Survivor (11 page)

Mrs Hulbert kept telling her husband to leave, but he was too nervous.

‘I’m sure things will get better,’ he kept saying as his hair began to turn grey and fall out.

But it didn’t get better, because angry little men like Gross never let up. Of course, if Mr Hulbert had stood up to him, Gross would have backed down straight away. Cowards always do. But Mr Hulbert was scared he would lose his job so he just put up with all the daily misery.

Angela sat on Gross’s desk and watched him. When he picked her up to sign a letter, she dribbled ink all over his shirt front.

‘It was the least I could do,’ she said later.

Gross stormed out of his office, threw Angela at Mr Hulbert and told him he had to buy him a new shirt.

And then something very strange happened.

As Mr Hulbert opened his mouth to apologise, Winchflat transmitted a magic field through Angela.

The words Mr Hulbert’s brain created were, ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, what size shirt collar are you?’

The words that came out were, ‘I’ve just about had enough of you, you evil little poisoned toad.’

The whole office fell so silent that you could hear a pin drop. Gross stood rooted to the spot with his mouth opening and closing and nothing coming out.

Mr Hulbert tried to apologise. Instead of saying how sorry he was and how he didn’t know what had come over him and straight after work he would go and buy not one, but two shirts, what he actually said was, ‘You are the worst boss in the world and it’s about time you were taught a lesson.’

The whole office, all twenty-five people, were now standing with their mouths hanging open. Gross was still doing his goldfish impersonation when Angela leapt off Mr Hulbert’s desk and squirted ink all over his face and down his trousers – not just ordinary ball-point ink, but very smelly ink that seemed to have been made from dead fish.

Gross tried to scream, except part of Winchflat’s magic had been to strike him dumb. He turned to walk back to his office but Angela had also sprayed a pool of ink just behind him, which he slipped in, landing face first in front of the newest secretary, who had already told him she was leaving at the end of the week.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘let me help you get that nasty ink off your face.’ And she poured a cup of tea over him.

Up in Winchflat’s attic cellar, Betty and Ffiona sat watching on a TV screen that was beaming back everything Angela could see.

‘Now what?’ said Ffiona. ‘Won’t my dad get in the most awful trouble?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Winchflat. ‘We will now implement the second part of the plan. Come on, get into my shrink-you-as-small-as-a-speck-of-dust-transport-you-somewhere-then-enlarge-you-again-machine.’

‘Your what?’ said Betty.

‘My SYASAASODTYSTEYA machine,’ said
Winchflat, reading the letters off a label stuck to his wardrobe door. ‘If you can’t remember that, just call it the Zoomy Thing.’

‘Is that it?’ said Betty.

‘Yes, brilliant, isn’t it?’

‘It looks like a wardrobe,’ said Ffiona.

‘Exactly,’ said Winchflat. ‘It’s even got clothes hanging inside it. That way no one can tell what it really is.’

‘You mean it’s kind of like the Tardis on
Doctor Who
?’ said Betty.

‘Apart from the fact that it’s a wardrobe and not a phone box and that it is not any bigger inside than it is outside and it doesn’t have a blue light on top and it doesn’t make funny weird noises when it materialises, I suppose it’s exactly like the Tardis,’ said Winchflat.

‘It’s not very original, is it?’ said Betty.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Winchflat.

‘A wardrobe. It’s just like
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, isn’t it?’

‘No it’s not,’ said Winchflat. ‘There’s no lion.’

‘Well, why couldn’t you use something different, like a chest of drawers?’

‘Listen, it’s squashed enough inside the wardrobe, what with all the clothes in there,’ said Winchflat. ‘Can you imagine trying to get inside a
chest of drawers? Anyway, I had a wardrobe. I don’t have a chest of drawers. Now come on, we’ve got to hurry and help Ffiona’s father.’

‘But a wardrobe…’ said Betty.

‘Listen, little sister, this is no ordinary wardrobe.’

‘No more I am,’ said the wardrobe. ‘I have held the robes of kings and queens.’

‘Come on, get in,’ said Winchflat. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

‘Is it safe?’ said Betty.

‘Absolutely,’ said Winchflat. ‘It’s as safe as hearses.’

‘Should that be as safe as houses?’ said Ffiona.

