by Alan Nolan
Like the toaster, and, indeed, like the whole kitchen of 14 Clobberstown Avenue (or ‘Clobberstown Lodge’, as it proclaimed grandly on the wonky sign that hung on the gate), Nanny Gigg had seen better days.
She was skinny, pink and wrinkly, with mischievous grey eyes. Her hair, although frizzy and curly like Sam’s, was steel grey instead of red. She always wore mis-matched, brightly coloured, baggy clothes and had a large collection of wigs and hats.
But what Sam loved about Nanny Gigg most of all was the fact that she was, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy. Not completely, 110%, paint-your-ankles-blue-and-marry-a-teapot crazy. Just a little bit.
Nanny Gigg was well known in Clobberstown for being a little bit loopy. She had been lightly loony from an early age. Before her husband Daddy Mike (Sam and Bruno’s grandad) disappeared, back when Sam’s father was a little boy, Nanny Gigg used to dress up in his school uniform and climb trees on the green across from Clobberstown Lodge, with all the neighbourhood kids cheering her on.
One day she got stuck at the very top of the highest chestnut tree and the fire brigade had to be called to rescue her. The fireman was very surprised to find at the top of the ladder that the little schoolboy he thought he was rescuing was actually a middle-aged lady in shorts, grey socks and a cloth school cap.
Another time, when Sam was a tiny baby, Nanny Gigg left her at home with her friend Marjorie and ‘borrowed’ next door’s new puppy, Barker. (Mr Soames had no idea that Barker had been ‘borrowed’.) She dressed the dog up in Sam’s baby clothes, put a bonnet on her head, stuck her in a buggy and proudly paraded around the local shopping centre, stopping old ladies to ask them if they liked her ‘hairy baby’.
Barker, being a nice puppy, was quite happy with all the attention, but the shopping centre security guards definitely weren’t – they barred Nanny Gigg and her ‘hairy baby’ for two weeks.
But that was a long time ago, before Sam and Bruno’s parents went to South America for their long, extended trip to catalogue the tree frogs of the Amazon Basin. Barker wasn’t a pup any more and Sam certainly wasn’t a baby any more, but Nanny Gigg was still a couple of custard creams short of a fruitcake.
Nanny Gigg placed the recently caught slices of toast on a side plate, adjusted her false teeth and hollered up the stairs, ‘BRUNO! Your breakfast is ready!’
She turned to Sam. ‘Sit down, luvvy. I’ve made you your favourite –pancakes.’
‘Yum!’ said Sam, delightedly.
‘With tomato ketchup,’ said Nanny Gigg.
Yak, thought Sam, despondently.
Sam shouldn’t have been surprised. Nanny Gigg was a good cook, but she tended to do the same thing with food as she did with her clothes – she put things together that didn’t really match. In the same way she didn’t mind being seen in public wearing a lime-green woolly coat, with a purple belt around her waist and orange rubber clogs on her feet, she equally had no problem serving up a helping of Irish stew for dinner with a side order of fried marshmallows and a little bowl of yoghurt-covered peanuts. Sam had gotten used to the strange culinary combinations and never complained.
‘Eat up now,’ said Nanny Gigg. ‘You’ll need your strength for the Irish dancing tomorrow.’
Sam brightened up. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘Nearly forgot!’ She took a deep breath and tucked in to the tomato ketchup–covered pancakes. It was a weird combination of tastes, but it kind of worked.
‘What time is Ajay coming over?’ asked Nanny Gigg.
Ajay Patel was Sam’s best friend. He was in her class at school and loved animals too, although the ones he liked best were more of the creepy crawly variety – in his bedroom he had a huge collection of stick insects, scorpions, newts and lizards. He even had a couple of snakes and a big, black, hairy tarantula spider called Tadhg. Most of his collection ate grasshoppers or crickets, but the snakes liked to eat dead mice. Ajay’s dad got a pack of ten dead mice from the pet shop and kept them in the freezer. Once a week he’d defrost a couple of them and feed them to the snakes. It was pretty disgusting and, while Ajay loved his snakes (their names were Stormbringer and Jeremy), he really didn’t like to watch them while they were eating.
Ajay was a bit smaller than Sam, but he was a great footballer, and could do a trick where he would slurp a whole small carton of milk into his mouth and then swirl it round and round, building up the pressure until the milk squirted out his nose and then out of his eyes so he looked like he was crying milky tears. This made him very popular in class, although Ms Sniffles had to go home sick after she walked into the classroom at lunchtime and saw him doing his milky trick for a large crowd of schoolkids. This, needless to say, made him even more popular.
