Survivor (3 page)

For the rest of the holidays Ffiona and Betty saw each other every day. Betty was rather nervous the first time Ffiona came to her house. After all, not many people have a sister who is a small hairy dog called Satanella.
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Nor do they have a sister called Merlinmary who is so hairy she might actually be a he, but no one can get near enough to find out in case they get a severe electric shock. In fact, most people don’t have any relations as weird the Floods.
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‘Listen, everyone,’ Betty said at breakfast the first day Ffiona was coming to visit, ‘my new best friend’s coming over today and I don’t want you all to freak her out.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Morbid. His twin, Silent, sniggered quietly.

‘Come on, you know,’ said Betty. ‘We don’t look like other people and … hey, stop doing that.’

Morbid and Silent were making slime appear in midair and then run down all over their faces, and it wasn’t nice green slime, it was purple with bits of carrot in it.

‘All right, little sister, just for you,’ said Winchflat, and he made his left ear – which he had transplanted to the end of his nose to see if it improved his hearing – go back round to the side of his head.

‘And I promise I won’t do anything like this,’
said Merlinmary, setting the curtains on fire with a bolt of lightning.

‘OK, OK, that’s enough, children,’ said Mordonna. ‘This little girl is quite shy and she is Betty’s best friend so let’s all be nice to her and act as human as possible.’

‘Yeuww, gross,’ said Morbid.

Only Satanella didn’t do anything silly. She just nudged at Betty’s hand and said, ‘Is the little baby coming too?’

‘No, not today,’ said Betty.

Betty had suggested to Ffiona that she might like to leave her glasses off until she got used to the Flood family, but she needn’t have worried. Her brothers and sisters had only been teasing and did their best to make Ffiona welcome.

The twins, Morbid and Silent, went as far as falling deeply in love with Ffiona the instant they saw her. It was touching to see their green skin flush pink with shyness. Actually, it wasn’t so much touching as weirdly nauseating. Because although pink and green go together quite well in clothes,
they don’t look so great on skin. Their adoring gazes looked like a cross between an unwanted puppy, true love and something that had been dead for four days. Fortunately Ffiona did not realise their weird expressions meant they loved her. She just thought they always looked like that.

Ffiona shook all four of the twins’ hands about fifty times, and after Betty finally managed to drag her away to meet the rest of the family, the twins
put on rubber gloves and said they would never wash their hands again.

Satanella didn’t want to freak Ffiona out by seeming to be a talking dog, so she had managed to type her a card, which she laid in Ffiona’s lap. It said:

‘You didn’t, did you?’ said Satanella.

‘Didn’t what?’ said Ffiona, holding the note at arm’s length to avoid its old-bone-been-buried-for-a-while-and-then-dug-up-again smell.

‘Bring your baby brother with you?’

‘No, he’s asleep. He keeps putting worms up his nose and it makes him very tired.’

Ffiona said hello to Winchflat and Valla, and told Nerlin she was pleased to meet him, and she was about to shake hands with Merlinmary but the whole family shouted ‘No!’ and Betty knocked her to the ground before Merlinmary’s friendly lightning could fry Ffiona’s eyebrows.

She even shook the skeletal hand of the children’s grandmother, Queen Scratchrot, who was buried in the back garden – and she still wasn’t put off when she found bits of grey skin under her fingernails. A bit of decomposing flesh on your hands was a small price to pay for having a best friend.

Ffiona also found that the twins bringing her glasses of water garnished with frogs’ eyes every five
minutes was better than sitting at home trying to avoid crocheting yet another baby blanket.

‘Well, they’re actually quite nice,’ she said to Betty, who had chased the twins out of the room. ‘In a slimy sort of way.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Betty, who was still worrying her strange family would frighten Ffiona. ‘You mean, you actually like them?’ She pointed to the frogs’ eyes floating in the glass.

‘Yes, now I’m used to them,’ said Ffiona.

The twins, listening outside the room, thought that Ffiona was talking about them and their hearts
almost burst with love. Their eyes rolled back inside their heads and looked at their brains while brown smoke dribbled out of their nostrils, and as everyone knows, happiness just doesn’t get any better than that.

