So it was decided that Nerlin and Mordonna would organise for a cottage to be built up in the Enchanted Valley, and while Winchflat was working on the transporter, they would fly up and down on turbo-charged broomsticks (currently the fastest way to travel, though they did tend to make your eyes bleed).
‘And when Winchflat has perfected a transporter, you can start using that,’ said Mordonna.
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Nerlin. ‘I don’t want bits of me ending up in different places from each other. I mean, my feet could end up in Tristan da Cunha and my bottom in a caravan by the Belgium seaside, and then I wouldn’t be able to go to the lavatory and I would explode.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mordonna. ‘Of course, we wouldn’t use it until it’s been thoroughly tested first. We’ll start off transporting some sheep, and if that turns out OK then we’ll transport some Belgian Traffic Wardens, and if that turns out OK we’ll try normal people, and if that turns OK, well, then you can use it.’
‘I don’t want a load of sheep and traffic wardens up in the Enchanted Valley at my wonderful cottage eating all my lovely flowers and baby ducks,’ said Nerlin.39
Mordonna suggested that they get their children to take it in turns standing in for Nerlin as ruler each weekend while he was at the cottage.
‘That way,’ she said, ‘we can try them all out and, who knows, maybe one of them will actually like it and want to take over the job permanently?’
‘Brilliant,’ said Nerlin, and went off to look for Winchflat.
Winchflat was in his Number Seven Laboratory, where he worked on inventions that contained bacon.40 This was always the first place anyone looking for him went to, not just because he spent more time in there than any of his other twelve laboratories, but because some of the other ones were top-secret, invisible or dangerous, or all three. And anyway, Number Seven Laboratory smelled so much better than the rest.
When Nerlin told Winchflat that he wanted a Star Trek-type transporter machine to go up to his cottage, his son was delighted.
‘I often thought about trying to make a machine like that,’ Winchflat said, ‘but because it would take so much time and work, I’ve never got round to it. Now I’ve got a reason to. Brilliant!’
What he didn’t tell his father was that he had been working on a transporter since the age of seven, but had had mixed success and finally got bored with it, which was his way of telling himself that something was too difficult to do. Winchflat could never admit to himself or to anyone else that there might actually be an invention he couldn’t invent.
He had previously had some minor success with transporting solid objects from A to B, but it had mostly involved getting small pieces of bacon to de-materialise from his plate and re-materialise in his mouth.
So it can’t be impossible, he told himself. Winchflat soon discovered that there was more to it than just enlarging everything, when the bigger version had transported a very angry fat duck into his mouth. It had taken two weeks to get the taste of what that duck had done in his mouth out of his mouth, even after he had scrubbed his tongue with steel wool dipped in bleach.41
For Winchflat’s next attempt he made sure to keep his mouth shut and stuck cotton buds up his nose.42 This time he also made sure the duck was wearing a nappy. But of course that created another problem because he forgot to weigh the nappy and, as everyone knows, when you transport ANYTHING from ANYWHERE to SOMEWHERE ELSE it is VERY IMPORTANT to maintain the EXACT TOTAL weight of whatever it is you are transporting. If you don’t, various things could happen:
Everything will get transported OK but not as far as you planned, and there is no way of knowing where it has gone unless you had transported a person with a mobile phone.
Everything will be transported to exactly where you wanted it to go, but bits of it will be missing.43
Everything will be transported to exactly where you wanted it to go, but everything will be smaller so it will become the same weight as when you first entered it into the transporter.44
Everything will be transported to a potato farm in Belgium.
Everything will turn inside out, which doesn’t bear thinking about.
Winchflat’s duck suddenly vanished and reappeared in a cupboard under the stairs of a house in Tristan da Cunha, which was really weird because none of the buildings there have staircases.
‘Oh well,’ Winchflat said, and tried again.
This time he used a chicken, which ended up on the duck’s back. It was at this point Winchflat decided that his transporter needed a reverse gear, a sort of undo button that could bring whatever had been sent off into the wide blue wherever back again.45
Nerlin sent out for a box of Royal Crayons and a Royal Sketchbook and sat down to design his retirement cottage. Nerlin had a hard enough time drawing conclusions, never mind pictures. He had never ever in his whole life tried to draw one, not even something as simple as a ball. Growing up in the damp drains beneath Dreary, it had been difficult to draw. Rats ate the crayons, and the paper grew mould that could kill penicillin. Not that Nerlin had wanted to be an artist, but now he felt creative urges stirring in a tiny room at the back of his brain.
Not only would I end up living in a lovely cottage in the Enchanted Valley, Nerlin said to himself, it would be a cottage I would have designed all by myself.
Like most things in life, the more you do something, the easier it gets. In less than a week, Nerlin had learnt that the pointy end of the crayon was the one you drew with and that to open a sketchbook you had to turn over the pages. He also discovered that a red crayon was different from a blue one, and that neither of them tasted as nice as an orange one.
