Fiction
Better Out Than In
A story about inflation, and why it stinks.
My grandma always said, better out than in.
She doesn’t like conflict, my grandma. According to her, the worst place for conflict is in the guts. The two worstest types of people in the world are the ones full of poo or hot air, she said. They tend to be politicians or lawyers.
Really, I should have taken her advice. I normally do. But I guess I was being what my dad likes to call, 'the exception that proves the rule.' I was also what the doctor called, 'a medical effin' miracle.'
The problems all started with them diseased bats from China. My dad worked at the airport. He was an ‘international luggage distribution specialist.’ Or as the kids from school called him, bag daddy, or Baghdad.
Once Ozzy Osbourne ate a diseased bat and started spreading his infection to everyone, the airport pretty much closed up.
Mum said QANTAS (dad spelled it differently, he preferred C's and U's to Q's and A's) fired him unfairly. I got worried when she said that, thinking they torched him with flames, like they was doin' overseas to burn up that covid.
But when he came home, he looked more grey than anything. Like something burnt long ago, that won't ever catch fire again.
Mum kept her job in the hospital, but sometimes she came home looking grey too. She got all these sores on her face from wearing masks all the time, and her voicebox got wore out from having to yell at the sick old deaf people who couldn't understand nothing.
It did make it easier for me to get away with naughty stuff, cos mum could barely whisper at me and dad didn't care what I did as long as I got him an adult drink from the fridge each time I walked past.
Funny, I kind of missed getting in trouble.
I also missed my happy meals on Friday nights and my Freddo frog in my lunchbox. Every time mum and dad came back from grocery shopping their faces looked sourer than Jimmy Chee's after he fit eighteen mega warhead sours in his mouth at once to break the school record.
Something about inflation, my dad kept saying. Apparently, the economy had turned from a bull to a bear, and that was bad.
It sounded alright to me, cos bears are cuddlier and much less likely to be bitten by Ozzy Osbourne. The last thing we needed was another virus.
Anytime money was talked about on the telly, my dad would turn so red I thought maybe there was a chance he could still catch fire. He never did. He smoked lots, but in the end he gave that up too. Inflation.
One day we was doing history at school, and learning about the native Americans. One of them wrote,
When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money.
It got me thinking.
Sometimes, like Mrs Dawson said, that can be dangerous. See, I don't always look at things real proper. I get a bit mixed up. But to me, it feels like everyone else is walking around backwards and I'm the only one putting one foot in front of the other.
I knew for a fact there was still trees uncut. We got a big redgum out front that the possum lives in since she got kicked out of our roof.
The fish are still safe too. We got a box of fish fingers in the freezer I use to hide the ice-cream dad thinks we ran out of months ago.
The streams I can't be fully sure of, but when we went camping before the virus hit, I drank straight from a creek that tasted even better than mount Franklin.
So why weren't we eating our money?
I started with the five cents. They looked small enough, but they weren't. Normally I uses jam to help swallow my medicines, but we didn't have jam no more. I tried margarine and almost spewed up all over my Pikachu blankie.
I thought about giving up the money. But then I saw mum and dad in the kitchen one night. Dad was holding twenty bucks in the air like it was a clump of weeds he'd reeled in instead of the flathead we was supposed to be catching.
Mum was crying. Dad threw the money at the fridge, but cos it was paper and he had a bung shoulder from all the baggage handling, it kind of just fell at his feet.
I had to try again.
Grandma told me she used cod liver oil to help swallow her tablets, or vodka jelly when she was 'feeling frisky.'
The cod liver oil stunk like sewer drain, and she said I couldn't have any vodka jelly cos I wasn't Russian around enough. So she helped me make kids jelly and after I stole three packs to use at home.
She asked why I needed to be swallowing tablets at my age, and I told her my tummy was playing up. She frowned so hard her wrinkles almost ate each other.
The jelly worked real good. Soon I was onto tens, twenties, and the goldie's when I could find ‘em.
To make things even easier, I smooshed a few coins together by leaving ‘em on the train tracks before the coal trains came through. They got flatter and I got fatter.
Mum and dad didn't seem to notice. Or if they did, it wasn't helping.
They kept fighting, and one time mum told dad he needed to go to his room for ten days and he wasn't allowed to leave until she said so. She still brought him dinner, but I heard him in there coughing all the time because mum didn't go in and vacuum the dust for him.
They also didn't notice my gut started sticking out like them starving African kids you see on TV.
Grandma did. She poked it with her finger and told me straight away my guts was blocked up. She gave me her special cocoa mix and said unless I drank that every day she'd tell my mum and they'd take me to hospital to cut me open.
The next week we had a school excursion to Parliament house. My guts was really hurting by now. I was standing outside looking at all the different flags they got there when I felt someone stab me in the stomach. I fell over and squirmed like a morteined cockroach, and Mrs Dawson asked me if I was ok.
I really didn't want her to send me to the hospital, so I snuck off to the toilets and drank my whole supply of grandma's special cocoa I’d been saving for an emergency.
When I got back inside, everyone was standing in a room listening to a bunch of old bald men yell at each other. Apparently it was called 'question time,' but the only question I had was how come the whole lot of them wasn't on detention? Mrs Dawson would've whooped my arse if I spoke like them.
And that's when it hit me. Well, not just me. I can't remember much of what happened, but they told me half my class, two camera men and a dozen of the angry bald men copped it.
At first they thought a pipe had burst. A sewer pipe, on account of the water being all brown. And then coins started raining down, and they got real confused. That was until they saw me, lying face down with the fire hydrant from hell spouting from my PooTube.
Grandma's cocoa mix sure packed a punch. The doctor at the hospital afterwards wanted to know what was in it. Probably so he could sell it himself. Grandma was there with me, and she told him he could 'suck it and see.'
The camera people at the parliament caught the whole thing, and next thing I knew these reporters came to see me in hospital. One of them called me a ‘political activist,’ and compared me to that Greta Thunberg girl from Sweden.
My dad was there, and he did most of the talking. He wasn’t so grey no more.
He told them I was making a 'political protest against the government for inaction on inflation and the cost-of-living pressures on everyday Australians.'
He told me never to do anything so dangerous again, but he kept patting me on the back like I’d won best and fairest for the footy team I never joined.
Mum told me later we got paid a lot of money for the interview, and because of it dad got his job back at the airport. She hugged me for a long time.
I was happy to say nothing, but at the end of the interview, the reporter asked me, 'What made you think of carrying out such a dramatic performance protest in the halls of Australia’s parliament?'
I thought for a while, and rubbed my shrunken belly. I told her, 'Well, it's like my grandma always said, better out than in.'
This was a response to Ann James's deluded custodians prompt for September.
Thank you to Grandma Smillew for her wonderful publication and her medicinal cocoa mix.
