by Duncan Ball
‘Leetle beet,’ the girl answered. ‘Ecin,’ she added pointing to herself.
‘Ecin?’ Selby said. ‘Is that your name?’
‘Yes, and Etuc,’ she said, pointing to the other girl. ‘Sister.’
‘Oh, so you’re sisters,’ Selby said. ‘Good to meet you.’
‘You eat now?’ Etuc asked.
‘Food? Are you kidding? What have you got? Never mind about that,’ Selby said. ‘Just bring everything you’ve got and I’ll eat it.’
For the next hour, Etuc, Ecin, the chief and the other villagers prepared a wonderful feast. There were things that Selby had never eaten before and there were vegetables that were so good they didn’t even taste like vegetables. Selby ate and ate and when he couldn’t eat any more the entertainment began. There were musicians with strange musical instruments, dancers, jugglers and even a village clown who did fantastic acrobatics.
‘Hey, that guy’s funny!’ Selby said, clapping his paws together.
‘You eat more?’ Etuc asked.
‘No, I couldn’t possibly —’ Selby started. Then he saw the beautiful bowl of fruit that Etuc and Ecin held in their hands. ‘Dessert, eh? Oh, why not,’ Selby said.
Selby opened his mouth and waited till Etuc had spooned him out some wonderfully sweet fruit. And when he’d finished it, Ecin dabbed his mouth with the bottom of her long skirt.
‘Well I wanted to go on holidays and be treated like a king,’ Selby thought, ‘that’s just what happened.’
Selby slept the most wonderful sleep of his life that night as Etuc and Ecin took turns standing over him fanning him gently. And in the morning he awoke to the soft chanting of the villagers, kneeling before him.
‘Nail-Art-Sua,’ they chanted, ‘God Nail-Art-Sua.’
Days passed and Selby was treated as he’d never been treated before. He ate and ate till he could hardly walk and Ecin and Etuc sang beautiful songs to him.
Then one morning his thoughts turned to the Trifles. Somewhere at a distant airport on the resort island of Sunseasia, they would be pleading with people to find him. In Selby’s mind, there were tears streaming down their faces. Then tears formed in his own eyes.
‘It’s all very nice being a god-king,’ he sniffed, ‘but the poor Trifles must be worried sick about me. And I miss them too. I’ve got to explain to these nice people who I really am and see if they’ll take me back to the airport.’
‘Excuse me, girls,’ Selby said. ‘Could I say something?’
‘Say?’ Etuc said.
‘I am not a god or a king,’ Selby said.
‘No god?’ Ecin said.
‘No, I mean yes. I mean no I’m not a god. I’m Selby. Can you say Selby?’
‘Selby?’ the puzzled girl said.
Selby took a stick and spelled his name out in the dirt.
‘Ybles!’ she cried.
‘No, Selby,’ Selby said.
‘Ybles!’
‘You’re reading it backwards!’ Selby said.
Then something in Selby’s brain snapped.
‘Hey, hang on,’ he said, climbing off of the throne and looking at the tag on his cage.
‘God. Dog,’ he said to Ecin pointing to the letters. ‘You’ve been reading everything backwards!’
‘Back … wards?’ Ecin asked.
‘Yes, back-to-front. Look, you’ve even read Australian backwards. Nail-Art-Sua is Australian spelled backwards! It’s beginning to make sense now.’
‘Nail-Art-Sua. Nail-Art-Sua,’ everyone chanted again.
‘How am I going to convince you people that I’m not a god?’ Selby said as he popped another piece of delicious fruit in his mouth.
Maybe he’d eaten too much. Or maybe he was nervous but there was a sudden rush of air from his stomach and out came a big burp.
‘Oooops, pardon me,’ he said. ‘Now where was I?’
Ecin and Etuc looked on in shock — as did the other villagers.
‘What?’ Ecin asked.
‘Nothing,’ Selby said. ‘I just burped, that’s all.’
‘Burp?’ Etuc asked.
‘Yes, you know. Air. It came out of my mouth. Sorry, I won’t do it again.’
The big man grabbed the crown of flowers from Selby’s head.
‘You no god,’ Ecin said.
‘Hey, hang on,’ Selby protested. ‘Everybody burps, don’t they? That doesn’t mean I’m not a god. What am I saying? No, I’m not a god. It was just a normal burp. It wasn’t a bottom burp or anything. Would you mind terribly if I just went back to where you found me? To the airport?’
