Molly Moon & the Monster Music (2 page)

Molly shut her eyes. She felt a bit weird. Everything felt extra irritating. Maybe it was the tea. She usually drank concentrated orange squash. Perhaps the tea had some angry-making spice in it or maybe it was full of caffeine. It should have a warning on the side of the box. Instead of saying “May cause drowsiness” like some things do, it should say “May cause anger and irritability.”

Molly glanced about the room and then her eyes fell upon a painting on the wall of flowers in a golden pot. It really was exquisite. At once she felt better. Like fire put out by water, her anger was quelled. And suddenly she felt that these emotions
were all new. It was as if she had never felt anger before and never appreciated beauty. All of it seemed new and fresh. She stood up and stretched. As she passed Micky she patted his shoulder.

“Sorry about that,” she apologized. “I don't know why I got so annoyed. Sorry.”

“That's OK. It's just I'm not used to you being bad-tempered,” Micky said. “You're usually so nice.”

Outside on the main street they heard the sound of cheering. Molly went to the balcony and looked over.

The Japanese boy band was leaving in a limousine and fans had gathered to snap their pictures and gawk. Molly watched as bodyguards guided the boys into the car. Then she noticed more bodyguards shepherding a smaller person in with them.

“I thought there were only three boys in the band,” Molly said to Micky, who had come to peer over the balcony with her.

“There are. That tiny man's their manager. He's called Mr. Proila—and he's mean. He controls them. You think Lucy and Primo are bad, but they're nothing compared to him.”

Molly shrugged and glanced at her watch.

“Petula, come on. It's time to collect Gerry from
the airport.”

P
etula sniffed at Molly. The nasty smell had gone. Seeing her open the door, she dropped the stone that she'd been sucking and trotted after Molly along the hotel's carpeted corridor. At the top of the stairs they paused. Molly gave Petula a competitive look and then, suddenly, they both raced down.

“Next time I'll win.” Molly laughed, arriving at the bottom of the stairs. Petula wagged her curly tail.

Molly half walked, half skidded across the white marble lobby and through the revolving hotel door, and she and Petula stepped out into the Ecuadorian sunshine.

“Hat for dog? I make she small one.” A woman in a trilby was selling hats outside the hotel.

Molly smiled. She felt sorry for this woman, who worked such long hours and sold her hats for so lit
tle. “All right. You can mail it to me when it's done. Thank you.”

“Thank you. You good girl,” the woman said with a wink. “See you later.”

Molly and Petula walked to a queue of black-and-white taxis. Molly waved at the driver of the first cab and she opened its door.

Soon they were driving up the steep, narrow streets that climbed out of central Quito to the suburbs beyond. Little houses and small apartment blocks clung to the slopes, patchworking the mountainsides with brightly painted brick walls and corrugated roofs.

Molly looked at her watch. A little bored, she decided to entertain herself by dipping into Petula's mind to see what she was thinking. She loved reading Petula's mind for it made her feel closer to her. Focusing, she asked, “What are you thinking?”

Instantaneously a bubble popped up over her pug's head. Inside the bubble were pictures of the fields outside the window, and of Petula running through them, and then of the fields back home. Molly let the bubble pop. She gave Petula a big cuddle.

“So you're feeling homesick, are you, Petula? Yes, it is very selfish of me to think of staying out
here. We'll go back to England soon.”

When they arrived at the airport, Molly discovered that the plane was late. To fill the time, and because she liked to help people, she decided to use her skills to fix a few things. She hypnotized a fretful baby so that it went to sleep in its stroller and a spotty teenage girl to stop her worrying about her acne and to eat less greasy food and chocolate. She hypnotized a bad-tempered man to be more charming. Still with time on her hands, Molly made friends with the airport-café waitress and helped her clear tables, and then she rounded up luggage carts and parked them near the entrance of the airport. Three and a half hours later, she stood leaning against a rail in the arrivals area with Petula on the ground beside her.

“LOS ANGELES WW328 . . . LANDED . . . 15:45,” the arrivals board finally read.

