Floods 6 Read online

  Claude was over the moon to see Satanella again, and when he was introduced to Ruby and Rosie he was over three moons. On their part, Ruby and Rosie found Claude’s nappy to be a wonderful new world of excitement – not quite as incredible as the one on the beach, but a constant panorama of always changing smells – and so they fell in love with him instantly.

  ‘Dog, dog, dog, dog, dog,’ Claude said, showing that he could recognise what they were but wasn’t able to count properly. He also said, ‘dog, dog, dog,’ whenever he saw his mother, his father, his sister and anyone else, including furniture and horses and goldfish.

  The four of them spent the rest of the day running in and out of everyone’s rooms and eating bits of poached chicken and fluff.

  The sign outside the theatre said:

  ‘I don’t believe my eyes,’ said Mordonna. ‘We’re going to see a wizard, or at least a human pretending to be a wizard. This should be fun.’

  ‘Maybe he’s a real wizard,’ said Betty.

  ‘The Great Klunko?’ said Mordonna. ‘I don’t think so, not with a name like that. No, he’ll be a sad middle-aged loser called Terence.’

  Betty and Ffiona’s prize was seats right in the front row, the best place to see everything, and the very best place to be when the Great Klunko called for volunteers.

  The Great Klunko, who actually was a sad middle-aged loser called Terence, had seen better days. At least it is to be hoped he had, because if he was now at the height of his powers, he should have given up and got a job making sandwiches. He swept onto the stage in a long black cloak, a tall black cardboard hat and threadbare trousers that were coming unravelled at the hems.

  The Sensational Brenda was worse. She was quite a lot larger than someone wearing a sequinned bathing costume and red high heels should have been, and it appeared she had put her lipstick on with her eyes closed or in a dark room during an earthquake or both.

  ‘Good evening, everyone,’ called the Great Klunko.

  ‘Good evening,’ said three small children somewhere at the back of the theatre.

  ‘I CAN’T HEAR YOU!’ roared the Great Klunko.

  ‘Then wash your ears out!’ shouted someone. There were roars of laughter from the audience.

  The look of resigned desperation that had been on the Great Klunko’s face when he had walked on stage was now joined by a look of pathetic sadness.

  The Sensational Brenda twirled around in her glittering costume. Some bits of her twirled faster than other bits and it was at least a minute before all of her caught up with itself and faced the audience again.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman,’ said the Great Klunko, ‘a big hand for my assistant, the Sensational Brenda!’

  ‘Hey, Grandma,’ shouted a voice in the darkness, ‘the old folks’ home called, your dinner’s getting cold.’

  Over the years the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda had undoubtedly heard every single insult they could possibly imagine and had tried to develop thick skins so they could ignore them. But although they managed to hide it very well, Mordonna could see the two performers were upset inside. She realised that even the most rubbish actor or performer had a dream inside their head of hitting the big time and becoming really famous. As time passed and they got older, that dream faded, but it would never go away completely. The Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda must have put their dreams in a cardboard box right at the back of the cupboard.

  Even though they hadn’t done a single trick yet, it was obvious that the magician and his assistant were not going to be very good. There would probably be a couple of card guessing tricks, a coin being made to appear out of thin air, maybe a white dove and some vanishing stuff.

  Mordonna decided to help them. She would put the Great into the Great Klunko and create a night that everyone in the theatre would remember for the rest of their lives.

  ‘Show us your knickers, Grandma,’ shouted the voice from the audience.

  ‘I bet they’re all big and baggy,’ shouted a second voice.

  ‘And brown,’ shouted a third.

  And tonight, Mordonna said to herself, you three will most definitely vanish.

  She turned to see where the three boys were sitting in the darkness at the back of the theatre and, clicking her fingers, made one of the spotlights on the stage turn round and shine right at them. This, of course, made them all go instantly very quiet.

  ‘You seem very enthusiastic young men,’ said the Great Klunko. ‘Why don’t the three of you come up on stage and help me?’

  Normally, he only invited one person at a time onto the stage, but Mordonna had done a little magic as he spoke. The three louts came down the aisle and blundered up onto the stage. Once everyone in the audience could see them, they weren’t quite so brave and stood in a line looking stupid and embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t be shy, young man,’ said the Great Klunko. ‘You’re a little treasure chest.’

  He waved his hand over the first teenager’s head and produced a gold coin. ‘You’re a regular gold mine, aren’t you?’

  He produced three more coins out of thin air. He clicked his fingers behind the boy’s head a fourth time. At the same time Mordonna clicked hers and seventy-five-thousand two-dollar coins rained down around the boy and buried him up to his neck.

  ‘Wha … eh?’ said the boy.

  The three boys struggled out of the pile and began grabbing as many coins as they could. This was a bad move because Mordonna rewarded their greed by changing every coin they had put in their pockets into slimy, smelly and very dead rats, with just enough not-dead ones to give each boy a rather nasty bite.

  The Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda were speechless, but only for a split second until Mordonna clicked her fingers a second time and the rats vanished.

  ‘Now,’ said the magician, under Mordonna’s control, ‘I will transport all three of you to a far-off place. Drum roll, please.’