Nerlin shut his eyes and tried to imagine his dream cottage. He had no problems thinking of descriptions like ‘thatched roof’, ‘roses round the door’, ‘self-closing toilet seat’ and ‘bacon library’, and he could see these inside his head perfectly, but when he opened his eyes and tried to draw them, everything went wiggly and came out wrong. So he tried to start off with something simple.
‘When I go to live in the cottage,’ Nerlin said, ‘I will have a dog. I might even have two, and we will all play together.
‘And,’ he continued, ‘we will play with a red rubber ball.’
So he closed his eyes again and there in his head was a beautiful big red rubber ball. It lay in the grass with the sunlight reflecting off its lovely coat of dog dribble.
Nerlin opened his eyes and began to draw.
A simple red rubber ball – no grass, no dog dribble, nothing difficult. What could possibly go wrong?
Except his red ball was blue.
And it was square.
Nerlin was depressed.
‘I can’t even draw something as simple as a red rubber ball,’ he complained.
‘You can’t be good at everything, my darling,’ Mordonna said. ‘You are the King of the greatest country in the world. You are the world’s top wizard.46 You don’t need to be able to draw. There are other people who can do that for you.’
‘But I want to live in a cottage I designed all by myself,’ Nerlin said.
‘And so you shall, my beloved,’ Mordonna replied. ‘We will use one of Winchflat’s Magic Hats.’
Over the years Winchflat had developed magic hats for hundreds of different occasions, including some that were programmed to do almost anything.47
‘Winchflat will fit you with a Magic Hat that will take the pictures inside your head and turn them into a drawing that will be exactly the same,’ said Mordonna.
‘Oh sure, no problem,’ said Winchflat.
He sat his father down, strapped the hat – which was more like a strange crash-helmet – on his head, plugged it into an electric socket and turned it on.48 Winchflat then adjusted the controls until Nerlin’s ears, which were poking out of holes on each side of the hat, turned a lovely shade of blue. He consulted a colour chart and fine-tuned the colour until it was exactly right.
‘Now, Father,’ h
e said, ‘I want you to start imagining your cottage. Start at the front gate, walk up the garden path and into the house. Go through each room and imagine every little detail, right down to the colour of the toilet paper and how many pairs of dirty underpants there are in the laundry basket.’
Nerlin’s ears began to throb in waves of different colours, and as they did so a robot arm began to draw on a huge sheet of paper Winchflat had pinned up on the wall.
It was an amazing thing to see. If Nerlin changed his mind, another robot arm rubbed out the bits he didn’t like.
When the ground floor was finished, Nerlin thought about the upstairs with wonderful bathrooms, and bedrooms with balconies that overlooked perfect views. There was even a dog’s bedroom with wallpaper covered in pictures of squeaky toys and special dog cake. Nerlin and Mordonna didn’t actually have a pet dog, but they both knew that no country cottage was complete without one.
‘And anyway,’ Nerlin said, ‘even if we don’t get a dog, we could end up with some naughty grandchildren who could sleep there.’
‘Absolutely,’ Mordonna agreed. ‘And if they are really horrible children, I could change them into dogs with a special spell.’
‘You miss Satanella being a dog, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Mordonna said. ‘Now that she’s a young woman, it’s not quite the same going through her hair for ticks and fleas.’
Once the upstairs was finished, Nerlin imagined the cellars and the robot arm drew them too. Winchflat was particularly interested in this part of the cottage and quite a few of his creative suggestions were added to the plans, including many exciting innovations that Nerlin had never heard of and some he wished he had never heard of.49
Finally there was the garden to design and here Nerlin got a bit carried away. There were sunflowers as tall as houses with centres the size of twenty dinner plates, and roses so large you could climb inside them and go to sleep, and leaves made of chocolate. This meant that Winchflat had to build a special machine to make these plants because they didn’t really exist. There was also special grass that never needed mowing and a crystal-clear stream with bacon-flavoured fish.
Mordonna said they had to do everything properly so that they could submit the plans to the council and get building approval.
‘What’s the point of that?’ Nerlin asked.
‘Well, we don’t want some petty official coming along later and telling us the whole thing has to be pulled down because it doesn’t comply with the regulations,’ Mordonna explained.
‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Nerlin.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Mordonna replied. ‘You know what office people can be like. And yes, Transylvania Waters is the greatest and most magical kingdom anywhere, but council officials are the same all over the world. They want everyone to think they’re important.’
‘No, won’t happen.’
‘How do you know?’ Mordonna asked.
‘Because I am Transylvania Waters’s Head of Planning,’ said Nerlin with a big grin, ‘and I give myself full permission to build my cottage. In fact, I will even give myself a grant to go out and buy everything I need.’
The cottage and garden were created and built exactly how Nerlin had imagined them, except the cottage wasn’t made of gingerbread and cake because the builders kept eating it. So they changed over to more conventional materials like bricks and cement, though it took a few days for the builders to realise this, by which time most of them had lost a lot of teeth.
‘They should change the bakery,’ the builders had complained. ‘These roof tiles are as hard as slate. They’re almost inedible.’
But finally the cottage was finished, and Mordonna and Nerlin called a family meeting to tell the children what was happening.
‘So every weekend your father and I will be going up to the cottage and one of you will be left in charge,’ Mordonna told them.
