Floods 9 (4 page)

‘What's your idea then?' said Betty.

‘Well, I like the robbing from the rich bit,' Ffiona said. ‘It's the giving it away bit I don't like.'

‘So, you think we should rob from the rich and keep it?'

‘Yes,' said Ffiona, but seeing Betty was not so keen she added, ‘We needn't keep all of it.'

‘I suppose that wouldn't be so bad,' said Betty.
‘We rob from the rich, keep some of it and give some of it away?'

‘Well, not exactly.'

‘What exactly then?'

‘Well, we steal from the rich, keep some of it and then go shopping,' said Ffiona.

‘Oh, I see, buy stuff to give to the poor like food and clothes and things they haven't got?'

‘No,' said Ffiona. ‘We buy stuff that we haven't got like designer clothes and PlayStations and nice shoes.'

‘I think that's probably bad.'

‘Not for us,' said Ffiona. ‘And we could have brilliant highwayman costumes with, like, black velvet masks with diamonds on, and big leather boots.'

‘And horses?' said Betty, who was maybe, perhaps, possibly, beginning to warm to the idea. ‘Could we have horses?'

‘Could do,' said Ffiona, ‘though I think I'd favour high-speed motorbikes, but we could use horses in Central Park or if we go out to the country.'

‘Have you got any pictures of the black velvet masks?'

‘I have, actually.'

So it was decided. The two girls would become highwaymen, or rather, highwaywomen or, to be even more accurate, highwaygirls, which sounded rubbish, so they agreed to stick with highwaymen.

Unlike the twins, who started their betting with five dollars, and Winchflat and the Maranzio triplets, who started their share dealing with some creative lies, Betty and Ffiona's project required a much larger investment, and as each student had only been given fifty dollars to start with, they instantly ran into a problem.

‘Do you know how much a horse costs in New York?' said Betty. ‘It's ridiculous. They're way more expensive than motorbikes and we haven't got enough to buy a bicycle. I mean, even a couple of black velvet masks will cost more than we've got.'

‘Where there's a will there's a way,' said Ffiona. ‘Obviously the first things we need to steal from the rich are horses, motorbikes and black velvet masks.'

‘There are horses in Central Park,' said Betty. ‘You can have a ride in a horse-drawn carriage and there are policemen on horseback too.'

Central Park was a long way from the Summer School campus, too far to walk, so the girls decided to steal a motorbike. That created another problem.

‘Do you know how to drive a motorbike?' said Ffiona.

‘Not as such, but I do know how to drive a flying broomstick,' said Betty. ‘It can't be that different.'

One of the rules of Summer School was that no students were allowed to take flying broomsticks. There had been protests from students and parents. After all, broomsticks are super environmentally friendly. The resources they use up are one stick, a bundle of twigs and a bit of string, and they don't need any fuel to run. But they were banned in New York because it was decided the sight of children flying around the city on brooms would totally freak out the human population and probably cause a lot of accidents with people driving their cars into things and people walking into signposts.

‘Not to mention all the dogs trying to run away with them, like they did when we had that school trip to Paris last year,' the Headmaster had said. ‘There are still three poodles missing who grabbed hold of them and were carried off into the clouds before their owners could call them back.'

After they had watched a few motorbikes drive past, the girls decided that maybe it was not quite the same as flying a broom.

‘OK then,' said Ffiona, ‘why don't we start with the black velvet masks? They can't be difficult to get.'

But compared to Transylvania Waters, New York is useless for shopping. As incredible as it may seem, there is not a single branch of DisGuys'n'Gals, where you can buy everything the well-dressed witch or wizard would want to wear from pointy hats to turbo wands.
¹⁸
In fact, a search of several blocks failed to turn up a single shop where you could buy even a simple black velvet mask.

That night Betty and Ffiona were still at the bottom of the list. They had spent the entire day on their highwayman plans and hadn't actually made a single cent between them, apart from the single cent
Ffiona had picked up in the gutter. The twins, on the other hand, had another great day at the races and made another million-plus dollars.

The two girls were too embarrassed to tell anyone what they'd been doing. In Transylvania Waters even a two-year-old could find a black velvet mask. So if they'd told anyone, they'd have been a laughing-stock.

The next morning they crept out of the building before anyone else was up. Over a bowl of porridge in Auntie Crab's Greasy Spoon Diner down an alley across the street, they decided what to do next.

‘What is a mask for?' said Ffiona.

‘To hide your face, so no one can tell who you are,' said Betty.

‘Exactly, and we can't find any, can we?'

‘So what are you suggesting?'

‘Improvisation,' said Ffiona.

Ffiona took a thick black texta out of her pocket and drew a mask on Betty's face.
¹⁹
She then
handed the pen to Betty to do the same for her. This would not have fooled anyone who knew them for an instant, but they were not going to rob people they knew.

‘This whole disguise thing a bit pointless,' said Betty. ‘In fact, it's actually the opposite of a disguise.'

‘How?' said Ffiona.

‘Well, if people we've robbed go to the police and the police ask them what we looked like and they say, “They had pretend masks drawn on their faces,” as soon as we set foot outside looking like this we'll be arrested,' said Betty. ‘We're certainly going to be the only two children in New York looking like that.'

