Wynand Louw

Mr Humperdinck's Wonderful Whatsit (2017 ed)


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went into the kitchen to get a new tray of doughnuts. When he came back, he almost bumped into the customer’s face as he opened the door. The man was peeking through the keyhole.

      “Sorry,” he mumbled, and returned to the other side of the counter.

      After the man had left, Pete opened the front door and most of the butterflies flew out. He then went to see if Maggie was all right. She wasn’t too bad, but she wouldn’t be able to work. Anything edible she touched turned into butterflies. So Pete hung the CLOSED sign on the door and went out to do the deliveries.

      When he had done all the deliveries, Pete decided that he had to see Freddy. His only transport was the old skateboard he had salvaged from a dustbin and repaired with a little help from Mr Humperdinck and a lot of ingenuity. Taming the skateboard had been even more difficult than repairing it. The darn thing kept throwing him off like a wild horse. But with time and practice, Pete had become its master.

      The first stretch of road to Freddy’s was level: past the Italian hairdresser, LORENZO ALTINTOPI, BARBER of DISTINCTION, next to AUNT ANNIE’S and the 24-hour supermarket, then across the street at the traffic lights. Ollie onto the pavement. The next bit was very tricky since the pavement was always crowded with people. Pete kept his right foot on the elevated tail of the deck, so he could lift the front wheels and change direction in an instant. In this way, he made his way through the crowd with only the occasional small collision. At the main road intersection he cut through the corner door of the convenience store (the girl at the till always shouted at him, but of course she couldn’t catch him) and then it was downhill to the station.

      It was on this downhill stretch that Pete had had one of his more serious spills. One weekend, a shop owner had erected a brand-new billboard, and Pete, not expecting it there on the Monday morning on his way to school, made a magnificent crash into it. If it were on television, they would have shown the action replay over and over again, backwards, from different angles, and in slow motion. Such was the beauty of this crash. And Pete had a wonderful cut on his forehead to show for it.

      When he arrived at school, his face and shirt were covered in blood. Aunt Nellie, the school nurse , cleaned him up and tried to contact his father, who was (as expected) not available. So she had to take him to the day clinic herself. Not only did Pete legitimately miss a whole day of school, but he also had not three, not five, but EIGHT stitches! And afterwards Aunt Nellie took him for the biggest ice cream of his life.

      The next day at school everybody envied him his eight stitches. The girls in the class wanted to know if it hurt, and of course he said that it didn’t. For the rest of the week everybody regarded him with the awe and adoration due to a veteran of the racetrack.

      After ducking under the new billboard, Pete ollied over a fire hydrant, and then raced downhill to the corner where he had to tailslide and grab the traffic light with his right hand in order to stop. When the light turned green, he sped across the street to the station and ground the rail downstairs into the large main hall. This was a skateboarder’s dream. A marble floor as big as two football fields with staircases and ramps for wheelchairs! Pete carefully stuck to the places where he knew the crowds of commuters would be less thick, and here he practised his stunts at breakneck speed. A few ollies to warm up. Flip ollie. Frontside flip. Backside flip. Rail flip.

      And the three-sixty grab: Ollie off a low staircase, get phat air, grab your deck with one hand, do a full 360-degree spin, and then land facing in your original direction.

      Suicide.

      Pete landed half on his belly, half on his right side, with his right arm and hand stretched out to break the fall, and after a four-metre skid on the marble, he came to a stop at the counter of the station coffee shop. The guy behind the counter (his name was Vusi) was used to this. The first few times Pete crashed into a table and chairs before reaching the counter, but Vusi moved them so that he would have an open landing strip.

      “Ladies and gentlemen, another perfectly executed Belly Skid, performed for your entertainment by Pete Smith, the Awesome Stunt Skater!” Vusi announced and helped him to his feet. There was a small round of applause.

      Pete blushed and disappeared around the corner. The rest of the way to Freddy’s flat was routine skating any rookie could do.

      Freddy was one of five brothers, and they all lived on the eighth floor in a flat with two bedrooms. Pete found him reading a book, while the rest of the family watched a soap opera.

      “We have to talk,” said Pete.

      Freddy nodded. “Let’s go to my office.”

      His “office” was behind the lifts in a shaft where all the building’s water and sewage pipes ran up and down. They entered the shaft by a little quarter-sized door behind the stairwell and climbed down an iron ladder until they came to a landing made of a steel mesh. Here Freddy switched on a light.

      Pete never felt comfortable in Freddy’s “office”. When you looked at your feet on the steel mesh you could see a gaping black chasm that was at least seven stories deep. And there was always an updraft.

      “The weirdest thing happened today!” Pete said when they were both seated on the cushions Freddy had put there.

      “Weirder than the rat in your schoolbag?”

      “Far weirder than that!”

      Pete told his friend in detail what had happened that afternoon in Maggie’s shop. Freddy asked questions about the exact moment that the doughnuts changed into butterflies, about whether there was any sound associated with the changing process, and so on. When Pete had finished, he thought for a while.

      “Cool. Well, either there’s a sound scientific explanation (which I can’t figure out) for this phenomenon, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, then it must either be psychokinesis or magic.”

      “Psycho what?” As usual, Freddy had lost Pete along the way.

      “Psychokinesis. Like that guy who bends the forks and spoons by just looking at them. A load of claptrap. Camera tricks.”

      Pete couldn’t believe his ears. “So it must be magic, right?”

      “Sure,” said Freddy. “Why not? Let me show you my latest project!”

      Pete was a bit disappointed by Freddy’s apparent lack of interest in his story. Did he really believe in magic?

      Freddy was always tinkering with some project. Most of them didn’t work, but every now and then he accomplished amazing things. Like the computer he built from a lot of old stuff the bank threw away. For a twelve-year-old it was a pretty neat thing to do, even if he were a genius. The home-made computer sat on a stand in a corner of the office. It looked like a chicken coop full of wires, with a big fan at the back to stop it from overheating. Freddy switched it on. The ancient screen flickered a few times and came to life. It cast a spooky glow on the two boys in the pipe shaft. But Pete still had other pressing matters to discuss.

      “Schiz is going to tell the school board to expel me,” he said.

      “Bummer,” said Freddy. “What’re you going to do?”

      “Don’t know …”

      “Why don’t you fire old Schiz? The best form of defence is to attack.”

      “Are you crazy? I can’t fire him!”

      “Why not? School’s a waste of time anyway.”

      Freddy only went to school because everyone expected it of him. He read brainy books on physics and philosophy while he sat on the loo. He even wrote a letter to the New Scientist and it was published.

      Pete shook his head.

      “Look, you can go to any other public school,” said Freddy. “Just write him a letter and tell him that he’s fired. If you withdraw from his school, he can’t have you expelled.”

      He started typing:

      Dear Mr Schulz, As the result of recent reports