by R. A. Spratt
‘He is a Piggins,’ Nanny Piggins reminded them. ‘So yes, he does have one extraordinary ability.’
‘What is it?’ asked the publicist optimistically. ‘I hope it sells books.’
‘He has a unique and unparalleled talent for running away from angry people,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Is that a talent?’ asked Samantha.
‘Oh yes,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Think about it. If you were so inadequate and your sisters were so brilliant and you had a tendency to claim credit for their accomplishments, you’d learn to be good at running away too.’
‘But Nanny Piggins, how can he run when he’s so . . .’ Derrick did not like to say the word.
‘Fat?’ supplied Nanny Piggins. ‘Yes, I know. But he is still a pig and therefore a gifted athlete compared to a mere human. Plus he somehow manages to use his greater weight to his advantage by doing lots of plunging, plummeting and sinking when he is on the run.’
‘So that’s it?’ asked Samantha. ‘It’s all over?’
‘Not at all,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Now we have to find him and punish him.’
‘But how?’ asked Derrick.
‘Luckily I had the foresight to bake a GPS tracking device into a shortbread cookie that I slipped into my brother’s pocket yesterday while I was giving him a noogie,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Could you bake me a whole batch of those cookies so I can keep track of all my authors?’ asked the publicist.
Nanny Piggins retrieved a handheld radar device from the pocket of her dress. (She had broken the heart of many a European designer by insisting they include pockets in their couture frocks.) She switched it on and a green blip appeared on the screen. ‘That’s him!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘Bramwell is the green blip. Follow me.’
And so Nanny Piggins followed the blip, the children and the publicist followed Nanny Piggins and the crowd of Bramwell fans followed them all, determined to get their books signed.
They tracked Bramwell down the road, over a fence (or more accurately through a fence, which had collapsed when Bramwell tried to climb it), along a wall, under shrubbery, out onto another road, into a cake shop (with particularly delicious lamingtons) and down an alley, where they reached a dead end.
‘Do you think he climbed one of these buildings?’ asked Samantha, looking up at the six-storey walls surrounding them on three sides.
Nanny Piggins looked at her monitor and the blip clearly moving away from them. ‘No,’ she said. ‘When you have the physique of my brother you never go up when you could go down.’
They all looked at Nanny Piggins’ feet. She was standing on a manhole.
‘Into the sewers?’ asked Derrick. ‘But that’s disgusting.’
‘As is my brother,’ said Nanny Piggins sadly.
‘It’s so unhygienic,’ said Samantha.
‘And stinky,’ added Michael.
‘My brother is no stranger to stink,’ revealed Nanny Piggins. ‘He once went an entire calendar year without taking a bath.’
‘What happened?’ asked Derrick. (He had long wondered what would happen if he never took a bath, aside from having much more time to read comics.)
‘The stench became so unbearable that my sister Wendy waited until he was asleep, taped a high-powered hose to the inside of his trouser leg, then turned the hose on,’ remembered Nanny Piggins. ‘He was blasted with water from the inside out. Eventually his clothes swelled up with the pressurised water until they exploded off and he was left clean as a whistle.’
‘I bet that taught him a lesson,’ said Samantha.
‘No, actually it taught Wendy a lesson. Because then Bramwell didn’t go and buy new clothes for three weeks,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘and the only thing worse than a stinky brother is a naked brother.’
‘So are you going to let him disappear into the sewers?’ asked Michael.
‘Of course not,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I brought a bag of marshmallows in anticipation of precisely this eventuality.’
‘How will eating marshmallows help?’ asked Derrick.
‘I’m not going to eat them,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’m going to shove them up my nose, and I suggest you do the same if you are coming with me.’ And with that Nanny Piggins shoved two pink marshmallows into her snout and heaved the manhole cover aside. As the first wave of stench wafted up, the children and Boris hastily shoved marshmallows into their own noses. The crowd of Bramwell fans backed away, realising they did not want their books signed by someone who would willingly climb down into that odour. Only the publicist lunged forward, catching Nanny Piggins by the sleeve.
‘Before you go,’ said the publicist, ‘is there any chance I could sign you to a multi-book deal? Because if your brother does prove to be a huge fraud and we have to pulp all his books for legal reasons, we will be looking to sign a new pig adventurer.’
‘Me write books!’ scoffed Nanny Piggins. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I’m far too busy having adventures to waste my time writing about them.’
‘But we could get you a ghost writer,’ argued the publicist.
‘I absolutely refuse to work with ghosts,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Just because they are trapped for eternity between worlds doesn’t give them the right to go around waking people up with their wailing.’
And with that she disappeared down into the black stinking hole.
The sewers turned out to be every bit as unpleasant as you might imagine. They were smelly, slimy and wet. The absolute last place you should go if you happened to be wearing a suede, lemon-coloured bodysuit. But Nanny Piggins was on a mission and therefore heedless of her appearance.
‘This way,’ she whispered. (You should always whisper in a sewer so as not to attract the attention of the rats.) They set off following the blip, only now they moved more slowly and cautiously. (The sewer is one place you really do not want to fall over.)
