by Sam Hay
The SPOON OF DOOM
Sam Hay
Illustrated by Hannah Shaw
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Also by Sam Hay
Imprint
For Mum
Chapter One
I was halfway through my cheese-and-pickle roll when it happened.
‘Yuk!’ squealed Mandy Moon, who was sitting opposite me. ‘There’s something really horrible on your roll.’
I glanced down. She was right. It was horrible. Long, green and slimy. And just millimetres from my mouth.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said cheerfully, ‘It’s only a marsh slug.’ (As if that made it OK.)
Mandy wrinkled her nose. ‘It looks disgusting.’
She was right (again). Marsh slugs are particularly unpleasant to look at. But as my dad will tell you (though you’ll wish you’d never asked), they’re not the slightest bit poisonous and actually taste quite nice. If you find yourself stuck in a marsh, there are worse things you could eat, because marsh slugs are full of useful protein and good for your gut…
See. I said you’d wish you never asked.
By now, Mandy was making a puking face, so I slid the roll (and slug) back into my lunch box and moved on to my crisps – less protein and not good for the gut, but far more my sort of thing.
I pretended nothing had happened. But Mandy was still in a state of shock. She was peering into my lunch box, watching the green slug slither slowly across the roll.
‘Aren’t you going to do something?’ she said, unable to stop staring.
‘Nope.’ I was beginning to wish I could put Mandy in a lunch box, too.
‘You’re not going to take it home, are you?’ she said, appalled.
It’s the school rules, you see. What you don’t eat, you take home.
‘Yep,’ I said, emptying the final few crisp crumbs into my mouth.
Mandy gasped. ‘But what will your mum say?’
I shrugged. ‘Something like “sorry about the slug, son, tomorrow I’ll make sure you get a stink beetle instead”.’
Mandy’s mouth opened, but no words came out. So I snatched up my lunch box and scarpered. You see, sometimes I just can’t be bothered explaining the weird world I live in.
My parents are entomologists. Or bug-botherers to you and me. Mum likes beetles and spiders. Dad prefers soft bellies – slugs, snails and worms. They met at bug camp when they were twelve and have been inseparable ever since. Love bugs – that’s what Mum calls them. Personally, I prefer marsh slugs.
Anyway, they’re totally besotted by mini-beasts. And our fridge is full of them. Hatching usually, which is all very well and interesting unless, like me, you prefer your butter without beetle larvae attached.
Personally, I am not the slightest bit interested in creepy crawlies. I never have been. When I was a small boy, I never worried worms. Nor did I collect spiders in small boxes. And to this day, I’m still perfectly happy for snails to go about doing their snail stuff without any involvement from me.
But unfortunately my parents have other ideas. They’ve even lumbered me with a buggy name. Albert Grub. Or A. Grub, as it says on all my schoolbooks. It’s OK. You can laugh. I’m used to it. Sometimes I think I was adopted. What other explanation can there be for the fact that I have absolutely no interest in creepy crawlies?
My parents don’t mind. They humour me. I, on the other hand, have to put up with living in their flea pit. Well, actually it’s a house. But it’s a total tip. There’s dust everywhere. Bugs like dust. (I don’t.) There are also strange experiments dotted around – like the old boot in the hall that has woodlice living in it. And the understairs cupboard that is strictly for spiders. (Mum says they’re not poisonous, but I’ve seen them – they’re purple for gawd’s sake!) There’s even an old scabby dog basket that’s riddled with fleas. (And we don’t even have a dog.)
Frankly, it’s embarrassing. I don’t dare bring any friends home – and certainly not since the incident with my best friend Barry.
He came round for tea a few months ago. Sausage and chips, it was, which was great, except Barry’s dinner was already being enjoyed by a large cockroach that had somehow escaped onto his plate.
I was mortified.
