Grey Lynn Park

for Matea, Billie & Effy

PART ONE

THAT SOMETIMES HAPPENS

A BILL STORY

Billie. Are you ready? This is a story about Bill who dropped vegetables from the sky. Bill did this not because people were hungry, or vegetarian, but because he was crazy like the Irish. Also he had the aeroplane Zelda, and a great big vegie garden. Anyway, Bill reckoned, some people needed a lettuce leaf smack them on the head from a thousand feet more than food. Or they needed a vegie garden so they could smack themselves on the head. And then they’d need an aeroplane so as to drop their vegies from a great height, and have fun themselves. But then they’d have to land straightaway in order to be hit by their own vegetables.

It was all too complicated. Better Bill did the job himself.

Of course, Bill had a near limitless supply of organic vegies from his hydroponic glasshouse and associated outdoor garden which were both dedicated to the cause of producing aerodynamic and highly accurate heat-seeking vegetables.

Today’s what? Monday? Of course, Mondays were usually Bill’s day off. But instead of relaxing in his shed working on the trap-door mechanism of the honest and trustworthy Zelda, or even designing some kind of advanced stealth vegetable capable of launching itself on a whim and turning people purple when it hit them.. instead of any of these things, or any other thing, Bill dragged Zelda grudgingly from the shed (for it was her day off too), climbed into the cockpit, pushed the button that said “I’d rather be in the sky,” and took off down Elgin Street.

Elgin Street was a difficult street to take off from as it had a slope down towards the park and then a sharp rise to Williamson Avenue. Also, a bit of a dogleg at the beginning. And then there might be a neighbour driving to or from home, or some extraneous person with no good reason to be there at all.

Too bad. Bill flew up high above the city and circled once so as to have a good look at the day. No. Today he would not bomb cars, or their perpetrators, or even their perpetrators’ pets. With not a vegetable on board, Bill veered south, following the motorway. To farmland. Country folk. Cows in paddocks. Sheep shit. Payload.

He landed in a field recently mown for hay and, coming to a halt near a fence, pulled back the cockpit of the single engine Zelda and climbed down. There was a barn to one side of the field, and a gnarled macrocarpa which at some time in the past had been butchered by some person knowing next to nothing about trees.

“Hay bales are vegetables,” thought Bill as he walked towards the barn.

Bill spent the rest of the day hand-picking cow pats and loading them into the cargo bay of the ever-patient Zelda, neatly stacked and ready for delivery. By the time Zelda was full up with cow pats it was nearly dark. Bill decided to light a fire and camp for the night. He and Zelda would camp together under the stars. Bill searched for kindling underneath the macrocarpa. He remembered he’d heard somewhere that cow pats were good to burn, but dismissed the idea. Once embers were established however, Bill finally succumbed to the burning cow pat idea and, having searched out an extra-dry, paddock-aged cow pat from his newly replenished aerial cellar, he threw it on the fire. Before too long Bill discovered the beautiful aroma that only city folk and the totally ignorant can know.

As you may be aware, Billie, country people themselves don’t burn cow pats. And I am not at all suggesting that Bill was ignorant.. only that he lived in the city. Just saying.

Sometime after dark a torchlight came bobbing across the field. It was Eliza Tenfold. Eliza, as it turned out, had seventeen hundred kids and had just put them all to bed. Now she was at a loose end. Mister Tenfold was rightly dozing in front of the TV. She’d come to see what an aeroplane was doing in the hay paddock.

Beside the fire Bill explained the problem. He’d stolen nearly all of their cow pats. He’d lit a fire without consulting the mafia. Someone had butchered the macrocarpa. Or, having passed through the stomachs of live animals, could cow pats still be considered vegetable? Besides which, aeroplane fuel had suddenly gotten cheaper. Vegetable bombing would inevitably catch on. Before too long, everyone would be doing it. Meanwhile, victims would be getting cleverer and cleverer. Top of that, according to the newspapers, the world’s sea levels were about to drop, opening up a whole lot more land. The worry was the fish would become too crowded. The jetties would all be in the wrong place.
“Could I tender a simple solution?” said Mrs Tenfold.
“I’d be glad if you did that,” replied Bill.
“My neighbour, Senseless Johnson.”
“That’d be Senseless who?”

Senseless Johnson himself turned up in the morning with A249. A249 had a yellow tag in her ear to prove who she was. A black cow with a white face. Senseless Johnson ran 450 hectares of sheep and cattle some way up the road. Up until now A249 had been mowing grass. The deal was done. Bill could grow his own cow pats. In return, Senseless Johnson and Mrs Tenfold required something extra special. A return favour.

