Shrunk! (7 page)

‘How did they ever get it in?' I ask.

A man takes the front door off its hinges. The dinghy scrapes out on to the front path.

It's funny how everyone paints boats the same colours, blue and white. It's just like the one I shrank in the bay, only smaller – or maybe bigger?

The telly's on really loud, so we sneak in without Grandma noticing, and find my bedroom smells like a farmyard. It sounds like one too.

‘MOOO.'

‘EEYORE.'

‘BAAA.'

Oh no – they've changed. They're much bigger than I remember, more like blueberry muffins than popcorn, and they've pooed
all
over the carpet. They've also eaten every scrap of grass and they've chewed a hole in my duvet cover. I didn't know sheep grew that fast. Perhaps they were lambs?

Whoops.

‘Wow!' says Eric.

‘Woah!'
says Jacob.
‘Now that's weird. What you got them in your bedroom for, Model Village? Shouldn't they be outside, running around in the mini haystacks?'

‘It's not like you, worrying about something else,' says Eric.

‘What d'you mean – not like me? Anyway – I don't like cruelty to animals,'
says Jacob, rubbing one of the sheep between the ears.

‘But,' Eric says, ‘you don't care about cruelty to people?'

‘I'm not cruel. That's just mucking about.'

‘Hmmm,' says Eric.

‘Quick, while Grandma's watching the news, let's stick them in the model village,' I say to Eric.

I bundle the donkey and the cows into a plastic policeman's helmet, and Eric picks up the cardboard box full of sheep.

‘Am I coming?'

‘No, you stay here,' I say, ‘and look for Jupiter.'

Jacob looks at the room.
‘Where's the telly, then?'

‘Downstairs. Anyway, you don't need it, you're looking for a planet.'

‘What – no TV? What d'you play your games on, then?'

I shake my head. ‘No telly, no games console, no laptop. There's Dad's catch-the-baby-from-the-burning-building thing, but Tilly's got the games. Otherwise, the radio. You'll have to read a book, Jacob.'

‘Or look for Jupiter,' says Eric.

‘Got any comics?'

I put the radio on, and we leave Jacob on the floor, measuring himself against the cartoons, and tiptoe downstairs.

Outside in the model village, we let the little animals free. They mix in with Grandma's lumpy resin sheep. Mine are a bit smaller, but they look fantastic skipping through the tiny houses.

‘Seems a shame to let them go, really,' says Eric.

We're caught in a square of yellow light that spills across the grass. I jump, dropping the policeman's helmet. ‘On your way home, Eric?' asks Grandma, from the doorway. ‘Your dad rang – he's cooking.' She holds the gate open for him.

‘Baaaaa.'

‘Oh – um, yes, I suppose I was, Mrs Perks,' he says, raising his eyebrows.

I pretend I can't hear the sheep.

The gate squeaks as he opens it. Eric sort of hesitates on the threshold, but Grandma waves him away.

‘Go on, dear – home now,' she says.

‘Baaaaa.'

Eric waves and heads off along the road to his house.

‘Mooo.'

She doesn't even blink. ‘Now, Tom – something on your mind?'

I could ask her: can you shrink things? But I daren't. I could ask her: how do you put things back? But I'm too scared. Perhaps there's a way of getting her to tell me what I want to know, without me telling her what she wants to know.

‘Why didn't you want me to wish?' I ask.

‘Didn't I, dear? When was that?'

A tiny sheep wanders out from the model village. It's standing by the church, looking up at Grandma, like she's a really big bit of grass.

‘Baaaa.'

Oh no. I'll have to take emergency action. ‘No, Grandma, you didn't – and you didn't want me to find this.'

I take the meteorite out of my pocket and Grandma's eyes widen. I walk back towards the front door, so that she's looking towards me, and not towards the sheep.

‘Did you wish?' she says.

‘No,' I lie, ‘but what would have happened if I had?'

She doesn't say anything for a minute, just follows me up the step and into the house.

‘Moooo.'

‘In this village, Tom, dear – you have to be careful what you wish for. When I was a little girl I wished on a shooting star.'

