Nanny Piggins and the Rival Ringmaster (9 page)

‘I can’t believe you’ve managed to put all this together and Father still hasn’t noticed,’ marvelled Samantha.

‘I gave him a turkey sandwich for lunch,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘He’ll be asleep for hours. Which is a good thing, because he’s going to be the star of our show.’

‘He is?!’ exclaimed the children.

‘You’re not going to blast him out of the cannon, are you?’ worried Samantha.

‘Not that we’d mind if you did,’ added Michael.

‘No, he’s going to be part of the freak show,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘Children will be able to pay ten cents to behold the world’s most boring man.’

‘Surely no-one will pay that?’ said Derrick.

‘Ah, you only say that because you get to see your father every day,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Do not underestimate Mr Green. His boringness truly is world class. Kevin and Alistair have each paid Rosalind ten cents for a peak themselves. And they are professionals who get to see freaks every day.’

‘Sarah! Are you ready?’ called Boris. ‘It’s time to open the gates and I don’t think we should delay. Some of the children are already getting paling marks on their faces where the crowd has pushed them against the fence.’

‘All right, I’ll come and make an announcement,’ said Nanny Piggins. She went over to the front fence where the huge crowd of children fell silent. ‘Boys and girls, you are about to see sights that will shock, appal, delight, disgust and amaze you – sometimes all at the same time. After this afternoon your lives will never be the same again. Which I know is a risk, doing something utterly wonderful at your age could make the rest of your lives pale in comparison. But hopefully it will have the opposite effect and give you higher standards. Instead of learning clarinet, now you will go home and learn clarinet while balancing three chairs on your nose. Instead of learning to ride a bicycle, now you will learn to ride an elephant
through a flaming ring of fire. So please, step right up, hand over your fifty cents and prepare to have the most extraordinary afternoon of your lives.’

Nanny Piggins’ backyard circus began. The children were astounded by the death-defying feats of the Flying Lee Brothers. They were delighted by Boris and Esmeralda’s soft shoe routine (although many of them had to leap out of the way when the dancers came too close. To be stood on by a Kodiak bear would be painful, but to be stood on by an African elephant would be tragic). And Mr Green’s one-man freak show did a roaring trade. There was a constant stream of children lining up to watch him snoring away in his office armchair while Rosalind drew their attention to his most notable features.

‘Behold the way, as he sleeps, drool oozes from his mouth!’ said Rosalind.

‘Ew!’ exclaimed the children.

‘And observe his fingernails,’ continued Rosalind, ‘that he never cleans no matter how much he picks his nose!’

‘Yuck! Gross! Blurgh!’ wailed the children (some with weaker stomachs actually threw up at this point).

After the circus had been running for three hours and over a thousand children had been through the gates, Nanny Piggins came over to where Derrick, Samantha and Michael were selling tickets to see how it was going.

‘We’ve made $512!’ said Michael.

‘Excellent!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We’ll be able to make a lot of cake with that.’

‘And then sell the cake,’ said Samantha.

‘Yes, and sell some of the cake,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘It’s time to wrap things up. I’ll tell Boris to break out the flaming hoops. And I’ll wheel in my cannon.’

Unfortunately, at that moment, the festivities were interrupted by the piercing sound of an approaching siren. The children would have made a run for it but Esmeralda was doing her stretching exercises by the back gate, thereby blocking their escape.

‘Oh no, the police,’ wailed Samantha.

‘It can’t be the police,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘The Police Sergeant would never be such a party pooper.’

‘It can’t be a fire engine,’ said Derrick. ‘Nothing’s been set on fire. Except Dexter’s stilts, and we put that out half an hour ago.’

‘And it can’t be an ambulance,’ said Michael, ‘because they don’t send ambulances here anymore unless they have verification from a responsible adult that there really has been an injury to a person and not a cake.’

