Survivor (7 page)
Authors: Colin Thompson
‘Oh, er, but, but, but…’ said the headmaster.
‘Impersonating an outboard motor will not help you at all,’ Betty continued. ‘And quite frankly I am disgusted. I would like you to ponder on what life would be like as the headmaster at the school on St Kilda in the Outer-Outer-Hebrides, a place where the sun seldom shines and all there is to eat are puffins and seaweed.’
‘I, umm…’
‘Never mind that. Do I make myself clear?’
Silence.
‘I can’t hear you,’ said Betty.
‘Yes, Mrs Hulbert,’ said the headmaster. ‘Is your brother really…?’
‘I do hope you’re not suggesting I might be telling lies,’ said Betty. ‘If that was the case I imagine St Kilda might be too good for you. I’m sure my
brother could arrange a cultural exchange with one of the remand schools in Transylvania Waters.’
‘No, no, of course not, Mrs Hulbert,’ said the headmaster. ‘I’ll deal with the McTort girls straight away.’
‘My daughter will be back at school tomorrow,’ said Betty. ‘Think yourself lucky I don’t remove her for good. Next time you feel like bullying her, just remember who her uncle is.’
‘But I…’
‘And I’ll thank you not to phone me again. You have nothing to say that I want to hear.’
The headmaster began to say that he hadn’t phoned in the first place, but Betty had hung up.
‘Wow,’ said Ffiona, ‘that was brilliant, Betty. Do you think it will work?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Betty.
And it had. The headmaster sent for Bridie and told her she had to tell him the truth.
‘I never done nothing. It was that witch girl,’ said Bridie.
‘Which girl?’ said the headmaster.
‘No, yeah, but no,
witch
girl, stupid, not which girl,’ said Bridie.
‘Oh, for goodness sake, child, there’s no such thing as witches. Just tell me the truth.’
‘Yeah, but I, like, come from a broken home,’ said Bridie.
‘I know that,’ said the headmaster, ‘but it was you who broke it.’
‘So?’
This went on for about half an hour with the headmaster getting nowhere. What he didn’t realise was that for Bridie to tell the truth would have been a whole new experience for her and her brain wasn’t big enough to fit any new things into. Also, the headmaster kept using words like ‘deceitfulness’ and ‘subversive’, which had way too many letters in them for Bridie to have been able to understand them.
The headmaster had never been to Transylvania Waters or even seen a photo,
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but he
had heard stories of how an incredibly handsome young student teacher, who may even have been a minor prince, was once sent there and came back six months later as an eighty-five year old Belgian geography teacher with warts.
After an hour of trying to get the truth out of Bridie and failing, he put his head in his hands and said, ‘Well, I’m chucking you out of school anyway, and your sister goes too.’
‘Cool,’ said Bridie defiantly. As she left the room she added, ‘Well, yeah, I did do what you said with the kidnap thing and, like, my mum’s a gypsy and I’ll get her to put a curse on you.’
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever,’ said the headmaster.
Betty and Ffiona turned up for school the next day and everyone pretended nothing had happened. Not one single teacher said a single word about the incident at the next staff meeting because everyone realised that life was a lot more peaceful without the McTort girls there. Without Bridie’s influence the other bully girls kept their heads down and didn’t dare bother anyone in case they got thrown
out too. One of them even learned to write her own name in crayon in joined-up writing.
‘Yeah, like, the kidnap didn’t go totally to plan, but we still, like, got a result,’ said Bridie to her two friends when they met at the mall after school, as she used her Tartytat Scarlet Flash lipstick to write something unrepeatable on the window of the ‘Happy Babies’ nursery shop.
‘Oh yeah?’ said friend one. ‘How was that then?’
‘I don’t have to go to school no more,’ said Bridie. ‘That is well cool.’
‘Won’t your mum and dad, like, go spazz and totally freak out?’ said friend two.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Bridie. ‘Like I’m going to tell them, as if.’
‘But what about school?’
‘Who needs it?’ said Bridie. ‘Ain’t nothing what they can learn me anyway.’
