Muggles Bereaved Read online

  Some rabbit avatars returning from work in the nearby carrot fields were delayed by her antics and became quite nippy. They had already suffered wormhole maintenance delays and now they were being held up by a scruffy girl in oversized clothing which she had to keep hitching up. Rabbits were only human, after all. Yes, surprising, isn’t it. Rabbits were only human. The world likes to hear about shape-shifters, skin-shifters and transmogrodons. It enjoys shivering at word of predatory Orcs. But rabbits are one step removed again. Beyond goblins and trolls and well into the Wonderland realms of that naïve little girl Alice. So next time you take a pot shot at a rabbit, think hard. They are only human.

  Now all this slimming activity had taken place in cyberspace on an iPad in the bedroom. But when Tracy cast the iPad aside and stood up, her trousers and knickers simply fell to the floor. A quick check in the one small mirror in her dressing table drawer confirmed to her delight that the weight loss was not a figment of an iPad game, but very real. She was looking at a girl with bare, slender legs that reached up into a huge baggy top that hung like a discarded bell tent. She was slim!

  When Tracy went downstairs, clutching her trousers with one hand,, her mother was puzzled by the slim girl in baggy clothes who walked into the living room having come down from upstairs. She took some persuading that this was indeed her Tracy and not a girl who had been on a sleep-over. This was only accomplished after some hours of interrogation about intimate family matters which only Tracy would know. Mother was forced to unlock and enter the closed world of the family’s black sheep.

  “And what is it about great Uncle Edrich that we do not tell anyone outside the family.”

  “Mo-other! Uncle Edrich met his wife coming out of the Brownbin Mustard factory arm in arm with her co-worker and lover and he blew her head off with his shotgun. It was a Purdy 20 gauge, side by side shotgun worth about £40,000.”

  Tracy’s mother, Emily Anne Emmendale, shuddered at the casual, rat-a-tat-tat of Tracy’s telling of the tale. So matter of fact, so abrupt and brazen. Tracy clearly took after her father who was a wham-bam-sorry-Ma’am character in so very many ways. But did Tracy know of the lover’s demise.

  *And what did he do to the lover?”

  Tracy sighed her irritation. “He shot him in the nether regions and he bled to death in the street.”

  “And what about Ma Begley?”

  “Ma Begley was your maternal great grandmother and she remarried Albert Begley the embezzler of the Credit Union funds.”

  The interrogation went on in this vein and Tracy’s father joined in.

  “I have a tattoo on my thigh that is only visible when we go to the lido in the summer. What does it depict?”

  “It is a picture of somebody called Eartha Kitt dressed in a leopard skin patterned cat-suit who was a singer with a voice like rolling thunder. Your words.”

  Eventually all were satisfied. Discussion then turned to explaining Tracy’s dramatic weight loss. Tracy attributed it to a miracle which had happened as she was passing the Catholic church of Our Lady of the Services Trois Pièces. Tracy knew that her mother would believe this, absorbing nothing beyond the words ‘Catholic Church’. She would, and did, cross herself and genuflect with a gasp of wonder, despite her PhD. Tracy’s father, who knew a bit about that church and its priests and their habits, was a lot more sceptical. But he was not about to contradict Emily Anne when she was in transcendental mode. To deny the existence of miracles would see him in the spare bedroom for a year at least. And she would have a very special diet available for a recalcitrant husband. It was not just Timothy Lumsden in “Sorry!” who risked curried porridge for breakfast.

  It was agreed that the world in general did not need another Catholic miracle, whatever benefits might accrue to the King’s Lynn tourist trade. No-one relished the idea of thousands of pilgrims camped along Keppel Street hoping for a glimpse of the sainted Tracy. It was further agreed that she should stay off school and totally incommunicado for at least a week on the false grounds of the severest food poisoning or a variety of Sprue, which Tracy’s father, an ex-Chindit, was well aware of from his time in the jungles of Southern Gondwanaland. The idea of food poisoning being unleashed in her house upset Tray’s mother who prided herself on her hygiene. It sent her into an OCD paroxysm of counting the cutlery, the crockery and all the lumps of coal in the woodshed. But she emerged somewhat subdued from this exercise covered in coal dust, the coal being an unused hangover from a previous occupier’s fetish for open fires.

