried-up creek bed.’

  ‘But what is there to observe?’ asked Fin. ‘Surely erosion is something that’s not there. It’s something that has eroded.’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve never got to go on the excursion,’ said Kieran, ‘This was going to be my first time.’ He seemed a little put out. Erosion was the type of boring thing he would be interested in.

  ‘Shhhh,’ said Mr Lang at the front of the room. ‘The reason we aren’t going to be looking at Mrs Bartholomew’s erosion this year is because the school has been awarded a special grant by SEORYS, the Scientific Education of Regional Youth Society. They are providing the money so we can afford the petrol to take you to . . .’ he paused and smiled here, obviously enjoying the opportunity for once to give actual good news. ‘. . . The Gulargambone Dinosaur Park.’

  ‘Woo-hoo!’ the room exploded with excitement. Students were cheering and chattering excitedly about the news.

  ‘What’s the Gulargambone Dinosaur Park?’ asked April.

  ‘It’s a farmer’s field out in the middle of nowhere, with big fibreglass models of dinosaurs,’ explained Animesh.

  ‘Why are they so excited about that?’ asked April.

  ‘It is more exciting than erosion,’ explained Animesh.

  ‘Only marginally,’ said April.

  ‘April doesn’t like dinosaurs,’ explained Fin. ‘Because of Mum.’

  ‘What about your mum?’ asked Matilda.

  Fin realised he had made a terrible mistake. They weren’t meant to mention their past. Or their mother. And in particular, they weren’t meant to mention their past as it related to their mother.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Fin.

  ‘It can’t be nothing,’ said Animesh.

  ‘She was a dinosaur nerd,’ said April.

  ‘Huh?’ said Matilda.

  ‘Mum was a palaeontologist, a dinosaur scientist,’ explained Fin.

  ‘Oh,’ said Animesh. ‘I take it back. That isn’t interesting.’

  ‘We know,’ said April. April also knew that palaeontology was just their mother’s cover identity. Really she was an international super spy. But still, any mention of dinosaurs made April angry. It reminded her of her mother’s deceit.

  ‘And now . . .’ said Mr Lang, pausing to let the conversation die down, ‘. . . here to present the grant from the Museum of Natural History we have the senior professor of palaeontology, Professor Maynard!’

  April literally fell off her chair.

  Fin yelped with fear.

  Joe leapt up and stood in a protective stance in front of his family.

  They watched as the familiar buxom middle-aged lady bustled onto the stage in her scruffy tweed jacket and dishevelled hair. You would never guess she was the mastermind behind an international counter espionage unit.

  ‘Girls and boys,’ said Professor Maynard brightly. ‘It is so wonderful to be here in Currawong to present you with the first annual palaeontological high school grant.’

  She was smiling broadly but the Peski kids knew that Professor Maynard smiled broadly when she did lots of things. Like, tell you that your mum was being held in a secret prison or throw a can of high explosives into your home and demolishing it. So if anything, the smile on Professor Maynard’s face made them more frightened.

  ‘I know the opportunity to see real life-sized models of some of the most famous Jurassic reptiles will be an experience you treasure for the rest of your lives,’ said Professor Maynard. ‘However long that may be.’ She glared at the Peski kids as she said this. They got the distinct impression she wasn’t expecting them to have long lives.

  ‘You will have the opportunity to get away from your mundane school life,’ continued Professor Maynard.

  ‘Hey!’ protested Mr Lang.

  ‘You know it’s true,’ heckled Animesh.

  Mr Lang nodded glumly.

  ‘And see up close, even touch, great big dinosaurs!’ said Professor Maynard. ‘Something no one got to do when dinosaurs were still alive because mammals hadn’t evolved yet.’

  Matilda Voss-Nevers put her hand up and called out, ‘I don’t believe in evolution.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Professor Maynard. ‘I like a young woman who knows her mind. All the facts may be against you. But facts are so easy to manipulate. It’s wise to be sceptical of everything.’

  Again, she glared at the Peski kids.

  ‘I’m sure, young lady,’ continued Professor Maynard. ‘You will enjoy the excursion just as much. Apart from dinosaurs there will be lots of other wonderful scientific phenomena you can observe at the park like . . .’ Professor Maynard struggled to think of anything. She turned to Mr Lang for support.

  ‘Err . . .’ said Mr Lang. ‘Erosion?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Professor Maynard. ‘Erosion. Wonderful phenomena. If it weren’t for erosion we wouldn’t have found so many dinosaurs. They’d still be in the ground wouldn’t they.’ Professor Maynard evidently thought this was a joke because she laughed out loud at her own observation. Several of the students laughed as well but mainly because they were nervous to see such a large, possibly-insane woman amused.

  ‘Jolly good,’ concluded Professor Maynard. ‘Continue on. Here’s your cheque.’ She handed Mr Lang an oversized cardboard check. ‘Now Mr Ling . . .

  ‘Lang,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Professor Maynar.

  ‘Um,’ said Mr Lang.