Bill and his Angus-cross-Hereford cow became inseparable. Except when flying. Operating on the time-proven “drop first, think later” principle, Bill managed to teach A249 to glide. Out the bomb hatch she went, with her specially fitted orange suit, her customised wings and remote controlled parachute, and a full stomach of grass.
After a month of near daily practice, A249 could glide a full thirty miles and even control her own speed and flight by moving her legs.

There are accounts from various places scattered about the globe of unlikely items falling from the sky. Sudden downpours of frogs. Sideways blizzards of first edition copies of The Count of Monte Cristo. In the days of Moses as the bible tells us, somewhere in the Wilderness of Sin, bread fell from the sky.

Anyway, with Bill’s new gliding cow, that was the beginning of the random falling liquid cow pat saga.

As for that extra special favour for Eliza Tenfold and Senseless Johnson? Well Billie, we’ll have to see. That tale is for tomorrow. Go to sleep now, Billie. Sweet dreams. I’ll see you in the morning.



A BILLIE SNR STORY

Billie, as you know, A249 was the name of Bill’s flying cow. Now, as Bill didn’t own a car, and Zelda was too big to fit in the garage (she had her own special aeroplane shed), A249 got to go to sleep in the garage which Bill had converted into what might be described as the world’s first studio flat for bovines. Of course, A249 was quite possibly the world’s first flying cow, so there might have been a couple of firsts there.

I’m assuming you know that ‘bovines’ is a fancy word for cows. ‘Ruminants’ is another fancy name for cows. Some people like to use fancy words as it makes them appear intelligent. Other people wonder why we need fancy words at all, given they all pretty much mean the same thing as the regular word. But I use them because it is simply not possible to have too many words. I mean, try and think of one word you don’t like! Also, I use fancy words because I assume I am talking to a genius such as yourself. That way, everyone looks intelligent.

But Billie, did you know that cows can sleep standing up? I think I may have mentioned this somewhere before. Cows are very clever. Not even human beings can sleep standing up. Hence, there was no actual cow-bed, as such, in the bovine garage studio flat. Instead, there was a fair bit of hay on the floor just in case A249 did, in fact, feel like lying down. After all, you never know.

By day, A249 would be out flying with Bill, raining down liquid cow shit on those least expecting cow shit rain. Hardly anyone expects cow shit rain. But on Mondays (her and Bill’s and Zelda’s day off) A249 could be found browsing the precincts of Grey Lynn Park looking for the kinds of herbs no one’s ever heard of (I think I’ve mentioned them before as well).

As you can imagine, A249 was quite the celebrity at Grey Lynn Park and was often followed about by a gaggle of curious humans. Sometimes A249 might even wander right into the middle of a touch rugby game, whereby someone would invariably think to lead her back to the side-line, as if the appreciation of the game could be better had there. Human beings are quite weird. And cows themselves are very curious, especially about human beings and unknown herbs.
But do you know what? There is always going to be some Grey Lynn resident annoyed about their unknown herbs getting eaten, quite probably on account of their not knowing what they are missing.
In the upshot, most human beings have little or no idea about unknown herbs.
But cows do.

Which brings us to Bill’s wife, Billie, your namesake. Ah ha! I bet you didn’t know Bill had a wife called Billie. I also forgot to mention their two children, Billie Jnr and Crescoptovix. Patently, you had no idea this Bill’s wife or their kids were around and about, because I never told you. Well, there are a lot of things we don’t know. To be sure, this particular Billie is not you, and you are not her, but you share the same name. That sometimes happens.

This Billie, Bill’s wife, the one that isn’t you, considered her husband’s vegetable flying exploits to be within acceptable marriage parameters and instead just got on with stuff. By this, I don’t mean that Bill and Billie weren’t actually living their lives together. Being husband and wife doesn’t mean you have to be doing the same things all the time. You could quite likely fall out of love if you were. So, amongst many other things, what Billie did was grow stuff. I mean plants. Over time, Billie herself learnt quite a bit about the unknown herbs. Of a Monday, for example, she often followed A249 around to see what she might find. A herb, perhaps, that could cure small mindedness. A herb that improved one’s chances of winning Lotto. A herb that would make clear the rules of touch rugby and double as a salad ingredient. Truthfully, Bill might never have cottoned on to the idea of vegetable bombing without his wife’s botanic expertise. And you would be really amazed at the kind of plants Billie could grow. Fat ones. Tall ones. Tiny little ones smaller than an atom. Plants that could say things without speaking. Whistle without whistling. Turn up at the supermarket with no legs or wings or car or bicycle or skate board. In some ways, plants are even cleverer than cows. For example, they can sleep upside down. All the time. They don’t even need to get out of bed.

