Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan (6 page)

‘Nanny Piggins! Nanny Piggins!!’ shrieked Michael.

‘What is it?’ asked Nanny Piggins. Which just goes to show what a caring nanny she was, because Nanny Piggins was watching her favourite soap opera, ‘The Young and the Irritable’, with Derrick, Samantha and Boris. And normally if anyone tried to speak to Nanny Piggins while Bethany
was telling Crevasse that their son was really his brother’s nephew’s father, Nanny Piggins would have pretended she was deaf until the commercial break, then soundly told them off for interrupting her. But Nanny Piggins could tell from the note of horror in Michael’s voice that something serious was going on (not as serious as Bethany’s twin sister coming out of a coma on ‘The Young and the Irritable’, but still pretty serious).

‘I found this,’ gasped Michael, as he waved a screwed-up scrap of paper.

‘Found it? You haven’t been climbing into dumpsters again? What have I told you about that?’ demanded Nanny Piggins.

‘I must never climb into dumpsters without you,’ chanted Michael, ‘because it’s not fair to let you miss out on all the fun.’

‘Exactly,’ said Nanny Piggins approvingly.

‘But I didn’t find this in a dumpster,’ said Michael. ‘I found it in the bin in Father’s office.’

‘You were searching your father’s rubbish bin?’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘Why? We only searched it yesterday.’

‘No, I wasn’t searching,’ explained Michael. ‘I was just looking for something unimportant to spit my gum into, like his cheque book, when I found this.’

Nanny Piggins looked more closely at the crumpled piece of paper. She smoothed it out on her thigh. It was a handwritten note, with lots of crossings out and corrections, written by Mr Green.

It read …
Wealthy attractive lawyer, who drives a Rolls Royce, seeks wife to clean house and look after children. Applicants must not pester me with problems, concerns or any type of conversation
.

‘What is this?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘It’s a personal ad,’ said Derrick.

‘A personal what?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Advertisement,’ said Derrick. ‘If you’re lonely and you want to meet someone, you can put an advertisement in the newspaper saying what type of person you’re looking for, and if anyone is interested, they write back.’

‘But that’s ridiculous. There are people everywhere. The streets are full of them. If Mr Green wanted to meet someone he could just walk out his front door,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘I don’t think Father wants to meet someone,’ said Samantha. ‘He just wants to get married. If he could do that without ever meeting the woman I’m sure he would.’

‘It’s all very well for him to get a wife from the sad, lonely women who read newspapers,’ said
Nanny Piggins, ‘but that is no way to find you a mother.’

‘I don’t know what we can do about it,’ said Derrick.

‘Fetch me the bus timetable!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Maybe there’s time to go into town and burn down the newspaper office before they print their next edition.’

‘We can’t do that,’ said Samantha.

‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘“The Bold and the Spiteful” is on in five minutes,’ said Samantha.

‘Good point,’ said Nanny Piggins. (‘The Bold and the Spiteful’ was Nanny Piggins’ second favourite soap opera. She was not going to miss it just to burn down a newspaper office.)

‘We will have to come up with another solution,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘We could always do nothing,’ suggested Boris. Bears were very good at doing nothing. They did absolutely nothing for four months every winter when they hibernated. This took a lot of willpower and an awful lot of videotape, because Boris didn’t like missing ‘The Bold and the Spiteful’ either.

‘Hmm … nothing, I like that idea,’ mused
Nanny Piggins. The commercial break was coming to an end and she secretly wanted to keep watching her soap opera.

‘After all, Mr Green can place an advertisement,’ said Boris. ‘But no-one in her right mind would want to marry him once she’d met him.’

‘Excellent point,’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘They don’t allow newspapers in lunatic asylums, do they?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Samantha.

‘And blind and deaf people can’t read newspapers, can they?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘No,’ agreed the children.

‘And who else would apply?’ concluded Nanny Piggins.

‘No-one’ seemed the obvious answer. So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children went back to watching their program.

Unfortunately, whether because not all lunatics are in asylums, or because lunatic asylums have such low and easy-to-climb walls, Boris’ plan to do nothing did not work. Mr Green was inundated with replies. Every day the letterbox was filled with
perfume-drenched letters. Many with pink or lilac stationery, and some even sealed with a lipstick kiss.

On the bright side, however, Mr Green was too stupid to think of monitoring his mail. So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were able to have a lovely time every afternoon, steaming open the envelopes and reading all the letters. Of course they were not able to read
all
the letters. Some were not written in English. Some were written in English but did not make any sense. And one was entirely written in marmalade, so it soon became illegible because Boris could not resist licking it.

‘These letters are disgusting,’ said Nanny Piggins after reading the fiftieth putrid love poem admiring Mr Green’s wealth and Rolls Royce. ‘We had better destroy them all.’

‘Isn’t that a little unfair to Father?’ suggested Samantha. ‘Maybe he is lonely and it would be nice for him to get remarried.’

Nanny Piggins, Derrick, Michael and Boris stared at Samantha for a moment. No-one knew quite what to say. ‘You have met your father, haven’t you?’ asked Nanny Piggins kindly. ‘Do you honestly think getting married would make him happy? Unless they change the law and make it legal to marry a tax legislation book.’

‘I suppose,’ said Samantha.

The problem was that Samantha read a lot of romance novels. So on some level she secretly hoped that her father had just been pretending to be mean and uncaring for the last nine years and that secretly he was nice and normal.

