The Astounding Broccoli Boy

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  A door opened in the wall ahead of us. I stopped the float. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘We’d better take the milk in,’ said Tommy-Lee, picking up a crate. ‘After all, she is the Queen.’ He carried it in through the door with the penguin following at his heels. We went in after them.

  We were in a huge kitchen, full of the smell of bacon cooking. Dozens of rashers were frying on a pan the size of a door. Six people, all in white aprons, stared at us, hardly blinking, frozen by the paralysing ray of our unbelievable greenness.

  I said, ‘Hi. Don’t worry. We are green, but we are also nice . . .’

  Koko shoved me aside, muttering, ‘Green but also nice? Honestly.’ She struck a pose and said, ‘Behold the Green Knights! The mighty Karol who can do kick-boxing . . .’ She pointed at Tommy-Lee. He launched into a kick-boxing demonstration. His feet flew. His arms whirled. His body swerved and spun. I have to admit it was impressive. The people in the kitchen were so impressed that most of them hid under a table.

  Koko pointed at me next, told them my name was Rory and that I could slightly teleport. The frightened heads popped up from behind the table and stared at me expectantly. I put my hand up. ‘I can’t just do it, just like that. It has to be the right time.’

  ‘And I,’ said Koko, ‘am Koko Kwok. And I . . .’ She thought for a bit. ‘. . . am In Charge.’

  My 200-per-cent brain noticed that the bacon was starting to burn. I said, ‘Hey, don’t burn the Queen’s bacon.’ One of the men in white edged towards the pan, never taking his eyes off me. Except for one millisecond when he glanced over my shoulder. My 200-per-cent brain realized this meant there was someone behind me. I looked round. There was a man with a hefty-looking saucepan raised over his head, as though he was going to hit me with it. He must have been behind the door when we came in. I went to duck, but before I could move the penguin popped up on to a chair right in front of him. One second it wasn’t there. Then it was. It really did seem to teleport. The man was so shocked he dropped the pan. It rang on the stone floor. We all stared at it. Then stared at him.

  ‘Were you going to hit me?’ I was quite offended, to be honest.

  Resistance is useless,’ growled Tommy-Lee. ‘And especially don’t hurt the penguin.’ The penguin clapped its little flippers at this. ‘Nice work, Peter,’ said Tommy-Lee. Then he gave me his Bad Look again. ‘I bet you feel bad now. You said he couldn’t join and he still saved your life. Say, “Sorry, Peter.”’

  ‘Not now,’ I hissed. ‘I’m trying to explain things to these people.’

  ‘Say, “Sorry, Peter.”’

  I said, ‘Sorry,’ and patted the penguin on the head.

  ‘We need to talk to the Queen,’ said Koko. That sounded reasonable until she added, ‘We’re going to take over running things here for a while,’ which sounded Mad. ‘Is that her breakfast? Give it to us. We’ll take it to her. We can explain everything to her over a bacon butty. And some sardines for the penguin.’

  So they put four bacon butties, a pot of tea and four cups on a tray. They tried to put some sardines on a plate for Peter, but as soon as they’d opened the tin, he knocked it out of their hands with his beak and gobbled up the contents.

  They told us the way to the Queen’s bedroom. They pointed us up some stairs and told us to follow the long gallery right to the end. ‘There’ll be a man there. He’ll help,’ they said.

  The penguin went ahead. We were beginning to get the feeling that it was good at directions. It hopped up the stairs and waddled along the gallery and wasn’t distracted by the amazing paintings that lined the walls. They were mostly of animals being shot or chased, so maybe it found them upsetting. We were passing one of a tiger having trouble with some dogs when a bright light flashed on and a big man with a radio clipped to his belt appeared.

  ‘Hold it right there,’ he said. ‘Identify yourselves. Be advised that I am armed.’

  I explained that we were taking the Queen her breakfast.

  ‘We’re going to have a word with her about running the country,’ added Koko, which I wish she hadn’t. He wasn’t listening anyway. His radio crackled into life and we could hear someone talking to him about intruders in the palace.