And now, thanks to the marsh slug’s appearance, I had to suffer the embarrassment at school as well. Enough was enough. As I walked home in the rain, I planned what I’d say to them:
Grow up and stop playing with creepy crawlies…
Insects are not big and they’re not clever…
(Though that’s not strictly true. Insects are exceedingly clever, as my parents constantly tell me. After all, there are a million trillion more of them than there are of us, and they’ve been around since the dinosaurs.)
But I didn’t get a chance to tell my parents what I thought, because when I got home, I could see that something big and bad was afoot.
And somehow I knew it had nothing to do with the marsh slug that was sleeping soundly inside my school bag.
Chapter Two
For starters, they were both there. Normally, when I get back from school, Mum is in her study working on her book. It’s about beetles and she’s been writing it for ten years. (What more can she find to say about them?) And Dad is in the garden tending to his gastropods (that’s the bug-botherer name for slugs and snails – it makes them sound much more interesting than they are, trust me).
Today, they were also sitting at the table holding hands. Love bugs they might be. But they don’t generally hold hands. Thank god.
On one side of the table was a stack of papers. Bills. Unpaid bills. I knew that because I’d sneaked a peek a few days ago and everything was written in red. On the other side of the table was a large and uneaten, slightly crooked carrot cake. Mum had been baking. That in itself was a bad sign. Mum only bakes when there’s a crisis. So I knew something bad must have happened.
‘Hello,’ I said cautiously.
Mum turned to look at me. ‘Oh, Albert,’ she said with a slight quiver in her voice. ‘I’m sorry…’
I grinned nervously. ‘It can’t be that bad.’
‘Albert’s right,’ said Dad patting her hand. ‘Something will turn up. It always does.’
‘Not this time, Gordon,’ said Mum, looking like she might blub. ‘We’ve got a pile of bills. The roof is leaking. You’ve lost a marsh slug. And I’ve lost my job.’
I frowned. It had definitely not been a good day. (Though I reckoned I could probably solve the marsh slug problem.)
But Mum wasn’t finished. ‘So we’ll have to cancel the holiday.’
I gasped. Now wait a minute … we’d been planning our holiday for months. Normally we don’t do holidays. There’s never much point. Mum and Dad only ever agree to go camping, and only to places that look like our back garden – muddy, marshy and full of slithery stuff for them to catch in jam jars. But this holiday was going to be different. I’d finally persuaded them to book a beach holiday. And I just couldn’t wait.
I was about to start shouting when I saw Mum’s eyes fill up. I can’t bear anyone blubbing, especially not Mum; it gives me the willies. So I quickly changed tack…
‘Look, Dad,’ I sa
id cheerfully, ‘I’ve got some good news.’ I rummaged in my school bag and produced my lunch box. ‘Your missing slug! Somehow it got mixed up with my cheese roll.’
Dad beamed. It doesn’t take much to make him happy. But Mum just sighed. I realised the job thing had upset her a lot.
Mum stacked shelves at the local supermarket. But she said her head was too full of bugs to be much use to anyone most of the time.
‘How did you lose your job anyway?’ I asked.
She blushed. ‘I fell out with the manager over a spider’s web.’
That sounded about right.
‘I just couldn’t help it, Albert. There I was in amongst the baked beans when I spotted it. It was one of those special moments – you know…’
Nope. Never had one.
Mum looked dreamily at Dad, who gazed back sympathetically. ‘No two webs are ever the same,’ she continued. ‘And this one was so magnificent, I just had to sketch it…’
I smiled as best I could. But inwardly I rolled my eyes. My parents just don’t live in the real world. My sympathies lay with the supermarket manager who wanted a shelf full of beans, not a wonderful spider’s web for his customers to admire.
‘Well, I’ve still got my job,’ said Dad stoically.
Mum and I nodded. But we all knew the truth: Dad’s part-time lecturing job at the local college paid peanuts. Small peanuts. Tincy wincy pip-sized peanuts that no monkey would swing twice for. We were definitely on our uppers.
