Nanny Piggins and the Daring Rescue 7

by R. A. Spratt

  The village threw quite the party that night. Admittedly the food consisted mainly of marshmallows, because it was still a few weeks until yam harvesting time, but there was lots of dancing and mango juice, and of course Nanny Piggins managed to find a few chocolate cakes in her luggage, so everyone had a marvellous time.

  Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were sad the next morning when they had to say goodbye.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t stay?’ asked the Chief.

  ‘I’m afraid Mr Green has to be rescued, and I really should get on with it,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But if you ever have another yam shortage, just call me and I’ll pop back for a visit. And I’ll bring a cannon next time.’

  All right, I suppose we have to do this,’ said Nanny Piggins with a sigh.

  Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were standing outside an unimpressive concrete-clad building in downtown Port Vila. According to their directions, Mr Green’s office was inside.

  ‘We could always leave him here and hire a Mr Green impersonator to come and live in the house with us,’ suggested Boris.

  ‘Excellent idea!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘We wouldn’t even need to hire anyone. You’re a brilliant actor, you could impersonate Mr Green.’

  ‘But Boris is a ten-foot-tall bear,’ Michael pointed out.

  ‘Pish!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘No-one who has ever met your father would be able to pick him out of a line-up. There’s something about him that makes you want to avoid looking at him directly. It’s as if his boringness could damage your retinas, unless you look at him through a tiny hole in a piece of paper.’

  ‘You have to rescue Father because you promised,’ said Samantha sternly, ‘and you know you are a pig who prides herself on keeping her word.’

  ‘Darn my deep-seated sense of integrity,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I blame my mother for bringing me up properly. If only she’d allowed me to be immoral, I would get so much more done in a day.’

  ‘You do have lapses of immorality when it comes to cake,’ Derrick observed.

  ‘True,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but that’s got nothing to do with morality. That’s just common sense. If someone is going to leave cake unattended in a locked factory behind nothing but a 12 foot high razor wire fence with movement-sensor technology and infra-red trip wires, then I think on an unconscious level they want me to steal it.’

  ‘So are we going to rescue Father?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘I guess so,’ said Nanny Piggins with a sigh.

  When they entered Mr Green’s office it was not what they were expecting. The concrete and breeze block exterior was vaguely prison-like. And from the tone of desperation in Mr Green’s phone call, Nanny Piggins had assumed he would be chained to his desk inside, or there would be someone standing over him with a stick, hitting him periodically to force him to violate the tax code faster. But Mr Green’s office was nothing like that. It was a beautiful big room with Melanesian decorations on the walls, reed floor mats and a huge picture window with a spectacular view of the tropical harbour. The only thing that Nanny Piggins had imagined accurately was the vision of Mr Green sitting at his desk weeping.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here,’ sobbed Mr Green. ‘I couldn’t bear the strain any longer.’

  ‘Have they been hitting you?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘Have they been yelling at you?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘Have they been forcing you to eat vegetables?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘No, it’s all far worse,’ said Mr Green, waving his hand vaguely at the office. ‘Look at the conditions they expect me to work in.’

  They all looked about at the beautiful, spacious, sun-drenched office.

  ‘It looks lovely,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Exactly!’ sobbed Mr Green. ‘How can I get anything done?!’

  A woman poked her head round the door. ‘Iced tea, Mr Green?’

  Mr Green wailed louder. ‘Did you hear that? Iced tea! I didn’t even have to yell at someone to get it. They’re offering to bring it to me! It’s like a form of torture.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘I’m not allowed to eat my sandwich at my desk,’ complained Mr Green. ‘They expect me to go out for lunch! At a restaurant! With French cuisine. And at the end of the day a security guard comes around and locks the door. And I have to go home, and stop working.’

  ‘Shocking,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘And you should see the house they’ve given me.’ Mr Green completely broke down at this point. ‘It’s a beach house. I can hear the lapping of the waves from every room.’

  ‘Now, Mr Green, just so we can understand fully,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘What exactly is wrong with all those things? They sound lovely to me.’

  ‘I don’t want lovely,’ said Mr Green. ‘I want to work hard – harder than everybody else, so that I win and know that I’m better than everyone. And the only way I can do that is in my nice quiet basement office, with no windows or sunshine or iced drinks with little umbrellas to distract me.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Are you worried that if you let your guard down, you might accidentally wind up being happy.’

  ‘But my basement office, my paperwork and my stale sandwiches are what makes me happy,’ said Mr Green. ‘I miss them.’ He broke down again.

  ‘But Father,’ said Derrick, ‘if you don’t want to be here why don’t you just come home. You’re a grown man. They aren’t holding you hostage. You could leave.’

  ‘But they are holding me hostage!’ protested Mr Green. ‘They took my passport.’

  ‘They found out how morally bankrupt you are and they’re keeping you under lock and key?’ guessed Nanny Piggins.

  ‘No, I’m a hero,’ said Mr Green, starting to cry again. ‘They are forcing me to stay because they love me.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make any sense,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Have you been hiring a Mr Green impersonator to pretend to be you?’