‘What, you mean, like, you’re not going to tell them and you’ll just pretend you’re going to school?’ said friend two.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Bridie. ‘And I’ll come down here every day. Brilliant. Anyway, my dad’s not there and my mum never wakes up until
Oprah
starts so I can, like, stay in the house anyway until, like, um, err, what’s that thing what comes after two?’
‘Three.’
‘Yeah, I can like stay in the house until three o’clock and my mum wouldn’t know.’
‘We didn’t get the witch girl, though,’ said friend one.
‘Yeah, well, I decided to let her off. She’s well scared and won’t bother me again,’ said Bridie.
‘Yeah, but listen,’ said friend two, ‘what about the sack I took to school? My dad only got it last week. He’ll go totally spazz if I don’t take it back.’
‘Well, just tell him you brought it to school for, like, show and tell, and that nerdy girl stole it.’
‘Cool,’ said friend two. ‘Anyway, I think my dad’s got loads of other sacks. He’s always coming in and telling my mum he’s got another one.’
‘Whatever.’
So because of Betty’s magic Mr and Mrs Hulbert never found out about the trouble at school, which was a good thing because they probably would have moved house again and they didn’t want to.
Mrs Hulbert was over the moon that Ffiona had her first best friend, but she also thought that maybe Mordonna could become
her
first best friend. At that point she hadn’t met Nerlin, but she wondered if maybe he might become Mr Hulbert’s first ever best friend too.
And maybe
, she thought,
Betty has a little brother who could be Claude’s friend.
She decided to ask the whole Flood family over for afternoon tea, but first she had to go to the library and get out a book to find out exactly what afternoon teas were. She had heard about them, but had never had one or been to one or even seen one on television, because the Hulberts didn’t have a television, though she had heard a play on the radio once where everyone had had afternoon tea and it had sounded quite nice with lots of tinkling tea cups and cucumber sandwiches.
Mrs Hulbert had bought her first cucumber earlier that week. She had always thought they were a bit too exotic for the likes of her family and buying it had made her feel quite daring. She hadn’t actually eaten any of it or told Mr Hulbert about it, but every morning she looked at it sitting in the fridge and felt her life was about to get a lot more exciting.
‘There’s probably a magazine about them,’ Mr Hulbert suggested. ‘Something like
Afternoon Teas Weekly
.’
But before she could get herself down to the
newsagents or the library, Mordonna came over to the Hulberts’ house and invited them over for a barbie the next Sunday.
‘Well, that’s sorted that out, then,’ Mr Hulbert said. ‘We’ll find out all about afternoon tea and then we’ll know exactly what to do when we ask them back.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Hulbert. ‘But I don’t understand about the barbie. Does she mean Ffiona is supposed to take her doll?’
‘I suppose we’d better have cucumber sandwiches,’ said Mordonna. ‘They’d be the sort of thing refined people like the Hulberts would expect.’
‘The Hulberts aren’t posh, Mum,’ said Betty. ‘They’re just ordinary people like us.’
‘Sweetheart, how many times do I have to remind you?’ said Mordonna. ‘Nobody is like us.’
‘No, I know, Mum,’ said Betty. ‘What I mean is, they’re not stuck up at all. They’re nice, normal people.’
‘Yes, darling, and nice, normal people eat cucumber sandwiches for afternoon tea,’ said Mordonna. ‘I’ve seen it on the Lifestyle Channel. They have white pepper and the crusts cut off.’
‘So no bat kebabs or rat rissoles then,’ said Nerlin, who was sitting at the kitchen table sharpening his skewers.
‘I don’t think so, but you’d better check in the book, darling.’
The book which Mordonna was referring to was probably the most useful book a wizard or witch can have when they are trying to live as unobtrusively as possible in the so-called ‘normal’ human world.
The first edition was written in 1683 by one of Nerlin’s relatives and was called
Grandma Floode’s Book of Ye Handy Hintes.
Since then the ‘e’s and ‘ye’ have been dropped so the current edition of the book is called
Granny Flood’s Book of Handy Hints.
