The Race Against Time

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  “It must be some sort of alarm,” said Jem.

  Within a few seconds, the door opened and in walked the Queen.

  “How absolutely lovely of you to call,” said Imogen, scooping up the last conscious snake and draping it round her neck.

  “Welcome to El Dorado,” said Eliza. “I see you have already met our pets.”

  “They tried to eat us,” said Mum.

  “You mustn’t be cross with them. They’re trained to eat visitors,” said Eliza.

  “Absolutely trained to. Trained them ourselves,” said Imogen.

  “We have to keep El Dorado a secret,” explained Eliza, “and snakes seemed much the best way to do it.”

  “That doesn’t work with us,” said Mum. “No snake alive could defeat my husband.”

  “Please,” said Dad, who was still trying to get his breath back. “You took our car. We need it back.”

  Imogen and Eliza looked shocked. “You can’t ask for a present back once you’ve given it. That’s the height of rudeness, isn’t it, Imogen?” said Eliza.

  “Height and depth of it,” said Imogen. “Don’t be so rude.”

  “I think you’ll find,” said Mum, “that the height of rudeness is trying to feed your guests to snakes.”

  “Anyway,” said Dad, “we didn’t give you the car as a present. You just took it.”

  “Well, now, there’s a reason for that, isn’t there, Imogen?”

  “There certainly is. When you came to us, we gave you all kinds of presents. Whatever you said you liked, we gave you.”

  “Which is only polite.”

  “If someone admires something, it’s only polite to give it to them.”

  “And we admired Chitty Chitty Bang Bang like billy-o.”

  “We admired her twice.”

  “But you never gave her to us.”

  “Not so much as her spare tyre.”

  “That was rude.”

  “That was unusually rude.”

  “But our great-grandmother always said, ‘When someone is rude, just ignore them.’ ”

  “So we ignored your rudeness.”

  “And we took Chitty. Simple.”

  “It was simple till you tried to feed us to anacondas.”

  “We are a bit unpredictable at times.”

  “Would you like a tour of El Dorado? We’re ever so proud of it.”

  “Ever so, ever so.”

  Everyone followed the unpredictable Queen out of the snake pit and into the streets of gold. Whenever they passed a house, windows would open and people would lean out and wave to the Queen. Or they would come running out of their front doors to tell them news. Or share problems. A couple of times, the Queen had to stop to examine a door that wouldn’t shut properly or a dripping tap. Dad had brought Chitty’s toolbox, so he was happy to help.

  In the middle of the town square, mounted on a pedestal of gold, was a diamond as big as your head.

  “What’s that?” asked Red.

  “That,” said Imogen, “is a diamond as big as your head.”

  “We call it,” said Eliza, “the Diamond As Big As Your Head. In the evening we come down here and watch the changing reflections of the sunset play in the depths of the diamond’s heart.”

  “It’s like a very early form of television,” said Lucy. “A very early, unbelievably expensive, and slightly abstract form of television.”

  “What’s television?” asked Red.

  The square led to a platform that jutted right out over the waterfall. From here they could see the whole rain forest and the great Orinoco River winding through it, as clearly as if it had been drawn on a map.

  “This is where we were standing,” said Imogen, “when we first saw Chitty heading upriver toward us.”

  “I had to dash off,” said Eliza, “and get everyone to go back down to the village made of wood so we could pretend that we all lived there.”

  “Why?”

  “People are always looking for El Dorado, City of Gold. If they find a perfectly nice city of wood where the City of Gold is supposed to be, it puts them off the scent.”

  “But it is so much stress.”

  “Such stress,” agreed Imogen. “That’s why you have to be two people to be Queen. Because El Dorado is two towns. One real and one pretend.”

  “But why?” asked Lucy. “A town made of gold should be one of the wonders of the world.”

  “If I had all this gold,” said Red, “I wouldn’t want anyone to see it. I’d keep it all to myself, too. Hats off to you, girls. You’re doing the right thing.”