Molly and Petula watched as travelers of all shapes and all colors rolled luggage out of the baggage-claim area. The travelers popped out as if they were coming off a factory conveyor belt, until at last a tanned eight-year-old boy burst through the swinging doors, his eyes dashing from left to right as he looked for someone.

Gerry was in a white shirt with flowers on it and
wore a blue straw hat with a small brim that he kept tapping down as though worried it might come off. His face lit up when he saw Molly.

“MOLLY!” he shouted. He turned to a uniformed flight attendant who was walking alongside him, said something to her, and pointed his finger at Molly. The flight attendant nodded. Gerry rushed forward, ducked under the rail, one hand firmly keeping his hat on, and threw his free arm about her waist. Molly hugged him back. They hadn't seen each other for a long time.

“I can't believe it! It really is you, Molly! I can't believe it!” His accent was as Cockney as it had been when he lived at the orphanage. Then Gerry spotted Petula. “Amazin'! Is that Petula?” He bent down and hugged her, too. Petula licked his face. Odd, she thought. Gerry had a strong smell of mouse about him.

“Uh-hmm,” coughed the tall flight attendant beside him in an official tone. “So, Gerry, where is your guardian? I have to sign you over to a guardian, you see. I can't let you go until then.”

“This is 'er,” Gerry blurted out.

“Oh no, sorry.” The attendant laughed. “The person has to be a grown-up. Young lady, is your mother or aunt about? She's called Mrs. Moon.”

Molly saw what had happened. Gerry had traveled unaccompanied and Lucy Logan must have given Molly's name as the grown-up who was going to meet him when he got off the plane. She knew Molly would be able to handle this problem. A little hypnotism was what was needed, that was all. Molly put her hand under the flight attendant's elbow and gently led her away from Gerry. Then she centered herself and looked up at the young woman to concentrate on how she should hypnotize her. The lady was brisk and efficient, tight as a coiled spring, but not unkind. Capturing this essence of her, and trying to make herself feel this way, too, Molly turned her eyes on.

She hadn't used them for a few days, but this made no difference to their power. They throbbed as they drove a hypnotic glare into the woman's brown eyes.

“She's . . . She's . . .” The woman stumbled over her words. “She's called Mrs., erm, Mrs.. . .”

“Mrs. Moon?” Molly asked.

“Y-yes.”

Molly felt the fusion feeling—a wave of warm tingling that started in her toes and enveloped her body, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end—and she knew the woman was hypnotized.

She kept looking into her eyes as she said, “I am Mrs. Moon. I am the boy's mother. I may not look it, but I am. I'm thirty-five years old.”

The woman nodded dumbly and smiled like a baby who's just been given an ice cream.

“Good,” she replied. “Sign here then, please, and you can take him away.”

“In half an hour you will no longer be hypnotized by me,” Molly whispered. “You will remember that you handed Gerry Oakly over to a woman who looks like I will when I'm grown up.” Molly paused. If she could, she always liked to leave people with something good after she'd hypnotized them. “From now on, you will be very happy. You will dance . . . a lot. Got that?”

The woman nodded. “Good-bye,” she said. Smiling blissfully, she turned and began walking away across the terrazzo airport floor. Halfway across she stopped. She did a little balletic twirl, which was applauded by an old man with a walking stick. Gerry let Petula go just in time to see the flight attendant pirouette through a queue of teenage students and disappear.

“That woman must be stupid!” he remarked. “Anyone can see you're not a grown-up.”

“Well,” said Molly (deciding not to tell Gerry
about her hypnotic powers), “I could look thirty-five to her. Maybe she needs glasses.”

Gerry seemed unconvinced. Then a naughty look crossed his face. He glanced about. Carefully he took off his blue straw hat.

“Look,” he said. “I made a secret compartment in it.”

Molly looked into the crown of the hat, where a black cloth lining had been sewn in. All of a sudden it moved.

“Oh! Is it Titch II?”

“The Third,” Gerry said sadly. “A cat got number two.”

Petula winced when she heard the word “cat.” She hated cats. But the smell of mouse coming from the hat distracted her. She lifted her nose to get a better whiff.

“Did you travel all the way from LA with him in there?”

“Yeah.” Gerry undid a Velcro seam in the lining and a brown mouse stuck his nose out.

