Floods 3

by Colin Thompson

  ‘You mean steal one?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I think “steal” is such a nasty word, don’t you?’

  ‘Actually, I quite like it,’ said Nerlin. ‘Don’t forget I grew up in the drains. We had to steal everything just to survive.’

  ‘Ah, how true,’ said Vessel, remembering his own childhood.

  ‘Well, we’ll just say we’re borrowing the boat,’ said the Queen. ‘When we’ve finished with it, the owners can come and get it back.’

  ‘Of course,’ Vessel added, ‘the three idiot spies hiding in the tree above our heads will probably “borrow” a boat too.’

  Cliché, Stain and Ooze all began doing bird impersonations to try and throw the fugitives off the scent.

  ‘Oh, listen,’ said Vessel. ‘There are three pigeons up in that tree. Can’t remember the last time I had pigeon pie. Where’s my gun?’

  Cliché, Stain and Ooze fell out of the tree and landed at Nerlin’s feet. Pretending to be Belgian33 tourists, they began babbling incoherently and bowing and backing away in the direction of the coal mine, which they fell down. They landed on George, who most definitely did not like it and told them so in several languages, including Belgian.

  The Hearse Whisperer kept very still up in the branches. She really was disguised as a pigeon, and had no intention of becoming a pie.

  ‘Oops,’ said the Queen, watching George’s kung-fu hooves connecting with the three spies’ bottoms. ‘Time to go, I think.’

  Nerlin and Mordonna with baby Valla went one way. The Queen and Vessel went another and Parsnip flew overhead, keeping a lookout for the spies. They blended in like barbed wire at a jellyfish party, but because they looked so weird, no one dared bother them, though several people did invite Parsnip to join them in a sweet and sour crow and noodle dinner.

  The three spies didn’t manage to escape from the mine until they had each carried seven bags of coal to the surface at the suggestion of the miner, who had a large stick and an angry donkey. The Hearse Whisperer had followed Vessel and the Queen down to the harbour and sat watching them from a tall chimney. She knew the Queen would sense her presence if she got too near so she kept a safe distance.

  ‘Right,’ said Vessel when he and the Queen reached the wharf, ‘we need to find a boat, something big enough to survive the open sea.’

  ‘None of these is much good,’ said the Queen. ‘They’re a load of junk.’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Vessel. ‘But that one at the end of the harbour looks promising. The one with the French flag.’

  ‘How will we get everyone else off the ship?’ said Nerlin, who had just reached them with Mordonna.

  ‘No problem,’ said the Queen. ‘We are wizards, after all.’

  She took a small wand from her sleeve and waved it at herself. There was a flash and the Queen turned into a twenty-three-year-old French cafe dancer with long black hair, bright red lips and a dress with a long split in the side. She walked up the gangplank of the French boat and whistled loudly.

  ‘’Allo boys,’ she said in French, ‘’Ow would you all like to come to a party with lots of pretty girls, silly loaves of bleached white bread a metre long and bowls of hot snails in garlic? There will be an accordion player and second-rate red wine.’34

  The entire crew of the boat ran towards the Queen, who led them down a very dark alley where Vessel had removed all the manhole covers. In the darkness the Queen and Mordonna helped each sailor make a donation of one pint of blood for baby Valla’s breakfasts. The sailors floundered around in the drains for several hours before they realised they weren’t at a party. By the time they got back to the harbour, their ship, the Maldemer, had vanished.

  ‘At last long Snip-Snip got proper crow’s nest,’ Parsnip said with pride from his new nest at the top of the Maldemer’s mast. ‘Snip-Snip watch out.’

  No one on board had ever been on a boat before. Lake Tarnish is so toxic that any boats on it get eaten away within a few weeks.35

  ‘Ahoy land,’ Parsnip shouted.

  ‘Thank you, Parsnip,’ Vessel called back, ‘that’s not surprising considering we haven’t left the harbour yet.’

  ‘Ahoy harbour,’ Parsnip replied.

  ‘Right,’ said Vessel, ‘we need to find out how to work this thing. I saw a picture of a boat once. I think we’re supposed to fix these huge bedsheets to that stick poking up out of the floor.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Queen agreed, ‘and I think the pointy end should be at the front, not at the back like it is now.’

