Floods 4

by Colin Thompson

As everyone knows, kids can be horrible to each other and much more narrow-minded than their parents ever are. They can’t stand anyone to be different. So because of her freckles and the lace-up shoes and the tidy hair ribbons, Ffiona’s life at school was always made absolute hell by all the other kids. It had been particularly bad at her last school, Thistlecrown Primary. Ffiona’s life had been a neverending misery. At least once a week her teacher had to fish her out of the drains after the bullies had flushed her down the toilet, and it always took the entire summer holidays for her hair to grow back after it had been pulled out or had rude words cut in it on the back of her head.

  ‘And we moved once before that too,’ Ffiona explained. ‘We came here because Mum and Dad thought it looked like a nice peaceful area and so the school would probably be nice and peaceful too.’

  ‘What, Sunnyview?’ said Betty.

  ‘Yes. What’s it like?’ Ffiona asked. ‘Is it nice?’

  ‘Well,’ Betty explained, ‘all that stuff you said about your old school is pretty much what Sunnyview is like.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ffiona. Her shoulders fell and she began to look miserable.

  ‘But,’ said Betty, ‘you don’t have to worry. I’ll look after you.’

  ‘But what about the big kids? Won’t they just push us both down the toilet?’

  ‘If you’re my friend, no one will lay a finger on you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this…’ Betty began.

  Having just got her first best friend, Betty was a bit anxious about telling Ffiona she was a witch. But then, she thought Ffiona would find out soon enough anyway, so she went ahead and told her everything.

  ‘A witch? Wow,’ said Ffiona. ‘Are you sure? My mum says there’s no such thing as witches and wizards. She says it’s all made up.’

  ‘Lots of it is,’ said Betty. ‘All that Harry Potter stuff ’s not real, but there are proper witches and wizards and I’m one.’

  ‘You don’t look any different,’ said Ffiona. ‘I mean, umm, your mother, she kind of does look like, umm…’

  ‘She really looks like a witch, doesn’t she? All the black hair and eye make-up and deathly white skin?’ said Betty. ‘Mind you, she could be mistaken for a Goth looking like that.’

  ‘Goths don’t wear pointy hats, though, do they?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘But you don’t look like your mum,’ said Ffiona. ‘You look ordinary.’

  ‘I know,’ said Betty. ‘It used to upset me, but it’s actually brilliant, because I can do all sorts of magic stuff and no one ever suspects me because I look like a sweet little girl.’

  ‘Can you really do magic?’

  ‘Yes, it’s great,’ said Betty.

  She told Ffiona that all the kids at school knew she was a witch and left her alone.

  ‘A few of the really stupid kids tried to pick on me,’ she explained, ‘but after I turned this disgusting boy who used to live next door to us into a fridge, they pretty well leave me alone.6 So if I let everyone know you’re my friend, you’ll be OK.’

  Ffiona looked so relieved that Betty thought she was going to burst into tears.

  ‘Can you do some magic now?’ Ffiona said.

  ‘OK, though you mustn’t tell my mum, because she made me promise not to,’ said Betty.

  She clicked her fingers and Ffiona’s Barbie doll leapt off the bed, ran three times round the room and vanished under the bed. Ffiona sat wide-eyed with a huge grin on her face. The Barbie doll crawled out from under the bed, shook herself and jumped up into Ffiona’s arms.

  ‘I love you,’ said the doll and then turned back into a normal doll.

  ‘WOW,’ said Ffiona, holding the doll up to her face and shaking it a bit.

  ‘Don’t do that, you’ll give me a headache,’ said the Barbie.

  ‘So you needn’t worry about anyone bothering you at school,’ said Betty. ‘And anyway, our school toilets are too small to flush children down.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness!’ said Ffiona. ‘Shall we go and ask our mums if you can come and visit again tomorrow?’

