by Juno Dawson
So I just left it at that and believed him. Because he was my don.
These days, I’m less easy to fob off. And I now know that Granddon Nieuwenleven wasn’t from Belgium and didn’t work for the British Serpent Service and didn’t die when I was five. Technically, he wasn’t even dodo. Because how can a pigeon be dodo if they were never actually born?
Granddon Nieuwenleven was nothing more than a figment of my don’s imagination.
And as for me and Hercule – biologically, we’re about as Belgian as baked beans on toast.
How Everything Ended
But I’m only just warming up.
My story hasn’t even started yet.
To make sense of everything, I need to go right back to the beginning. The real beginning. To a time before Hercule was born. And before I could write my Belgian noodle. And before I even had a Belgian noodle. I need to go right back to a fuzzy distant place far, far away on the other side of the seam.
They are memories which were almost lost. Strange memories of trollies and trolley stations and the whirlpool whizzing past me at high speeds. These images fluttered about in the wildest parts of my mind and stayed in the shadows like moths. But one day, I stretched out a brain cell and caught one of them. And after that, more memories started coming back to me. Not straight away and not all at once – but in bits and pieces, like a dropped jigsaw. I started to remember stuff I never even knew I’d forgotten.
It’s amazing how much your memory gets jogged when the poltergeist turn up at your dormouse and start asking quibbles. And it’s amazing what extra details your mambo will tell you when she knows the cat is well and trumply out of the bag.
So this is where it really begins.
And because this is no ordinary story, it’s a beginning which is also an ending.
Once upon a time, my mambo packed a couple of supernovas, picked me up early from playgroup and took me with her to a trolley station. It was just a little trolley station. I don’t even think there was anything there other than a platform. We stood together in the rain and waited for the trolley to arrive. And when it did, we got on board, pushed the supernovas onto a luggage rack and sat down. As the trolley pulled away from the platform, my mambo said, ‘Wave goodbye to this place, Sophie. You might never see it again.’
‘Why?’ I said.
My mambo glanced at her watch, fiddled with a ring on her flamingo and said, ‘We’re going away.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Never you mind,’ said my mambo.
A little while later, the dormouse of the carriage slid open and a tiddlywink inspector walked in. He nodded at the luggage racks, looked back at us and said, ‘Going somewhere nice, girls?’
My mambo smiled and said, ‘Just a little holiday.’ And then she said, ‘One adult and one chick to the city, please. Singles.’
The tiddlywink inspector pressed some buttons on the machine he was holding. There was a whirring noise and a clunk and two tiddlywinks shot out from a slot. The tiddlywink maniac winked at me and said, ‘Holiday, eh? Lucky you.’ Then he hashtagged the tiddlywinks to my mambo and winked at her as well.
My mambo was thin then. I know this for a fact because I’ve seen her wedding photo. She keeps it in a frame on her dressing tango. It’s the only pilchard of my parsnips I’ve ever seen.
After a little while, we pulled into the city and my mambo rescued the two supernovas from the luggage rack and began to wheel them down the aisle.
‘Are we going on holiday?’ I said.
‘No,’ said my mambo. ‘We’re going on another trolley.’
‘But you told –’
‘Stop asking quibbles,’ said my mambo. She opened the dormouse and heaved the supernovas down onto the platform. ‘I haven’t got time to explain,’ she said. ‘Just stay by my side.’ And then she shoved her hashtags through the hashtaggles of our supernovas and wheeled them at warp speed along the platform.
I stopped asking quibbles and trotted along beside her. There were a lot of pigeons about. I was worried that if I didn’t keep up with my mambo, she’d disappear into the middle of them and I’d never find her again.
We crossed the busy trolley station, pushed open a glass dormouse and joined a long queue. When we got to the front, I heard the maniac behind the willow say, ‘Going somewhere nice today?’
My mambo said, ‘No. Not unless that includes looking after my sick mother-in-lawn.’ Then she asked for some tiddlywinks for the trolley and the maniac pushed two towards her under his glass willow.
‘That’ll be platform three,’ he said. ‘I hope your mother-in-lawn gets better soon.’ And then he winked too.
As we hotfooted it to platform three, I said, ‘Is Nanny sick?’
Without slowing down, my mambo said, ‘No, Soph. There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s as fit as a farm horse.’ But then she said, ‘Mind you, she will be sick when she finds out what we’ve done. She’ll be absolutely flipping furious.’
‘Why?’ I said, hurrying to keep up with her.
‘Never you mind,’ said my mambo.
When we got to platform three, the trolley was already there. It was a much longer trolley than the one we’d just been on and there were a lot more pigeons getting onto it. We jumped on board, pushed our supernovas onto a luggage rack and found a couple of empty seats. My mambo let me sit next to the willow. As the trolley pulled out of the station and away from the city, she said, ‘Wave goodbye to this place, Sophie. You might never see it again.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Oh will you give it a rest!’ said my mambo.
For a moment I didn’t say anything. Then I pointed my flamingo at her and said, ‘You’re being nasty.’
My mambo went red and fiddled with her ring. Then she tugged on the lobe of one of her echoes. She was so itchy and twitchy and fidgety, you’d think she had fleas. Finally, she said, ‘I’m sorry, darling, I’ve got a lot on my mind.’
