Floods 11 Page 3

  The very moment Mordonna looked up was the same very moment that both birds were overcome with an uncontrollable urge to relax every single one of their muscles. A tiny bit of a moment later, Mordonna was the first living being to get an eyeful of bacon-flavoured bird poo.

  She cursed loudly, something Betty had never heard her do before, and did the first spell that came into her head. This resulted in the new and exciting bird species, the Dingly Frycatcher, becoming extinct and two pairs of very dirty football shorts landing flat on Mordonna’s face.

  Oh yes, Betty thought. Who’s the man? Er, no, I mean, who’s the girl? No, that doesn’t sound right. Who’s the best?

  Mordonna cursed some more, which, like the birds, was a new and exciting thing and expanded Betty’s and Ffiona’s vocabulary in new and exciting ways, which, unlike the Dingly Frycatchers, would not vanish. These were valuable and powerful words that Betty couldn’t wait to use. Ffiona, on the other hand, tried to pretend she hadn’t heard them, which wasn’t surprising because the rudest word she ever used was ‘bother’, even though Betty was always trying to teach her new, much better ones.

  Mordonna calmed down, changed the football shorts into rose-scented wet-wipes and walked up the hill.

  ‘If you three are Cookery Witches,’ she said, ‘I’ll eat my hat.’

  ‘Would you like me to make a nice rhubarb and earwax gravy to go with it?’ said the Fake Colander. ‘And perhaps a few lightly fried nuts-and-bolts rissoles on the side?’

  Wow, you’re good! Betty thought, doing a quick Gravy Spell and an Alchemy Spell – subsection 3674k: Assorted-Engineering-Accessories-into-Yum-Yum-Side-Dishes Spell – just in case.

  Mordonna snorted and grabbed Betty by the collar. She knew her daughter was playing games and was torn. Part of her wanted to put Betty over her knee, smack her bottom and ground her for a month, and part of her wanted to congratulate Betty for being so talented and creative and devious, characteristics she greatly admired.

  There was also part of her that thought she may well have miscalculated her daughter’s abilities. Mordonna certainly didn’t want to end up in a battle with her own daughter, so she grabbed both girls, put them on 3G’s back and turned to leave.

  ‘You three under no circumstances are to do any cooking with my daughter, or I will turn you into three fat tadpoles in a very small dish with a hungry eel swimming in it,’ she said to the three fake Cookery Witches. ‘Right, we’re going back to Dreary.’

  ‘But, Mother,’ Betty protested, ‘what about our birdwatching?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck, young lady.’

  It was Friday evening, one of the five days of the week that Betty didn’t cook for the family. Fridays were everyone’s favourite dinner because they’d had all week to get over Betty’s weekend cooking and they knew this would probably be the last, nice ordinary meal they would get before Betty’s Saturday Breakfast Surprise.

  ‘I must say I’m certainly not putting any weight on,’ said Mordonna as she tucked into a plateful of Happy-Hoppity-Hop-Hot-Pot,9 but then she had been exactly the same weight since she had been seventeen, give or take five grams.

  ‘Well, I’m losing weight,’ said Nerlin, who had always been as thin as a bunch of thin sticks, but was now as thin as a bunch of twigs, which are a lot thinner than sticks.

  The weird thing was that even though Betty only cooked on the weekends and everyone ate as little of it as possible, it seemed to take all the goodness out of anything else they ate. It was as if Betty’s food attacked and destroyed all the calories, vitamins and other good stuff in everything.

  Every day Nerlin would go down to his shed and eat at least five kilos of rich, 97% fat milk chocolate – not the dark yuppy stuff, but the rich brown sort with added sugar, extra extra fat, fifteen E numbers and melted pig lard. Yet, no matter how much of it he ate, he kept losing weight.

  ‘Maybe we could sell Betty’s breakfasts as a miracle diet product?’ Winchflat suggested.

  ‘That’s a brilliant idea,’ said Valla, who always had his eye out for a good business opportunity. ‘We could make a fortune. Actually, we could make quite a lot of fortunes.’

