Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  “I was so sure.” Jem sighed.

  “And now we are so doomed,” said Lucy.

  “At least we’ve got rid of Tiny Jack,” pointed out Jem.

  As the van sank deeper and deeper into the ocean, they peered into the gloom.

  “Do you notice anything unusual about these bubbles?” Jem asked.

  Chitty’s windscreen was still covered in bubbles.

  “The bubbles are not going upward — they’re going backward. We are travelling forward. We’re not sinking; we’re sailing. Underwater.”

  Lucy looked out the window. On either side of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — just where the wings had been — two great tanks of air had appeared. At the back, out of one of the exhausts, a large propeller was slowly, powerfully churning the water, sending the van forward.

  Jem looked at Lucy. “So,” he said, “Chitty doesn’t just fly. She’s also a submarine.”

  The water at this depth was utterly dark, like an ocean-size version of Lucy’s bedroom. Every now and then, tiny glowing fish flickered past — like traffic on a faraway nighttime motorway. Sometimes strange luminous plants drifted up to the split windscreen and hung there, like weird Christmas lights.

  Then up ahead they saw a big single light moving quickly toward them. “It looks like the headlight of an underwater motorbike,” said Jem.

  “There’s no such thing as a submarine motorbike,” said Lucy.

  “There’s no such thing as an underwater camper van,” said Jem, “but here we are driving in one. For all we know, we’re about to hit a massive submarine traffic jam.”

  They weren’t. Because it wasn’t a headlight. It was an eye. Huge, unblinking, unmistakably an eye.

  “That can’t be real,” said Jem.

  “Yes, it can,” said Lucy. “It is. It’s the biggest eye in the world, the eye of a colossal squid. It’s like a giant squid but much bigger and scarier. It’s got hooks as well as suckers on its tentacles. It’s unusual to find one this far north. It must be our unlucky day. Anyway, that’s its eye. It looks like it’s seen us. Like I said, unlucky.”

  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang shuddered and shook as though she was afraid. But it wasn’t fear. It was tentacles. The tentacles of the colossal squid can be forty feet long (which is why, even though its terrible eye was still a long way off, its vicious, hooked tentacles were already entwined around Chitty’s front axle and bumper). The colossal squid overcomes its enemies by squirting gallons of black ink at them (which is why Lucy and Jem and Little Harry felt as though darkest night had suddenly fallen). It attacks its prey with its beak (which is shaped like a parrot’s but the size of a shovel).

  The squid whacked Chitty’s side with one huge, suckered tentacle and then another. Its hooks dragged them down into the deep. Even blinded by ink, the children knew they were going downward. The air in the van turned really cold, and not just cold but strangely heavy and dense, as though something was squeezing it. Chitty shuddered as her bodywork was crushed and crumpled by the sheer weight of the water.

  “Go away!” shouted Little Harry, and he thumped Chitty’s horn.

  “Don’t do that!” said Lucy. “We need to think.”

  Jem reached past her and thumped the horn again.

  “I said, don’t!” yelled Lucy.

  Jem tooted the horn again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Didn’t you notice? Watch. I mean, listen. I mean, feel.” He pressed the horn once more. Longer. Harder. Keeping his hand on it. There. Lucy could feel it, too. A shiver seemed to run through the whole of Chitty, a shiver that came from the tentacles.

  “The sound goes right down the squid’s tentacles,” said Jem. “It tickles. The giant squid is ticklish!”

  He pounded on the horn again. Again and again. Every time, the squid shook and shivered until it just couldn’t take it anymore. Its tentacles curled up as though it was hugging itself. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang broke free.

  They rose slowly through the water, passing from the dark of the depths into the golden-green shallows, where the coral grows and the colourful fish graze, and into the bright water near the surface, where a shoal of quick silver fish swarmed around Chitty as though she might be something to eat. When she finally broke the surface, the fish leaped from the water and flew over her as if waving good-bye. Lucy and Jem and Little Harry applauded in pure delight.

  Suddenly a face appeared at the driver’s window. For a terrifying moment, they thought it was Tiny Jack or Nanny.

  It was a man in a long green boat waving a big oar and using it to splash them, all the time shouting and waving his fist.

