Floods 9 Read online

  This time the traffic jams were ten times worse than they had been when Red Bottom Plague had broken out. Everything ground to a complete halt as people abandoned their cars and ran to the nearest supermarket to buy toilet paper. Of course, the shelves where the toilet paper should have been were empty. Sneaky people broke into the checkout tills – not to steal the money, but to take the paper rolls the receipts were printed on. But they had vanished too. Humans can never outsmart a wizard.

  Enterprising people tried to think laterally, which means thinking sideways to try and find a solution to a problem that is not the usual solution.

  This is what they thought.

  If there is no paper, what else can we use to wipe our bottoms?

  Here are a few things that do not work:

  • Lettuce leaves.

  • Goldfish.

  • Sticky tape.

  • Golf clubs.

  • Weet-Bix.

  • Skateboards.

  • Belgium.

  Here are a few things that do work, though you have to be pretty desperate:

  • Kittens.

  • Wigs.

  • Cardigans.

  • Armchairs.

  • Seaweed.

  • Bacon.

  • Parrots.

  • Small children.

  Here are some things you must NEVER use:

  • Copies of The Floods.

  • Dynamite.

  • Mashed potato.

  • Belgian dynamite wrapped in barbed wire.

  • Your baby sister.

  Some people decided they would not go to the toilet until the crisis was over. Some of them exploded.

  A few days later posters began to appear everywhere. They were advertising a wonderful new and exciting toilet paper that was softer and fluffier yet much stronger than anything anyone had ever experienced before. The posters said:

  And sure enough, a few days after the posters appeared, all the supermarket shelves were overflowing with Cuddlycheeks. Not only was there toilet paper again, but it really was the softest yet strongest toilet paper that had ever been created.

  Everyone was overjoyed.

  Until they got to the checkouts.

  ‘Ten dollars a roll!’ they cried. ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘It’s a special introductory offer,’ said the checkout girl. ‘Next week it goes up to fifteen dollars.’

  But everyone paid up. They complained. They argued. They threatened, but they paid up, because if they didn’t, there were only too many people who would.

  The first week, Transylvania Waters Summer School made three billion dollars.

  ‘This is not so much like taking candy from a baby,’ said Professor Throat, ‘as taking its toothless gums too.’

  The second week, with the price increase, they made six billion dollars. The third week, because worrying about the high price of toilet paper was making all the humans very stressed, which meant they had to go to the toilet twice as often, they made eight billion dollars.

  ‘I wonder just how much we could get away with charging before people refused to buy it?’ said Aubergine Wealth. ‘That would be an interesting experiment.’

  People were already setting up stalls on street corners and selling toilet paper by the sheet. In the poorer parts of town, shops were being held up at gunpoint by desperate men demanding all the Cuddlycheeks products and people were auctioning sheets on eBay.

  The fourth week, the Floods made ten billion dollars.

  They knew they could have increased the price to twenty-five dollars a roll, but at twenty dollars a roll, adverts started appearing on the internet and on shop noticeboards offering second-hand toilet paper for sale. That was when they decided it was time to call a stop.

  ‘Except there’s still a bit more to be made out of this,’ said Aubergine Wealth.

  He and Winchflat went to the Stock Exchange and sold all of their shares in all of the paper companies for an outrageously astronomical profit. All, that is, except one small factory in Belgium. The sale did not include the secret recipe for making the ultra-super-soft Cuddlycheeks, but the new owners of the factories didn’t care. They just began making the old stuff again. Getting twenty dollars for one roll of toilet paper was fabulous. Money began to pour in like water.

  For a whole week.

  Then the factory in Belgium began selling Cuddlycheeks for fifteen dollars a roll.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said the new owners of all the other factories. ‘We’ll charge fourteen dollars a roll. It’s still several thousand per cent profit.’

  Then the factory in Belgium began selling Cuddlycheeks for ten dollars a roll.

  ‘Oh well, eight dollars a roll is still a huge profit,’ said the other factories.

  Then the factory in Belgium began selling Cuddlycheeks for five dollars a roll.

  ‘We’re still making a profit.’

  Then the factory in Belgium began selling Cuddlycheeks for a dollar a roll.

  Half the other factories closed down.

  Then the factory in Belgium began selling Cuddlycheeks for twenty cents a roll.

  The other half of the factories closed down. Aubergine Wealth bought them all back for almost nothing and they all began making Cuddlycheeks and settled on a fair price of two dollars a roll.

  By the end of the Great Toilet Roll Enterprise, as it was referred to in Volume Two of Aubergine Wealth’s later autobiography, All Your Monies Are Belong To Me, the Quicklime College Summer School had made thirty-seven billion dollars.

  * * *

  22 Don’t ask.

  23 See The Floods 11: Desperate Housewitches.

  24 Maldegard had discovered the entrance to the caves when she had been out searching for Gasper Berries in the deserted dungeons below the cellars below the kitchens of Castle Twilight. She had read about the legendary berries that are the sourest thing in the whole world – one berry is enough to make your mouth shrink smaller than a mosquito’s bottom – and gone searching for them in the least likely place they would be, guessing that because no one else had ever found them, that was exactly where they would be. She was the first person in living and half-dead memory to go down to the dungeons and, sure enough, there were berries growing and glowing everywhere. And that was where she had found the tiny door that led into the Caves of Huge Darkness.