  ‘Except for one little thing,’ said Mordonna. ‘It’s wizard food.’

  ‘So?’ said Valla.

  ‘Well, we all know what wizard food does to humans, don’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Valla. ‘It sort of kills them, but they’d all be nice and thin when they died.’

  ‘So I think we’ll probably give the diet thing a miss,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Don’t be too hasty, Mother,’ said Valla. ‘I bet there’s plenty of humans who’d be only too happy to die in agony if it meant they could be thin for a while. I bet they’d pay a fortune for it.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Not to mention the money their families could save buying a narrower coffin.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Mordonna.

  Valla could see the immense wealth that had suddenly appeared in his brain slipping away just as suddenly, but he found it hard to give it up.

  ‘Couldn’t you make a machine to bring them back to life again?’ he asked Winchflat.

  ‘Yes and no, sort of,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Well, what is it, yes or no?’

  ‘Sort of both,’ Winchflat explained. ‘I can stop a dead person being dead, but they aren’t really properly alive again.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re zombies.’

  ‘So, what’s wrong with that?’ said Valla, getting excited again. ‘I mean, let’s face it, most humans are zombies anyway.’

  ‘Except bits of them don’t keep falling off.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Valla. ‘They’d be even thinner then, wouldn’t they? Seems to me, it’s a win–win situation.’

  ‘Except zombies go around all the time trying to kill people,’ said Nerlin, who had been having a bit of trouble working out exactly what was going on, because although his father Merlin had filled him up with lots of very clever wisdom, there were still little gaps between his brain cells that were filled with stuff that looked like brains, but was actually porridge.

  ‘So do humans,’ said Valla. ‘I really don’t see what’s the problem. I mean, I’m married to a zombie and we’re very happy indeed.’

  This was true, but Valla’s wife had not been killed by anything the Floods had done. She had died a long, long time ago and Winchflat had resuscitated her corpse by turning her into a zombie.

  ‘Yes, but it was either make her into a zombie or a pan of soup,’ Winchflat said. ‘It’s not the same thing at all.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t you sort of neutralise the being dead bit?’ Valla suggested. ‘Make a machine to stop it.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Winchflat. ‘I think the best I could do would be to dilute the dying part so it took a bit longer.’

  ‘Well, there you go,’ said Valla. ‘If you could make it take longer to kill them, the humans might not realise it was Betty’s food that was doing it.’

  ‘I absolutely forbid you to even think about it,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘But, Mother,’ Valla begged.

  ‘NO!’

  ‘Well, we could still sell Betty’s cooking to witches and wizards,’ Winchflat suggested. ‘Maybe set up a wizards-only restaurant.’

  ‘Don’t you start with the restaurants,’ said Mordonna. ‘That’s what your little sister and her nerdy friend want to do.’

  ‘Great,’ said Valla. ‘I’ll be their business manager. It might not make several fortunes, but it could make one.’

  ‘Except for one other thing,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘What now?’ said Valla. ‘You’re always down on anything I want to do.’

  ‘Well, no one likes Betty’s food. It’s revolting.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Valla. ‘It will make you thin.’

  ‘And how many fat witches and wizards have you met?’ said Mordonna.

  ‘We
ll, there’s the Groaner-Chumleys,’ said Valla. ‘They’re incredibly fat. I mean, they are so fat they have to do special Slimming Spells every time they want to go through a door. Then they do Big Fat Spells to get back to the massive size they were before.’

  ‘Apart from their chins,’ said Winchflat. ‘They haven’t got any chins.’

  ‘Yes, but the Groaner-Chumleys aren’t like any other wizards. They want to be fat,’ said Mordonna. ‘They have spent generations developing their hugeness. To us they are seriously overweight, but to themselves it’s a fine art maintaining a constant enormosity.’

  ‘I heard their bones were filled with methane. So if they don’t eat tons and tons of food, they float up into the sky,’ said Nerlin.

  ‘I think that’s a rumour they started to stop people thinking they’re greedy pigs,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘It would be an interesting experiment,’ said Winchflat, ‘to secretly feed the Groaner-Chumleys some of Betty’s cooking and see if they do actually float away.’

