The twins, who secretly enjoyed gardening and only did it at night when no one was watching, taught Igorina how to plant things by digging holes with a shovel, and not with her teeth held in her left hand, as Igorina tried to do at first.
Merlinmary just made her giggle by giving her friendly electric shocks of a few million volts, while Valla introduced her to the joys of blood.
Of course, Winchflat was over the moon at having a mad assistant to help him with his experiments, just like Doctor Frankenstein had in the movie. Whatever Igorina did, Winchflat simply adored her all the more, even when she was helping him build complex and delicate machines and she muddled things up, like pouring a litre of boiling oil into a very complicated and fragile computer instead of handing him the small screwdriver he’d asked her for.
Mordonna, wisely, decided not to teach Igorina how to cook. She tried to teach her how to wash up but no one would eat anything off the plates after she had washed them, because, being a waterwise creature, Igorina cleaned everything by putting it into her mouth and sucking all the old food off. She even got Winchflat to modify the end of her tongue so she could get the hard-to-reach bits stuck between the prongs of the forks.
Nerlin decided that the only thing he could teach Igorina to do was to wash and polish the car, which didn’t take long because the Floods didn’t have a car. Mr Hulbert had a company car, now, though, so Igorina went round to their house every Friday night and cleaned it. This also involved respraying the car because she was so enthusiastic at cleaning the dirt off that she cleaned all the paint off too. All the neighbours thought the Hulberts had become rather eccentric because they seemed to have a different coloured car every week.
Mrs Hulbert had to have a long lie down after she showed Igorina how to do embroidery and the creature had sewn all her fingers together.
‘Though I must say,’ Mrs Hulbert admitted, ‘she did it with very neat stitches and in exquisite colours.’
‘I suppose it comes from having been sewn together herself,’ said Mordonna.
The two families were sitting on the Floods’ back verandah drinking slurpies, some of which did not contain body parts. It was a warm summer’s Friday night and everyone was feeling very relaxed.
‘You know what would be nice?’ said Mordonna.
‘What’s that, my darling?’ said Nerlin.
‘A nice holiday at the seaside,’ said Queen Scratchrot from inside her coffin.39
‘Once again, Mother, you have read my thoughts,’ said Mordonna.
‘We could all go,’ said Nerlin. ‘Both families.’
‘What a great idea,’ said Mr and Mrs Hulbert.
Even though Betty and Ffiona had borrowed the How To Teach Magic To Someone Who May Or May Not Have A Bit Of Wizard’s Blood In Their Veins book from Winchflat, it was agreed by everyone that Ffiona was quite magical enough already and there was no need to perform any spells on her. This was great relief to everyone, especially Ffiona, who had realised quite a while ago that what happened when Betty did magic was only very remotely connected to what she had meant to happen.
Betty had to spend three days in Winchflat’s library ironing all the wet books until they were dry. Then she had to spend another three days mending all the books she had set on fire when she had tried to use a very small dragon with the flame turned down really low, but not as low as she had thought, to help her do the drying.
And in case you were wondering what life was like at Sunnyview School after Bridie had been thrown out and all the other bullies had quietly changed their ways, it was like a lot of school: too boring to write about.
FOOTNOTES
1 Don’t try this at home.
2 And of course you should never compare excitement to a wet fish in a bucket of mud. I have at least three cousins who are nowhere near as exciting as a bucket of mud, even one with no fish in it at all.
3 This was exactly what Winchflat was doing.
4 Skivvytex is a disgusting leather-look plastic made from environmentally nauseous recycled Belgian beach sandals. Greenies love Skivvytex even though it uses ten times as much energy to recycle it as it would to make brand new plastic.
5 You may find this hard to believe but there are girls who really do get called things like Ffion and Aaaqil and Ffarjon, especially in Wales, where everyone thinks with a stutter.
6 See The Floods 1: Neighbours.
7 Actually, not many people have a sister called Satanella.
8 Though I did have an Uncle Claude who spent the last fifteen years of his life living in a large bucket of preserved eggs in the mistaken belief that the liquid would also preserve him, which it did. It didn’t stop him from dying but it did stop bits of him rotting away after he had died.
9 Although Mordonna kept taking the crocodile away from Betty, she never took it far enough and, being addicted to the fluff from Betty’s socks, which collected under her bed, it always found its way back there.
10 Winchflat calculated on his mega-powerful computer that there was a 98% chance of the twins swapping names with each other at last seventeen more times – and that it was quite likely they had done it before.