  ‘Intruders in the palace?’ said Tommy-Lee. ‘Did you hear that? Where are they? We’ll sort them out for you!’

  ‘Get back,’ said the man, reaching for something on his belt. My 200-per-cent brain noticed right away that it was a gun. The man’s unenhanced brain did not notice the penguin, which seemed to think the gun was an extra sardine. So the moment the man pulled it out of its holster, it playfully leaped up and tried to peck it out of his hands. It really was amazingly quick, that penguin. But not as quick as the bullet that ripped a hole in the painting of the tiger and blew clouds of plaster all over the place.

  ‘You need to be more careful with that,’ said Tommy-Lee, picking the gun up off the floor, where the penguin had dropped it – disappointed by its lack of fishiness. The man crouched on the ground with his hands over his head. I said we were sorry about the mess and asked him again the way to the Queen.

  ‘There, just through there.’ He pointed at a narrow mahogany door. It did actually have a little brass crown screwed to it, so we were fully expecting it to be the Queen’s bedroom. We were disappointed when we got inside to find that it was a gents’ toilet. There was a row of latrines and some stalls.

  ‘I’ve never been in a boys’ toilet before,’ giggled Koko.

  We tried to go back and explain to the man that he’d made a mistake, but he had locked us in.

  ‘He’s locked us in.’

  ‘You don’t think . . .’ said Tommy-Lee, ‘that HE was the intruder, do you? Let’s get him.’

  But just then we heard one of the toilets flush. We all went quiet. We were all thinking the same thing.

  ‘But why would the Queen use a boys’ toilet?’ whispered Koko.

  ‘She’s the Queen. She can wee wherever she likes. Haven’t you heard of the Royal Wee?’

  The door opened.

  It wasn’t the Queen.

  It was a man in pyjamas. He was carrying a baby.

  He stared at us. He stared at the gun in Tommy-Lee’s hand. We stared at him. The baby stared at the penguin. ‘Tiger!’ it whooped, inaccurately.

  ‘OK,’ said the man, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘Are you,’ asked Tommy-Lee, ‘a prince?’

  ‘I am. The baby wouldn’t sleep. I came for a walk.’

  ‘Tiger!’

  ‘Prince!’ said Tommy-Lee. The prince put his hand in the air because Tommy-Lee was suddenly pointing at him with the gun. Only one hand though, because he was holding the baby with the other. ‘Let the baby go,’ he pleaded. ‘You can do what you like with me. But let the baby go.’

  ‘We’d love to,’ I explained, ‘but we’re locked in. Tommy-Lee, put the gun down. You’re frightening the prince.’

  ‘There’s no need to be frightened,’ said Koko. ‘We’re here to help. We wanted to speak to your grandma. But you’ll do. If we tell you what we think, you can tell her. OK?’

  ‘Sure. Do you mind me asking . . . ? Are you . . . green? I mean, really green. Like spinach.’

  ‘Broccoli,’ corrected Tommy-Lee. ‘Would you like a bacon sandwich?’

  While the prince ate the sandwich Koko explained her ideas about how to deal with aliens. Also some other ideas she had about traffic congestion, extra school holidays, the ridiculous price of Haribo in cinemas and the way bus drivers are always polite to grown-ups but often rude to children. The prince seemed really interested in this. His baby seemed really interested in the penguin. Things were getting very conversational.

  Then from somewhere in my 200-per-cent brain a memory popped up – a memory of the page in Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared about how to deal with kidnappers. It said you should always try to keep your kidnapper talking. The more they get to know you, the harder it will be for them to be nasty to you. The prince was now asking K
oko details of which buses she took to school and how much the ticket cost.

  He was keeping her talking!

  He thought we had taken him prisoner.

  I could see things from his point of view now – he was locked in a toilet in his own house with three green children armed with a pistol. I could hear people moving around outside. His bodyguards. Maybe they were getting ready to knock the door down and spray us with sleeping gas or something.

  All these thoughts happened at once.

  I remembered another page from Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared. The page that said, if you need to get out of a tall building in a hurry, always use the toilet window as there will be a thick drainpipe just outside, to take all the bad stuff away.

