Jungle Tangle Page 6

  The owner shook his head.

  ‘No second opinions?’

  The owner shrugged listlessly.

  Klench couldn’t understand how anyone could care so little about so huge an exchange. But this man didn’t seem to care about anything. He was staring miserably into space as if he’d forgotten Klench was there.

  ‘Deal.’ Klench banged the table. ‘You take me to hotel. Zen I give you box.’

  The owner murmured his agreement. Then, putting his head in his hands, he moaned and moaned.

  9 - Toodle Pip

  Getting into the car next morning, Abbie felt as trembly and second-thoughty as Mum had looked the night before. She waved. Mum and Ollie were crying on the doorstep. Mum had refused to come to Heathrow – she couldn’t bear airport goodbyes – and Ollie had school.

  ‘I’m taking your photo in for Show and Tell,’ he shouted. ‘Every day.’

  ‘See you soon.’ Abbie blew kisses. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’ Mum blew them back. ‘And don’t talk to any strange llamas.’

  Dad drove off. Mum and Ollie shrank into sobbing blobs. Abbie sniffed.

  Dad put a hand on her knee. ‘It’s only two weeks,’ he said, rather trembly himself.

  Two weeks. That’s fourteen little boxes of Coco Pops, thought Abbie.

  ‘That’s fourteen crosswords,’ said Grandma from the back seat. ‘For the love of Eric, will you settle down?’

  Abbie looked round. Chester was tickling Grandma’s glasses.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Grandma. ‘Chester wants to know if you took yer travel pills, Fernando.’

  ‘Si,’ said the head, who was perched on Grandma’s lap. ‘Now I no pukey in fly bird.’

  They drew up at the zoo. Winnie was waiting at the entrance. She unpacked their suitcases from Dad’s car and carried them to Matt’s battered green van.

  In front of the pond, a crowd had gathered to see them off. In the front row Babs and Hilda both stood on one hairy leg and waved their other seven. Clement and Persephone bowed their ancient heads. Hue, the chameleon, tried to stow away by turning silver on the front of Perdita’s tracksuit. She only noticed when he wouldn’t zip up.

  In the middle row the seals flipped their flippers and the penguins flapped their flappers.

  At the back, Alphonse fluttered his eyelashes and Gina curled her trunk into a heart shape.

  At the gate Coriander put her arms round Minnie. Vinnie put his arms round Coriander. Then Winnie put her arms round Vinnie and lifted them all in an eight-arm love squash.

  Mackenzie flew onto Perdita’s head. ‘Cheerio!’ he screeched. ‘Off you nip to the equator. Toodle pip and see you later.’

  He flapped over to the gatepost and wolf-whistled everyone into the van.

  Matt drove. Coriander sat next to him. The others squeezed in behind.

  All the way to Heathrow Dad banged on about the Incas. ‘They didn’t have money, you know. They paid their taxes by doing lots of work for the emperor – things like farming and building.’

  ‘But gold they had, and seelver. And we conquistadores, we take that metal to make into coins. We seedy greedy graspers.’

  ‘So the Incas had no cents – and you had no sense!’ Dad hooted. For once Abbie didn’t groan. At least he was trying to jolly things along.

  There was silence in the front. Matt was rubbing a finger over his teeth. Abbie hadn’t seen him do that since Coriander had been kidnapped last summer. He must be so scared of letting her go again. But she had five companions this time – and three of them had legs. What could possibly go wrong?

  They parked at the airport and loaded their cases onto trolleys.

  Grandma popped Fernando into her handbag. ‘Keep down,’ she said. ‘Don’t want the world and ’is wife gawpin’ at you. And keep off me travel sweets.’

  Coriander took Matt’s hand. ‘Let’s say goodbye here,’ she murmured. The Platts entwined in a nine-plait cuddle.

  ‘Look after each other,’ said Matt in a choking voice.

  ‘We will,’ said Perdita and Coriander. Matt’s glasses streamed with tears. He pressed something behind his ear. Tiny windscreen wipers swept across each lens.

  The Hartleys entwined in a three-heart huddle.

  ‘Look after each other,’ said Dad in a choking voice.

  ‘We will,’ said Abbie and Grandma. Dad’s cheeks gleamed with tears. He pressed something behind his ear. Nothing happened.

  ‘And now, please, we go,’ said Grandma’s handbag. ‘My pants they have ants for find my wife.’

  They checked in their luggage. Before going through security Abbie took Fernando out of the handbag. She stuffed him up her sleeve just in time to avoid the X-ray machine and some embarrassing questions.

