Alligator Action (7 page)

Petty started to fully wake up just at the point when she was led into the wings of the stage. The last few hours had seemed like some weird dream . . . but then she could hear the rowdy audience, and she knew it was real. The audience was shouting at the man with the kettle on his head. There was a short, plump, red-haired woman sitting next to him on the sofa, crying into a wadded-up tissue.

“I just don't understand it,” sniffed the woman. “I sent him to a nice school. Cooked his favorite dinners. Let him watch all his favorite TV shows. Bought him lots of toys. And for what? For him to grow up pretending to be a superhero with a kettle on his head!”

The kettle-headed man sprang to his feet
and shouted, “I am NOT pretending to be a superhero, Mother. I AM a superhero!”

The audience laughed and booed. Then a dark-haired woman in a sparkly yellow jacket shimmied across the stage with a microphone. “Well, Brian,” she asked, “If you are a superhero, what are your super powers? What can KettleMan do? Apart from make lots of really hot cups of tea . . .”

The audience fell apart, exploding in laughter. KettleMan was now steaming. Literally. He pressed a switch on the kettle on his head, and a jet of steam shot out of the long spout above his eyebrows. “BEHOLD MY POWER!” he shouted. Then two burly security guards grabbed him and dragged him offstage. “If I WANT to be
KettleMan, I have the RIGHT to be KettleMan!” shouted Brian as he was dragged past Petty. His mother hurried after him, looking weary.

Destiny Darcy sighed, gazed at the audience, and said, “So sad!”

She walked to the center of the stage and stared out into the crowd. There were about two hundred people squeezed into the tent. They perched on tiered seating, which had been set up on some kind of scaffolding. They were behaving every bit as badly as they would in the proper TV studio back in London, thought Destiny. It was a good idea to take the show on tour. A
very
good idea. And now, it was going to get even better.

“Imagine how it feels,” Destiny said, her voice a whisper, echoing through the many speakers in the tent, “to know that your mother rejected you.” The audience made a sympathetic murmur. “To know that her work was always
far
more important than her daughter.” Destiny's voice began to rise. “To realize that she was SO selfishly caught up in her own ambition that she—LITERALLY—forgot you existed!”

Standing in the wings, Petty Potts felt her arm being taken by one of the burly security men. “I'm NOT going out there!” she exclaimed.

“Oh, yes, you are, love!” he replied, gripping her arm tighter. “This is Chatz TV's biggest show. Nobody walks out on it.”

Petty stamped on his foot. But he didn't seem to notice. Back onstage, Destiny Darcy was still talking. Goose pimples ran up and down Petty's spine. There was something weirdly familiar about that voice . . . .

“Today, I bring you a world exclusive,” Destiny said. “A story which will shock you to the core. Because the coldhearted, ruthlessly ambitious mother who neglected her own daughter is HERE TODAY! Bring her on, boys!”

And Petty was propelled into the hot, bright stage lights to a chorus of boos and catcalls.

“And the daughter she FORGOT . . .” went on Destiny, turning to stare at Petty.

“. . . is
ME!
”

The audience gasped. Josh and Danny were so shocked they just sat in their seats, mouths open.

Petty Potts had a DAUGHTER?

Back onstage, sinking into the leather sofa, was Petty, peering at Destiny Darcy in absolute amazement.

“What are you talking about, you deranged woman?” she spluttered. “I haven't got a daughter!”

“Oh no?” Destiny said. “Then I wonder who this is.”

Up on a big, white screen at the back of the stage, a photo appeared. Josh's and Danny's mouths dropped open even wider. It was the photo from Petty's new lab. They'd just seen it days ago. It was of Petty's former best friend—and now worst enemy—Victor Crouch, with his arm around Petty. And next to Petty on the other side was a teenage girl who was undoubtedly Destiny Darcy.

There was a gasp of amazement from the audience.

“That's the bit of the photo that was cut out of the frame!” hissed Danny, finding his voice at last. “We thought it looked odd!”

Petty was gaping too now.
That girl in the photo DOES look familiar
, she thought.
Didn't Victor Crouch give me the same photo years ago? If so . . . why was the girl cut off the end of my copy
? So I would forget she existed? “This is ludicrous!” she muttered, aloud. “How could I forget having my
own
daughter?”

She shook her head. As she did so, some of the more recent memories slid back the right way up. She suddenly recalled being kidnapped from her lab only days before. She shook her head again, trying to remember who'd kidnapped her.

Destiny Darcy saw the head-shaking and began to stomp around the stage in a rage, her black sequined trousers glittering and flouncing in the TV lights. “You STILL don't believe me?” she shouted. “Well—how about this for proof?” She held up a bit of paper with the words POSITIVE MATCH written on it in large blue letters. A cameraman whizzed up to her, focusing on the paper. Behind her, the huge screen above the stage cut to the image. It said “DNA TEST” at the top.

“I have PROOF!” snarled Destiny. “I know how to prove who is related to who!”

“Whom,” Petty said. “Who is related to
whom
. Surely if I was really your mother, you would have learned better grammar.”

“GAAAH!” shouted Destiny, stamping her foot. “You were ALWAYS just like this!”

Petty sat still and tried to work out what to do next. All she really wanted to do was to get back to her lab and find Josh and Danny and carry on with the S.W.I.T.C.H. project.

“And what hurts most of ALL . . .” Destiny furiously paced the stage as the audience sat transfixed. “. . . is exactly WHAT all that research you were doing—the research that meant you FORGOT I EXISTED—was FOR!”

Suddenly, she took a small drawstring bag out of her jacket pocket. “THIS,” she told the audience, “is my mother's GREAT WORK!” She tipped up the bag, and marbles rained out of it and clacked onto the stage, rolling off in all directions.

“Yes,” said Destiny. “My mother has spent
her ENTIRE LIFE working on a new design . . . for MARBLES!”

The audience gasped, then laughed and jeered.

Josh and Danny stared at each other, feeling panicky. “It's definitely her!” hissed Danny. “Destiny Darcy is the Mystery Marble Sender!” And now, of course, it began to fall into place, thought Josh! The black sequin in the note, the prize from Chatz TV containing one of the marbles—there were even Destiny Darcy Diddly DeeDee dolls in the goody bags where they'd found their last marble.

“The
Destiny Darcy Show
was in Cornwall, when we got the third marble!” hissed Danny. “Jenny and her friend went to it, remember?”

“And there was a Chatz TV tent up at the zoo when we S.W.I.T.C.H.ed into anacondas!” remembered Josh.

Back onstage, scrabbling to pick up the marbles, Petty was furious. “You FOOLISH woman,” she shouted. “You have NO IDEA what these are, have you?”

“Well,” smirked Destiny, “whatever you think they are, Mother, you've obviously LOST YOUR MARBLES!”

The audience hooted.

“But this is sad,” Destiny said, her face suddenly tragic. “Because, clearly, my mother has gone insane. And earlier today, a good friend of hers and I . . . well . . . this is terribly hard to say, but we signed the forms to have her committed . . . to a mental asylum!”

Petty, with her hands full of marbles, was alert and staring around. “Look,” she said. “Destiny . . . Maybe I do remember you after all!”

“Oh-ho!” chortled Destiny, “And now perhaps you conveniently remember this man too!”

And then, to the tune of a theme song, a man walked onstage. He carried a hat and had a full head of light brown hair, which was obviously a wig. His eyebrows had been penciled in, but Josh and Danny could still see the long, sharpened fingernail on the little finger of his left hand. And even if they hadn't seen it, they knew.