With the beat of a hundred slimy wings,
the boy vanished into the clouds.
* Probably one of the most used words in the English language, hence its inclusion in The Walliamsictionary.
Madame Solenzio Sloth was the island’s piano teacher. You might reasonably assume that a piano teacher taught the piano. In this case, you’d be wrong.
Sloth was the idlest music teacher in history. The lady would go to the most extraordinary lengths to avoid having to teach any of the children on the island anything.
Whenever Ned reluctantly rolled himself over to Madame Sloth’s house for his weekly lesson, she would not utter a single word to him. Instead, she would look at him haughtily and open her hand to be paid. Once her palm had been crossed with silver, she would waddle over to her old gramophone, and put on a recording she had made of her giving a piano lesson. This was just in case any grown-ups were passing by her house and heard what she was really up to.
Which was, of course, nothing.
“Now, child, let Madame Sloth hear those scales one more time,” the voice on the crackly old record would say.
Then you would hear the sound of piano keys being struck.
Once the illusion had been created, Madame Sloth would take an hour-long snooze on the chaise longue.
The only way she would wake herself up in that time was with one of her own bottom bangers.
BABOOM!
They were as thunderous as a Wagner opera.
If her bottom bangers didn’t wake her, an ornate gold carriage clock on her mantelpiece would chime to tell her the hour was up and her lesson was over.
CHING!
How was Madame Sloth allowed to get away with this? Because Greta Greed did nothing about it. In fact, she encouraged it. Anything that brought children misery was fine by her.
Because Ned never learned a thing about playing the piano in his years of enduring Madame Sloth’s “piano lessons”, he would be sent off to have more and more lessons!
One day when his mother returned home from the fish market, Ned told her what was really happening in those lessons.
NOTHING.
NOWT.
NADA.
N U F F I N K .
DIDDLY SQUAT.
Of course, being a grown-up, Ned’s mother didn’t believe him. Just like all the other grown-ups on the island, Madame Sloth had bamboozled the woman into thinking she was the most fantabulous piano teacher in the world.
Aside from her gramophone scam, Madame Sloth had a trio of nasty tricks up the sleeve of her long, flowery blouse.
If a child dared to complain about the daylight robbery, Madame Sloth would open the piano lid and shut the nasty little wretch inside.
CLANG!
That way, Madame Sloth could carry on with her precious snooze undisturbed.
“LET ME OUT!”
If a child attempted to grass her up to their parents, in the next lesson Madame Sloth would turn the piano stool upside down and make them perch on one of the legs for the full hour!
“OUCH!”
If a child was so bold as to wake Madame Sloth up from one of her snoozes, they would be held upside down by their ankles and forced to play the piano with their nose.
“OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!”
PLONK! PLONK! PLONK!
One time, Ned couldn’t take any more of this nonsense. As Madame Sloth lay on the sofa snoring and bottom banging...
“ZZZZ! ZZZZ! ZZZZ!”
…he shouted, “THIS IS THE END! I AM NEVER, EVER COMING TO ONE OF YOUR STUPID PIANO LESSONS EVER AGAIN!”
Needless to say, the piano teacher woke up in a FOUL mood. Without a word, Sloth walked out of the piano room and into the kitchen. As Ned sat on the piano stool, bemused, she returned clutching not one, not two, not three, but six tins of baked beans. One by one she ripped them open and guzzled them down in seconds like some kind of strongman at a fair. Her tummy began making the most disturbing sounds, like a boiler that was about to explode.
“I need to go!” announced Ned.
“Just one moment,” replied Sloth.
Next, she shuffled over to the boy. From the way she shuffled, it was clear she was clenching her cheeks together. Not her top cheeks – her bottom cheeks. Then, as soon as her behind was close to Ned’s nose, she unclenched.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” cried the boy.
Sloth let off the most explosive BOTTOM BANGER of all time.
KABOOM!
The force of the blast was enough to blow Ned straight out of the window.
WHOOSH
Needless to say, Ned was in no doubt as to how much he and all the children of the island had suffered at the hands of this monstrous woman. He knew that he would be doing them all a favour by teaching the teacher a lesson.
The question was, how?
It may surprise you to know that for someone who taught the piano, Madame Sloth could not actually play the piano herself. Not a note. In fact, she hated the sound of a piano being played, as she did all musical instruments.
The only sound she did like was the sound of silence.
Silence meant Sloth could sleep in peace.
As Ned and Slime flew over the island, Ned spotted the roof of Madame Sloth’s grand old black-and-white house. It was easy to spot as she had a swimming pool the shape of a piano in the garden – no doubt paid for by her ill-gotten gains.
“There!” exclaimed the boy.
The pair swooped down to the ground beside the house. Looking through the window – surprise, surprise – they saw that the piano teacher, if you could call her that, was fast asleep on her chaise longue, snoring away.
Looking across the piano room, Ned and Slime could see the child Sloth was meant to be teaching. The poor thing had been made to stand on one leg on the piano stool whilst balancing a book of sheet music on her head. Presumably this was some kind of punishment, no doubt for daring to stand up to the world’s laziest piano teacher.
