Floods 11 Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Betty and Ffiona cooking dinner? Run for your lives!

  Betty and her friend Ffiona love cooking. The trouble is, they are both so useless at it that their families make themselves ill just to avoid their meals. It isn’t that their families are too kind to tell the girls how bad their cooking is – they actually tell them all the time.

  But Betty and Ffiona don’t believe them, and now the girls are planning to open Transylvania Waters’s first gourmet restaurant.

  Queen Mordonna forbids them … unless they can prove their cooking skills by winning TV’s most popular cooking contest.

  Will they poison all the judges, or will The Cheffie Olympics be Betty and Ffiona’s finest hour?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Floods Family Tree

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Most Delicious Drink Ever

  Postscript

  Endnotes

  Copyright Page

  More at Random House Australia

  Thank you to Daniel Kelly, who came

  up with the title of this book.

  THE FLOODS FAMILY TREE

  The FLOODS Family Tree has got so complicated that it’s impossible to keep track, what with strange remote relatives popping up here and there, who may be real or simply the result of a bad dream from eating Betty’s cooking. So instead, here is a nice picture of a tree out of my garden.*

  Since The Floods 10 our hero Nigel Davenport, 38, has grown a third ear and his other two ears have moved down his body to be with their new companion. Unfortunately, because Nigel always wears extremely thick underpants and even thicker hairy tweed trousers, this means he is now virtually deaf.

  And the bad consequence of being almost deaf, you ask? Whilst tightrope walking over the famous Bottomless Lake Full Of Starving Crocodiles, Nigel did not hear his assistant tell him that his shoelaces were undone.

  Meanwhile back in Surreyshire-on-Sea, Nigel’s lumpy but unappealing mother, Ironica, has been kidnapped by secret-secret-secret agents from a revolutionary group whose aim is to control the world’s muesli production.

  The future is looking even bleaker for Jolyon Whipsnade-Throgmorton than it was before, as he recently crashed his Vespa into a very large thistle and is currently in insensitive care at the local hospital, having all the prickles removed with an organic laser.

  WILL Nigel find the secret of life, or at least the secret of bacon, before the crocodiles reach him?

  WILL Ironica EVER manage to stay regular without her daily muesli?

  WILL Jolyon EVER be totally prickle-free?

  Who cares? You will be much better off reading this …

  Since Betty Flood had been five years old, it had become a Floods family tradition for her to cook everyone breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings. No one was quite sure how or why this tradition had started. They thought it was probably something to do with a TV programme. It certainly wasn’t because Betty was any good at cooking.

  She wasn’t.

  She was absolutely dreadful and the more she tried, the worse she got. Cookery books didn’t help, even very simple ones with big writing and lots of coloured pictures. It was like the way that her magic always went wrong, only worse. There was something inside Betty’s brain that made the simplest recipe, such as boiling an egg, go very wrong.1

  So, whenever they could, the Floods would do their best to avoid eating Betty’s cooking. They tried flushing it down the toilet once, but the toilet just threw it back at them. They tried creeping out into the back garden of 13 Acacia Avenue and putting it on the bird feeder, but that just covered the lawn with dead birds, which, of course, being a family of witches and wizards, the Floods thought looked rather nice. The trouble was that when the maggots – which had been feasting on the Queen Mother in her coffin buried near the clothes line – crept up out of the ground and into the poisoned birds, they mutated into enormous carnivorous moths that tried to bite everyone’s ankles.

  Betty decorated a big saucepan with mulberry leaves to lure the moths in and invented what no one agreed was her finest dish – Big Moth Bourguignon. (‘Finest’ was a totally unsuitable word to describe anything Betty cooked.)

  ‘I mean,’ said her mother, Mordonna, ‘I love her to bits, but her cooking could kill at ten paces.’

  ‘And has done. Remember cousin Clitheroe?’ said her dad, Nerlin.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Mordonna, ‘but he was like a small Balkan country.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Nerlin. ‘Dark and brooding?’

  ‘No, he had a very weak constitution.’

  ‘But you must admit,’ said Betty’s brother, Winchflat, ‘you don’t know anyone else who can burn water.’

  The family tried being ill on Sundays so they could stay in bed, but that was even worse. Betty insisted on making them special breakfasts designed to make them well again. These breakfasts were exactly the same awful things she made for everyone else, except she liquidised them in a blender and added ground mandrake roots that would kill humans, but just made the Floods have hallucinations in which they were Belgian ballroom dancers in a competition on a very slippery ice-rink and were naked with a burning candle in each ear that kept dripping hot wax on their bare skin.

  Everyone had hoped that when the family moved out of Acacia Avenue and went to live in Transylvania Waters, things would be different. After all, there was a whole army of cooks and kitchen staff at Castle Twilight. So they hoped Betty might let the professional cooks do all the cooking, but, no, Betty wouldn’t hear of it. She even took over one of the smaller kitchens just for her own use. AND, what was even worse, she offered to teach the castle cooks how to improve their cooking.