As the morning wore on they got closer and closer to the blip. Bramwell actually moved quicker than his sister, because he dived into the sewers like they were waterslides, slipping and sliding from one tunnel to the next. But he also stopped to rest all the time and that is how Nanny Piggins and the children gained ground on him.
After several hours they finally had him within reach. ‘He’s just up ahead,’ whispered Nanny Piggins excitedly. ‘Down this tunnel and around the bend.’
They crept forward quietly until they got to the corner. Then Nanny Piggins leapt out to confront her brother.
‘Aha! There’s no escaping now!’ she yelled.
But Bramwell was not there.
‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Nanny Piggins, looking down at her monitor. The blip had disappeared.
‘Look,’ called Derrick. He was pointing to a shower of shortbread cookie crumbs on the floor.
‘Oh no,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘He found the shortbread cookie and ate it.’
‘Won’t the tracking device still work in his stomach?’ asked Michael.
‘I doubt it. Mother taught us to chew all our food 32 times,’ said Nanny Piggins forlornly.
And so Nanny Piggins and the children had to abandon their pursuit of Bramwell. They climbed out of the sewers and made their way home. Which was almost as unpleasant as being in the sewers, because everyone they walked past leapt away in horror, or fainted from the stench of their now ruined clothes. Nanny Piggins’ beautiful suede bodysuit was certainly not lemon-coloured anymore.
After they got home and had scrubbed themselves vigorously with several bars of soap for a considerable amount of time, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children gathered in the kitchen to cheer themselves up with a few serves of banoffee pudding (a wonderful confection of banana, toffee and cream that is excellent for restoring spirits).
‘Are you terribly disappointed that you didn’t catch Bram
well?’ Michael asked his nanny.
‘Not really,’ said Nanny Piggins, between bites. ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up again some day – posing as someone incredibly glamorous like an astronaut, or a race car driver, or a nanny – and when he does, I’ll bite him.’ (Eating pudding always made her feel philosophical.)
‘I’m exhausted,’ said Boris. ‘When they built those sewers I don’t think they had ten-foot-tall bears in mind. I banged my head so many times.’
‘I told you not to do so much leaping in the air,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘I can’t help it. I’m a ballet dancer,’ said Boris. ‘I always do a grand jeté when I see a rat.’
Boris took a bucket of honey from the cupboard and trudged out to his shed. The children and Nanny Piggins were just helping themselves to their seventh servings of banoffee pudding when their munching was interrupted by a bloodcurdling scream.
‘Yaaaaaaggghhhhh!’
‘That sounded like Boris,’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins, leaping to her trotters.
But then there was a second even more blood- curdling scream.
‘Wwaaaaaagggghhhhh!’ said another screamer.
They all burst out the back door just as Boris burst out of the shed. (Unfortunately he missed the doorway and smashed out a bear-shaped portion of wall.)
‘Sarah, save me!’ Boris squealed. ‘There’s someone in my bed.’
‘Not that Goldilocks again!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Why won’t she leave you poor bears alone and take a nap in her own house for once?’
‘I don’t think it is Goldilocks this time,’ said Boris, ‘unless she has gained weight.’
Nanny Piggins and the children peered through the large hole in the shed wall. On Boris’ bed they could see an enormous lump, not unlike a huge beach ball covered in a blanket.
‘That lump looks familiar,’ said Nanny Piggins as she climbed into the shed and picked up a garden trowel. She then gave the lump a sharp whack. And lo and behold her brother leapt up, screaming.
‘Bramwell!’ exclaimed the children.
‘Why on earth would he go to so much trouble to run away from you, only to come here?’ marvelled Samantha.
‘Because he might have a genius for escape,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but he is still a nitwit.’
‘I had nowhere else to go,’ blubbered Bramwell, still rubbing his bottom. (Which was not easy because his arms were barely long enough to reach it). ‘I spent all my book advance on cupcakes. And no hotel will take me. I have been blacklisted from anywhere that serves a buffet breakfast.’
‘But why come here?’ asked Derrick.
‘I didn’t think anyone would notice me in the shed,’ said Bramwell.
‘Normally that is true,’ said Boris. He certainly had gone unnoticed living there for the longest time. And a ten-foot-tall bear is even more eye-catching than a four-foot-wide pig.
‘Well, you can’t stay here,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You’ll just have to go back to your old job.’
‘Bramwell has a job?’ asked Michael.
‘Yes, he is a waste disposal technician at a factory,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘He takes out garbage?’ asked Derrick.
‘Not exactly,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘He eats it.’
‘What?!’ exclaimed the children, thinking that Bramwell was even more unhygienic than they had imagined.
‘It’s not as bad as it sounds,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘Bramwell works at a chocolate factory, so if someone accidentally ruins a batch of chocolate by burning it, curdling it or adding a coconut filling, Bramwell comes in and cleans it all up. He’s a much more environmentally friendly alternative than putting it in landfill.’
‘It’s not very glamorous though,’ sulked Bramwell.