  I said, ‘Let’s go.’ I opened the window. There was the pipe.

  ‘Go where?’ said Koko.

  ‘Back to HQ.’

  ‘I’m TRYING to talk to the prince,’ said Koko. ‘We’re TRYING to sort out the nation.’

  ‘Koko. Green is for Go!’

  In normal life none of us would ever normally climb down a fifteen-metre drainpipe. But we did it with no trouble that morning. It just seemed like the sensible thing to do. There was a bit of a wobble when Tommy-Lee had to admit that the penguin probably couldn’t manage it. But he was fine when I said, ‘Think about it, Tommy-Lee. He’s a king penguin. He’s obviously going to be happier in a royal palace.’

  I was worried about how we were going to get back to HQ, but things turned out OK. When we got into the courtyard there was a helicopter hovering over a milk float and loads of soldiers pointing guns at a milkman. The milkman was yelling at them, saying, ‘The intruders were PRETENDING to be a milkman. I’m the ACTUAL milkman. Ask anyone. Ask the Queen.’

  ‘Step away from the milk float.’

  He did. The soldiers surrounded him. The helicopter followed them across the courtyard.

  We got on his milk float and drove it away.

  Tommy-Lee was looking sadly back at the palace, worried about the penguin.

  ‘Oh!’ groaned Koko. ‘I should’ve given one of our business cards to that prince. What a waste of a networking opportunity.’

  ‘Look!’ shouted Tommy-Lee. ‘Peter!’ The penguin was waddling towards us with his wings sticking out like stabilizers on a bike.

  ‘Peter!’ he yelled. I waited. He hopped on board. We floated through the empty streets all the way back to the hospital. The roofs of the houses started to shine as the sun came up.

  The cradle was dangling above the bins – just out of reach.

  ‘It’s OK. We can get up on top of the milk float and jump in,’ I said. But just as I said it, the cradle motor started whirring and the cradle wobbled down towards us. That’s really lucky, I thought.

  But I was wrong.

  The reason the cradle was moving is that someone was on board.

  That someone was Nurse Rock.

  She stood, glowering at us. A smile carved itself into her face. Rolled up in her hand was Tommy-Lee’s map of London.

  ‘Good morning, children,’ she cooed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  And So the Heroes of London Await Their Fate . . .

  The waiting was the worst bit.

  Nurse Rock put us back in the Fish Tank.

  She didn’t bring us breakfast.

  She didn’t stick any needles in us.

  She didn’t tell us off.

  She just left us sitting there.

  No one said a thing.

  Except Tommy-Lee, who said he was worried about Peter the Penguin. (Nurse Rock had made us leave him by the bins.)

  Then he said he was worried that Dr Brightside would now refuse to make us well because she was so cross with us.

  Then he said he was worried that we would all starve to death.

  Then he said he was worried that his old badness had come back because he was feeling very much in the mood to start smashing things up.

  Then Nurse Rock came back in. ‘I’ve decided not to tell Dr Brightside what you’ve been doing,’ she announced.

  We all said thank you, though I’m not sure why.

  ‘I don’t know if she could bear to know,’ she said. ‘She’s spent all this time trying to prevent this terrible contagion from spreading, and now it turns out that you’ve been wandering all over London, infecting the whole city.’

  ‘What will she do?’ begged Tommy-Lee, who seemed to be worried that she was going to pickle him or something.

  ‘I just don’t know,’ said Nurse Rock, who was enjoying herself just a bit too much.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Koko. ‘If you don’t tell her, we won’t tell her.’

  ‘You won’t tell her what?’ snapped Nurse Rock.

  ‘That we went out. That the security arrangements were clearly lacking. That we were supposed to be in isolation but somehow we were able to wander in and out all we liked. We just won’t mention any of that, if you don’t want us to.’ Koko shrugged.

  Nurse Rock bit her lip. I have to say Koko has great Making-People-Feel-Bad skills. But Nurse Rock is hard to beat. She just shrugged right back at her and said, ‘Fine. Good idea. You keep that to yourself, and meanwhile I’ll reform the security arrangements, as you suggested.’ She mentioned such things as changing the codes on the hospital doors and making us all sleep in separate fish tanks.