  It was conceded that severe illness was the only believable excuse and letters were written to the school and to the key gossips down the street. It was also agreed that Tracy need not be grounded but must use the gate from the rear yard after first ascertaining that the coast was clear. She no longer looked like ‘fat’ Tracy and might be mistaken for a visiting cousin. The ability to go out was necessary to the acquisition of new clothes and shoes.

  Tracy knew that Lim and Jim had seen so many mysterious happenings in the last few weeks that they would readily believe what had happened to her. She phoned them late at night from her bedroom, forsaking the usual texting as she wanted no internet record of events. When she put down the phone, she was not sure that Lim and Jim did believe her, after all. She had had to endure a further interrogation demanding total recall of recent ‘doings’ of the Companions of The Order of the Spectacles. It only stopped when she recalled how Lim had bruised her bosom with his levitation smash and grab. The boys and the entire school would soon see her in the flesh. In less flesh, of course, and in baggy clothes unless her mother could get out with her and buy a replacement uniform and a few other necessary items like knickers that did not slip off when she walked.

  This suited Tracy’s mother very well. She had always wanted a girl who was pretty and elegant and could carry off clothes as well as any of those skinny models who she described wonderingly as ‘mere clothes hangers’. Her Tracy had achieved her slim elegance by means other than self-starvation and eating tissues for lunch. There was much measuring and checking, made easier by the fact that Tracy was more or less the same size as her mother now. In fact she used one of her mother’s ‘little black dresses’ for their shopping expeditions. This was the first outing that dress had had since father was dined out of the officer’s mess in Huntingdon. The choice of new clothing from the M&S Young Miss range also turned out to be quite inspired and Tracy was soon pimping and preening before her adoring family. This was an M&S store in another universe, you understand, not the M&S you are used to, where men’s trousers come in two shades of drab, black and less black. In Tracy’s universe, the alternate Brooke Shields was the face and figure of M&S. So “Young Miss” did not have a cynical, sarcastic, alternative meaning at all.

  “Blimey, Trace,” said her dad, seeing the new clothing, “you are drop dead gorgeous, girl.”

  A week later, Tracy, made paler by a thin, brushed film of talcum powder, returned to school and entered into a new round of interrogation, especially from suspicious teachers who had a legal responsibility to identify cases of malnutrition and neglect as well as bulimia and anorexia. They were only assuaged after seeing what Tracy could tuck away at school dinner, an exercise mounted by Tracy as a diversion, for she no longer had an addiction to carbohydrates or protein. Tracy found the unwanted attention of certain boys the more irritating. They were boys who had mocked her as a fatty and yet now expected to be able to date her as if nothing had ever happened. She was very glad to have the Companions of the Order of the Spectacles as almost literal bodyguards. She noted anxiously that Jim seemed totally in awe of her if not a little scared.

  “Never mind,” Lim told Tracy when Jim departed for yet another period of detention, “Jim has always had the hots for you and he now thinks you are too beautiful to have anything to do with a snub-nosed and freckled young red-head like him. Which you are, of course.”

  “He needs to keep his mind on the mission,” said Tracy, who was nevertheless ti
ckled pink. “And he needn’t worry. I might have it, but I am not flaunting it. I just want to be able to run from tigers faster than both of you! What about the mission?”

  “Well, Jim actually came up with a pretty good idea, one we might usefully adopt. Just as soon as we have all mastered our new powers. Not that your slimming trick will do much good, unless you plan to become a stick insect so that you can squeeze through the airfield’s palisade railings.”

  “It isn’t a power as such,” said Tracy, “It was a sort of gift from another universe.”

  “Gifts usually have givers,” said Lim with considerable sagacity, “had you thought of that?”

