Floods 6 (9 page)

It rained a lot on the rhubarb farm and the ringmaster sat on his verandah staring out at his fields of mud and rhubarb and thought,
It can't get any worse than this.
Then the verandah collapsed on his head and he realised it could.

The next act was some acrobats. There were no animals in the act, but the acrobats were not very good. The only highlight was when one of them fell off, and even that wasn't so great because there was a safety net, so the only thing that got broken was a fingernail.

But then three of the clowns came back and this time they had five chimpanzees with them. The apes were dressed in copies of what the clowns were wearing – baggy trousers with big red spots and orange braces and silly bow ties.

Mordonna concentrated.

‘The chimpanzees are really angry,' she whispered. ‘They were all taken away from their families when they were babies and have never seen them since. This will take a bit of sorting out.'

‘Will it be difficult to find their parents?' said Betty.

‘No, that bit's easy,' said Mordonna. ‘I can do a quick DNA test, transport it to a laboratory in the Congo and get them to do comparison tests on the International Chimpanzee DNA Database. We can do that before the first custard pie falls inside the first pair of clown trousers.'

‘So what's the problem?'

‘None of them want to go back to the Congo,' said Mordonna. ‘They want to stay here and get revenge and they want to get it over and over again.'

She clicked her fingers and the oldest chimp came over and climbed
into her lap. As chimp and witch communicated telepathically, one of the clowns came marching over with a very angry look on his face.

‘What do you think you are doing?' he snapped and, under his breath, he added, ‘Just you wait until later, you little troublemaker.'

As he reached out for the chimp it screamed at him and bit him on the hand. The clown jumped backwards, tripped over his big silly clown shoes and fell flat on his back. Two other chimps raced over and threw custard pies at the fallen clown. Then the first chimp wiped them all over the clown's face…

…with her bottom.

The audience exploded with laughter. They all thought it was part of the show. As the two other clowns ran over, Mordonna clicked her fingers again and their trousers fell down, making them fall flat on their faces. The five chimpanzees ran round the circus ring grabbing all the ice-creams off the audience and throwing them at the three clowns. When the children saw what the chimps
wanted them for, they were only too happy to hand them over.

Now, what most people don't realise is that chimpanzees can actually talk and are a lot more intelligent than many human beings. They just pretend they can only grunt and aren't very bright to avoid the millions of problems that speaking with mankind would bring them. So while Mordonna was tempted to get the leading chimp to speak, she didn't. She sent her thoughts out into the fairground and searched through all the people working there until she found one with a kind heart. There were quite a few people with kind hearts, but Mordonna needed just the right one. She found the perfect person: Carla Divine, a girl of eighteen who wanted to be a clown, but wasn't allowed to because she was a girl.

While the five chimpanzees kept the three human clowns pinned to the floor with biting, bottom wiping and screaming, Mordonna cast her spell. Carla Divine left the coconut shy where she was working and went back to her caravan.
She locked the door and put on the secret clown costume she had made herself, but never told a single soul about. Whenever she put on the big, baggy red silk trousers and the huge spotty bow tie and the funny shoes, she was overcome with a feeling of extreme happiness. Once she had completed the picture by putting on the makeup with the big red clown grin, a little voice inside her head kept saying,
It doesn't get any better than this
, over and over again.

Then she marched into the circus tent and into the middle of the ring. Instantly the five chimps rushed up to her and kissed her hands. The chimps adored her because she had always treated them as her equals and preferred to be with them than most of the humans in the circus. This was because chimps, like labradors, spend huge amounts of time thinking,
It doesn't get any better than this.
⁴²

The audience cheered and cheered.

Carla drank in the applause for a few minutes
and then held up her hand. You could have heard a pin drop.

‘Well, boys and girls,' said Carla Divine. ‘What do we have here?'

The chimps jumped up and down and pointed at the three sticky, sawdust-covered clowns, who kept trying to stand up only to fall flat on their faces again. If it looked like one of them might manage to get to his feet, one of the chimps would bite him on the ankle.

‘We have three very dirty clowns, haven't we, boys and girls,' Carla continued. ‘And what do we do with someone when they get dirty?'

‘BATH! WASH!' shouted eighty-seven hyperactive children.

‘Yes, that's right,' said Carla, ‘and with
lots
of water.'

Three of the chimps ran out of the ring. They ran back a minute later, each dragging a big hose.

‘WASH, WASH, WASH, WASH!' chanted the audience in time to Carla waving her arms up and down.