  Professor Maynard burst into over-loud laughter, ‘Of course you know your own name! There could be no possible explanation for being confused about that. Now, you were going to take me on a tour of your lovely school.’ She bustled out of the room in much the same eccentric way she had bustled in. Mr Lang hurried to keep up with her.

  ‘Should we be fleeing for our lives?’ Fin whispered to April.

  They picked up their bags and started ambling unenthusiastically towards their next class.

  April shrugged, ‘Maybe she did just come to give our school money to go on a dinosaur excursion.’

  ‘I don’t think Professor Maynard really cares about dinosaurs,’ said Fin.

  They all stopped walking. Trying to work out what Professor Maynard was up to was making all sorts of dreadful possibilities run through their minds.

  ‘We need to check on Dad,’ said April. ‘If she’s here, this could be a distraction.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Fin. ‘Come on.’

  Fin tugged on Joe’s shirt sleeve, ‘We need to have sudden simultaneous ear aches.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Joe.

  ‘We’re chucking a sickie,’ said April. ‘Skiving off. Wagging. Get with the program will you. If Maynard is here we need to check that Dad isn’t being bundled into a van back at home.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Joe.

  ‘How are we going to convince the school that we are all sick simultaneously?’ asked Fin.

  ‘Stand still, I’ll punch you,’ said April. S
he pulled back her arm to let fly her fist.

  ‘No!’ said Joe, grabbing hold of her elbow.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ protested April. ‘If he doesn’t get a nose bleed. He’ll at least get concussion. He can hit me back. Then we can both go home.’

  ‘No,’ said Joe. ‘You’re on your l-l-last strike for fighting. You’ll get expelled.’

  April realised Joe was right. She dropped her fist.

  ‘We need something more subtle,’ said Fin.

  ‘Food poisoning?’ suggested April.

  ‘But then we’d all have to throw up,’ said Fin.

  ‘I d-don’t want to do that,’ said Joe. Joe took eating very seriously. He didn’t want to do it in reverse.

  ‘We could fake the symptoms of measles,’ said Fin.

  ‘What are they?’ asked April.

  ‘Elevated temperature, clammy skin and red spots,’ said Fin.

  ‘You want us to draw spots on ourselves with a marker?’ asked April.

  ‘It might work,’ said Fin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Joe.

  ‘If we throw up no one will come near enough to get a close look,’ said Fin.

  ‘I can’t be bothered drawing on all the spots,’ said April. ‘It would take forever.’

  ‘Well I’m not letting you punch me in the face,’ said Fin.

  April had stopped and was looking up. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’

  ‘What?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Look,’ said April, pointing at something in the tree above them. The branch seemed to have grown a brown lump.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Joe. The lump was directly above his head. Being the tallest, it was only a few feet away. The lump seemed to be buzzing.

  ‘A bee’s nest,’ said April.

  Joe was not stupid. But he was not a quick thinker. Or to be more accurate, he was not a deranged thinker, so his brain was not able to guess the progress of April’s thoughts.

  Fin had guessed and tried to make a run for it. But April had grabbed him by the wrist with one hand and used her other hand to slip her school bag off her shoulder, swing it in a big loop and hurl it up at the tree. The whole thing took less than a second. Joe looked across to see why Fin was yelling and the next thing he knew something landed on his head. Two things to be exact. April’s school bag, then the buzzing lump. In the next second Joe’s head was engulfed in a cloud of angry buzzing insects.

  ‘Ruuun!’ Fin screamed.

  Joe could only just hear him over the buzzing. Joe ran. They all did. In separate directions. Fin ran and jumped in the school’s ornamental fishpond. April ran to the girls’ bathroom. But the bees were not gender biased. They followed her in there. Several of them had been caught up in her perennially messy mass of hair. She was starting to panic now. Pumpkin was barking wildly. The bees weren’t bothering him, but he thought all this running around was a great lark.

  April burst back out of the bathroom again, flapping her hands in her face. She had been stung several times already. This was not what she had intended. One or two stings would have been enough to get them out of school for the rest of the day. The bees could stop now, eight or nine stings was way more than was needed.

  Suddenly SPLASH! April was hit in the face by a geyser of water. It startled her and she lost her breath, but the cold on her stings was a blessed relief. The buzzing went away. Even the bees caught up in her hair were now waterlogged and less angry. The geyser stopped. April wiped her eyes to see Joe standing in front of her with the gardener’s high pressure hose. Joe had several large red welts on his face. He was dripping wet too.

  ‘Thanks,’ said April in a rare moment of sibling affection. April did not often thank Joe for the myriad of things he did to take care of her on a daily basis. She took him for granted the way most children take their mothers for granted. But being rescued from a swarm of angry bees, a self-inflicted swarm of bees in particular, made her feel a wave of affection for him.

  While the kids were at school and Dad was gardening, Ingrid spent the day trying to find Svetlana. It was harder than she expected. Ingrid had assumed that it wouldn’t take her long to find a malnourished Russian woman with terrible English in a small country town where everyone knew everyone and there was only one road in and out. It was not to be.

  Ingrid had spent a long night searching every clothing bin, bridge underpass, storm water drain and disused shed in town. Now that it was daylight again, Ingrid had given up on subtlety. She decided to just ask.