The pigeons set Ned down and trans-slimed back into a blob.
The girl balancing on the stool looked as if she were about to expire. Her face had gone as red as a tomato, and she was pouring with sweat. She must have been balancing there like a flamingo for nearly an hour.
With a nod of his head, Ned signalled to her that she should escape.
“Are you sure?” the girl mimed. She was clearly terrified of the lady sprawled out on the chaise longue.
Ned nodded his head again.
Tentatively, the girl put her other leg down and breathed a gigantic sigh of relief.
“Thank you!” she mouthed, before tiptoeing out of the room.
Slime slid under the boy’s feet and inflated into a ball so Ned was just the right height to slide in through Sloth’s open window.
The boy eased himself through, landing on a piano stool. The slimeball followed. At first it was too fat to fit through.
SHUNT! SHUNT! SHUNT!
Then Slime made itself thin and poured itself through.
SQUELCH!
“Shush!” shushed Ned. “Let’s not wake Sloth. Yet!”
How best to wake someone who loves silence?
With the world’s loudest noise, of course!
“Slime!” began the boy breathlessly. His idea was so good he couldn’t get it out quick enough.
“Yes?” replied Slime, now turning back into a blob in the piano room.
“I need you to become the hugest orchestra in the world.”
“Goody! Goody!”
“And I want you to make the noisiest noise that ever –” Ned wasn’t sure of the word, so guessed at one – “NOISED”.*
This was perfect payback for Sloth’s explosive bottom banger.
In an instant, the blob divided into a hundred smaller blobs. These small blobs, smaller than globules, are called “globettes”.* One by one, the globettes began to take shape.
These globettes trans-slimed into musical instruments faster than Ned could name them.
A tuba!
A French horn!
A violin!
A trumpet!
A double bass!
A harp!
A set of cymbals!
A xylophone!
A bass drum!
And, last but not least, a giant gong!
Madame Sloth was oblivious, still snoozing on her chaise longue.
“Now, orchestra,” began Ned, “gather around her, and I will conduct!”
When all the pieces of the orchestra were in position, as close to the piano teacher as possible, Ned assumed the role of conductor. He picked up a banana from the fruit bowl on the coffee table to use as a baton. The boy had once seen a conductor on the television, so had some sense of what to do.
Ned tapped the banana on the table to get the attention of all the slimy instruments.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
Still Madame Sloth snored and trumped away.
PFT! PFFFTT! PFFFFFT!
Her bottom bangers were so foul they could strip the wallpaper from the walls.
All the instruments in the slime orchestra (or “slimechestra”*) turned to the conductor. Ned nodded and twirled his banana through the air.
The noisiest noise that ever noised exploded into the room.
A shocked Sloth shot up off the chaise longue with incredible speed.
She smashed up through the ceiling of her piano room.
BANG!
Smashed through her plush bedroom above.
BANG!
Finally smashing through the roof of her house.
BANG!
“ARGH!” screamed Sloth as she sailed through the air.
Ned looked up from the piano stool through the hole in the roof.
The boy smiled to himself before he remembered something he had learned.
Something important.
Sir Isaac Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.
In short – what goes up must come down.
“ARGH!” screamed Sloth again, not that screaming did any good, but it seemed like the appropriate thing to do.
The large lady was plummeting straight towards little Ned. If the boy didn’t do something – and fast – he would be nothing more than human slime!
“HHHEEELLLP!” screamed Ned. Now he was screaming too. “THE PIANO!”
Thinking fast, Slime trans-slimed back into a blob and reached round the legs of Madame Sloth’s grand piano with its blobby arms. It yanked the instrument under the hole in the roof, knocking Ned on his piano stool out of the way as it did so.
“ARGH!” screamed Sloth, before crash-landing into her own grand piano!
“My piano!” she cried from inside the mess of wood and keys and wire. “Now I can’t give any more piano lessons!”
“You never did!” retorted the boy.
“NED!” she screamed. “I WILL GET YOU FOR THIS!”
With that, Sloth tried to lift herself up from her piano. In all the kerfuffle, the gold carriage clock toppled off her mantelpiece. It clonked Sloth on the head.
BOINK!
“OUCH!” she cried.
“Another job well done!” remarked Ned.
“Always a pleasure!” replied Slime as it trans-slimed into a rocket. “HOP ON!”
The boy smiled and hauled himself up.
Then the rocket blasted him through the hole in Sloth’s ceiling, high into the sky above.
ZOOM!
“I got the ZOOMIES!” howled the boy in delight.
* A word you will most definitely find in perhaps the most important book ever published, The Walliamsictionary.
* See your Walliamsictionary. If you don’t have one, then buy one today. Not just one – buy one hundred copies!
* I have to admit some of these are better than others, but you will find them all in your Walliamsictionary.
Glutton’s Glaces was the name emblazoned on the island’s one and only ice-cream van.
