Chapter 1
That bucket
This is Peter Pimple.
Peter is 3 months old and he is stuck in a bucket full of cold water even though it was winter. His dad talked him into getting into the bucket by saying that he was smelling real bad and needed a bath. His dad, whose name was James, then pushed him down so that he could not move his arms and said he will be back just now. Peter is really clever and knew that his dad was running away with another lady while his mother was shopping. He knew that his dad had lots of time to make his getaway because his mother had a credit card and could shop and shop until the chickens came to roost. Peter had to make a plan, and very fast.
For a moment Peter did not know what to do because if you are only three months old there is very little you can do. It was getting pretty cold in that bucket. He could imagine that his father and that lady were not as cold as he was. His clothes which his mother bought with that credit card were getting sopping wet. But then, just as Peter was beginning to lose all hope, he realised that there was only one way out. He had to become older immediately. If he were five years old he could just get up and step out of that bucket. He knew if he could concentrate, really concentrate and believe he could, he would become five years old and get out of the bucket. Peter started concentrating as best as he could. He thought about being big, bigger and then biggest. Nothing worked. He then felt the cake of soap his dad handed him, whilst tricking him, in his left hand even though Peter was right handed. He ate the soap. He had no idea why, but what the heck, if all else fails have your cake and eat it. And then, through willpower and foam, he felt a strange feeling all over his body. His legs started growing and growing. Then his arms also grew. The only thing that was somewhat worrisome was the fact that by time his left leg aged five years, the right one was still only about three and kicking wildly at that.
He ate some more soap and that sorted the jimmy leg. His hands and feet also stretched — even his nails were getting bigger and his hair lost its baby feel and covered his head completely. A thick mane of unruly hair mopped on his head. Even his clothes started to stretch and stretch and the next thing Peter Pimple was five years old and stood up in that bucket mad as a snake and determined to revenge himself. The only downside of becoming five was the fact that the Spiderman logo stretch so badly that it was no longer visible. It blurred into the red of the shirt.
But, there was a slight problem, also known as bad debt. Before he could revenge himself he had to become very quickly three months old again. He was sure that his mother was about to exhaust her credit limit any time now and then she would come home. If she caught him being five years old she will suspect something is wrong. She will probably then take him to Doctor Scheister. Doctor Scheister is not good news and he may just inject Peter with some hormones to make him small again. Doctor Scheister needed very little motivation or urging before he pumped you full of drugs. He would not have been surprised if Doctor Scheister was the kingpin of a mob.
If he has to be three months old again he won’t be able to have his revenge because he will be stuck in his little cot and will eat, sleep and cry all day long. He will also have to wear diapers again. Peter hated diapers because they smell and if you are only three months old you cannot take them off by yourself.
Peter realised that the really big problem was to get small again but obviously without losing his new found maturity. He had to look like this again, pronto:
He tried concentrating but it did not help at all. It just gave him a headache. But then he remembered that one day his mother tried to pull a shirt over his head which was all of a sudden too small. The day before it was fine but the next thing something made it small. His mother cursed and said to him “your father left the clothes too long in the tumble dryer. I cannot remember how many times I have told him that if the clothes were left in the dryer too long they will shrink”. She emphasized the will deliberately and shook her head knowingly and obviously disapproving of all of his father’s laundry related activities.
Shrink, shrink I have to shrink, he realised. Peter decided, what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. If the dryer shrank the clothes it must work for him and he decided to go and find the dryer even though he did not know what it looked like because he was until this morning only three years old. He clutched the remainder of the cake of soap to his chest and set off. The house was like a labyrinth, a tangle full of furniture that had to be negotiated on new, somewhat unsteady, legs. At least he could, for one and before setting off, peer into his cot from the outside. What a smell. No wonder he was ill half the time. He could only imagine what stuff must have gone onto him, into the cot and his clothes. It was one huge antiseptic cage reminiscent of an outhouse full of Handy Andy Multi-Surface Cleaner.
Chapter 2
Tumble driers and poodles.
He stood around helpless. But then, all of a sudden, he remembered that, when he could not sleep because his stomach cramped, his father used to tell his mother to “put him on the tumble dryer”. The tumble dryer reverberated and was nice and warm and made him sleep. Ah ha, now he knew where the dryer was. It was in that room that smelled of soap and disinfectant and bleach and all sorts of antiseptic type smelly stuff. He will never forget that smell because it reminded him of the soap that his mother used to clean his backside when she changed his nappies. Thus, all he had to do was to follow his nose. As he followed his nose he came across all sorts of strange things. Good grief, what was this, he wondered.
He has never seen such a thing but then again, you must not forget, he was most of the time in his cot and could not walk by himself so he did not see much other than people’s faces, in particular his ugly grandma Floris who had a bit of a moustache that scratched and tickled him when she kissed him with her very dry martini mouth.