  And then it was hot chocolate, ‘I Spy’ and ‘Spot the Funniest Bot’ while they waited in the departure lounge. Abbie had to think very hard not to think how Mum, Dad and Ollie would be thinking of her.

  An hour later, walking up the steps to the plane, she took her last sniff of home.

  * * *

  Dr Strode-Boylie ripped out the letters page of The Times. He screwed it into a ball and hurled it at the floor. ‘Why haven’t they printed my letter of complaint? That unfenced zoo – it’s a national scandal!’

  Genevieve patted his arm. ‘Maybe that’s the problem, dear,’ she said quietly. ‘It isn’t national. Maybe you should lower your sights: try a local newspaper, like The Bradleigh Bellow.’

  ‘Lower my sights? I’ve spent fifty years with my sights on the stars, woman. And look where it’s got me!’

  Genevieve looked. And saw a man whose sights were very low indeed, beneath the silver scowl of his eyebrows.

  * * *

  ‘Put me down, peeg!’ Carmen Feraldo, shrunken wife of Fernando and prisoner of Hubris Klench, tried to bite through her captor’s rubber glove. But after four centuries without exercise, her teeth didn’t make a dent. ‘My husband, he keell you for treat me so bad!’

  Klench chuckled and dropped Carmen on the desk in front of him. He gazed round the huge lobby of his new possession, the Hotel Armadillo. ‘Your husband,’ he said, ‘cannot hear you. Ass I explained, he iss in Inkland.’

  After Carmen had shrieked in the Baños hotel, Klench had told her all about meeting Fernando last summer. Well, not quite all. He’d told her how he’d kicked and bullied Fernando, not how Fernando had saved the day.

  ‘Zere zere.’ Klench now pinched Carmen’s ear. Then he unscrewed the pot of glue sitting on his desk. He smiled. This was no ordinary adhesive but Bitter Albert’s Superdooperglooper Glue, a gift from a former fellow prisoner who’d once used it to stick a warder’s hands together.

  ‘Sticks like ze Billyo,’ sang Klench, brushing her neck with glue. ‘Now I can show you offs to guests – and sell you to highest bidder.’ He giggled. His criminal clients would be queuing up to buy this freaky knick-knack. ‘Until zen, you can be my receptionist.’ He squeezed Carmen into a hole that he had drilled in the desk.

  ‘Villano!’ she squealed as her neck wedged tight.

  He yanked her hair fondly. ‘You are too kind.’ Ignoring her curses, he sat down at the desk. At last he could relax. The journey had been terrible – all that dirt and exercise. But now it was over. That miserable fool who’d led him here was long gone with the Inca box, and the hotel was his. The new staff were already hired: young men from local jungle villages who were prepared to cook, clean and work their guts out for practically no pay. Six of them had been sweating out front all day, clearing a space for helicopters to land.

  ‘Right on schedules,’ he murmured, looking at a timetable on the desk. Tomorrow morning the three doctors whom he’d contacted through his criminal network would be flying in, ready to operate on rich crooks in search of disguises.

  ‘Let me go, el Bruto!’ Carmen tried to wriggle free. But she was stuck fast to the desk. ‘I never estand for thees!’

  ‘You never stand for anythink, I thi
nk!’ Klench gave her playful poke in the eye. ‘Now shut ups and practise your smilinks. First guest vill arrive in two days. You must velcome him nice. He is vay rich man.’ He rubbed his hands. He couldn’t wait. Carmen would wow that crooked cowboy out of his diamond-studded socks.

  10 - Plane Awful

  The food was dreadful. It was the best part of the flight.

  The trouble started on take-off. Grandma was sitting next to the aisle (‘I’ll need to go a lot’) next to Perdita (what a star) next to Abbie at the window. Coriander sat behind Grandma.

  The plane roared into the sky.

  ‘’Oo wants a sweetie?’ Grandma took the tin out of her handbag, which she’d refused to stow in the overhead locker.

  ‘Si,’ squeaked Fernando inside. The man across the aisle frowned, as if he’d just heard a handbag squeak.

  Grandma lowered a toffee into the bag. There was a choking sound. The man across the aisle stared, as if he’d just heard a handbag make a choking sound.

  Grandma reached into her bag and took out a half-chewed toffee. ‘Sorry, Fernando. Too tough to swallow?’ The man across the aisle gaped, as if he’d just heard a handbag being apologised to.

