Survivor (5 page)

‘Everyone does that, don’t they?’ said Betty. ‘Though I suppose most people don’t feed it to their goldfish. Granny Scratchrot collects all the wax out of her ears and the crusty bits from her eyelids and moulds them into little grey mice. Then she picks her nose and makes it into two tiny eyes and when she sticks them on the mouse’s head, they come to life and run away down the tunnels that lead to her grave. So I don’t think eating the odd bogey matters.’

‘What’s your biggest secret?’ Ffiona asked.

‘I don’t think I’ve got one,’ said Betty, ‘except that I’m not very good at magic, but everyone knows that so it’s not really a secret.’

‘Haven’t you got a hankyblanky?’

‘I used to have a dead lizard when I was a baby,’ said Betty. ‘I used to go to sleep with his tail in my mouth, but when I got my first teeth I ate it in my sleep one night.’

‘Is that a secret?’ Ffiona asked, thinking that
if she had sucked a dead lizard’s tail she probably wouldn’t want anyone to know about it.

‘Oh no, we all had one when we were babies.’

‘I’ve got another secret,’ said Ffiona. ‘I’m scared of going to school on Monday.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Betty. ‘I’ll look after you.’

Monday morning, 8.25 am – first day of term

Betty kissed her parents goodbye, picked up her school bag and said good morning to the front gate as it opened for her. She turned left down Acacia Avenue on her way to school. As she did so, Ffiona, who had been waiting at her own front gate, came running after her.

‘M-m-morning, Betty,’ said Ffiona.

Ffiona only stuttered when she was nervous. Her new school uniform didn’t help. Most of the other kids had cool shoes, but Ffiona’s looked like her granny might have worn them. Most of the
other kids had their hair just hanging down. Some even had it brushed and combed. Ffiona’s hair was in two plaits that were so tidy they looked like plastic, with bright red ribbons on each one. And Ffiona’s skirt was the only one in the whole school that came down over the top of her really tidy and totally wrinkle-free grey socks.
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‘Come on,’ Betty reassured her. ‘I told you there’s nothing to worry about.’

As they turned the corner into Juniper Street, four other girls crossed the road and came up behind them. They had learnt long ago to avoid Betty, but since they had never seen her with anyone else, they didn’t recognise her at first.

These four girls were Bridie McTort, the school’s number one bully, and her cronies. Bridie came from a long line of bullies dating back to the time of her great-grandmother, who liked pulling the wings off butterflies and eating them. As
she
got
bigger, Great-grandmother McTort would pull the wings off bigger things and, by the time she was fifteen, she was chasing swans around the public parks. When she started trying to pull the wings off children, she was arrested and transported to a small remote island, where she pulled the wings off everything – including a small aeroplane, which was pretty stupid as that was the only way of getting off the island. Eventually she was sent back to where she had come from by parcel post. Bridie McTort has a lot of nightmares.

‘Oh, look at the little baby with her pretty hair ribbons,’ said Bridie, the lumpy one in the middle.
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‘And look at her little blonde fr–’

She suddenly realised who the little blonde friend was and stopped talking, but it was too late. Betty stopped and turned to face them. The four bullies stepped backwards.

‘Stop!’ Betty commanded and their legs froze.

‘Well, well, look who’s come to greet us on our way to school,’ she continued. ‘Beautiful Bridie and her three lovely, lovely friends.’

‘We’re not scared of you,’ said Bridie. ‘We know it wasn’t you that gave us spots.’

‘Really?’ said Betty.

‘Yeah. It’s like, food and stuff that gives you spots, not people,’ said Bridie. ‘Not even if they’re, like, witches, which you’re not because there ain’t no such thing.’

‘Yeah, we’re, like, totally not scared of you,’ said the other three.

‘Well, that just goes to show, and there’s no nice way to say this, just how completely stupid you are,’ said Betty, ‘because you should be. Look.’

And she gave them each fifteen more big painful spots.

‘You’re a witch, you are,’ said Bridie.

‘I thought you said there’s no such thing?’

‘Yeah well, you’re, like, totally, I mean, yeah, whatever,’ said Bridie.

‘Now listen to me, you morons, and make
sure you tell all your friends, if you have any. Just tell them that this is Ffiona and she is my friend and if she gets the slightest bit of bother from any of you, I will make you wish you had never been born,’ said Betty. ‘Understand?’

The four girls mumbled and looked at their feet.

‘I said, understand?’

More mumbling.

Betty clicked her fingers and five large magpies landed on a rooftop next to them. Betty pointed up at the birds and said, ‘Do you want my bird friends to come and pull your hair out?’

‘As if,’ said Bridie.

‘Yeah, like, whatever,’ said the other three.

Betty crooked her little finger and beckoned to the magpies, who all swooped down and began to attack the four bullies. They were under strict instructions not to do anything too dreadful like pecking the girls’ eyes out, just to pull their hair and steal their iPod headphones and burst their pimples. Betty held up her arms and the magpies
flew over and landed on the fence next to her. She tickled the backs of their heads and gave each one a piece of cheese.

