by Georgia Byng
“Thank you, Miss Teriyaki. Yes, I vill be zare in a few minutes…. No, I am not smoking my pipe! What an idea! I stopped because a voman picked me up…. Well, of course not! No vun has picked you up, Miss Teriyaki, because your cat is not as attractive as mine…. You don’t need to nag. I am coming.” Tutting, Miss Oakkton snapped her phone shut. “Interfering nag!” Then she refilled her pipe and lit it again. As she exhaled, a cloud of smelly smoke filling the shop alcove, a teenager drove his motorbike and sidecar into a parking space in front of her. Miss Oakkton stepped toward him.
“Excuse me, young man,” she began. The biker pulled his keys from the ignition slot and looked up. Immediately Miss Oakkton’s large eyes had a hold on him. He couldn’t look away, and for some reason, he felt he ought to do whatever this big muscley woman said. So, when she asked, he passed his motorbike keys to her.
“Now get off zat bike,” she said. The teenager did as he was told. Miss Oakkton put her two baskets, one with a cat in it, into the sidecar, and climbed onto the motorbike. It sank down under her weight. She started the engine. Then, laughing like a woman fresh out of the madhouse, she revved up the engine and drove away.
Flying along a London street on a blustery winter’s night as a ladybug is difficult, as the tiny Molly and Micky were discovering. Huge double-decker buses driving past them made cyclonelike swirls of air that buffeted and knocked them. Then one gust blew to their advantage. It caught them up and cast them forward, inches from Black. With a few sturdy flaps of their bug wings, the twins had soon landed on his right shoulder and were standing knee-deep in the fuzz of his camel-hair coat.
Underneath them, Black’s giant body parted the night air with ease. His massive feet thudded on the pavement.
Around, the streets were heavy with light. Beautifully designed shop windows, with dummies dressed in the latest fashions and photographs of glamorous people having fun in the same clothes behind, shone out into the night. Late-night shoppers passed Black, their arms laden with bags, some brushing shoulders with him, so that Molly and Micky had to grip the camel-hair strands with all their might.
Cafés glittered invitingly; cars with white headlights and red brake lights beamed brightly. Red, amber, and green traffic signals blinked. And everywhere the noise of engines hummed—buses, trucks, cars, motorbikes accompanied by the sound of bike bells. Clonk, clonk, shuffle, thud, tap went the people’s feet on the street.
“The human being certainly dominates the world!” Micky observed.
“I know. It’s frightening when you’re only four millimeters high, isn’t it?” Molly replied, wiggling her antennas.
As they settled down again, a mountainous building loomed up. Its stucco walls and pillars rose into the sky to a lofty gray slate roof. Dozens of windows punctuated each floor. They looked like eyes, and hanging underneath them were their balconies that looked like wrought-iron mouths. On the wall, in shiny gold, was the sign THE GLITZ RESTAURANT. Two torches with flames in their sockets burned on either side of it. A large window followed the corner of the building around so that the restaurant faced both the hat shop on one corner and a bus stop on the other.
Black paused before entering. He swung his bag off his left shoulder, tugged his coat from his arms, and seeing two ladybugs on his lapel, brushed them off with his hand. And then he entered the Glitz.
Molly felt like she had been charged at by an elephant. She tumbled through the air as light as a lentil and as helpless as a frog in a flood. She tried to flap her wings and regain her balance, but instead she flipped around and around so that the world was a blur. Then, finally, she hit the wall of the entrance. With crumpled wings, she fell to the ground and bounced from her back to her front legs. Dizzy and stunned, she lay still.
A few minutes passed as Molly’s senses slowly came back to her. She shook out her wings, then packed them into her shell-like outer layer, and she checked her body for injury. Surprisingly, she was fine—a bit shaken, but not hurt. Now she looked worriedly about for Micky.
Micky had landed closer to the pavement, where dangerous feet trod past, and he was spinning around on his back. Molly scuttled toward him and, with her face under his wings, heaved him over.