‘Hopefully, yes,’ said Winchflat.

So that all three of them could fit inside the wardrobe, they had to take out six overcoats and seventeen pairs of shoes. The wardrobe was not happy about it and threatened to lock her doors when Winchflat tried to take out the three hat boxes.

‘Right,’ said Winchflat, ‘hold on. I’m homing in on Angela’s signal and then I’ll transport us there.’

‘Do we have to hold our breath or shut our eyes?’ said Ffiona.

‘No, because we’ll be there quicker than a split…’ Winchflat began to say as he pressed the red button.

There was a flash and a smell of burnt onions, which Winchflat apologised for and said he was trying to fix, and the wardrobe vanished. A fraction of a second later it re-materialised in Mr Hulbert’s office.

‘Right,’ said Betty as the three of them climbed out. ‘Where’s that dreadful man?’

In order to avoid complications later with people saying a wardrobe had appeared out of nowhere, Winchflat’s machine transmitted a magic beam that made everyone around it fall sleep. Winchflat clicked his fingers and Mr Hulbert woke up.

‘Umm, err, umm,’ he said, pointing at the wardrobe. ‘Wardrobe, wardrobe, wardrobe, wardrobe.’

‘Yes, it is isn’t it,’ said Winchflat and clicked his fingers again to make Mr Hulbert relax.

Mr Hulbert didn’t relax much, but at least he stopped saying wardrobe over and over again. He expected Gross to appear from behind the wardrobe and scream at him, but Gross wasn’t so
much standing behind the wardrobe as lying down being very flat and dead underneath it.

Ffiona sat her father down and gave him a glass of water.

‘Brilliant,’ said Betty.

‘But he’s dead,’ said Ffiona. ‘Isn’t that wrong and kind of against the law?’

‘Normally, yes,’ said Winchflat. ‘But Gross has simply been transported into another creature. He’s not so much dead as now living inside a small green frog deep in the Amazon rainforest. I tried to move him into something cuddly like a rabbit, but because he was so vile he ended up as one of those frogs the Amazon Indians get poison from for their arrows.’

‘You just made all that up,’ said Betty.

‘No I didn’t,’ said Winchflat. ‘It’s one of the basic laws of robotics that robots are not allowed to hurt humans, and my Zoomy Thing is a kind of robot and so it transmogrified Mr Gross into something else. The feet and arms you can see
sticking out from underneath ZT are merely an empty shell.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Betty, who didn’t believe a word of it, even though it was actually all true.

‘Now what I suggest you do,’ Winchflat said to Mr Hulbert, ‘is phone your head office and tell them that your boss has walked out. It wouldn’t
surprise me if, because you’ve been here much longer than everyone else, they put you in charge.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think they’d do that,’ said Mr Hulbert.

‘Yes they will,’ said Winchflat. ‘Wait until we’ve gone, count to fifty and then make the phone call.’

Winchflat slipped an exhausted Angela into his pocket, ushered the two girls back into the wardrobe, pressed the green button and they vanished.

‘What about the body?’ said Betty.

‘It’s stuck underneath ZT,’ said Winchflat. ‘We’ll give it to Granny when we get home. She’ll dispose of it for us.’
³⁴

‘…forty-nine, fifty,’ said Mr Hulbert and everyone in the office woke up with all memory of the leaking pen incident erased from their memories.

‘Gross has left the building,’ said Mr Hulbert. ‘And the good news is, he’s not coming back.’

He rang head office and it was exactly as Winchflat had predicted. Because he had been there so much longer than anyone else, he was put in charge. His wages were doubled. The newest secretary, who had poured the tea over Gross, changed her mind and decided not to leave at the end of the week, and the office started to make five times as much money as it ever had before, which meant everyone got a huge bonus and Mr Hulbert got a company car, which was a bit embarrassing for a while until he learnt how to drive.

‘It just goes to show,’ said Mrs Hulbert to Ffiona. ‘All that nastiness your father put up with over the years has finally been rewarded.’

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘And you didn’t have to ask Betty to help either, did you?’

‘No, Mother.’

That weekend, Mr Hulbert put all his cardigans in a pile in the back garden and set fire to
them. The following weekend the whole Hulbert family went to the mall and bought jeans, though Mrs Hulbert drew the line when her husband said he was thinking of getting a tattoo.

