by R. A. Spratt
‘Exactly,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Nasty animals. Being first in the alphabet makes them so conceited. You should have as little to do with them as possible. So Percy, what was it you’d like me to do?’
‘I was hoping that you would agree to be my agent,’ said Percy.
‘Of course,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but first you’d better tell me what an agent is.’
‘Creative people get an agent to handle their business negotiations for them,’ explained Percy, ‘because people who have an artistic temperament often aren’t good at arguing with megalomaniacs. The last time I negotiated a contract was with the Ringmaster. I tried to get a ten per cent pay raise but by the time I left his caravan I’d negotiated a 20 per cent pay cut plus an additional 25 years on my 50 year contract.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be happy to represent you,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It would be my pleasure to go down to the radio station and bite a few shins. I’ve been meaning to do that anyway, to punish them for the dreadful music they’ve been playing. They call it “classic rock” but frankly, banging two rocks together would sound better.’
And so, after a light breakfast of a few dozen chocolate-covered pancakes, and getting dressed (a business suit over her best wrestling leotard), Nanny Piggins was ready to go down to the radio station to negotiate Percy’s contract. The children came along too, because Nanny Piggins thought it would be much more educational than school. Contract negotiation requires a knowledge of mathematics, psychology, legal terminology and all the main pain points in the human shin. They also took Boris with them because he had one semester’s worth of training in law, plus he could create a diversion by doing a little ballet if the need arose.
When they got to the radio station, the first challenge was getting past the reception desk. A very rude, slack-jawed youth called Jessica told them they could not go in without an appointment, then seemed almost disappointed when Nanny Piggins announced that they had one.
‘You can’t take a bear, a parrot and three children into a job interview,’ said the receptionist.
‘They aren’t children,’ fibbed Nanny Piggins. ‘They are a very short documentary film crew, doing a fly-on-the-wall exposé on the interior decoration of radio stations.’
‘Where are their cameras?’ asked the receptionist.
‘They are hidden about their persons,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Well, you definitely can’t take a bear into the interview,’ said the receptionist.
‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Because,’ said the receptionist.
‘Do you have a manual somewhere specifically stating that bears are forbidden from entering the premises?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘No,’ sulked the youth.
‘Then I suggest you don’t go ahead making unilateral decisions on your own,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Because this Bear is also a legal genius who has won every trial he has ever taken to court.’
Boris smiled and nodded. (Admittedly, he had only taken one case to court, which made it easier to maintain his one hundred per cent success rate.)
Realising that she was going to lose this argument, the receptionist sulked some more, said ‘Whatever’, put her ear buds back in (she was listening to something other than the rubbish being played by her own radio station) and buzzed them through.
‘Come in, come in,’ said the station manager. ‘We want you to know we are very happy to have Percy be a member of our team. It’s a shame he couldn’t be here today. I was looking forward to meeting him.’
‘He is here,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘He is?’ said the station manager, looking at Derrick, then Michael.
‘Over here,’ said Nanny Piggins, pointing to the parrot sitting on her shoulder.
‘Allo, awk,’ said Percy.
‘Is this a joke?’ asked the station manager. ‘Did the guys from StirFM send you over?’
‘We’re circus folk,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We don’t joke about contract negotiations. We may weep about them for decades, but we never joke.’
‘I can’t hire a parrot,’ protested the station manager. ‘I’d be a laughing stock.’
‘Good. Your listeners could do with a laugh,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Your DJ’s aren’t very funny.’
‘No way,’ said the station manager. He pressed the intercom button. ‘Jessica, call security.’
‘Oh dear, I don’t like to get nasty but I can see you are not going to be reasonable,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If you don’t give Percy the job, then things are going to get ugly for you.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ asked the station manager.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’m glad you’re catching on. I’m saying that Percy is a parrot – a group very under-represented in the media. If you don’t hire him, you will put every bird in the country off side.’
The station manager laughed. ‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘Am I?’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We’ll soon see how you like it when every bird in town goes out of its way to poo on your head.’
‘They wouldn’t!’ said the station manager.
‘Of course they would,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Birds poo on people’s heads all the time. Imagine how much more they would do it if they had a reason.’
‘Not just you,’ added Boris. ‘They’d poo on your car.’
The station manager gasped. ‘Not the Ferrari! Couldn’t they poo on my family instead?’
‘What colour is your car?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Red,’ said the station manager.
‘They’d definitely poo on that,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Birds can’t resist a shiny red car.’
‘But I can’t hire a parrot!’ wailed the station manager.
‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Are you worried he will show up your other DJs?’
‘No, because he’s a parrot!’ said the station manager.
Nanny Piggins sighed. ‘I can see they did not teach logic or debating at your school. Now, children, this is my dilemma. I don’t want to use violence. But some people just don’t respond to reason.’
Suddenly the door banged open. ‘What in the heck is going on in here!’ exclaimed a large man wearing cowboy boots and, even more strangely, a cowboy hat even though he was inside. ‘I’m trying to meditate in my office and all I can hear is angry threats and squawking.’
