T4

(T4 = Terminator 4)

My sister is pretty excited. She’s roughly 20 months pregnant and she’s showing me through her new house that she’s moving into in the next couple of days. "Here’s the loungeroom, you’ve gotta love the green carpet, I reckon we just mow it instead of vacuuming, here’s my room, look, it’s got a walk in robe and ensuite, here’s the kitchen, here’s the dining room, come through this bedroom, I’ll show you the back room. It’s huge. It’s got heaps of windows, and the clothes line out the back isn’t broken! Hang on, I’ll just open these blinds so you can see …. " At which point this ginormous huntsman goes running up the window just centimetres from her fingers. She lets out a blood curdling scream, jumps three feet in the air and almost gives birth right then and there. OK, so I let out a bit of a scream too. My daughter just stands there looking at us as if to say, "What’s the problem?"

The problem is this, we can’t possibly leave the house with the T4 still alive, having the run of the house, just waiting to attack everyone in their sleep. It has to be killed. Next problem, no spider killing tools in the house yet, as it's still empty. We improvise and find a very long stick outside, two kiddie beach balls from the back of the car and two phone books. We have a plan.

My sister, being the bravest one, starts by opening the blinds so we can more or less see the T4. Then we ready ourselves with our equipment. Again, because my sister is the bravest one, she gets the stick, I get the beach balls and my daughter gets the phone books. We're not sure what we need the phone books for but we figure they're a good idea. So armed with our weapons we commence the spider killing. The brave one starts poking at the T4, with the purpose of luring it out of it’s hidey hole so that I can throw the beach balls at it. Stupid plan, I know. All it really does is get the T4 pissed off big time and make us scream like girls every time it moves. When we aren’t busy screaming we can hear this thing hissing at us.

Eventually the T4 drops to the floor (mega girly screams accompany this event) and starts running straight at me! You know that awful pissed off spider kind of running when they run across carpet. I call it stilt running. I’m not the brave one so I freeze and just watch this T4 getting closer and closer and my sister's screaming at me, "Chuck the balls at it, chuck the balls at it," so I do. But my ball skills are as good as my bravery skills and I miss both times. I’m still frozen to the spot, the gap between me and the T4 getting shorter and shorter and now she's screaming at me, "Drop the phone books on it, drop the phone books on it." Ah, that’s why we have the phone books. My daughter begins shoving the phone books at me, so I take one and come to the realisation that in order to drop a phone book on the T4 I’m gonna have to be standing practically right over it. My brave moment hasn’t arrived yet so I stay frozen where I am and wait for the spider to come to me. Still there’s the, "Drop the phone books on it, drop the phone books on it," amid yet more girlie screams all 'round. Finally the T4 is right at my feet and my brave moment arrives. No, it's not a brave moment at all, it's more like blind fear that this thing is going to actually touch me if I don’t do something, so I drop the first phone book on it, then the second phone book.

Triumph! Have you ever seen a very pregnant woman jump and dance on top of two phone books? It’s a treat. Really.

So we go out to the kitchen all puffed up with pride at our spider killing skills and write a note to the other housemates to warn them about the 'dead' T4 under the phone books in the back room and could the boy housemate please do the removal and disposal. We're a bit too squishy to do that part.

I get a phone call two days later from my sister telling me that the other housemates had gone to the house, read the note, gone down to the back room, removed the phone books and found the T4 squashed into the carpet. They'd left it like that with the intention of removing and disposing later on after they’d done a few things. So a little bit of time goes by and the boy housemate is standing next to the T4 when the bloody thing jumps up, runs over his foot, streaks across the floor and up the wall! This thing had been under the phone books, the phone books that a pregnant woman had jumped and danced on, for two days. It had left an imprint of itself in the carpet, yet didn’t die.

The boy housemate caught the T4 and put it outside into the garden. I would have put it into the garden too ... the garden of a house on the other side of town.