The Young Dictator Read online

  But her words were drowned out by the hostile roar that Ralph emitted into the furry face of Chairman Meow.

  They had taken an instant dislike to each other. Even without any kind of misunderstanding, they wouldn’t have got on. Chairman Meow raised his paw and his claws sprang out. Ralph bit the end off his forefinger and pointed it at the cat. “Die!” he boomed.

  “No, you die!” countered Chairman Meow.

  “No, you!” insisted Ralph.

  “I said it first!” screeched Chairman Meow.

  “No, you didn’t. I did.”

  “Die anyway, you brassy buffoon!”

  “Take this, fluffy fool!”

  At the same instant they discharged their respective weapons. It was a clash of opposites. Magma spurted from Ralph’s hollow finger, a trail of liquid fire; ice was projected from Chairman Meow’s claw, a solid beam of utter coldness. The two rays met in the middle. When fire and ice meet there’s always trouble. Bang! Hiss!

  Clouds of steam obscured the scene, reducing visibility to zero. Jenny was so alarmed that she reached into her pocket, took out her phone and called the emergency services. “Police! Town Hall! Quick!” she yelled into the mouthpiece. Then the mists parted and revealed something weird and entirely unexpected. A new friendship.

  Somehow, the clash of fire and ice had created peace.

  Like two opposite values cancelling each other out, a positive of heat and a negative of cold had equalled zero.

  Ralph and Chairman Meow were standing side by side like the best of old friends. Jenny watched in disbelief.

  “But I called the police!” she hissed.

  The siren of the police car grew louder as it approached, but the driver took one look at what confronted him and decided not to stop. He drove past as if he was going to another callout and hadn’t seen the giant brass man and equally large cat. In fact, he stepped on the accelerator pedal and zoomed away at a ludicrously fast rate.

  “He won’t sell many ice creams going at that speed,” Chairman Meow said and Jenny had the unsettling feeling that she had heard this comment before, but she couldn’t remember where.

  Then Ralph and Chairman Meow went off together. They headed for the horizon and didn’t stop until they reached it. But they used a strange method of getting there. It wasn’t a walk or a run, but a sort of dance, a skipping motion in which they waved their arms in a peculiar way and kicked up their legs. Neither of them looked back. Jenny remained silent as she watched them vanish. She sighed.

  “Neither of them even had the decency to say goodbye.”

  Head hanging low, she trudged home.

  “So you’ll be going back to London, will you?” Dad enquired, after Jenny arrived at her house and told him what had happened. She thought about this for a minute and then shook her head.

  “There’s nothing for me there,” she declared.

  “You want to live here permanently, I suppose?” Dad asked and it was obvious he loathed the idea. Jenny replied:

  “No, I’m not happy here in Carrington and I think it’s time I moved on to pastures new. I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the sea. Under the sea, you see, there’s an unknown world, a place few people have explored properly. Maybe it needs me as a ruler.”

  “Why would it need a ruler? It’s made of water. You can’t draw lines on water, neither straight nor curved.”

  “Are you feeling unwell?” Jenny asked.

  “Just a little run down. Don’t worry. Help is coming. Ruler of the sea, you say?” Dad looked dubious. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” said Jenny. She turned away and went up to her room. The idea about exploring the depths of the ocean had occurred to her as a joke but she considered it more carefully as she packed a suitcase. Why not? It might be good fun making friends with octopuses and squids and starfish. There was the problem of being able to breathe down there, but a solution would occur to her eventually, she was sure.

  She finished packing and closed the lid of the suitcase. Someone rang the doorbell and she went down to answer the door, but Dad had beaten her to it. He was inviting Frampton Plunk, the ticktocker inside. Frampton ignored Jenny as she stood frowning halfway on the stairs, but the goblin in his pocket peeked out and thumbed its little nose at her. She poked out her tongue in reply and it ducked back inside.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” Frampton asked Dad.

  “I think one of my cogs has lost some of its teeth,” answered Dad; and then to Jenny’s horror, he unbuttoned his shirt and revealed his bare chest and allowed Frampton to slide open a panel where his heart was. Springs and little wheels moved erratically inside him.

  “You’re a model as well?” Jenny gasped.

  “Yes, yes, didn’t I ever tell you?” Dad answered.

  “And made out of matchsticks too!”

  “Of course. They are a very versatile material for building clockwork robots with. I just need an occasional repair.”

  “For how long have you been artificial?”

  “What a daft question. Always!”

  “Who built you? Did you make yourself?” cried Jenny.

  “Don’t be silly! Whoever heard of anyone making themselves! Mum made me. It was long before you were born.”

  “I’m confused now,” admitted Jenny.

  “Well, that’s the whole point of growing up, isn’t it? To be confused at regular intervals about nearly everything.”

  “I suppose so,” said Jenny as she trudged down the remaining steps of the stairway, dragging her suitcase behind. She reached the door, but as she opened it Frampton leaned forward.

  “He’s wrong. I’m also wooden and I did make myself,” he hissed into her ear and then he smiled very smugly.

  Jenny said nothing. She was far too weary.

  She walked slowly to the train station and thought about her plans to make herself ruler of the underwater realms. Was it a feasible ambition? Probably not. All the more reason to try!

  The streets were mainly deserted. A few giant spiders scuttled about but most had returned to the basement of the Town Hall, where they felt more at home. Bones lay scattered everywhere, rubble and debris made walking difficult. She constantly had to pick her way over obstacles and take detours down roads she didn’t know at all. At long last she saw the façade of the train station in the distance.

  She bought a ticket for Brighton. If she was going to learn how to live in water that seemed a good place to start.

