Survivor (4 page)

The water ran faster until every one of the remaining eighty-four volumes of the encyclopaedia were soaking wet.

I am in big trouble
, Betty thought,
again
.

But the water had done the trick. Each book had swollen up until the gap, where volume six for people whose names begin with ‘F’ had been, closed up.

‘That’ll do,’ she said.

She clicked her fingers and to her amazement the water actually stopped.

‘Well, it will probably fool your brother for a while, at least,’ said Serge and, as the two girls left, he climbed onto Betty’s shoulder and whispered, ‘Your secret’s safe with me.’

Back in Betty’s bedroom, the two girls sat facing each other on the floor.

‘Before we begin,’ Betty said, ‘I, umm, err, need to tell you something.’

‘OK,’ said Ffiona.

‘I’m not the best witch in the world,’ said Betty. ‘I mean, sometimes I make tiny little mistakes.’

‘Right.’

‘What I mean is,’ Betty continued, ‘my mum has banned me from doing big magic.’

‘How do you mean?’ Ffiona asked.

‘Well, I’m not allowed to change little things like a sparrow into big things like a vulture, because sometimes I get the words a bit muddled up and when you do magic it’s really, really important to get all the words right. I mean, you don’t just have to use the exact right words, but you’ve also go to get them in the exact right order, and some of the words are very long and some spells have dozens and dozens of words in them,’ Betty explained. ‘But of course you can always undo a spell by saying it all backwards.’

‘So even if you use all the right words but say them in the wrong order, it can be dangerous?’ said Ffiona.

‘Not just dangerous, but weird and sometimes even really funny,’ said Betty. ‘Look.’

She took off her shoes and put them on the carpet in front of her.

‘Now what I should say is:

Boring shoes,

Be black no more

With pearls and rubies shine

Boring shoes

Down on the floor

Make yourselves divine.

And then they would turn into a fabulous pair of shiny golden slippers all covered in precious jewels.’

‘Wow,’ said Ffiona. ‘Do it to my shoes.’

‘No, because I always get the words muddled up when I’m saying it as a spell. I’ll show you
what happens. Oh, and if I were you I’d get up on the bed.’

Betty climbed on the bed too, crossed her fingers and her eyes, which is what you have to do to make ordinary words into a spell, and said:

‘Boring shoes,

Be black no more

With rearls and poobies shine

Shoring boos

Down on the floor

Make yourselves divine.’

There was a soft pop and Betty’s shoes vanished. A few seconds later there was a lot of thrashing about and strange noises under the bed and a small crocodile appeared.

‘See. Now I’ve go to try and remember what I said wrong and then say it all backwards again to undo it,’ said Betty. ‘And if I don’t get it exactly right, the crocodile will probably turn into something worse.’

The crocodile was scuttling round the room with two Barbie dolls in its mouth. Its tail knocked a chair over and kept banging against the door, until Mordonna called up from the kitchen.

‘Betty, have you been playing with your shoes again?’

‘Umm, it was an accident, Mum,’ Betty shouted.

Mordonna came into the bedroom, grabbed the crocodile by the tail and said, ‘Look, that’s the third pair of shoes you’ve ruined in a the past month. You’re aired for a week.’

‘What’s aired?’ said Ffiona after Mordonna had taken the crocodile down into the garden. ‘I thought it’s what my mum did when she hung the blankets out in the sunshine. Your mother’s not going to hang you out on the clothesline, is she?’

‘No, that’s human aired. Witches’ aired is like being grounded,’ said Betty, ‘except your feet don’t touch the ground. Look.’

Ffiona got down on the floor and looked at Betty’s feet. They were hovering about two centimetres off the ground.

‘It means you can’t walk anywhere,’ Betty explained, ‘because no matter how much you move your legs you just stay in the same place. The only way to move around is to grab hold of things and pull yourself along.’

‘Couldn’t you fly around on your broomstick?’

‘What broomstick?’ said Betty.

‘Don’t all witches and wizards have broomsticks?’

‘Not nowadays,’ said Betty. ‘I think my granny might have had one, but we all use vacuum cleaners now.’

‘What, to fly on?’

‘No, to clean the carpet.’

‘I could pull you along,’ said Ffiona. ‘You’d just have to hold my hand.’

‘Not a good idea,’ said Betty. ‘My mum’s already thought of that one. If you hold my hand you’ll get a terrible electric shock.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I grabbed Satanella’s tail once and she grabbed Merlinmary’s ear and we blew all the lights in the street out,’ said Betty.

‘Oh my goodness,’ said Ffiona.