  ‘What’s this thing?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I think it’s called a compass,’ said the Queen.

  ‘It can’t be, there’s nowhere to put the pencil to draw a circle with,’ said Nerlin.

  They hoisted the sails and, as they did, the boat turned itself round and began to sail south-east.

  ‘Which is, er, exactly the direction we want to go,’ Vessel lied as he looked at the maps.

  Now and then an island or another boat appeared on the horizon, but by pulling on the rudder thing they found hanging over the back of the boat, they managed to keep out of everyone’s way.

  When the spies reached the harbour, the first people they met were a group of French sailors who smelled as if they had been to a party down a drain.

  Cliché asked the sailors if they knew where the spies could get a boat, but the sailors thought they were making fun of the fact they’d lost their own boat, and attacked them. The only good thing about this was that the last bit of the attack involved Cliché, Stain and Ooze being thrown into the harbour, which washed off all the coal dust they had been covered with.

  Cliché couldn’t swim and neither could Ooze, but as luck would have it the three of them managed to grab hold of a rope hanging down from an old junk.

  Seeing this, the French sailors cut the mooring rope and the junk began to drift out of the harbour towards the open sea, with the three spies still hanging on for dear life and the sailors making rude French hand signals and blowing raspberries.

  As she watched the spies clamber up the rope and onto the deck, the Hearse Whisperer realised the junk was about as seaworthy as a paper bag full of marbles. She changed herself into an albatross36 and flew slowly out to sea.

  The junk had not been built for life on the open sea. It had been built to carry bags of very light feathers up and down a very calm river. So it wasn’t long before it started leaking.

  ‘Is it supposed to do that?’ said Cliché as the water came up round his ankles.

  ‘No, I think the water’s supposed to be outside the boat,’ said Stain.

  ‘Maybe this is an ancient Chinese submarine,’ Ooze suggested.

  ‘If we don’t grab those buckets and start bailing out, it’ll soon be an ancient Chinese underwater shed,’ said Cliché.

  They took off all their clothes, tore them into strips and stuffed the strips between the planks. It slowed the water down, but there were too many holes in the junk to stop it completely. All through the day and into the night they took it in turns to empty buckets over the side of the boat.

  ‘I can’t lift my arms another inch,’ said Ooze, collapsing on the deck. ‘If we don’t find land soon, we’ve had it.’

  ‘Is there a map?’ said Cliché. ‘Let’s see if there is any land.’

  ‘Yes, there is a map,’ said Stain. ‘It’s jammed in the big gap in that plank there – and even if we looked at it, what good would it do? It’s pitch black, we don’t have any instruments, the stars are totally covered by clouds, it’s beginning to rain and I want my mummy.’

  ‘Something will turn up,’ said Cliché. ‘It always does.’

  ‘This time I think the things that are likely to turn up are our toes and a shark,’ said Ooze, grabbing Stain. ‘I want your mummy too.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Cliché, ‘and a pair of trousers.’

  The boat sank lower and lower in the water as the dark night grew so dark that the three spies couldn’t see their fingers in front o
f their noses or even find where their noses were. They began to wail and groan in such a pathetic way that it even chased the sharks away.

  But, as Cliché had predicted, something did turn up.

  It was a bump.

  The sinking junk hit something, not with a big crash, but more of a gentle thud that was just hard enough to make the whole boat fall to pieces. Each spy grabbed a plank and hung on. They tried to make their pink legs looks as unappetising as possible by turning blue, just in case the sharks came back.

  Night fell and so did the wind, turning the sea to glass. The clouds went off to hassle Belgium and overhead a half moon and a million stars twinkled in an endless sky. Far out of sight of any land, the Maldemer sat motionless in the total silence, which was broken only by a whale coughing eighty-four kilometres away.37

  At last the escapees felt safe. The only sign of life was an albatross circling far above them.

  ‘Ahoy moon,’ Parsnip called.

  There was a bump and the ship rocked in the water.

  ‘What was that?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘What?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘That bump. And I can hear voices.’

