by Sam Gayton
His enormous cheeks blushed.
‘And don’t call me small, either,’ she growled. ‘You’re big.’
Gulliver tried his best to smile kindly.
‘Lily …’ he began, but she shook her head and stuck her fingers in her ears. ‘Lily, listen …’
Gulliver was about to embark on another one of his lectures. He did it at least once every day. Taking her in his palm – and using words like reason and sensible and scientific progress – he would patiently try to convince Lily that he wasn’t an evil kidnapping giant at all.
And perhaps, Lily thought, he tried to convince himself too.
‘You must understand, Lily,’ he began, like a teacher giving a lesson. ‘I am not a kidnapper; I am a man of science and reason. And you are not my prisoner, as you just said yourself you are my proof. The proof of all my travels!’
Lily closed her eyes. She had heard this speech before. It was always the same. Now he was gesturing to his book.
‘In this country, no one else has been to the places I have been, or seen the things I have seen …
Now he was counting them off on his gigantic fingers.
‘They do not know about Laputa, the floating island … They do not know about the struldbrugs, the immortals from the East … They do not even know about Lilliput – your old home – and all its miniature inhabitants.’
‘Yes,’ said Lily. ‘And I hope it stays that way. The last thing Lilliput needs is you giants stomping all over it.’
And she stuck her fingers in her ears and began to hum.
‘Do not say that,’ said Gulliver. His voice was so rumbling and deep that Lily could not help but hear him. ‘London, and the rest of the world, must be enlightened. It must know the truth. That is why I need you, Lily. Without you no one will believe me … without proof my Book of Travels will seem like a fantastical story … A story for children!’
Lily scrunched up her face in disgust. This was the worst part. This was what made her feel sick with fury.
‘No one has ever taken my writing seriously. That is why I brought you here to London. Do you see how precious you are? People will only believe me if they can see you.’
Lily shook her head bitterly. All Gulliver wanted was for people to buy his book. He might talk about truth and reason, but really he had kidnapped her out of greed.
‘It is the only way,’ Gulliver continued. ‘Believe me. Eighteen years ago I came back from my first journey to Lilliput …’
Lily groaned. ‘I’ve heard this all a hundred times.’
‘Then you must hear it again!’ Gulliver snapped. ‘I will tell you until you understand. After my first journey to Lilliput I went straight to Parliament and told them I had visited a nation of tiny people. They thought I was mad! I very narrowly escaped being locked up in the asylum at Bedlam!’
‘I wish they had locked you up,’ muttered Lily. ‘Then you’d know what it feels like. Then you’d set me free.’
Gulliver ignored her. ‘Curse those politicians! What yahoos!’
A yahoo was Gulliver’s name for other giants. He had learned it on one of his travels, after meeting a race of talking horses. The talking horses taught Gulliver that human beings were cruel creatures – as savage as apes. Ever since then he had called other people yahoos, just like the horses did.
Sometimes Lily wondered whether Gulliver had forgotten that he was also a yahoo himself.
‘Yahoos, everywhere I look!’ he shouted in a rage. ‘All I want is for them to know the truth!’
Gulliver ground his teeth together and went to drive a fist into his palm in indignation, only stopping when he realised that would squash Lily flat. He stared at her. His eyes were full of bloodshot and doubt.
‘I have always looked after you well, Lily.’ He was a little out of breath. ‘I have fed you. Protected you. Civilised you. Taught you to speak English, to read and write. And, yes, when you have misbehaved, I have punished you.’
Lily began to tremble. For a moment she thought Gulliver was going to stick her in the Sock. But he just sighed and set her down on the desk by the candles.
‘But I am not a yahoo,’ he said, ‘and so I will keep you from your cage. For the rest of tonight you may stay here, where I can keep an eye on you.’
Lily turned away. She sat with her legs dangling off the edge of the desk, staring at the floorboards below.
‘Be patient, Lily,’ he said gently. ‘I have a few final chapters to write … When I am finished I will show you and my book to King George Himself. Then you will understand. You will forget this silly idea about going home. Your home will be here instead, and you will live like a princess, adored by everyone!’
