And maybe, she thought, Betty has a little brother who could be Claude’s friend.
She decided to ask the whole Flood family over for afternoon tea, but first she had to go to the library and get out a book to find out exactly what afternoon teas were. She had heard about them, but had never had one or been to one or even seen one on television, because the Hulberts didn’t have a television, though she had heard a play on the radio once where everyone had had afternoon tea and it had sounded quite nice with lots of tinkling tea cups and cucumber sandwiches.
Mrs Hulbert had bought her first cucumber earlier that week. She had always thought they were a bit too exotic for the likes of her family and buying it had made her feel quite daring. She hadn’t actually eaten any of it or told Mr Hulbert about it, but every morning she looked at it sitting in the fridge and felt her life was about to get a lot more exciting.
‘There’s probably a magazine about them,’ Mr Hulbert suggested. ‘Something like Afternoon Teas Weekly.’
But before she could get herself down to the newsagents or the library, Mordonna came over to the Hulberts’ house and invited them over for a barbie the next Sunday.
‘Well, that’s sorted that out, then,’ Mr Hulbert said. ‘We’ll find out all about afternoon tea and then we’ll know exactly what to do when we ask them back.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Hulbert. ‘But I don’t understand about the barbie. Does she mean Ffiona is supposed to take her doll?’
‘I suppose we’d better have cucumber sandwiches,’ said Mordonna. ‘They’d be the sort of thing refined people like the Hulberts would expect.’
‘The Hulberts aren’t posh, Mum,’ said Betty. ‘They’re just ordinary people like us.’
‘Sweetheart, how many times do I have to remind you?’ said Mordonna. ‘Nobody is like us.’
‘No, I know, Mum,’ said Betty. ‘What I mean is, they’re not stuck up at all. They’re nice, normal people.’
‘Yes, darling, and nice, normal people eat cucumber sandwiches for afternoon tea,’ said Mordonna. ‘I’ve seen it on the Lifestyle Channel. They have white pepper and the crusts cut off.’
‘So no bat kebabs or rat rissoles then,’ said Nerlin, who was sitting at the kitchen table sharpening his skewers.
‘I don’t think so, but you’d better check in the book, darling.’
The book which Mordonna was referring to was probably the most useful book a wizard or witch can have when they are trying to live as unobtrusively as possible in the so-called ‘normal’ human world.
The first edition was written in 1683 by one of Nerlin’s relatives and was called Grandma Floode’s Book of Ye Handy Hintes. Since then the ‘e’s and ‘ye’ have been dropped so the current edition of the book is called Granny Flood’s Book of Handy Hints. There have been suggestions that it should be called something cooler and more modern like Humans for Dummies, but most readers agree the title it has is nice and comforting, which is exactly what wizards and witches need when trying to deal with the weird and frightening world of humans.
The book has tons of information on things that wizards find perfectly OK that simply freak humans out. For example, humans get really distressed if they buy a sandwich, take a big bite and then find a long black hair in it. They even get upset if it turns out to be one of their own hairs. But wizards, on the other hand, quite often will add hairs to their meals to enhance the eating experience. In wizardy countries like Transylvania Waters you can buy packets of hairs specially for putting in food, and there is quite an industry surrounding the whole thing, including a monthly magazine called What Hair,19 hair-flavoured crisps and a Hair of the Month Club. The hair generally agreed to be the very best for food enhancement is from the almost extinct Pocket Vampire Bat. Only the whiskers from its left ear are used and as each bat only has seven whiskers in its left ear,20 they are staggeringly expensive. It is said that to eat something with one of these hairs in it is like dying and being carried up to heaven by an angel made entirely of milk chocolate who sings to you in a voice sweeter than condensed milk. Some claim the nasal hairs from the legendary Himalayan Yeti are even better, though most people don’t believe yetis exist, and no one actually knows anyone who had eaten one of these hairs, but lots of people know someone who claims they know someone who knows someone who had a friend who…
The part of the book Mordonna was referring to was the Equivalents section, where you look up the wizard food and it gives you the human equivalent.
‘Bat kebabs, bat kebabs,’ said Nerlin, flicking through the pages. ‘Amazing. It says cucumber sandwiches with white pepper and the crusts cut off.’