While the clowns were being hosed down, the little girl sitting in the row in front of the Floods turned to her father. ‘That was, like, the best circus I have
ever
been to,' she said. ‘The chimpanzees were brilliant.'

What happened next:

The man who owned the circus knew a good thing when he saw it and Carla Divine was promoted from polishing coconuts to being chief clown. She was given a brand new caravan with enough room for her and the five chimpanzees to live in and, as the six of them sat around her stove toasting marshmallows, they all thought,
Life does not get any better than this,
together.

And of course they were right.

The three mean clowns were allowed to stay on as Carla Divine's assistants. You might think that they would never agree to that, but Mordonna cast a spell over them so they all thought that Carla Divine was a genius and the highlight of their week became giving the chimps a bubble bath on Friday nights.

 

Of course, the Floods didn't interfere with the acrobats or high-wire act.

‘If humans want to risk serious injury to
themselves
, that's up to them,' said Mordonna. ‘Though I think we need to get rid of the bouncing kittens. I'm sure they can't enjoy being dropped onto a trampoline from twenty metres in the air.'

‘No,' said Betty, ‘but they do look funny going up and down waving their little legs around, don't they?'

‘Now, darling, that's not very nice, is it?' said Mordonna, doing her best not to laugh.

‘Sorry,' said Betty.

‘She's right, though, Mum,' said Morbid. ‘They look hilarious.'

‘Yes,' said Satanella, ‘and besides, cats are evil little creatures. They're always trying to scratch me when I chase them.'

All of this was true, but it was cruel, and so Mordonna changed them into chickens.

‘Which is probably just as cruel,' said Nerlin, ‘but even funnier than the kittens.'

‘Sorry,' said Mordonna. ‘I am a witch. I am supposed to be a bit evil – and anyway, the one thing chickens spend every minute thinking about is being able to fly, and now they can. Sort of.'

After the horse and poodle and clown fiascos, the circus owner almost cancelled the highlight of his show, the lions.

‘The way things are going tonight,' he said, ‘it could end in serious injury to someone.'

But, like most so-called ‘lion tamers', the Port Folio Circus's lion tamer was a short little macho loser who would never admit to being afraid of anything.

That was his first mistake.

As the lion tamer paraded around the ring, pushing out his chest and cracking his whip, the huge steel fence was locked into place and the three lions were pushed down the tunnel into the spotlight.

The lion tamer cracked his whip and the lions roared. Most people think that circus lions roar because they have been trained to, but they
actually roar because they are miserable and angry. It's only the whip and the tranquilisers that have been slipped into their water bowls that stop them acting like lions are supposed to.

When the three lions were all sitting on their round boxes, the lion tamer stood in the middle of the ring and lifted his right arm above his head to give his whip a great crack to prove how macho he was. Just before the whip came down again, Mordonna clicked her fingers and the braided leather thongs turned into braided antelope's intestines
⁴³
dripping with blood and smelling very, very delicious.
⁴⁴

It was hard to tell who moved the quickest, the three lions or the lion tamer. It was all a blur as they fled down the tunnel. Actually, it was only the lion tamer who fled. The lions chased.

What happened next:

Actually, what happened next cannot be written down for the following reasons:

• My publisher wouldn't let me as this is a children's book.
  
• You can guess anyway.
  
• Any really nasty, vicious stuff might not be too good for Mordonna's image.
  

But everyone lived happily ever after, sort of. The lions were taken to a lovely huge wildlife park, which was better than going back to the wild because they didn't have to go and hunt for their dinner.

They spent their afternoons lying in the shade of a big tree thinking,
Life does not get any better than this.

They also thought,
I never realised that lion tamer could give you such indigestion.

 

The final act of the circus, which would have included the horses and poodles and lions, was a bit of an anti-climax.

What normally happened was that pigeons were released and flew around the big top in a terrified flock, crashing into the ropes and poles
before taking refuge on a perch right in the very top of the tent. Mordonna knew that there was only one way to get them down from there. After everyone had left, the circus owner would open the tap on a big cylinder of sleeping gas. The gas would drift up to the top of the tent and make all the pigeons pass out. One by one they would fall off the perch and fall down into the safety net, from where they would be stuffed back into their cages until the next performance. Needless to say, all that gas every day, and twice on Saturdays, made the poor birds feel horribly sick nearly all the time, so there was no way that Mordonna was going to let that happen ever again.

When Mordonna made a hole appear in the canvas, the pigeons couldn't believe their luck and flew off to join the horses in the forest.
⁴⁵