Free Shrinking Ralph Perfect by Chris D'Lacey Page B

him in goal. This suited Ralph well. You didn’t have to run around much in goal. You could lean against the posts in quiet moments and imagine you were holding the line for England, making breathtaking saves from Brazilian strikers who could bend a ball twice round the planet and back but still not hit the netting behind your hands. In real life, of course, it was never like that. But, boy, Ralph was good at soccer in his head.
    That night, he needed to be. Never mind two, he needed to play a game of three or four halves to keep his pounding brain at bay. If he once stopped tipping shots over the crossbar or parrying headers away at close range his brain would start to boil like a pan of soup. Glop. Glop. Bubble. Gloop. Then egg-shaped swellings would erupt in his skull as hideous notions popped into hishead, each more gigantic, more fantastic than the last. Each involving a pair of rubber gloves.
    What could Jack want with a pair or rubber gloves?
    Mum had loaned him her very best pair. They were cherry red, oversized and reached way up her forearms. They had double-thick padding and the finger ends were bloated. They made Mum look like a circus clown.
    They made Jack’s eyes pop out on stalks.
    ‘Ideal,’ he’d called them. ‘Just the ticket.’
    That was the moment the footy kicked off inside Ralph’s head. A game of frantic, all-night action. But in the pauses, the set plays, the corner kicks, the rebounds, the time spent waiting for the crowd to return the ball into play, his mind began to conjure up dastardly experiments. Little experiments. Involving electricity. For outside, rain was slapping the windows. And every now and then, a fork of lightning would bleach the curtains and tangle with the shadows. In these brief high-voltage moments, Ralph’s mind would pitch into the room next door. And there would be Jack, hunched over his fish tank and shrunken house, haloed by a grisly pale-blue light, wielding a pair of smoke-charred electrodes joined to a lightning rod on his dog-servant’s collar by wires fat with the zing of current. And all that was saving him from crackling like pork were Mum’srubber gloves…rubber gloves…rubber gloves…
    ‘Hey you, wake up.’
    ‘No, don’t fry the ants!’ Ralph screamed. His bedroom swam into focus. His poster of Batman. His computer, blinking. His clothes lying in a heap on his chair. His mum with a vacuous look on her face. Everything normal. Phew.
    ‘I was thinking of boiling them for a change,’ she said. ‘Up. Get. Now, please.’ She dangled a smelly sock over his nose.
    Old socks. Vomarama. Always did the trick. Ralph sprang up like a rifle target. ‘What time is it?’
    ‘Daytime,’ his mother said dryly. She threw a fresh sweatshirt at him. ‘Wear this. We’re going visiting, remember?’
    A quick dream fragment scorched Ralph’s mind: Jack grinning, wild with laughter, wringing his rubber-gloved hands as he approached…
    ‘No, Mum. We can’t. It’s a trap. We mustn’t go.’
    His mother tossed a pair of jeans onto the bed. ‘I baked a cake,’ she said. End of argument.
     
    It was an apricot-jam sponge. A triple-decker special. The top was garnished with real fruit slices and mouthwatering dollops of freshly-whipped cream. The verysecond Ralph saw it, he wanted to beat his boyish chest and become a Neanderthal gateau hunter. He could wrestle alligators for that cake. Overturn dinosaurs. Hand-fight orcs. That cake had to feel the clamp of his teeth. Forget Jack, that cake was his.
    ‘Hands off,’ said his mum, tapping his wrist. They were standing at the door to Number 9 and Ralph had just reached for a squirt of butter filling, bulging seductively from the middle and upper layers.
    ‘Can’t I just—?’
    ‘No. You don’t touch this cake. Not even if Mr Bilt wants to share it.’
    No cake? Ralph was taken aback. His mum had never engaged in gastronomic torture before. Why start now?
    The door to the house swung open. Jack, dressed in