Floods 12

by Colin Thompson

  ‘A picnic?’ said Nerlin. ‘Brilliant. Will we have a campfire and sausages?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mordonna. ‘In fact, it’s not so much a picnic as a camping holiday.’

  ‘Wow! With tents and everything?’

  ‘Yes, tents, campfires, sausages, and lashings of lemonade,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Wow?’ said Nerlin. ‘And you know what? This will be Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s first picnic ever.’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t have lots of picnics before you met him?’ said Betty.

  ‘He told me he hadn’t,’ said Nerlin.

  At first Betty had been happy that her father had an invisible friend. She loved her dad and if an invisible friend made him happy, then it made her happy too. Of course, being a wizard meant that Geoffrey-Geoffrey might not even be imaginary. Unlike humans, whose invisible friends were just part of their imagination, witches and wizards could have all sorts of invisible friends and relations who were only too real. But there was something about Geoffrey-Geoffrey that was suspicious and was beginning to drive Betty crazy.

  Actually she was at that awkward age where pretty well everyone, apart from her best friend Ffiona, drove her crazy, but she was beginning to really hate Geoffrey-Geoffrey. He symbolised everything that upset her about her poor father’s declining brain. Things like Alzheimer’s disease and general Doolallyness weren’t supposed to happen to witches and wizards. They were the sorts of things that humans got. In fact, lots of humans seemed to spend their whole lives like that. Betty was starting to wonder if Geoffrey-Geoffrey might have something to do with her darling father’s state of mind.

  ‘Betty, stop teasing your father,’ Mordonna snapped. ‘Things are hard enough as it is, without you stressing him out too.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Betty. ‘It’s just that it’s really upsetting to see Dad turning into a vegetable.’

  ‘Geoffrey-Geoffrey says vegetables are good for you,’ said Nerlin. ‘Except broccoli, of course.’

  It took two and a half days to get everyone and everything ready to go up into the mountains. If Nerlin hadn’t been going, it would probably only have taken a couple of hours.

  First of all they had to go and find some Royal Donkeys, which weren’t so much Royal Donkeys as Ex-Royal Donkeys. After Maldegard and Edna had ridden Blossom and Bubbles, the descendants of George-The-Donkey-Formerly-Known-As-Prince-Kevin-Of-Assisi, simply known as George, on their map-making quest, it had been decided to give all the donkeys their freedom.

  Now, as everyone knows, Transylvania Waters donkeys have the power of speech, and, like humans, they have a whole range of different personalities. Some are quite bad-tempered on account of not being horses. Some are very happy on account of mysterious and wonderful chemicals in the Transylvania Waters clover and thistles. Once free to roam where they liked, most of them had gone to live in remote little valleys up in the mountains, where the water was clear and sweet, the grass was as soft as velvet and porridge grew in big tasty lumps on enchanted bushes.

  It would have taken far too long to go and recruit these donkeys for the expedition to the Old Crones, so it was among the donkeys that had stayed down on the plains or in Dreary itself that they looked for their volunteers. Blossom and Bubbles had actually stayed right in the middle of town and opened a comedy club, where seven nights a week they told their legendary seventeen funny jokes, none of which were rude, not even the one with the knicker elastic in it.

  ‘Go up and visit the Old Crones, you say?’ said Blossom.

  ‘Bit of a holiday might be nice,’ said Bubbles. ‘I say, have you heard the one about the piglet and the chamber-pot?’

  Everyone had.

  About fifteen thousand times.

  ‘I haven’t heard it,’ said Nerlin.

  About fifteen thousand and one times.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Nerlin. ‘Why did the piglet climb inside the chamber-pot in the first place?’

  Betty told him to ask Geoffrey-Geoffrey to explain it.

  Blossom and Bubbles collected some of the other donkeys that had stayed in town.