“I don’t like being a—” Micky didn’t finish his sentence, for a massive feathered monster was standing over them. A scruffy, mangy pigeon stared down at Molly and Micky, cocking its head as it contemplated the two tasty morsels.
With a sudden, vicious movement, it lunged. Its beak hit the paving stone between the two ladybugs, grazing Molly’s left wing.
“Oh, no!” Micky was speechless.
“Hide!” Molly screamed.
Micky and Molly dived for cover where a small broken piece of masonry had left a tiny hole in the wall. But even in the crack they weren’t safe, for the pigeon was hungry. It began to peck relentlessly at the stone, determined to oust its supper.
“I don’t want to be eaten by a pigeon!” Micky screamed. “I don’t want to be chomped up by a…by a…beeeeak.”
“Just—just control yourself, Micky,” Molly said, squishing into the hole as far as she could. Then another beak began to peck at their hiding place, too.
“Two of them! Jeepers!” Micky screeched. “You know birds are related to dinosaurs! T. rexes, velociraptors, allosauruses!”
“Calm down, Micky,” Molly pleaded, starting to feel desperate herself.
“What do you mean, calm down? Those beaks are like car-sized pick axes.”
Molly’s insides lurched with fear.
Calm. Calm. Molly tried to find some amid the terror of the moment.
“I know!” she gasped. “We should just morph into them!”
“What?”
“Morph, you ningbat. Like before.”
“But…but we have to find a pattern—there isn’t one.”
“Yes, there is.” Molly gulped. “Look at the wall.”
Micky raised his eyes. It was true. The stone was covered with green mildew.
“Okay, okay, okay,” he stuttered. “Okay. I’ll try and turn into the scruffy one.”
Molly and Micky grew quiet and focused, for they knew their lives depended upon it. Both stared at the green algae, ignoring the horrible pecking that threatened to snap them up. Molly saw a picture first. The strange pattern of algae began to look like a dog. Immediately holding this image to the side of her mind, she thought of what it was to be a pigeon. She looked at the beady, cold eyes of the bird that pecked so intently. She considered its feathers and wings.
And, amazingly, she found it quite easy to find the essence of pigeon.
Good-bye, and thank you! she managed to think to the ladybug.
For a millimoment, she was nothing. Then she got the watery tipping feeling as her mind and her spirit washed into the pigeon. The creature stopped pecking. Like a gadget suddenly without batteries, it stood stock still. Its pea-brained mind registered Molly’s arrival. For a moment, it attempted to push her out. But its efforts were a futile grapple. In the next second, Molly eclipsed its personality and took charge of its body. She flexed her new, scrawny bird legs with claws on the end and stretched out her muscley wings. She peered out of its beady black eyes over her new pale, dirty beak. Below her, the ladybug whose body she’d borrowed stood stunned as it recovered.
Molly shook her feathery self and observed the inside of the pigeon’s mind. She saw rooftops and streets as though from a bird’s-eye view. She saw a great white sculpture of a woman with no arms, on which the pigeon liked to sit on sunny days.
Then she noticed that the other pigeon was still pecking at the ladybugs and knew that Micky hadn’t managed the morph yet. Quickly Molly gave the scruffy pigeon a sharp jab in the neck. For a moment she thought the creature would peck her back, since he was bigger than her. But instead it went very quiet.
“Is that you, Micky?” Molly asked.
“Just made it,” the scruffy pigeon replied, his voice a coarse trill. “Let’s fly up to that corner balc
ony before we get into any more trouble.” With the ladybug flying lessons under their belts, the twins flapped up to a balcony.
“Scary being a ladybug, wasn’t it?” said Micky as they landed. “Suppose it’s fine if you’re on a rosebush in the summer, eating aphids.”
“Yes,” Molly agreed, folding her wings. “And then, scary to be an aphid.”
Below, the traffic flowed past, a river of machinery.
“You know we’re in trouble, Molly, don’t you?” Micky suddenly said. “We can morph from animal to animal, but we don’t know how to morph back into ourselves. I mean, we have to choose the creature we want to morph into, don’t we? But Molly and Micky, the real us, aren’t here…. The question is, where are our bodies, Molly?” A cold wind ruffled the feathers on his neck. Instinctively, he puffed himself out to keep warm.