Sam got on with Ajay because he was loyal, a good listener (a handy thing, since she was a good talker) and because, whatever happened, he always stayed calm. No matter what the situation – forgotten homework, a missed bus or a last-minute dash to the pet shop for live grasshoppers – he never seemed to panic.
‘He said he’d be here around eleven o’clock,’ said Sam, polishing off the last of the pancakes.
‘Grand,’ said Nanny Gigg, looking at the kitchen clock, which was always fifteen minutes slow. ‘I’m off upstairs for a bath. The next time you see me I’ll be as wrinkly as Mr Soames’ – she looked at Sam with one eyebrow raised – ‘only much, MUCH better looking.’ Nanny Gigg winked and trotted upstairs.
Sam took a long drink from her glass of cold milk and sat back in her chair. She loved Irish dancing – she was good at it and had loads of trophies. Ajay was coming around to play accordion while she practised. He played in the band of the same dance school that Sam went to, the Cú Chulainn Academy, so it made sense to practise together. Sam looked up at the fifteen-minute-slow clock too. Just ten o’clock, she reckoned. Ajay wouldn’t be here for another hour.
A small scratching noise caught her attention, a tiny scritch scratch from the corner of the kitchen. On the floor below the kitchen counter, a little brown mouse was busily eating some crumbs that had fallen out of Nanny Gigg’s cake sandwich the night before. Nanny Gigg loved sandwiches. She also loved cake. She hated to waste stale cake, so whenever there were slices of cake left over and going a bit hard, she’d stick them between two slices of buttered bread and munch away merrily. Nanny Gigg’s loose false teeth made sure that her gob was a world leader in the production of soggy cake crumbs, which made for some well-fed mice in Clobberstown Lodge.
Ahh, thought Sam, a little mousey! She slowly got off her seat with the idea of trying to stroke the mouse’s fur, befriend it, house-train it, call it Molly and keep it as a pet, but just then she heard a much louder noise from the other side of the kitchen.
The back door slammed open. The mouse (bye, Molly …) scurried away in fright, cake crumbs forgotten. Sam jerked upright.
In the doorway stood Bruno holding a big, shiny red … well, Sam didn’t quite know what it was. If she had to guess, she would have said it looked a bit like a vacuum cleaner, but with a sort of machine-gun handle at one end and a sort of trumpet spout at the other. The middle bit, though, was the weirdest part. In the centre of the cannon-like contraption, there was a glass goldfish bowl full of blue liquid. Floating in the liquid was what looked for all the world like a brain – it was pink and squidgy and had different coloured wires coming out of it and trailing up into the body of the gun. Above the goldfish bowl was stencilled the number ‘3000’.
‘Do you like it?’ smiled Bruno.
‘What is it?’ asked Sam. She deliberately answered with a question in the hope that Bruno would be confused and wouldn’t notice her looking around for an escape route. She always got worried when Bruno smiled like that.
‘This,’ said Bruno grandly, ‘is the Brain Swap 3000. I found it in Daddy Mike’s inventing shed.’ He held the device out from his body and gazed at it admiringly. It looked like he had made an effort to polish it.
‘What,’ said Sam, regretting the words even as they left her mouth, ‘d
oes it do?’
Bruno’s smile faltered. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that, I don’t know …’ His head dropped. Sam made a slight move sideways towards the door of the sitting room. Bruno’s head shot up again. ‘But there’s only one way to find out!’ he cried.
Sam turned and ran through the door, narrowly missing the side table that held Rover the goldfish’s bowl as she dived behind Daddy Mike’s old, unused armchair. She heard a couple of switches being flicked on and an electronic SQUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE noise as Bruno came into the sitting room holding the Brain Swap 3000.
‘100% power,’ he said. ‘The green light is on!’ He hadn’t bothered to read Daddy Mike’s instruction manual, but any fool knows green lights mean we are good to go. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are locked and loaded!’ He didn’t quite know what this meant, but he had heard it on a cop show and thought it sounded cool.
‘Saa-aam,’ he crooned, ‘come out, come out wherever you are. I want to try out this baby on you …’
Sam furrowed her brow. Bruno was always being mean to her and treating her like a guinea pig with Daddy Mike’s inventions, but not this time – she had had enough; it was timeto make a stand. She got to her feet and came out from behind the big, tatty armchair. ‘No, Bruno,’ she said, a stern look on her freckly face. ‘Put that thing away. There’s no way you are going to use that on me!’