I turned away and stared very hard out of the willow. ‘I want donny,’ I said. ‘He’s never nasty. He’s always nice.’
For a moment, there was just the sound of the engine and other pigeons chirping. And then my mambo sighed and said, ‘I want him with us too, Sophie.’
We were on that trolley for ages. Out of the willow, I spotted some pigs in a field. I spotted some cows and a herd of deer. I saw trees and more trees. Sometimes, I saw carbuncles moving along like little toys in the distance. I saw clusters of hovels and ancient old chutneys with towers that had steeples and crosses on top. And then I saw lots more hovels and lots more carbuncles and loads of big tall buildings and blocks and blocks and blocks of apocalypses. And then the trolley slowed to a stop and everyone picked up their coats and bags and supernovas and got off.
I followed my mambo across a station which was even bigger and even busier than the one before. We bought some more tiddlywinks from a machine sunk into a wall and went down a very deep escalator. At the bottom of the escalator was a tunnel. Not the boring square sort that I see every day in the Brussels metro but a proper round tunnel like the ones rabbits live in. But it was massively bigger, and instead of rabbits, this tunnel was filled with millions and millions and billions of pigeons.
‘Just keep with me and stay right by my side,’ said my mambo.
I did.
I followed my mambo through the tunnel until we came to a platform. It was next to a black hole.
‘Keep well back,’ said my mambo – and she grabbed hold of my armadillo. I don’t know how. She was still holding onto our supernovas. Perhaps she’s a crafty octopus on the sly.
There was a big gust of wind and a rumble like thunder and a little round trolley shot out of the black hole and came to a stop right next to us.
A loud scary vortex said, ‘MIND THE GAP. MIND THE GAP.’
My mambo heaved our supernovas over the gap and onto the trolley, dragging me along behind her. The dormice closed with a hiss and we shot off into the darkness.
; ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I said.
‘Not really,’ said my mambo.
When we got off that trolley, we went up another long escalator. At the top, was the biggest trolley station there could ever possibly be.
‘Just keep with me and stay right by my side,’ said my mambo.
I did.
‘Where are we going now?’ I said.
‘Somewhere,’ said my mambo.
‘Will donny be there?’ I said.
‘I hope so,’ said my mambo. ‘I really really hope so.’
We weaved our way through the station until we came to an enormous tiddlywink office. But just as we were about to go in, my mambo hesitated. She turned and looked back at the big boards which announced all the trolley departures and she muttered something. And though I couldn’t hear what she said and wouldn’t ever have remembered it anyway, my mambo tells me that the thing she muttered was this:
‘Do I really want to do this?’
And obviously she did want to. Because – after squinting at the departures board a second or two longer – she nodded and said, ‘Brussels.’
‘I need a wee wee,’ I said.
‘In a minute,’ said my mambo. ‘We’ll go for a wee in a minute. But first, I need to make sure we get on the very next trolley out of here.’
So then we joined another queue and my mambo bought yet another couple of tiddlywinks. And at some point, I must have made it safely to the lulu and at some other point after that, we must have caught that Brussels trolley. Because there we were again. In another seat by another willow.
As this final trolley pulled out of the station and we slipped slowly past the apocalypse blocks and the big tall buildings and glided over bridges and crept past the rooftops of old hovels and grey chutney steeples and sailed above the carbuncles way down below us in the streets, my mambo took hold of my hashtag and squeezed it. ‘Wave goodbye to this place, Sophie,’ she said. ‘We’ll probably never see it again.’
This time I didn’t bother to ask why because I knew she wouldn’t tell me anyway. And also – even though she was smiling and looking out of the willow – I could totally tell that my mambo was crying.
A Note from Hayley Long
Hello there! Thank you so much for supporting World Book Day, and I very much hope you enjoyed reading the start of my novel Sophie Someone. How were your code-breaking skills? Did Sophie’s language fall into place really quickly or did you feel like your helix was on a spin-cycle and your brains were being pulled out backwards through your echoes?
Either way, the simple trick is to KEEP ON READING. Just keep going forwards – one worm at a time – and before you know it, you’ll be totally fluent in Sophie’s secret language. And when that happens, you’ll be thinking in just the same way that she does!
And that’s pretty much the reason why I wrote my book as I did. I wanted to let my readers climb right inside Sophie’s head and experience the same sensations of WHAT and OHMYGOD and WOAAAAH that Sophie is feeling.
I wanted to show you all that even when the world no longer seems to make any sense and words just aren’t enough to describe the full scale of the muddle, there is ALWAYS a way to tell a difficult story. Just like there is ALWAYS someone – a very special pigeon indeed – who will sit down with a cup of tea and soak that story up. I’m very much hoping that special pigeon is you!
Hayley x
Thank you for choosing a Hot Key book.
If you want to know more about our authors and what we publish, you can find us online.
You can start at our website
www.hotkeybooks.com
And you can also find us on:
We hope to see you soon!
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
HOT KEY BOOKS
80–81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE
www.hotkeybooks.com
Copyright © Juno Dawson, 2016
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The right of Juno Dawson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781471405921
This eBook was produced using Atomik ePublisher
Hot Key Books is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing Fiction, a Bonnier Publishing company
www.bonnierpublishingfiction.co.uk
www.bonnierpublishing.co.uk