Underdogs Read Free Page A

boy, I can tell you.
    “Please?” I drooled. It was sickening. All this for a lousy paper run, while other guys my age were raking it in at Maccas and Kentucky Fried bloody Chickens. It was a disgrace. “C’mon, Max.” I had an idea. “If y’ don’t employ me again I’ll come here wearin’ these clothesI’m wearin’ right now” (I was wearing crummy tracksuit pants, old shoes, and a dirty old spray jacket) “and I’ll bring my brother and his mates along and we’ll treat the place like a library. We won’t cause trouble, mind you. We’ll just hang round. A few of ‘em might steal, but I doubt it. Maybe just one or two …”
    Max stepped closer.
    “Are you threatenin’ me, y’ little grot?”
    “Yes, sir, I am.” I smiled. I thought things were going along fine.
    I was wrong.
    I was wrong because my old boss Max took me by the collar of my jacket and removed me from his property.
    “And don’t come back in here again,” he ordered me. I stood.
    I shook my head. At myself. A grot. A grot! It was true.
    My game plan for getting the job back had backfired miserably. The pulse in my neck felt really heavy, and I felt like I could taste last night’s blood in the bottom of my throat.
    “Y’ grot,” I called myself. I looked at myself in the bakery shop window next door and imagined I was wearing a brand-new light blue suit with a black tie, black shoes, nice hair. The reality, though, was that I was wearing peasants’ clothes and my hair was stickingup worse than ever. I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me, and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That’s the smile I was smiling.
    “Yeah,” I said to myself. “Yeah.”
    I looked in the local paper — I had to get Rube to go in the newsagent’s and buy it for me — for another job, but nothing was going. Things were skinny. Jobs. People. Values. No one was on the lookout for anyone or anything new. It got to the point where I considered doing the unthinkable — asking my father if I could work with him on Saturdays.
    “No way,” he said, when I approached him. “I’m a plumber, not a circus clown, or a zookeeper.” He was eating his dinner. He raised his knife. “Now, if I was —”
    “Ah, c’mon, Dad. I can help.”
    Mum put in her opinion.
    “Come on, Cliff, give the boy a chance.”
    He sighed, almost moaned.
    A decision: “Okay,” although he waved his fork under my nose. “But all it’ll take is one screwup, one smart-mouth remark, one act of stupidity, and you’ll be out.”
    “Okay.”
    I smiled.
    I smiled to Mum but she was eating her dinner.
    I smiled to Mum and Rube and Sarah and even to Steve, but they were all eating their dinner because the matter was over and the whole thing didn’t really excite any of them. Only me.
    Even at work on Saturday my father didn’t seem too enthusiastic about me being there. The first thing he made me do was stick my hand down some old lady’s toilet and pull all the blockage out. It’s true, I nearly vomited into the bowl right there and then.
    “Oh, blood-y
hell!”
I screeched under my breath, and my father just smiled.
    He said, “Welcome to the world, my boy,” and it was the last time he smiled at me all day. The rest of the time he made me do all the sap jobs like getting pipes off the roof of his panel van, digging a trench under a house, turning the mains off and on, and collecting and tidying his tools. At the end of the day he gave me twenty bucks and actually said thanks.
    He said, “Thanks for your help, boy.”
    It shocked me.
    Happ
    “Even though you
are
a bit slow.” He cut me down right after. “And make sure you have a shower when we get home….”
    During lunch it was funny because we sat on these two buckets at Dad’s van and he made me read the paper. He took the Weekend Extra part out of the inside and threw the rest of it over to