The Young Dictator Read online

  Mum frowned down. “London?”

  “Of course. You have to go to Parliament. You’ve won the by-election now and your job involves living in London and working with the other elected politicians and the Prime Minister.”

  Mum considered this and then shook her head. “No, I don’t really like that idea. I think that maybe the government should move here instead. In fact, this Town Hall can be the location.”

  “That’s not how it’s done,” objected Jenny.

  “Really? And who are you to tell me what to do? You’re nothing but a little flesh girl. I am the wooden ruler of Carrington, soon to be dictator of the country and then the world! Ha ha ha!”

  “You remind me of myself when I was younger,” said Jenny.

  Jenny sat with her arms folded on the sofa in the lounge of her house. The television in front of her showed nothing but bad news. Mum was getting up to all sort of mischief and uniformed bullies were running around with giant spiders, breaking things and arresting people. Sighing, Jenny picked up the remote control and switched it off.

  Dad came into the lounge with a tray on which stood two mugs of tea. He passed one to Jenny, who accepted it.

  “Why so glum?” Dad enquired.

  “I feel responsible for all the chaos of the past few weeks,” said Jenny as she blew on her drink and sipped it. “I guessed that the model of Mum was mad right from the beginning, but how was I to know she would go so completely insane? She’s terrible.”

  “Your mother always was a headstrong character.”

  “True, but things are really bad at the moment. All those politicians in London forced to walk all the way to Carrington while carrying Big Ben on their shoulders. No wonder half of them dropped dead on the way! It’s a stupid idea to relocate the government here. You know something? I’m starting to hope her spring winds down.”

  “That’ll never happen. Frampton said she’s immortal.”

  Jenny was exasperated. “That was what I feared. What shall I do now? Shall I try to damage her mechanism?”

  “Why do anything? I’m sure your mother knows best.”

  “I expected you to say that.”

  “Your powers of prediction are amazing!”

  “I can’t stop myself from wondering if Gran is behind all this. I know that sounds farfetched, but farfetched things are usually true, more often true than things that aren’t farfetched.”

  “That’s a very farfetched thing to say.”

  “Which means it must be true.”

  Dad nodded. “I agree. The fact that we are here at all, that the universe exists, is pretty darn unlikely, isn’t it?”

  There was a noise outside. Jenny stood and went to the window and on the street she saw people running and giant spiders chasing them. Men in uniform ran after the spiders, urging them on. Webs were everywhere and the husks of dead or dying people were stuck on them in various positions like flies in disguise. Jenny sighed again.

  “I’m going to do something about this,” she said.

  “Like what?” Dad chuckled.

  “It was my fault that Mum turned into a tyrant. I came back here with the hope of enjoying a quiet life, but then I realised that a quiet life wasn’t the sort of thing I truly wanted, but things have become too exciting since the election. The chaos needs to be toned down. The fact of the matter is that I feel responsible and even ashamed.”

  Dad nodded wisely. “It’s normal for girls of your age to feel confused about all sorts of things, especially about guilt. You are starting to grow a conscience. It’s just a phase you are going through but you’ll snap out of it soon enough and become just as selfish and callous as you were before. That’s called ‘growing up’ and it happens eventually to everyone. It even happened to me, a very long time ago.”

  “All the same, I ought to do something. Perhaps I should declare war on Mum and do my best to destroy her?”

  “Just you on your own against her army of thugs and spiders? Jenny, you wouldn’t stand a chance. And you can’t kill Mum with a sword or a knife or anything like that because she doesn’t have any blood inside her and little girls shouldn’t be allowed to play with sharp objects anyway. It is better to forget about the whole thing.”

  Jenny licked her lips. “Mum does have one major weak point, though. She is made from matches, live matches.”

  Dad nodded. “That’s right. Millions of them.”

  “If one of those matches was set alight, the others would catch fire too and soon there would be an inferno where Mum once was. And to set one match on fire, all I need to do is scrape it with a piece of sandpaper. She would be destroyed in just a few minutes.”