‘You good dog,’ Ecin said, patting him.
‘Very good dog,’ Etuc said, kissing him on the head.
And so it was that Selby said a sad goodbye to the people who had been so kind to him. They had lost their god-king but they still seemed to like him. Ecin and Etuc guided him to the airport. There he was discovered by the airport staff and flown to Sunseasia.
‘Selby! Here you are at last!’ Mrs Trifle said, taking him out of his cage and giving him a big hug. ‘It certainly looks like you’ve been well fed and well looked after. They said you’d be well taken care of.’
‘Yes, we had a good holiday too,’ Dr Trifle said. ‘But it’s time to go back to Bogusville now so back in your cage. See you when we get there.’
‘Hey, hang on,’ Selby thought as they put him back in the cage. ‘Don’t I get to see Sunseasia, too? No, (sigh) I guess not.’
Selby headed off down the long conveyor belt. Two baggage handlers picked him up.
‘Here’s one for Bogusville,’ one of them said.
‘Never heard of Bogusville,’ the other one said. ‘They must mean Bougainville. Put it on that trolley over there.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
‘Oh no,’ Selby moaned as he headed off on the wrong trolley to the wrong aeroplane to the wrong country. ‘Here we go again.’
SELBY (SUDDENLY) SNAPS!
A STORY OF WORMHOLES AND WISHES
‘Travel through time?!’ Dr Trifle exclaimed to his old astronomer friend Percy Peach.’Is that possible?’
‘Absolutely!’ Percy exclaimed back. ‘I do believe that there are wormholes in the universe.’
‘There are some in the backyard, too,’ Mrs Trifle said, looking up from the needlework picture she was sewing on a piece of cloth.
‘Ahah!’ Percy exclaimed again. ‘But these aren’t worm wormholes, they’re holes that go through space and time.’
‘Do you mean that someone could suddenly go through one of these wormhole thingies and end up in a different place at a different time?’ Dr Trifle asked.
‘As everybody knows,’ Percy said, ‘a microsecond after the mega blast when the universe began there were further mega blasts which left the galaxies in clusters and wrinkles in the space-time continuum. Naturally, this left wormholes. Are you with me?’
‘Wow!’ Selby thought. ‘I get goose bumps just listening to him. He’s sooooooooo smart! But I don’t have a clue what he’s saying.’
‘I don’t have a clue what you’re saying,’ Dr Trifle said.
‘Easy peasy. I’ll show you … ‘ Percy said, taking the cloth out of Mrs Trifle’s hands. ‘Hmmmmm. Interesting design. A girl and a dinosaur.’
‘It’s a Princess,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘She’s locked in a tower. That’s a dragon.’
‘Very nice,’ Percy said, crumpling the cloth into a tiny ball. ‘Okay, once upon a time the universe was tiny — like this.’
‘The whole universe?’ asked Mrs Trifle.
‘Even tinier. Then kabooooooooom and kabooooooooom again and again,’ Percy said, throwing the cloth onto the carpet. ‘Now the universe is like this. The earth and the sun and the moon are only tiny dots in there somewhere. See the wrinkles?’
‘I certainly do,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘Now I’m going to have to iron it again.’
‘The wrinkles cause wormholes. You could be over here one minu
te,’ Percy said, stabbing the cloth with his finger, ‘and suddenly snap you’d end up over here, say, in the time of the dinosaurs.’
‘Or in Europe when there were princesses in towers,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘But if these wormholes really exist why haven’t I seen one?’
‘Because they’re invisible. Invisible tubes that move around slowly like the thing that cleans the gunk off the bottom of your swimming pool.’
‘So why don’t we go snapping through wormholes and disappearing all the time?’ Dr Trifle asked.
‘Because we haven’t reached a hyper-sympathetic coefficient of molecular frequency!’ Percy explained. ‘We’re not jiggling at the right speed. If someone was jiggling enough and the end of a wormhole came around then snap off they’d go. Which is what brings me here today. I want you to build a time-travel machine.’
‘But I’m just an old-fashioned inventor,’ Dr Trifle protested. ‘You need a young science whiz.’
‘You’ve already invented the perfect thing,’ Percy said. ‘Remember your B-E-D?’
‘My bed?’
‘No, not your bed, your B-E-D. Your Bifurcated Energy Dispenser. The thing you attached to your bed to jiggle it. It was an invention to help people get to sleep, remember?’
