Playschool

by Colin Thompson

  At Professor Throat’s invitation, Mordonna Flood walked out into the middle of the field and held up her arms. All the fathers in the audience instantly sat up straighter and began shouting, ‘Take them off! Take them off,’34 and all their wives began hitting them with their programmes. Ten more bolts of lightning flew down from the clouds and touched Mordonna’s fingertips before racing round the stadium giving everyone an electric shock – something that wizards and witches enjoy in the same way ordinary people enjoy sherry.

  ‘Let the games begin,’ Mordonna cried, and as she did so the stadium gates opened and the first competitor from last year’s ultra-ultra-seriously-long-distance marathon ran into the stadium. His arms raised high in the air, the winner, Fleetwood Flood (second cousin), did a final lap of the stadium and collapsed at Mordonna’s feet.

  In the three hundred and sixty-five days since the race had begun, Fleetwood had covered eighteen galaxies and six parallel universes. He had run, swum, cycled, tangoed, teleported and flown through wind and rain, night and day and Belgium. He’d had nine total body transplants, been married twice and even learnt to ask for a cup of tea in Belgian.

  As he was lowered into the winner’s coffin, Mordonna placed the gold medal round his neck and the spectators cheered.35

  Mordonna went back to her seat and the field and track events began.

  Traditionally the relay race was the first event. Witches and wizards could never understand why people would want to run round a track handing each other a stick, so they changed the rules slightly. Quicklime’s relay was much more exciting. Instead of a stick they used a poisonous snake and the point of the race was not to take the snake from someone else but to do your best not to take it. The winner was the team with the least number of dead members. The Floods always won this event because of their highly developed team techniques. No equipment or special clothing was allowed, such as barbecue tongs or leather gloves, but there was nothing to stop you using your own natural gifts. So Merlinmary always led their team out and simply electrocuted the snake. As it was against the rules to kill the snakes, Satanella then grabbed the dead animal from Merlinmary and ran round the track shaking it violently in her teeth so everyone thought it was still alive. The twins then followed, using the snake as a skipping rope, before Winchflat slipped it one of his special iSnakezombie pills that made it kind of appear to be still alive just long enough for him to carry it past the finish line.

  In fact, the Floods won every event apart from the gymnastic dancing, where you jump around on a big mat waving a stick with a ribbon on the end. They found it impossible to compete in that without collapsing in laughter. And they never competed in the high diving because, like all sensible people, they didn’t do drugs.

  Finally, it was time for the day’s most popular event: the three-legged race.

  The Floods tossed a coin to see who would leave their legs behind and then they tied themselves together with Merlinmary sitting on Winchflat’s shoulders and Satanella jammed in between the twins.

  Unlike the other single runners, who had grown an extra leg for the day, Howard Tiny had had himself photocopied. He had lain sideways on the photocopier so only one of his legs got copied.

  ‘You should do this more often, seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four,’ said Howard’s photocopy. ‘With two heads we could count bigger numbers, ninety-eight.’

  ‘Yes, and there’d always be one of us there to pull the sock out of the other’s mouth, one hundred and one, two, three, four!’ said the original Howard. ‘I’ll ask Mum if you can stay.’

  Radius Leg, the sports master, had never been present on a single sports day. He had spent more than half his career in traction or intensive care under Matron’s watchful eye. This sports day he was still hibernating under a snowdrift. So, as she did every year, Matron had brought her Radius Leg clone out of her spare parts cupboard.36

  ‘Three, two, one, BANG!’ shouted the Radius Leg clone, and the race began. As always there were several children who had grown their extra legs back to front. They stayed at the starting line going in circles until the runners came round for the second lap and knocked them flying. Howard Tiny, who was really tiny, got about halfway round the track and sat down on the grass.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to count to two hundred and forty-seven,’ he said to his photocopy.

  ‘That’s my favourite number too,’ said the half-Howard.