‘This pig wants me to hire this parrot,’ explained the station manager.
‘And who are you?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘I can only assume you are either a cattle worker who has become severely lost, or a man in a position of ultimate authority which allows you to dress for the office as though you were going to a fancy-dress party.’
‘I’m the owner of this radio station,’ said the owner.
‘Ah,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You see, children, executives in the entertainment industry like to dress up like cowboys for the same reason the Ringmaster wears his tail coat 24 hours a day.’
‘Because they’re in charge?’ asked Michael.
‘Yes, and because they’re barking mad,’ explained Nanny Piggins.
‘I like the cut of your jib, little lady,’ said the owner. ‘Are you married?’
‘No,’ said Nanny Piggins, beginning to glower. (She disliked getting marriage proposals on a first meeting – she thought it showed unnecessary presumption.)
‘But you are, sir,’ the station manager reminded him.
The owner looked down at the ring on his left hand. ‘Oh yeah, never mind. I’ll offer you a job instead.’
‘What?’ exclaimed the station manager.
‘She’s a spitfire, and she’s got the gift of the gab,’ said the owner.
‘You can’t just hire a pig off the street to be on the radio! She’s got no training,’ protested the station manager.
‘What do you mean “no training”?’ retorted Nanny Piggins. ‘I am the World’s Greatest Flying Pig.’
‘But
you never trained at that,’ Michael pointed out.
‘True,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but all those head injuries have to count for something.’
‘You’re hired,’ said the owner, grabbing Nanny Piggins by the trotter and shaking it.
‘I actually came here to negotiate a job for my friend Percy the Parrot,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Well then he’s hired too,’ said the owner. ‘Now everybody clear off. I need to get back to my meditation. My doctor tells me if I’m going to stop having heart attacks I need to calm down.’
‘Have you tried cake therapy?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘I thought cake was bad for your heart,’ said the owner.
‘Rubbish,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘That’s only if you eat it in small amounts. If you eat enough really sugary cake, with very thick icing, you will become pleasantly numbed and drowsy from all the calories. Pigs in Tibet have been doing it for years. It’s called transencakeal meditation.’
And so when Nanny Piggins and Percy returned the next day it was to host the breakfast program, with Boris and the children tagging along for moral support (and to drive the getaway car if things got out of hand). The station manager had tried scheduling ‘The Percy & Piggins Show’ on the midnight to dawn shift but the owner would not hear of it. He wanted to listen to Nanny Piggins’ program and he was not going to get up early to do it.
Predictably, Nanny Piggins was brilliant. Her insightful advice, words of wisdom and cake recipes were highly entertaining. She held up the whole station’s schedule for an hour and a half when she told the story of the time she snuck chocolate cake over the border into Afghanistan to trade it for a two-week ceasefire so they could put on their circus. But Percy was no less a talent. His interview technique was a revelation. In day-to-day conversation he seemed like just an ordinary parrot with a 50,000 word vocabulary, keen intellectual insight and knowledge of world events.
Yet when he came to do political interviews he was brilliant. You see, the radio station had a standing arrangement with the mayor that each day he would ring up and talk about what he was doing around town. So at 7.45am precisely, the mayor rang in to ‘The Percy & Piggins Show’.
‘Hello,’ said the mayor.
‘Good morning Mr Mayor,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I do hope you’re not still wearing your pyjamas.’
‘What?’ said the mayor. (The previous radio hosts had never guessed that he conducted his daily interview still wearing his pyjamas.)
‘It’s just that I can hear you are in an unusually echo-free room,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘so either you are obsessive–compulsive and have stapled egg cartons to the walls of your living room, or you are still sitting in bed and the sound is being absorbed by the bedding. If you are still in bed I assume you are not wearing your suit because it wouldn’t be terribly comfortable. But the idea of you in pyjamas is a disturbing visual image for our listeners, which is why I hoped it wasn’t true.’
Being a politician, the mayor knew how to answer this question – by asking his own question and answering that instead. ‘I hoped you were going to ask me about the power outage yesterday at the sewerage plant,’ began the mayor.
But this is where Percy cut him off with a blindingly brilliant rhetorical attack.
‘I hoped you were going to ask me about the power outage yesterday at the sewerage plant, ack!’ parroted Percy.
The children were stunned. They knew he was a parrot but they had not expected him to literally ‘parrot’ the mayor, repeating exactly what he said.
The mayor was not expecting to have his words repeated back to him, but he had been mayor for some time so he had grown used to not listening to others, and he ploughed on. ‘I have set up a committee and they will be investigating it immediately.’
‘I have set up a committee and they will be investigating it immediately,’ parroted Percy.
‘Have you?’ said the mayor. ‘Oh gosh.’ (He hadn’t really set up a committee and was quite shocked that Percy had.)
‘But we know who to blame,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We blame you! You are the one who sacked all the workers and automated the sewerage works. We all saw the press conference six months ago.’