Then the creature thing started woofing and waffing and woofing like crazy. Ha, he knew what it was. It was the thing that his father called “that stupid poodle”. Well, on this score he agreed with his father. It did not only look ridiculous but its non-stop barking was not good for Peter’s ears. Remember, his ears were still very sensitive because he only became five that morning. Peter started running with the poodle hot on his heels. Then, just then, he smelled that smell, the smell of washing powder, fabric softener and bleach and he ran into the room where the smell came from and slammed the door in the yapping poodle’s face.
Chapter 3
Dilemmas
But it was not going to be so easy. Peter now faced a dilemma he did not anticipate: he did not know what a dryer looked like. There, in front of him, were two square white machine things that looked almost the same, except the one had a round indented window in front and lots of knobs and dials and the other one not. It was simply without knobs and had no window. It smelled of soap. Even though he was five years old he could not see what was on top of the square white machine things. He was probably destined to be short. One glance at his puny pectorals confirmed the worst; he was not going to play action sports. What luck, at least he would be able to sleep on an airplane; that is if the person next to him was not so fat as to smother him.
He saw, in the corner of the room, small steps behind a clothes bin full of recently washed, but still slightly damp, clothes. He pushed the bin aside and put the steps in front of the white things and then clambered up all the way to the top. There were lots of dials and knobs and switches on top of the machine that had nothing in front. Peter decided to be bold and pressed and twisted all the switches and dials on the thing without the window. He then opened the thing’s lid. It coughed and gurgled a bit inside and then a stream of water started filling its stomach. Water, mmm thought Peter by himself, water is wet. A tumble dryer dries; it certainly is not wet. Thus, it was the washing machine.
Eureka! The tumble dryer must be the other machine thing. All he needed to do now was to get wet, get the dryer working and jump inside and shrink and shrink. But this was easier said than done. To get into the washing machine seemed suicidal. By now it was spinning and gurgling at a rate that made his head spin. Something like the foam bath his mother used in his bath was bubbling out of a hole, blue stuff that smelled like his jersey streamed out of another and all of it must clearly have been quite hot as it stormed up quite a bit of foam. He was not overly keen on getting in there. But reduce in size he had to, and pretty quick at that.
He started to twist, turn and pull whatever button he could lay his hands on. Something must have worked because a cold jet of water came out of nowhere and a nice, good, clean and cold smell wafted his way. No time to waste. He crawled over the tumble dryer and dived into the washing machine’s stomach. Good grief. He was now cold, wet and smelled like a new jersey. Nevertheless and thank goodness, the tub had holes in the side into which he could stick his toes and crawl out like a bedraggled cat. It took some doing though as it was still turning albeit somewhat slower. Just as his left foot left the machine it went into a spin. It heaved rather violently to and fro. Luck, it appears, was on his side. If your father ran away and your mother has an unruly credit card in her hands you need fortune to favour you a bit.
There was no lid on top of the dryer. That meant that the little window was probably a door through which he would have to climb to get into the dryer. Peter clambered quickly down the steps, folded them into upright and put them were he found them so that it would not create any suspicion. He felt like a sleuth.
He hesitated for a moment and then pressed all the switches and turned all the dials on the dryer. The dryer started making all sorts of turning noises which almost sounded a lot like his mother’s hairdryer but a lot more noisy and violent almost like a car engine without oil.
He knew about cars because he got strapped into a baby seat at the back of his dad’s car while his dad played Mozart to make him stop crying. It never worked. Anyway, he opened the round door. The moment he did this the machine stopped. He crept in to see what was wrong. It was just hot and dry inside and there were no dials or switches that he could see.
Chapter 4
Poodles
Peter got out, somewhat perplexed, and closed the round door. He switched the dryer on again and it started wheezing and turning and shaking badly. He then opened the door. The dryer stopped. It came to an immediate standstill. When he closed the door again the dryer worked away again. Ok, this is easy, he thought. Switch the machine on, jump in and close the door from the inside.
But this was, as usual, easier said than done. There were no handles inside the door. He saw something that looked rather strange — almost like his breakfast bowl but upside down with a stick in it. It said “plunger”.
The poodle was still barking madly outside the door. Peter thought about going outside to teach it some manners but realised that there were more important things to do, especially because he heard his mother’s car screech to a halt in the driveway. There was, given the sound of the brakes, no doubt that the credit card has had its day on town.
Peter stuck his face into the plunger. It made a hollow noise and almost sucked his eyes out when he tried to remove it. That is it he realized. He pressed all the buttons, turned all the dials on the dryer and then jumped face first into the dryer, the plunger in hand. As he did this he, at the same time, turned around and pressed the plunger against the glass door and pulled it towards him. Bang, shut the door. The door made a very loud ominous click. He turned around, with difficulty seeing that he was now five years old and saw a very strange world through the thick glass of the locked door of the tumble dryer. Peter was stuck inside a locked dryer and he still was five years old. He fiddled this way and fiddled that way. All he managed to do was to get the barrel properly stuck. And then the world started spinning round. His dad may even be in a car in Paris with the hood down but that mattered not — he was in a flat spin. Things were getting pretty hot inside that dryer.
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