  ‘See if who floats away?’ said Betty and Satanella, coming in for dinner.

  ‘The Groaner-Chumleys,’ said Valla.

  ‘Piggy Groaner-Chumley is in my class at school,’ said Betty. ‘The teacher always makes him sit in the back row, otherwise no one else can see the blackboard and bits of him keep spreading over the floor.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Satanella.

  ‘And sometimes, he floats up to the ceiling and has to have an emergency concrete sandwich to bring him down again,’ said Betty. ‘It’s brilliant. Once he flew up so hard, he made a hole in the ceiling, and someone said it happened outside school one day and he flew up into the clouds and didn’t come down again until he’d eaten eighty-six seagulls.’

  ‘Yes, yes, OK,’ said Mordonna. ‘But this is the thing. There will be NO selling of Betty’s cooking to humans. OK?’

  Valla nodded and mumbled, ‘OK’.

  ‘What about Ffiona’s cooking?’ said Betty. ‘Can we sell that?’

  ‘Not without a Government Health Warning,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘We need to get some money,’ said Betty when she and Ffiona were safely back up in Betty’s room. ‘If we’re going to start our own restaurant, it’s going to cost a lot of money.’

  ‘I’ve got fifteen dollars in my piggy bank,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘And I’ve got fifty thousand dollars in mine,’ said Betty.

  ‘Fifty thousand!’ said Ffiona. ‘How did you get all that?’

  ‘Oh, you know, here and there,’ said Betty. ‘I did a lot of odd jobs.’

  ‘A lot! You must have done tons and tons of them.’

  ‘No, not so many,’ said Betty, ‘but they were pretty odd.’10

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘A bit of blackmail too,’ said Betty. ‘I’m quite good at that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ffiona. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of setting up a stall outside the castle and selling my homemade lemonade.’

  ‘What, the one with the pickled warts in it?’ said Betty. ‘I love that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Betty agreed. ‘And I’ll come up with a magic potion we can add to it that will make everyone who buys a glass be overcome with the desire to give us a huge tip.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Ffiona. ‘Wouldn’t that be a bit like stealing?’

  ‘No, it would be exactly like stealing,’ said Betty.

  ‘Isn’t that bad?’

  ‘Well, it depends on who you are stealing from and why you are stealing it,’ Betty explained. ‘Sometimes stealing is a good thing. Sometimes it’s the best thing to do.’

  ‘My mum says stealing is stealing and it’s all bad,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to say anything nasty about your mum because she’s a lovely, kind lady, but it’s much more complicated than that.’

  Betty then told Ffiona how she had hacked into the Dreary council computer and changed a few little things so that the three guards that Mordonna had posted to keep a look-out for Betty and Ffiona were now officially working at the Dreary sewerage works as junior lavatory brushes, and no amount of protesting was going to change things.

  ‘Listen, sunshine,’ the sewerage works boss had said, ‘your names are here on my computers in black and white. Just be grateful you three have such privileged jobs. There are people who would give their right arm to work here. Though there are other people who would give both their arms not to work here.’

  Betty also hacked into the Castle Twilight computer and changed the records so the three peasants who had done so well impersonating the three Cookery Witches were now employed in the castle kitchens as Official Food Tasters and Leftovers Eater-Uppers. She also instructed the computer to send seventeen turnips, a partridge in a pear tree and another partridge in a pair of trees to their home village once a month, along with a big bag of liquorice underpants, twelve cents and five scents.

  ‘So you see, some sort of stealing is actually good,’ Betty explained.

  Ffiona wasn’t really sure, but she didn’t say anything. Betty was her best friend and also her hero.

  So Ffiona set to work in a shed at the back of the castle brewing up thousands of litres of her special lemonades in her five favourite varieties.

  These were:

  • Deluxe Lemonade with Pickled Warts.

  • Special Lemonade with Live Tadpoles.

  • Relaxing Lemonade with Embalming Fluid.

  • Sports Lemonade with Caffeine and Prickles.