  Lucy wound her window down so that she could hear him and translated. “He’s speaking Malagasy,” she said. “So I was right when I said we were heading to Madagascar. Malagasy’s an interesting language. It’s not related to any of the other languages in Africa, but it has a lot in common with languages from Borneo and the Philippines.”

  “So you speak it, then?”

  “No. But he probably speaks French, anyway. Most people in Madagascar do. Excusez-moi, parlez-vous français?”

  The fisherman did speak French. He spoke a lot of it. Very quickly and loudly while waving his fist in the air.

  “He’s a fisherman,” said Lucy, “who thought he’d caught something huge. Now he’s disappointed that he’d just snagged his line on Chitty’s bumper. Better not mention that he did have a colossal squid but that you tickled it away. He’s really, really cross.”

  The man had now dropped his oar into his boat and was clambering across onto Chitty, climbing in through the window.

  “Apparently he gets seasick, and now he wants a lift home. I think it’s the least we can do.”

  The man curled up on the backseat, occasionally groaning.

  “Isn’t being a fisherman a strange job for someone who gets seasick?” said Jem.

  “I don’t think he’s in the mood to discuss his career choices,” said Lucy. “His name is Fury, and I think he earned it.”

  Soon trees appeared on the horizon, and there were birds in the air that were not gulls. Then the beach appeared — a white beach in a narrow bay, with thickly wooded cliffs rising steeply behind it. Beyond that, delicate blue mountains. A cluster of square huts with pointy roofs was hidden among the trees. Although the huts were simple — small and made of tin and branches — each one had a satellite dish on the roof and a plasma-screen TV on the porch. At one end of the beach was a much bigger hut that seemed to be a jigsaw of scrap. A man with a beard sat sunning himself under a sign that read: “Professor Tuk-Tuk’s Miraculous Seaside Maritime Repair.”

  “Exactly as I predicted,” said Lucy. “We’ve hit the top of Madagascar. That mountain must be Maromokotro, the highest on the island.”

  As Chitty ploughed through the surf and up onto the sand, dragging the green boat behind her, three children — a little boy, his big brother, and a teenage girl — came running up to greet Mr. Fury. He got out of the van and swung the toddler up in the air. He tickled him and put him on his shoulders, then he pointed to Chitty and snarled. Then his children looked at Chitty, and they snarled, too. Particularly the girl. She strode across, kicking up sand as she came. She pushed back her black hair and stared at Lucy with her black eyes, which were painted with very, very black eyeliner. “My dad,” she said in perfect English, “says you ruined his chances of catching a colossal squid today, and now all he has to show for a day at sea is this piece of junk.”

  “We’re sorry,” said Jem. “And Chitty’s not a piece of junk.”

  “Tsy ratsy kosa zany,” repeated Lucy, in perfect Malagasy.

  “That wasn’t French,” said Jem.

  “No, that was Malagasy.”

  “You don’t speak Malagasy.”

  “I do now. Not well. Just enough to get by.”

  Mr. Fury’s teenage daughter stared at Lucy. “You speak Malagasy?”

  Lucy stared back at the girl. “So? You speak English.”

/>   “I speak a lot of languages.” The girl looked Lucy in the eye.

  “For instance? Satria maninona?” said Lucy in perfect Malagasy.

  “French, German, Mandarin Chinese . . .” said the fierce girl.

  “Cantonese, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, a bit of Japanese . . .” challenged Lucy.

  “Japanese? Really? What are the verbs like?”

  “Not as complicated as they look.”

  “Cool,” said the girl, opening the door of the van. “Come and teach me the proper use of the subjunctive, and maybe I’ll let you live.”

  When she had finished speaking, the girl’s father said to her, “Where did you learn to speak English?”

  “In my bedroom. What do you think I’m doing in there all day? My eyeliner?”

  “You do always have perfect eyeliner.”

  “I study English,” his daughter replied, “and French, German, and Mandarin Chinese.”

  “What was your dad saying?” Lucy asked as she strolled up the beach with the girl.

  “Nothing much. He underestimates me.”

  “Mine, too,” said Lucy.

  Little Harry toddled up the beach after them. Jem sat in the driver’s seat, watching the others with a stab of loneliness.

