The Biggerers

by Amy Lilwall

  She had already worked out the difference between ‘flat-colourful’ people and ‘real’ people. Watty had told her that the flat-colourful people were called ‘cartoons’ – and that they weren’t always people.

  ‘Well, what are they then?’

  ‘A mixture of animals and monsters and mythical creatures and…’

  ‘What’s a mythical creature?’

  ‘You know, it’s like a unicorn or, or Pegasus…’

  Isabel screwed up her face. ‘You mean Peppa Pig. It’s not easy to say. Look, like this.’ And she opened her mouth and eyes really wide for the best pronunciation. ‘PE-PA-PIG.’

  Watty laughed. ‘No. PE-GA-SUS is a flying horse.’

  ‘But that’s a unicorn.’

  ‘Unicorns have a horn in the middle of their head.’

  ‘And wings.’

  ‘No. No wings.’

  Isabel looked shocked. ‘Yes they do!’

  ‘No, darling, I’m afraid they don’t.’

  ‘Some of them do.’

  ‘Well, maybe, but it doesn’t really matter because they are mythical. Which means that they don’t exist.’

  Isabel looked at Watty from the side of her head. ‘I’m not so sure,’ she said. ‘I think it’s just cartoon ones that aren’t real.’

  ‘They don’t exist at all, not even real ones.’ Watty winced. That sentence had come out all wrong. But Isabel nodded. Even real ones didn’t exist; she had understood.

  ‘And pigs neither?’ she asked.

  ‘Now, that’s silly. You know that pigs exist.’ Watty held the shape of ‘exist’ between his teeth. How could she be sure? She’d never actually seen one.

  ‘No. Not like that. Not with two eyes on one side of their face and with clothes on.’

  Watty’s lips pressed together. Good point.

  ‘And they talk. Pigs don’t talk.’

  ‘True, true…’

  ‘So these ones are like people and animals and unicorns.’

  Watty sighed. ‘Well, you know that a real person draws them. That means that everything about them has been thought about and decided by somebody and by somebody’s imagination. Everything they say, everything they wear, everything they do…’

  Isabel listened with her face tilted towards Watty, her eyes looking up to the right.

  ‘Real pigs are real, though. Like you.’

  ‘They are indeed.’

  ‘And they haven’t been designed by a person.’

  ‘No,’ said Watty, glad that Drew wasn’t suffering this particular interrogation, having to ignore a career full of scientific meddling in order to give her a good clean answer.

  ‘No,’ repeated Isabel. ‘I knew that but I just wanted to check…’

  Watty went on. ‘So, even though some of them seem like pigs or people, they’re just imaginary – just a mixture of things that real people think about. Let’s just call them “cartoons”, shall we? All of them.’

  ‘Every last one?’

  ‘Every last one.’

  ‘Yes. That’s nice. That’s nice that they all have the same name.’ And she was able to think about something different, happy that she knew everything there was to know about cartoons.

  Although it was quite complicated.

  Sometimes, real people would hang around with other beings that definitely weren’t cartoons. Like Pegasus and unicorns and mermaids… Although mermaids could speak. The horses couldn’t. The two bears and one dog fascinated Isabel. They actually spoke to a real man even though they were ‘animals’. But they weren’t his pets… Or were they? They seemed to all live together and, well, behave like they were the same. And he could understand all of them, even though they all spoke differently. One of them couldn’t say anything, nothing at all! He just seemed to whisper into the person’s ear. One of them squeaked – the dog one. One of them spoke proper English and she had a bow in her hair, and she wore a dress. The strange thing was that the programme was named after the one that couldn’t speak. Isabel had always thought that the nicest and the most important was the girl-one with the bow that could speak. But nobody seemed to mind that the one-that-couldn’t-talk was the most important. In fact, they all seemed to be really good friends.

  And the best thing of all was their bedroom. It had three little beds, three little wardrobes and lots of tunnels and balconies that covered up their legs when they walked from one bit to another and hiding places, and in one of the little wardrobes there were little dresses – little dresses that would have fitted Isabel perfectly – and it was pink where the girl slept and blue and green where the boys slept and there were little pictures on the wall… Little bedside tables… Little lamps…

  After the ‘little chicken’ question, after Watty had gone off to work and even after lunch, Drew had caught Isabel hammering the remote control buttons with the palm of her hand. ‘What’s wrong with you, grumpy-guts?’ he asked, rubbing the top of Isabel’s head with a thumb.