  • Traditional Lemonade with Secrets.

  Betty got the castle carpenters to build them a lemonade stand and set it up opposite the main gate of the castle. This was the main street through Dreary, the place where many travellers stopped for a rest between running their daily errands. They would stand in the shade under the old oak trees, look across at the castle and think to themselves how lucky they were to live in such a perfect country with such a wonderful king and queen and the best-tasting crispy-rat burgers in the world and all these wonderful, happy, content thoughts that always made them strangely thirsty.11

  Then Betty added a few pinches of her Generosity Powder to each batch of lemonade and did a quick Oh-My-God-This-Is-So-Delicious-I-Must-Have-Another-Glass-ASAP Spell, which was the very first spell that she had made up all of her own instead of using or modifying an existing spell. Finally they were ready for business.

  It so happened that very week was one of the hottest of the summer. The sky was blue all day without a hint of rain and everyone was very, very thirsty. This, of course, was no coincidence. Betty had waited until Winchflat was out and then crept into his laboratory and made a few adjustments to his Weather Machine.

  Keen-eyed readers, or even those with glasses, may have noticed that Betty’s magic had suddenly started working exactly how she wanted it to. No one was more surprised at this than Betty herself. She spoke to no one about this change, not even Ffiona and certainly not her mother. Keeping her newfound talent a secret could be a very useful thing.12

  They sold out of all five lemonade varieties in three days and got the three fake Cookery Witches sent up from the kitchens to help them brew another batch and another batch followed by another batch and some more. By the end of the first week they had made a lot of money, which they stashed away in a secret bank account.

  ‘At this rate,’ said Betty, ‘in about a month’s time, with what I’ve got saved up already, we’ll be able to buy it.’

  ‘Buy what?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘That,’ said Betty, turning and pointing to a run-down building behind their lemonade stand.

  ‘What for?’ said Ffiona. ‘It’s a dump.’

  ‘Yes, and so it will be very cheap,’ Betty explained. ‘And above all it is just about the perfect place to start our restaurant.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Ffiona. ‘I’m not sure what your mum will say, though.’

  ‘She will say, “no way”,’ said Betty. ‘But we’ll worry about tha
t later.’

  There were two reasons why the building was derelict.

  The first was that in the bad old days when Mordonna’s father, King Quatorze, had ruled Transylvania Waters it was the place where all the people he hadn’t liked, and there had been hundreds of them, had ended up. The bad king had a big catapult that stood just inside the castle grounds and his enemies were put into this catapult and thrown over the castle walls. Nine times out of ten, the old building, which had originally been the finest tearoom in Dreary, was where the catapultees landed. If they were quite heavy, they would crash through the front windows. If they were about average weight, they would fly a bit further and land on the roof, sometimes going right through and ending up in the bathroom. And if they were lighter, they would fly right over the tearoom and land in the garden, flattening the dainty umbrellas and tables or even killing the occasional chicken.

  So the building had got the reputation of being a disaster zone and only visitors to Transylvania Waters, who didn’t know better, would go there. It finally closed down when King Quatorze threw a very heavy Bavarian prince, who had actually lost quite a bit of weight due to the King removing his wallet, over the wall onto a group of Belgian nuns, who were just entering the teashop for a bumper feed of scones with clotted cream and strawberry fancies.13 Two of the nuns were killed instantly. The remaining three were so disturbed by the incident they lost all their religious beliefs and ended up as an exotic trio who scored fifteen points one year as Belgium’s entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, singing a song called ‘Scone Scone Boom Boom’.

  The second reason was that the old lady who had owned the tearoom had died without leaving a will and had no living friends or relations. So the building had just been left to slowly decay into the ground. If it had been anywhere else but Transylvania Waters, it would have become a squat with tramps lighting fires in the middle of the lounge room floor, as many simple Hebridean folk do to this day, and have graffiti all over the walls. However, there are no tramps in Transylvania Waters, and besides, the tearoom had the fearsome reputation of being haunted by the souls of the catapultees and the two dead nuns, who were said to wander its rooms looking for cream teas and strawberry fancies.