  ‘Good idea. But you shouldn’t tell your mum about me being a witch,’ Betty added. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  The girls went back downstairs, where Mrs Hulbert was trying to get Mordonna to be enthusiastic about the joys of crochet. Mordonna was biting her tongue to stop herself clicking her fingers and doing some serious magic. What she wanted to do was make seven sheep appear in the Hulberts’ back garden, each one covered in a different very brightly coloured wool. She wanted them to stand in a mystical circle while all their wool leapt off their backs, spun itself into knitting wool, shot up into the clouds at the speed of light before reappearing thirty seconds later as a massive crocheted blanket that covered the whole lawn.

  Instead she drank her tea and ate a coconut biscuit, though she did do one tiny magic trick that made Mrs Hulbert decide to stop buying Women’s Weekly and buy Cosmopolitan instead.

  ‘See, I told you not to judge people by their looks,’ she said to Betty as they walked home.

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ Betty admitted reluctantly. ‘I really like Ffiona.’

  ‘There you go,’ said Mordonna, ‘and I expect I’ll really like Mrs Hulbert too. I must remember to find out what her first name is.’

  For the rest of the holidays Ffiona and Betty saw each other every day. Betty was rather nervous the first time Ffiona came to her house. After all, not many people have a sister who is a small hairy dog called Satanella.7 Nor do they have a sister called Merlinmary who is so hairy she might actually be a he, but no one can get near enough to find out in case they get a severe electric shock. In fact, most people don’t have any relations as weird the Floods.8

  ‘Listen, everyone,’ Betty said at breakfast the first day Ffiona was coming to visit, ‘my new best friend’s coming over today and I don’t want you all to freak her out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Morbid. His twin, Silent, sniggered quietly.

  ‘Come on, you know,’ said Betty. ‘We don’t look like other people and … hey, stop doing that.’

  Morbid and Silent were making slime appear in midair and then run down all over their faces, and it wasn’t nice green slime, it was purple with bits of carrot in it.

  ‘All right, little sister, just for you,’ said Winchflat, and he made his left ear – which he had transplanted to the end of his nose to see if it improved his hearing – go back round to the side of his head.

  ‘And I promise I won’t do anything like this,’ said Merlinmary, setting the curtains on fire with a bolt of lightning.

  ‘OK, OK, that’s enough, children,’ said Mordonna. ‘This little girl is quite shy and she is Betty’s best friend so let’s all be nice to her and act as human as possible.’

  ‘Yeuww, gross,’ said Morbid.

  Only Satanella didn’t do anything silly. She just nudged at Betty’s hand and said, ‘Is the little baby coming too?’

  ‘No, not today,’ said Betty.

  Betty had suggested to Ffiona that she might like to leave her glasses off until she got used to the Flood family, but she needn’t have worried. Her brothers and sisters had only been teasing and did their best to make Ffiona welcome.

  The twins, Morbid and Silent, went as far as falling deeply in love with Ffiona the instant they saw her. It was touching to see their green skin flush pink with shyness. Actually, it wasn’t so much touching as weirdly nauseating. Because although pink and green go together quite well in clothes, they don’t look so great on skin. Their adoring gazes looked like a cross between an unwanted puppy, true love and something that had been dead for four days. Fortunately Ffiona did not realise their weird expressions meant they loved her. She just thought they always looked like that.

  Ffiona shook all four of the twins’ hands about fifty times, and after Betty finally managed to drag her away to meet the rest of the family, the twins put on rubber gloves and said they would
never wash their hands again.

  Satanella didn’t want to freak Ffiona out by seeming to be a talking dog, so she had managed to type her a card, which she laid in Ffiona’s lap. It said:

  ‘You didn’t, did you?’ said Satanella.

  ‘Didn’t what?’ said Ffiona, holding the note at arm’s length to avoid its old-bone-been-buried-for-a-while-and-then-dug-up-again smell.

  ‘Bring your baby brother with you?’

  ‘No, he’s asleep. He keeps putting worms up his nose and it makes him very tired.’