11 One of the teachers, Miss Tankard, always wore a very thick skirt that she could have tucked into her boots, but then her legs were so short there was barely room to fit her knees in.
12 I’m sure you’ve noticed that it’s always the shortest one in the middle of a group of bullies who is the biggest coward and does all the talking.
13 Ffiona’s parent thought stamp collecting was a bit too exotic for their family, what with all the bright colours and foreign words on lots of the stamps. They encouraged Ffiona to collect dead leaves, which were nice safe brown colours and had no words or pictures on them at all (apart from one leaf Ffiona’s mother had inherited from her grandmother, which actually had a picture on it that looked exactly like the baby Jesus).
14 So remember, next time you get an email asking you to enter your secret details, it’s probably from Bridie’s mum.
15 This, of course, is how most teachers want parents to feel and, like doctors, their training includes lessons in how to make people feel silly and inferior. Their argument to support this is that most people really are silly and inferior.
16 As everyone knows, Deaf Ears are one of the main requirements for someone to become a headmaster. To be a headmistress, you need Deaf Ears and thick lace-up shoes.
17 Training in The Easiest Thing to Do is another qualification required before becoming a school principal.
18 There aren’t actually any photos of Transylvania Waters, not because cameras are banned, but because it is so damp there that they go rusty and stop working in less than twenty-four hours. There are a few paintings, but because Transylvania Waters is an enchanted place, if anyone tries to paint something bad, it changes into a pretty landscape with baby rabbits and lovely flowers.
19 In the back of this book you will find a page from What Hair. Click Here
20 They have no whiskers in their right ears because they sleep with that ear to the wall.
21 Although the book was a bestseller in the world of wizards, large bits of it were completely useless because some of the authors had never actually lived among humans or done any proper research.
22 See The Floods 3: Home & Away.
23 They had actually taught her two things. The second one was a rather nice recipe for upside-down cake, which she had never made because an upside-down cake seemed too much like showing off.
24 See The Floods 1: Neighbours.
25 You should NEVER use power tools at all except under adult supervision, and only then if the adult is not Belgian or less than fifty centimetres tall.
26 Twenty-three if you counted the two pockets as well, and twenty-five if you added the two spare ones sewn inside the hem.
27 This made her wonder if undoing her top button had been such a good idea after all.
28 And now I’ve written that, I’ll have to go into my ki
tchen and eat some too. By the way, if you’re ever in Bellingen make sure you go to the Gelato Bar and get some too because it is brilliant.
29 The cucumber sandwiches, being a lot lighter, had shot up over their heads, and missed them. One even got caught up in a cloud and was later rained down onto a very confused postman in a small Hebridean village.
30 I cannot tell you what numbers one and two on the list are because they are just too gross to write down.
31 What Mrs Hulbert was thinking was, ‘What the hell’, but she had never said the ‘H’ word before and although she was feeling very relaxed, she wasn’t quite ready to go that far.
32 Humans usually use an old-fashioned sixpence, which is far more dangerous. At least if you swallow a rat’s foot, it tastes nice and won’t choke you like a small coin could.
33 A halibut is a type of fish. Mr Gross, who lived up to his name, always called Mr Hulbert halibut.
34 Queen Scratchrot will enjoy eating a dead Mr Gross because a diet of cats, mice and encyclopedia salesmen can get a bit boring no matter how much tomato sauce you use.
35 Wizards can actually take out their breaths and hold them in their hands. They often do it for a laugh at parties to make everyone think they are dead.
36 Which, of course, is something all hippos do at least three times a day.
37 My grandson Walter, who is eight months old, has just learned to say Mama and Dada, but he is still learning to remember to open his mouth before he says the word and not halfway through.
38 A small ant that was also in the corner looked at the mutating purple stuff and thought, It’ll end in tears. Which it may well do in another book because that’s the sort of thing that happens with purple stuff.
39 The queen has a small mouthpiece that she attaches to the end of her rat-soup funnel so people who can’t hear her inside their heads can also hear what she is saying.
Everybody needs good neighbours…
The Floods aren’t like other families – for a start, they’re all witches and wizards. And they weren’t made in the traditional way like you or me. Some of Nerlin and Mordonna Flood’s six eldest children were made in the cellar, using an ancient recipe book and a very big turbocharged wand. The youngest child, Betty, is a normal, pretty little girl – but her attempts at magic never go the way she plans.