Winchflat made a new cellar under number 11 and set up his tracking, cloaking, disguising and confusing machines. The screens were all blank, but as he twiddled the knobs and calibrated the calibratey bits and pressed the hyper-active button, signals began to come through.

At first the screens were filled with rubbish: Vatican TV’s edition of
Big Brother
, which is actually called
Little Sister
, a strange sports channel from Outer Mongolia that appeared to involve a lot of men in felt boots jumping up and down in puddles of yak’s sick, and a shopping channel
that was so believable that Winchflat found himself phoning up and ordering a body-building machine, which he thought would actually build a body for him and save all the complicated stuff he’d had to do to make Igorina if he ever needed to make another one.

Betty, who had gone down to the cellar to lend a hand, bought herself two sets of genuine imitation diamondette necklaces set in pure 28-carat gold alloy – one set for herself and one for Mordonna.

Finally things settled down and a small red dot appeared on the left of the screen. The dot moved slowly forward and then came to a dead stop not quite in the centre of the screen. Winchflat and Betty held their breaths,
³⁵
waiting for it to move those last few millimetres, but it didn’t.

‘You’re sure that’s her, are you?’ said Betty.

‘Oh yes,’ said Winchflat. ‘I’d recognise her anywhere.’

‘But it’s just a red dot.’

‘Well, it might be just a red dot to you,’ Winchflat snapped, ‘but it’s my Igorina to me.’

‘OK, so where is she?’

‘Ah, well, now, yes, umm. Where’s my calculator?’ said Winchflat.

He pressed the calculator to his lips and then held it against the red dot on the screen.

‘Aren’t you supposed to do sums or something?’ said Betty.

‘Who’s the genius,’ said Winchflat, ‘you or me?’

‘Huh,’ Betty snorted. ‘You’ve changed, haven’t you? Build yourself a girlfriend and suddenly you’ve got an attitude. Well, listen, brother, girlfriend or not, you’re still a nerdy weirdo.’

Before Winchflat could answer, a special blue light bulb on top of one of the machines started flashing.

‘Get down,’ said Winchflat. ‘Laser coming.’

A loud humming filled the air and a fifty-million watt laser beam lit up the room. It bounced backwards and forwards from wall to wall, wrapped itself round the door handle and came to rest on Winchflat’s Zoomy Thing wardrobe, which he had brought along in case they needed to rush round the world after Igorina.

‘That’s odd,’ said Winchflat as he and Betty crouched under a table. ‘It’s supposed to point a thin beam onto that map on the wall over there and show us where she is.’

The loud humming faded and was replaced by another noise. The noise was like a very, very old hippopotamus with a really bad sore throat trying to laugh at another hippopotamus that has just fallen face down in the mud.
³⁶
Winchflat ran across the room and threw open the wardrobe door.

There was Igorina, doing her best to laugh.

‘What are you doing in there, you naughty girl?’ said Winchflat.

‘Sideunheek,’ said Igorina, who still needed a lot of lessons in speech therapy, starting with Lesson One: Open Your Mouth.
³⁷

Winchflat reached into the wardrobe, grabbed hold of Igorina’s hands, and helped her out. This was not a good idea because one of her hands came off in his hand, making Igorina laugh so much that indescribable purple stuff started coming out of her nose. Betty, who was much better at sewing than her brother, stitched the hand back on and then went over Igorina, adding extra stitches here and there to make sure everything stayed in the right place. The purple stuff crawled off and hid in the corner, where it began to mutate.
³⁸

‘I recognise this ear,’ said Betty as she fixed it on more securely with a few staples.

‘Yes, it’s one of mine,’ said Winchflat. ‘I read in a magazine that nothing says “I love you” like giving someone one of your ears.’

‘That is gross,’ said Betty.

‘Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,’ said Winchflat. ‘Just you wait until you get older and get a boyfriend. You might want to give him one of your ears.’

‘Well, it didn’t work for Van Gogh,’ said Betty.

‘Who?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Anyway, little sister, I’m a wizard, remember? I can grow another one.’