Then suddenly I felt something land on my head. (Though that in itself wasn’t unusual in our house.) Gingerly, I reached up to feel what it might be – an eight-legged arachnid. Or a six-legged beetle. Or something even more horrible. One of Dad’s snails, maybe?
But no. It was water.
‘I think we’ve got another leak,’ I said glumly, as a second blob landed on the end of my upturned nose.
Mum finally burst into tears. And then it happened. Just as I was wondering whether I should stick down my lunch box to catch the drips, the doorbell rang, and life as we knew it changed for ever.
Chapter Three
Actually, life very nearly didn’t change for ever. Because I very nearly didn’t let the bloke with the briefcase in.
‘I’m looking for Timmy Piddler,’ he said.
It sounded like a wind-up.
‘You’ve got the wrong address,’ I said crossly, about to close the door.
He looked at his notebook. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Absolutely. We’re the Grubs,’ I said. ‘Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, sounds absolutely nothing like Piddler.’
I’m not normally that rude, and certainly not to strangers. But I was too busy worrying about the future of my family to mind my manners.
The bloke peered at his paper again. ‘This is 33 Cuthbert Close,’ he said, looking past me into the hall. ‘Perhaps I could speak to your mum or dad?’
‘OK, but they’ll tell you the same thing,’ I said. Couldn’t he see we were in the middle of a crisis?
Obviously not, because he stepped past me and found my parents, still holding hands, still blubbing.
‘Dad,’ I snapped. ‘Tell this man there’s no one called Timmy Piddler living here.’
But Dad didn’t tell him. Instead he made a very strange face. His Adam’s apple bobbed three times in quick succession. He gulped for air and then a shadow seemed to pass over him. His face went dark, and then pure white, and I thought for a moment he was about to have a heart attack, which really would have finished me off.
But he didn’t. He looked at Mum, who had stopped blubbing, and then, in an ‘I’m Spartacus’ gesture, Dad stood up, shoulders back, shaggy head held high, and in a strange, deep commanding voice, he said, ‘That’s me. I’m Timmy Piddler.’
And then I felt I was having a heart attack. The blood began pumping very loudly in my ears. A thousand questions burbled up from my belly and got stuck in my throat, and I struggled to breathe.
What? What was he on about? His name was Gordon Grub.
And then suddenly I realised what he was doing. Dad was obviously so desperate to solve our family finances, he was about to break the law and commit identity theft. Whatever this bloke wanted with Timmy Piddler, Dad was ready to accept, good or bad.
It was quite brave, in the circumstances. After all, the bloke might have been about to steal our stereo to settle a debt. Or arrest him for some unpaid parking misdemeanour. Or punch him on the nose for some long-standing insult committed years ago by Mrs Piddler. Or, alternatively, and this was obviously what Dad was banking on, he could have been about to give him a suitcase full of lottery cash. Whatever it was, I couldn’t let him do it.
‘No, you’re not!’ I said firmly. ‘You’re Gordon Grub.’
But no one was listening to me. I was drowned out by the clicking open of the flicky clips on the stranger’s briefcase.
‘Excellent, then I have some rather good news for you, Mr Piddler,’ he said.
Chapter Four
Ten minutes later, Cyril Saltman of Saltman & Bone, Solicitors was sitting comfortably on our sofa, a cup of tea in one hand and a slice of carrot cake in the other. At his feet was his open briefcase (no cash, alas) and a bucket collecting drips from our leaky ceiling.
‘So, just for the record, Mr Piddler,’ he said, looking dubiously at the cake. ‘When did you actually change your name to Grub?’
I leant forward. I wanted to know, too.
Dad looked sheepish. ‘When I was 20,’ he mumbled, scuffing the carpet with his slipper.
My brain suddenly started doing somersaults. Why had he changed it? Was he a spy on the run? Or witness to a really grisly murder – maybe a mafia hit or something. Maybe we were living under witness protection and his past had finally caught up with him and we’d have to move house and change names again. Maybe I’d finally get to say goodbye to Grub.