“Maybe,” Molly said, “we have to morph into a human first, and then maybe we’ll feel how to do it.”
Molly peered down at the two streets below. Near the hat shop was an alley where she could see some rats foraging near a smelly bin. She looked down at the main street.
“That old couple waiting for a bus,” she said. “How about them? You be the man, I’ll be the woman.”
The old woman was dressed in a brown-and-yellow tweed coat with a green hand-knitted wool hat on. She was sucking on a piece of candy and clutching her brown handbag tightly with mittened hands. She had a weatherbeaten face, pink cheeks, and little brown eyes that glittered behind round spectacles, and her gray hair was as thin as cotton candy. The old man wore a flat, dark blue beret and a nylon raincoat. Molly saw that imagining the old woman as a child wasn’t going to be as easy as she’d thought. She wondered whether mind reading would help, so, pulling her thoughts together, Molly sent out the message, Old lady, what are you thinking? However, to Molly’s disappointment, a bubble didn’t appear above the woman’s head. It was as if mind reading was something Molly could only do in her Molly Moon body. Molly shrugged her bird shoulders. She supposed it didn’t really matter. The book hadn’t said that mind reading would help a person to morph.
“Are you ready?” Micky the pigeon asked. Molly nodded. And they both began.
Molly looked about for a pattern. The bus shelter was good, as it had glass on the front of it that was stained with old watermarks. The drips definitely looked like mountains. Holding these in her mind, Molly did her best to imagine the old woman as a child. She would have been smaller and thinner, Molly thought, and much less wrinkly, of course. She would be wearing a child’s coat and hat, with a satchel instead of a bag. Molly’s eyes considered the old lady’s face and drank it in. And as though she had a magic eraser, her imagination erased the crow lines around her eyes and the puppetlike marionette lines around her mouth. The creases of her brow and the puckering around her chin dissolved, and the old lady’s mottled skin was replaced by the fresh complexion of a child.
Molly pulled the image of the water-stained mountain range into the center of her mind. And as the two visions merged, Molly aimed her being at the old lady. She felt herself shiver and quiver, and suddenly she lost all sensation of her claws, her wing tips, and her tail.
“Good-bye, and thank you!” Molly managed to cry as she whizzed away. In a split second she couldn’t feel her pigeon body at all. But this moment was minuscule, for in the next, the pouring feeling swished through Molly.
“EEK!” the old lady shrieked.
Molly had done it! She’d morphed into a human body. The idea of it was so miraculous and the sensation so spectacular that for a moment Molly was half stunned with amazement.
“Are you all right, dear?” her husband asked with concern.
Molly floundered for a second as the shock of her situation overwhelmed her. Then, seeing that the old woman’s personality was stronger than she had reckoned on, she concentrated hard. Molly felt like she was wrestling with the lady’s spirit, trying to pin her down. Molly was winning, but not entirely. Finally Molly took control, and the woman’s personality was submerged. As soon as Molly felt she was in charge, she thought apologies to her, explaining to her what was happening. At once, she felt the person who she was in relax.
Molly felt strange. It was extraordinary to be in another human body, and it was an extra shock to be in an old one. Her bones were creaky and stiff, and she could hardly register her muscles. Her bottom was fat and bulgy, and it was very peculiar having two lumps on the front of her chest.
On top of the physical sensations were the mental ones. Molly was at once familiar with the woman’s life and her personal history. She didn’t see every memory at once, of course, for there were billions of them tucked away in the old lady’s mind. But Molly knew that she was called Sofia and that the man beside her was Wilf, her dear husband, who she had married fifty-four years before in a church in Rome.
“I said, are you all right, Sofia?” her husband repeated. Brought to her senses, Molly was now in the moment. She saw two street performers, one with a violin, the other with a flute, who were sitting near the bus stop filling the evening air with their music, and she saw the man, Wilf, looking concernedly at her.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Molly as Sofia said, an Italian accent rounding her words. “I think something stung me, that’s all.”