  ‘Where are the other ones like me? I’ve never seen other ones like me.’

  Drew froze. ‘What, children?’

  ‘No!’ She looked at Drew. ‘Little.’

  Ah. It had arrived. The conversation had finally arrived. But Watty wasn’t there! They needed to speak about this all together, the three of them. They should have explained this morning, over breakfast, when they had the chance… Oh no… Isabel was crying.

  ‘Shall we write Watty a poem for his notebook?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on! How about we practise handstands? Or ice some chocolates?’

  Usually Isabel would pout and fold her arms and Drew could coax her into the kitchen. But she cried, and cried, all red and shiny from so many tears that had made a big wet patch along the neckline of her little dress. ‘Please!’ she said. ‘Please, Drew! I’m really sad and I don’t know why!’

  Drew’s heart, inside its chest, detached from its tangle of arteries and fell, plop, to the bottom of Drew’s stomach.

  The little girl who couldn’t go out, who was dependent upon the telly and her dog for company. Who would never play with other children. Who was so sad and didn’t know why. Drew knew why. It was time to tell the truth, all of it, today. But Isabel needed to be consoled first.

  They had been preparing for this for a while.

  Drew took a DVD from its case and popped it into the player before kneeling in front of Isabel. ‘Now listen to me.’

  Isabel nodded.

  ‘I’m going to show you a programme with little people.’

  Isabel gasped.

  ‘But!’ Drew held up one finger as if to stopper the little girl’s excitement. ‘This is not real. They are actors, do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And these actors are pretending to be little people.’

  ‘Okay.’ She didn’t seem to care; she was already looking over Drew’s shoulder.

  Drew pressed play, then went to call Watty.

  Isabel sat and watched The Borrowers series all afternoon. When the DVD had come to an end, she pressed play and started the whole thing again, and when she had watched it all over again, she cried because they weren’t real.

  ‘I did tell you,’ said Drew.

  ‘If they could have spoken to the bigger ones, then they wouldn’t have had to live in a mouse hole,’ sobbed Isabel. ‘Am I going to have to live in a mouse hole?’

  Drew sighed. ‘Watty’s back now. Shall we all sit down and talk about this?’

  Isabel’s mouth turned from down to up, and she laughed as the yellow bear, the whispery one, as big as her, popped out from behind Drew’s thigh.

  Watty had thought that buying her a Sooty puppet would help her to understand what was real and what was not. But she screamed when she saw that he didn’t have any legs, and spent ages putting his black nose to her ear, squinting, trying to hear what he was saying.

  ‘You listen,’ she finally said a few days later, thrusting the bear at Drew. ‘He will only talk to
people.’

  They blinked at her. ‘But you’re a person.’

  ‘I’m not.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not a person.’

  * * *

  ‘Gosh! I’m so sorry, I completely forgot to come over last night!’ Susan held the phone under her chin and wriggled her way out of one side of her coat at the same time, tossing the bag with Jinx’s humcoat onto the sofa. A green light blinked at her from the drinks machine. No more beakers. Already. Susan lifted the edge of her blouse and looked down at the lip of skin that pouted over her jeans.

  ‘Don’t worry, dear… I got the impression that your husband was going to prepare something special for you.’

  She shook the coat from her other shoulder, wanting to say: ‘He’s not my husband.’ But instead she said: ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘I found some of those chocolates among the groceries that he fetched for me, you know; the heart-shaped ones painted with some sort of gold… I don’t know what it is… You can eat it.’

  Smiling into the handset, Susan strode about the lounge looking for Jinx. ‘Perhaps they were for you?’

  ‘Ha! Doubtful,’ laughed the old lady.

  Susan opened her mouth to say something important but the gold chocolate hearts had pushed out the important thought. Dammit. What had she wanted to say? It was… something about… about Blankey. That was it. She had scoured the garden and looked inside the composting bin… ‘I did have a look—’

  ‘I wanted to ask—’ said the old lady at the same time. Then: ‘Sorry. You go on, dear.’