  “The ‘giver’ as you call him was one Baldering Semapro. He is some sort of hypnotist in a universe labelled F451.”

  “I see.” Lim did not ‘see’ at all, but it was an expression his father used when he wanted to look like the great sleuth Hercule Poirot. His father could be a real ’ham’ when it came to acting.

  “But how did you access another universe and how did you know its number? Did you dial it up on a cellphone app?

  “No, not at all. I got a text message inviting me to visit a web site.”

  “A text message? From who?” Lim knew that he should have said ‘from whom’ but that would sound daft and pretentious.

  “Dunno,” said Tracy, realising that she wasn’t a total cleverdick after all. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask. And when they examined her phone, the message was long gone.

  But Lim was right. Gifts usually have givers and often come with strings attached. That had not occurred to Tracy at all. Something she keenly desired had been handed to her on a plate, almost as if in answer to a prayer. And she had prayed about it a lot, and tearfully and earnestly too. Did God send a text? She did not think so. God would never manifest Himself with a name like Baldering Semapro. Maybe it was some soul-mate in another universe. Wait, maybe even another version of Jim in a parallel existence, an older and undoubtedly wiser Jim, but red-headed and freckled nonetheless. This was becoming a bit too spooky and mind bending. But Lim was thinking other thoughts and no longer listened to Tracy. He was half hoping that his nose might be able to shrink and straighten out. Maybe, just maybe, he would get luxurious curly pubes too, and a correction to his vision enabling him to throw away his contacts. He made a mental note to pray for an introduction to Baldering Semapro and an inter-universal cosmetic surgeon.

  “If you are good at praying and have a link to another world, perhaps you could seek out a Superpower that might be of some use,” Said Lim.

  Lim did not realise that this was phrased quite hurtfully, and that the superpower was the most useful thing the female populations of every Universe would die for. But Tracy knew that there was simply not any malice in him. It was just the remnants of a Chinese directness. Chinese tourists used expressions like “Give me, la” when sweets were being handed round. Some exchange students from Gondwanaland-Chine had nearly caused a riot in school with their ‘Chinglish’. Once matters were explained, everyone could see the humour in the clash of cultures. It was also amusing that the Chinese stumbled into malapropisms that confused ‘kitchen’ and ‘chicken’ and ‘ankles’ and ‘knuckles’. The question “Why skinheads wear jeans above knuckles?” brought the house down. And when there was a commotion in the school yard because of a scuffle involving a flurry of punches, this was reported as “a fluffy of activity.” Not that Lim made such mistakes, for his English and his accent were impeccable. When asked politely on the basis of almond eyes alone, “Where in China do you come from?”, he would reply gravely, “King’s Lynn.” It was, after all, his place of birth on planet Rowling in this universe, 633S. Now I know you think Lim was in universe B25Z, but, as Isaac Newton would one day reveal in his treatise “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia et Alterna Universi”, universes tend to flip-flack with an alternate. The behaviour is named after the flip-flack spider found in northern Gondwanaland. This spider “actually turns itself into a kind of wheel and doubles the speed of its movement when it senses danger”. Honest. Just Oogle it. Universes do not ‘sense danger’, but they definitely flip-flack. Proved beyond doubt by Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp. You won’t be able to Oogle that proof because the space-time crease affecting that era carries flip-flack forward in time. Just trust me on that. Hale-Bopp flip-flack theory will win a Nobel prize.

  Tracy took Lim’s advice home and prayed earnestly that she might receive some Superpower to add to the Companions’ arsenal. They really needed a can of stealth paint or one of those mythical invisibility cloaks. Lim, meanwhile prayed for his inter-galactic, inter-universe cosmetic surgeon. He tried to direct the prayer across to universe F451 and to Baldering Semapro. Like most of the ‘manifestations’ recently experienced, the prayers went out but there was no ‘bursting-out’ of answers. Not yet.