  The family had long ago given up pretending they thought Betty’s cooking was good. There had been way too much throwing up and smuggling peculiar food out of the room in wet trouser pockets and worse places for anyone to pretend any more.

  The trouble was that Betty insisted. She also made the whole family promise they would not do any magic on her cooking to change it in any way.2

  ‘How will I ever improve if I don’t practise?’ she said.

  ‘But, sweetheart,’ Mordonna pleaded, ‘you haven’t improved. I think we all agree you are never going to improve. From your very first breakfast, which we can all still remember …’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Nerlin. ‘How could we ever forget those choc-chip omelettes with throbbing frog spawn gravy?’

  ‘Well, we can’t, can we?’ said Winchflat, and everyone laughed. ‘I mean, the memory even overruled my Memory-Washing-Machine.’

  ‘We all have different talents,’ said Mordonna sympathetically to Betty, ‘and yours is not cooking.’

  ‘But I love cooking more than anything else in the whole world,’ Betty insisted, ‘and so does my best friend, Ffiona. When we leave school we’re going to start our own restaurant.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Mordonna at this incredible news, ‘we are your family and we love you and we all hate your cooking. I think if you opened a restaurant and cooked for strangers, you would end up in court being sued for damages.’

  ‘And a lot of funeral expenses,’ said Winchflat.

  Ffiona’s involvement did not help. Betty’s family had hoped it would. After all, the Hulberts were humans, not wizards, a
nd they were very conventional humans too, who thought pasta was quite exotic. So Edna and Mordonna were very surprised when Ffiona’s cooking turned out to be as weird as Betty’s. Each mother blamed the other child for being a bad influence, but in the end they had to admit it was neither girl’s fault. They were both just strange.

  ‘Maybe there’s an evil witch who has cast a Bad Food Spell on the two girls?’ Nerlin suggested.

  ‘Well, there is that coven of three witches – the Cookery Witches – who live in that remote cave at the far end of the valley,’ said Winchflat’s wife, Maldegard. ‘We came across them when we were making the official Transylvania Waters maps.’

  ‘Why would you think they’ve got anything to do with all this?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Well, they did seem to have a lot of cooking pots and cauldrons,’ said Maldegard.

  ‘All witches have a lot of cauldrons,’ said Mordonna. ‘I’ve got twenty-seven.’

  ‘And all the grass and plants and insects and birds were dead for about fifty metres in every direction around their cave.’

  ‘Well, yes, that is a bit suspicious.’

  ‘But I think the name of their cave is probably a bit of a giveaway,’ said Maldegard.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They called it The Devil’s Kitchen,’ said Maldegard, ‘and they insisted we stay to lunch. We felt very weird afterwards. My tongue felt as if it was hairy. But when I touched it with my finger, it wasn’t. But my finger was.

  ‘And so were my teeth,’ she added. ‘It took several days to wear off, and thank goodness it did. Have you ever tried shaving your teeth?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Merlinmary. ‘I do it every morning.’

  ‘Look, it’s here on the map,’ said Maldegard.

  ‘Where?’ said Betty. ‘Show me, show me.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it, young lady,’ said Mordonna. ‘I will take the castle guards and visit the three witches, and if it looks like they had anything to do with your cooking, I will throw them in the castle dungeons and torture them in strange and exciting ways using very prickly vegetables.’

  ‘But Betty’s cooking was terrible before we came here,’ said Winchflat. ‘It was terrifying when we were in Acacia Avenue.’

  ‘Yes, but they could have been in touch with Betty by telekinesis or something,’ said Mordonna. ‘They could have been sending dangerous recipes into her brain while she was asleep.’

  ‘Why?’ said Nerlin.

  ‘Maybe they work for my terrible father,’ said Mordonna. ‘He might be imprisoned on that rock, but how do we know he isn’t trying to find ways to kill us and take the throne back?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s clever enough to do anything like that,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘When I was married to him, he needed a servant to find his feet for him every morning before he could put his socks on, and even then he often ended up with them on his hands.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Mordonna, ‘I am going to interrogate these cookery witches.’

  ‘The Devil’s Kitchen is a brilliant name,’ said Betty. ‘It’s the perfect name for our restaurant.’

  Betty thought it was the perfect name to make every wizard and witch in Transylvania Waters want to go there. Ffiona agreed.

  Mordonna agreed because she thought it sounded like the perfect name to stop anyone wanting to go there. Ffiona’s mum, Edna Hulbert, agreed.

  Ffiona cooked breakfast every weekend for her family the same as Betty did, and the Hulberts dreaded it just as much as Betty’s family did. Ffiona’s favourite dish was deep-fried muesli with pork dripping and custard à-la-mode.

  ‘We specialise in exotic cuisine,’ the two girls insisted. ‘And we will open Transylvania Waters’s first Fine Dining restaurant and it will be world-famous and people will have to book months and months in advance to get a table.’

  ‘And months and months plus ten minutes in advance to reserve a seat in the toilet afterwards,’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘I’m afraid the world just isn’t ready for your talents,’ Mordonna said gently, but no amount of reasoning would make either girl give up the idea.

