Floods 11

by Colin Thompson

  However, people did call the lavatory ‘the smallest room’. They were usually the sort of people who were pathetically embarrassed by the word ‘toilet’ or ‘lavatory’, the sort of people who asked if they could wash their hands when they really meant they wanted to have a pee.25

  So Betty decided she would search the lavatory first. There weren’t many places to look. There was nothing inside the toilet cistern. There was something jammed down between the back of the toilet and the wall, but when Betty pulled it out it was a caravanning magazine, which was very strange because it is a well-known fact that ALL witches and wizards absolutely, totally HATE caravanning on account of caravans being absolutely, totally dreadful and the sort of places people who like cats go for their holidays. Caravans were banned by law from going into Transylvania Waters, and any tourist who tried to bring one in was turned into a pumpkin and their caravan was turned into a medium-size bonfire. Nice, old-fashioned, traditional gypsy caravans were allowed, but only if they had their wheels taken off and didn’t move about.

  Betty tapped all the walls and the floor, but there didn’t seem to be any secret compartments or loose floorboards, which in itself was a bit suspicious on account of every other room in the building having lots of creaky floorboards.

  Betty was just about to leave when she noticed a piece of string hidden under the toilet seat. It was the same colour as the toilet bowl – a pale, dirty, greyish yellow – and almost invisible. When she pulled the string, a plastic bag came back up the drain and there was Letitia Puddle’s recipe book and another little book called Gardening for Alchemists.

  ‘This book is an absolute treasure trove,’ said Betty as she and Ffiona sat on her bed looking through the pages of Letitia Puddle’s recipe book. ‘I can’t wait to try them all. My mouth’s watering just reading them. I mean, listen to this.’

  Sardines and Strawberry Surprise

  INGREDIENTS

  22 sardines – alive

  5 jars of strawberry jam at room temperature

  99 grams of bio-dynamic prickles – medium

  NOTICE: This recipe is only for the advanced cook, as it is essential for the sardines to stay alive throughout the whole process.

  Empty the strawberry jam into a large bowl and stir in the prickles taking care not to break them. Take a sardine in one hand, and with the thumb and forefinger, hold its mouth open while filling it up with the strawberry jam and prickle mixture using a long-handled teaspoon. Repeat until you have filled each fish right up to the top. Arrange the fish on a large plate with the tails towards the centre and a brick on the tails to stop the fish wriggling off the plate.

  To eat, tip your head back and squeeze the contents of the sardine into your open mouth. Keep squeezing until the sardine is absolutely, totally and completely empty, including the stuff you don’t want to think about.

  Best eaten with a dry white wine and gravel.

  ‘Doesn’t that sound fabulous?’ said Betty, but Ffiona couldn’t hear her because she was in the bathroom throwing up.

  Page after page of Letitia’s recipe book was filled with wonderful recipes. Some were as simple as the Sardine and Strawberry Surprise, while others looked as if they would take several weeks or even months to prepare, but every one was a gem and Betty could already see them being the basis of a wonderful recipe for her restaurant when it opened, and of course the legendary Letitia Puddle would get a full credit for her part.

  What a team! Betty said to herself.

  ‘I love it,’ said Letitia when Betty dug her up and gave her the news.

  Now that Betty sort of had her parents’ approval to go ahead with the restaurant, she spent the next week doing up the inside of the old tearoom so it was dry and warm for Letitia Puddle to move back in permanently.

  ‘It is so lovely to be back in the old place,’ she said. ‘And you are sure that the new king won’t throw anything over from the castle?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Betty reassured her. ‘My dad is a lovely kind man who wouldn’t hurt a fly unless they are part of my Wasps In A Sugar Cage dessert, in which case he crunches them up and has seconds.’

  ‘Supposing you don’t win The Cheffie Olympics?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Well, duh,’ said Betty. ‘It’s not like I’m going to be competing with other wizards and witches, you know, and talking of which, how many wizard chefs do you know of? The other competitors are all going to be human, which means they can’t do any magic at all. So, tell me, how I’m not going to win?’