The proprietors were a husband-and-wife team, Glen and Glenda Glutton. They were meant to sell ice cream, but instead they ate it. All of it. Every last bit.
The technique they had for stealing from children was foolproof.
The van would be parked up outside the playground, or school, or beach. Anywhere on the island where children could be found. Then Mrs Glutton would appear at the serving window.
“What delicious ice cream would you like, my dear?” she would ask in her nice voice. She had a nice one and a nasty one. More of the nasty one in a moment.
“Oooh!” Ned cooed, looking at the sign with all the delicious toppings.
“Take your time, my dear.”
“A Mr Whippy with chocolate sauce and chocolate chips and a chocolate flake, please!” Ned really liked chocolate.
“Wonderful choice, my dear. Now, money first!”
“Can you change a one-pound note, please?” asked the boy. It had been a Christmas present from his grandmother.
“Of course we can, my dearest of dears!”
As soon as Ned had passed the money over, she snatched it out of his hand and yelled, “MR GLUTTON! DRIVE!” This was in her nasty voice.
Glen Glutton, who’d been sitting in the driving seat all along, then put his foot down on the accelerator pedal and they sped off.
BRUMM!
As they did, the pair shouted, “SO LONG, SUCKER!”
Poor Ned was left at the side of the road in a cloud of burning rubber smell from the tyres.
With no ice cream.
And no pound note.
How could the Gluttons be allowed to get away with this?
Greta Greed, of course. There had been so many attempts to bring the pair to justice, but Greed stepped in every time to prevent them from being arrested. To think that this awful duo had made so many children miserable caused the old lady’s dark heart to sing with joy. The Isle of Mulch often had visitors, providing fresh victims for the Gluttons.
The gruesome twosome were not the best advertisements for their own ice cream. Both ate so much of it, straight from the pump, that their teeth had turned black or fallen out altogether. Sometimes a rotten tooth would fly out mid-sentence and hit a child on the head.
Because they ate so much ice cream, Glen and Glenda Glutton had ballooned. So much so that they never left their van.
They couldn’t!
It was impossible for them to fit through the doors!
So the Gluttons slept in the van, they ate in the van, they even did their doo-dahs in the van.
Just don’t ask for the chocolate sprinkles. They don’t smell anything like chocolate.
As Ned zoomed over the island on his “slocket”,* he spotted a long line of children. They were from the posh boarding school on the Isle of Twaddle.
Their hideous purple-and-yellow blazers gave them away.
The pupils must have been on a trip to see the world’s most boring tourist attraction, Mulch’s Medieval Fort. It was a ruin, little more than a few old stones jutting out of the ground. Because it was old, grown-ups decided that children had to go and look at it. Often for hours at a time.
“DIVE!” ordered the boy.
Still riding the slocket, he hovered over the heads of the children. They were too sad to even crack a smile at a rocket made of slime.
“What happened?” Ned called out from above.
“It was those rotten ice-cream sellers,” sobbed one.
“They took a mammoth order of ice creams from our whole school and made off with all our pocket money,” blubbered another.
“The pair were so rude they shouted, ‘SO LONG, SUCKERS!’ as they sped off in their dirty old van,” snuffled a third.
“We thought having ice cream would help us get over the crushing disappointment of having visited the world’s dullest tourist attraction,” bawled a fourth. “But we were wrong.”
“It’s made this school trip the worst day out ever,” yowled a fifth.
“I would actually prefer to be at
right now doing double Math
ematics!”
“Surely nothing is worse than double Mathematics!” exclaimed Ned.
“This is,” replied the previous child, before bursting into floods of tears. “Boo! Hoo!”
This set all the Twaddle children off again.
“BOO! HOO! HOO!”
It was a symphony of sobbing.
“These kids are really annoying,” murmured Slime.
“Shush!” shushed Ned, before turning to the children to ask, “Which way did the gruesome twosome go?”
All of the children were bawling their eyes out, actually unable to speak.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” muttered Slime.
“SHUSH!”
Instead the children pointed.
Fortunately, all in the same direction.
“Thank you, kids! Slime! That way!” ordered Ned, and he zoomed off. “I’ll be back, Twaddlers!”
“BOO! HOO! HOO!”
The Isle of Mulch was a network of long windy country roads sheltered by trees, so it was difficult to spot vehicles from above.
But then Glutton’s Glaces was no ordinary vehicle.
This great pink monstrosity, with a giant model of a Mr Whippy ice cream on its roof, would be visible from outer space. Soon the van rolled into view, and Ned signalled for Slime to zoom down beside it.
At first Mr and Mrs Glutton didn’t see the strange sight of a boy riding a slocket zooming beside them.
Glen was in the driving seat, devouring a humongous handful of ice cream with a flake sticking out.
Ned tapped on the driver’s window to get the brute’s attention.
At first Glen smiled and nodded back, before the surreal display made him slam on the brakes.
SCREECH!
The ice cream he was scoffing went everywhere.
All over his face.
SPLAT!
And all over the windscreen.
Slime: The new children’s book from No. 1 bestselling author David Walliams. Page 6