  Grandma popped the half-chewed toffee in her mouth. It pulled her false teeth down from her gum. The man across the aisle asked to move.

  ‘You’d better keep quiet,’ Abbie murmured to the handbag, ‘or the staff might confiscate you.’

  ‘For why?’ replied the bag. ‘I not eellegal. I have passport.’ (Coriander had stuck his photo in a little red book to make him feel important.) ‘You ashame of me or sometheeng?’ The bag began to sing a loud Spanish marching song. Abbie sighed. She leaned across Perdita, took Grandma’s bag, stood up and shoved it in the overhead locker. Poor Fernando – but what could you do?

  Then there were silly little sandwiches and Grandma spilling her drink over Perdita. Who took it very well, of course. ‘Mmm, I smell all orangey.’

  The girls were too excited to read their books. So Perdita taught Abbie the Dreadlocks Game (changing every word that began with d to ‘dreadlocks’). And when that got too dull, Abbie taught Perdita the Pudding Game (guessing what type of dessert the other passengers would be). And when that got too mouth-watering, Coriander told them about her last trip to Ecuador, when she’d found Fernando and his wife in the jungle.

  ‘I wasn’t looking for shrunken heads.’ Coriander spoke softly, so that Fernando overhead wouldn’t be reminded of losing his wife. ‘I was after the Fringed Bees of Logroño.’

  ‘The what?’ said Abbie. She’d never get used to the wonders of Coriander’s former job, travelling the world to collect rare samples of hair.

  ‘Logroño is in the eastern rainforest. The bees there grow long fringes over their eyes. Then they can’t see a thing, so they crash into trees and die. Matt made me a tiny pair of scissors so I could save their lives. Never found any bees, though. Just … you know,’ she pointed upwards, ‘on the forest floor.’

  ‘Where exactly did Fernando’s wife fall out of your bag?’ whispered Abbie.

  Coriander shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Somewhere near Logroño. We’ll have to go there and retrace my steps in the rainforest.’

  Hot, wet jungle seeped into Abbie’s mind. She shivered deliciously. ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Steamy, crowded, noisy–’

  ‘Bingo!’ While they were talking, Grandma had been playing by herself, calling out the numbers and filling them in. Strangely enough, she’d won.

  A flight attendant rushed up. ‘Everything OK, madam?’

  ‘I’ve got a full ’ouse,’ said Grandma. ‘Where’s me prize?’

  The attendant frowned. ‘I’m afraid we don’t provide,

  er …’

  Grandma jabbed the attendant in the stomach. ‘I won fair and square, young lady.’

  Abbie dreamed of stuffing Grandma in the overhead locker with Fernando.

  ‘I’ll play with you,’ said Perdita, neatly avoiding a scene. ‘Abbie, you can call the numbers.’

  So Abbie spent the rest of the flight to Spain, their first stop, writing numbers on scraps of paper, stuffing them down the sides of her knee-length flight socks and then pulling them out one by one. ‘What a bore, thirty-four. Waste of time, eighty-nine. Oh what fun, sixty-one.’

  Then there was the four-hour wait in Madrid airport. Fernando managed to keep quiet till they got off the plane. But when Grandma told him where they were, he hurled himself against the sides of the handbag till it bulged like a cheek full of sweets. ‘España, my beloved country! Four hundred feefty year I have not seen her. Fiesta, siesta, Castilla, Sevilla – the sights, the sounds, the esmells. Let me out!’

  ‘Sorry, chuck, no can do,’ said Grandma kindly but firmly. Abbie had to admit she had a way with heartbroken heads. ‘There’d be a right rumpus. Why don’t we describe it to you? I bet Spain’s changed a bit since your time.’

  The handbag sighed. ‘Hokay. What choice I have?’

  So they took it in turns to find a private spot and whisper into the bag – which wasn’t as easy as it sounds since the only private spot they found in the transit lounge was the loo.

  On top of this, Fernando found all the changes very upsetting. Sitting on a toilet seat for the third time, Abbie tried a new approach. Instead of taking him out and showing him the bathroom tiles, she kept the handbag shut.

  ‘Oh, look,’ she cried, pulling the flush. ‘There goes a happy, er … peasant chucking a bucket of water over himself in the, um … plaza.’ I wish Dad was here, she thought. He’d be able to fill me in on sixteenth-century Spain.

  ‘What thees peasant wear on head?’ came Fernando’s suspicious voice from the handbag.