  After seven laps there were only three teams left in the race. The Floods began the final lap with Bypass Noble, who had managed to grow a third leg with a big spring in it, very close behind them. Two laps back, a small figure hidden inside a paper bag ran as fast as his little legs would carry him. It was Charlie – formerly known as The Toad – and the paper bag was to make sure Orkward Warlock wouldn’t recognise him. The trouble was, no one had put any eye holes in the paper bag and Charlie kept getting lost. Also, the extra leg Matron had lent him from her spare parts cupboard was the wrong size and he kept tripping over it. He finished fifteen minutes after the other two teams, but still got the bronze medal.

  Orkward sat on a rock outside the treasure cave and looked down into the stadium far below him. Even from this far away he could hear the sounds coming from the crowd. They were sounds that Orkward hated and despised, the sounds of people having a good time and being happy.

  He would teach them.

  He would give them a new sound, the sound of five revolting Floods children exploding into a billion little pieces that even Matron wouldn’t be able to reassemble. As he watched, Narled trundled across the grass towards the medal winners’ podium. The Floods, as Orkward had predicted, had won the three-legged race and were standing there looking disgustingly happy, waiting to get their billionth gold medals. As Satanella ran round the stadium doing a lap of honour, the hatred Orkward Warlock felt for the Floods grew so big he felt as if his head would explode. It was bad enough that they won everything, got all the gold stars, had more friends than anyone else, had the most beautiful mother in the entire universe and just looked so horribly pleased with themselves, but now they had made him get a pounding headache too. As Merlinmary held her hands high in the air and the entire stadium cheered when she sent fabulous bolts of lightning soaring up into the clouds, Orkward felt the veins on his neck throbbing louder and louder like a bass drum. Blood began to trickle down his nose, blood that no longer tasted sweet on his tongue but was as bitter as his soul.

  Narled disappeared beneath the stand and re-emerged a few seconds later. Orkward took out a remote control box from his backpack and switched it on. The red light on it started to flash. It throbbed like a heartbeat and Orkward felt his thumb twitch in excitement. His mouth went dry and his own heart began to beat in time with the red button. He felt faint with excitement.

  Ten, nine, eight …

  Professor Throat walked forward carrying the medals.

  Seven, six, five, four …

  The Professor reached down and pinned the first medal to Satanella Flood’s collar. She wagged her tail with such enthusiasm that she threw herself off the podium.

  Three, two …

  Orkward pressed the button.

  Time seemed to stop. The wind that always ran down the valley stood still. The split second seemed like an hour. The blood on Orkward’s tongue, though as bitter as before, now tasted like fine wine, and in that last split second he realised who his true father was.

  He, Orkward Warlock, was the devil’s child.

  He, Orkward Warlock, was son and heir to the dark forces of the underworld and he, Orkward Warlock, would make everyone fall at his feet.

  Except then the world exploded.

  Orkward was amazed by how loud it was. It sounded as if it was right behind him.

  And it was.

  The mouth of the cave erupted in an amazing ball of fire. Narled’s treasure trove burst out of the cave in all directions. It flattened trees, shattered rocks and blew Orkward Warlock into more pieces than there are
grains of sand in the whole world.37

  Down in the stadium the crowd looked up and, thinking the school had put on a special fireworks display, everyone cheered. Seconds later, hundreds of wonderful things began to rain down on them. Seventy-three iPods, countless gold coins, seven hundred and nine lost buttons, bits of Lego, ballpoint pens, missing pieces of jigsaw puzzles, shoes, and twelve thousand pages of missing homework covered the playing field and half the valley. In the fourth year common room, twelve gold crowns, three French hens and a partridge in a pear sauce flew out of the fireplace as the explosion shot out of the back of the cave and down the secret tunnel Merlinmary had discovered.

  ‘Wow, that was some firework,’ said Nerlin Flood as a diamond the size of a chicken’s egg landed in his lap.

  A small china doll flew through the window into Orkward’s old room and landed on the bed.