  Ffiona said hello to Winchflat and Valla, and told Nerlin she was pleased to meet him, and she was about to shake hands with Merlinmary but the whole family shouted ‘No!’ and Betty knocked her to the ground before Merlinmary’s friendly lightning could fry Ffiona’s eyebrows.

  She even shook the skeletal hand of the children’s grandmother, Queen Scratchrot, who was buried in the back garden – and she still wasn’t put off when she found bits of grey skin under her fingernails. A bit of decomposing flesh on your hands was a small price to pay for having a best friend.

  Ffiona also found that the twins bringing her glasses of water garnished with frogs’ eyes every five minutes was better than sitting at home trying to avoid crocheting yet another baby blanket.

  ‘Well, they’re actually quite nice,’ she said to Betty, who had chased the twins out of the room. ‘In a slimy sort of way.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Betty, who was still worrying her strange family would frighten Ffiona. ‘You mean, you actually like them?’ She pointed to the frogs’ eyes floating in the glass.

  ‘Yes, now I’m used to them,’ said Ffiona.

  The twins, listening outside the room, thought that Ffiona was talking about them and their hearts almost burst with love. Their eyes rolled back inside their heads and looked at their brains while brown smoke dribbled out of their nostrils, and as everyone knows, happiness just doesn’t get any better than that.

  ‘You know what?’ said Betty. ‘I think you must have a witch or a wizard somewhere in your family.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Well, if you like eating frogs’ eyes,’ said Betty.

  ‘But I can’t do magic or anything like that,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Maybe you’ve just never been shown how.’

  ‘Could you show me?’

  ‘Oh yes, no problem,’ said Betty.

  Although Betty said this with great confidence, she had never done anything like it before and she often got magic spells wrong. Once she had tried to turn a pumpkin and four white mice into a carriage and horses like in Cinderella, but she had ended up with four geography teachers and a camping toilet. The toilet was a big hole in the ground and the geography teachers were in the hole up to their necks, which, of course, many people would agree is the best place for geography teachers.

  Since then she had been under strict instructions from her family to stick to small magic, like giving people spots and making toast appear in funny and embarrassing places. She was expert enough to always have total control over what was on the toast and would change it depending on the situation.

  Naturally she didn’t tell Ffiona any of this.

  Besides, she said to herself, teaching someone else to do magic isn’t the same as trying to do it yourself.

  Betty’s genius brother, Winchflat, had a massive library of magic books in a cellar under the house. There was everything you could ever want to know about magic, from how to turn four geography teachers in a deep smelly hole into a table lamp with choice of lampshade trim, to how to create an entire planet out of 7,653 simple everyday household items.

  Winchflat’s favourite place was Quicklime College, the school he went to in Patagonia. He loved school so much that during the holidays when he was working in his secret workshop – where he was spending a lot of time right now working on something BIG – he would make it look exactly like his school classroom.

  So, while Winchflat was in his secret workshop, Betty and Ffiona went down to his library to find a book on how to teach magic to someone who may or may not have a bit of wizard blood in their veins.

  ‘Nice cobweb,’ said Ffiona, stroking a very hairy spider that was sitting on the door handle.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the spider. ‘Could you move your thumb? It’s squashing my third foot.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Listen, Serge,’ said Betty to the spider. ‘You won’t tell Winchflat or anyone we’ve been in here, will you?’

  ‘Well, umm,’ said Serge, ‘that depends.’

  ‘On what?’ said Betty.

  ‘My sore foot,’ said Serge.

  ‘What about it?’ said Ffiona. ‘I said I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know,’ said Serge. ‘But you have to kiss it better.’

  Serge is one of only six known living examples of the rare Patagonian Hairy Toothed Spider. He was smuggled into Acacia Avenue by Winchflat in his school bag.

  ‘No problem,’ said Ffiona, and she kissed him. Serge’s legs were so hairy they tickled the inside of her nose and made her giggle, which she then had to explain to the spider in case he thought she was laughing at him.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ said Serge.

  When Betty told him, he ran down the door, across the floor and up to a shelf on the far side of the library to an eighty-five volume encyclopaedia. He climbed on top of the books and disappeared over the back. A few seconds later one of the books slowly moved outwards and fell on the floor.