  ‘But if you use magic, that’ll be cheating,’ said Ffiona.

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘Cheating’s wrong.’

  ‘Oh really?’ said Betty. ‘And who told you that?’

  ‘My mum,’ said Ffiona, ‘and lots of other people.’

  ‘No, I’ll tell you who thinks cheating is wrong,’ said Betty, ‘and that is people who can’t do it.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘There is no but,’ Betty continued. ‘If you want to draw a straight line, you use a ruler. If you want to win, you cheat. Humans just complain about it because they can’t do it as well as wizards. I mean, if I cheat a bit and some human thinks I’m doing it, I can just do a simple little No-I’m-Not Spell and they will all think I am brilliant, honest and wonderful.’

  ‘But …’

  Betty whispered the No-I’m-Not Spell and Ffiona said, ‘But you are brilliant and honest and wonderful so you would never have to cheat.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then,’ said Ffiona, and Betty wondered how humans had survived on Planet Earth for so long with such minute brains.

  Each country that wanted to enter The Cheffie Olympics had to hold local heats to find the best cook they could. In some countries there were so many entrants that the heats led on to semi-semi-semi-eighteenth finals and semi-semi-semi-ninth finals and so on until they reached their final finals and found a winner.

  For some strange reason there were a lot of people from America who actually thought they could cook – a bit like the way they thought they could sing and win a TV show – when it would have been a lot kinder for everyone to just quietly put them to sleep and save the world a lot of headaches, stomachaches and earaches.

  Over two hundred VERY BIG contestants – who were too greedy to wait for the judges to look at their creations and simply ate them immediately and all the leftovers and everything else that was left in the studio kitchen – quite simply exploded, and for two weeks there was a toxic cloud of vaporised hamburger dust floating over the whole of America.

  France totally failed to find a winner because everyone insisted they were the finest chef in the world and refused to admit otherwise. So France was barred yet again from entering.

  Belgium, as they did every year, entered their national dish, mussels and chips, and came to the conclusion it was much too delicious to share with the rest of the world, so they withdrew and spent the whole competition sulking in their hotel, as they did every year.

  Scotland, as they did every year, entered their national dish of porridge, and Ireland were there with a potato.

  Betty studied all the other entries and drew inspiration from them for the Transylvania Waters heats.

  ‘For my starter,’ she announced to the viewers, ‘I will be making a variation and a great improvement on the Belgian National Dish. I am making Muscles and Chips. I shall be using marinated Kitten Muscles and Smoked Oak Chips.’

  She sailed through to her main dish.

  ‘For my main dish,’ she said, ‘I will be making a variation and a great improvement on the Irish National Dish. In a beautiful handmade porcelain pot I will be baking a dinosaur toe – Pot a Toe.’

  She swept all before her as she presented her dessert Frog Spawn Extraordinaire in a Smoked Goldfish Bladder, which of course brought the house down, followed by the house bringing it up again.

  ‘Well done, darling,’ said Nerlin. ‘You are now Transylvania Waters’s
Official Entry into this year’s Cheffie Olympics, which this year is being held in the capital city of the home country of last year’s winner – Ulan Bator.’26

  Betty was given a golden spoon, which was not so much gold as an old iron ladle with the plating worn off and a lovely coat of bio-organic rust.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Betty’s brothers, sisters and mother, realising that Betty would be away in Mongolia for at least a week, which meant they wouldn’t have to eat any of her cooking for a while.

  ‘Do the runners-up get prizes?’ said Ffiona.

  ‘Runners-up? What runners-up?’ said Betty.

  ‘The other people in the heats.’

  ‘What other people?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ffiona, feeling a bit silly until she realised that no one else seemed to have noticed that Betty had been the only person in the heats.