  ‘When I arrived and began going through the paperwork,’ explained Mr Green, ‘I discovered a massive fraud. A foreign investor had embezzled millions from the government and hidden it in an offshore caviar trading scheme. I exposed it all and recouped millions for the country. The President says I’m a national treasure.’

  ‘Wow!’ exclaimed Samantha, impressed by her father for the first time ever in her life.

  ‘It was money for schools, libraries and hospital renovations,’ continued Mr Green. ‘Returning it affected the lives of everyone in the country, and they’re all so grateful.’

  He began sobbing again here.

  ‘But Father,’ said Derrick, ‘that’s wonderful. You should be so proud. We’re proud.’

  ‘We didn’t know you had it in you,’ marvelled Michael.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Mr Green. ‘The only reason I found the fraud was because I was the one who had arranged it years ago on behalf of a previous client.’

  ‘So you were only returning money you had embezzled?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘It’s not called embezzlement when a lawyer does it,’ snapped Mr Green. ‘It is called identifying areas for flexibility within the tax code.’

  ‘It’s still stealing money that isn’t yours,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Yes, but when you’re doing it for a client that’s not a bad thing,’ said Mr Green. ‘It just shows I believe in providing good customer service.’

  ‘It would be fitting punishment to leave you here,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You have been very naughty.’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Mr Green.

  ‘But it would not be fair on the people of Vanuatu,’ continued Nanny Piggins. ‘They might love you now, but you would be sure to poison them with your spendthrift ways and misery-guttishness.’

  ‘But how are we going to get him home if the whole country wants him to stay here?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘If they won’t let your father leave, we’ll just have to sneak him out,
’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’m good at being sneaky, having worked with the Ringmaster for all those years.’

  They all stood back and looked at Mr Green, imagining ways they could get him past border security.

  ‘You could bake him into a cake!’ suggested Michael.

  ‘Or strap him into some scuba gear and submerge him in a giant crème brûlée?’ suggested Samantha.

  ‘Or roll him up in a giant sponge cake and tell people he’s a Swiss roll?’ added Derrick.

  ‘They’re all good ideas,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but this is your father we’re talking about. It would be unfair to a dessert to taint its beautiful flavour with his body odour.’

  ‘Can you taste body odour?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Do you honestly want to find out?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘No,’ shuddered all three children.

  ‘No, I had a simpler idea,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Children, I need you to fetch me some sticky tape, string and brown paper. And Mr Green, I need you to go out and buy a brand new refrigerator, a large one.’

  It turns out that Nanny Piggins’ idea was to take the refrigerator out of the box and throw it away (actually, she gave it to the local orphanage on the condition that they promised to fill it with chocolate cakes for the children). Then she put Mr Green into the refrigerator box with a couple of dozen sandwiches, a thermos of tea and a few airholes, and taped the box shut.

  ‘Nanny Piggins, is there a reason why you have taped Father up in a box?’ asked Samantha. ‘Or did you just do it so we can have some peace and quiet while we figure out how we’re going to get him home?’

  ‘This is how we’re going to get him home,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We’ve turned him into a giant parcel. Now we’ll just pop him in the post.’

  ‘Are you sure that’ll work?’ asked Michael.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘The post office delivers millions of insignificant letters and bills every day. It’s about time they delivered something worthwhile and earned their postage stamps.’

  The first problem occurred when they arrived at the red mailbox in the street. It soon became clear that the large refrigerator box was too big to go in. Even with Boris and Nanny Piggins shoving as hard as they could, it refused to fit through the letter flap.

  So they had to take their giant parcel to the actual post office. Nanny Piggins usually detested the post office and the children tried to keep her from entering one. It always ended with her standing on the counter denouncing all the postal workers for their rudeness, accusing them of poking holes in parcels to see if they wanted to steal what was inside, and shaming them for the greatest inhumanity of all – forcing people to queue up in winding, serpentine lines. But the post office in Vanuatu was pleasantly laid back. Nanny Piggins was easily able to persuade the lady at the counter that a five-vatu postage stamp was enough postage (by bribing her with a chocolate biscuit).

  Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children left the post office thinking their plan had been a brilliant success. But they had not counted on the anti-brilliance of Mr Green. He would have made his escape if he had been able to stop himself complaining for five minutes. But this was something he could not do.

  The lady at the counter wondered why the large parcel sitting behind her kept complaining about the heat, or its sandwiches, or the excess of sugar in its tea. But she was an amiable person, so when the giant parcel asked for a copy of the Economic Times to be squeezed in through its airhole, she obliged. It was only when Mr Green loudly exclaimed ‘Ow!’ and told her off for jamming the newspaper in his ear that she pressed her eye up to the airhole. When she spied Mr Green, the county’s great hero, cowering at the bottom of the box, she first asked for his autograph, then on reflection realised her whole family would like his autograph, so cut him out of the box and drove him out to her village where he was forced to endure a delicious twelve-course Melanesian feast.