  ‘Probably just mermaids,’ said the Queen. ‘You get a lot of them round here.’

  She said this with such confidence that no one thought to ask her how she knew, seeing as how she had never been to sea in her whole life.

  ‘Is that what mermaids do?’ Nerlin asked. ‘Cry like babies and say they want their mummies?’

  ‘I’m guessing they’re probably not mermaids,’ said Vessel. ‘Get a torch.’

  ‘We haven’t got one,’ said Mordonna. ‘I looked earlier.’

  ‘OK,’ said Vessel. He threw some petrol over the side, followed by a match.

  The cries of ‘I want my mummy’ changed into ‘I want my mummy and some ointment’ and ‘Ow, ow, my ear’s on fire’.

  ‘Spies ahoy,’ said Parsnip.

  ‘Oh, look, it’s our three little spies,’ said the Queen, ‘and they’ve got surfboards.’

  ‘No, no …’ Cliché began.

  ‘Maybe we could whip up some waves for them to ride,’ said the Queen. ‘I remember having to learn a big wave spell at school. Never could understand why, seeing we didn’t have any sea, but now I suppose it could be useful.’

  ‘No, please, no …’

  ‘No trouble,’ said the Queen. ‘Glad to help. I just have to make sure I remember it right, because I think it was right next to the “turning a spy into a jellyfish” spell in the water spells book.’

  ‘No, I, we, err …’ Stain stammered.

  The fire had burnt off all his hair except for one tuft so now he looked like an overcooked coconut. The other two looked worse, like burnt coconuts that had been used in a coconut shy at a fun fair.

  ‘Now, don’t tell me,’ said Vessel. ‘There’s something you want. That’s why you banged our boat.’

  ‘Yes, we –’

  Vessel held up his hand. ‘No, no, let me guess. Three cold naked spies hanging on to bits of wood, hundreds of miles from land in the middle of the night with a terrible storm approaching … what on earth could they want?’ he said.

  ‘A cup of tea?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Surfboard wax?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Swimming trunks?’ said the Queen.

  ‘A towel, that’s what it’ll be, I bet you,’ said Vessel. ‘I bet they want a towel.’

  ‘Help,’ Cliché bleated in a pathetic voice.

  His fingers had gone numb holding onto his plank, and even the plank itself was disappearing as a giant marine woodworm ate it for breakfast.

  Vessel threw a rope over the side and hauled the three naked, shivering spies on board. They were each given a sack to wear and then locked in the ship’s hold with half a beetroot and a mug of water.

  ‘What are we going to do with them?’ asked the Queen.

  ‘Find some remote island that barely supports life and leave them there,’ said Vessel. ‘Unless you have a better idea.’

  ‘We could keep them as a blood supply for Valla,’ Mordonna suggested. ‘Fresh food is much healthier for him.’

  So each morning Cliché ‘donated’ a cup of his blood for young Valla’s breakfast. Six hours later Stain ‘donated’ a cup for Valla’s lunch and in the evening Ooze did the same for the boy’s dinner.

  They spent a few weeks drifting about in the Pacific learning useful sailor-type things, like the fact that one bit of sea looks exactly like another bit of sea and one seagull looks exactly like another seagull, even the girl ones, and young boy wizards do not like seagull blood half as much as spy blood.

  ‘Ahoy ahoy,’ shouted Parsnip, getting very excited. ‘Snowbits, mountain, place ahoy.’

  ‘Must be South America or Burma,’ said Vessel, who had never done geography.

  ‘Ahoy, umm, Snip-Snip look in atlas.’

  There was a fluttering of wings from the crow’s nest, followed by a lot of sheets of paper blowing away and some swearing.

  ‘Ahoy Chile,’ he reported.

  ‘Yes, we are all feeling a bit cold,’ said Vessel.

  ‘Not cold skin, got big place Gataponia,’ Parsnip explained, which made everything perfectly clear.

  Gradually the coast of South America filled the whole horizon. Everyone’s spirits began to lift. Weeks of eating the French sailors’ food – silly loaves of bleached white bread a metre long and bowls of cold snails in garlic washed down with second-rate red wine – had made them all rather depressed. They were also just about to run out of toilet paper.

