The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Just give him a little pinch whenever he does it,’ Taylor advised.

  ‘Hm,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I will pinch Billy. I don’t want to, I’m sorry.’

  This seemed to delight both of them, Billy because he wasn’t keen on being pinched, and Taylor because I had surprised her.

  ‘Most people obey me,’ she said. ‘I seem to have that nature. I’m a real spitfire.’

  ‘She is,’ Billy agreed. ‘She was a stowaway on this ship, do you know? Such moxie! The captains found her in a linen chest. They also admired her moxie and gave her the stateroom next to mine. Now I am travelling unaccompanied, but my ticket was arranged by my mother, and I’m under the official care of the captains. No moxie here, what?’

  ‘You almost got through that whole speech without doing it, Billy, and then you fell down at the end,’ Taylor said. ‘Come on, let’s go win this treasure hunt.’ And she took off at a sprint.

  We did win the treasure hunt.

  I hadn’t believed it likely, as we had started off so slowly. But it emerged that Billy had been on board for weeks, and knew the ship inside-out and upside-down.

  ‘Like the palm of your hand?’ Taylor suggested but Billy said, no, he had only the vaguest idea what the palm of his hand looked like. He’d never paid much attention to it. Whereas he’d done nothing these last few weeks but explore this ship.

  So Billy solved all the clues in a flash and also knew the quickest routes and shortcuts. Taylor, meanwhile, was agile and athletic, so if a clue was hidden on a high shelf, say, or pressed behind a light fitting, she scampered up the wall like a lizard and grabbed it.

  ‘She’s on her way to join a circus,’ Billy told me proudly as Taylor collected yet another clue. This time it was tucked behind the curtain rail in the Theatre. ‘That’s why she stowed away, what? Hertfordshire is one of our ports of call, and Taylor plans to meet up with the Razdazzle Moonlight Circus there. Have I got that right, Taylor?’

  ‘You’ve got it right, Billy,’ Taylor agreed, hanging upside down from the beams, and swinging sideways with an outstretched hand. ‘My special skill is tricks on horses, only I couldn’t bring my horse along. Wouldn’t have fit in the linen chest, see? You ride yourself, Bronte?’

  She landed beside me with a thud, handing Billy the next clue.

  I told her that I did ride, and that I have a horse named Tully at home, a chestnut with soulful eyes, only I hadn’t brought him along on my journey either—actually, it had never come up as an option—and that I didn’t know how to do tricks on him.

  ‘No trouble,’ Taylor said confidently. ‘I’ll teach you. Where to now, Billy?’

  ‘The Formal Dining Hall,’ he announced, studying the clue, ‘where that historian gives lectures every night.’

  ‘Any good?’ I asked.

  ‘Fascinating,’ Billy replied, while Taylor said, ‘Deathly dull. Give them a miss.’

  I promised I would and off we ran again.

  I felt a bit useless for much of the hunt, since Billy and Taylor were doing all the work, but then the final clue said, ‘Betwixt firm binds live other worlds,’ and Billy frowned, stumped. Taylor did a handstand and spoke from near my feet: ‘Say again?’

  Billy repeated the clue: ‘Betwixt firm binds live other worlds’.

  ‘That sounds like what my governess would say,’ I said. ‘About books. Is there a library on the ship?’

  And they both flew away, shouting, ‘Yes! There is!’

  Another team of children was running towards the Library, so the three of us zoomed past them, skidded around the corner and through the Library door. ‘There!’ shouted Billy, pointing to a glint of gold at the top of a bookshelf, and Taylor scrambled up, grabbed it and held it up to us. It was a small golden chest with a lid.

  The three of us were panting, laughing, and gasping for breath when Randwick arrived in the Library, followed by hurrying groups of children who sighed or shrugged when they saw us with the chest.

  ‘And this is what taking it easy looks like?’ Randwick said to me archly, but then he smiled and said, ‘Good work, team.’

  ‘It was Bronte who got the final clue,’ Billy told everyone, and Taylor added, ‘It was. Nicely-played, Junior Captain.’

  ‘But these two did everything else!’ I told the crowd, and Billy said sternly, ‘Credit where it’s due, Bronte. You have earned our thanks, what?’

