Aristotle's Nostril Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the author

  Morris Gleitzman grew up in England and came to Australia when he was sixteen. After university he worked for ten years as a screenwriter. Then he had a wonderful experience. He wrote a novel for young people. Now, after 36 books, he’s one of Australia’s most popular children’s authors.

  Visit Morris at his website:

  www.morrisgleitzman.com

  Also by Morris Gleitzman

  The Other Facts of Life

  Second Childhood

  Two Weeks with the Queen

  Misery Guts

  Worry Warts

  Puppy Fat

  Blabber Mouth

  Sticky Beak

  Gift of the Gab

  Belly Flop

  Water Wings

  Wicked! (with Paul Jennings)

  Deadly! (with Paul Jennings)

  Bumface

  Adults Only

  Teacher’s Pet

  Toad Rage

  Toad Heaven

  Toad Away

  Toad Surprise

  Boy Overboard

  Girl Underground

  Worm Story

  Doubting Thomas

  Grace

  Too Small to Fail

  Give Peas a Chance

  Pizza Cake

  Once

  Then

  After

  Soon

  Now

  Extra Time

  Loyal Creatures

  For Sarah, Trudi, Katie, Emily, Jessica, Kellie,

  Daniel, Laura, Maddie and Grace

  1

  Aristotle’s whole body went grin-shaped as he thought about the good thing he was going to do.

  He knew if the other nose germs found out, they’d think it was a naughty thing.

  Very naughty.

  They might even punish him.

  Aristotle didn’t care.

  I’ll just have to make sure they don’t catch me, he thought.

  He peered around the crowded floor of the nostril and up the vast teeming nostril walls to the heavily-populated nostril ceiling high above. Nobody was watching. The other germs were all having a meeting. Something about a new law to ban germs giving other germs piggybacks.

  This was the perfect moment.

  Aristotle crept over to Blob, grabbed him and dragged him behind a chunk of broken-off nose hair.

  ‘Hey,’ complained Blob. ‘Don’t. I’m trying to count how many germs are at the meeting. Now I can’t remember if I was up to six million and thirty-seven or six million and thirty-eight.’

  ‘Surprise,’ said Aristotle happily.

  He pointed to the cake sitting on a pimple.

  Blob stopped struggling.

  Aristotle felt himself go grin-shaped again.

  I’m a very lucky germ, he thought. I’ve got a brother who likes having fun as much as I do. Well, almost as much. Well, a bit. Well, he will when he tastes the cake.

  Blob was staring at the white fluffy icing and the ten flickering candles.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, puzzled.

  For a moment Aristotle thought Blob was joking. Then he remembered his brother never joked. Plus Blob’s normally round body was scrunched flat with disapproval. He looked more like a skin flake than a germ.

  ‘It’s a birthday cake,’ said Aristotle. ‘It’s what germs in exotic foreign places give each other on their birthdays.’

  Blob looked long-sufferingly at Aristotle.

  ‘By exotic foreign places,’ said Blob, ‘I assume you mean places outside the nostril?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Aristotle.

  He knew why Blob was looking disapproving. Blob didn’t like anything from outside the nostril. Aristotle couldn’t understand why. Blob had never been outside the nostril, none of them had, so why was he so picky?

  Aristotle didn’t let it spoil his birthday mood.

  ‘The cake’s not from outside the nostril,’ he said. ‘Just the recipe. I got it from a visitor. Happy birthday, Blob.’

  Aristotle waited hopefully for Blob to relax and grin back and give him a hug. He’d often wondered what it would be like to be hugged, to be wrapped up in all of Blob’s arms and several of his legs.

  But Blob wasn’t relaxing.

  Or grinning.

  Or hugging.

  Blob was folding most of his arms, which made him look like an angry adult. Aristotle always felt sad to see kids carrying on like adults. Around here young germs did that a lot.

  ‘We germs don’t have birthdays,’ said Blob sternly. ‘You know that. We don’t live long enough. You’ve got to live at least a year to have a birthday.’

  Aristotle sighed.

  ‘Blob,’ he pleaded. ‘This is our anniversary. We’re ten. We were born ten hours ago. We should be celebrating.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ said Blob. He glanced anxiously up at the nose-hair highway overhead to see if anyone was watching. ‘Do you know how many laws we’d be breaking? The No Parties part of the Nostril Protection Act for a start.’

  Aristotle felt his excitement and pleasure draining away.

  ‘You’re already violating the Fluffy Icing Prohibition Bill,’ continued Blob. ‘Which is a law, as you know very well, that specifically forbids, anywhere in this nostril, the making of fluffy icing.’

  ‘It’s just mashed skin flakes,’ said Aristotle. ‘Please, Blob, blow out the candles. Have some fun, just for once.’

  ‘I will do no such thing,’ said Blob. ‘These candles are in direct contravention of the Nasal Passage Fire Control Act.’

  ‘They’re not real candles,’ sighed Aristotle. ‘They’re just some carbon molecules that I know burning off a bit of energy as a favour.’

  Blob peered at the carbon molecules more closely. The carbon molecules gave him a cheery wave. Blob jumped back, alarmed.