  The next day Nanny Piggins made another attempt to sneak Mr Green out of the country. She took him to the airport and tried to book him onto a flight by disguising him using a fake moustache (which she had made from a strip of fur she snipped off Boris’ bottom while he was sleeping).

  Things went well at first. They got magazines and snacks for the plane. But as soon as Mr Green approached the check-in desk, the staff became suspicious.

  ‘You have a Russian passport,’ said the check-in lady.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Green. ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘It also says you are a ten-foot-tall bear,’ said the check-in lady.

  ‘I look different in different light,’ said Mr Green.

  ‘And that you have blue eyes, the same blue as a Swiss lake,’ continued the check-in lady.

  ‘It does not say that on my passport!’ denounced Mr Green.

  ‘Yes it does,’ said the check-in lady, showing him the passport.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered Mr Green. ‘If I say I am a ten-foot-tall Russian bear with blue eyes, then I am a ten-foot-tall Russian bear with blue eyes. It’s none of your business. I demand to be allowed on the plane.’

  A crowd had gathered around him. People were pointing and muttering.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ said the check-in lady. ‘The hero of the people. The great one!’

  Half an hour later, after the police had escorted Mr Green back to his luxury villa, they all sat around the kitchen table wondering what to do next.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ wailed Mr Green. ‘Why does everyone have to love me!’

  ‘You could always do something dreadful,’ suggested Derrick, ‘like push someone under a falling anvil.’

  ‘No,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Unless he does it to himself, I can’t condone that.’

  ‘You could be really bad at your job and wait to get fired,’ suggested Samantha.

  ‘That would take forever,’ said Mr Green. ‘This is the tropics. No-one expects you to work when it’s a nice warm day, perfect for going to the beach. And every day is a nice warm day, perfect for going to the beach. No, the President has decreed that I am a national hero, and I must stay for the full term of my contract.’

  ‘Then there is nothing for it then,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I shall have to take this to the top.’

  ‘Mount Everest?’ asked Boris.

  ‘No, the President,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’ll have to see him and demand that he let you go.’

  ‘Hah!’ scoffed Mr Green. ‘Why would the President see you? You’re just a nanny.’

  Everyone turned and looked at him.

  ‘How can you have lived with Nanny Piggins as long as you have and still think that?’ marvelled Samantha.

  ‘Don’t be angry with him,’ said Nanny Piggins, shaking her head sadly. ‘It’s not his fault he’s a little slow. He is just a lawyer.’

  To give her credit, Nanny Piggins did try asking for an appointment with the President the official way, by ringing up his diary secretary and being very polite. But after being very politely told that childcare workers were not given appointments with the most important man in the country, no matter how good they were at being blasted out of a cannon, Nanny Piggins decided to take matters into her own hands.

  Nanny Piggins went down to the President’s office, snuck up behind his receptionist, grabbed him about the neck and held a slice of mud cake over his mouth. She had seen a movie the previous week where an international super-spy did the same thing but with a chloroform-soaked rag. Now, to sneak up behind someone and hold a smelly rag over their nose seemed horribly violent to Nanny Piggins. But to sneak up behind someone and hold a delicious cake over their mouth seemed like a lovely act of friendship. One lick and they would give in to her immediately. And of course she was right.

  After she had subdued the receptionist, Nanny Piggins just needed to do the same thing to three security guards, two secretaries, a janitor and a cabinet minister before she was in. It actually took longer than she expected because two of the securi
ty guards and the cabinet minister all chased after her, begging to be subdued again with a second slice.

  When she burst into the President’s office, Nanny Piggins found him sitting at his desk. Well, to be strictly accurate he was more slumping, because he was in the middle of his mid-morning nap.

  ‘Mr President!’ called Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Urgh!’ exclaimed the President as he awoke with a start.

  ‘I demand that you allow Mr Green to return home immediately!’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Who?’ asked the President.

  ‘Mr Green, Mr Lysander Green, the tax lawyer,’ explained Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Oh, the Great Mr Green,’ said the President.

  Nanny Piggins shuddered. ‘As the World’s Greatest Flying Pig, it offends me to hear the word ‘great’ used in the same sentence as the name Mr Green, but as a courtesy to your high office I shall allow that to pass for now. Yes, I want Mr Green back. He is unhappy here and his constant complaints are an irritant to me and his children.’

  ‘Oh no, I’m sorry, you can’t have him,’ said the President. ‘Vanuatu is his motherland now. If the children miss their father why don’t you all come and live here too?’

  ‘Hmm, that is tempting,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Hey, wait a minute! How dare you try to seduce me with your wonderful lifestyle. I have come to rescue Mr Green and you are not going to distract me from my task.’

  ‘I’m President and I say you’re not, so there!’ said the President, standing up, which just goes to show how strongly he felt because when you are overweight and humidity is above eighty per cent, then getting to your feet is no small feat.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You’ve forced my hand, so I will force yours.’

  ‘Are you threatening me with physical violence?’ asked the President.

  ‘No, with something far more powerful,’ said Nanny Piggins before turning on her heel and storming out of the building (again, holding mud cake over the security guards’ faces on her way past, because they begged her to).