‘But you’re not very glamorous, are you?’ Nanny Piggins pointed out. ‘And the sooner you accept that, the happier you’ll be. The whole world can’t be filled with impossibly glamorous incredibly talented pigs. It would be exhausting. No, there are fourteen of us, and that is just the right number.’
So Nanny Piggins sent Bramwell packing (with twelve large chocolate cakes and a crate of sherbet lemons to sustain him on his bus ride home). And everything returned to normal. Well, almost normal. The publicist did still call twenty times a day begging Nanny Piggins to sign a book deal.
‘I’m so sorry, Nanny Piggins,’ said the probation officer for the forty-seventh time.
‘There’s no need to apologise,’ said Nanny Piggins, while offering him another slice of cake. ‘It’s not your fault the criminal justice system is so terribly unjust and that Judge Birchmore is a raving psychopath.’
‘If only there was some way I could give you community service right here in our office,’ lamented the probation officer. ‘You could do a little filing, type some letters, or just take a nap. I’d let you do it if I had my way.’
‘I know,’ said Nanny Piggins, patting his hand kindly, ‘but I don’t mind going out into the community. And I’m not afraid of hard work.’
‘It’s true,’ agreed Michael. ‘Nanny Piggins often stays up all night working on her cake recipes.’
‘I can tell,’ said the probation officer as he stuffed even more cake into his mouth.
‘So do your worst,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Treat me as you would any other law-breaking miscreant. Which part of the community do you want me to serve? I could sniff out bombs for the bomb disposal squad, teach trapeze to school teachers or give a wrestling workshop to the army.’
‘Oh, we don’t do any community service like that,’ said the probation officer. ‘I’m afraid what I can offer you is far less glamorous.’
‘How much less glamorous?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘The Golden Willows Retirement Home needs a volunteer,’ said the probation officer.
‘To do what?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Help the old people re-enact historical scenes from their pasts?’
‘No, just talk to them,’ said the probation officer. ‘The nursing home’s television broke down last week. The residents are getting restless. They need someone to go down and talk with them or organise a game of bingo. That sort of thing.’
Nanny Piggins leaned towards Derrick. ‘Is bingo that game where you fire rubber darts at police officers, trying to knock their hats off?’ she whispered.
‘That’s what you call bingo,’ said Derrick. ‘But there is another far more boring version of the game.’
‘And what are the alternatives to this “talking to old people”?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Don’t you have something that would better use my athletic cannon-blasting skills?’
‘Sorry,’ said the probation officer. ‘I have very strict instructions from Judge Birchmore that I am to give you no alternatives and make you do the worst job available.’
‘Talking to old people doesn’t sound that bad,’ said Samantha.
‘No, you wouldn’t think so, would you?’ agreed the probation officer. ‘But I sent five people down to the retirement home last week and they all came away crying. Three of them opted to go to jail rather than complete their community service.’
‘Hmm,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Give me the address. I’m sure the old people can’t be that difficult. If I can’t placate them with my cake baking, I do still have the Howitzer I borrowed from the war museum. I can always try threatening them.’
Forty minutes later, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children arrived at the old people’s home.
‘Are you nervous?’ asked Michael.
‘Not at all,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Sure, old people can be crotchety. And when you help yourself to their boiled lollies they can yell at you for hours while trying to hit you with their walking sticks. But on the bright side, you can always outrun them.’
With that she stepped for
ward and pressed the doorbell. They then waited for a minute before it became clear that no-one was coming to answer the door. Nanny Piggins pressed the doorbell again and yelled, ‘Yoo-hoo, is anyone home? I’m the court-appointed criminal who is being forced to help you!’
But again no-one answered.
‘Does this mean we can go home?’ asked Boris.
‘We’ve only been here for 75 seconds,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If we went home now it would take me two thousand years to get through my community service. We’d better just let ourselves in.’
So Nanny Piggins kicked in the front door (entirely knocking it off its hinges) and they all walked inside.
‘What is that odour?’ asked Nanny Piggins as she sniffed about. ‘It smells like someone is growing mushrooms in here.’
‘And why is it so warm?’ asked Boris. ‘Is this a nursing home for old people who want to pretend they’re living in the tropics?’
‘I think old people like things to be warm,’ explained Samantha. ‘It’s got something to do with them having bad circulation.’
‘Packing them into a mouldy sauna isn’t going to help that,’ said Nanny Piggins, throwing open a few windows to let in the fresh air. ‘The only way to improve circulation is by circulating, preferably down the road to the bakery. A couple of dozen chocolate brownies always get my blood flowing.’
Just then a cleaning woman edged backwards into the room, wiping the floor with a mop.
‘Hello,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’m Nanny Piggins.’
‘I don’t speak English,’ said the cleaning woman in perfect English.
‘What?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘I only speak Chinese,’ said the cleaning woman.
‘Really?’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You don’t look Chinese.’
‘All right,’ said the cleaning woman. ‘I only speak Portuguese.’
‘Onde fica o grande gerente?’ asked Nanny Piggins (which is how you say ‘Where is the big boss?’ in Portuguese).
‘I’m also a deaf mute,’ said the cleaning woman.
‘You don’t have to feel threatened by me,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’ve just been sent by my probation officer as part of my community service.’