  ‘Something like this?’ he said.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Betty.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Serge. ‘Your brother has eyes like a hawk. In fact he has eyes like a whole flock of Greater Spotted Tiny Mouse-Eating Hawks. He’ll notice the book’s missing the second he comes into the room. You’ll need to do some magic to make a fake book to fill the gap.’

  ‘Oh right, yes. Err…’ said Betty, not wanting Ffiona to see how bad she was at magic. ‘I’m not sure I can remember that particular spell.’

  ‘Oh, but surely…’ Serge began.

  ‘No, I remember now,’ said Betty. ‘At the end of last term my after-school magic teacher said pretend book spells were the first thing we would do next term.’

  ‘Well, you must be able to do something,’ said Serge, but when he saw the expression on Betty’s face he realised she hadn’t the faintest idea what she was doing.

  Betty stared at the encyclopaedia and concentrated. Nothing happened. She closed her eyes, except for the corner of the left one, and concentrated harder. Water began dripping out of the ceiling.

  ‘Oops,’ she said, but it was too late.

  The water ran faster until every one of the remaining eighty-four volumes of the encyclopaedia were soaking wet.

  I am in big trouble, Betty thought, again.

  But the water had done the trick. Each book had swollen up until the gap, where volume six for people whose names begin with ‘F’ had been, closed up.

  ‘That’ll do,’ she said.

  She clicked her fingers and to her amazement the water actually stopped.

  ‘Well, it will probably fool your brother for a while, at least,’ said Serge and, as the two girls left, he climbed onto Betty’s shoulder and whispered, ‘Your secret’s safe with me.’

  Back in Betty’s bedroom, the two girls sat facing each other on the floor.

  ‘Before we begin,’ Betty said, ‘I, umm, err, need to tell you something.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘I’m not the best witch in the world,’ said Betty. ‘I mean, sometimes I make tiny little mistakes.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What I mean is,’ Betty continued, ‘my mum has banned me from doing big magic.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Ffiona asked.

  ‘Well, I’m not allowed to change little things like a sparrow into big things like a vulture, because sometimes I get the words a bit muddled up and when you do magic it’s really, really importan
t to get all the words right. I mean, you don’t just have to use the exact right words, but you’ve also go to get them in the exact right order, and some of the words are very long and some spells have dozens and dozens of words in them,’ Betty explained. ‘But of course you can always undo a spell by saying it all backwards.’

  ‘So even if you use all the right words but say them in the wrong order, it can be dangerous?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Not just dangerous, but weird and sometimes even really funny,’ said Betty. ‘Look.’

  She took off her shoes and put them on the carpet in front of her.

  ‘Now what I should say is:

  Boring shoes,

  Be black no more

  With pearls and rubies shine

  Boring shoes

  Down on the floor

  Make yourselves divine.

  And then they would turn into a fabulous pair of shiny golden slippers all covered in precious jewels.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Ffiona. ‘Do it to my shoes.’

  ‘No, because I always get the words muddled up when I’m saying it as a spell. I’ll show you what happens. Oh, and if I were you I’d get up on the bed.’

  Betty climbed on the bed too, crossed her fingers and her eyes, which is what you have to do to make ordinary words into a spell, and said:

  ‘Boring shoes,

  Be black no more

  With rearls and poobies shine

  Shoring boos

  Down on the floor

  Make yourselves divine.’

  There was a soft pop and Betty’s shoes vanished. A few seconds later there was a lot of thrashing about and strange noises under the bed and a small crocodile appeared.

  ‘See. Now I’ve go to try and remember what I said wrong and then say it all backwards again to undo it,’ said Betty. ‘And if I don’t get it exactly right, the crocodile will probably turn into something worse.’

  The crocodile was scuttling round the room with two Barbie dolls in its mouth. Its tail knocked a chair over and kept banging against the door, until Mordonna called up from the kitchen.