‘Good point,' said Ffiona. ‘But if we weren't the only two, then it would be a brilliant disguise.'

‘Meaning?'

‘What if all the children the same age as us had black masks drawn on their faces?'

‘How on earth are we going to do that?' said Betty.

‘Duh, you're a witch, remember,' said Ffiona. ‘You can do magic spells. Couldn't you make a spell so every kid wakes up tomorrow with a black mask?'

‘Yes, of course. Brilliant,' said Betty.

‘Why didn't you just use magic to give us masks,' said Ffiona, ‘instead of us having to muck about with textas?'

‘You know my magic sort of doesn't always come out exactly how I plan,' Betty explained. ‘When I was little I tried to make a Hello Kitty mask appear on my face and I ended up with a bright ginger beard. Which I can tell you is not a good look for a five-year-old, boy or girl. Mum was furious and made me keep it for a month before she magicked it away. Dad was even more cross because I kept using his razor and made it go all blunt.'

‘You don't think all the children in New York will get ginger beards, do you?' said Ffiona.

‘Who knows?' said Betty. ‘Be a bit of a laugh if they did, wouldn't it?'

Although Betty was a witch and could do magic, most of her spells didn't come out exactly as she planned.
²⁰
She had once turned a small boy into a big fridge when all she had intended to do was give him a fright. On that occasion the result had been a good one. The boy had been vile and made a far better contribution to society as a fridge than he ever would have done as a human.

This time, however, no one was delighted at the outcome.

The next morning, every single child in New York woke up with a mask. The masks were not black but bright red like super-neon luminous tomatoes. That alone wouldn't have been a problem. The two girls could simply have repainted their mask to match. No, the problem was where the mask had appeared. They were not covering the top half of their faces, but splashed across every child's bottom.

‘I don't know what all the fuss is about,' said Betty after she had Ffiona had re-coloured their
own masks red. ‘At least they're not all hairy.'

Mothers across New York panicked and traffic came to a total stop as they tried to drive their much-too-big cars with their screaming children in the back to the nearest hospital. The city was thrown into complete chaos.

The children were not in any pain, but it did appear that the red mask-shaped patches on their bottoms were growing bigger and bigger and a rumour ran round the city that once the two halves of mask met and joined up, you would die. This, of course, was complete rubbish and all everyone would have had to do was wait for a few days until the marks began to fade away. But at the time, no one, not even Betty, knew that and panic spreads very quickly nowadays with newspapers and television all desperate to grab the headlines by turning a simple cold into a plague that is threatening to wipe out the whole world in fourteen minutes.

 

Nobody can get a simple cold or a dose of the flu any more. People get struck down with Goldfish-flu
or the terrible vegetarian illness called Toflu. If you catch Vegetarian Toflu, you become terminally smug and everyone near you is at risk of dying of boredom. One sneeze these days and everyone expects tens of thousands of people to drop dead from a new and much-deadlier-than-the-last-outbreak-which-was-actually-fairly-harmless virus. If you cough while you're bending down to tie your shoelace and get run over by a car, the newspapers are guaranteed to scream, ‘Pandemic Claims Another Victim!!!!'

 

Schools closed, in case the new mystery disease was catching. Shops and streets were deserted. All the goldfish were flushed down toilets because some idiot said the outbreak was being transferred by them.

‘Stands to reason, doesn't it?' said a leading doctor. ‘The outbreak manifests itself in bright red weals and goldfish are orange, which is nearly red.'

‘Maybe it's being spread by mailboxes,' said a professor of rubbish from some learned institution. ‘They're red.'

So everyone panicked for no sensible reason at all and stopped posting letters.

‘Oops,' said Betty.

She felt rather guilty so at the Summer School meeting that evening, she admitted what had happened. Instead of getting into trouble, most of the other students and staff thought it was hilarious and went out and committed an enormous amount of highway robbery by disguising themselves as health officials with fake Red Plague Scanners and telling all the distressed mothers that they had located the germs and would have to remove the source immediately in order to irradiate it and kill the germs before they spread.

Amazingly, the source was always inside handbags, particularly in the wallet area.

‘Humans are so pathetic,' said the Headmaster. ‘Why, I have had the bubonic plague for the past twenty-three years and it's never done me any harm.'

‘It's not like this is causing any real harm, either,' said the Matron. ‘I remember a similar outbreak
in Scotland many years ago when everyone's arms turned tartan.'

‘My favourite one was in 1987,' said the Cook. ‘The one in Belgium when everyone's legs turned back to front. If I remember rightly that was caused by one of the Floods too.'

‘Do you mean that I'm not the only one who has magic go wrong?' said Betty.

‘Oh no,' said the Matron. ‘Your family's famous for it. Happens in all top wizard families. And after all, your father is King of our beloved Transylvania Waters. You don't get much topper than that. The Belgian leg affair happened when your Great-Aunt Florinse tried to turn a ginger kitten into a tabby.'

‘No one ever told me that,' said Betty. ‘It would have been reassuring to know I inherited Clumsy Magic.'

‘But coming back to our current problem,' said the Headmaster, ‘we need to discuss the situation. And by discuss, I mean, of course, work out all the ways we can profit from it.'