“But didn't they catch you at the X-ray machine?”

“Nah. I just walked through with my hat on and they were so busy they didn't even notice.”

“What about on the plane?” Molly asked,
amazed.

“Oh, Titch enjoyed it. I gave 'im some exercise in the wash basin of the airplane's restroom. An' he slept. An' I gave 'im some cheese. That stewardess was in a dream or somethin'. Loads of times my 'at was bobbin' about like crazy on my 'ead but she didn't seem to notice.”

“Didn't he, um, wee on you?” Molly asked.

Gerry scratched his hair. “Erm, a bit, I s'pose. But Titch III's pee don't really smell.”

Petula cocked her head and sniffed the air. Molly wrinkled her nose, too.

“Hmm.” She laughed. “That's a matter of opinion. Maybe you should have made him a kind of mouse diaper.”

Gerry grinned. “Maybe next time.”

Molly hugged Gerry around his shoulders. He was a lot shorter than she was, which wasn't surprising as he was much younger. She was really glad to see him.

In the cab on the way back to the hotel Gerry told Molly about his new life in America. The large mansion that belonged to Primo Cell, Molly's father, was a far cry from Hardwick House, the dump where he and Molly and Rocky and the other orphans had
grown up. It had indoor and outdoor pools, a game room with Ping-Pong and tenpin bowling, and each one of the nine adopted orphans had his or her own bedroom.

Mrs. Trinklebury, the woman who had once worked as a cleaner in the orphanage, was now in charge. She had enrolled the children into a progressive school where they grew vegetables, cooked, did lots of art and music, and where English, history, geography, science, and even math lessons were, Gerry said, fun.

“Fun?” Molly asked incredulously.

“Yeah,” Gerry said keenly. “English is just books, and the teacher reads 'em to us, too. It's just like story time all the time. And math isn't like math, because the teacher is so funny. He's got a parrot that talks all the sums! An' history is like scary stories about what's 'appened in the world so far, and the way the teacher tells it you don't wanna leave the class, the stories are that good. An' the geography lesson makes you want to get on an airplane and see all the countries. An' we do a class called natural world. We learned all about endangered species.” Gerry gazed out of the window, his eyes turning misty. “It's really sad what's 'appening to the rain forests,” he said as they passed a copse of trees.
“And 'orrible about the whales.”

Molly stroked Petula. “Why? What's happening to the whales?”

“People are huntin' and killin' 'em, Molly, even though they're endangered. One day there might not be any left. Some grown-ups are sick.” Gerry opened the window and then wound it up again, as though to clear his mind.

“Music lessons are really cool. We made our own instruments out of oil drums and saws and glass bottles. An' we formed a band and played our crazy instruments and the teacher was the conductor.”

Molly was impressed. Perhaps she could hypnotize the tutor waiting for them back home to be like these teachers.

“I'm learnin' the harmonica, and”—Gerry's hand dived into his pocket—“this one is for you.” He passed Molly a silver harmonica. “Bought it with me own pocket money.”

“Harmony” was etched across the top side of the instrument.

“Oh, thank you so much, Gerry,” Molly said gratefully. “I really like it.” She gave it a blow and they both laughed at the noise she produced.

“If you practice you'll get better,” said Gerry. “I
was bad, too, when I started.” He then took another harmonica out of his pocket and gave Molly a demonstration. “Oh . . . yeeeeeah,” he said when he finished.

Molly laughed. “Brilliant!” she said encouragingly.

“An' I wrote this one about the whales. I did it for my endangered-species project.”

This time he played a mournful tune. In between chords he made a strange, guttural noise with a high-pitched call mixed into it. That was his impersonation of a whale, Molly realized. Though it was actually quite funny, she didn't laugh. Gerry was obviously deadly serious and she didn't want to hurt his feelings. Little did she know that in a matter of days she would be far less considerate, and Gerry would be wondering where the kind Molly had gone.

G
erry, chatty as a finch, filled Molly in about his life in America, making her laugh with his funny impersonations. She was very glad that she'd gone to the airport to meet him. Gerry did stink a bit of mouse pee, but it was really terrific to see him again.