‘Then who can it be?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

It turns out they were all right. It was not the police, an ambulance or a fire engine. It was the official car of the city’s Lord Mayor that screeched to a halt outside their house.

‘The Lord Mayor has a siren?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘He probably thought it would make him seem more important,’ guessed Boris.

‘Certainly nothing could make him seem less important,’ observed Nanny Piggins.

A few moments later the Lord Mayor, wearing his full ceremonial robes and gold chains, strode into the Green’s backyard.

‘Who is in charge of this circus?’ asked the Lord Mayor.

Rosalind was weeping in the corner so Nanny Piggins stepped forward. ‘I am.’

The Lord Mayor strode over to her, then amazed the crowd far more than any acrobatics or freak show they had seen that afternoon by doing the most extraordinary thing. He handed Nanny Piggins a great big brown paper bag and whispered, ‘Here’s your payment. Sorry it’s a bit late this year, but with the Ringmaster in jail we didn’t realise that the arrangement still stood.’

‘Oh … thank you,’ said Nanny Piggins, trying to play along. But then she was undone by actually looking into the brown paper bag. ‘Leaping lamingtons!’ she exclaimed. ‘There must be $25,000 in this bag.’

‘Do you want more?’ asked the Lord Mayor nervously.

‘If you’re silly enough to give it to me, yes please,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But first I’d like to know why you have given me this much.’

‘In this city we pride ourselves on being orderly, calm, relaxed …’ began the Lord Mayor.

‘You mean boring?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Precisely,’ agreed the Lord Mayor. ‘There are a lot of dull, boring people in the world and they need somewhere to live. So we encourage them to come and live here. To that end, for the last twenty years
we have paid the Ringmaster not to bring his circus to this town.’

‘You’ve paid him $25,000 a year not to do a circus?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Yes,’ said the Lord Mayor. ‘Lots of towns do it.’

The circus performers were all muttering among themselves now.

‘That’s appalling. I always knew he was a terrible crook,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but now I realise he had even less excuse for refusing to buy chocolate biscuits for the break room.’

‘So could you wrap up this little shindig?’ asked the Lord Mayor.

‘Here,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘How about I give you $5000 back and we wrap it up in five minutes, just so we can finish the grand finale.’

So Nanny Piggins took $20,000 from the Lord Mayor, refunded all the entry fees to the children and gave them one last spectacle to behold. She climbed into her homemade cannon and blasted herself so high into the sky that when she came back down all
the children had gone home and the circus tents had been packed away.

Now that Nanny Piggins had the money to pay off the credit card bill, they did not have to worry about Mr Green having a cardiac arrest (at least not yet). And the circus performers decided to go home – to their real home, the circus.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.’

‘No, doing your backyard circus has been so much fun,’ said Rosalind. ‘It has reminded us why we became freaks and outcasts from society in the first place. Because we are circus folk. It is who we are.’

‘You’re a wise bearded woman,’ said Nanny Piggins, giving her a hug.

Saying goodbye to Esmeralda took a little longer because she had grown very fond of the children and kept trying to hug them. And also because she kept forgetting she was leaving, and would wander into the living room to watch TV. Eventually Alistair lured her on to the circus truck with a bag of peanuts (as the Ringmaster had done all those years ago).

‘I’ve had a lovely holiday,’ called Esmeralda through the open window. ‘I don’t remember much of it. But according to the notes the children have
written on my hoofs, I’ve had a lovely time and I’m welcome to come again whenever I want.’

‘Don’t go!’ wailed Boris, breaking down and sobbing. ‘Who will I practise my tap dancing with now? You’re the only dance partner I’ve ever had who is tall enough to dip me.’

‘Don’t cry,’ said Esmeralda, patting Boris with her trunk. ‘I promise that if I meet any giraffes I’ll send them your way!’

And so things returned to normal at the Green house. Except for the elephant trap on the nature strip. It was a week before Nanny Piggins remembered she was supposed to fill it in. And when she went out to do it, she discovered the truancy officer down there, in a very bad mood, having been trapped at the bottom for a fortnight.