Lily said nothing. She watched Gulliver picking up his scattered notes from the floor. He reordered them, dipped his quill in ink and began to write again.
The closer he gets to finishing that book, she thought, the further I am from home.
LILY WARMED HER hands by a candle. She looked at Gulliver as he scribbled and yawned.
Sooner or later, he’ll fall asleep, and I’ll think of a new escape plan. All I have to do is wait.
So Lily sat watching her kidnapper to see if his eyes were drooping. But he drank cups of yesterday’s coffee to keep from sleep. And maybe all the Escape Plans were trapped somewhere, just like she was. Hours passed, nothing came.
For a long time the only sounds were Gulliver scratching away with his quill and the coals shifting in the fireplace. Outside, the street was silent. A horse neighed in the stables across the road. In Mr Plinker’s workshop downstairs, a broken clock was stubbornly chiming thirteen.
‘What are you doing?’ Gulliver said as he scribbled. His eyes did not leave the paper.
‘Thinking,’ said Lily shortly.
‘Good,’ said Gulliver. ‘Perhaps you will reflect on the error of your ways. Perhaps you will realise how necessary it is that you help instead of hinder me.’
Lily scowled at him. Her hopes were low, her patience was thin and her temper was short. She was trapped – again – and Gulliver was explaining – again – how everything was necessary.
It was one of those intensely irritating and painful moments – like Gulliver’s spontaneous trigonometry lessons – which could only be made better by shouting lots of rude words.
The only problem was Lily didn’t know any. Not in English. Gulliver had only taught her polite words so that when the time came she would be able to entertain King George and answer the queries of giant scientists.
Luckily Lily knew plenty of rude words in Lilliputian.
‘Oh, be quiet, you flustian mungle boff,’ she muttered.
Gulliver stopping his scribbling and pointed a warning finger at her. He hated it when Lily talked in Lilliputian.
Especially when she called him such rude things.
‘You,’ he said, ‘are very vulgar.’
Lily sat back and grinned. ‘And you are a slubber, and your stunkles eek like an uckbluck!’
Gulliver’s mouth dropped open. His spectacles slid a little way down his nose. ‘That is completely untrue!’ he cried. ‘My armpits do not smell remotely like a–’
‘Oh, why don’t you go and flimbip a boffybumf on its nozzer?’ Lily giggled.
‘How dare you?!’ he cried, blushing. ‘I would never be so disgusting as to kiss something like that! I would probably catch all sorts of infections –’
‘Be quiet, you quog!’ Lily shouted. She went over to the candles and wrote more rude words in the spilled wax. ‘You zijji guncher!’
‘Behave yourself!’ he thundered. ‘Speak properly!’
‘I won’t!’ said Lily dancing across his desk. She jumped up onto his ink bottle, dipped her feet inside and started to tread black footprints all across his Book of Travels. ‘You can’t make me!’
Gulliver tore his hair in exasperation. ‘Where did you learn this foul language from, child?’ he cried, blotting the stains on his paper.
‘Not from y
ou,’ said Lily, and then she paused and blurted out: ‘You YAHOO! That’s right! You’re the biggest, meanest, cruellest yahoo of all!’
And with that she kicked a candle so hard, it toppled right over and fell onto the Book of Travels.
The flame caught on a dog-eared page and suddenly it seemed to Lily that the whole desk was alight. The pages of the book shrivelled to ash as she staggered backwards, horrified and awestruck by what she had done.
Above her came an ear-splitting shriek. She looked up at Gulliver, his eyes filled with the flames. With one hand, he snatched Lily away from the fire. Then he grabbed the iron kettle from the hearth and tipped it over the desk. A great waterfall of dirty brown coffee poured from the spout. Lily gasped and shut her eyes.
The coffee hit the Book of Travels with a sizzling sound. The flames vanished, the candles winked out and a billow of steam rushed past Lily, up to the ceiling.
In the sudden darkness Gulliver opened his mouth to try and speak. His eyes began to water. His palm trembled. It was as if Lily had suddenly grown many times her size and struck him a terrible blow.