  “It’s simple really,” said Imogen. “El Dorado — City of Gold — used to be spread out all along the riverbank. But, as you know, people here love to give presents and get presents. People gave us all kinds of things — fish, pots, pigs, boats . . .”

  “Those leaves that make your head feel funny when you chew them.”

  “They were fun. But all people wanted in return was gold. Everyone wanted gold.”

  “We didn’t mind giving them a bit of gold, of course, Eliza.”

  “No, of course not, but gold is so useful, you know, for plumbing and roofing. It’s easy to cut. It’s not too cold and best of all it doesn’t go rusty.”

  “We’d just got the town how we liked it . . .”

  “. . . when people started taking it away, bit by bit. Imagine.”

  “Imagine people coming round taking your roof. Or your downspout.”

  “But we hated to offend anyone by saying, ‘No, you can’t have our golden downspout.’ ”

  “Or our golden roof.”

  “So we moved the whole golden town up to the waterfall and pretended that all our gold had gone.”

  “It’s nice that no one is offended.”

  “But it’s a stress pretending to live in one place when you really live somewhere else.”

  “Double stress,” agreed Eliza.

  “Double stress multiplied by both of us,” said Imogen.

  “But now we’ve got Chitty. She will sort out all our problems.”

  “That’s what our great-grandmother promised us. ‘Chitty Chitty will come back,’ she said, ‘and solve all your problems.’ ”

  “And she never lied.”

  “Well, well, pip-pip, must go and rule,” said Imogen.

  “Pip-pip, rule-rule,” said Eliza. “A monarch’s work is never done.”

  From the golden platform, the Tootings looked out over the unending jungle.

  “What are we going to do?” said Jem.

  “Search the city until we find Chitty,” said Dad. “Then go straight back home, where no one tries to feed you to the snakes.”

  “We’re in a legendary city of gold,” said Mum. “The least we can do is take some photographs. Lucy . . .”

  Lucy took out her jelly-baby phone, then almost dropped it. Staring at her from the screen was Nanny.

  “Well, well, well.” Nanny smiled. “Look where you are! The legendary Lost City of Gold. You know what I think? I think the moment Tiny Jack gets his hands on Chitty, that will be the first place he’ll go. He just loves gold, bless his heart. He’ll go straight there, and he’ll bring every scrap home.”

  “Home?” said Dad.

  “That’s what we call Zborowski Terrace now. We just love it here. It’s so cosy!”

  Lucy hung up.

  “Don’t answer it anymore,” said Mum. “It upsets your father.”

  “I didn’t answer it then,” said Lucy. “Somehow she was there waiting for me when I picked it up.”

  “That was a good idea about taking the gold away,” said Red. “We could take a truckload and whoop it up in Manhattan. Then when it’s all gone, come back, get another truckload, and whoop it up again.”

  “Somehow I don’t think the Queen is going to let us get away with that,” said Lucy. “We have to do things their way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to give them presents. If we give them good-
enough presents, they just might give Chitty back.”

  “But we don’t have any presents,” said Mum.

  “We’re from the future,” said Jem. “We must have something that they would think was amazing. What about Little Harry’s remote-control dinosaur? I bet they’d think that was worth a Chitty.”

  “Brilliant idea!” said Dad.

  Little Harry knew straightaway what they were talking about. He clutched his little red backpack to his chest and said, “No, no, no.”

  “We’ll find you another one,” soothed Mum, “as soon as we get home. Two, in fact . . .” But when she got the backpack open, there was no dinosaur in there. “What happened? Did you leave it in Chitty? Did you lose it in New York?”

  Little Harry was crying. Mum cuddled him while the others tried to think of presents.

  “What about this sticky spider’s web stuff?” said Jem. “It’s so strong and thin at the same time.”

  “The rain forest is full of spiders,” said Lucy. “They could pick as much of that stuff as they liked off the trees.”

  “It breaks my heart to say this,” said Red, reaching into his pocket, “but do you think they’d sell it to us? I’ve got nearly ten dollars . . .”

