Floods 6 (3 page)

After lunch everyone went down to the beach.

Like the town, it hadn't changed in a hundred years. There were rows of old-fashioned deckchairs full of people with bright pink sunburnt bodies all fast asleep with handkerchiefs over their faces.

‘If they're all asleep,' said Betty, ‘and if they've got their faces covered up, why don't they just stay at home in their back gardens?'

‘I expect it's the change-is-as-good-as-a-rest thing,' said Nerlin. ‘What I want to know is why all those people are in that angry water. Do you think we should go and help them?'

‘No, Daddy,' said Betty. ‘It's called the sea and it's not angry. That's called surf and what the people are doing is swimming.'

‘Really? Why on earth would they do that? And what about those people with the doors?'

‘Umm, what doors?' Betty looked out at the surf, confused.

‘Look, those people in the water with the doors,' said Nerlin, pointing at one of them. ‘They drag them out into the deep water and then try to stand on them. I mean, how stupid are they? If they want to stand on the doors they should just lie them down on the sand. Then they wouldn't keep falling off all the time.'

‘I think it's called surfing,' said Betty. ‘I had a look on Google before we left home.'

‘Surfing?' said Winchflat. ‘Well, I do that on the internet all the time. It's much better that way. I mean, you never fall off and you don't get wet.'

‘Well, what's the point of it?' said Mordonna.

‘I haven't the faintest idea,' said Betty.

‘Didn't it say?'

‘No. It's just another one of those mysteries of life that shows us how weird humans are,' said Betty, covering herself with one of the Witch Shrouds that Mordonna had brought with them to stop them getting horribly healthy-looking in the sunshine.
²⁰

‘We're not weird,' said Ffiona.

‘No,
you're
not, but most humans are,' said Betty.

‘I'm afraid to say, you're absolutely right,' said
Mr Hulbert. ‘Sometimes I feel quite depressed about being human.'

‘If you ever want to change, you only have to say so,' said Mordonna. ‘We could help you.'

She lay back in her deckchair, letting the sun melt her White Lead Blockout into every pore of her skin.
²¹

‘Could you make us into wizards?' said Ffiona. ‘That would be so cool.'

‘I'm afraid not,' Mordonna explained. ‘Wizards and witches are unchangeable. We're the top species, which means no lesser species can become the same as us. Of course, in twenty-five billion and three years, when evolution has finished changing things, then the descendants of humans will probably have evolved into wizards.'

‘Wow,' said Ffiona. ‘You mean everything's evolving all the time?'

‘Yes,' said Mordonna. ‘In twenty-five billion
and three years, the descendants of those jellyfish lying on the sand there will have become bank managers.'

‘So if we did want to change,' said Ffiona cautiously, ‘what could you change us into?'

‘How about magpies?' said Mordonna. ‘They're pretty clever, you know.'

‘Or cockroaches,' Winchflat added. ‘They're
really
clever.'

‘I think we'll probably just stay human,' said Mrs Hulbert, looking faint.

‘Yes, that's probably best,' said Mr Hulbert.

Winchflat had put Queen Scratchrot in her backpack down on the beach next to his chair and the Queen was enjoying herself playing with the sand. She scooped it up in her one remaining hand and let it run between her fingers, counting the grains as they drifted away.

‘Six hundred and forty-three thousand, seven hundred and fourteen,' she said. ‘When I was younger and had all my skin, I could hold over fifty million grains in the palm of my hand.'

‘I thought you said you'd never been to the seaside before, Granny,' said Betty.

‘I haven't, dear. It was back in the Transylvania Waters salt mines,' said the Queen. ‘We used to go down and play there. It was a tradition for all royal children to be taken down there to throw stones at our enemies, who were kept in chains to dig out the salt. They were happy days. Well, not so much for our enemies, but we had a lovely time.'
²²

‘What's that squeaking noise?' said Nerlin.

‘Sorry, dear, it's me,' said the Queen. ‘Got sand in my shoulder sockets.'

A gang of fifteen seagulls had landed on the beach and were now approaching the Queen. They were exceptionally big seagulls, and when they saw the Queen's bones poking out of the backpack they began to get very excited. They came rushing over and, before Winchflat could chase them away, one of them grabbed the Queen's left thigh bone and flew off.

‘Oww, oww, oww, help,' cried the Queen as Nerlin chased the other seagulls away.

Mordonna threw a spell at the gulls and they all came crashing down on the sand.

‘Listen, birds,' she said to them. ‘One of you go after your mate and bring that bone back this very minute. That is the bone of a queen and when we put her back together again, we do not want to find any bits missing.'

The seagulls, who understood every word Mordonna said, all squawked in a loud, rebellious way, so Mordonna turned thirteen of them into Belgian taxi drivers.