  We opened the little gold box and it turned out to be full of sweets and chocolate bars.

  The other children suggested, quite earnestly, that we ought to share the treasure confectionery with them, as that was only fair.

  ‘In what way, fair?’ Randwick demanded. ‘Did you people win?’

  Nobody had an answer to that, but we let them have some of the sweets anyway. There was still plenty left for the three of us.

  Maybe we would have become friends anyway, but winning a treasure hunt makes you so fond of each other. We had a midnight feast that night in Billy’s stateroom, to celebrate winning.

  Lying at the bottom of the treasure chest were six chocolate bars marked, Maywish of the Riddle Empire. Taylor and I had never heard of this brand but Billy gasped to see them. Once we tasted this chocolate, he assured us, it would be our new favourite for all time. In the future, we would find ourselves dreaming of Maywish Rose and Black Pepper chocolate at unexpected moments.

  ‘Not a chance,’ Taylor declared. ‘My favourite is Carrols Chocolate Cherry, and that will never, ever change.’

  ‘Mine is Cendra Delite,’ I said.

  ‘Nice,’ Taylor nodded her approval. ‘But Carrols Chocolate Cherry defeats all. I bet you a thousand silver, Billy, that you are wrong about this Maywish Rose and Black Pepper—I mean, rose and black pepper, for a start! Who puts rose in a chocolate?! It’s a flower! And black pepper? Are you kidding with me? Burns your mouth. Makes you sneeze—anyhow, nothing will ever shift me from Carrols Chocolate Cherry.’

  ‘Very well,’ Billy said calmly. ‘A thousand silver.’

  Then we ate the chocolate, and Billy turned out to be completely right.

  ‘I’m going to have to write you an IOU for those thousand,’ Taylor apologised. ‘The moment I make my fortune, you will have it. Give me another of those chocolate bars, meantime. Rose and black pepper! Genius.’

  Billy said he’d waive the debt and Taylor said he was the bee’s knees, and we carried on eating sweets and chocolate until we fell asleep amidst the wrappers.

  The next few days were a dazzle of fun. Sometimes we were in the Kids’ Club, playing games with Randwick and the other children. Sometimes we ran around the ship, exploring alone. As we were the only three ‘unaccompanied minors’, I think the other children were a bit in awe of us, and we enjoyed that.

  We ate meals together at the Captain’s Table, all dressed up in elegant clothes with our hair combed neatly—Billy had the most immaculate shirts and pressed trousers and little bow ties, and Taylor seemed to have brought along a collection of dizzily-coloured circus outfits when she stowed away in the linen chest. Aunts Lisbeth and Maya asked us to describe our days and seemed delighted by everything we said. Then they told big, laughing stories about the adventures they themselves had had in their Cruise Ship, what with the sea monsters and finfolk.

  Aunt Maya told about the day a passenger spotted a little mer-child caught in the tentacles of a giant squid. Aunt Lisbeth, without a thought, had dived into the sea and rescued the child. Aunt Lisbeth told the story of how Aunt Maya had skated out onto an iceberg that was threatening to stave the ship’s hull, and bravely reasoned with the berg-troll until he agreed to move along.

  The further north we sailed, the fewer icebergs we saw, and the warmer grew the days. Taylor, Billy and I swam in the pool, or stretched out on the sun lounges and chatted. I told them about my journey to visit the aunts, and they were very interested to hear that the next aunt, Aunt Alys, was a queen.

  ‘She has a son, Prince William,’ I said.

  �
�Same age as you?’ Taylor asked. ‘Will you be friends?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘I hear he’s quite a handful.’

  ‘In what way?’ Billy enquired.

  ‘Just a brat, I think. I plan to try to tame him.’

  ‘You’ll be good at that,’ Taylor said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Billy agreed sunnily. ‘You’ll be excellent, what?’

  ‘You did it again, Billy,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Thanks ever so.’

  Billy taught us how to play billiards—he was very excited about the ‘gyroscope’ that kept the table level—and Taylor tried to teach us how to do tricks on horseback. This was difficult, as we didn’t have a horse. However, one stormy day, when the sea was huge with waves, and the ship pitched and yawed, Taylor said: ‘Perfect!’ She made us climb onto the deck railings and practise standing on one leg.