  “How would you be able to get close enough to her to strike sandpaper on one of her matches? She doesn’t allow anyone to get near her anymore and I bet she doesn’t trust you,” said Dad.

  “I’ll have to find a way of doing it from a distance.”

  “Good luck,” said Dad ironically.

  Jenny walked out of the lounge and went upstairs to her room. She had a selection of tools there and Dad heard her hammering away, but he had almost no curiosity about her intentions.

  He sipped his tea and sat back on the easy chair and relaxed. His life’s work was done, he had finished the model of Mum, and whether or not it turned Carrington into a paradise or a disaster area wasn’t his concern. He had done everything he was destined to do.

  Jenny came back holding a long pole with a sheet of sandpaper nailed to the end. “This will extend my reach to four metres,” she said, “and I’ll be able to attack Mum from a safe distance.”

  “Sure, well done.” Dad had his eyes closed and was humming softly to himself. Jenny sneered at him and went out.

  She slammed the front door behind her and hurried down the street. It was a nightmarish and bizarre scene. She carefully avoided the webs and ducked behind any available cover whenever a uniformed man appeared. She knew that Mum had turned the Town Hall into her personal palace, a fortress where she kept politicians as slaves.

  Next to the Town Hall stood Big Ben. Why Mum had insisted that the clock tower should be relocated here was a mystery to Jenny. Probably it was just one of Mum’s whims, or maybe she didn’t trust the clocks and watches in the Town Hall itself. Big Ben loomed over the Town Hall and cast a long shadow over it as it boomed.

  Bong! Bong! Bong! Three o’clock. As fine a time for an assassination as any, Jenny decided. She approached the entrance of the Town Hall but was prevented from entering by the Lord Mayor, who was dressed in the menacing uniform designed by Jenny herself, with an armband displaying the symbol of lollipops bound together.

  “That’s far enough. Don’t you dare take another step.”

  “What do you mean?” cried Jenny. “Don’t you know who I am? And why have you changed sides? I mean, you were supposed to be neutral, a servant of the people. But now you are—”

  “A humble sentry,” snapped the Lord Mayor.

  “Bit of a comedown, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all. You see, I believe in Mum’s vision. Democracy made this country soft and even when you became a dictator the essential manners remained. People still assumed that everyone was equal. Well, Mum isn’t flesh and blood like you. She’s wooden and doesn’t have any weaknesses at all. Her regime will do away with equality and fairness. Democracy is for idiots. Tyranny is the best way!”

  “Your views are disgusting,” cried Jenny.

  “Weren’t your views similar, when you were in power?”

  “No… Yes… I mean, I was young and naïve and selfish back then and I didn’t know anything about the world or real life,” said Jenny. “I’m still young and naïve and selfish, of course, but I’ve learned a lot too. Trying to rule people is a tricky business because people are different even when it seems they are the same. It was supposed to be just a game and now it has got out of control and it’s wrong.”

  The Lord Mayor shook his head at these words.

  Jenny decided
to distract him.

  “Look over there!” she cried. “It’s a liberal!”

  “A liberal! Where? Where?” The Lord Mayor rapidly turned his head to gaze in the direction indicated by Jenny’s pointing finger, and while he was busy doing this, she poked the pole through the entrance until it was fully extended. Although she couldn’t see what she was doing, she moved it around anyway, hoping by chance to rub the sandpaper across the tip of one of Mum’s numerous matches…

  “I don’t see any liberals,” growled the Lord Mayor.

  “Behind that tree,” said Jenny.

  She moved the pole back and forth. Suddenly she felt an obstruction, a thing that moved and wasn’t an item of furniture. She vigorously rubbed the sandpaper against it with all her strength. The Lord Mayor’s ears were alerted by the rasping noise and he span rapidly on his heels. “Hey! What did I tell you? You absolute rotter!”

  “Too late!” chortled Jenny, dropping the pole.