‘See, I told you,’ said Mordonna. ‘What about the rat rissoles? What’s the human equivalent of them?’
‘Ratatouille.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes,’ said Nerlin, ‘and it sounds dreadful. It’s got absolutely no rat in it at all, just those horrible vegetable things.’
‘Well, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,’ said Mordonna, ‘humans are weird.’
‘These cucumber sandwiches?’ said Betty. ‘Won’t they taste odd cooked on the barbie?’
‘Not according to the book,’ said Nerlin. ‘That’s what you do, spray them with oil, cook them on the barbie and then cover them with tomato sauce.’21
‘Right. Morbid, you go down to the petrol station and get a litre of oil,’ said Mordonna. ‘And Betty, see if you can find if we’ve got the human sort of tomato sauce stuff, not the one with blood in that your granny likes.’
After reading the book some more, Mordonna made cucumber sandwiches, which she had to throw away after Betty said she didn’t think the Hulberts would enjoy sandwiches cut out in the shape of human skulls. She then made a second batch and cut them into squares, which everyone agreed was nowhere near as attractive. Nerlin put on a face mask and some rubber gloves and cut up a whole lot of vegetables, which Betty cooked into ratatouille. She had to do this blindfolded to resist the almost uncontrollable desire to add bits of rat.
‘But a few dried tails would make the whole thing taste so much better,’ she kept saying, and everyone agreed.
‘I know, I know,’ Mordonna said. ‘Nevertheless, we won’t put them in.’
‘Well, what about a few hairs?’ Betty suggested. ‘Just mild ones like rabbit.’
‘No.’
The twins were beside themselves – which meant there were four of them – at the thought of Ffiona being at their house for a whole afternoon. They made a huge tray of cakes in all sorts of strange shapes and colours, some of which were very rude – especially the ones that looked exactly like human . Satanella spent all of Saturday practising not biting anyone, while Merlinmary charged up the garden lights. Even Valla, who was at work at the Blood Bank all day, made some bright red decorations to hang in the trees. They looked remarkably like red blood corpuscles, but Mordonna guessed that the Hulberts probably didn’t know what blood cells looked like so she didn’t make him change them.
‘If they ask, we’ll say they are the national emblem of Transylvania Waters,’ she said.
‘They are,’ said Valla.
The only thing they still needed was a barbecue, so Nerlin and Winchflat went down to one of the cellars and made one. Considering neither of them actually knew what a barbecue looked like, this was quite an achievement, but hey, wizards can do that sort of stuff.
Sunday arrived with wind, clouds and rain, but Winchflat went down to his cellar, twiddled a few knobs on his ‘Perpetual Sunshine Machine’ and all the wind shrivelled up and vanished while the clouds went off to annoy Belgium. He adjusted the temperature gauge and the air grew comfortably warm. Merlinmary breathed flames onto some fallen branches and made charcoal for the barbecue.
‘Now, I want everyone to be on their best behaviour,’ said Mordonna. ‘The Hulberts are shy sort of people so I don’t want to see any body parts being dragged round the garden. If you do play catch or fetch with the children, Satanella, do i
t with a red rubber ball, not a knotted ball of pig’s intestines.’
Along the road, Mrs Hulbert was giving her family similar instructions. ‘Now, I want everyone to be on their best behaviour,’ she said. ‘The Floods are not like other people, but Mrs Flood and Betty have been very nice so I’m sure the rest of the family will be too. And remember, they are the only family that has come and said hello to us since we moved in.’
This bird was flying by when it saw the Hulberts and fell asleep from boredom.
‘Don’t worry, they’re all nice, Mum,’ said Ffiona. ‘They might look a bit weird – well, actually, some of them look very weird indeed – but they are really nice.’
This was said for the benefit of Mr Hulbert, who was very, very, very, very normal and tended to get quite nervous when he came into contact with anything that was the slightest bit out of the ordinary. A car painted in fluorescent pink with blue spots on the doors passed him once and it upset him for a week. Mrs Hulbert ironed all the folds out of the newspaper every morning so he wouldn’t worry about missing any words in the creases.