‘Council will be taking legal action against the suppliers of the automated sewerage equipment for their design failures,’ said the mayor.
‘Their design failures,’ parroted Percy.
‘Oh all right, my design failures,’ confessed the mayor. ‘Curse your investigative committee. I don’t know how they found out.’
‘Found out,’ repeated Percy.
The children giggled.
‘Stop parroting what I say. It’s childish,’ said the mayor.
‘Stop parroting what I say. It’s childish,’ parroted Percy.
Now everyone laughed. Obviously it is cruel to laugh at someone else’s discomfort. But when that person is a politician it is okay.
‘I’m the mayor, show me some respect,’ said the mayor.
‘I’m the mayor, show me some respect,’ parroted Percy.
‘So you admit you fired the workers so you could get a spa installed in your mayoral office,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘I did no such thing,’ gasped the mayor.
‘I did no such thing,’ parroted Percy.
‘The spa budget was entirely separate from the sewerage budget,’ protested the mayor.
‘The spa budget was entirely separate from the sewerage budget,’ parroted Percy.
‘Stop repeating everything I say!’ yelled the mayor.
‘Stop repeating everything I say!’ parroted Percy.
‘Why do you want him to stop repeating you?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Because you’re ashamed to hear your own lies repeated back to you.’
Now, the mayor did not exactly confess at this point. But there was a dreadful moment of silence when all the listeners could hear just how well his bedroom was soundproofed – and then the sound of the mayor giving one panicked sob of shame before he hung up the phone.
‘That was a triumph!’ exclaimed the owner as he burst into the radio booth. ‘We’ve been trying to roast that bloated self-important popinjay for years, and you stuck it to him. I’m buying you all lunch, anywhere you want to go.’
‘Can we go to the Slimbridge Cake Factory?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Sure,’ said the owner. ‘I didn’t know they had a restaurant.’
‘Oh, they don’t,’ said Boris.
‘But Nanny Piggins knows where there’s a gap in the fence we can crawl through,’ explained Michael.
Unfortunately for the mayor things did not get better as the week wore on: on Wednesday he rang up to talk about the state of the education system; on Thursday he rang up to discuss the tongue depressor shortage at the local hospital; and on Friday he called to announce council’s plan to dig up all the bushes they had planted last year and replace them with plastic replicas, because they were being sued by a lady with very bad hay fever.
And each time he was humiliated by Percy, who simply repeated everything he said. It turns out that if you take what a politician says, which sounds very hard to believe the first time you hear it, then simply repeat it, it sounds ridiculous. By the end of the week people were openly laughing at the mayor everywhere he went. He knew things were bad when his loyal secretary of 26 years started repeating what he said and giggling. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was when his wife started doing it. Then he had to get revenge.
When Nanny Piggins and Percy (with Boris and the children) arrived at the radio station on Monday they were met by two large, burly men in suits and the mayor himself.
‘Arrest that parrot!’ demanded the mayor.
‘What’s all this about?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Are you the fashion police? Because if you are, I always imagined you’d be better dressed.’
‘We’re from the department of immigration,’ said the burlier of the burly men. ‘We have been given evidence that would suggest that Mr Per
cy Emilio Parrot is in fact not a citizen of this country.’
‘Rubbish!’ declared Nanny Piggins. ‘Percy was born and bred here.’
Percy coughed. ‘How many red macaws have you seen flying about the local area?’
‘You’re an immigrant?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘But you speak such flawless English.’
‘Thank you,’ said Percy. ‘I had to listen to a lot of audio tapes in the car. Which was particularly difficult because I didn’t own a car.’
‘We need to see your passport and citizenship papers,’ said the immigration official.
‘I don’t have any,’ said Percy.
‘See, I told you so,’ declared the mayor. ‘Arrest him and have him deported!’
‘I was kidnapped,’ said Percy.
‘What?’ said the mayor.
‘I was a young chick, newly hatched, when I was cruelly taken from my mother’s nest by a wicked criminal,’ said Percy, dabbing the corner of his eye with his wing.
‘The Ringmaster!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children.
‘Exactly,’ said Percy. ‘He smuggled me into this country inside a tube of potato chips.’
‘With the chips?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘No,’ said Percy.
‘How unspeakably cruel!’ denounced Nanny Piggins.
‘I was raised in the circus,’ said Percy. ‘Since that day I have never seen my family, the jungle, or my homeland.’
The immigration officials were so touched by this story they were dabbing away tears.
The mayor rolled his eyes. ‘You don’t believe this load of hogwash, do you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ warned Derrick.
Nanny Piggins intensely disliked the term ‘hogwash’. She did not see how a pig taking a bath could be taken as something derogatory.
‘I’m afraid that foreign birds with no papers can’t be permitted to stay,’ said the immigration official.
‘Ha!’ said the mayor. ‘Did you hear that? Foreign birds are not permitted to stay’ he mimicked in a singsong voice.
‘Unless,’ said the other immigration official, ‘he is sponsored by a zoo. Zoos have lots of foreign undocumented animals.’