‘W-w-wow,’ said Ffiona, who had been trying to hide behind Betty and was clenching her hands together really tightly.

The girls ran away across the street and shouted, ‘We’ll totally get you.’

‘Don’t you ever learn?’ said Betty.

‘And we’ll, like, get your nerdy friend too, innit?’

Betty walked across to the four girls and stood in front of them.

‘Look, I’ve told you, if the tiniest, weeniest bad thing happens to Ffiona,’ Betty warned them, ‘you will regret it big time.’

Bridie turned her back on Betty and bent over.

‘Like, talk to the bum, because the ears ain’t listening,’ she said.

‘OK, I did warn you,’ said Betty. ‘And now here’s a bum that’s much bigger
than yours.’

She held up her left hand and clicked her fingers. An enormous elephant appeared right behind the girls – an enormous elephant that had eaten two hundred kilos of cheap baked beans and hadn’t been to the toilet for seven days.

It went to the toilet then vanished.

There was a lot of losing balance and falling over mixed up with a lot of swearing as the four bullies tried to get back on their feet. By the time they managed to crawl away, every single square centimetre of their skin and clothes was covered in elephant poo.

Ffiona couldn’t believe her eyes. A big grin spread across her face. It was the sort of grin you get when something incredible happens that you think you might get you into huge trouble, but you still can’t stop being excited.

‘We know where you live,’ the biggest girl cried as the four bullies went home to change. ‘We’ll get you.’

‘In your dreams,’ laughed Betty.

Bridie wanted to say, ‘I’m telling my mum on you,’ but she knew hard girls don’t say that sort of thing – and besides, if she had told her mum she would have just got a clip round the ear.

You may well be wondering how Betty managed to do all this stuff to the bullies seeing as how most of her magic always went wrong, and so
it had. All Betty had been planning was for a small black cloud to appear above the bullies’ heads and soak them to the skin, with possibly a bit of hail and the odd lightning flash. But Betty was one of those people who often end up better when they make a mistake than when they get things right. The elephant was fifty times better than a bit of rain.

When word got round school about what the elephant had done to the bullies, Betty became a hero. Even the teachers smiled to themselves. Everyone knew that Betty was a witch and that her family were very weird, so they had always kept their distance – especially after the rumours about what she might have done to Dickie Dent. But now everyone wanted to be her friend, if only to make sure the elephant didn’t pay
them
a visit. And because Ffiona was Betty’s best friend, she was accepted by everyone without all the usual toilet flushing, lunch stealing and hair pulling that usually happened to new girls who looked like Ffiona. Betty was totally cool and that made Ffiona cool too, even if she
did look like she enjoyed embroidery and stamp collecting.
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Of course, everyone expected Bridie to try to get revenge on Betty because that’s what bullies do, but they also knew that Betty would always win.

‘I mean, what can Bridie do?’ one of Betty’s classmates said to her. ‘If she tries to get you into trouble no one will believe her. I mean, who’s going to believe an elephant just appeared from nowhere?’

If you look inside most bullies you will find a mean little coward. Some people will tell you it’s not their fault that some children are bullies. They might get bullied at home by their older brothers or their parents. Well, like Bridie says: ‘Talk to the bum because the ears ain’t listening.’ Just because
bullies are miserable at home, it doesn’t mean they can bully other kids at school.

Bridie
was
bullied at home. She had three brothers who were horrible to her because their dad hit them, and a mother who spent all day at home huddled over a computer trying to steal people’s secret passwords and money.
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But it didn’t make it any better for all the kids whose lives Bridie made a misery. If she had had a tiny bit of brain in her head, she would have made friends with Betty and then Betty could have sorted her family out for her.

This is Bridie’s brain magnified 3 million times

But she didn’t have any brain. All she had was mean nasty thoughts and all she wanted was revenge. She stayed off school for three days and had to have sixteen baths and a lot of scrubbing before the smell of the elephant finally went. By then her skin and her temper were both red raw and all she wanted to do was kill Betty.

She may have been seriously dumb, but she knew that she would never be able to get the better of Betty. That nerdy new girl, Ffiona, would be a different story, though.

Bridie and her gang made their plans. They went to the hardware store and, while one of the girls fell on the floor pretending to have a fit, Bridie stole six padlocks and some chains.

‘No one, like, rags me off and, like, gets away with it,’ she said.

‘Yeah, like totally whatever, innit?’ said her three slaves, though two of them were starting to have second thoughts because, although they would never admit it, they were pretty scared of Betty. Also, after fifteen showers, some of them
with a really hard scrubbing brush, they could still smell elephant poo.

Not only did most of Sunnyview School think Betty was cool, but so did Mrs Hulbert, though cool was not a word she ever used except when she was describing the weather. Mrs Hulbert thought Betty was lovely because when the two girls came home from school that day, Mrs Hulbert thought she had never seen Ffiona so happy. She even got out the chocolate biscuits, which were only for very special occasions like Christmas and birthdays.