  ‘Oh. Right, well…’ Damn damn damn. It had gone again! ‘Have you found Blankey?’

  ‘No,’ replied Mrs Lucas. ‘I take it you haven’t found her either?’

  Susan made her lips into the shape of ‘no’, but the old lady’s words had climbed out of the handset and pulled at the corners of her mouth. Her mind drew up an image of the old lady sitting well forward in an armchair, ankles crossed, looking from the phone, to the door, to the littler basket. Gosh; how could she have forgotten to go over there last night? With her free hand, she pushed her hair out of her face and bent to look under the sofa for Jinx. No sign. But her wrist caught her eye. She blinked at it. Instead of saying ‘no’, Susan’s mouth took a deep breath and said: ‘I haven’t got any news for you…’ She stood up and touched the glowing skin with her nose. The LOG meeting flyer illuminated.

  ‘Oh…’ climbed out of the handset like a tiny, hungry child.

  ‘But why don’t I make us a nice cup of coffee and we’ll discuss where to go from here?’

  There was a short silence, then: ‘I’m sure you’ve got things to be getting on with.’

  ‘No, seriously. I think I have an idea of who we can ask about all of this. There’s definitely something strange going on.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Come over now and I’ll tell you all about it. Oh, why don’t you bring those chocolates?’

  Suddenly the hungry child was a gaggle of happy children, bursting through each hole of the handset as the old lady laughed. ‘Well, if we don’t know for whom he bought them, we may as well share them.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Susan laughed back, goose-bumping at the ‘m’ in ‘whom’.

  They said goodbye and hung up. With her free hand, Susan scrolled down through the LOG meeting flyer for the address. The other side of town. She would have to drive them both there. Hopefully Mrs Lucas would be free. ‘Jinx!’ she called. Nope, not in the kitchen. She turned and scanned the hall before making her way to the dining room. ‘Jinx! Bonbon!’ She pressed a button next to the dining-room doors and they slid up into the ceiling. ‘Jinx!’ she called. ‘Bonbon! Jiiiinx! Bonboooon!’ Nothing. They hardly ever left the garden. She’d been hoping to ask them about Blankey before Mrs Lucas got there… For coffee and gold hearts. She turned and let her feet swish across the carpet towards the kitchen. Oh well, what did it matter if she asked them later on? Scraping noises came from the vacuum hatch just as she reached into an upper cupboard for beakers. ‘Is that you two?’ she called without looking over her shoulder. ‘Bonbon?’

  A clap.

  Susan smiled; it was still a bit of a surprise, hearing her clap. But, gosh; they would really have to keep an eye on this. ‘Hang on, let me just grab these.’ Maybe she should try to explain to them exactly what had happened at the store. She frowned and turned around.

  Bonbon stood hugging herself while Jinx sat on the floor, holding her ankle in order to stroke her hair with her foot.

  ‘What are you doing, silly?’ Susan squatted in front of Jinx. ‘I’ve got a present for you in the lounge.’

  Jinx put her foot down. In half a second she was next to Bonbon and stroking her coat.

  ‘That’s right,’ Susan laughed. ‘Bonbon, did you tell her?’

  Clap.

  ‘That was very nice of you! Were you excited about telling Jinx that she had a present?’

  Clap.

  ‘Oh, you sweetie.’

  Jinx was already pulling one of Susan’s fingers towards the lounge.

  ‘Yes, alright. But first…’ Susan made a serious face. ‘I need your help for something very important; do you understand?’ She looked at Bonbon but both of them clapped together. ‘Oh! Jinx! You can do it too?’

  Jinx blinked.

  ‘Did Bonbon teach you?’

  Clap.

  Susan’s mouth dropped open. That really was quite amazing. The words of the scary technician lady bubbled up in her mind. ‘We don’t yet know their intellectual limits.’ Ha! Too right they didn’t. They actually spoke to each other about the new things that were happening in their lives; they imparted knowledge. That was so… human! She felt pressure around her fingertip again and grinned. They obviously still had to learn about patience. ‘Yes, alright, Jinx. Now listen, both of you: do you know what’s happened to Blankey?’