‘Did you?'

Grandma's spooning oxtail soup into a mug. There's a big ladle hanging on the wall, but she's using a little one. Grandma's always using things that are the wrong size.

The soup's kind of purple and sticky. I hope she's not thinking of giving it to me. I take an apple from the sideboard. It's huge, but delicious.

‘Yes – I wished something silly, really.' She's filling another mug now.

‘What did you wish for?'

She ignores my question. ‘The meteorite landed in our garden, just like the one you've got there, and I picked it up, just as you did. It was by the castle.'

‘Here – this castle? In the model village?'

Grandma nods. ‘They say the real castle's built on a giant piece of space rock, one that fell millions of years ago. This was just a small one. Perfect, really. It fitted in the palm of my hand.'

‘And you saw it fall?'

She nods. ‘Just like that one you've got there. It banged, as it came down – a real thunderclap – and then whacked into the lavender, right in front of me.'

She carves a chunk of her homemade bread, and crashes it into a battered old tray as if it was the meteorite.

‘The thing is, after that – I found I could shrink things.' She stares really hard at me, and I nearly choke on the apple.

‘Shrink? How – extraordinary.'

‘Hmm.' She bangs one of the mugs of soup on to the tray and reaches into a drawer in the dresser. ‘Here you are.'

She pulls out a cloth bundle and unwraps it on the table. A small, ordinary, smoothed stone rolls out from a bundle of ancient, crumbling lavender.

‘Woah, Grandma.' I pick it from her hand. It's very heavy, just like mine. So I put them side by side on the kitchen table. We both stare. They're about the same colour and size. Both are odd shapes.

‘They could come from the same rock,' she says, stroking mine with her cracked old fingers. ‘Extraordinary, extraordinary.'

‘What's extraordinary?' I ask.

‘The cosmos, dear. It's quite extraordinary, for example, that the night your meteorite fell, Jupiter vanished.'

‘Is it?' I say weakly.

‘Yes – you wouldn't know anything about it, I suppose?'

Did you know that stick-on Dracula teeth look exactly like plastic dinosaur claws?

I know that, because Mum and Dad and Tilly save me from Death By Grandma by bursting back into the kitchen, and Dad's false teeth shoot out of his mouth all over the floor.

Mum scrabbles about picking them up and it turns out that one of them
is
a plastic dinosaur claw.

Grandma stuffs her meteorite back in the drawer. I stick mine in my pocket. She snaps me a look that says the subject won't be forgotten, that she'll be asking again before the evening's out.

‘How did it go?' asks Grandma.

‘Fabulous – fantastic – they loved us.'

‘And did the disappearing cupboard work?'

Mum and Dad look at each other.

‘Not exactly,' says Mum.

‘It was really funny,' says Tilly. ‘Mum lost Dad, and the rabbits got stuck in the middle, and ran out all over the stage. The audience couldn't stop laughing, they thought it was on purpose.'

‘So did you enjoy it?' I ask.

‘Have a good fight?' she asks, without even looking at me.

‘Have a good time dressed as a pumpkin?'

‘You must be really stupid choosing Jacob Devlin.'

‘Thanks. Do you know where the games for Dad's catch-the-baby-from-the-burning-building thing are?'

‘They're not in my room and you can't go and look for them.'

‘I'll be careful.'

‘No – and I'll know if you've been in there, and I'll kill you if you have. Anyway, they're not there.'

‘If they're not there, why would I go in and look for them.'

‘Exactly.'

Most of the time, I don't understand Tilly.

Carrying a mug of oxtail goo, I escape upstairs, only to find Jacob and the squirrel standing nose to nose on either side of an empty cereal bowl. Oddly, they're almost exactly the same height, and probably, the same weight. The squirrel's tail is all fluffed up. It looks really angry.

They're circling round the bowl, first to the left, then back to the right.

The squirrel's got evil-looking claws, and with its lips pulled back, a nasty sharp-toothed scowl.

Jacob's holding his toasting fork, but I don't think much of his chances against the squirrel.