  ‘Get rid of them now,’ he said. ‘And the icing, and the cake. Do you have any idea what will happen if the authorities see this cake?’

  ‘They’ll want a piece?’ said Aristotle hopefully.

  ‘A piece of you is what they’ll want,’ snapped Blob.

  Aristotle looked sadly at his brother. How could his very own identical twin be so different to him?

  We both look the same, he thought. We both have exactly the same round bodies. We both have exactly the same number of arms and legs, with all the arms at the top and all the legs at the bottom.

  But we aren’t the same.

  ‘Blob,’ said Aristotle quietly. ‘Why don’t you want to be happy?’

  Blob’s whole body went grim-shaped.

  ‘We’re not here to be happy,’ he said. ‘We’re here to make sure the nostril operates in an orderly and efficient manner.’

  Aristotle wanted to grab Blob and shake him till his insides wobbled. He wanted to ask him what made a kid of ten talk like some ancient ninety-six-hour-old.

  He didn’t.

  A loud voice was suddenly echoing across the nostril.

  ‘What’s going on over there?’ it boomed.

  Aristotle and Blob shrank down behind the chunk of nose hair.

  ‘We’ve had it now,’ moaned Blob. ‘We’ll be up for disciplinary action and smacked bottoms.’

  ‘Come out immediately,’ boomed the voice. ‘A
nd bring that illegal cake with you.’

  Blob went sag-shaped. He put all his hands up and stepped miserably out from the hiding place.

  Aristotle picked up the cake and followed.

  He tried not to think about what would happen now. The anger. The punishment. The blowing up of the cake by the cake-disposal squad.

  At least Blob wouldn’t be blamed. The authorities would say it was all Aristotle’s fault, and they’d be right.

  He was the odd germ out.

  He was the one who’d been born with the tragic and mysterious problem.

  Why am I so different, thought Aristotle sadly. Why am I, out of all the millions and millions of germs in the nostril, the only one who wants to be happy?

  2

  Court was in session.

  ‘The defendant is charged,’ said the clerk of the court, ‘with being in possession of an illegal item, namely a birthday cake, and attempting to have fun with it.’

  Aristotle didn’t like being in court.

  He was used to it. He’d been in front of the court more times than he could remember. The judges’ seats, ornate and high-backed and carved out of priceless ancient dried phlegm, were quite familiar. So were the judges’ wigs, woven from real dust-mite armpit hair. But Aristotle still found the whole experience scary.

  The judges were so strict.

  And the jury was so big.

  Aristotle gazed up at the towering sides of the nostril, at the huge nose-hair highways criss-crossing the nostril airspace, at the vast military camps high up under the nostril roof. From every part of the nostril millions of germs were glaring down at him. Most of them seemed to be angrily waving their arms and legs.

  I could be wrong about that, thought Aristotle hopefully. It could just be the wind. It’s pretty strong up there and it could just be making their limbs flap.

  ‘Defendant,’ boomed the chief judge. ‘How do you plead?’

  Aristotle turned back to the judges. At least there were only a few hundred of them. Unfortunately they looked even angrier than the jury.

  The warm outgoing wind died away and the nostril was suddenly filled with the cold rush of incoming wind.

  Aristotle shivered.

  ‘Guilty or not guilty?’ boomed the chief judge.

  This was always the tricky part. There wasn’t much point pleading not guilty when the court had three million witnesses. But Aristotle hated pleading guilty. He didn’t feel guilty. Scared, yes, but not guilty.

  ‘It was only a birthday cake,’ he said.

  Millions of voices murmured disapprovingly from above.

  The judges and the jury all went grim-shaped. The whole nostril was silent for a moment except for the faint sound of incoming dust chunks bouncing off nose-hair highways and jury members.

  Aristotle, looking up again, saw that hurtling in with the dust chunks was a new visitor. An exotic spiral-shaped microbe with multi-coloured tentacles, which were flapping helplessly as the wind carried the microbe towards the back of the nostril.

  Aristotle knew it wouldn’t get there.

  It didn’t.

  Members of the nostril defence force, airborne division, swung down from the roof on ropes, snatched the exotic microbe out of the airstream and dragged it away.

  Poor thing, thought Aristotle. Now it’ll end up in court too.

  Aristotle realised that Blob, who was standing next to him in the dock, had shuffled closer.

  ‘Plead guilty,’ muttered Blob. ‘Don’t make it worse by lying. I’ll give you the usual character reference. The one where I explain to them that you’re basically a decent germ but also a bit of an idiot.’

  Aristotle gave Blob a grateful look.

  Honest and generous. What more could a germ ask for in a brother? Apart from happy.

  But before Aristotle could enter a plea, the chief judge did it for him.

  ‘You’ve already admitted you had a birthday cake on or about your person,’ said the chief judge. ‘That sounds guilty to me.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Aristotle quietly.

  The germ multitudes muttered disapprovingly again.

  ‘Before I pass sentence,’ said the chief judge, ‘I wish to make a few remarks.’

  Aristotle wasn’t surprised. The chief judge always made a few remarks at this point in Aristotle’s trials.

  ‘We live in the most important part of the human body,’ said the chief judge. ‘Not in an arm or a leg or a . . . or a . . .’