The next-door neighbours should have known better than to annoy a family of witches and wizards. But they did, and they’re about to find out what the Floods do to bad neighbours.
Look through a murky arched window in deepest Patagonia, and this is what you might see…
Every day five of the Flood children travel halfway round the world to Quicklime College, the ultimate school for witches and wizards. There’s no time for silly games flying around on broomsticks. Sports day is coming up, and before you even wonder how four-legged Satanella copes with the three-legged race, here’s a secret for you. Orkward Warlock, the vilest child in the school, and his sidekick, The Toad, hate the big happy Floods family. And they’re plotting to kill the Floods – on sports day.
The Floods family are on the run!
Travel back in time to faraway Transylvania Waters and find out what happened when a lowly drain cleaner called Nerlin Flood fell in love with the royal princess Mordonna. Can the two escape from an explosively angry King Quatorze, the nastiest spies in the land, and the prospect of life down the toilet? Why does their eldest child, Valla, drink blood? Was Satanella really turned into a dog because of an accident with a prawn and a faulty wand? This is your chance to find out how all the Floods children came to be born – or created.
How Much Blood and Fear Can YOU Handle?
It was a dark and moonless night and in
the darkness something stirred…
OUT NOW!
The body had obviously been dead for a while. Grass had started growing out of its nose and a family of Patagonian Pocket Mice had built a nest in one of the jacket sleeves.
CSI special investigator Septic took out his blue torch and shone it in the corpse’s face. The body was out in broad daylight so the torch light was barely visible, but the blue torch was always the first thing Septic used at a crime scene and rules were rules, especially in forensic science.
Putting on a pair of rubber gloves, Septic began to go through the victim’s pockets.
‘Interesting,’ he said, holding up a small brown object and handing it to his assistant, Oily. ‘Bag this.’
Oily put the object in his mouth and sucked it. He rolled it around with his tongue, frowned, sucked it some more then swallowed it.
‘I said bag it, not eat it,’ said Septic. ‘I wanted it analysed back in the lab.’
‘No need, boss,’ said Oily. ‘I can tell you all you need to know. Treacle toffee from a small town in Belgium. Unlike normal Belgian treacle toffee, which is made with one hundred percent local products, this one has been tampered with. It contained treacle from Transylvania Waters.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ Septic asked.
‘Because only Transylvania Waters treacle contains lethal amounts of arsenic,’ said Oily and dropped down dead.
‘Fair enough,’ said Septic.
This sort of thing happened all the time and the Crime Scene Investigation department always kept at least ten Oily clones on hand to cover the sudden assistant-becoming-dead situations that occurred about four times a week. Septic spoke into his phone and a couple of minutes later an identical assistant arrived.
‘Your first observation?’ said Septic.
‘Our killer was a very considerate person,’ said Oily.
‘How so?’
‘Well, look where we are, chief,’ Oily replied. ‘In the school graveyard. I mean, we’ve got less than ten metres to go to bury the body.’
‘That’s another thing,’ said Septic. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange for a school to have a graveyard?’
The two investigators and the dead body were standing at the entrance to the graveyard at Quicklime College, the famous yet very secretive school where all the students were witches and wizards apart from a few ghosts and ogres.1 This was the school where five of the Flood children went every day.
And the dead body was standing, not lying down like dead people are supposed to. It was leaning against the left stone gatepost with an absent-minded expression on its face as if it had been waiting for a bus rather than being in a becoming-dead situation. What made the scene even more mysterious was that the victim, although dead in Patagonia in South America, had half a return ticket clutched in his left hand for the journey from Bruges Town Hall to the city morgue, which was many thousands of kilometres away in Europe.2
‘So, do you think the victim was Belgian, chief?’ said Oily.
‘Possibly,’ said Septic. ‘Though of course, he could have been a bus ticket collector.’
This turned out to be the case, because a search of all the victim’s pockets turned up bus tickets from eighteen other countries, including Wales and Tristan da Cunha, which doesn’t even have a bus service…
1 There were not enough ghosts and ogres of school age to support a school of their own so they were allowed to study at Quicklime’s along with the regular students and the Smith-Klaxon cannibal triplets.
2 Of course, bright readers will know already that Patagonia is in South America and that Bruges is a town in Belgium, which in Europe, and that the two countries are on opposite sides of the world, but unfortunately some of you might have teachers who know a bit less about geography than a blind upside-down cave fish and who think Bruges are those purple marks you get on your skin when you bang yourself.
HOW TO LIVE FOREVER
The Floods
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