  ‘Yeah, as if,’ sneered one of the boys, who were just too stupid to know when they were beaten.

  ‘As if, as if, as if,’ chanted the other two and then all three sang, ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go.’

  The Sensational Brenda opened the door of a black cabinet at the back of the stage. Everyone in the audience knew that the cabinet must be standing over a hidden trapdoor in the floor so that when the door was shut, whoever was inside would fall through the hole onto a big mattress underneath the stage.

  The three young men all squeezed inside the cabinet. Brenda locked the door with five chains and ten padlocks and then the Great Klunko said the magic words.

  ‘Alakazoo, alakazaam, alakaseltzer…’

  What should have happened next is that Brenda should have pressed a hidden button, which would let off a big flash of magnesium smoke while the trapdoor opened and the three louts fell through on to the mattress.

  But what actually happened was far more exciting.

  The cabinet rose in the air until it was three metres, four metres, five metres above the stage. The whole theatre held its breath as it hung in the air surrounded by tiny sparks of lightning.

  The lightning grew stronger, big flashes sparking all around the cabinet and out over the audience’s heads. For a whole minute the cabinet hung there defying gravity, and then there was an almighty clap of thunder and it came crashing down onto the stage, shattering into a thousand pieces. There was another blinding flash of light and there was the cabinet, all back in one piece, looking as shiny as the day it had been made. Its door flew open to reveal a few remaining flashes of lightning dancing around inside it and three pairs of shoes. The louts were nowhere to be seen.

  The audience erupted in the loudest cheers the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda had ever heard in their whole forty-two years on the stage. In fact, if you added all the cheers they had ever heard together, this was better.

  ‘Quick, slip downstairs and see that the boys are all right,’ the magician whispered to Brenda.

  ‘But, but
… I didn’t press the button,’ Brenda whispered back. She went to check the mattress below the stage anyway.

  The audience were on their feet cheering for a full five minutes.

  ‘They’re not there,’ said Brenda. ‘There’s no sign of them.’

  Mordonna walked down to the edge of the stage, took off her sunglasses, looked up and caught the Great Klunko’s eye.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Just carry on with your act.’

  The magician and his assistant both looked down at Mordonna and felt great waves of peace and happiness sweep over them. The happiness tide had been out for a very long time in their lives, so long that they had never expected it to return, but now they felt as happy as they had the day they had first met and fallen in love.

  ‘Everything will be wonderful,’ Mordonna whispered to them. ‘Just do all your regular tricks and they will be brilliant.’ She sat down again.

  Meanwhile, in a sausage factory in a small town in Belgium – a factory that, many years before, had been a small theatre – three speechless louts had appeared in the Sausage Twisting and Snipping Room. Four young Belgian girls, who had been twisting and snipping sausages before sending them down the conveyor belt into the Sausage Boiling and Wrapping Room, stood open-mouthed as an ever-growing mountain of untwisted and unsnipped sausages began to pile up round their feet.

  ‘Why is there a sausage factory underneath the theatre?’ said one of the young men.

  The four girls, who only spoke Flemish and knew exactly how to tell a local taxi driver where they would like to go, screamed and ran out of the room.

  ‘I don’t think we’re underneath the theatre,’ said another one of the young men.

  They followed the girls out of the room, ran down a corridor and found themselves outside in the main street of Silly.36

  ‘This ain’t Port Folio, is it?’ said the first lout.

  ‘No, and it’s not eight o’clock in the evening, either,’ said the second, looking out the window at a sunny sky.

  ‘I want my mum,’ cried the third.

  How the three of them got home again from a country where they couldn’t understand a single word anyone said to them and where they had no money or shoes or passports or any signal on their mobiles is another story.37

  Back in the theatre, the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda were going from strength to strength. Never in their entire career had they had such a wonderful and appreciative audience. And never in their entire career had all their tricks not only gone exactly how they were supposed to but ten times better.

  Now the Great Klunko could not only guess which card the volunteer from the audience had picked, but he could make it vanish and reappear in the underpants of the person they had been sitting next to in the audience. And on top of that – and this was not something Mordonna had had any control over – the person with the card in their undies was a top television executive who happened to be visiting his grandmother in Port Folio and had, against his wishes, been taken by the old lady to see the Great Klunko.

  ‘Do I really have to?’ he’d said, but now he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Here in this little sleepy seaside town, where even the fish and chips had cobwebs on them,38 was the greatest magician he had ever seen in his life, a man whose tricks seemed almost mystical. He would sign him up. He would call him The Man Who Put the Magic in Magician, and they would both become seriously famous and very seriously rich. The Sensational Brenda was probably not as young nor as beautiful as today’s television audiences demanded, but the producer had never seen anyone, young, old, plain or gorgeous, who could juggle six eggs, throw them up into the air in a puff of smoke and have them come down as six live chickens. For an encore the Sensational Brenda then juggled six paper bags full of mushrooms that changed into six pink pigeons that landed on the stage and turned into six cute puppies that could bark all the Beatles songs in perfect harmony.