  We got in trouble for that, as we could easily have fallen overboard.

  ‘No, no,’ Billy said. ‘We made sure to fall onto the deck, you see, when we fell?’ And he pointed to the bump that he had got onto his head, doing just that. It made no difference: we still got into trouble.

  The next day it was calm again, and Taylor said she would teach us some tricks in the corridors—only Billy reminded us they were called passageways—so that the next time the seas were wild, we could do cartwheels on the deck railings.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, interested. ‘Even though we got into trouble last time?’

  ‘She’s not at all bothered by authority,’ Billy explained. ‘Trouble washes over her like soap bubbles. It makes me quite giddy, what?’

  ‘Before I start,’ Taylor said. ‘Let’s see what you can do. Can you stand on your hands, Bronte?’

  It didn’t seem likely. That would make me upside down.

  ‘Just try,’ Taylor coaxed. ‘Like this.’ She demonstrated a few times.

  So I tried. I fell forward onto my palms, threw my legs in the air, and without even thinking, I found myself running along on my hands. Then, because it felt right, I swung my legs over my head and sprang back up to a standing position. It was easy.

  ‘Great turkey!’ shouted Billy.

  ‘Jeepers,’ said Taylor, and whistled loudly. ‘Junior Captain, you’re a natural! You have circus performers in your family?’

  ‘No!’ I laughed, but suddenly I remembered my Aunt Sophy’s tale about my mother. How she had impressed my father with gymnastics in the wild horse forest.

  ‘Oh, that’s it then,’ Taylor said. ‘You’ve inherited it. It’s in your blood.’

  A strange thing happened at that moment. I looked down at my hands, and the veins on them, and at my arms and legs, and I saw myself, for the first time, in a completely different way. I was the child of Patrick and Lida Mettlestone.

  ‘Okay, Billy,’ Taylor said. ‘Let’s see what you can do!’

  Billy was a bit hopeless, to be honest. He kept flinging himself onto his head, instead of his hands, and then falling back, groaning in agony. But he tried his best.

  Sometimes the ship would dock in a port, and people would disembark and explore a seaside village for the day. Then everyone would come back on board with bags full of souvenirs, faces flushed from the windy shore, brimming with stories of their day.

  One balmy Sunday, we arrived at the village of Lasawftk, and word went around that the Lasawftk Markets were underway. ‘Marvellous markets!’ everybody said. ‘What luck!’ and there was a general bustle towards the gangplanks.

  However, Taylor had twisted her ankle that morning and wanted to rest it, and Billy was caught up in an intense game of billiards with a financier from Clybourne. So I ended up going to the Markets by myself.

  At first, I wandered around the stalls wondering just what it was that adults found so great about markets? Really, they’re just shops out-of-doors. Perhaps adults don’t get enough fresh air? And that’s why there was all the excitement?

  Anyway, these markets had colourful fruits and vegetables, fresh bread, jewellery, paintings, and oils from every Kingdom and Empire. Exactly the kind of thing you get at the market at Gainsleigh Harbour and every other market I have ever visited. It was perfectly pleasant, but I thought I might return to the ship and watch Billy’s game.

  I was standing at a stall, picking up pots and vases and things, while I had these thoughts. I wasn’t paying much attention to the pots; I was pretending to be interested by them. I pulled the lid from a tall, slender bottle and squinted inside it—as part of this pretending—and then I noticed that the man behind the stall was standing very still, watching me.

  I looked at the bottle in my hand. It had the swooping, ornate appearance that you associate with genie bottles. ‘Is there a genie in here?’ I joked, for something to say.

  ‘Not any more, there’s not,’ the man said, his voice as still as he himself was. ‘You’ve just let it free.’

  ‘What?!’ I almost dropped the bottle in my shock.

  He raised his eyes from the bottle to my face. ‘No, I jest.’ Then he smiled, the faintest smile, an echo of a smile, and I had the strange thought that his original smile, his real smile, had been lost somewhere, far in the past.

  ‘That genie,’ he added, ‘was freed many years ago.’

  His eyes were sad, and suddenly I knew that he himself had once known the genie from this bottle. Maybe he’d even been friends with that genie, and his original smile, his real smile, was lost in the time of that friendship.