  There had been four other potential entrants, but by an amazing coincidence they had all won an instant holiday in Tristan da Cunha on the same dates as the Transylvania Waters heats and had been whisked away there for a week’s fun, frolicking and pneumonia. Not that the result would have been any different. The four knew better than to try and beat Betty and were very relieved to go off to Tristan, where they were given a potato and an enormous bag of seaweed each and were under no threat from any of Betty’s Nasty Warts, Pimples and Boils Spells.

  Ffiona, who was acting as Betty’s assistant in The Cheffie Olympics, helped her pack all her special cooking tools, ingredients and equipment. There were very strict rules about what each contestant could take into The Cheffie Olympics Kitchen and here are a couple of the things that were banned and how Betty got around them:

  BANNED – Special Food Additives such as Traditional Chinese Flavour Enhancer.

  SOLUTION – Each one of Betty’s five chef’s knives had hollow handles and a secret button that released her Special Food Additives such as Traditional Chinese Flavour Enhancer and Even More Special Non-Traditional Patagonian Flavour Mega-Multiplier.

  BANNED – Written recipes or cooking tips.

  SOLUTION – Ffiona had several recipes and other useful information tattooed inside her ears, on her arms under her clothes and engraved on her teeth.

  Betty also had her left thumb replaced with a high-speed micro mixer, which could turn something as hard as a nutmeg into a fine dust in ten seconds. She also replaced most of her blood with caffeine, her ear wax with Vegemite27 and was wearing a junior teen bra made of bacon, which she could break bits off and crumble into her mixing bowl.

  ‘Just a few squirts of condensed milk up each nostril,’ she said, ‘and I think I’m pretty well set.’

  Then there was the discussion about who would go to Ulan Bator with Betty and Ffiona. Naturally both their mothers wanted to go and naturally both the girls didn’t want them to.

  ‘I’m not having you hanging around with Mongolian boys,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘And I’ll need to check that you’ve cleaned your teeth every day,’ said Edna Hulbert.

  ‘But everyone will laugh at us like we’re little children,’ said Betty.

  ‘You are little children,’ said Mordonna.

  ‘Mother, we are fourteen,’ said Betty. Mordonna made a note of that.

  ‘But you have to have a responsible adult with you,’ said Mrs Hulbert.

  The two mothers suggested all sorts of very sensible ladies with cardigan brains and lace-up shoes and the two girls rejected all of them.

  ‘I will go with them,’ said Letitia Puddle, who was temporarily living in Betty’s wardrobe while the old teashop was being done up.

  With the help of a couple of Winchflat’s machines and a bit of Betty’s magic, the old lady was now almost completely reincarnated, though the occasional bit of finger kept falling off and older missing bits had been replaced with parts carved out of Betty’s Incredible Cast-Iron and Cholesterol Toffee, which was so strong it had been used to build a bridge over a very deep gorge in Upper Transylvania Waters, which had ended in tears when a pack of wild Toffee Hounds had licked the bridge until it had been so thin it had collapsed when a rather fat wizard taking his pet penguin for a walk was halfway across it. Luckily, the penguin landed in the raging torrent below and swam safely downstream until it reached Lake Tarnish. The wizard was never seen again. Actually, bits of him were seen again when someone who was cleaning out a Lake Tarnish Trout they had caught came across his little finger.

  ‘Great idea,’ said Betty. ‘No offence, Letitia, but let’s face it, your present looks will scare the hell out of all the humans there and make the other contestants feel quite ill.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Letitia. ‘I thought what I might do, if it looked like someone was doing just a bit too well, you know, their cooking was coming out perfectly and they weren’t getting behind or anything, is sort of wander casually by their workbench and drop one of my fingers into their mixing bowl.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Betty.

  ‘And if that doesn’t freak them out, I could drop one of my ears in and then make a big fuss about them stealing it,’ said Letitia.

  Ffiona was horrified and even thought of warning the judges, but then realised that Betty was the only friend she had and she didn’t want to lose her. Also, she dreaded to think what Betty might do to someone who betrayed her. She could imagine spending the rest of her life as a slug stuck under the rim of a really disgusting toilet. This didn’t mean she had a vivid imagination. It meant she could remember Betty telling her that was exactly what she had done to a nasty little boy who had taken one of her toffees.