  If you live in a small country town there are two types of people that always know everything about what is going on. The taxi drivers and the hairdressers. Currawong was so tiny that the town had just one hairdresser and she was married to the town’s only taxi driver, so Ingrid went to get a haircut at Sylvia’s Salon. Within fifteen minutes she knew everything she needed to know.

  She soon found out that Mrs Harrison from out by Hill Vale had come in to have her roots done that morning. She’d told Sylvia that her daughter, Bessie, had burnt the French toast she was cooking for breakfast that morning, the smoke alarm in her kitchen had gone off, which had scared her cat, her cat had run up onto the roof of the milking shed and refused to come down. The cat was a purebred Siamese show cat and worth a lot of money so Bessie had driven over to the Cat Lady’s house to get help. When Bessie was standing on the Cat Lady’s verandah, she had peered in through the fly screen and seen a strange skinny woman doing the dishes.

  By the time she left the salon, Ingrid had all the information she needed, and a hair cut she didn’t.

  The Cat Lady lived with her grandson, Neil, on a small farm a short way out of Currawong. Now, a normal person who found a strange Russian woman stowed away in the boot of their station wagon would report them to the police. But the Cat Lady was not normal. She was deeply eccentric. When she found Svetlana huddled under an old potato sack, she thought of the plums in her back paddock that she would never be able to pick with just Neil for help and offered Svetlana a job. So it was in the plum orchard that Ingrid finally found her.

  ‘You have come to take me away,’ said Svetlana. She was trembling with fear.

  ‘No,’ said Ingrid. ‘I do not work for this country’s government.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ asked Svetlana.

  ‘Information,’ said Ingrid.

  ‘I know nothing,’ said Svetlana.

  ‘This is probably true,’ agreed Ingrid. ‘What does Dr Banfield want?’

  ‘To stop wedding of her man,’ said Svetlana.

  ‘Why?’ asked Ingrid. ‘What is it she wants to do with him?’

  Svetlana shrugged. ‘She no tell me. If I don’t know. I can’t tell if I captured.’

  ‘But what do you think?’ said Ingrid. ‘What is your guess?’

  Svetlana looked shifty. ‘I think her man has something she needs. Something important.’

  Ingrid nodded. ‘I begin to understand. It is time to take action.’

  Half an hour later the Peski kids were still in sick bay. The school wanted them to wait for Dad to come in and pick them up, but Dad never answered the phone. The three of them were looking forlorn, covered in big red welts, which were covered in big pink blobs of calamine lotion, when Mr Lang walked past with Professor Maynard.

  ‘What are you three doing here?’ asked Mr Lang. He was so used to seeing the Peski kids when they were in trouble or causing trouble, it did not cross his mind that they might be in sick bay because they were genuinely ill.

  ‘We were stung by bees,’ said Fin.

  ‘What? All of you?’ asked Mr Lang incredulously.

  ‘This school has very angry bees,’ said April. ‘You should do something about it. It’s a safety hazard.’

  Mr Lang was more confused than anything else. April made irrational accusations all the time so that was water off a duck’s back to him. But all three of them being stung multiple times by bees just defied comprehension. ‘You were all stung repeatedly by bees?’

&
nbsp; ‘No, one bee can only sting once,’ said Fin. ‘We weren’t stung repeatedly. We were stung by multiple bees, each just once.’

  ‘Perhaps the bees have evolved into a new strain of hyper aggressive bees,’ suggested April.

  Mr Lang still looked at them with disbelief.

  ‘April hit the nest with her school b-b-bag,’ explained Joe.

  ‘Ahhh,’ said Mr Lang. Now things were starting to make sense.

  ‘But why would she do that?’ asked Professor Maynard, looking meaningfully at April. ‘Surely it would have been better to leave it alone. To just go about your day, causing as little fuss as possible. Surely that’s what your mother would want you to do.’

  The Peski kids realised that Professor Maynard was not talking about the bees now. She was angry with them for repeatedly failing to live quiet and unassuming lives in Currawong.

  ‘I couldn’t help myself,’ said April defiantly, although defiance is less impressive when you’ve got half a dozen welts on your face. ‘I wanted to know what would happen if I knocked a bees’ nest down onto Joe’s head. I needed answers. I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.’

  Professor Maynard wasn’t the only one who could talk in double talk.

  ‘Why haven’t you been sent home?’ asked Mr Lang impatiently.

  ‘Because their father never answers the phone,’ snapped Mrs Pilsbury. She was the school secretary and she made no pretence of the fact that she had been listening in on their conversation. Mrs Pilsbury loathed the Peski kids, but then, she loathed all kids so this was not unusual.

  ‘You can’t sit here in sick bay for the rest of the day,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘We want to go home,’ said Joe. ‘We can ride our bicycles.’

  ‘We can’t let you go, unless you’re accompanied by a responsible adult,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘I’ll run them home,’ offered Professor Maynard.

  The Peski kids were horrified. Professor Maynard was a terrifying government-sponsored psychopath. The whole reason they wanted to go home was to check that she hadn’t arranged to have something done to their dad. Now they were going to be taking her home with them.