“Stung you? Where?”
“On my nose,” Molly said. Then she added, “Um, are you there, Micky?”
“Micky? What are you talking about, Sofia?”
“Nothing, nothing, you just look like Mickey Mouse in that hat.”
The man looked very confused.
Molly glanced upward, then saw a scruffy pigeon flying toward her. It flapped over and landed on her arm. She knew at once it was Micky.
“Good lord, Sofia,” her husband exclaimed. “Get that filthy bird off you.” He lunged toward Micky the pigeon, who fluttered upward and then back down to perch again on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Wilf. The poor bird’s just being friendly. Now I must use the bathroom in that restaurant, dear. Please wait here.”
Without waiting for Wilf’s reaction, and still with Micky the pigeon on her shoulder, Molly as Sofia waddled to the curb. She looked left and right, and crossed the road.
A mile and a half away, the truck that was carrying Petula and her new friend Stanley pulled into the Nine Elms Flower Market. It drove around the vast covered building and parked. The giant plastic electric doors were in operation, opening and shutting as flower sellers wheeled trolleys piled high with boxes of flowers inside. Stan’s driver climbed out of his truck, and Petula and Stanley the bulldog heard him greet an old friend.
“How are ya? Cor, me legs ain’t ’alf stiff. Don’t feel like unloadin’ this lot now. Fancy a pint?”
“That’s the spirit.”
“See you later, Stanley. Good dog.” And then their voices receded into the distance.
Stanley pushed his nose under the tarpaulin at the side of the truck to check they’d gone.
“Here we go, luv,” he said to Petula. “Squeeze past ’ere, and we’ll get you sorted.” He disappeared past some flower boxes and hopped off the truck. Petula followed him. After a leap onto a bale of cardboard and a jump onto a crate full of flowerpots, she was down.
Stanley had already found his friend.
“How long you been standin’ here all on yer Jack Moss?”
“Not long,” said his friend, a small brown-and-white Jack Russell with a cheeky face and an amused look in his eye.
“Do your people know you’re out?”
“The boys were playing a card game with their dad. Let myself out of the dog flap. See you found yourself a girlfriend, Stan.”
“I’d be so lucky! This is Petula. Petula, meet Magglorian. He’s got a good loaf a’ bread, and he’ll be able to ’elp ya.” Magglorian smiled and nodded. Petula smiled back, a little bit embarrassed by the introduction.
“Loaf of bread is head in rhyming Cockney,” Magglorian said. “Talking to Stan here can be
like talking to someone who’s speaking double Dutch.” Magglorian laughed. “Nice to meet you, Petula. So how can I help?”
“I’m trying to find the children that I live with. They’ve disappeared,” Petula began. “A woman has taken them.”
Magglorian’s eyes widened.
And so Petula told Magglorian what had happened. Magglorian frowned and shook his head so that his brown ears flapped. “Hmm.” When Petula got to the bit about hypnotism, she saw Magglorian give Stanley a “I see we’ve got a right one here” look, which annoyed her.
“Look, mister, you can believe what you like,” Petula said. “I haven’t got time to waste trying to persuade you.” She turned to Stanley. “Thanks for the lift. I should be just fine now. Really, thank you so much, Stanley. Good-bye.”
Petula didn’t pay Magglorian another glance. She turned and began walking away.
“Magglorian, how come you did that?” Stanley asked, amazed by his friend’s behavior.
“It is a bit far-fetched, Stanley. Come on, you have to admit it, it is a bit crazy.”
“Well, I believe her,” Stanley said. “And I’m going to help her.” With that, Stanley trotted after Petula. Magglorian watched them go. Then he barked.
“Wait! I’m coming, too.” He ran after the other dogs. “I’m sorry, Petula,” he said, panting as he arrived. “I’d search the world over for the boys who own me if I ever lost them. Let me help you find your friends.”
A Glitz doorman in a red suit with gold braid on its shoulders and a smart black cap opened the door to the hotel for Molly the old woman. Molly thanked him, adding, “Is this the way to the restaurant, young man?” She hoped that was where Black had gone.