  “Oh, Red,” said Mum, “that’s the sweetest thing I ever heard.” She kissed his cheek. He blushed. “But it won’t work. They don’t use money. They think it’s silly.”

  “Yeah, but they’re wrong. Money is the greatest. If we explained it to them . . .”

  “No,” said Dad, “that won’t work. What we need is a shop or an all-night garage. Somewhere we could buy a big box of chocolates.”

  “We’re in sixteenth-century Amazonia, Dad. There are no all-night garages,” said Lucy, “but you’ve given me an idea. Jem, where’s the logbook?”

  Lucy flicked quickly through the pages of the logbook, which Jem had handed to her, until she came to “Monsieur Bon Bon’s Secret Fooj Formula.”

  “I thought that was some kind of racing fuel,” said Jem, “but Mum said it was . . .”

  “Fudge,” said Lucy. “It’s a recipe for fudge. Follow me.”

  They followed her to the nearest house. A family was sitting around outside, playing a game with little glass balls.

  “Are they diamonds?” gasped Red. “Can I see?”

  Lucy said something to them in a language the others didn’t understand.

  “I thought you said that you didn’t speak El Doradoan,” said Dad.

  “That was this morning,” said Lucy. “I’ve had all day to learn.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them I liked their stove. Also their pots and pans. They said we could have them.”

  “What do you want their stove for? You can’t leave a family with no cooker.”

  “They can have it back in an hour.”

  The stove was in a courtyard, overhung with branches and blossom, around the back of the house. Lucy gathered the ingredients and pans she needed. The secret of Monsieur Bon Bon’s secret fudge recipe is

  This makes the fudge come out smooth and creamy instead of gritty and sugary. Lucy set to work.

  “Lucy?” gasped Mum. “Are you cooking?” Lucy had never cooked anything before in her life.

  “Think of it as an experiment in economics,” said Lucy, “which just happens to be edible.”

  “It won’t be edible if you let the pan bubble like that. It will be burned.”

  “I’m following the instructions.”

  “The instructions involve a certain amount of familiarity with the concept of not incinerating things.”

  The thick, black, tarry mixture in the bottom of the pan did look fairly unconvincing. Lucy started again. This time she read out the instructions and measured the quantities while Mum stirred and mixed and blended. Soon the pan was bubbling again, and soon after that faces began to appear, peeping over the courtyard wall. All over El Dorado people dropped what they were doing and drifted toward the smell. It was as if their brains had allowed their noses to take control of their bodies.

  Dad opened the gate so that people could come in and see the fudge. For a while, they stood there, smelling it in silence, while Mum poured it onto a tray to cool. They had no idea it was something you could eat. It smelled so good that just smelling it was enough. No one even thought of eating it. As that lovely fudge fragrance floated out across the city in tattered wisps of steam, out across the treetops, all the squirrels, bats, and monkeys stopped what they were doing and sniffed the air. The whole forest fell silent.

  When Lucy finally picked up a piece and popped it into her mouth, everyone lunged forward. She put up her hand and said, “Surely, your Queen eats first.”

  “Surely, the Queen eats last,” said Imogen.

  “Normally, yes,” said Eliza, “but on this occasion . . .”

  Hungrily, she reached for the fudge. Mum pulled it out of her way. “I think it probably needs to set,” she said, “to bring out its true creaminess.”

  The waterfall itself seemed to wait with bated breath until the fudge had set to perfection. Then Mum said, “OK, it’s ready,” and with a great shout, the Great Amazonian Fudge stampede began. Elbows, knees, shins, and fists flew as everyone tussled to grab a piece. The city reverberated to the sound of happy chewing and contented sucking. This is when Lucy announced her great idea.

  “Your Majesty,” she said, “and people of El Dorado. What you are eating not only tastes delicious — it is also the answer to all the problems of El Dorado. El Dorado is made of gold, but people from out of town like that gold and want to take it away. Because you are polite and lovely, you feel you have to give away your own doors and gutters and roofs as presents.”