‘You know what?’ said Betty. ‘I think you must have a witch or a wizard somewhere in your family.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Well, if you like eating frogs’ eyes,’ said Betty.

‘But I can’t do magic or anything like that,’ said Ffiona.

‘Maybe you’ve just never been shown how.’

‘Could you show me?’

‘Oh yes, no problem,’ said Betty.

Although Betty said this with great confidence, she had never done anything like it before and she often got magic spells wrong. Once she had tried to turn a pumpkin and four white mice into a carriage and horses like in
Cinderella
, but she had ended up with four geography teachers and a camping
toilet. The toilet was a big hole in the ground and the geography teachers were in the hole up to their necks, which, of course, many people would agree is the best place for geography teachers.

Since then she had been under strict instructions from her family to stick to small magic, like giving people spots and making toast appear in funny and embarrassing places. She was expert enough to always have total control over what was on the toast and would change it depending on the situation.

Naturally she didn’t tell Ffiona any of this.

Besides
, she said to herself,
teaching someone else to do magic isn’t the same as trying to do it yourself.

Betty’s genius brother, Winchflat, had a massive library of magic books in a cellar under the house. There was everything you could ever want to know about magic, from how to turn four geography teachers in a deep smelly hole into a table lamp with choice of lampshade trim, to how to create an entire planet out of 7,653 simple everyday household items.

Winchflat’s favourite place was Quicklime College, the school he went to in Patagonia. He loved school so much that during the holidays when he was working in his secret workshop – where he was spending a lot of time right now working on something BIG – he would make it look exactly like his school classroom.

So, while Winchflat was in his secret workshop, Betty and Ffiona went down to his library to find a book on how to teach magic to someone who may or may not have a bit of wizard blood in their veins.

‘Nice cobweb,’ said Ffiona, stroking a very hairy spider that was sitting on the door handle.

‘Thank you,’ said the spider. ‘Could you move your thumb? It’s squashing my third foot.’

‘Sorry,’ said Ffiona.

‘Listen, Serge,’ said Betty to the spider. ‘You won’t tell Winchflat or anyone we’ve been in here, will you?’

‘Well, umm,’ said Serge, ‘that depends.’

‘On what?’ said Betty.

‘My sore foot,’ said Serge.

‘What about it?’ said Ffiona. ‘I said I’m sorry.’

‘I know,’ said Serge. ‘But you have to kiss it better.’

‘No problem,’ said Ffiona, and she kissed him. Serge’s legs were so hairy they tickled the inside of her nose and made her giggle, which she then had to explain to the spider in case he thought she was laughing at him.

‘What are you looking for?’ said Serge.

When Betty told him, he ran down the door, across the floor and up to a shelf on the far side of the library to an eighty-five volume encyclopaedia. He climbed on top of the books and disappeared over the back. A few seconds later one of the books slowly moved outwards and fell on the floor.

‘Something like this?’ he said.

‘Brilliant,’ said Betty.

‘Hold on,’ said Serge. ‘Your brother has eyes like a hawk. In fact he has eyes like a whole flock of Greater Spotted Tiny Mouse-Eating Hawks. He’ll notice the book’s missing the second he comes into the room. You’ll need to do some magic to make a fake book to fill the gap.’

‘Oh right, yes. Err…’ said Betty, not wanting Ffiona to see how bad she was at magic. ‘I’m not
sure I can remember that particular spell.’

‘Oh, but surely…’ Serge began.

‘No, I remember now,’ said Betty. ‘At the end of last term my after-school magic teacher said pretend book spells were the first thing we would do next term.’

‘Well, you must be able to do something,’ said Serge, but when he saw the expression on Betty’s face he realised she hadn’t the faintest idea what she was doing.

Betty stared at the encyclopaedia and concentrated. Nothing happened. She closed her eyes, except for the corner of the left one, and concentrated harder. Water began dripping out of the ceiling.

‘Oops,’ she said, but it was too late.