  25 See The Floods 7: Top Gear.

  26 Great minds think alike, because Maldegard sent him a coded text message at that moment saying exactly the same thing.

  27 We will NOT be naming the person who did not think Yuk.

  28 They probably weren’t actually complaining. It’s just that their mating calls sounded like they were. So did their singing, snoring and territorial calls. Though of course, if you are the only very small beetle in a world full of dinosaurs with very big clumsy feet, you would complain. I suppose if everyone called you a louse you’d complain too.

  29 There had been similar cries from behind bushes, deep in forests and several places where this sort of thing should not have been happening.

  30 Have you ever wondered how many people at any given moment are actually going to the lavatory around the world? I know I haven’t, but let’s work it out.

  There are around six-and-a-half thousand million people in the world. Now if you calculate that going to the lavatory takes about five minutes over the course of a day, and five minutes is point-three-five per cent of a day, then you can say that at any single moment of any single day, point-three-five per cent of the world’s population is going to the lavatory. That means there are over twenty-two million people having a poo or a wee at the same time. So if we say that half of them were clutching a handful of toilet paper, that is eleven million screaming people – probably the loudest noise ever heard on earth. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Actually, it probably makes you wish you could stop thinking.

  ‘I think anything else we do now will be a bit of an anti-climax,’ said Professor Throat.

  ‘W
hat about underwear?’ said Betty. ‘We could do the same thing again with that.’

  ‘What, the same as we did with the toilet paper?’ said the Headmaster. ‘It’s a bit similar, isn’t it? The highest marks are not just awarded for the most money, but originality will be taken into account.’

  ‘I think it would be fun,’ said Betty. ‘All the stuffy uptight people suddenly losing their undies.’

  ‘Now listen, my dear,’ said Aubergine Wealth, ‘making money is a serious business. It’s not something you should think of as fun.’31

  ‘Ooh, someone needs to get a life,’ said Betty.

  ‘I have a life,’ said the economics teacher, ‘a very rich, comfortable life actually.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Betty. ‘And your wife and your children, do they have very rich and comfortable lives too?’

  ‘There is no Mrs Wealth. Nor do I have any children.’

  ‘So you live this very rich and comfortable life all on your own, do you?’ Betty asked.

  ‘I have a tortoise,’ said Aubergine Wealth. ‘Bullion.’

  ‘Ooh, I bet it’s lovely cuddling up to him on cold winter nights and talking about how your day has been.’

  ‘I do not have cold winter nights. I can afford heating. And yes, I do talk to Bullion about things.’

  ‘Really?’ said Betty, who was discovering that she disliked Aubergine Wealth even more than she had thought she did. ‘And does he talk back, maybe discuss the price of lettuce?’

  ‘That’s enough, little sister,’ said Winchflat. ‘Everyone’s different, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Betty. ‘There are people who have fun and there are people who don’t. And I think it would be fun to take everyone’s undies, and fun if we could make lots of money while we did it.’

  ‘I know it’s summer, but it still gets quite cool at night,’ said Winchflat. ‘If we took everyone’s underwear now, lot’s of them could get chills and the flu.’

  ‘And we could sell them lots of expensive chill and flu cures,’ said Ffiona. ‘As well as very expensive knickers.’

  Ffiona couldn’t believe she had said the word ‘knickers’ in front of everyone. It was actually quite exciting so she said it again.

  ‘Very expensive knickers,’ she continued. ‘I mean, everyone wears knickers.’

  ‘Apart from Scotsmen and forgetful old ladies,’ said Merlinmary.32

  It was put to the vote and agreed that it would be fun to do. As it had been Betty’s idea in the first place, she and Ffiona were put in charge of the operation while everyone else got on with other projects.

  Winchflat converted his paper-stealing machine into an Underwear Magnet and showed Betty how to work the controls.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It’s ready to go. You’re sure you can remember what to do?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty. ‘The red button’s for, er, umm, and the blue one does, er. Yes, it’s fine. No problem.’

  When everyone had left Betty turned on the machine and the two girls waited while it warmed up. Then Betty pressed the red button except in the split second before she pressed it, she realised there were three red buttons and it might have been the blue button she was supposed to press, but it was too late to stop.

  ‘Or maybe it was the green one,’ she said.

  Suddenly the air was filled with knickers of all shapes and sizes and colours. Once again, they travelled through solid walls and out into the street, where they made a beautiful sight, like multi-coloured confetti. Once again, they floated out to sea and formed into large clouds before suddenly vanishing. But instead of re-materialising in great piles in the Caves of Huge Darkness, they turned round and flew back towards New York.

  This took about fifteen minutes, more than enough time for everyone to realise their knickers had vanished and begin freaking out. And of course it hadn’t just been the ones they were wearing, but all the other pairs they had in drawers, laundry baskets and washing machines, not to mention all the new pairs in shops everywhere. They had all vanished.