  The castle’s Sandwich Chef made mountains of sandwiches, including grass sandwiches for the donkeys. The castle’s Hot Drinks Chef made gallons of hot tea, including Grass Tea for the donkeys and Gravitea for Nerlin to stop him falling off Blossom. The castle’s Cake Chef made a seven-metre-long chocolate Transylvania Waters Roll – which is like a Swiss Roll, only longer and with lots more chocolate – and finally the castle’s Lolly Chef gave everyone10 a paper bag of lollies with absolutely no liquorice at all, though there was a warning notice printed on each bag to say that the lollies may have been in the same castle as some peanuts.11

  The castle’s Clothes Chef gave everyone12 a warm scarf. The donkeys mistook theirs for snacks and promptly ate them.

  So, finally, they were ready to set off.

  Except Nerlin.

  ‘No, I can’t go,’ he said.

  ‘What is it now, my darling?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Someone has stolen my bottom,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘You’ve got your trousers on back to front again,’ said Mordonna.

  Then they were finally, finally ready to go.

  ‘Where is Geoffrey-Geoffrey’s donkey?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I thought he could just ride on Blossom with you,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘I think the two of us would be too heavy for one donkey.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Blossom, who knew all about Geoffrey-Geoffrey and had actually had an invisible friend of her own when she had been younger. ‘Before Tubby-Tubby ran away to join the Belgian Foreign Legion13 she used to ride everywhere on my back.’

  Then they were finally, finally, finally ready to go. Except …

  ‘There is NO except,’ Mordonna snapped, as she climbed onto Bubbles’ back and led everyone out of the castle gate onto the street.

  ‘Which road leads out of town?’ she asked Bubbles.

  ‘All of them,’ said Bubbles, an answer which, of course, was perfectly true but not much help.

  A crowd of three people and a dachshund called Sir Frances Treves – named after Sir Frances Treves14 – cheered as the party passed and then went and collected their cheering fee from the castle office.

  What with Nerlin wanting to stop and say hello to everyone they passed, especially Sir Frances Treves, it was getting dark by the time they reached the edge of town.15 So they went back to the castle for a good night’s sleep before setting off at the crack of dawn the next day in the hope of reaching Quenelle’s cave by nightfall.

  On their way up the mountain the next day, Nerlin greeted every tree they passed, all seven hundred and thirty-two of them. Fortunately, he did not insist on stopping to do this. He also said hello to the grass and the sky, seventy-two butterflies, a family of bow-legged goats and a partridge quite near a pear tree. Fortunately, none of them greeted him back, apart from one of the goats, which tried to eat his sock as he rode by.

  ‘Tell me,’ Nerlin said to his daughter-in-law Maldegard – Transylvania Waters’s official map-maker – as they rode along side by side,16 ‘did you come up here when you were making the Great Transylvania Waters Atlas?’

  Now, Maldegard had a kind and gentle disposition and although she admitted Nerlin’s brain was becoming a bit erratic as he got older, she refused to accept that he was going Doolally or even had a problem.

  ‘He’s just a bit eccentric,’ she’d said earlier to her husband, Winchflat. ‘And who can blame him, what with his age and having the responsibility of running an entire country?’

  Winchflat had pointed out that it was actually Mordonna who ran things and the only responsibility that Nerlin had to deal with was deciding what colour sprinkles to have on his cereal each morning.

  ‘Let’s face, it my darling – Papa is losing it,’ he’d said.

  ‘Losing what?’ Maldegard had protested. ‘I would say that as time goes by, he gets happier and happier.’

>   ‘Yes, but what about the rest of us who have to live with it?’ said Winchflat.

  ‘That’s your problem,’ Maldegard said. ‘I think it’s much more important to be happy than to remember how to tie your shoelaces.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘But nothing. You’re all just being selfish, and anyway he is the King and everyone loves him. There are plenty of people who are only too happy to tie his shoelaces for him.’

  And, really, Maldegard was right. She said that as Nerlin got older and his brain started to shrink, all he was doing was clearing out the stuff he didn’t need anymore. She said, and honestly no one could argue with her, that the world would be a far better place if more people had invisible friends and went around saying good morning to bushes instead of running around shooting and fighting each other.

  ‘Yes, we did come up here when we were making the maps,’ she lied to Nerlin. ‘And you’ll never guess what we called this lovely little valley that we’re travelling up now.’

