The Taylor TurboChaser

by David Baddiel

  “O—”

  “NOOOOWWW!”

  Frantically, Rahul pressed the button. The flag flew back in the car, which meant the bull, who had been aiming right for it, ran straight through … nothing. And kept going.

  “Brilliant, Amy!” said Rahul, looking over his shoulder.

  “Thanks!” She looked over her shoulder too. The bull skidded to a halt. It frowned, as if to say, “Eh? What happened?” But then slowly, and with a strong sense of being even more annoyed now, he turned round.

  “But I don’t think it’s over. Let’s go!”

  Amy threw the direction lever forward. The TurboChaser moved towards the gap in the hedge again. But it took a while to get up to speed on the wet grass, and she could hear the bull approaching.

  She could also see it approaching in her rear-view mirror.

  “IT’S GOING TO SPEAR US FROM BEHIND!” shouted Janet.

  With an agonising crash, it did. With a terrible crunch, the bull’s horns came into contact with the back of the TurboChaser.

  “AAAAARGGGH!” cried Janet and Jack.

  Amy reached over and pressed the hazard button again. The red flag popped out once more. The bull, distracted, swerved away from the car towards it.

  Amy swung the car in the opposite direction; the bull swung towards it; Amy turned back again; the bull followed. They went round and round in a figure of eight, the bull continually trying to headbutt the hazard flag, Amy continually swerving out of the way at the last minute.

  “I know what to do!” said Janet. She took out her phone.

  Jack looked at her. “You’re going to call the farmer? The RSPCA? A cowboy who might be able to rodeo this monster out of here?”

  Janet shook her head, and clicked on her phone. Immediately, music started playing out of the Bluetooth speaker that Rahul had Blu-tacked to the dashboard.

  “What. Is. That?” shouted Jack.

  “It’s a song my mum really likes. ‘A Beaver’s Banana’, I think it’s called.”

  “‘Oh, this year I’m off to sunny Spain … Y viva España!’” came out of the speaker.

  “I just thought some Spanish music felt … right,” Janet continued.

  And indeed, had you been perhaps passing that field at that moment, and seen the whole scene from afar, many things about the sight of a weird car with a red flag dodging a chasing bull would not have felt right at all. But something about the music would have done.

  “‘… I’m off to sunny Spain …’”

  “Phew,” said Rahul. “That wasn’t easy.”

  “No,” said Amy.

  It was ten minutes later. They were driving through the next field, which was, thankfully, free of cows and, more importantly, bulls.

  “But you did brilliantly, Amy. You tired him out!”

  Jack leant over from the back and put his hand on her shoulder. “Yeah. Well played, sis.”

  Amy glanced backwards. He still had his sarcastic face on. But through that she could tell he meant it.

  “I tired myself out quite a lot as well, though.”

  “OMG, what is that smell?” said Jack.

  “It’s ME!” said Janet.

  “Oh, not the bean thing again …”

  “NO!” said Janet. “LOOK!”

  Amy stopped the car. Everyone looked at Janet.

  There was no getting round what they were seeing. Her fairy wings were covered, completely, in cow poo.

  “HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?” Janet screamed, on the verge of tears.

  “I think …” said Rahul, looking at the glass behind her, “it came through there.”

  They all looked round. A crack had appeared, running all the way along the glass at the back of the car.

  “Oh dear,” said Amy. “It must have shot up from the ground when we were skidding around.”

  “Urrrggghhh,” said Janet.

  “Maybe, Janet, at last, this might be a reason to take the wings off?” said Jack. “Or were you hoping to fly to meet Peter Pat?”

  “His name is Pan,” said Rahul.

  “PETER PAT! AS IN COW PAT! IT’S A JOKE!” shouted Jack.

  Rahul thought about this for a second, then nodded. “I see. I think ‘To meet Mr Smee-ly’ would’ve been better.”

  “Oh, now you’re the King of the Comedy Workshop, Rahul?”

  “OK, calm down, everyone,” said Amy. “I think you are going to have to get rid of the wings, Janet. It does smell like the inside of a cow’s stomach in here.”