  The Tooting family was broken into pieces, and the pieces were scattered just like the pieces of Chitty had been. The difference was that Chitty knew how to put herself back together, but Jem didn’t know what to do.

  The boy came over with a football and held it up as if to say, Want to play? but Jem shook his head, then called Lucy out of the window. “Let’s get out of here! We need to find Mum and Dad.” He got out of the van and turned the crank handle impatiently. Once again Chitty wouldn’t start.

  “Come on,” growled Jem.

  “Told you it was junk!” shouted the fierce girl. Jem ignored her and tried again. Nothing happened. The girl called out something Jem didn’t understand.

  “She says you’ll flood the engine,” shouted Lucy. “Her name is Flora, and she painted her bedroom black just like mine. Can you believe that?”

  Jem didn’t want to know. He just wanted his parents back. He dropped the crank on the sand and prowled away up the beach.

  Lucy and Flora talked using words and phrases from every language they could think of. It was like a game of verbal snap. Flora told Lucy how in the old days you could catch fish and dig up turtle eggs just by rolling up your trousers, but now that the sea was getting dirtier, fishing wasn’t what it used to be. People had to sail farther and farther from shore to catch the fish. Dad hated his job because he always got seasick and never caught anything. He really wanted to be in catering, but as everyone cooked for themselves, there was no call for that line of work.

  The only man on the island who was really happy, she said, was Professor Tuk-Tuk. His philosophy was “There’s no such thing as rubbish.” Whenever anything was washed up on the beach, he would take it apart and make it into something new. Nearly all the boats in the bay were made from bits of washed-up cars and white goods. “That’s why they all have such strange names,” said Flora. “Like Allegro and Hoover and Capri. I like those names. But our boat has an unpronounceable name. Everyone says it’s unlucky.”

  “But you must be able to pronounce the name,” said Lucy. “You can pronounce anything.”

  “Of course I can,” said Flora. “It’s —”

  “LUCY! COME QUICK! COME AND LOOK AT THIS!”

  It was Jem. While he’d strolled up the beach, Mr. Fury and his son had started walking around Chitty, looking under her sills and even opening her bonnet, trying to figure out what was wrong with her. It reminded Jem so much of himself and his own dad that he couldn’t bear to watch, so instead he looked at Mr. Fury’s big green strangely shaped boat. Its body was like a huge metal canoe, but with four semicircular pieces missing — as though someone had taken a bite out of each corner. In the back were two plump couches with red leather upholstery. There was a big old steering wheel. The boat’s name was written in curly steel letters along the front of the prow. It was written upside down. Jem had to turn his head sideways to read it.

  Jem was still spelling it out for himself when Lucy started running toward him. He looked up in excitement and called to her, “Lucy! Here! The name . . . !”

  The name was, of course, Zborowski.

  Jem looked back down the beach to where Mr. Fury and his son were still inspecting Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and he knew at once that there was nothing wrong with her engine. Of course there wasn’t. It worked eight fathoms under the sea and in the blistering heat of the desert. It wouldn’t work here because Chitty didn’t want it to. Chitty was going nowhere until she got her body back.

  Flora thought Jem was just admiring the boat. “Professor Tuk-Tuk made it,” she said, “from parts of cars and trucks that were washed up on the beach.”

  “I know,” said Jem. “The hull is part of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Lucy, look — look at it upside down. It’s the bodywork of a car — a car with a massive engine. This is Chitty’s original body.”

  Lucy bent over and put her head between her knees. “Oh, yes!” she said. “It’s obvious now. Wasn’t she lovely? Kind of retro. . . .”

  “Wait,” said Flora. “Are you saying you think our boat is yours? We need our boat!”

  “Yes, Jem, how would they make a living without their boat? It would be a tragedy,” said Lucy.

  “I love a tragedy,” said Flora. “Except when it happens to me. You can’t have the boat.”

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has flown us all over the world, looking for parts of herself. She’s crossed seas and deserts and escaped from Tiny Jack and his nanny. She won’t leave until she gets her body back. . . .”

  “So we’ll be lost forever on a beautiful island, with some nice people and excellent seafood.” Lucy shrugged. “Could be worse.” But the moment she said that, she knew she didn’t mean it.