‘Don’t you just love Easter?’ beamed Nanny Piggins. ‘As far as holidays go it’s got everything going for it: fresh flowers, ostentatious hats and, of course, chocolate.’ Nanny Piggins smiled an even bigger smile before skipping happily towards the kitchen.

‘Yes, Easter,’ said Derrick.

‘Lovely,’ said Samantha.

‘Couldn’t be nicer,’ said Michael.

‘Always a favourite,’ said Boris. Once the door swung shut the children huddled around Boris to talk tactics.

‘Right, what are we going to do?’ asked Boris.

‘We tried locking her in the cellar last year and that didn’t work,’ said Michael.

‘We should have seen it coming,’ said Samantha, shaking her head. ‘We all know how good she is at tunnelling.’

‘We could lock her in the attic,’ suggested Derrick.

‘She’s a flying pig!’ exclaimed Boris. ‘She isn’t going to let a little thing like a double brick wall and an eight-metre drop keep her from the biggest chocolate-eating day of the year.’

‘What if we locked her in a safe first?’ suggested Samantha, ‘then locked the safe in the attic?’

‘That’s no good,’ said Boris. ‘My sister can get out of a safe faster than you can get out of a pair of leather trousers.’

‘It takes quite a long time to get out of leather trousers,’ said Derrick. (He knew this because he’d had an English teacher who made him play an Austrian goat herder wearing lederhosen in the school pantomime.)

‘My point exactly,’ said Boris.

‘We can’t just let her run loose like she did last year,’ said Samantha. ‘She scared children.’

‘She scared adults,’ added Derrick.

‘She made the Police Sergeant cry,’ added Boris.

‘And she ate so much chocolate she was in a sugar-induced coma for three days,’ added Michael.

‘Why don’t we try reasoning with her?’ suggested Samantha.

‘Ha!’ scoffed Boris. (Being Russian he was very good at making these sort of guttural noises.) ‘She would never listen to reasoned arguments when she could be eating a chocolate egg.’

The children had to nod sadly at the truth of this.

‘If only there was some way we could show Nanny Piggins the effect she has on other people when she rampages through the neighbourhood, wildly gobbling chocolate,’ said Michael.

‘I’ve got it!’ exclaimed Derrick.

‘Got what?’ asked Boris. ‘Not lice I hope! It’s all right for you humans, you’ve only got hair on your heads. But when you’re a bear with lice, scratching is a fulltime job.’

‘No,’ said Derrick patiently. ‘I’ve got an idea of how we can help Nanny Piggins.’

‘Does it involve a blowgun and elephant tranquillisers?’ asked Michael.

‘No, although perhaps we should have those on stand-by in case my plan doesn’t work,’ said Derrick.

‘What’s your idea?’ asked Samantha.

‘Well,’ said Derrick. ‘We’ve been reading Charles Dickens at school.’

‘You poor boy,’ sympathised Boris, wrapping Derrick in a big bear hug. ‘Why didn’t you say so earlier? Dickens writes such horribly thick books and with such difficult big words, no wonder you have been looking wan lately.’

‘No, what I mean is, we’ve been reading
A Christmas Carol
,’ said Derrick through a mouthful of Boris’ fur. ‘The story of Scrooge.’

‘Oh, that’s not such a bad book,’ said Boris, letting Derrick go. ‘It’s much shorter than the others and it’s got ghosts in it so it’s very exciting.’

‘That’s right,’ said Derrick. ‘And the ghosts come to Scrooge in the night and show him how awful his behaviour is at Christmas.’

‘So we could do the same thing for Nanny Piggins,’ said Michael, catching on. ‘We could use ghosts to show Nanny Piggins what her Easter behaviour is like.’

‘But where are we going to find three ghosts?’ asked Boris. ‘I only know one and he isn’t very agreeable; all he ever says is “boo” or “whaaaaaggggggerrhhhh”.’