  But no smoke poured out of the building. Clearly she hadn’t got Mum with the sandpaper but somebody or something else. The mystery of who this might be was soon solved. A massive spider came scuttling out of the door and its knees, angled high above its head, were brightly polished, all eight of them. Jenny swallowed dryly.

  “I seem to have made a mistake,” she said.

  The Lord Mayor nodded to the spider. “Get her!” he cried.

  The spider launched itself at Jenny.

  But she reacted quickly. “Skreet kreel kreekt!”

  It halted, blinked its eyes, then turned on the Lord Mayor. “Wait! I am the one giving you orders!” he wailed.

  “It doesn’t speak English I’m afraid,” said Jenny. “But I speak Spider and it clearly trusts me more than you.”

  The spider sank its fangs into the Lord Mayor’s neck, pumping poison into his veins. He began to turn blue all over, even his eyeballs, and swell up like a fruit, and Jenny thought he was going to explode and splatter her with a mixture of blood and venom.

  And in fact that’s what happened. It was horrible.

  Jenny made a disgusted face.

  But she didn’t have time to feel properly sick. A familiar figure marched stiffly out of the Town Hall. It was the matchstick Mum, come to learn what all the fuss was about. She stared at the deflated corpse of the Lord Mayor and then glowered at Jenny.

  “So you were the one who tried to assassinate me with sandpaper! I’m very disappointed with you, my girl.”

  “Nothing has changed then,” remarked Jenny.

  “How dare you attempt to depose me? I planned to get rid of you soon anyway, but now I think it should be done immediately. You’ve become a nuisance and a liability. And so—”

  “Your spiders won’t harm me now,” pointed out Jenny, “because they prefer humans who speak their language. In fact I would ask them to bite you if I thought it would have an effect.”

  “I’m immune to poison, of course,” said Mum.

  “Because you’re made of wood?”

  “Exactly. I don’t like bragging about it though.”

  “We’ll have to scrap with fists.”

  “Will we? I don’t think so. I have powers, my girl.”

  “Really? What are those then?”

  Mum drew herself up to her full artificial height. “Over the past weeks I have been teaching myself telekinesis, which is the art of making things move just through the power of my mind. Humans can’t do this because their brains are squishy, but my brain is a clockwork device installed by a goblin and is capable of the trick.”

  Jenny was impressed. “You can move any object?”

  Mum seemed a little abashed. “No, not any object. Not yet, at any rate. Just three kinds of things. Moonmoths first.” She shut her eyes and made a fierce face. “Come to mummy, dears!”

  For half a minute nothing happened. Mum clenched her jaw so tightly that it squeaked but Jenny thought she could feel the mental rays rippling away from her mind like sluggish radio waves. And then there was a very quiet but distinctive noise in the background.

  The rustling of delicate wings…

  From the direction of the river flapped a swarm of large moths. Jenny watched in horrified fascination as they fluttered towards her. Mum was shaking with the effort of controlling them. “Attack Jenny!” she croaked in a mean voice. “Attack her at once!”

  The moths circled Jenny’s head. One of them landed on her nose and tickled the tip of it, then flew off again.

  Jenny waited. The moths continued to fan her with their wings for two or three minutes, then they gave up. They started flying back to the places they had come from in zigzag patterns.

  “That wasn’t very effective,” commented Jenny.

  “Only one of my three weapons!” grumbled Mum. “I can also control umbrellas! Come to me, umbrellas of Carrington! Come to me and make mincemeat of this annoying little girl!”

  Again she squeezed her face with enormous effort for half a minute, a period of time in which Jenny looked around and tried to anticipate from which direction the new attack would come. North, south, east or west? The truth caught her by complete surprise.

  Up was the one direction she hadn’t looked…

  Descending from the sky was a rain of umbrellas. They landed around Jenny but none of them actually hit her. They settled on the ground like nesting crows and rolled back and forth.

  “Is that it?” Jenny asked with contempt when they stopped raining. It seemed that this second attack was even less effective than the first one, but Mum wasn’t to be put off so easily.

  “You poor fool! I also have control over oranges!”