  ‘What? What?’ said Nerlin with the eagerness of a four-year-old child.

  ‘We called this place Geoffrey-Geoffrey Shire.’

  Nerlin was ecstatic. ‘Wow,’ he said.

  ‘And the whole area, the three hills over there and the other nearby valleys are called The Land of Invisible Friends,’ Maldegard continued.

  ‘No!’ said Nerlin, looking around with his eyes wide open and a huge happy smile on his face. ‘So do you think there are lots of other invisible friends living up here?’

  ‘I’m sure there are.’

  ‘And I suppose they’re all waiting for a visible friend to come along and find them, like I did with Geoffrey-Geoffrey,’ said Nerlin. ‘Except I was back at home having a bath when Geoffrey-Geoffrey appeared.’

  ‘Right,’ said Maldegard. ‘Though I expect here is where he grew up.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it was,’ said Nerlin. ‘After all, you can’t just have invisible friends wandering around the countryside tripping people up and bumping into things. It’s obvious they’d all have to live in the same place until they found their visible friend.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Maldegard.

  ‘I wonder why Geoffrey-Geoffrey came up out of the plughole.’

  Maldegard was nothing if not quick-thinking and very imaginative.

  ‘Oh, that’s easy to explain,’ she said. ‘The purest water in the whole of Transylvania Waters is in this stream we’re travelling by, so I imagine this water is used in the King’s bathtub at Castle Twilight.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Nerlin agreed. ‘So Geoffrey-Geoffrey must have fallen in the water and got carried all the way down to my bathroom.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Maldegard.

  ‘What a fantastic bit of luck,’ said Nerlin. ‘I mean, just suppose it had been someone else having a bath that night. Geoffrey-Geoffrey would be their invisible friend and not mine.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maldegard, ‘and as we know, not everyone is as friendly to invisible friends as you are. So it wasn’t just lucky for you, but it was lucky for Geoffrey-Geoffrey too.’

  Overhearing their conversation, Mordonna decided that Maldegard would now be the one and only Official-Side-By-Side-With-The-King-Rider, which everyone was very happy with, apart from Bacstairs, who had got locked in the lavatory back at Castle Twilight by accident,17 just before the party had set off.

  The sun had come up over the mountains and was now making everything in the valley appear warm and golden. The group turned away from the stream and began to climb a steep path to higher ground, where the Old Crones lived.

  They could see brightly coloured rags flapping in the distance. These were like the Buddhist prayer flags from the Himalayas, except they weren’t prayer flags and they weren’t from the Himalayas. They were actually the Old Crones’ baggy knickers because it was Friday, which was laundry day. Nevertheless, they were a welcome sight, telling the party they were on the right path.

  They reached a small plateau of the softest green grass and instantly every single donkey began drooling. This wonderful grass was not there by accident. It was an early-warning device planted by the Old Crones to alert them of approaching donkeys.

  The Old Crones knew that as soon as any donkey saw the grass they would have to stop and eat it, which would give the Old Crones time to take any action they needed. Why they wanted to be warned of approaching donkeys is not quite clear, though a few years earlier there had been a plague of salesmen bothering people everywhere as they tried to sell them a really rubbish set of encyclopedias,18 and they had travelled by donkey.19

  ‘Time for lunch,’ said Bubbles, stopping in her tracks and refusing to move another step.

  ‘Yeah, time for lunch,’ all the other donkeys agreed.

  ‘Hooray,’ cried Nerlin. ‘Picnic time.’

  The Picnic Blanket Maid spread the picnic blankets on the grass and the Picnic Maid laid the food out and the Picnic Beverages Maid poured out the drinks. Nerlin, not realising that there were separate picnics for the wizards and the donkeys, began wolfing down grass sandwiches.

  ‘These sandwiches taste just like grass,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, well, Father …’ Winchflat began.

  ‘They’re absolutely brilliant!’ Nerlin cried.

  ‘They’re actually meant for the donkeys,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ said Nerlin. ‘They’re much too good for donkeys. They’d rather eat grass. Oh, this is grass. Umm, sorry about that.’