‘We’ll be the ghosts!’ announced Derrick.

Boris grabbed Derrick and hugged him again, almost but not quite breaking all his ribs. ‘I admit that my sister’s Easter excesses need to be stopped, but I will absolutely not allow you to jump in front of a bus, just so you can become a ghost and re-enact a parable from nineteenth-century literature.’

‘It’s all right, Boris,’ squeaked Derrick. (It is hard to talk when your diaphragm is being crushed.) ‘I only meant that we should
pretend
to be ghosts.’

‘Ooooh,’ said Boris. ‘That’s a much better idea.’

When Nanny Piggins went to bed that night she was delirious with excitement. She loved Easter so much. Normally, when she was that excited she could not sleep at all. But on this occasion she had been excited all week, so after five nights of giddy anticipation, Nanny Piggins fell into a deep sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Now at this point I should take a moment to explain Nanny Piggins’ annual bout of
uncharacteristically selfish behaviour. As anybody who has read Nanny Piggins’ adventures knows, she was usually a very generous soul. Even though she loved cake with every fibre of her being, she still, as a point of principle, always, always, always shared. But Easter was her blind spot.

She could not wrap her mind around the concept that a chocolate egg hidden in someone else’s garden, in a street and suburb miles away from her own home, was not put there for her. As far as she was concerned, any chocolate left unattended in an open area was free game. As a result, she always ate dangerous amounts of confectionary on Easter Day. And a lot of children had very sad Easters where they found no eggs, and were left thinking the Easter Bunny had been very cruel in hiding his chocolate eggs in extraordinarily difficult locations. I know it does not sound logical, but in Nanny Piggins’ defence, it is hard to feel logical after you have eaten seven times your own body weight in chocolate.

Now back to the story …

Nanny Piggins had been asleep for some time when the window rattled. (Boris was standing outside on a ladder, pretending to be a spooky wind by shaking the window frame.) Next, a moaning sound came from outside the door. (Michael was
pretending to be a ghost by re-enacting the sounds he made after last Easter’s stomach-ache.) Then smoke rolled in under the doorway. (Derrick was pretending to be an eerie fog, by standing outside the door with a pop-up toaster, purposefully burning toast.) Then, among the rattling, moaning and smoke, Samantha made her dramatic entrance.

She was wrapped from head to foot in gold tinsel and wearing Mrs Simpson’s wedding dress. (Mrs Simpson had actually agreed to this, because she was so shocked when they asked. Nanny Piggins usually just took things and gave sorry gifts later.)

‘Whaooooaaaahhhh!’ said Samantha dramatically as she rolled into Nanny Piggins’ bedroom on a skateboard. You could not see the skateboard because the skirt of the wedding dress was so long, it looked like Samantha was floating into the room.

Sadly, this spectacular cacophony of homemade special effects was wasted on Nanny Piggins, who continued to sleep soundly.

‘WwwhhhhaaooohhhhAAAAHHHHH!’ wailed Samantha even more loudly. But her nanny did not stir. ‘She’s not waking up,’ Samantha hissed to Derrick and Michael in the hallway.

‘Try this,’ said Derrick, as he put down his toaster and passed Samantha a chocolate bar.

Samantha leaned forward and held the chocolate bar over the bed, then ever so gently rustled the wrapper.

Nanny Piggins immediately sprang bolt upright. ‘Give me the chocolate!’ she demanded.

Samantha put the chocolate bar back in her pocket. (Surprisingly Mrs Simpson’s wedding dress did have pockets, because Mrs Simpson, or Miss Paraskevopoulos as she was known at the time, knew that speeches at wedding receptions can be very dull so she wanted to have a novel on hand for secretly reading under the table.)

‘I am the Ghost of Easter Past!’ announced Samantha grandly.