  “They have four stomachs, you know,” said Rahul.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “All of them poo-ey.”

  “We should stop, Amy,” said Rahul. “I’m going to have to check out how bad that crack is. And we should clean the car up a bit.”

  “But …” said Amy, “I really wanted to try and get there in one night.”

  “Yes. I think that may have been a bit ambitious.”

  “I’m that!” said Janet.

  “You are?” said Jack.

  “Yes. I can write with my left AND my right hand!”

  “You mean ‘ambidextrous’,” said Amy.

  Jack looked at Janet. “I’m just amazed you can write at all, Janet.”

  Janet looked at him.

  “U.U.R.G.G.H. What does that spell, Jack?”

  “Pardon?” he said.

  Janet flicked one shoulder forward. Which flicked one wing forward. Which flicked a large sliver of cow poo at Jack’s face.

  “UURGGH!” he said.

  “Correct,” said Janet.

  “OK,” said Amy. “It’s still early on Saturday morning. We’ve got loads of time to get to Scotland. Let’s stop here for a bit.”

  Amy found a spot at the edge of the field under a large oak tree, and parked. Rahul got out of the TurboChaser with his torch, and began scraping at the back window with a spatula.

  “There’s a lot of cow mess on here!” he shouted.

  “Oh, that is good,” said Jack.

  “It is good!” said Rahul. “We can use it for—”

  “I don’t even want to know what for, thanks,” said Jack, getting out of the car. “Would you like the bits on my face too?”

  Rahul shone the torch at him and squinted. “No. That’s just some flecks. It’s not enough.”

  Janet appeared next to Jack.

  “Is there anywhere to wash this off?”

  Rahul flashed the torch towards the oak tree.

  “There’s a little stream, I think, down behind the tree.”

  They went down there.

  “Sorry,” said Janet to Jack, as she took her wings and dipped them in the water.

  “That’s OK,” said Jack, splashing his face. “Good meme.”

  “What was?”

  “The poo-flick, spell-URRGH joke.”

  Janet beamed. “Thanks!”

  Meanwhile, Amy called over to Rahul from her seat.

  “What about the crack in the window?”

  “I’ve put some black tape on it. I think it will hold up until we get there … What about you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Rahul looked at her. “Will you hold up until we get there? This is hard work.”

  Amy blinked. She felt that she was, already, deeply tired. She looked at the alarm clock on the dashboard: it was three o’clock in the morning.

  “I’ll do my best,” she said.

  Janet and Jack came back from the stream.

  “OK, everyone!” Amy said. “Try and get some sleep. We’ll get going again as soon as it’s light tomorrow.”

  “Will it be OK to drive during the day? Won’t people think, What kind of car is that?” said Janet.

  “I’ve had an idea about that,” said Rahul.

  “Where are we going to sleep?” said Jack.

  “In the car,” said Rahul.

  “In the car?” repeated Jack, and not sarcastically, just astonished.

  “I’ve had an idea about that too,” said Rahul. “Well, I had a
n idea about it, in advance. I thought we might have to sleep in it, so … Amy, can you press that button on the dashboard, the one that looks like a teepee?”

  Amy looked down. She pressed it. Nothing happened.

  “Nothing’s happening” she shouted.

  “Just wait,” said Rahul.

  He went over to the front of the car. He bent down to the TAYTURB1 number plate and lifted it up. He rummaged around underneath and pulled out a crank handle, a bit like the ones on very old cars that people in the very old days would turn round and round to get the engine going. And that, in fact, was what Rahul did. He turned the crank round and round. But it didn’t start the engine.

  Instead, out of the chimney, the one that poked through a cat flap in the roof, came a fabric of many different colours – red, blue, green, yellow – shooting out like a kind of cloth firework. It fell over the car, like a loose drape. Then he turned the handle the other way, and the material tightened and moved upwards, making the car into …

  “A tent!” said Amy. “You’ve made it into a tent!”

  “Yes,” said Rahul. “And I packed sleeping bags!”