  A woman’s voice spoke up beside me. ‘Is it right to sell a genie bottle that contains no genie?’ she asked, tartly. I hadn’t realised she was there, and I started, and turned to look at her. She was all got up in the sort of reds and crimsons that you usually see as lipsticks. Shawls were draped over her in every direction, and she seemed to be holding her arms up high, as if on purpose to show off these shawls.

  ‘Not at that price,’ the man retorted, pointing to the tag on the bottle. It’s true that it was very cheap, only a few copper coins. The man turned away, as if to help another customer, but there was nobody else to help.

  Now the woman gave a little shiver and disappeared and then I realised that she was the genie herself.

  ‘Oh!’ I said, and the man turned his sad face back to me. He shrugged.

  ‘She returns to say hello now and again,’ he said. ‘She brings me fruit.’ And he indicated a large basket of fruit that had just appeared on the table.

  ‘That’s nice of her,’ I ventured.

  I would have liked to hear more about the genie, but the man was now peeling a banana from the basket. ‘You could buy the bottle if you like,’ he said, taking a bite. ‘It’s very cheap.

  ‘It is,’ I agreed, but I was thinking that really, as the genie herself had intimated, there was not much use in a genie bottle without its genie.

  ‘An empty genie bottle has a very peculiar power,’ the man said, guessing my thoughts.

  ‘What power is that?’

  He took another, larger bite, chewed a while, and swallowed. ‘It helps you dream the dreams you are meant to dream.’

  ‘Complicated,’ I observed.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘At night, when we sleep, we mostly dream a lot of nonsense, but sometimes we dream just as we ought.’

  I thought I knew what he meant, but wasn’t sure.

  ‘This bottle.’ He picked it up and placed it in my hands. ‘This bottle, if placed by your bed while you sleep, will direct you to the right dream.’

  ‘Every night?’

  He shook his head quickly. ‘Just once.’

  ‘Hmm.’ I looked at the price tag again. One proper dream didn’t seem worth it. ‘If I bought the bottle,’ I said, ‘would the genie bring me fruit?’ That would be handy.

  But the man shook his head again. ‘She has long ago left this bottle. It no longer has any hold on her. She visits me and brings the fruit because we have … a past.’ Then he smiled again, even more faintly, the echo fading.

  In the end,
I bought the bottle from him, and returned to the ship.

  Buying the genie bottle had felt like a dream itself, I told Billy and Taylor. The way I had somehow known that the man’s smile was an echo, and that he had been friends with the genie, and that the woman was the genie, and so on.

  They took all this in their stride and asked if they might borrow the bottle some time so that they could have a dream they ought. Billy was especially cheerful, having won the game of billiards against the financier, but Taylor was glum, as she was tired of icing her ankle.

  We agreed to take turns sleeping alongside the genie bottle and I let Taylor go first on account of her glumness. She returned it to me the next day, furious about her dream. In it, she had climbed a tree and was crawling out onto a branch, when the branch began to crack.

  That’s it. Bam. Woke up. Dream done.

  ‘What’s that all about?’ she demanded. ‘So short! No action! No plot twists, unless you call a branch cracking a twist, which I do not. No resolution! No respect for my intelligence because I am not the sort of girl to climb a tree and choose a branch that will crack!’

  ‘Maybe it means something symbolic?’ I suggested.

  ‘What, I shouldn’t try new adventures? Because things will come crashing down? Ridiculous!’

  ‘So you didn’t dream the dream you ought?’ Billy asked tentatively.

  ‘Not a chance.’

  Billy took a turn the next night and he was very happy to report that he had dreamed he was locked in a cage and that a dog had explained to him how he should escape.

  ‘Talking dog?’ Taylor asked, impressed. ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yes, and the odd thing was that the dog was actually me,’ Billy added. ‘I realised that the moment I saw him. I’m allergic to dogs, as a rule. But not in this dream! Lovely, big, reddish-brown, woolly dog, and an expert in escapology.’

  ‘Was that the dream you were supposed to dream?’ I asked and Billy said, ‘Search me, what?’ but he put his hands in his pockets and did a sort of sliding-back dance step, grinning all the way.