Bruno smiled a bit wider and pulled the trigger. There was a rush of wind in the sitting room, followed a schlorpy, schloorpy sound as a bright beam of blue light shot out of the trumpet end and hit Sam square in the chest. Sam’s body suddenly went rigid. She straightened up, flat as a plank, the stern look still on her face, and then she slowly toppled forward, bouncing off Daddy Mike’s armchair and landing on the moth-eaten carpet, her body stiff and her eyes staring. The blue liquid in the Brain Swap 3000’s bowl bubbled a little, making the pink brain inside shift around and appear to be alive.
‘Uh-oh,’ said Bruno. His smile had gone. He reached out his foot and gave Sam’s body a little kick. It stayed stiff. Hmmm. He looked at the gun. The small digital readout at the top read ‘Power: 85%, Contents: 100%’. Bruno had absolutely no idea what that meant. Some people liked to do research before embarking on any endeavour, but Bruno fancied himself as a MAN OF ACTION, and MEN OF ACTION didn’t do research, never read the manuals and were strangers to instruction books. Who has time for reading, he thought, when there are trees to climb, sweets to eat, and sisters to torment? Not me! He held up the gun and looked at the pinkish, doughy looking brain inside and wished he had read the manual for this particular invention. Nanny Gigg is going to ground me for a month. He gave Sam’s rigid body another kick. Wake up!
He pointed the gun at Sam’s body again as she lay on the carpet. Maybe another blast will bring her back? He pulled the trigger, but this time nothing happened. He tried it again, still nothing. He held the gun up and slapped it on the side, like he’d seen Nanny Gigg do with her laptop when it went on the fritz. The gun went off with the same rush of wind and schlorpy-schloorpy sound, but this time the beam of blue light sped across the sitting room, hitting Rover the goldfish’s bowl and spinning it around, causing water to splash over the sides of the glass and soak the lace doily beneath it.
Bruno stared, horrified, at the gun and put it down on Daddy Mike’s chair. The readout on the top said ‘Power: 70%, Contents: 0%’. He backed away from the strange red device, wishing he’d never set eyes on it. Of all the freaky gizmos in Grandad’s shed, why did I have to pick this one? His foot caught on Sam’s stiff arm as he walked backwards and he fell heavily on the carpet, his backside raising a small cloud of dust.
‘Help!’ a tiny, squeaky voice cried. Bruno looked up from the floor. What was that? ‘Help!’ cried the voice again. There was a small splashing noise and a blurbling sound of bubbles in water. Bruno looked around. The goldfish bowl on the side table was rocking. ‘Help me!’ cried the small voice again. Was it– ? That voice couldn’t be coming from the bowl, could it?
Bruno got up and walked slowly to Rover’s bowl. ‘Bruno! Help me! I can’t swim!’ Bruno’s eyes goggled. In the bowl, splashing around in the water, was Rover the goldfish. Except it wasn’t Rover the goldfish. Rover the goldfish’s face looked almost … human. Rover’s eyes looked up at Bruno and its lips moved as it opened and closed its goldfish mouth. Bruno stared at the fish. He’d never really looked so closely at Rover before, but he would have sworn he could see freckles on the sides of its little fishy face.
‘Bruno!’ cried the goldfish. ‘It’s ME, SAM! Get me out of here now, I can’t swim!’
‘But, but,’ stammered Bruno, ‘but you’re a fish. Fishes can swim.’
‘Not this one,’ said Sam as she manically flapped Rover’s fins, trying to keep her fishy head above the water. ‘I never learned! Our class was meant to, but the swimming pool was closed for renovations!’
‘But you are a fish,’ said Bruno. ‘If I take you out of the water, you’ll die.’ Sam couldn’t argue with his logic.
‘It must have been the Brain Swap 3000!’ shouted Bruno. He looked at Sam’s stiff body, lying like a discarded plastic mannequin on the floor. ‘It schlorped your brain out of your head and into the gun, then when I fired it again it must have schloooped your mind into the goldfish! This is AMAZING!’ He did a little dance.
‘Be amazed on your own time,’ squeaked Sam. ‘I can barely doggy-paddle here! Get me out of this goldfish and put me back in my own body! NOW!!’