  ‘That’s solitary confinement!’ I said. ‘They don’t do that even if you murder people!’

  ‘For all I know, you’ve given a deadly disease to hundreds of people,’ said Nurse Rock. ‘You’re very lucky to be locked up in here. People out there, they hate anything different. And at a time like this when strange things are happening, if they saw green children, they’d probably . . . well, I don’t want to think about it.’

  I pointed out that people had mostly been quite nice to us so far.

  ‘Really?’ Nurse Rock smiled. I knew that smile. It was exactly the smile that Tommy-Lee used to do whenever he saw me taking my lunch box out of my school bag. It was the smile of someone who was going to have a good time by making someone else have a bad time. ‘Let me point something out,’ she said.

  ‘No, don’t. It’s all right.’

  ‘How long have you been in this hospital?’

  ‘Errmmmm . . . Honestly it doesn’t matter . . .’

  ‘Your OWN PARENTS have still not been to visit you.’

  So the waiting wasn’t the worst bit after all. That actually was the Worst Bit.

  I’d never been in hospital before.

  I didn’t know how often your mum and dad were supposed to visit.

  But now I came to think of it, why hadn’t they come? And why hadn’t Tommy-Lee’s mum come? Was it really just because we were green?

  I could feel all the power and buzz I’d got from being green draining out of me. Nurse Rock must have known that that sentence – ‘Your own parents have still not been to visit you’ – was like Kryptonite, a special formula for neutralizing superpowers.

  They moved us into separate fish tanks.

  They took all the I’ve-Been-Brave certificates and drawings off the wall, and we each took our own with us.

  My fish tank was opposite Tommy-Lee’s. I couldn’t see him though. I guessed he was just lying on his bed again, wrapped in his duvet like a fat floral caterpillar.

  I never in my life thought I’d miss Grim Komissky.

  When it was time to do drawings, I drew a square house with a square lawn and a lollipop flower thing at each corner. Just so I could have one on my wall.

  I had a blood test and a chromatograph and did my urine sample. When the quinoa came I ate it. When it was time to put the lights out, I stood at the window.

  I could just make out the shadow of Tommy-Lee, pacing round and round inside his own fish tank. Just going from one wall to another, from window to bed, over and over in his sleep, like a big depressed bear in a zoo who can’t believe there’s no way out of his cage. The more he walked, the more I re
membered the other walks we’d done together – walks along secret corridors and over rooftops, walks through the streets and the parks of the night-time city that we called Wonderville – before we knew it was only London.

  Empty London.

  It was while I was remembering those walks that it all finally made sense. The empty streets. The police. Of course! The only reason that our parents wouldn’t come was if something terrible had happened to them! Maybe the entire population of Birmingham had been destroyed by Killer Kittens! Maybe Captain Chaos himself was holding the whole West Midlands to ransom. Anything could have happened!

  We had to escape. Our country needed us!

  I’m not saying I planned my daring escape just because I wanted my mum. I’m saying I planned a daring escape so I could rescue my mum. And Dad.

  A Superhero Can Be Locked Up But His Spirit Can Never Be Imprisoned!!!

  Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared has a whole chapter about how to escape when you’ve been locked away for no reason. It tells you all about the Count of Monte Cristo, who was thrown into a secret cell in a prison on an island in the middle of a sea full of sharks. In the end he escaped, got his revenge and got really rich. He tapped on the wall of his cell with a spoon so that other prisoners would know he was there. One of them heard him and dug a tunnel right into the count’s cell. They became friends. Then this new friend gave the count a secret treasure map just before he died. The prison guards wrapped the dead man up in a sack so they could throw him into the sea, but the count had changed places with the corpse. The guards threw him into the sea, thinking he was dead, but he cut himself out of the sack with a secret knife, swam away, found some treasure, got rich, got married and got revenge.

  He made it sound easy.

  Except you really need a dead body to make this work.

  Plus I had a feeling that in this hospital they don’t throw you into the sea when you’re dead.

  I didn’t have a dead body.

  But I did have a spoon.