‘I remember all right,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘It jiggled us off to sleep and out the door and down the street. We woke up the next morning in the middle of the Bogusville roundabout.’
‘One of my more embarrassing inventions,’ Dr Trifle admitted. ‘I shouldn’t have knurled so much off the eccentrics of the sleep enhancement modulator when I was preening the cam peaks.’
‘And you should have nailed the bed to the floor,’ Mrs Trifle said.
‘Well, I think that a jiggling bed is just what we need to go through a wormhole if we can get it jiggling at the right jiggle-rate,’ Percy said. ‘Do you still have the B-E-D?’
‘Yes, it’s in my workroom,’ Dr Trifle said.
‘Okay, kiddies,’ the astronomer said, ‘time for B-E-D. There’s no time to waste!’
And so it was that Dr Trifle raced into his workroom, got his B-E-D and bolted it to the Trifles’ bed.
‘This is sooooo exciting!’ Selby thought as he watched Dr Trifle nail the bed to the floor and then plug in the B-E-D controls.
‘Hop on and let’s go!’ Percy said, jumping on the bed.
‘I’m sure your theory is wrong, Percy,’ Mrs Trifle said. ‘But I can do with a bit of a lie-down.’
Soon Percy Peach and the Trifles were sitting on the bed as Percy turned up the knob on the B-E-D controls.
‘They’re not going without me,’ Selby thought, climbing up on to the foot of the bed.
Soon the bed had gone from a hum and a ripple to a very relaxing jiggle.
‘According to my calculations this is perfect,’ Percy said. ‘Now all we have to do is wait till a wormhole squiggles its way around here.’
‘Gosh,’ Mrs Trifle said, yawning a big yawn. ‘It’s making me sleepy.’
‘Me too,’ Dr Trifle said.
Selby lay there, struggling to stay awake. He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again to see the picture on Mrs Trifle’s needlework in front of him. Suddenly there was a loud snap and he and the Trifles were tumbling through darkness. Seconds later, they landed with a thud.
‘What happened?!’ Mrs Trifle cried.
‘I think we snapped,’ Percy said, smiling broadly.
‘Where are we?’ Dr Trifle asked. ‘And when are we?’
‘It certainly isn’t Bogusville,’ said Mrs Trifle, pointing to the castle behind them.
‘Sheeeeeeesh,’ Selby thought. ‘It actually worked! This is sooooo scary!’
‘Let’s go back before we get stuck here,’ Mrs Trifle said.
‘Or end up somewhere else and some when else,’ Dr Trifle added.
‘Don’t worry,’ Percy Peach said. ‘It’s a slow moving wormhole. We’ll be okay if we only spend an hour here. Let’s have a look around.’
Suddenly the castle’s drawbridge dropped with a crash and twenty men in armour came riding out. One, with a red feather in his helmet, spoke.
‘Who are ye?!’ he demanded.
‘I don’t believe this!’ Selby thought. ‘I must be dreaming! Wake up, Selby! Wake up!’
‘Is this a movie?’ Mrs Trifle whispered. ‘Who is this fellow?’
‘I’ll talk to him,’ Percy whispered. ‘Pray forgive us, sire,’ he said. ‘We are but poor souls who have lost our way.’
‘Lost your way — in a bed?!’ the knight boomed. ‘Ye are camping on my property!’
Before anyone knew what was happening the soldiers lowered their pointy sticks and herded Percy Peach and the Trifles over the drawbridge and into the castle, leaving Selby behind.
‘Oh, great! Now they’ve captured Percy and the Trifles!’ Selby squealed. ‘Dream or no dream, I’ve got to get them out!’
Selby dashed around to the back of the castle.
‘Oh, no, there’s no back door!’ he thought. ‘What now?’
Selby was just wondering what to do next when he noticed the tall tower behind the castle. In the top window was a beautiful young woman.
‘Save me!’ she cried.
‘This is getting sillier by the second!’ Selby thought. ‘This dream is turning into a fairytale!’
‘Pray, come hither, kind sir!’
‘She thinks I’m a sir,’ Selby thought, as he moved a bit hitherer. ‘Can’t she see I’m a dog? Maybe she needs glasses and they haven’t invented them yet.’
Selby looked up again. A tear fell from her eye and glistened in the sunlight.