  With the tent round it, inside the TurboChaser everything felt very cosy. Amy switched on some of the car lights so that they could see. Rahul showed them how to fold down the glass sides of the inside of the car to make an enormous bed for them all to sleep in. A comfortable bed, because he was also able to slide out the mattresses from beneath the chassis for them to sleep on. They all got into sleeping bags (courtesy of Agarwal Supplies, Outdoor Section). Then Janet brought out her Lodlil bag.

  “Dinner!” she said.

  “Yum! Lovely!” said Rahul. “What is it?”

  She turned her bag upside down. About forty plastic cartons rolled out.

  “Beans! Baked beans!”

  Amy, Jack and Rahul looked at each other.

  “And …?” said Jack.

  “Four plastic forks!” said Janet, fishing them out of the bag.

  Amy shook her head, and laughed. She grabbed a fork and peeled open a carton.

  “Nothing like cold beans!” she said.

  “That’s what people say about leftovers. After they’ve been hot,” said Jack, picking up a fork wearily. “Not about ones that have never been heated at all …”

  “Yum,” said Janet, her mouth full.

  After dinner, they all settled down to sleep. It was warm, and dark, and Amy felt especially tired – she did, after all, have to drive all by herself, and just with her arms.

  “Goodnight, everybody!” she said.

  “Goodnight, Amy!” said Rahul.

  “Night, sis. Good meme,” said Jack.

  “Night, um, bro,” said Amy.

  She was asleep before she noticed that Janet hadn’t said anything. In fact, they were all asleep, and so couldn’t hear a tap-tap-tapping sound coming from her sleeping bag.

  “How long are we going to wait here, Mrs Taylor?”

  “Be quiet, Sanjay.”

  “I’m sorry, Prisha, my love. Only … I have a big delivery coming tomorrow for the warehouse. And I was hoping to get some sleep before then.”

  Suzi, who was driving the van, had pulled over. They were in a layby, somewhere off the long motorway that winds from the city up to the north. Prisha was in the passenger seat. Sanjay and Norma and Colin were in the back.

  Norma and Colin were sleeping on each other’s shoulders. Colin was dribbling a little.

  “I don’t know, is the answer, Sanjay. I just have no idea where to start with finding them. This is a very long road and there are a lot of cars on it. And we don’t even know if this is the way they came.”

  “How can you sleep, Sanjay,” said Prisha, turning round, “when you know our child is out there somewhere on the roads in … in …?”

  “The Taylor TurboChaser.”

  “The what?”

  “The Taylor TurboChaser. That’s what they call it.”

  “Yes,” said Suzi. “It is.”

  “It is nice, at least, that Rahul named it after your family,” said Sanjay.

  Suzi sighed, and half smiled. “Yes. Lovely thought. But right now I’d prefer just to know where it is.”

  BLEEP! BLEEP! came a noise from the back.

  “OH LORDY! HELP ME! SAVE ME! NOT THE DEMENTORS!”

  “COLIN! IT’S OK! YOU WERE HAVING THAT NIGHTMARE AGAIN!”

  BLEEP! BLEEP!

  “Norma, I think it’s your mobile,” said Suzi.

  “Oh. OK. You stupid banana, Colin.”

  “I didn’t have my Patronus, Norma. It was sucking the life out of me!”

  “Shh. Oh look.”

  “What?” said Suzi.

  “It’s a text from Janet.”

  Sanjay, Prisha and Suzi looked round, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

  “Oh,” said Colin. “What’s it say?”

  Amy awoke to a whooshing sound. It was Rahul outside the TurboChaser winding up the tent. The coloured cloth was funnelling back inside the chimney. Which meant that Amy suddenly felt a bit exposed, lying on some glass plates in the open air in the middle of a field.

  She rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Go away,” said Jack, who normally said that when woken up. In fact, he normally said it over and over again, until forced out of bed much later by Suzi.

  Amy looked out. The sun, which had come up a while ago, was bright against a blue morning sky. The field they were in was very green. In her vision, Rahul suddenly appeared, holding something rolled up. It looked like a poster.