  Waiting on the platform, she thought again about Gran. She couldn’t believe that Gran had been so easily defeated. Jenny had a feeling that she was being watched and she was convinced it was Gran watching her, but not watching her in the normal sense, from the outside. Watching her in some other way that she couldn’t describe.

  Jenny shook her head in dismay. Her fears that Gran had turned into the model of Mum had proved groundless; so too her momentary belief that she had transformed into Ralph. So where was she? Jenny couldn’t prove anything, but she had a hunch that Gran had become large, really enormous, bigger even than the brass man.

  She stood on the platform and continued to wait.

  Had she been able to watch herself from above she would have seen a young girl who was standing with her chin in her hands, deep in thought. Rising higher, she would have seen that girl shrink in size, becoming just a speck in a fairly average ordinary town.

  Rising yet higher, like a spirit, she would find herself gazing down on the island of Britain through the clouds; and then down on the continent of Europe. Soon she would be out of the atmosphere, watching the world dwindle to a ball, a berry, a dot. And then the solar system itself, so large from the perspective of those who live in it, would shrink to a point. And the galaxy itself, a rapidly contracting spiral.

  Continuing this journey into infinity, she would have seen clusters of galaxies, one of which was the Milky Way, converging and dwindling to nothing, and more clusters appearing and dwindling, and so on and so on, until at last she
realised that she had finally left spacetime altogether and was staring at the entire universe from outside.

  And then she would know. For the universe had a definite shape and the shape wasn’t the one anyone might expect. It was a head, the head of an ancient evil woman. The head of Gran.

  A head that could blink and open its mouth, displacing trillions of stars and planets as it did so, and utter a laugh.

  The biggest and deepest laugh in the history of creation.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

  That is what Jenny would have seen.

  Luckily for her, she didn’t.

  T H E E N D

  Glossary of Difficult Words

  Young readers won’t have any trouble, but some of the words used in this book might be a bit difficult for adults to understand, so the publisher asked me to include a glossary to help explain the meanings of the more unfamiliar terms. Here is that glossary and here are the words.

  Glossary. A list of difficult words, often including the word ‘glossary’.

  Vegan. A person who only eats vegetables and fruit, whether this is for religious, ethical, aesthetic or health reasons.

  Aesthetic. In accordance with the principles of good taste. Gran, for example, is not aesthetic but Chairman Meow is.

  By-Election. When a politician dies, people wave bye-bye to him or her and then hold an election to find a replacement.

  Parliament. A building where politicians gather to squabble.

  Squabble. To fight in the style of a seagull.

  Soya. A kind of bean. Very nutritious. Eaten by vegans. The correct way to use this word is as follows: “I soya eating that bean!”

  Polling Station. A place where ordinary citizens go to cast their votes during elections. Some people say that there’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary citizen’ and that we are all unique. This is true but missing the point somewhat.

  Ambassador. A person who is chosen to live abroad and talk in the accent of the place he or she comes from while eating chocolates.

  Alchemist. A person who tries to change one thing into another by using secret recipes and strange experiments that usually fail.

  Goblin. Gnome. Leprechaun. Troll. Orc. Moleman. These are all examples of mythical beings with the exception of ‘gnome’, which is real and lives in gardens, and ‘troll’, which is also real and thrives on the internet.

  Haggle. To gently argue about the price of something in order to pay less.

  Tax Money. This is money that people pay to politicians so that politicians can do their work. The work of a politician often involves trying to force people to pay more tax money.

  Theorist. Someone who knows about something they have never seen.

  Octahedron. A three-dimensional shape with eight identical sides. Each side is a triangle. It looks like two pyramids stuck together base to base.

  Atlantis. A legendary land that sank under the sea because of global warming and took everything down with it. Thousands of years later hats, food, dogs, computers, octahedrons and even global warming had to be reinvented.

  Federation. A group of friendly countries or planets who work closely together in order to outdo each other.

  Submachine Gun. A machine gun specially designed for use inside submarines.

  Hypnotically. Hypnosis is a science that involves swinging a watch on a chain and making the person who is watching the watch eat a raw onion.

  Raw Onion. A boiled onion before it is boiled.

  Atmosphere. This is the mix of air that one finds at parties and concerts. If the atmosphere is good, people have a great time. If the atmosphere is bad, people stand around awkwardly. The astronauts who landed on the moon discovered that the moon has no atmosphere. This is because they forgot to take beer and cakes and music.

  Herbal Tea. This is tea that doesn’t taste like tea.

  Queasy Feeling. This is the feeling that most people get after they have eaten too many raw onions and drunk too much herbal tea.

  Garrison. The male child of a garridad and garrimum.

  Garridad. Garrimum. Mythical creatures like goblins, leprechauns, orcs, etc.

  Twiddling. This is what experts do with dials. It can also be done with thumbs but care must be taken not to twiddle them beyond the point of no return. A thumb that has been twiddled beyond that point can never be poked into a pie. This is known as the Rule of Thumb.

  Chocolate Medallion. The sort of thing ambassadors eat.

  Neutron Star Hearts. A neutron star is a star that is so dense that one teaspoon of it would weigh as much as ten billion exaggerations. The heart of such a star is the densest part. It is so dense that it can’t even count to ten, let alone to ten billion. A teaspoon made out of a piece of neutron star would stir a cup of tea, herbal or otherwise, with immense difficulty.

  Crossbow. This is a very annoyed bow.

  Anticlimax. When the ending of something isn’t as good as you hoped it would be. For instance the ending of a glossary that just trails off...

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  Table of Contents

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