  Bonbon clapped twice. Jinx only once.

  Susan stared at them. Maybe she hadn’t been clear. She turned to Jinx. ‘Jinx, do you know where Blankey is?’

  Two claps.

  ‘Oh.’ Why did she say yes the first time? ‘Did you know that Blankey’s gone missing?’

  Both of them clapped ‘yes’.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  They blinked up at her. Bonbon seemed to roll her eyes. Susan laughed again.

  ‘Do you think I’m silly for asking questions that can’t be answered with yes or no?’

  Bonbon clapped once, slowly and deliberately.

  Susan grinned. Bonbon was making fun of her. How wonderful. ‘Okay; do you know that Blankey has gone missing because…’ Susan searched the ceiling for a reason. ‘Because she told you she was leaving?’

  Two claps from each.

  Ah-ha. That wasn’t the reason. ‘Because… you saw her go?’

  Two claps from each.

  ‘Because… someone told you?’

  Two claps from Bonbon. One from Jinx.

  ‘Someone told you, Jinx? Who told you?’

  Jinx walked over to Bonbon and held her sleeve.

  ‘Bonbon told you?’

  Clap.

  ‘Bonbon, who told you?’

  Bonbon rolled her eyes.

  ‘Right, sorry! Erm… Who, no, wait… erm…’

  Bonbon walked over to Susan and put her hand on her shoe.

  ‘I told you?’

  Clap.

  ‘I told you?’

  Clap.

  ‘Oh.’ Susan wrinkled her eyes. ‘Really?’

  Clap.

  Her finger was being squeezed again. This time Susan let herself be led all the way to the lounge, walking on her knees, wondering when she could have told Bonbon about Blankey. Bonbon followed, and looked on as Susan took the green humcoat from its bag and shook it out for Jinx. Jinx froze for a moment, before scrunching herself up, pulling her arms in, twisting her fingers, wrinkling her toes, jamming her eyes shut and rolling her lips back so fiercely that she was shaking. ‘Are you alright, J
inx?’ Just as the ‘n’ in Jinx had left Susan’s nose, Jinx jumped into a star and out of her mouth came the highest, tiniest squeal. She straightened and looked around her to see where the noise had come from.

  ‘Did you just squeal, Jinx? Did you just make a little noise?’

  Clap-clap.

  ‘Yes, you did! Didn’t she, Bonbon?’

  Clap.

  ‘Do it again – can you do it again?’

  Jinx opened her mouth and stood with it open. Susan watched her with folded lips. Jinx scrunched herself up again, exactly like before, until she was shaking. Doorbells chimed in the hallway. Jinx shut her mouth and looked towards the hall.

  ‘Oh… You look so nice, Jinx.’

  Jinx twirled one way, then the other.

  ‘It’s so nice in green.’

  ‘I know,’ scrunching her face up and gritting her teeth together. ‘I’m so happy, Bonbon.’

  Bonbon smiled. ‘I know you are.’

  Jinx tried to look at the back of herself in the dining-room doors, liking her reflection; oh! She just had to show Chips! Chips would really like her in this coat.

  ‘Is this Bonbon and…’

  ‘Jinx. Bonbon and Jinx.’

  ‘Oh how lovely.’ Mrs Lucas beamed at them both. ‘But that’s… that’s my Blankey’s coat!’ She pointed towards Bonbon. ‘I mean… That looks like my Blankey’s coat.’

  ‘I bought it the other day.’ Susan looked at Bonbon. ‘Have you got the same coat as Blankey, Bonbon?’

  A clap.

  ‘So it is! Little copycat…’

  ‘Is this… Is this the clapping you were talking about?’

  ‘Yes! This is it. Although…’ Susan tapped the side of her nose.

  ‘And you really haven’t seen my Blankey?’ Mrs Lucas looked from Bonbon to Jinx and back again.

  Bonbon clapped twice. Jinx watched, wanting to clap but too busy playing with the buttons on her coat.

  ‘That means “no”, doesn’t it?’

  Susan nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’