‘Actually it was brilliant, but I got into real trouble,’ said Betty. ‘Mum made me eat porridge for a week.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ said Ffiona. ‘I like porridge.’

At last Betty understood how it was that Ffiona accepted all her strange relations so easily.
If she liked porridge she was weirder than all of them.

Being aired for a week turned out to be quite a good thing. Ffiona came round early every day and she and Betty sat on the bed and read the encyclopedia. Progress was slow because almost every sentence had at least two words neither of them could understand, even though Ffiona was one of those strange children who read dictionaries for a hobby.

‘Some of these words aren’t even in my dictionary,’ she said. ‘I mean, what’s a starboardcullis? I know what a portcullis is, but I’ve never heard of a starboardcullis – and how can you tell if it’s ripe or not?’

‘I think we’ll just have to ignore the bits we don’t understand,’ said Betty. ‘We’ll leave them out.’

‘But the instructions are very precise,’ said Ffiona. ‘It says we need thirty-seven point eight grammettes of ripe starboardthingies or else the spell won’t work, and it says that if we don’t do this spell first then none of the other ones will work either.’

‘OK, well, when we find come to an ingredient that we haven’t heard of,’ said Betty, ‘we’ll try to guess what it might be and use the nearest thing.’

‘Isn’t that a bit dangerous?’ said Ffiona. ‘If my mum’s cooking something and she doesn’t have the right ingredients and uses something else, it always tastes dreadful. I mean, you could think you’re making me into a witch and I could end up as a pink rabbit.’

‘No way,’ said Betty. ‘The pink rabbit spell is completely different. I’m quite good at that one except I’m colour blind and my rabbits come out green. I think.’

‘I know what a starboardcullis is,’ said a voice from under the bed.

‘Morbid?’ said Betty.

She took her junior witch’s pointy stick and poked it under the bed.

‘Oww, get off,’ said Morbid.

Silent said nothing, because he never did, but he thought,
Oww, get off.

The twins crawled out covered in fluff and knelt by the bed gazing up adoringly at Ffiona.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a sticking plaster, have you?’ said Morbid. ‘That crocodile under there bit my leg.’
⁹

‘No I haven’t,’ Betty snapped. ‘What were you doing under my bed? You know the rule, none of us is allowed to go into anyone else’s room.’

‘We came in to see if there was anything Ffiona needed,’ said Morbid.

‘Well, there isn’t. Go away. Ffiona’s
my
friend. You go and find one of your own.’

‘But … but … but …’ said Silent and everyone’s jaws dropped.

It was the first time in his entire life that Silent had uttered a a single word. Until then the only way he had ever communicated was by a few grunts, which only Morbid could understand. No
amount of magic had ever managed to change this, but now he was so infatuated with Ffiona it had given him the power of speech.

‘What did you say?’ said Betty and Morbid.

‘Umm … but, but, but,’ said Silent.

When they went downstairs and told Mordonna, she was so delighted that she gave Ffiona a huge hug and told her she was the cleverest girl in the world and that she could come and visit whenever she wanted. She even gave Betty her shoes back and un-aired her.

‘Mum,’ said Betty, ‘do you think one of Ffiona’s distant relatives might have been a wizard?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Mordonna. ‘I mean, look at all the magic we tried to get poor Silent to talk, and then along comes Ffiona and just one look was all it took for him to start speaking.’

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud and after that it was almost impossible to shut Silent up. He talked in his sleep and didn’t even stop even when Mordonna made him eat wet concrete. They tried the terrifying putting-a-spoonful-of-Belgian-
porridge-in his-mouth routine, but even that failed. Finally, they stuck his head underwater. No one could hear him when they did that, but they could tell by the way the fish threw themselves out of the pond that he was still talking.

Being witches and wizards, the only other solutions the family could think of were complicated things that involved a lot of magic and singed hair. It was Ffiona who finally came up with the answer. Because Silent never left a gap small enough for Morbid to get a single word in, Morbid stopped
speaking, so they did the obvious thing and simply swapped names.
¹⁰

Given Betty’s poor success rate with her spells, Betty and Ffiona agreed that they wouldn’t try any witch-making magic for the rest of the holidays.

‘You should probably get a lot more practice at ordinary magic before we try anything as big as that,’ said Ffiona, who was worried that Betty might turn her into a table lamp or a ginger biscuit.

The two girls decided that as they were total and complete best friends, they couldn’t have any secrets from each other. This meant that Ffiona had to tell Betty about her ‘hankyblanky’, which was a disgusting strip of old grey rag she wrapped around her thumb and sucked every night in bed.
She even told Betty that she sometimes picked her nose and ate it.