  At this point, most people would have spat out what they had in their mouth. Nerlin didn’t and, when no one was looking, he took another sandwich.

  ‘Note to self,’ he said, ‘replace cucumber sandwiches with grass ones for afternoon tea.’

  ‘No problem, Your Majesty,’ said Blossom. ‘You eat as many as you like. We’ll make do with this field.’

  ‘And help yourself to the Grass Tea too,’ said Bubbles. ‘We’ll just drink this crystal-clear pure water from the stream.’

  ‘There’s Grass Tea too?’ said Nerlin. ‘Brilliant!’

  He picked up a bucket of the donkeys’ tea and drained it.

  ‘Yuck, that’s revolting,’ he said. ‘It tastes just like grass.’

  ‘Here, Father, have a strawberry-jam sandwich,’ said Betty.

  ‘Oh yes, that’s delicious,’ said Nerlin. ‘Though I think the grass ones have the edge.’

  So, like most things going on round Nerlin, the picnic was eccentric chaos, but pretty well everyone was happy, except Blossom’s cousin Muriel, who was always miserable. When everyone asked her why, she said she wasn’t so much miserable as performing a tribute.

  ‘It’s a homage to the most famous donkey in the whole world,’ she said. ‘Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. He’s my ultimate hero and he was always miserable.’

  ‘So it makes you feel happy and fulfilled being miserable?’ Blossom asked.

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘So you’re happy being miserable, which means that, actually, you are the opposite of Eeyore,’ said Bubbles.

  ‘Damn,’ said Muriel. ‘Now I’m really miserable.’

  ‘Listen, you donkeys,’ Mordonna called out, ‘if you don’t stop doing philosophy, I’ll turn you into poodles.’

  ‘That would be better than being miserable,’ said Muriel.

  ‘Belgian poodles,’ said Mordonna. ‘With dandruff.’

  That made the donkeys talk about football, which has no philosophical content whatsoever. A sub-group of donkeys decided they’d rather talk about cricket, but they all fell asleep, because that’s what cricket does to people.

  ‘If we don’t get a move on,’ said Valla, ‘it’ll be dark before we get to the caves.’

  ‘I thought we were going to camp out under the stars,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘No, sweetheart, the plan is to camp in, not out,’ said Mordonna. ‘We will camp inside the Old Crones’ guest caves and sleep in the finest feather beds.’

  ‘With our sl
eeping bags?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘If you want to,’ said Mordonna.

  It had been a long day and it was getting longer. Mordonna felt like slipping away, back down the mountain to the castle and into her own bed, but she climbed onto Bubbles’ back and the party continued on their journey up to the caves.

  ‘Halt, who goes there?’ said a voice from behind a bush.

  ‘We do,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I know that voice,’ said Betty.

  ‘I know that voice,’ said the voice.

  ‘I know those voices,’ said a second voice from behind another bush.

  ‘What are you two doing here?’ said yet another voice from behind a completely different bush.

  ‘Just you come out here this minute,’ said Betty. ‘All of you.’

  Three middle-aged women badly disguised as little old ladies badly disguised as bushes came out from behind their three real bushes. It was the three ex-peasants who had helped Betty and Ffiona by pretending to be three cookery witches.20 Since then they had moved up in the world. They had also moved down, sideways and backwards, as well as forwards, though not at the same time.

  ‘Oh look, Mother,’ Betty said. ‘It’s the three wonderful Cookery Witches.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Mordonna, who knew perfectly well that they were fake cooks, but couldn’t quite prove it. ‘I see they have moved up in the world by becoming fake bushes.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Fake Cook One aka Fake Bush One. ‘Indeed,’ said Fake Bush Two. ‘We now has regular employment.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fake Bush Three, ‘we is working for the Old Crones as their security guards.’

  ‘Well, you go and tell your employers that their King and Queen are here and want to see them,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘No need, Your Majesty,’ said Fake Bush One. ‘They already know all that and they said to make you welcome and escort you up to the caves.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mordonna. ‘Lead on.’

  ‘We has to make you welcome first, Your Majesty,’ said Fake Bush Two.