  The chief judge looked around at the other judges for help.

  Aristotle sighed. The chief judge always did this, ran out of names for the parts of the human body. Why couldn’t he just admit that he didn’t know? And that none of the other germs in the nostril did either?

  ‘Beak,’ said one of the judges.

  ‘Fin,’ said another.

  ‘Brightly-coloured external bottom flap,’ said a third.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the chief judge. ‘We don’t live in any of those bits. We live in the nostril. The human body only has one nostril, and we have a sacred duty to make sure it operates in an orderly and efficient manner. If we lived in a leg, things would be different. Everyone knows a human has more than one leg.’

  ‘Seven,’ said one of the judges.

  ‘Thirty-two,’ said another.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the chief judge. ‘And four big toes and two tummies and quite a few wings.’

  ‘And,’ chimed in another judge, ‘several brightly-coloured external bottom flaps.’

  Aristotle sighed again. If the chief judge and the other authorities bothered talking to the airborne visiting microbes instead of just locking them up, the chief judge would know that humans had ten big toes, three tummies and very rarely a beak.

  ‘But this isn’t any of those other body parts.’ The chief judge was still on his favourite topic. ‘This is the nostril. The sacred, precious, one-of-a-kind nostril. And the nostril of a human is not the place for fun, games, silliness or birthday cakes.’

  Pity, thought Aristotle. I reckon this place would run much more efficiently if everyone relaxed a bit.

  He realised the chief judge was looking at him.

  So was everybody else.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Aristotle. ‘I’ll try not to be silly in future.’

  He meant it, he really did. Right now he’d give anything to be a normal law-abiding germ. One who wasn’t about to be sentenced to an unpleasant few minutes of snot sweeping.

  ‘I wish I could believe you,’ said the chief judge, suddenly going even grimmer-shaped than before. ‘But how many times has this court heard you say that in the past?’

  Aristotle didn’t know.

  ‘Clerk, if you please,’ said the chief judge.

  The clerk of the court stepped forward, fluttering all his arms importantly.

  ‘The defendant,’ he said, ‘was first found guilty of being silly when he used a snot dollop as a bouncy castle.’

  ‘Not a bouncy castle, your honour,’ said Aristotle quietly. ‘A trampoline.’

  The chief judge glared at Aristotle.

  ‘The defendant was next found guilty of being silly,’ said the clerk, ‘when he smeared Highway 42 with nostril grease and slid down it on his bottom.’

  ‘I explained about that in court at the time,’ said Aristotle. ‘I didn’t do any smearing, it was already greasy.’

  ‘Then,’ said the clerk, ‘the defendant . . .’

  ‘Just the total,’ said the chief judge.

  ‘Yes, your honour,’ said the clerk, giving the chief judge a hurt look. ‘The defendant has been convicted of sixty-three other silliness offences, and two hundred and fourteen counts of spending time with other silly individuals.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the chief judge.

  Aristotle protested.

  ‘The microbes from outside aren’t silly,’ he said. ‘They’re just a bit dazed from being blown in here by the wind. But they know heaps of interesting stuff. How to play chess and do
bungy-jumping. How to make sports equipment out of skin flakes. I met one who can play music on hollow lumps of dust-mite poo.’

  ‘Enough,’ boomed the chief judge. He glowered down at Aristotle. ‘Young germ, I think you can see why the birthday cake is the last straw and why we have to make an example of you.’

  Aristotle suddenly felt a chill, even though the wind had just changed again and warm air was gusting out through the nostril.

  What did the judge mean?

  ‘Before you pass sentence, your honour,’ said Aristotle, ‘can I have a witness in my defence?’

  The chief judge nodded wearily.

  Aristotle looked at Blob.

  Blob was gazing up at the jury members, counting them.

  ‘One million and one . . . one million and two . . .’

  Aristotle gave him a nudge.

  Blob jumped, looked around and saw the judges staring at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Um . . . character reference . . .right. Well, I’ve known my brother Aristotle for a long time, ten hours in fact, and um . . . well . . . there’s obviously something very wrong with him, but . . . er . . . I don’t know what it is and I don’t think he can help it.’

  Aristotle felt very moved.

  Poor Blob hated public speaking and here he was, twisting himself into knots with stress, the only germ in the whole place prepared to offer Aristotle support.

  Suddenly Aristotle didn’t feel so tragic after all.

  I’ve got a brother who loves me, he thought, and a nostril to call home. Nothing’s more important than that.

  The judges all stood up.

  ‘Taking into account,’ said the chief judge to Aristotle, ‘that you clearly do have something wrong with you, and that nobody seems to know how to cure your silliness, including your brother and partner in crime, the sentence of the court is as follows.’

  Aristotle gave Blob a grateful look.

  Thanks to him, the sentence looked like it was going to be a light one.

  ‘You and your brother will both leave the nostril right now,’ said the chief judge, ‘and never come back.’

  3

  Banished.

  Aristotle didn’t even want to think about the word.

  But he couldn’t help it because as he and Blob trudged slowly and miserably towards the nostril exit, millions of nose germs kept yelling it at them.