  And then as suddenly as all the undies had vanished, they re-appeared. Except not in the same places. Very large people now found themselves squeezed too tightly into tiny little bikini bottoms and the only way to get them off was by cutting them up with scissors. Very thin people found themselves in huge baggy bloomers that fell down to their ankles as soon as they stood up. Men discovered their snug cool white undies were now bright pink with lace trimmings. Not one single garment went back to where it had come from, and although there were some strange people who liked what they were suddenly wearing, most people were too embarrassed to talk about it or even leave the house.

  It was then that Ffiona pointed out that, although the whole thing had been a lot of fun, they hadn’t actually made a single cent out of it.

  ‘You should have pressed the blue button, little sister,’ said Winchflat when the girls took him aside and told him what had happened. ‘The Headmaster and Mr Wealth are going to be a bit cross. They’ve gone and bought millions of shares in underwear factories.’

  ‘Ahh, yes. Hadn’t thought of that,’ said Betty.

  ‘Maybe we could change all the underwear into something else?’ Ffiona suggested.

  ‘Tricky, but it is possible,’ said Winchflat. ‘I’ll have to make some modifications to the Underwear Magnet.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Betty. ‘You are, like, the best big brother in the world.’

  ‘Yes, and you will owe me big time,’ said Winchflat. ‘So what shall we change everyone’s undies into? Bear in mind we don’t want to choose anything that might kill or maim people.’

  ‘How about pasta?’ said Ffiona. ‘That wouldn’t hurt anyone. It would be very sticky and unpleasant, but it would actually hurt anyone.’

  ‘It might if they had coeliac disease and couldn’t eat wheat,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Could you make it, like, soya bean pasta?’ said Betty.

  ‘That wouldn’t work either,’ said Ffiona. ‘All the hippies would love that.’

  ‘Actually, I think we’ll be all right with regular pasta,’ said Winchflat. ‘I don’t think the coeliacs would get sick unless they ate their undies and anyone who eats knickers deserves all they get.’

  ‘OK. I like the pasta,’ said Betty, ‘but could we change the undies into something else?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’d be funnier,’ said Betty.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘How about cardigans?’ said Betty. ‘Everyone with any taste knows that cardigans are evil. That’s why they are banned in Transylvania Waters.’

  ‘All right,’ said Winchflat, shaking his head and grinning, which scared the life out of a small mouse sitting up in the rafters. ‘That’s what it’ll be, cardigans knitted out of spaghetti.’

  ‘With some yukky used tissues in one pocket,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘OK,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘And a live goldfish in the other,’ said Betty, but Winchflat refused to do that because it would have been cruel.

  ‘Well, I must say I absolutely agree with you about the evilness of cardigans,’ said Ffiona. ‘And I shall be forever grateful that your family got my parents out of them.’

  ‘Yes, it was touch and go with them for a while,’ said Betty. ‘But look how well they’ve turned out now. Why, you’re almost like wizards.’

  Ffiona thought that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her and, with tears in her eyes, gave Betty a big hug.

  * * *

  31 Aubergine Wealth had only laughed once in his life and it had been the morning he had opened The Financial Review to find that page three had been printed upside-down. He had actually chuckled for twenty-seven seconds and decided as soon as he had finished his breakfast and done the washing up and put the dishes away and made his bed and cleaned his teeth and polished his shoes, he would put his hat and coat on and take the newspaper down to his bank and show it to the bank manager, who he was sure would chuckle too. Sadly this di
dn’t happen because in the two minutes and forty-three seconds he was out of the room, his tortoise, Bullion, ate the newspaper. Naturally, Aubergine Wealth did not waste any money buying another copy. Nothing was that funny.

  32 Scotsmen are supposed to wear nothing underneath their kilts. This, of course, is to scare their enemies and is probably a complete lie. After all, it is very cold in Scotland. So if you ever meet a Scotsman wearing a skirt and he has got a very high voice, then he is probably not so much a Scotsman as a Scotswoman. Probably the safest thing to do is play it safe and go and live in Belgium, where the men wear trousers.

  The next morning, the streets were almost deserted. Unlike the toilet-roll shortage, when people scoured the city looking for paper, most people were too embarrassed or uncomfortable to go out. In fact, at seven-thirty that morning, seventy-six-point-three per cent of the population were standing in their showers trying to wash the sticky pasta off their bodies and discovering that spaghetti has a strange knack of wriggling its way into all sorts of nooks and crannies anywhere it can on the human body. There were tears before breakfast and over seven thousand billion swearwords shouted in very loud voices.

  The telephone lines, on the other hand, were so congested with people trying to buy knickers that the whole system crashed. This had a catastrophic effect on the Stock Exchange, where most of the business involved using telephones and faxes. The few screens that were working showed share prices plummeting, so for Aubergine Wealth and Winchflat it was not so much catastrophic as totally brilliant. They bought everything they could lay their hands on for pennies and by lunchtime the pennies had grown into dollars and by the end of the day, the dollars had grown into Huge Piles of Millions of Money. They did particularly well with shares in companies that made products for cleaning drains blocked up with soggy pasta.