‘My work …’ he managed at last. ‘My book … my travels …’
Lily nervously tugged at his sleeve. She had gone too far and she knew it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, trying to wriggle out of the trouble she was in. ‘You’re not really a yahoo.’
But Gulliver just stared at the mass of pulp and ash on his desk. Only a few pages had burned away completely, but there were hundreds that were now singed, or soaked, or coffee-stained.
‘Are you going to punish me?’ Lily asked in a small, shaking voice.
Gulliver was now purple with rage. The hand she sat on began to clench into a fist.
And Lily was afraid.
‘Please don’t put me in the Sock,’ she pleaded as his fingers closed around her like the bars of a cage. ‘Please, Gulliver. I said I was sorry. Don’t put me in the Sock. Don’t put me in there.’
Lily turned and wriggled under Gulliver’s sleeve, but he plucked her out with his other hand. She kicked, she screamed, she dangled from his fingers as he carried her over to where the Sock hung, on a rusty nail by the door.
Lily said ‘Don’t’ over and over again. She said ‘No’ and ‘Please’ and ‘I’m sorry’.
He didn’t listen. He dropped her. She fell.
Down into the darkness of the Sock.
WHENEVER ONE OF Lily’s Escape Plans broke, burned or blew up something they shouldn’t have, Gulliver stuffed her in the Sock. It was the itchiest, smelliest thing that he owned. After an hour wriggling around inside it Lily would emerge all splotchy, sweaty and stinking, like some horrible variety of cheese.
But the prickly, itchy wool and old, sweaty smell weren’t the worst things about the Sock. The worst thing was that it was also infested with fleas. And London’s fleas, like everything else in the city, were gigantic.
They bounced all over Lily’s skin, big as marbles. She had to flick them away before they bit.
This was why the Sock was so horrible. If Lily stayed still the fleas nibbled on her. But if she moved about it was like dancing inside a holly bush. And no matter what she did, there would always be the suffocating stink of Gulliver’s giant feet. If she breathed through her nose she smelled them. If she breathed through her mouth she tasted them.
And so, as Lily landed in the Sock, she immediately began to itch, and flick, and retch. It was awful. It was torture. But luckily, over the moons, Lily had learned of a way to escape from the Sock. In a way. For a little while.
From the second Gulliver tipped her in, to the moment he shook her out, Lily began to speak. She told stories. Memories. Scraps of her life before the Snatching.
They might be funny stories (like When the Seagull Plopped on Nana) or sad stories (like When the Rains Washed Mama and Papa Away). Lily told the funny stories to take her mind off the itching and biting. She told the sad stories so she’d always remember – worse things had happened to her than being trapped in the Sock.
This time Lily pretended she was home in Lilliput. She imagined the whole village sitting on the beach, with the sky dark and the tide out and everyone snuggled up cosy by the fires, begging her to tell them a story of her adventures among the giants.
Lily closed her eyes. What could she say to them? What adventures were there to tell? None. Just six dull moons spent in cages, pockets and socks. Just thirty-three Escape Plans, each one ending in failure.
No, wait, she told herself. There is one story.
‘I saved a giant’s life once,’ Lily whispered. ‘On the day we arrived in London. I’ll tell how it happened. It isn’t a funny story, though. It isn’t sad, either. It’s gruesome. Listen …’
And, gathering up everything she had heard and seen on that night and the nights since, Lily began to speak.
‘ONCE ON A winding street,’ Lily began, ‘lived the cruellest clock maker in all the city. His name was Mr Plinker. Altogether he had built hundreds of clocks, and none of them worked.
‘His pocket watches ran fast. His grandfather clocks ran slow. His mantel clocks ran forward or backwards, depending on the day of the week.
‘Every now and again one of them would explode.
‘That’s right.
‘Explode!
‘Mr Plinker’s clocks were so poorly made, so terribly treated and so horribly overpriced that they were dangerous as well as useless. At least, that’s what I heard his customers yell when they came back to the workshop to complain.
‘Mr Plinker blamed the clocks, but it wasn’t their fault. They were the victims, and Mr Plinker was their tormentor.
‘He nailed them to the wall above the counter.