  ‘Beryl, is that, like, you?’ said The Mirror. ‘No,’ said the china doll. ‘She got broken years ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ said The Mirror sadly.

  ‘Just kidding,’ said Beryl, turning back into a seriously gorgeous girl.

  ‘So why haven’t I changed back?’

  ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ said Beryl, staring at her reflection. ‘I just need to fix my hair.’

  As daylight went and hid behind the mountains, Professor Throat stood in the centre of the field and brought sports day to a close.

  ‘These have been the greatest games in Quicklime’s seven hundred and fifty glorious years,’ he said. ‘Not just because of the great explosion that showered everyone with gold and diamonds, but because of the great team spirit shown by everyone.’

  No one believed him. They all knew the best bit had been the treasure.

  ‘Of course,’ the Professor concluded, ‘being the seven hundred and fifty-first year, a number of great significance in the world of magic, next year’s sports day will be even greater …’

  Charlie, no longer a toad, was reunited with his parents, who felt so proud of his bronze medal and so incredibly guilty at how badly they had treated him that they spoilt him rotten for the rest of his life. He had a different iPod and Playstation in every room of the house, fourteen stunning girlfriends, a massive plasma TV, his own go-kart racing track and a special secret place in the dark forest where he could visit the little handbags whenever he wanted to.

  So that Orkward Warlock wouldn’t go down in history as a total failure, a new combined high, low, far and wide jump event was created and Orkward was awarded a lifetime achievement gold medal as the person who had jumped the highest, the lowest and the furthest all at the same time. But even then, his parents still wouldn’t have anything to do with him.38

  The Floods didn’t need a special happy ending, because their lives were just about perfect anyway. Their only worry was being totally unable to think of anything that could make their lives any better.

  Back home on the first evening of the school holidays, the whole family sat on the back verandah drinking warm blood slurpies as the ice-cold moon rose over the trees and sparkled on all the gold medals the children had won.

  ‘I think,’ said Mordonna, ‘that was the best sports day ever.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ everyone agreed. ‘At least until next year’s.’

  ‘I’m not going back to the retirement cave,’ said Alzhammer the dragon. ‘I mean, what’s the point? I’ll just get off to sleep again and it’ll be time to come here again for next year’s sports day.’

  ‘But what about your passengers?’ someone asked.

  ‘They’re as old as me,’ said Alzhammer. ‘We’ll all stay here.’

  Which was how Quicklime College became the first school in history to have classes on false teeth maintenance and how to crochet lumpy things.

  FOOTNOTES

  1 The King’s full title is eighteen pages long but here is a brief version: King-Nombre-Sept-À-Quatorze-Knees-And-Bumpsadaisy-The-Four-Hundred-And-Fourteenth-And-A-Half-Grand-Protector-Of-The-Haunted-Grapefruit-Keeper-Of-The-Holey-Pants-Guardian-Of-The-Square-Window-Supreme-Cuddler-Of-The-Round-Widow-Prince-Of-Half-An-Hour-Before-Twilight-Kevin-King-Of-Cardboard-Keeper-Of-The-Dinner-Money-And-All-Who-Sail-In-Her-The-Ninth-Except-On-Tuesdays.

  2 Not that money is ever a problem for witches and wizards. If they can’t find a way of stealing it, they just make it using a spell and some simple everyday ingredients like shoe polish and centipedes.

  3 Nerlin’s family hadn’t always been Dirt People. Once they had ruled Transylvania Waters, but, as so often happens, treachery, revolution and badly fitting tights had led to their downfall.

  4 When the building was finished, Merlin turned the human peasants into upside-down blind cave fish, which still exist to this day. (This is true – when I was a boy my uncle had an upside-down blind cave fish in a tropical tank. It was pink, blind and swam upside down.)

  5 A very remote island off the west coast of the Outer Hebrides, which is off the north-west coast of Scotland.

  6 Radius Leg chose not to wear his amulet as he liked the sudden unexpected searing bolt of agony when Orkward stuck a needle in his photo. When Orkward found out about this, he immediately stopped doing it.