Ffiona’s little brother, Claude, was young enough to think everything was exciting. He had only learned to walk a few months earlier – though he was still much better at falling over than standing up. He was also just starting to speak words that made sense, and now had a vocabulary that included the words goo, poo, and Ffuffuff, which is what he called Ffiona, and ughherr, which was what he called everyone else. He was still much too young to have caught his parents’ anxiety.
‘I don’t suppose Betty’s got a younger brother or sister who could play with Claude, has she?’ said Mrs Hulbert as they walked down the road.
‘No, Betty’s the youngest,’ said Ffiona.
‘Oh well.’
But Mrs Hulbert needn’t have worried. As the Floods front gate opened itself to let the Hulberts in, a lot of things happened at once. Firstly, Mordonna released a mega squirt of relaxing-with-witches powder into the air, making sure a good shot of it went up Mr Hulbert’s nose.
Secondly, Claude saw Satanella and went racing towards her, with Mrs Hulbert trying to rescue him. As he reached Satanella, the toddler tripped on the path and fell over, but instead of crashing down on the concrete and hurting himself, he landed on a nice soft dog as Satanella threw herself underneath him.
‘Goo, poo, ffuffuff, ughherr,’ he chuckled as he buried his face in Satanella’s fur.
‘Goo, poo, ffuffuff, Satanella,’ said Satanella, licking Claude’s face.
‘Wow, I’ve never licked a baby human before,’ she added. ‘Of course, I’ve always wanted to. Who hasn’t? And now I have, they taste even nicer than I imagined, a sort of mixture of stewed prunes and earth.’
‘That’s what he was eating before we came here,’ said Ffiona.
‘D-d … d-d … did that dog, um, err, speak?’ said Mrs Hulbert.
Mr Hulbert just stood open-mouthed. There was nothing in his brain that said what you’re supposed to do when you hear a dog talk, so all he could do was stare.
‘Let me explain,’ said Mordonna, putting her arm round Mrs Hulbert’s shoulder and taking her into the house.
‘Let me explain,’ said Nerlin, putting his arm round Mr Hulbert’s shoulder and walking him down the back garden to his shed.
‘I think that went well,’ said Betty.
‘Compared to what?’ said Ffiona and the two girls burst out laughing.
When they heard Ffiona laugh, Morbid and Silent were so overcome with love and blushes that they had to run and hide in their room.
‘I wonder if she will ever marry me,’ Morbid said to himself as they looked down into the garden where the two girls were playing with Claude and Satanella.
How can she? Silent said inside his twin’s head. She’s going to marry me.
Now in the human world this sort of situation would lead to terrible fights and possibly even murder, but wizards are a lot more intelligent than humans and can usually find much more civilised solutions to their problems, solutions that generally avoid killing each other, though sometimes someone might get turned into a toad.
‘When we are old enough to get married,’ said Morbid, ‘we’ll get Winchflat to photocopy Ffiona so we can both marry her.’
Just so long as we make sure that neither of us ever finds out which is the original and which the copy, Silent telepathed. Agreed?
‘Agreed,’ said Morbid.
The twins squeezed the insides out of a Giant Transylvanian Slime Worm and wiped it on each other’s faces, which is the wizard version of spitting on your palm and shaking hands.
‘Maybe we could get him to make three photocopies,’ said Morbid. ‘Then we could have a spare Ffiona each.’
I don’t think he’d do that, said Silent.
The twins realised that if they did marry two Ffionas, it would be the end of being wizards, not for them, but for any children that they might have. Because it is a well-known fact that if a wizard or witch marries someone who is not a wizard or witch, none of their children will be able to do any magic at all. There was a rumour a few years ago that a taxi driver who had a witch for a mother but an ordinary human for a father could do magic, but it was all a misunderstanding. The Magic Examiners came and told him to turn his taxi into something.
‘No problem, mate,’ he said.
He grabbed hold of the steering wheel and turned it into a side street.
Sitting at the table in the Floods kitchen with what appeared to be completely normal human cups of tea, Mordonna explained to Mrs Hulbert that Satanella wasn’t really a dog but her daughter, who had been changed into a dog by accident.22
‘So there’s nothing weird to get worried about,’ she said. ‘Satanella isn’t a talking dog at all, she’s a little girl.’