‘Just because these women are clearly desperate, deranged and criminally sociopathic,’ continued Nanny Piggins, ‘does not mean they deserve to be exposed to your father. I suggest we burn all the letters and bury the ashes in a deep hole down the far end of the garden.’

And that is exactly what they did. The letters made quite a merry fire once Nanny Piggins poured some petrol on them. And the children were able to toast marshmallows over the embers of their father’s romantic aspirations.

Unfortunately Nanny Piggins had underestimated just how much some single women want to get married. It never occurred to her that one of them would have the audacity to actually come to the house. And so, the next day when the doorbell rang, Nanny Piggins wishfully assumed it was a lost pizza delivery boy who was going to give them free pre-paid pizzas. She flung the door open, only to be confronted by a woman standing right there on their doorstep.

The words, ‘Yummy! Give me the pizzas …’ died on Nanny Piggins’ lips.

One look at the beautiful petite brunette with her peaches and cream complexion and sparkling brown eyes (magnified alluringly by horn-rimmed glasses), and Nanny Piggins knew she was in trouble.

‘Hello, I’m here about Mr Green’s personal advertisement,’ said the Mrs Green-want-to-be.

‘Go away!’ screamed Nanny Piggins as she immediately tried to slam the door.

But this woman, like Nanny Piggins, had surprising strength for her diminutive stature. As soon as Nanny Piggins moved to slam the door, she jammed her shoulder into it, and a pushing match ensued. Nanny Piggins and the Mrs Green-want-to-be both pushed as hard as they could. But the door never wavered more than a millimetre in either direction.

‘Go away,’ grunted Nanny Piggins.

‘Let me in,’ wheezed the Mrs Green-want-to-be.

The children rushed out into the hallway to see what their nanny was doing.

‘Can we help?’ asked Derrick.

‘Whatever you do, don’t let your father see her,’ panted Nanny Piggins.

Mr Green was practically never at home. He spent as much time as he possibly could at work, preferably on business trips, so he could avoid his children as much as possible. To find Mr Green at home was actually incredibly difficult. You would have to watch the house like a hawk to know that he was there. So either the Mrs Green-want-to-be was incredibly lucky or she had been hiding in the bushes across the street with a pair of field binoculars for four days.

When Mr Green was at home he had one rule. ‘Children must be neither seen, nor heard, nor smelled, and definitely not touched.’ He had this laminated onto palm cards and given to each of the children. If Derrick, Samantha or Michael was ever caught breaking this rule he got very cross. (You could tell because his neck turned red. He never actually told the children he was cross, because that would involve making eye contact, and he tried to avoid that.)

So when Mr Green burst into the corridor and said with a slightly raised voice, ‘What is all this ruckus!?’, they knew he was really mad.

The children instinctively tried to hide – Derrick behind the umbrella stand, Samantha under a pile of raincoats and Michael in the hall closet. Which
left Nanny Piggins momentarily distracted, because Derrick had accidentally jabbed her in the eye with an umbrella. The Mrs Green-want-to-be used this opportunity to give one enormous shove, pushing Nanny Piggins and the front door aside, and making her entrance into the Green home.

‘Mr Green?’ said the Mrs Green-want-to-be. ‘My name is Jane Doeadear. I have come about your personal advertisement.’

Mr Green did not so much respond as slobber, much like a hungry dog looking at a T-bone steak. When he placed the advertisement, Mr Green had simply wanted a free housekeeper/nanny/domestic slave so he could rid himself of the shame of having a pig for a nanny. He had very low standards. He was prepared to marry any woman willing to scrub the baked-on scum off his oven. It never occurred to him (or to be fair, anybody else) that he could find a wife who was also dazzlingly attractive. And Jane Doeadear definitely was that. She was just the type of woman Mr Green liked – small, shiny-haired, and with glasses.

Even Nanny Piggins had to admit that this stranger was good-looking. She had a sort of jaunty athleticism that Nanny Piggins found oddly familiar. It was almost as if they had met before but Nanny Piggins could not remember where.

‘Hello,’ said Mr Green in such a way that he clearly thought he was being dazzlingly attractive himself. He sort of smirked, winked and tried to look thin all at once. Fortunately the children could not see because they were trying to hide. But Nanny Piggins saw and it almost made her violently ill (which would have been a terrible tragedy because she had eaten the most delicious blueberry pancakes for breakfast. Nanny Piggins’ secret for making really good blueberry pancakes was to use chocolate chips instead of blueberries).

‘Do come in,’ simpered Mr Green, even more sickeningly.

And that is how Jane Doeadear invaded the Green family home. Mr Green immediately invited her to stay. He thought it would be cheaper than dating. And it would give him an opportunity to observe Jane’s cleaning abilities up close.

The next week was a horrible one for Nanny Piggins and the children. Mr Green started coming home from work at a normal time, just so he could watch Jane doing housework and sigh blissfully.

‘Do you think Father is suffering from some sort of brain damage?’ asked Michael.

‘Yes,’ said Nanny Piggins, as they watched him watching Jane. ‘But it’s no more severe than usual. Attractive women always have this effect on men.’

‘It’s almost as if he’s been hit on the head with a cricket bat,’ observed Samantha.

‘It’s worse than that,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘When you hit someone on the head with a cricket bat, the sharp pain and the flowing blood let them know something is wrong. But when a man is dazzled by a beautiful woman, he doesn’t realise he has gone temporarily insane. The opposite happens. He suddenly thinks he is the funniest, cleverest man ever to walk the earth. Really, when single men start dating they should all be locked up in lunatic asylums.’