But no. Dad cleared his throat. ‘I just fancied a change. I didn’t really like being Timmy Piddler. Grub seemed to fit me better.’
What? Surely no one would voluntarily choose the name Grub. I had ten years of teasing as proof. What was wrong with Smith, or Jones, or Brown…
Dad grinned at me. ‘I was a punk rocker back then, you know,’ he said. ‘As well as an entomology student, of course. Somehow Timmy Piddler just didn’t work – not for a punk-rocking bug man.’
He had a point.
‘Well, I have some rather good news, Mr Piddler,’ said the solicitor. ‘But first I must offer my sincere condolences to you and your family because I’m afraid I’m also the bearer of some rather bad news. Your great uncle Percival has passed away.’
The solicitor made a grim yet sympathetic face. One I reckoned he probably practised in front of the mirror.
Dad looked at his feet and shuffled uncomfortably.
‘I do hope he didn’t suffer,’ said Mum gently.
‘Oh no,’ said the solicitor cheering up. ‘He was 98, and passed away on holiday.’
If you had to go, that sounded like a good way to do it.
After a respectful pause, the solicitor started rummaging in his case. ‘Now – to the matter of his estate…’
Suddenly, I felt a bubble of excitement. I know it was selfish of me. After all, we’d just heard that some poor old fella had passed away, but I couldn’t help myself. You see we’ve never had much money. Nearly everything we own is second or third or fourth hand. And nothing works very well. The telly is older than Dad and my parents’ idea of a games console is a travel scrabble set. Most of the time I don’t mind, but sometimes, just sometimes, I long to be like everyone else.
The solicitor cleared his throat. ‘I’m pleased to inform you that you are Mr Piddler’s only living relative. And therefore his entire estate will pass to you.’
I gasped.
Mum gaped.
Dad looked at his feet again. Then suddenly he jerked his head up. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said desperately. ‘I’m sure I have several aunts and unc
les – and some cousins even. They must come before me – surely?’
I gave Dad a long hard look. I had the distinct feeling that there was something odd going on here. It was as if he didn’t want whatever it was that he was about to get, and he’d be pretty glad to offload it onto some unsuspecting relative somewhere.
‘Alas, not any more,’ said Mr Saltman. ‘They’re all sadly deceased. A series of unfortunate accidents means you are the last of the Piddler family.’
Dad looked decidedly uncomfortable.
Mr Saltman pulled out a pile of papers. ‘I’m afraid there’s no actual cash in the estate. And there’s no residential property, either – your great uncle sold his house and furnishings years ago.’ He scanned the paperwork. ‘But there is his factory.’
What?
‘He owned the Piddler’s Porridge factory, and now it belongs to you.’
A tingle of excitement crackled through my bones.
But Dad wasn’t smiling. ‘I don’t like porridge,’ he said grimly. ‘I’ve never liked porridge.’
I wasn’t too keen on porridge, either, but that didn’t stop me from dancing on the spot. We’d inherited a business. Maybe we were millionaires! Images of corporate jets and long limos fluttered into my brain. I pictured my parents swapping their scraggy jeans for nice suits and matching briefcases. No more slithery slimy stuff. No more embarrassing incidents at the dinner table when my friends came round. Hey, maybe we could even go on holiday!
I had a million billion questions bubbling inside my head, and as soon as Mr Saltman had gone (carrot cake wisely left untouched on the plate), I went on the attack…
Why hadn’t they told me we were really Piddlers?
Had Dad known about the factory?
And what was wrong with porridge anyway?
But Dad just shrugged and sighed and then escaped to the garden to see to his snails.
Mum was unusually quiet, too, and after clearing away the cups, she bustled off to check on her ladybirds. (Three hundred of them currently live behind our bathroom mirror. Don’t ask.)