  For the third time she concentrated as hard as she could, her eyelids creaking and her wooden facial muscles almost snapping. Jenny looked up in alarm. A rain of oranges would hurt a heck of a lot more than a rain of umbrellas or a formation of moonmoths.

  While she had her head craned upward, the attack came.

  The first orange trundled towards her.

  And now dozens of those spherical fruits rolled towards Jenny. They converged on her from greengrocer’s shops and supermarkets all over town. They rolled around her feet and came to a rest. She stamped on one of them and it burst, squirting juice into her eye. “Yow!” she yelped and Mum chuckled and rubbed her hands.

  “Ha! See how lethal a weapon these things are!”

  Jenny wiped her eye. “Finished?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have,” said Mum.

  “I’m going to snap you into tiny pieces,” promised Jenny.

  She prepared herself for the fight, but before she could even bunch her fingers into fists, an enormous shape loomed through the fluttering cloud of departing moonmoths. Jenny gasped.

  It was a brass statue thirty feet high. Was this Gran?

  “Hello there Jenny,” it rumbled.

  No, it wasn’t Gran. Not at all. It was…

  “Ralph! Why you here? You belong in Hell.”

  “I fancied a short break,” said Ralph, “so I thought I’d come to Earth and while I was here I decided to visit Carrington to see how you were. You seem to be in a spot of bother.”

  He looked at Mum and then winked at Jenny.

  Jenny nodded. “She’s a grotesque tyrant and wants to harm me. Break her into tiny pieces for me, would you?”

  “Sure thing,” said Ralph. He raised his right foot and brought it down directly on Mum’s head. She shattered into thousands of splinters and all her internal cogs spilled out and rolled away. Ralph stood on the pile of matchwood like an explorer, his metal hands on his brass hips, a smile of satisfaction on his hugely crude mouth.

  “Like that, you mean?” he enquired.

  “Thanks, Ralph. Sorry for killing the Devil, by the way. I realise how much you cared for him and I never apologised properly for making his head fall off. I was less mature back then.”

  “But love and loss are part of life,” replied Ralph.

  “That’s a very generous sentiment.”


  “It is rather, isn’t it? But what do you think of what I did to this robot who was harassing you with telekinesis?”

  “I’m grateful, that goes without saying, but—”

  “But what?” Ralph interrupted.

  “It’s something of an anticlimax,” said Jenny.

  “Yes, not all conflicts turn into lengthy affairs. They sometimes end in a sudden crash, bang, wallop of action.”

  Jenny nodded. They stared at each other. It was awkward.

  What was she supposed to do now?

  Invite him back to her house for a cup of tea?

  They didn’t have much in common.

  Ralph was equally at a loss for something to say. A spider crawled up his leg and clambered over his torso and began spinning a web under his armpit. “What a cute creature!” he said.

  Jenny saw her chance and she seized it. “We’re overrun with them. Do you want to take these spiders back to Hell with you? I mean, if they’ll be of any practical use to you, please do…”

  “How kind! How thoughtful! Yes, they are precisely the sort of thing I need to help me with my work. Thanks!”

  “Help yourself. Collect them before you go,” said Jenny.

  “I will. Much appreciated!”

  There was another awkward silence.

  Jenny opened her mouth to mutter something inane about the weather, but she was saved from debasing herself by the arrival of another unusual character, a bipedal cat exactly the same size as Ralph. It was Chairman Meow and he had expanded himself again.

  “Jenny! Seems I got here in the nick of time!” he cried.

  “No, it’s fine really, I don’t need—”

  But Chairman Meow had made his own assumptions about what was happening. “We’ve been worried about you for ages. You didn’t email or phone us. In the end, the Queen, Maya, Old Young Eyes and myself were convinced something bad had happened to you, so I volunteered to come here in person and find out for myself.”

  “That’s extremely sweet of you, but it wasn’t—”

  “I can see that you are being threatened by a massive brass man. Good job I have the power to shoot ice rays.”

  “It’s not necessary, really it isn’t,” said Jenny.