‘Right,' she said to the one remaining seagull. ‘Off you go and get the bone. And don't think once you're out of sight I can't get you, because I can
and if you are not back here in ten minutes, I will turn you into a Belgian geography teacher who likes ballroom dancing and beige cardigans with horrible leather buttons.'

‘Hello, good morning, and where would you like to go to today?'
²³
said the thirteen Belgian taxi drivers to every single person they met as they walked up and down the beach.

Unfortunately there was not a single person on the beach who could understand them because they were all speaking in Flemish.
²⁴

‘Go away,' was the reaction of most people, though two of them said, ‘Can I have a vanilla ice-cream with chocolate sprinkles, please?'

The ex-seagulls could only understand Flemish so their usual reply was,
‘Do you need a hand with your luggage?'

After a while the taxi drivers all gathered in a group and began wandering about saying,
‘I seem to have mislaid my taxi,'
in very distressed tones.

After eleven minutes, just as Mordonna was about to do her geography teacher spell, the two
seagulls returned and dropped the Queen's thigh bone at Winchflat's feet.

‘Let that be a lesson to you,' said Mordonna after she had turned the others back into seagulls. ‘Next time you're thinking about stealing a bone, make sure the creature it belongs to has finished with it. Now off you go and fly along the beach. Whoever drops the biggest mess on a sunbathing tummy will get this lovely big prawn.'

‘This holiday stuff's fun, isn't it?' she said when the birds had flown off.

All along the beach there were angry cries as everyone got dive-bombed by the seagulls.

Winchflat, who had stayed behind in the hotel checking his email, now joined his family on the beach. He seemed to have collected a troupe of small boys, who were trailing behind him with their mouths open and pointing. This was because Winchflat was entirely encased in a massive ancient deep-sea diving suit with huge lead boots and a big brass helmet with a thick glass window. Winchflat stopped beside his parents and opened his window.

‘I'm going for a swim,' he said. ‘I may be some time.'

‘Don't you need a boat with an air compressor and thick hoses to send air down to you?' said Mr Hulbert, who could remember seeing something similar in a book when he had been at school.

‘Normally, yes,' said Winchflat, ‘but I've made a few modifications. I will generate my own air internally.'

‘Yeuww,' said Betty. ‘That's gross.'

Winchflat closed his window and went down to the water's edge.
²⁵
As he walked into the waves, the weight of his diving suit made him sink deeper and deeper into the sand. So by the time he had walked out about twenty metres, he was stuck fast and the only bit of him that wasn't buried was his head. And there he stayed as the waves crashed over him.

‘I'm sure he knows what he's doing,' said Mordonna, who could not believe Winchflat could make a mistake.

None of them could. Since he had been a baby, Winchflat had been the family genius. He had only put a foot wrong once and that had been when he had been building his girlfriend Igorina and had put the left foot on the right leg. Even then he claimed he had done it for artistic reasons and not because he had made a mistake.

‘With her feet on opposite legs,' he had claimed, ‘if she ever tries to run away, she'll just keep ending up back here.'

‘I guess the seagull standing on Winchflat's head is probably part of a brilliant experiment,' said Nerlin.

‘It's probably something to do with sand,' said Merlinmary. ‘He's probably studying the interactions between the grains in a sort of space–time continuum kind of way, taking into account the ectoplasmic gaps and interdependent relationship between the, umm, er…'

‘What are you talking about?' said Betty.

‘I haven't the faintest idea,' said Merlinmary, ‘but I heard Winchflat say it once.'

‘Well, I think he's stuck,' said Betty.

‘Sweetheart, he's a wizard,' said Mordonna. ‘Of course he's not stuck. All he has to do is click his fingers and say a spell and he can be out of there in a second.'

‘No, he's stuck,' Betty insisted. ‘And he's stuck so fast he can't even move his fingers to click them.'

‘I suppose you could be right,' Mordonna admitted. ‘We'll just leave him there a bit longer and see if he is or not.'

‘How much longer?' said Betty as the tide came in a bit more and began to cover Winchflat's window. ‘That man's just tied his boat up to that
ring on top of Winchflat's helmet and the whole thing will be completely under water soon.'

As the tide turned, Betty waded out into the water and tapped on the top of the helmet.

‘Are you stuck?' she shouted.

Winchflat was stuck like toffee to a blanket, but he refused to admit it. He shook his head.

‘See,' said Mordonna when Betty returned. ‘I told you he wasn't stuck.'

‘He's lying,' said Betty, ‘but if that's how he wants it, fine. We'll just leave him there.'

And then everyone went to sleep for the rest of the afternoon.
²⁶
Then they woke up and went back to the hotel for dinner which, because it was mostly human food and not wizard food, the Floods wished they had stayed asleep for. Except for the bit when Valla did a magic spell that made all of the wax in all the diners' ears fly across the dining room towards the dessert trolley and mix itself into the trifle.