‘I have been locked in this tower by the evil Red Knight who lives in yon castle,’ she said.
‘I’d like to help,’ Selby said talking to her in plain English because 1. she probably didn’t know he was a dog and, 2. it was probably all a dream anyway. ‘But I’ve got to rescue my owners — I mean — my friends from the castle.’
‘Rescue me first and I shall help you to rescue them,’ she said, throwing down a long yellow ribbon. ‘Pray, climb up.’
‘Oh, well,’ Selby thought. ‘What do I have to lose?’
He grabbed the ribbon in both paws and climbed up the side of the tower.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ she said, kissing him.
‘You’re not surprised that I’m a dog?’ Selby asked. ‘A talking dog?’
‘All the better to hatch my plan with,’ she said.
‘She probably believes in dragons and magic,’ Selby thought. ‘So what’s a talking dog to her?’
‘Who is this evil Red Knight?’ Selby asked.
‘His name is Prince Nigel. Nigel the Naughty. He’s my brother. I added the “Naughty” part. I am Gwendolyn. Princess Gwendolyn the Good Girl.’
‘Did you add the “Good Girl” part?’
‘Yes. My brother is horrible. He locked me away because I shredded his teddy when we were little.’
‘He locked you up for that?! How awful!’
‘And I shaved his head when he was sleeping, and swapped his undies for pink frilly ones, and I put slugs in his bed, and told Mum and Dad that he ate all the chocolate cake when it was really me, and told everyone he was in love with Agnes Snoot, and I put my name on the tags of his Christmas presents so I got them all and I —’
‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Selby interrupted. ‘I’ve got the picture. So why don’t you just tell him you’re sorry?’
‘Because I’m not sorry!’ Princess Gwendolyn the Good Girl exploded. ‘He deserved everything he got! He was a pest! Besides, when our parents retired to the little castle at the beach they gave Nigel the big castle. He only got it because he’s a boy! It’s not fair!’
‘So what have you been doing all this time?’
‘Weaving my hair. Every time it grew a bit I’d cut it off and weave it into that long yellow ribbon so that I could be rescued.’
‘That ribbon was … your hair?’ Selby cried.
‘I wove it on the golden loom my mother gave me,’ Gwendolyn said, pointing to the loom in the corner. ‘It’s a valuable family hair loom.’
‘Why didn’t you just hang your hair out the window and wait till it grew down to the ground? Then I could climb up it that way. That’s what happens in the fairytales.’
‘I hate long hair,’ the Princess answered. ‘It’s such a pain. All that brushing and shampooing and conditioning. But enough. Nearby lies a cave. In it is a magic ring that will give three wishes. It was given to me by a witch. I hid it there so that my brother couldn’t get his grubby little paws on it. We must fetch it.’
‘What about my friends?’ Selby asked.
‘After I make my wish on the Wishing Ring, the ring will be yours. You can have any leftover wishes.’
Gwendolyn tied one end of the ribbon to her bed, stepped onto the windowsill and quickly slid to the ground. Selby followed.
‘Now on to the cave, dog.’
Selby ran after the fleeing Princess.
‘Why didn’t you just climb down before by yourself?’ he asked as they ran.
‘I could have,’ she said. ‘But to get the ring I needed a passing knight — or a dog like you — to slay the dragon.’
‘The dragon?!’ Selby laughed. ‘But they’re make-believe!’
The Princess stopped and pointed to the cave ahead. A huge animal lay sleeping in the entrance. A huge animal with fire and smoke coming out of its nostrils as it snored.
‘Sheeeeeeesh!’ Selby thought. ‘A dragon. Now this has to be a dream.’
‘Slay him, please, and I will fetch the Wishing Ring,’ the Princess said.
‘Hold the show!’ Selby whispered. ‘You’ve got the wrong dog. I’m not the dragon-slaying sort. I’m just a medium-size talking dog.’
‘Without the ring we have no wishes,’ Gwendolyn said, stroking Selby’s head. ‘My brother will find me and lock me up again. And you will not rescue your friends.’
‘Let’s use our heads,’ Selby said. ‘Couldn’t we just sneak past him?’
‘You are such a clever dog.’
Selby and Princess Gwendolyn tiptoed past the dragon and into the cave. There in a wooden box was the Wishing Ring. The Princess quickly put the ring on her finger and she and Selby were just tiptoeing out again when the sleeping beast’s eyes snapped open. He let out a roar.