  ‘Oh, you know, a floppy-ish sort of, um, hat,’ said Abbie, remembering pictures of Henry the Eighth. He was from the sixteenth century, wasn’t he?

  By the time their flight was called it was past midnight. Everyone who had legs stumbled onto the plane and fell into their seats. Everyone who didn’t was already snoring on Grandma’s head and in her bag.

  Abbie was woken by a face in her face. ‘Breakfast, señorita?’

  She stared at the perfect parting and wondered why Mum had dyed her hair black. Then she remembered where she was. ‘Oh. Yes please.’

  It sounded good: ‘Omelette and cheeps.’ It looked bad: a sad yellow rag with soggy yellow twigs. It tasted worse.

  ‘Ooh, me back!’ Grandma jolted awake. Chester, who was still half asleep, lurched off her head and landed in Abbie’s omelette. That woke him up. He shook himself off, spraying egg and chips everywhere, then flew back onto Grandma’s head.

  ‘Me back’s killin’ me,’ said Grandma. ‘Last time I spend a night in a plane.’

  So we’ll have to leave you in Ecuador, then, thought Abbie. Isn’t that a shame? What she said was, ‘Would you like my omelette, Grandma?’

  So Grandma tucked into two breakfasts. She just had time to spear the last Chester-coated chip before the plane began its descent into Ecuador.

  * * *

  Marcus scrawled the answer. He scraped his chair backwards so that everyone would know he’d finished. He sauntered up to the front. ‘Done,’ he said, slapping his Maths book down on Mr Dabbings’s desk. It felt good to finish first again, now that Pratters had gone.

  Mr Dabbings looked up. ‘Thanks, Marcus. Oh, butterbeans, look at the time! Pens down, kids. It’s eleven o’clock. The girls should be arriving in Ecuador right now. Time for our Happy Landing Harmony.’ He picked up the guitar that was leaning against his desk and slung the knitted strap over his shoulder.

  Marcus turned back to the class and rolled his eyes. The teacher played a tinny chord.

  ‘Hap-py Land-ing,’ sang Mr Dabbings on bottom G.

  ‘Hap-py Land-ing,’ Henry bellowed on B.

  ‘Hap-py Land-ing,’ chorused Terrifica, Snorty and Jeremy on D.

  And, on top G, ‘Hap-py Land-ing,’ sang Claire, Rukia, Craig (and Ursula, though no one noticed
).

  ‘Idiots,’ muttered Marcus, heading back to his seat.

  ‘Idiot,’ echoed Mr Dabbings thoughtfully. ‘An interesting word, Marcus, though not a kind one. Remember now, our tongues were made for kindness. So you’ll kindly use yours to apologise.’

  Marcus glared at the giggling class. ‘Sorry!’ he snapped. He slumped back in his chair and stared at the floor. Even Dabbers was telling him off. Face it: he was no longer cool at school.

  * * *

  Klench stood at the entrance of the Hotel Armadillo. The first guest had climbed out of his private helicopter and was striding across the clearing. His gold-toed boots gleamed in the evening sunlight.

  Klench bowed in the doorway. ‘Greetinks.’

  ‘Howdy.’ The tall man tilted his cowboy hat. ‘Brag Swaggenham.’ He wore a fringed suede jacket and denim jeans. His belt buckle glittered with rubies.

  Clicking his heels, Klench ushered his guest through the door.

  Brag Swaggenham waved a hand round the hotel lobby, as if claiming for himself the mirrored walls, the lampshades made from armadillo shells and the fountains where Cupids sprayed water from rude bits. The jewels of his many rings winked. ‘Like yer style, if not yer body, buddy.’

  Klench scowled. ‘For vich treatment you have comes?’ he asked icily.

  Brag held up his hands and sprang backwards, as if under arrest. ‘Fingerprint redesign. So the cops can’t pin that ol’ fire on me.’

  Klench raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  ‘Last year,’ said Brag, ‘In-doh-nesia. Remember? It was headline news.’

  Klench gasped. ‘You mean zat blaze vich destroyed whole island – zat voss you?’ He stared at Brag in admiration. Twelve villages burned to the ground; eight species of jungle vine wiped out. ‘Vy you do it?’

  Brag grinned. The diamonds in his back teeth sparkled. ‘Underground oil. Couldn’t be doin’ with forest folks and stoopid flowers in the way.’ He shrugged. ‘Shame we never found no oil. An’ shame they found mah fingerprints on the matchbox.’

  Klench nodded in what was the nearest he could get to sympathy.