  As they neared the coast, the sea grew rough. They were at the very bottom of South America, where the seas can be the most ferocious in the world. And they had arrived right in the middle of the rough and stormy season, which would have been hard to avoid since it went from the first of January until the end of December, apart from the odd calm week here and there.

  This was not one of those weeks.

  Vessel went into the cabin and looked through the ship’s library. There was a copy of How to Sail in Seriously Dangerous Seas for Dummies but it was all in French. There were also some dictionaries – French/Belgian, Belgian/Serbo–Croat, Serbo– Croat/Cajun and Cajun/English.

  ‘You,’ he said, hauling Cliché up into the cabin. ‘You’ve got a French name, what does this book say?’

  ‘Have I?’ said Cliché.

  ‘Have you what?’

  ‘Have I got a French name?’

  ‘Yes, Cliché is a French word,’ said Vessel.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Vessel. ‘Hang on, I’ll use the dictionaries here. Let’s see.’

  He flicked through the pages, translating language after language, and finally said, ‘Cliché in English translates as … umm, cliché.’

  ‘Oh, thanks for clearing that up.’

  Since it had taken five minutes to go through the four dictionaries to find out Cliché meant cliché, by the time Vessel had translated a single sentence, they would have smashed into the dangerous rocks that were now on all sides of them.

  ‘Here, give it to me,’ said the Queen, doing the French cafe dancer trick again to make sure they would obey.

  Vessel and Cliché both fainted. When they came round, Vessel locked Cliché back in the hold and slapped him for fainting at the Queen’s beauty, which only Vessel was allowed to do.

  ‘It says, ma cherie,’ the Queen said, turning the pages of the book, ‘zat unless you are a sailor extraordinaire avec le tons of experience, you should keep away from ze rocks avec ze sharp pointy bits.’

  ‘I think we kind of knew that already,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Exactement,’ said the Queen. ‘It ees a stupid livre.’

  There was a list of correct sailing terms in the back of the book, which only confused them even more. Apparently the ropes that were tied to the sheets were called sheets. The things they had called sheets were called sails and the pointy end of the boat was called
the front.

  ‘So what are the white cotton things we put on our beds then?’ Mordonna asked.

  ‘It doesn’t say,’ said the Queen, ‘but seeing as how the ropes are the sheets I imagine the sheets would be the ropes.’

  ‘The sooner we get to dry land, the better,’ Nerlin muttered.

  The Hearse Whisperer had landed on top of Cape Horn and changed back into the closest thing to a human she could manage. As she stood looking down into the angry sea, the Maldemer sailed into view. Tierra del Fuego was not called the land of fire for nothing and it didn’t take much effort on the secret, secret agent’s part to whip the storm up into an almighty frenzy.

  Two hundred and seventeen penguins huddled together on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs waiting for the storm to pass. The Hearse Whisperer lifted the birds into the air and dropped them onto the Maldemer. They waved their sad little wings and stuck their feet out in front of them in a feeble attempt to fly, but instead they fell into the already fragile sails, tearing them to shreds, before they landed in a wet, miserable, confused pile on the deck. The violent wind ripped the tattered sails from the mast and carried them away. With each giant wave, the poor penguins ran from one side of the boat to the other. Instead of sinking it as the Hearse Whisperer had hoped, they helped to keep it upright.

  One penguin missed the deck and got stuck in the top of the narrow funnel that ran up from the engine, which Vessel and Nerlin had built out of the rest of the chopsticks, an enormous jellyfish and four of Mordonna’s toenail clippings,38 bringing the ship to a sudden stop. No matter how hard Nerlin pulled on the rope, the engine refused to restart.

  ‘Right, you three,’ said Vessel, hauling Cliché, Stain and Ooze up from the hold, ‘up on deck, you have to man the oars.’

  The three spies complained and begged and promised that if they ever got safely home again they would devote the rest of their lives to helping little old ladies cross the street, even little old ladies who didn’t know they wanted to cross, but Vessel and Nerlin poked and pushed them up onto the deck.