  7 Orkward had tried smiling once but his mirror had laughed at him and the whole thing had made both him and the mirror sick for a week.

  8 That was the abbreviated thought and all Prebender Glorious had time for. The full thought was: I wish I was anywhere but here, doing any job but this, preferably a job that never brought me within two miles of anyone under twenty-five. What have I done to deserve this? Did I lock the back door when I left the house? I don’t have a back door. I don’t even have a house! And so on for forty-three pages.

  9 For example, if you look on here and here you’ll see he’s appeared there when he has nothing to do with the story at all.

  10 Actually cats are dreadful snobs and think all other creatures are beneath contempt.

  11 No one ever said it was easy being a wizard.

  12 Mordonna kept offering to turn Satanella back into a little girl, but she had decided life was more fun as a dog. ‘Of course, if I fall in love with a handsome wizard I’ll probably want to change back,’ she said. ‘But on the other hand I might fall in love with a whippet.’

  13 Except the Millipede family, who are obsessed with numbers and spend all day counting their legs.

  14 Which Narled had strangely failed to pick up.

  15 You can imagine the chaos created by a metre-tall bird, with massively powerful jaws full of very sharp teeth, landing on top of people’s heads shouting, ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’

  16 Merlinmary Flood is trying to train some of Winchflat’s spare birds as homing dodos. They’re very good at finding their way back but, because they can’t fly and are rather fat, they can only find their way home from about two hundred metres away. Merlinmary is now trying to teach dodos to read maps.

  17 A cross between a bat and an onion.

  18 It should be noted that this experiment had been done three hundred years earlier by Doctor Mordant’s predecessor and that most of the accountants currently alive do actually have fish brains.

  19 The school has thirteen clock towers because, unlike the rest of the world, Quicklime’s runs on a twenty-six-hour day. Each tower rings on its own hour with a different note so that wherever you are in the valley you always know what the time is to within fifty-eight minutes (each hour has fifty-nine minutes).

  20 Just as you get a flock of sheep and a pride of lions and a lump of PE teachers, so you get a cloakroom of Sacculus Pluscruris Patagonius.

  21 Orkward’s parents tried not to think about the day their son would finally leave school and return home with his nasty little head full of revenge. ‘We’ll blow that bridge up when he comes to it,’ said his mother.

  22 Talking proper.

  23 Shoelace???

  24 Quicklime’s parents never worry when their children don’t come home, for two reasons. One, the kids are witches and
wizards so they can look after themselves; and two, Quicklime’s students often stay behind at school for strange midnight ceremonies and rituals.

  25 Actually, only one of them, Audrey the hamster, was a real animal. The others, like Satanella, had once been children.

  26 If this seems rather complicated and leaves you feeling a bit muddled, take five minutes to run your head under a cold tap before reading any more.

  27 If you look at the back of this book there is a page about the Mobius Strip which explains how this happens. Once you get in, you can never get out again.

  28 Apart from the kitchen maid, who came in to get some marmalade.

  29 The back of Merlinmary’s hand was very hairy, which none of the chimneys was. Actually, there was one secret tunnel that was extremely hairy, but that’s another story.

  30 The Mobius Strip again.

  31 The cellars beneath Quicklime College are even more extensive than the ones beneath the Floods’ houses at 11 and 13 Acacia Avenue. There is a rumour that the two sets of cellars are somehow joined together even though they are on opposite sides of the planet. There is a more incredible rumour that Quicklime’s cellars actually spread out like a fine cobweb beneath the entire planet. This is completely ridiculous and completely true.

  32 If you had a shadow that kept creeping up behind you and hitting the back of your head, you’d be scared too.

  33 Click here for a few verses of the school song.

  34 Meaning Mordonna’s sunglasses, because as everyone knows, one glance into Mordonna’s eyes and you fall madly in love with her.

  35 It would be three days before the second place competitor reached the stadium and by then everyone would have gone home and it was the school holidays.