‘Really?’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Because you are the spitting image of the little girl I look after. Have you met her? Her name is Samantha.’

Samantha decided it was best to ignore her nanny’s insightful comment. ‘I am here to show you the Easters that have been!’ she declared. ‘Come with me!’

Nanny Piggins scowled.

Samantha realised what her nanny was thinking and corrected herself. ‘
Please
, come with me’.

‘All right then,’ said Nanny Piggins, smiling and jumping out of bed. ‘But it will have to be quick.
I need my Easter sleep. I’ve got a big day of eating tomorrow.’

Samantha led Nanny Piggins downstairs. (She had to get off the skateboard when she got to the staircase because she did not want to break her neck or tear Mrs Simpson’s wedding dress.) Then she took her into the living room, where the untuned television had been switched on. The black and white pixelated screen hummed and crackled.

‘Oh goody,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Are we going to watch TV? Because I haven’t had a chance to watch the episode of
The Young and the Irritable
that I taped earlier today. I’m dying to find out if Bethany’s eye-patch surgery was successful.’

‘No, we are going to watch home movies of your Easters past,’ intoned Samantha, with as much gravitas as she could muster, ‘so you can see what you have done.’

A video crackled onto the screen. (Michael was operating the remote from behind the sofa.) The video showed Nanny Piggins a year earlier, looking fabulous, but not behaving in the most dignified way.

‘More more MORE,’ bellowed the on-screen Nanny Piggins as she ran around a stranger’s backyard, grabbing chocolate and chomping it up.

‘Wow,’ marvelled Nanny Piggins. ‘I think my athleticism when I’m hunting Easter eggs rivals even my athleticism when I am blasted out of a cannon.’

‘Keep watching,’ instructed Samantha sternly.

On the video Nanny Piggins was eating more and more and more chocolate. It was becoming smeared all over her face, hair and Easter bonnet.

‘Oh dear,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Milk chocolate goes with almost everything, but it does not look particularly flattering with a floral dress.’

The camera panned across to show two small children crying.

‘What’s wrong with those children?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Why are they crying?’

‘You ate their Easter eggs,’ explained Samantha, still in her ‘Ghost of Easter Past’ voice.

‘
Their
Easter eggs?’ questioned Nanny Piggins.

‘They were hidden in
their
garden,’ added Samantha.

‘Then why didn’t they find them and eat them?’ asked Nanny Piggins, genuinely puzzled.

‘Because children aren’t allowed to get up at three o’clock in the morning and go running around in the dark,’ explained Samantha.

‘They’re not?’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘I
always let Derrick, Samantha and Michael do that if they want to.’

‘Most parents make their children wait, at least until daylight, before they start their Easter egg hunt,’ said Samantha.

‘Really?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Those poor children. I just assumed that all those eggs had been abandoned by a series of people who had suddenly and unexpectedly been diagnosed with diabetes.’

‘Now that you know what you have done,’ said Samantha, sounding as authoritative and dramatic as she could, ‘you may return to bed.’

‘Since we’re up, how about we watch
The Young and the Irritable
?’ suggested Nanny Piggins.

‘No, you must return to bed,’ said Samantha firmly.

Twenty minutes later Nanny Piggins was again in a deep sleep. Boris and the children had given up trying to wake Nanny Piggins with ghost effects. So Michael dressed up in Mr Green’s best bed sheet (they had sent Mr Green to bed on a bare mattress, explaining that his sheets had been confiscated by the dirty laundry police – an organisation that
doesn’t exist, but certainly should), marched in and prodded Nanny Piggins with the fire poker while yelling, ‘WAAAKE UUUUUP!’

Nanny Piggins stirred. ‘Did you want something?’ she asked, peering at Michael with bleary eyes.

‘I am the Ghost of Easter Present!’ announced Michael.

‘Present?!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘You’re giving me a present! How lovely. I thought that only happened at Christmas. I do love presents. They’re almost as good as Easter eggs.’