  “What is that?” said Amy.

  Rahul unrolled it. It was a long piece of paper, more like a banner than a poster. On it he had written:

  He had drawn a series of doodles round these words, of various crazy-looking cars.

  Amy nodded. Then she said, “I’ll ask again. What is that?”

  “I’ve made up an event,” said Rahul. “The Crazy Car Rally!”

  “And …?”

  “And if I put this up somewhere on the car, people who see us on the road will think, Oh right, I see. It’s a crazy car going to some sort of crazy car event. And then they won’t think about it any more. It’s sort of like an invisibility cloak. Except not.”

  “OK, I get it! Brilliant, clever!”

  “Thanks!” said Rahul, and he started attaching the banner to the front of the car.

  “Why so many exclamation marks?” said Amy.

  “That’s what you do if you’re the kind of person who goes to the Crazy Car Rally. You use a lot of exclamation marks. To show how crazy you are.”

  “Right. I’ll bear that in mind. OK, I think we should be getting on. Jack!”

  “Go away.”

  “No, come on.”

  “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Um … more of Janet’s beans?”

  “Go away.”

  Rahul started folding up the glass plates. Which involved rolling Jack over on his side.

  “I said go away.”

  Amy sighed. “OK, we’ll come back to you. Janet!”

  Janet popped her head out of her sleeping bag.

  “I was awake already. Just under the covers!”

  “Great,” said Amy.

  “Because it’s easier to see your phone there. It’s too light out here.”

  “Right. You’ve got a signal here?”

  “Some of the time … Anyone for beans?”

  BLEEP! BLEEP!

  Janet dived back into her sleeping bag.

  “Well …” said Rahul. “Jack’s still asleep …”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh.”

  “Go away.”

  “Right. But I’ve folded up the car, the tent material has gone back into the chimney – so we could have breakfast and then—”

  “Janet …” said Amy, who had spent the last few minutes thinking and frowning at Janet’s sleeping bag.

  “Yes …” she said, muffled, from inside it.

  �
��Who are you texting?”

  “Mum and Dad!” she said.

  Rahul, who was getting into the passenger seat, stopped and looked at her. Jack, who had his eyes closed and had been doing his very best not to wake up properly, opened them, and sat up.

  “Er, since when?” said Jack.

  “Well, I sent them a text last night,” said Janet. “But they haven’t replied yet, so—”

  “Oh no,” said Rahul.

  “What?” said Janet.

  And Amy said:

  “And … what are you saying in your message now?”

  Janet’s head came out of the sleeping bag again. “Don’t worry! Just that we’re OK, and having a great time being chased by bulls and stuff. I’m not telling them where we are! I’m not an idiot. Actually, where are we?”

  “I’m not entirely sure,” said Rahul.

  “But you could probably find out,” said Jack, “from Location Services on your phone. As could anyone who’s in contact with your phone. Certainly anyone who, I don’t know, bought your phone for you and has access to your account.”

  “Not to mention,” said Rahul, “anyone who’s had a message since last night. So could have been tracking us for a while.”

  There was a pause. Janet frowned at him. Then she looked at her phone.

  “Oops,” she said.

  “DRIVE DRIVE DRIVE!” said Rahul.

  “Do we know how near they are?” said Jack. BLEEP! BLEEP!

  “Oh,” said Janet. “It’s them! It says, DO NOT MOVE. WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU. WE WILL BE THERE IN AN HOUR.”

  “DRIVE DRIVE DRIVE!” said Rahul.

  Five minutes later, they were on the road. Not just on their way, which is what “on the road” can sometimes mean, but actually on a proper road again, no longer driving through fields. It was only a country lane, but, still, there were other cars on it, which meant that they were getting some very funny looks from passing drivers.

  Although one, at least, shouted out: “Enjoy the Crazy Car Rally!”

  “You’re going to have to turn your phone off, Janet!” said Amy.

  “What?” said Janet anxiously.

  “You are,” said Rahul.

  “But I won’t text them any more,” she said more anxiously.