  At the end of the show the audience cheered so loudly that the Great Klunko and the Sensational Brenda had to come back for seven encores and then use some ear drops to stop their ears ringing. They only managed to make everyone go home when they both got inside the cabinet and made themselves disappear. They did not reappear in Silly, but back in their dressing room, where Mordonna was waiting for them.

  ‘From now on,’ she said, ‘all your magic will be as brilliant as it was tonight.’

  ‘We don’t know how to thank you,’ said the Great Klunko.

  ‘Just do lots of brilliant magic for everyone,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘What happened to those three horrible boys?’ said the Sensational Brenda.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Mordonna. ‘And if you get any more troublemakers in the audience, just put them in the cabinet. Nice people will just get transported to the theatre foyer, but troublemakers will end up on the other side of the world.’

  As she left, the television producer arrived with a big fat contract and the three of them lived happily ever after in the Lap of Luxury, which is a very expensive seaside village in California with a tall fence all round it.

  After almost a week, Betty and Ffiona’s sandcastle still stood at the end of the beach as perfect as the day they had built it. The council had erected a fence round it with Keep Out signs, and a team of scientists were poking and prodding at the turrets with a whole barrage of high-tech equipment. Their instruments recorded nothing at all. Even the Sandometer, which should have told them the castle was made of sand, just showed a blank screen.

  Most scientists think they are Very Important People with Tunnel Vision, which means that although they tell everyone they are developing and discovering new and exciting things, they are actually just developing new and exciting names for things that everyone already knows about.39 The scientists on the beach at Port Folio were exactly like that. It never occurred to them that magic might have something to do with the castle, because scientists don’t believe in magic. As far as they were concerned, every single thing in every single place had a proper scientific explanation. If it didn’t, then it obviously didn’t exist – even if, like the wonderful sandcastle, they could see it with their own eyes.

  When their twenty-five different bits of equipment showed them blank screens, they assumed that all twenty-five were faulty.

  ‘They must have been dropped or got wet on their way here,’ said the chief scientist, who then ordered all twenty-five to be replaced.

  ‘These ones must have been dropped or got wet too,’ he said when the second lot showed blank screens.

  Winchflat went along to the sandcastle every day and watched the scientists.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he called over the barrier. ‘I think I can help you.’

  ‘Move along, sonny,’ said one of the Port Folio policemen, who were now on a twenty-four-hour guard around the sandcastle.

  ‘But I can explain it all,’ Winchflat insisted.

  ‘If you don’t go away right now, sonny,’ said the second policeman, ‘I’ll have to arrest you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the third policeman.

  ‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea,’ said Winchflat and clicked his fingers.

  Immediately all the seagulls on the beach gathered in a huge flock and dive-bombed the three policemen with such accuracy and attention to detail that in less than five minutes every square centimetre of their uniforms had changed from Official Policeman Blue to Unofficial Seagull Guano White With Black Streaks.

  ‘See, told you so,’ said Winchflat. He clicked his fingers again, which made the seagulls call for reinforcements before they all dive-bombed the four scientists.

  ‘We’re going to the funfair,’ said Betty when the family arrived at the sandcastle to check on the scientists’ progress. ‘Are you coming, Winchflat?’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Winchflat. ‘I’m having too much fun here.’

  ‘There’s a circus too,’ said Satanella. ‘With performing animals.’
r />   ‘I might come along later,’ said Winchflat as his team of precision seagulls swooped down to give the policemen and scientists another coat.

  Witches and wizards shouldn’t really be allowed to go to funfairs because they turn them into unfairs. No matter how much the sideshow owners cheat, and they all do, wizards can always win the big prize on the top shelf that no one is ever supposed to get. If the last coconut you need to knock down is glued in to the shy, wizards just unglue it. If the mechanical arm starts to move towards the five-cent whistle, wizards just concentrate and make it pick up the really good wristwatch. Of course the sideshow owners don’t realise this is being done by magic because, like scientists, and most humans, they don’t believe there is such a thing as magic.

  Betty’s favourite thing at funfairs was the big dipper. The bigger and dippier the better, but even the wildest ride in the world could always be made better with a bit of magical help.

  ‘I think I might be very sick if I went on that,’ said Ffiona, looking up at the huge wheel towering almost fifty metres into the sky.

  ‘No you won’t,’ said Betty. ‘You’ll love it.’

  And just to make sure nothing went wrong, she got her mother to do the I-Will-Not-Puke-Ever-At-All-Spell on Ffiona, and the Flying-Through-The-Air-Incredibly-Fast-Is-Brilliant-And-I-Love-It-More-Than-Anything spell too.

  The two girls waited until they could get the front seat in the first car. Normally the roller-coaster went round the track once, which took about five and a half minutes. With a snap of the fingers from Betty, this time it went round a lot quicker. Instead of slowing down as it reached the end, it kept speeding up until it was going so fast it kept leaving the track. By the time it came round for the third time it was travelling at over two hundred kilometres an hour and still accelerating. Apart from Betty and Ffiona, all the passengers were screaming at the tops of their voices. By the time it went round for the fifth lap all the people on the ground below were screaming too and running for the exits.