‘What, you mean a sort of time-share king?’ said Valla.
‘Or queen,’ Betty added.
‘Yes, from Friday night until Sunday night,’ said Nerlin.
‘Can we make laws and stuff like that?’ the twins asked.
‘Oh, I’m not sure about that,’ said Mordonna.
‘So we won’t be real kings and queens then?’ said Betty. ‘More like house-sitters?’
‘Umm, er …’ said Nerlin.
‘Why on earth would any of us want to do that?’ said Valla. ‘It’d be kind of like feeding the dogs while you two skived off every weekend.’
‘Maybe they could make laws that were only laws when it was their particular turn to be in charge,’ Nerlin suggested to Mordonna, seeing the promise of his lovely weekends up in paradise ebbing away.
This made Nerlin slip off into a wonderful daydream that involved him and Mordonna swimming underneath the Impossible Waterfall50 and eating bacon sandwiches with lots of barbecue sauce running down their chins while brilliantly coloured skylarks flew above them singing saucy songs.51
The next thing Nerlin knew, Mordonna was shaking him awake and telling him it had been agreed that the children could make one new law every month, but if she or Nerlin thought it was a bad law they could abolish it when they got back. So the worst that could happen was Transylvania Waters would have a bad law for one weekend.
A set of guidelines was drawn up that each law had to follow:
No animals are to be hurt or embarrassed. (Except for cats, which are really evil and deserve everything they get.)
Any law that incorporates bacon and/or chocolate will score an extra fifty points.
Any law that includes the destruction of bagpipes will score an extra one hundred points.
Guidelines and rules will be added and/or deleted as and when King Nerlin feels like it.
No declaring war on any other country – even Belgium.
No entering the Eurovision Song Contest while the King’s back is turned.
No tartan.
Or Vegemite.
Or goldfish juggling.
Or guide lines or scout lines or lines of guides or lines of scouts or broccoli.
Use-by dates must be printed in very, very small blurry writing.
No tearing along the dotted line – just walk slowly.
No.
Or not.
Most of the guidelines made no sense at all, and that suited everyone because it meant they could be ignored. All except the last rule:
No ignoring the guidelines.
Then, of course, there was the problem of deciding who should be King or Queen first. Everyone and no one wanted to go and sometimes at the same time. Obvious choices like going from eldest down to youngest or going in alphabetical order were quickly rejected for being too humanlike and boring. Putting names in a hat and pulling them out was no good either because everyone was a wizard or witch and could change the writing on the bits of paper with a very simple spell. It was the same with picking the shortest or longest straw.
In the end, Mordonna waved her hands around really, really fast and pointed her finger, and whoever was nearest was it. For the next weekend, the previous weekend’s ‘winner’ was allowed to leave the room until Mordonna had chosen, but they would have to go back in the week after, which meant that the same person could end up having to be in charge every second week.
‘That’s not fair,’ Betty complained, but a tiny thought had begun to nag at the back of her brain. If she did become Queen, no one would ever be allowed to tell her what to do – even her mother. Betty started to believe this might actually be quite a good idea, after all. But she didn’t want to give her mother the satisfaction.
‘And what fantasy land have you been living in, where they told you life was fair?’ Mordonna replied.
‘But …’ Betty began.
‘Right, madam,’ said Mordonna, pointing her finger. ‘You can go first.’
Mordonna was amazed at how many swear words her youngest daughter knew. They just poured out of her, thousands upon thousands,
until Mordonna began to wonder if many of them were just made up as Betty went along.52
‘… PLUGOOZE!!’ Betty shouted and stormed out.
‘I won’t let Mum get away with it,’ Betty said to her best friend, Ffiona, when they were sitting back in her room. ‘I’m going to make some really gross law with poo in it.’
‘Oooh, what are you going to do?’ Ffiona asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Betty. ‘Let’s try to think of something that will really annoy everyone.’
‘But then everyone will hate you,’ said Ffiona. ‘Not only that, they’ll feel sorry for your parents and like them even more.’
‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Betty. ‘Still, it’s only Monday. We’ve got until Friday to think of something.’
‘So if you’re only in charge for two days,’ said Ffiona, ‘how is everyone going to find out about the new law before the next week?’
That was when the penny dropped. In fact, a whole bagful of pennies and dolors53 came crashing down.
Mordonna had tricked them all. She knew full well that by the time anyone heard about any new law, even if it was made on a Friday evening, the weekend would soon be over and she and Nerlin would be back in charge and could delete the new law if they wanted to. But instead of making Betty feel like her mother had won, it had just made the idea of becoming Queen more appealing.
So Betty and Ffiona decided to go to the Inspiration Rock, which was a big rock in the forest just out of town. No one knew why it was called the Inspiration Rock, but that had been its name for as long as anyone could remember. In fact, it had been called that long before anyone could remember, even longer than Granny Crochet, who could recall hundreds of things from three or four hundred years before she’d been born. Anyone who had a problem they couldn’t find a solution to would go to the rock, pull their undies down and press their bare bottom against it in the hope of getting some inspiration.54
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