  Chapter Five – Rowling to the Rescue

  The Rowling Nations Institute gave them a part solution to their problem. This agency had been founded to draw the Muggles together and to regulate international affairs and provide peace-keeping resources. The blue berets of Rowling troops could be found on every continent and at every flash point and the committees of ‘The Rowling’ kept tabs on all developments that might give rise to conflict between nations. The current Secretary General of The Rowling, Rudyard Kipling, the poet and author, was very keen on transparency in government. The British Government, which was swaggeringly confident of its own propriety, was more than a little miffed when His Excellency the Secretary General demanded that the mysterious facility at Sculthorpe in Angle-land should be opened to the taxpaying public. A Brit seeking the revealing of British secrets? It was unheard of and probably treasonable. But Rudyard Kipling could not be deflected from his purpose. He had seen too much misery in the application of high technology weapons to indigenous peoples across Gondwanaland. Eventually, a surly British government, blinded by the glare of the spotlights of the media, yielded. They agreed that there should be an Open Day at Sculthorpe in September, giving the Companions just two months to refine their plans. It also gave the British Government time to fly out its most secret research items and aircraft and to ‘sanitise’ facilities and people. Unfortunately for the British Government, it relied on CForceS, despite their track record on Olympic security and private prisons. Somebody, somewhere and some-when should investigate the link between UK governments and CForceS. Just saying.

  For several weeks, the Companions had taken to cycling out to Scunthorpe and picnicking outside the perimeter fence. They picked a spot at the crossroads between the B1454 and A148 near to the Cock and Pullet and its grocery store. They had a pair of binoculars, a telescope, their camera phones, a circular ‘pop-up’ tent, a canvas windbreak and some plastic ground sheets. They sat on the edge of the road and they took it in turns to mount watch. It was a pretty exposed location and the Norfolk winds tried hard to sweep them away. But on a sunny day, they had a sense of being way back in history, with the flyers who had been based at this, one of scores of airfields across East Anglia. The flowers spoke of history as did the buzz of bees and the scuttling weasels and stoats. But at least one of the ‘bees’ was an RAF surveillance drone equipped with cameras. The companions remained unaware of it, or of the operator’s seeming fascination with Tracy rather than the boys. Surveillance options should never be in the hands of bored, unsupervised erks.

  Their latest picnic coincided with a fleet of CForceS lorries leaving the Sculthorpe base with a heavy Air Force Regiment guard and under a wealth of flapping tarpaulin, applied with customary CForceS ‘concern’ for stealth. The convoy was forced to pull up at the Four Winds Crossroads when one of the local ‘flat Capps’ contrived to lodge his Skoda under the side of a tractor and trailer on the junction. This was the kind of aged driver Lim’s dad described as “The Living Dead” whenever he encountered one, which was every time he eased his un-parkable Volvo off the family driveway. Short of bulldozing the accident and victim off the junction, the convoy
had to wait with drivers tapping fretfully on their phones and guards alert with prickling, adrenalin-fuelled anxiety. It would be just like the Air Force to mount a security test in the middle of a real, covert action.

  Unpredictably, the accompanying Air Force Regiment riflemen rushed forward to the accident, overcome with a desire to ‘rubberneck’. In doing so, they momentarily neglected their primary task. They swept forward like a sea going out before the onset of a Tsunami and would only sweep back again with the wreckage of their operation. Each airman felt a need to remonstrate with, rescue or observe the demise of the trapped motorists. This varied according to their personal sense of empathy or sociopathy. Our valiant Jim and Lim, much more mission-oriented, leapt up, scurried to the low loaders and peered under the flapping tarpaulins. The third low-loader carried a wide load, heavily wrapped, but with an unmistakeable shape. It was a barely concealed saucer shape, the wind having shifted some poorly secured pallets designed to mask the outlines.

  The companions were soon spotted and forced to run back to their bicycles by a squaddie in the lead wave of the returning Tsunami. He shouted. “Hey, you, get your noses out or I’ll be forced to shoot you.” That squaddie was one of the sociopathic ones. But just a mock-sociopath with teenagers of his own.