There have been suggestions that it should be called something cooler and more modern like
Humans for Dummies,
but most readers agree the title it has is nice and comforting, which is exactly what wizards and witches need when trying to deal with the weird and frightening world of humans.
The book has tons of information on things that wizards find perfectly OK that simply freak humans out. For example, humans get really distressed if they buy a sandwich, take a big bite and then find a long black hair in it. They even get upset if it turns out to be one of their own hairs. But wizards, on the other hand, quite often will add hairs to their meals to enhance the eating experience. In wizardy countries like
Transylvania Waters you can buy packets of hairs specially for putting in food, and there is quite an industry surrounding the whole thing, including a monthly magazine called
What Hair,
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hair-flavoured crisps and a
Hair of the Month Club.
The hair generally agreed to be the very best for food enhancement is from the almost extinct Pocket Vampire Bat. Only the whiskers from its left ear are used and as each bat only has seven whiskers in its left ear,
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they are staggeringly expensive. It is said that to eat something with one of these hairs in it is like dying and being carried up to heaven by an angel made entirely of milk chocolate who sings to you in a voice sweeter than condensed milk. Some claim the nasal hairs from the legendary Himalayan Yeti are even better, though most people don’t believe yetis exist, and no one
actually knows anyone who had eaten one of these hairs, but lots of people know someone who claims they know someone who knows someone who had a friend who…
The part of the book Mordonna was referring to was the Equivalents section, where you look up the wizard food and it gives you the human equivalent.
‘Bat kebabs, bat kebabs,’ said Nerlin, flicking through the pages. ‘Amazing. It says cucumber sandwiches with white pepper and the crusts cut off.’
‘See, I told you,’ said Mordonna. ‘What about the rat rissoles? What’s the human equivalent of them?’
‘Ratatouille.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes,’ said Nerlin, ‘and it sounds dreadful. It’s got absolutely no rat in it at all, just those horrible vegetable things.’
‘Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,’ said Mordonna, ‘humans are weird.’
‘These cucumber sandwiches?’ said Betty. ‘Won’t they taste odd cooked on the barbie?’
‘Not according to the book,’ said Nerlin. ‘That’s what you do, spray them with oil, cook them on the barbie and then cover them with tomato sauce.’
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‘Right. Morbid, you go down to the petrol station and get a litre of oil,’ said Mordonna. ‘And Betty, see if you can find if we’ve got the human sort of tomato sauce stuff, not the one with blood in that your granny likes.’
After reading the book some more, Mordonna made cucumber sandwiches, which she had to throw away after Betty said she didn’t think the Hulberts would enjoy sandwiches cut out in the shape of human skulls. She then made a second
batch and cut them into squares, which everyone agreed was nowhere near as attractive. Nerlin put on a face mask and some rubber gloves and cut up a whole lot of vegetables, which Betty cooked into ratatouille. She had to do this blindfolded to resist the almost uncontrollable desire to add bits of rat.
‘But a few dried tails would make the whole thing taste so much better,’ she kept saying, and everyone agreed.
‘I know, I know,’ Mordonna said. ‘Nevertheless, we won’t put them in.’
‘Well, what about a few hairs?’ Betty suggested. ‘Just mild ones like rabbit.’
‘No.’
The twins were beside themselves – which meant there were four of them – at the thought of Ffiona being at their house for a whole afternoon. They made a huge tray of cakes in all sorts of strange shapes and colours, some of which were very rude – especially the ones that looked exactly like human
. Satanella spent all of Saturday practising not biting anyone, while Merlinmary charged up the garden lights. Even Valla, who was at work at the Blood Bank all day, made some bright red decorations to hang in the trees. They looked remarkably like red blood corpuscles, but Mordonna guessed that the Hulberts probably didn’t know what blood cells looked like so she didn’t make him change them.
‘If they ask, we’ll say they are the national emblem of Transylvania Waters,’ she said.
‘They are,’ said Valla.
The only thing they still needed was a barbecue, so Nerlin and Winchflat went down to one of the cellars and made one. Considering neither of them actually knew what a barbecue looked like, this was quite an achievement, but hey, wizards can do that sort of stuff.