  At the very least, Ffiona could see her role in the new restaurant becoming less and less important with her probably ending up as Executive in Charge of the Washing Up, which would mean looking after the escargatoire28 of snails that Betty was organising to clean all the dirty plates and cutlery. There was also an escargatoire of Giant Rasping Slugs that would clean the saucepans.

  So she bit her tongue and said nothing, except, ‘Ow, I’ve just bitten my tongue.’

  Betty, on the other hand, thought Letitia Puddle was brilliant and they were a perfect match to run The Devil’s Kitchen, which looked like it was going to be a million times better than she had ever imagined.

  While all the other contestants had to travel by plane or train or road through the frozen wastes of Mongolia, and it was one of the coldest winters on record, Betty, Ffiona and Letitia Puddle borrowed one of the dragon buses that took the wizard children to Quicklime College in Patagonia. They travelled in comfort and arrived at their hotel completely relaxed and totally devoid of frostbite, unlike the poor Welsh team, who had been stuck in a broken-down truck for two nights and lost a lot of their fingers to frostbite. Betty tried to buy the fallen-off fingers to make into paté, but the Welsh refused to sell them.

  ‘They said they were attached to them,’ she told Ffiona. ‘Which is strange considering that is exactly what they are not.’

  Most visitors to Mongolia take sandwiches. Most Mongolian meals are very old mutton stuffed with weeds and boiled in yak milk, except for the ones that are very old mutton stuffed with weeds and boiled in horse milk. On special occasions they add sump oil and noodles. Strangely, most tourists, and there are more than twenty every year, do not appreciate this cuisine, though every one always takes the smell of it home with them, even if they haven’t eaten it. Exotic things like salt and pepper are only available to the very rich. Wizards, on the other hand, adore Mongolian cuisine.

  ‘This Yak and Moss Stew is brilliant,’ said Betty, tucking into a second bowl, to the great delight of the waiter. ‘I wonder if we could get the recipe.’

  ‘I think the chef would be honoured to give it to such an appreciative and lovely young lady,’ said the waiter.

  He was flickering his eyes in a very romantic way, but because he was cross-eyed Betty wasn’t sure if he was flirting with her or Ffiona.

  The chef came out of the kitchen. He was not cross-eyed and the two girls
realised that both he and the waiter had actually fallen for Letitia, whose semi-decaying remains reminded them of a cross between their dead grandmothers and the Yak and Moss Stew.

  Here is Chef Abcessokof’s wonderful recipe:

  Yak and Moss Stew

  INGREDIENTS

  Some Yak

  Some Moss – assorted

  Water

  Put the water into a big pot and set it to boil, taking care not to burn it. When the water is doing the big bubbly dance add the Yak and stir in the Moss. Let it do the big bubbly dance for three days or until tender. Add snow and nasal hair to taste.

  Letitia Puddle agreed that the stew was truly magnificent and she and Betty decided they might have a monthly Mongolian Night at The Devil’s Kitchen.

  ‘I think I’ll just have a sandwich,’ said Ffiona when the food arrived.

  This meant the waiter had to run back to the kitchen, collect two slabs of frozen Mongolian bread, which were normally used for paving rather than eating. He laid one slice on Ffiona’s plate, smashed it into pieces, poured Ffiona’s stew over the bread, and slapped the second slice on top of it, spraying the room with gravy.

  ‘You foreign girls are so sophisticated with your sandwiches,’ he said with a romantic leer, which went completely over Ffiona’s head.29

  The competition began the next morning. Including Betty, there were only seven contestants, with another eleven already eliminated by the weather. Two of them were buried in very big snowdrifts and weren’t discovered until a helpful bit of global warming thawed them out three years later. There were also five contestants who had been disqualified and deported for saying rude things about the Yak and Moss Stew, though a sixth contestant was let off when he said he hadn’t meant to insult the food, because he had actually thought it was building material and not food at all, the same as porridge.