  “All Chitty wants,” said Jem, “is to be herself again.”

  In the end, the solution was pancakes.

  Mr. Fury wanted a job in catering, but he had nothing and nowhere to cook.

  Jem had an idea. “When we were in Cairo,” he said, “people thought Chitty was a van selling pancakes. They queued for miles as soon as they smelled them cooking. I can show you how. You give us your boat, and we give you the van. The perfect pancake van.”

  “A van that sells pancakes?” said Mr. Fury. “That might just work.”

  “Camper Van Pancakes,” said Baby Fury.

  “Camper Van Pancakes.” Mr. Fury rolled the words around in his mouth as if he was trying to taste them. “The word today,” he said, “is that’s the best idea I’ve heard in years.”

  “That’s actually eight words,” said Jem, thinking sadly of Dad.

  “In fact,” said Lucy, “in Malagasy ‘the best idea I’ve heard in years’— hevitra tena faran’ny tsara reko hatramin’izay — is actually six words — though it sounds like more.” Then she added, “I miss Dad, too.”

  If you’ve ever been to Madagascar, you’ll know that Jem’s idea worked a treat. You can see Camper Van Pancakes vans in every town along the coast, and even in the central highlands, selling pancakes just like Mr. Tooting used to make.

  But what about the rest of the plan?

  When Professor Fred Tuk-Tuk saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s bulging curly exhausts and barn-door radiator, he stroked his beard and tilted his head. “This,” he said, pointing at Chitty, “belongs with this,” and he pointed to the Furys’ boat. “Please bring them both into Professor Tuk-Tuk’s Miraculous Seaside Maritime Repair.”

  They all helped wheel the camper van into Professor Tuk-Tuk’s workshop. Then Professor Fred Tuk-Tuk closed the doors. For two days, everyone along the beach could hear the sounds of hammering, soldering, welding, and pummeling. At the end of two days, the professor opened the door a little and called to the children to come and help him polish the brasswork and smarten up the pa
intwork. For a whole day, they polished and painted in there, and everyone else sat on the sand, wondering when it would all end.

  The doors of the garage finally opened, and into the sun rolled Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s radiator — cleaned and polished and tall like a set of park gates. The minute they saw this, people started cheering. The cheering got louder when the front wheels rolled into view — their spokes flashing silver. And louder again as the wheels were followed by the bonnet — long and gleaming and majestic. When they saw the shining brass of her headlights, the flash of her mirrors, the snarling mouth of the big boa-constrictor horn, and the rich red glow of her upholstery, the villagers went completely crazy. Professor Tuk-Tuk drove her out into the sunshine. Then she stopped.

  The professor fiddled with the choke and gunned the clutch, but Chitty was going nowhere.

  “Genius!” shouted Little Harry.

  “Shhh,” said Lucy.

  “Genius!” shouted Little Harry even louder, as Professor Tuk-Tuk bounced up and down in the driving seat muttering, “Come on, you stupid car.”

  Chitty is definitely not stupid, thought Jem. Neither is Little Harry. He followed his brother’s gaze. Little Harry was staring at the wall of Professor Tuk-Tuk’s garage. A wall that was made almost entirely of . . . of course . . . number plates. Chitty had no registration plate. There, in the midst of all the ordinary plates, with their blocky numbers and letters, were two very different from the rest — they were oval, and the letters, written in a fine, flowing old-fashioned script — spelled GEN 11. Jem ran over and took them down. Just at that moment, Chitty’s headlights glowed, as though she was pleased. Of course that might only have been the sunlight glinting on her brass.

  Jem smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Genius.” And he got the children into the car.

  There has simply never been such a luxuriously comfortable car. The leather of the seats was soft as silk, and the cushions were plump as pillows. The walnut of the dashboard, the brass and silver of her instruments, shone like summer. There were elegant little recesses in the door specially made for maps and spectacles and bottles of eau de cologne, even one for cigars. (As they didn’t have any cigars or bottles of eau de cologne, Professor Tuk-Tuk had popped the jelly-baby phones in there.) In the glove compartment were five pairs of leather gloves and a thick leather-bound book.