‘Stay st—' I shout, but Jacob jumps on the side of the bowl, flicking the other side up and cracking the squirrel on the underside of his jaw.

The squirrel yelps and leaps back into the corner. I throw myself forward to catch it, but it hides in a pile of socks. Jacob stands and brushes his hands together.
‘See – no problem – I can deal with anything. I'm a genius, see? Have you got the games?'

‘As you're a genius, have you found Jupiter?'

Jacob slaps himself on the forehead.
‘Oh – I forgot to tell you . . . It was in the . . . Of course not, you idiot. Anyway, they've told us all about it on the radio. It seems that we're most likely to be spattered with asteroids and comets before catapulting into the sun and roasting. Oh, and the Taj Mahal's been destroyed, and the Arizona desert now looks like Eric's skin and worst of all, a huge piece of rock has broken off from the Asteroid Belt and is on a collision course with Earth.'

‘Oh.'

‘And it's due to hit Earth the day after tomorrow, 2nd November.'
Jacob sounds quite pleased. As if he doesn't really live on Earth.

‘That's my birthday.'

‘Sorreee.'

I now feel completely sick. I really would like to go to bed until my birthday, and I'd like someone else to sort this whole thing out. And I'd like Jacob to go away.

We've spent an hour searching the floor for Jupiter, or at least I have. Jacob's been slurping oxtail soup and singing Queen's back catalogue in a squeaky helium voice.

He's got the top of the little games console open, and he's catching babies. It looks like a widescreen TV next to him.

‘Still no games?'
he says, just like Tilly would.

‘I'm going for a wee,' I say.

‘What about the squirrel?'

I look around the bedroom for a secure place to put Jacob. I spot a blob of chewing gum that I stuck to the mirror last week. ‘Here – this'll keep you safe.' I take it, stick it in my mouth and chew until it goes soft and stick it to his back. Then I press him to the wall over the washbasin.

I
do
put the plug in.

‘Hey! You can't leave me like this!'
But I can, and I turn on the radio, really loudly, and slip out of the door.

I can't get to sleep. I don't think Jacob can either, although at one point I hear tiny snoring. But I suppose it could be the squirrel. Jacob's on the windowsill by my bed now, sleeping in one of my socks.

I can't stop thinking about Grandma and shrinking. She must have shrunk loads of things. All the Christmas trees in the model village, the tiny gnomes in the tiny crazy golf, the street parties – all of that fiddly stuff must have been her.

And I'd always thought she was just weird.

When I do sleep, I dream that I miss my birthday. That I wake up and the whole day's gone past, and everyone's forgotten about it. Then I dream that Mr and Mrs Magic do a birthday party for me, and invite the whole school, and I go and I'm only wearing my pants and I wake up sweating. I lie awake staring at the meteor showers, and I must fall asleep again because this time I dream of giant asteroids crashing into Australia – I can tell it's Australia because the streets are bounding with koalas and the trees hang with kangaroos.

I get up half a dozen times in the night to look for Jupiter in different places in my room.

The last dream I have before morning is of Grandma, peering into my ears and pulling out my thoughts with a crochet hook. It's really scary. When the alarm goes off, Jacob's sleeping like a baby on my pillow, his face all spattered with Grandma's oxtail soup. He liked it so much he climbed into the mug to lick up the last bits.

Ugh.

Tilly's up early too. She's got music playing in her room and I can hear her dancing.

‘She's in there – get the games off her, will you?'

‘No – I'm going to look for Jupiter.'

‘I'll scream, I'll get Granny.'

I knock on Tilly's door, and try to push it open, but it's barricaded. ‘Tilly, have you got the games?'

‘Go away.'

‘Please.'

‘Go away, Tom. You wouldn't play with me, so I'm never, ever going to play with you.'

‘But I'm not asking to play with you. I'm asking for a game.'

Silence.

‘Tilly?'

More silence.

I go back to my room.

‘No luck with the game,' I say.

‘You just don't know how to deal with her,'
he says.

‘You try,' I say.