  “Stress.” Eliza sighed.

  “Solid-gold stress,” agreed Imogen.

  “What El Dorado needs — what this whole beautiful forest needs — is something that its people will like more than gold. Ladies and gentlemen, Your Majesty, I give you . . . fudge.”

  “Oh!” said everyone. “Definitely.”

  “But,” said Imogen, “what happens when we run out of fudge? There’re already only”— she counted —“thirty-seven pieces left. And I want one.”

  “The magic of fudge,” said Lucy, “is that you don’t dig it out of the ground. You make it. You can make as much of it as you like. This is Monsieur Bon Bon’s Secret Fooj Formula. With this recipe, you will have an infinite, inexhaustible supply of fudge . . .”

  “Wait,” said Eliza. “You mean we can eat this more than once in our lives?”

  “You can eat this every day. You can share it with everyone who comes to visit.”

  “No one will ever want our gold again,” said Eliza.

  “Who would want gold when they could eat fudge?” said Imogen.

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or at least her logbook,” said Lucy, “has solved all your problems. She has moved you from a gold-based economy to a fudge-based economy. Which is loads better. In a fudge-based economy, no one ever has to be poor. In a gold-based economy, you can run out of gold. In the fudge-based economy, if you run out of fudge — make some more fudge. Your stress is at an end.”

  “You’ve solved all our social and economic problems,” said Eliza.

  “We must give her a present,” whispered Imogen.

  “We’ve got just the thing,” said Eliza.

  “Follow the monarch,” said Imogen, leading the way down a wide avenue of trees. A troupe of little monkeys clattered through the branches above their heads.

  “In there,” said Imogen, pointing to what seemed to be a small golden garage.

  “Look inside, look inside,” said Eliza.

  Dad was the first to open the door, the first to see — spread out on the earthy floor — a pile of springs and wires and valves and lightbulbs, gaskets and bolts and nuts.

  “What is it?” asked Mum.

  “I know what it is,” said Jem, who recognized every single nut, bolt, and clip.

&nb
sp; “Me, too,” said Dad.

  “That,” said Jem, “is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

  “Well, this solves the mystery of how they got her through the jungle,” said Lucy. “They took her completely to pieces, then left the pieces in a heap.”

  If you’ve ever come home to find that someone has taken your house apart piece by piece, leaving nothing but a neat pile of bricks and a stack of floorboards, you’ll have some idea of how the Tootings felt looking at that heap of spare parts. For a long time, they didn’t speak or move, but stood in silence, each thinking their private thoughts. Mum remembered the day they found the headlights on top of the Eiffel Tower. Now those headlights were lying on their side on the earth floor. Jem remembered the day he first saw Chitty’s wings, carving through the sky above the cliffs of Dover. Now those wings lay against the carburettor like a pair of old deck chairs. Dad remembered where he had first seen that big, beautiful beast of an engine — stuck in a tree in a scrapyard. Now here was Chitty in a thousand pieces, as though she had just fallen down from that tree, as though all the adventures they had had together were nothing but a dream.

  “I must say,” said Imogen, “I thought you’d be more pleased.”

  “We brought her all this way,” said Eliza.

  “But you took her to pieces,” said Red. “How are we going to win the race now? It’ll take years to put her back together again.”

  “Oh, we don’t mind that,” said Imogen.

  “We waited years for her to come back.”

  “Years and years.”

  “We’re happy for you to spend years fixing her.”

  “Well, well, must go and rule,” said Imogen.

  “A ruler’s work is never done.” Eliza sighed and off they went.

  Dad and Jem surveyed Chitty’s scattered components. “Here’s the starter motor,” whooped Dad, scooping it up from under Mum’s feet.

  “Don’t bother,” growled Red. “That car’s not broken; it’s destroyed.”

  “Dad will put her back together in no time,” said Jem.

  “What? With those fat fingers? I doubt it.”