‘Oh, umm, right,’ said Mrs Hulbert.
‘Though when I was a girl, my grandmother had a whippet that could recite its nine times table up to nine times six,’ Mordonna added, ‘but that’s not really the same thing.’
‘No, yes, umm, I see,’ said Mrs Hulbert.
The inside of her head was very confused. On the one hand, Mordonna was the only person in Acacia Avenue who had been friendly since they had moved there. On the other hand, her new friend had a small talking dog that she said was her daughter. But if Mrs Hulbert’s parents had taught her one useful thing,23 it was that you should never judge a book by its cover. The Floods might look weird, but they were kind and friendly and since Ffiona had met Betty, she had been happier than ever before. So Mrs Hulbert decided that if Mordonna said the little dog was her daughter, she would believe her.
Through the window, Mrs Hulbert could see Claude tottering around the garden after Satanella, who was tossing a big red rubber ball up in the air. He was grinning and laughing and waving his little arms around in total happiness. And every time he tripped over his feet, which he did every ten steps or so, Satanella always managed to throw herself underneath him to cushion his fall. As Mrs Hulbert watched, Claude and Satanella landed on top of a flower-covered mound near the clothesline. The ground parted slightly and a skeleton arm came up out of the earth. It patted Claude gently on the head, ran its fingers through Satanella’s fur and vanished back into the ground.
Don’t panic, said the cautious voice that lives inside the head of all slightly nervous people like Mrs Hulbert.
‘Don’t panic,’ said Mordonna. ‘That’s just my mother saying hello. Nothing to worry about, she adores little children.’
‘Right, OK, lovely.’
‘More tea?’ said Mordonna. ‘I wonder what the boys are up to. It’s probably time we should be lighting the barbie.’
‘I don’t think Ffiona brought her Barbie with her,’ said Mrs Hulbert.
‘It’s not the doll, Mummy,’ said Ffiona as she and Betty came into the kitchen. ‘Mrs Flood means the barbecue.’
Meanwhile, Nerlin had taken Mr Hulbert to the shed at the bottom of the garden because he’d seen on TV that the
shed was where blokes went to do blokey things. Nerlin hadn’t built this shed. It had belonged to the previous owners of number 11, the Dents,24 and it was full of all the usual things that human men have in sheds: a couple of very grubby worn-out armchairs complete with mouse nests in the stuffing, a rusty fridge, dozens of broken household items like old toasters and video machines, and lots and lots of tools. There was everything from screwdrivers and angle grinders right up to a huge electric welder.
Nerlin was hoping Mr Hulbert could explain what all these things were for. Unfortunately, Mr Hulbert was not a shed type of man either. He was more a stamp-collecting man.
Nerlin didn’t want to admit he knew nothing about all the stuff, so he decided to bluff.
‘So how about this then, eh?’ he said, taking a bright yellow electric chainsaw off a shelf.
‘Very nice,’ said Mr Hulbert, who also didn’t want to admit he hadn’t the faintest idea what the thing was. ‘It looks very powerful.’
‘I should say so,’ said Nerlin, and pulled the starting cord.25
The chainsaw roared into life with such a loud scream that Nerlin dropped it. Unless you are in zero gravity, which neither Nerlin nor the chainsaw were, when you drop things they tend to fall downwards. And downwards was where Nerlin’s feet lived.
The chainsaw flapped around for a bit and then stopped. The reason it stopped was because it was jammed, and what it was jammed on was Nerlin’s ankle.
‘Oops,’ said Nerlin. He picked up his foot, which was now sitting under the workbench.
Mr Hulbert fainted.
‘It’s all right,’ said Nerlin. ‘It’s only one foot. I’ve got another one.’
Mr Hulbert said nothing on account of still being in a just-fainted situation. Nerlin picked him up and sat him in one of the old armchairs. Instinctively, even though two minutes ago he hadn’t known what an electric drill was, he plugged a drill in, stuck a paintbrush in the chuck and turned it on. The bristles spun round, creating a draft of fresh air, which brought Mr Hulbert round.
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