‘He pulled them apart in his workshop.
‘He tried selling them to rich gentlemen.
‘Then, if that failed, he would twist off their hands and smash their faces, and when at last they could tick no more he threw them in the fireplace and began the whole horrible process again.
‘I heard everything, from my birdcage in the attic. And I knew that Mr Plinker didn’t make clocks.
‘He tortured them.
‘And so, of course, it was only a matter of time before one of them tried to murder him …’
Now Lily paused and smiled, imagining the gasps of horror from her audience. They would be hooked. Hanging on her every word. Inside the Sock it seemed as if even the fleas had stopped their nibbling to sit and listen.
‘Have you ever heard of such a thing?’ she whispered. ‘A clock that tried to murder its maker?
‘Well, I’ll tell you something even stranger about that clock. Its name was the Astronomical Budgerigar.
‘The Astronomical Budgerigar was Mr Plinker’s own kind of cuckoo clock. It was tall and square, with a little triangular roof and a glass window above the clock face. It looked like a Lilliputian-sized house. And every hour, when the big hand pointed straight up, a perch shot out of the clock on a spring, and a bird sitting on it called out the time.
‘But what made the Astronomical Budgerigar different – what made it cruel and evil – was that Mr Plinker hadn’t put a pretend bird inside the clock. He had put a real one there instead.
‘A live bird, trapped in a mechanical cage.’
Lily paused again. That would be too much for some of the older Lilliputians. A live bird inside a clock? They wouldn’t be able to imagine it. They would gasp and shake their heads in disbelief.
She went on: ‘Maybe you don’t believe me, but it’s true. I know. I saw it with my own eyes. I was there, in the workshop, the night that it was made. Gulliver took me out from his pocket and put me on Mr Plinker’s counter. I stood staring up at that terrible clock, and I heard the poor creature inside, calling out for help. I wanted to set it free so badly, but I couldn’t. I was a prisoner too.
‘And, besides, he wasn’t the only one who needed my help.
‘Because I could see Mr Plinker lying in front of me, and he was dying.
> ‘I don’t know how it had happened exactly. I don’t want to know. It’s too horrible to think about. But it isn’t hard to imagine, is it? Clocks are like staircases, or jigsaws. They’re not usually dangerous, but if you leave them lying around unfinished, terrible accidents can happen.
‘Mr Plinker had probably been busy tinkering, with his hands deep inside the Astronomical Budgerigar. Perhaps his fingers had brushed the wrong pulley or lever … and somehow the murderous clock had started to tick.
‘And before Mr Plinker could take out his hand the cogs began to grind, spokes began to stab, pistons began to pound. The clock maker had jerked his fingers free.
‘Most of them, anyway.
‘Then he had fainted on his counter as if it was his coffin, looking as pale as death. And that’s where I first saw him.
‘I turned round. I didn’t want to look. I’ve seen blood before, but this was different. There was a whole river of red, flooding from his hand, all over the counter. I looked up at Gulliver. I almost wished he’d kept me in his pocket.
‘“Don’t worry,” he told me. “I have given Mr Plinker several sleeping drops.” Gulliver pointed at a brown glass bottle in his hand. “He is deep in his dreams, and I have sent his apprentice up to bed. No one will see you.”
‘“Why are we here?” I gasped.
‘“Because Mr Plinker’s apprentice was wandering the streets, looking for a doctor to mend his master,” Gulliver answered. “And he found me. And, because I am a doctor, I agreed to follow him back here and save Mr Plinker’s life. For a price.”
‘“What price?” I asked him, and Gulliver told me, looking very pleased with himself as he did so.
‘“Mr Plinker is going to let us stay in his attic, for as long as we wish. Do you not realise our good fortune, Lily? Two hours ago our ship sailed into London, and already I have found us a place to stay. Somewhere I can finish my Book of Travels, and keep you safe. All we have to do now is save Mr Plinker’s life, quickly.”
‘As Gulliver spoke he left me on the counter, next to Mr Plinker and his awful clock, and began to move around the room, gathering things. It was the dead of night, only one sickly candle burned, and even my sharp eyes could not see what he was collecting.