  Only Satanella seemed to like Betty’s cooking, but then she was a dog and dogs even like licking their own bottoms.

  ‘Though I must admit,’ said Satanella, ‘sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference.’

  ‘Yes, well I think that only proves how gross your food is,’ said Merlinmary.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Satanella. ‘I meant that in a good way.’

  Mordonna had got Winchflat to create various machines to try and solve the problem, but none of them had worked. In fact, they usually made matters worse. What had started out as a particularly revolting piranha fish pie with blood-orange sauce had turned into something so dangerous it was a miracle no one was injured. The blood oranges had turned into real blood, and the piranhas were not so much dead in the casserole dish as thrashing wildly about looking for living flesh to rip to bits.

  Winchflat’s Far-Flung-Transporter caused problems too, not just on earth, but in other galaxies. One Sunday he used it to send a particularly awful meal – Toe Cheese and Vegemite Bake – to a remote planet in a faraway galaxy. The result was that the entire galaxy fell into a black hole, which meant Betty’s meal ended up in another dimension of Time and Space, where it evolved in a strange, exciting and terrifying way.3

  A lot of Winchflat’s inventions didn’t work at all and it drove him mad. At the age of nine months he had built the legendary Ikky-Bubba-Sore-Gums-Soother, which had made him a multi-millionaire before his first birthday and even saw him nominated for the Nobel Prize for Undisturbed Night’s Sleep award. Though of course only being nine months old at that time, he’d had to use a fake inventor called Professor Cleverness, who pretended he had invented the machine. This was okay because Winchflat had also built Professor Cleverness at the age of ten months. Since then there had never been a situation that Winchflat hadn’t been able to fix. Some problems had taken several different machines with a lot of modifications to sort out, but he had always got there.

  And some of his solutions had been rather bizarre, but they had always ended happily.4 For example, his Make-Everyone-In-Australia’s-Got-Talent-Actually-Have-Some-Talent-Machine turned almost every contestant into small pink slugs, which of course was a huge improvement, and in the world of slugs they all were very talented and could eat a slimy cabbage leaf quicker than ordinary slugs.

  But Betty’s and Ffiona’s cooking defied Winchflat’s wildest creations, and although he never gave up officially, he stopped building any more kitchen machines.

  ‘I’m doing more research,’ he said every time anyone asked him about it.

  ‘We’ll have to think of something else,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Well, please think of it soon,’ said Nerlin. ‘I’m sick of having to spend half of every Sunday on the lavatory.’

  ‘All I can suggest at the moment,’ said Winchflat, ‘is that you take your breakfast into the toilet and cut out the middle man by quietly flushing it away without telling Betty.’

  So that’s what Nerlin did. He hid a stash of tasty snacks in a plastic bag in the toilet cistern, smudged a bit of Betty’s latest creation round his face, being very careful to make sure none of it actually went into his mouth, flushed the rest of Betty’s cooking – which caused untold horrors in the castle’s sewers – ate a couple of the snacks and went back downstairs.

  ‘Yum, yum, best breakfast yet,’ he said, to Betty’s delight.5

  Mordonna decided to set off the next day for The Devil’s Kitchen with seven of Castle Twilight’s soldiers. She made it very clear to Betty that under no circumstances was Betty allowed to go with her or follow her, and she made Betty swear an oath on her recipe book that she would do as she was told.

  But Betty was a witch – not a very good one admittedly, but a witch nevertheless – and therefore felt perfectly relaxed about lying to anyone, even her own mother, who she loved very much.
r />   ‘It’s what us witches do,’ she explained to Ffiona, who had never lied to her mother except the one time when she had dropped her baby brother, Claude, into the lavatory.

  Ffiona had told herself it had been an accident, but in her heart she knew she’d done it deliberately because Claude had chewed her iPod so badly that it would only play the Belgian Cycling Orchestra’s version of the ‘Macarena’.6 Ffiona had managed to haul her little brother out of the toilet before he got flushed away, but she had been so frightened of what might happen that she told her mother they had been playing in the garden and there had been a sudden short sharp rainstorm that had soaked him.

  ‘Why aren’t you wet too, then?’ Edna Hulbert had asked.

  ‘I went inside and changed,’ Ffiona lied, discovering that most lies usually need a lot more lies to keep them working.

  ‘OK,’ said Mrs Hulbert, ‘but that doesn’t explain all the wet toilet paper matted in his hair.’

  ‘Umm, I wrapped it round his head like a turban for a game we were playing and then it started raining,’ Ffiona said, bright red with guilt.

  Betty had no such problem with lies. The only definition of guilt she knew didn’t have the letter ‘u’ in it and meant something shiny. Because she looked so sweet and innocent, she nearly always got away with it, and if it looked as though she was going to be found out, she could turn on the most heart-wrenching tears as easily as turning on a tap.

  So when Betty nodded and promised that no of course she wouldn’t go anywhere near the three old cookery witches, she didn’t even have to cross her fingers behind her back. She just hurried off to make plans for the journey.