Winchflat tightened Igorina’s neck bolt and the three of them went to the kitchen at number 13, where Mordonna was cooking dinner. Being a very caring mother, she had actually downloaded some special recipes from the internet on things to cook for newly created Frankenstein type monsters.

When she tasted the Rusty-Girder and Festering-Foot Risotto Igorina’s face broke out in a big grin, but Winchflat managed to fix it back together with some gaffer tape.

‘That was a close shave,’ said Mordonna. ‘You’ll have to be more careful in future, Winchflat. And I think you’d better give Grandma her feet back, just in case your creation does decide to go walkabout again.’

‘What will I use for Igorina?’ said Winchflat. ‘I mean, I can’t expect her to sit down all day.’

‘Well, you’re the inventor. You’ll think of something.’

As luck would have it,
Frankenstein
was just one of a
whole box of old black and white films Winchflat had been given. One of the others was
The Wizard of Oz
, which he also thought was a documentary. The Tin Man gave him an idea.

Using seven old baked bean tins and some pop rivets, he made Igorina a pair of metal feet.

At first she kept tripping over – not because she couldn’t walk in them properly, but because Winchflat had forgotten to wash out the cans and small animals kept trying to eat the baked bean juice
that was oozing out between Igorina’s toes. She also drove everyone crazy with the terrible noise she made walking everywhere, until Winchflat glued some bits of car tyre under her feet.

Gradually, as all the stitches took hold and the various bits joined together in a more or less permanent way, Igorina worked her way into everyone’s affections and she became accepted as part of the family instead of something they all wanted to put in the rubbish bin. However, it did take a while to get Satanella to stop pulling Igorina’s hands off and burying them in the garden, especially as Igorina seemed to enjoy it.

Each day after school, Betty sat Igorina down and taught her how to read and write. At least once a week Ffiona joined in and taught her how to do maths. This took longer because Igorina couldn’t stop thinking calculators were bars of chocolate and eating them.

The twins, who secretly enjoyed gardening and only did it at night when no one was watching, taught Igorina how to plant things by digging holes
with a shovel, and not with her teeth held in her left hand, as Igorina tried to do at first.

Merlinmary just made her giggle by giving her friendly electric shocks of a few million volts, while Valla introduced her to the joys of blood.

Of course, Winchflat was over the moon at having a mad assistant to help him with his experiments, just like Doctor Frankenstein had in the movie. Whatever Igorina did, Winchflat simply adored her all the more, even when she was helping him build complex and delicate machines and she muddled things up, like pouring a litre of boiling oil into a very complicated and fragile computer instead of handing him the small screwdriver he’d asked her for.

Mordonna, wisely, decided not to teach Igorina how to cook. She tried to teach her how to wash up but no one would eat anything off the plates after she had washed them, because, being a waterwise creature, Igorina cleaned everything by putting it into her mouth and sucking all the old food off. She even got Winchflat to modify the end
of her tongue so she could get the hard-to-reach bits stuck between the prongs of the forks.

Nerlin decided that the only thing he could teach Igorina to do was to wash and polish the car, which didn’t take long because the Floods didn’t have a car. Mr Hulbert had a company car, now, though, so Igorina went round to their house every Friday night and cleaned it. This also involved respraying the car because she was so enthusiastic at cleaning the dirt off that she cleaned all the paint off too. All the neighbours thought the Hulberts had become rather eccentric because they seemed to have a different coloured car
every
week.

Mrs Hulbert had to have a long lie down after she showed Igorina how to do embroidery and the creature had sewn all her fingers together.

‘Though I must say,’ Mrs Hulbert admitted, ‘she did it with very neat stitches and in exquisite colours.’

‘I suppose it comes from having been sewn together herself,’ said Mordonna.

The two families were sitting on the Floods’
back verandah drinking slurpies, some of which did not contain body parts. It was a warm summer’s Friday night and everyone was feeling very relaxed.

‘You know what would be nice?’ said Mordonna.

‘What’s that, my darling?’ said Nerlin.

‘A nice holiday at the seaside,’ said Queen Scratchrot from inside her coffin.
³⁹

‘Once again, Mother, you have read my thoughts,’ said Mordonna.

‘We could all go,’ said Nerlin. ‘Both families.’

‘What a great idea,’ said Mr and Mrs Hulbert.