‘Oh yeah, right,’ said Bruno, and he picked up the gun. He took aim at the fish and fired. The same rush of wind, the same schlorpy-schloorpy, the same blue beam. Bruno looked into the bowl. The fish was Rover again, swimming around under the water, freckle-less and as happy as any fish can be, unaware that anything unbelievably freaky and weird had ever happened.
Bruno looked at the gun. The pink brain seemed to throb in its glass bowl, its wires waving in the blue liquid. The readout on the top said ‘Power: 55%, Contents: 100%’. 100%, thought Bruno. That must mean Sam’s brain is locked and loaded in the gun!
He looked around the sitting room. Hmmm. No need to put Sam back into her body straight away. Time to have some fun!
Bruno’s eyes settled on a small brown shape peeking out from behind a curtain. Aha! A mouse! He took careful aim with the Brain Swap 3000 and pulled the trigger. The room lit up with the blue beam and the sudden wind blew back Bruno’s curly hair. The tiny mouse was knocked up against the skirting board by the beam. Bruno threw the gun down on the chair and scrambled over to the curtains. He got down on his hands and knees in time to see the mouse pick itself up and stand up straight on his hind legs, brushing dust off its fur. It put its front feet on its hips and glared up at Bruno. ‘Bruno, you rat – you’ve turned me into a mouse!’ shouted Sam from the mousey body she was now inhabiting.
Just then there was a familiar mewling sound and Chairman Miaow, the white-furred Persian cat that lived on Clobberstown Avenue, came through the open window and jumped down onto the carpet, landing between Bruno and the small, mousey figure of his little sister Sam. ‘Oh, hi, Chairman Miaow,’ said Sam. Chairman Miaow looked at Sam and licked her lips. It was at that moment that Sam realised that she was now a mouse. Further to this, she realised that Chairman Miaow was a cat. A quite large, hungry-looking cat. ‘Ah …’ said Sam, and ran for it.
The cat chased Sam behind the curtains, up the leg and across the back of Daddy Mike’s chair, onto the sideboard where Nanny Gigg’s photo frames, vases and Irish dancing trophies from years gone by were kept, up onto the back of the sofa and back down onto the carpet. Bruno watched the chase with glee, throwing his head back laughing and slapping his leg with his hand.
‘Bruno, you nitwit!’ shouted Sam at the top of her mousey voice. ‘Get the cat! Put Chairman Miaow out! Help! HELP!’ She skidded to a halt, cornered up against the skirting board with no place to go. The cat slowly prowled towards her, growling.
‘Oh, shut up, Chairman Miaow,’ said
Sam squeakily. ‘You don’t frighten me. I knew you when you were a kitten!’ Sam drew back and punched the cat square in the nose with her mousey fist. Chairman Miaow looked stunned. Miaow-huh?
Bruno walked over to the corner, deftly caught the cat with one hand and dished her out of the window. He pulled the window closed so she couldn’t get back in, and Chairman Miaow sat on the windowsill staring in and licking her lips hungrily.
Sam kicked Bruno in the shoe with her mouse foot. ‘Bruno! Get me out of this mouse and put me back in my own body this instant!’
‘I will in me–’ started Bruno, but Sam ran up his trouser leg and bit him sharply on the knee.
‘NOW, I said,’ she squeaked from under the fabric.
‘Okay, okay, get out of there,’ said Bruno, rubbing his knee.
Sam came out and Bruno picked up the Brain Swap 3000 again. He aimed at Sam the mouse and fired the gun. He looked at the readout: ‘Power: 35%, Contents: 100%’. She’s in, he thought. Now to get Sam’s brain back in her body. He aimed the gun at Sam’s rigid body on the floor and pulled the trigger. The curtains moved with the rush of wind and Chairman Miaow, bored, jumped down of the windowsill and disappeared up Clobberstown Avenue.
Sam’s body twitched and then stiffly sat up. ‘You complete jerk, Bruno,’ said Sam. ‘Give that gun to me.’
She stood up and Bruno handed it over, inwardly relieved she was all right again. Sam looked at the gun – she didn’t like it, with its nasty trumpet barrel and horrible pulsing brain. The readout on the top now said ‘Power: 20%, Contents: 0%’. ‘Yuk,’ said Sam, handing the gun back to Bruno. ‘Put that back out in the shed. And I don’t want to see any more inventions. If you bring anything else out, I’m going to tell Nanny Gigg.’
Bruno, for once, did as he was told.
Chapter Three