In the meantime, you’ll be realising that with all the unknown herbs and the truly wondrous horticultural skills of Billie, A249’s poos were of a very top-notch quality, such that, if you went into a shop to buy some, well.. you’d get a big shock at the price tag. But A249’s poos were not for sale. They were for free.
And you know, of course, that plants need manure (a fancy word for poos) for them to grow up good and strong. So, one side effect of the very-highest-grade-liquid-cow-shit-rain-in-all-the-world was that if said rain were to fall by accident, shall we say, on some person’s garden, then before you knew it, an entire jungle of fantastic plants would spring up which, in turn, made lawnmowing a nightmare.

Dear Billie, this is a very long pre-amble and I haven’t even started my story yet. Oh well. It’s late enough. Perhaps I’ll get to that tomorrow.


P.S. I do, in fact, have the feeling that there is, wandering around somewhere on this planet, a word I don’t like very much. But I can’t for the moment recall what it is. Maybe it will come to me.
P.P.S. Actually, I hope it doesn’t.



A BILLIE JNR STORY

Billie, it seems not such a long time ago that Eliza Tenfold and Senseless Johnson asked Bill for that special favour. And yet six months have gone by! Time has a mind of its own, doesn’t it? It has the habit of speeding up and slowing down. If it couldn’t do that then it wouldn’t really be time, I suppose. For example, in childhood, it slows down. I guess you sometimes feel like that. Everything seems to take an age. I remember that myself. But if you are an old man like me, it speeds up. It simply whizzes by. And then, God help us, if you wanted to travel at the speed of light (as light does), time slows down completely. Grinds to a halt. It’s just one big now.
So what happens then?
My guess is, nothing.
But another question is: What happens when nothing happens?
Is it pretty much like going to sleep and when you wake up you are exactly the same little girl as when you fell asleep? And meanwhile, time has somehow marched on?
Is it not possible, Billie, that when you are fast asleep you are travelling at the speed of light?

Gravity is the same. Do you believe for a moment that those monstrous dinosaurs from 60 million years ago could survive in the current gravitational environment? Modern gravity simply wouldn’t let them. They’d collapse under their own weight. The biggest terrestrial animal you’ve got now is an elephant. Or a whale if you happen to be living in the sea. If modern nature could create bigger creatures, it probably would. In fact, it has! The Armillaria fungus that occupies a full 2,384 acres of soil in Oregon, USA. But it’s easier to be big if you live in the soil or the sea.
Thankfully, gravity has changed, otherwise you’d have a Tyrannosaurus Rex waking you up every morning instead of birds.
So what happened to all the miniature dinosaurs, you ask? I haven’t figured that one out yet. But I’ve heard some of them live on Stephen’s Island.
A lot of people think that the catastrophic impact of an asteroid slamming into some remote village in Mexico wiped out the dinosaurs.
Were there villages 60 million years ago? Certainly, there were. But it’s so long ago it’s hard to know what they looked like. Anyway, that one got wiped out.
I personally think it more likely that the demise of the dinosaur was due to a change in gravity. Maybe that asteroid had something to do with it, in which case it must have been one seriously heavy hunk of space junk.
Who knows?

Pretty soon Billie, I’m going to have to start writing you proper children’s stories. Pretty soon you will have learnt the English language just enough, like Billie Jnr, or even Crescoptovix, to know that I am talking cowshit.

So let’s go back in time.. to a time when things were ever so slightly lighter.

It happened to be that Eliza Tenfold and Senseless Johnson were both members of the local Maramarua Duck Shooting Club. The only rules of this club were that all members were required to meet every year at 6am on the first Saturday in May at a pond of their choosing, drink whiskey and milk, wear funny hats and shoot ducks. In fact, there were only three members of this club. But the third one, whose name was Doc Brewer, had sadly passed away on account of his drinking.
That sometimes happens.

At the onset of global cooling however, all the ducks had seen fit to do a runner, given that their ponds had frozen over and the ducks now had nowhere to paddle about. It could be, just like in a cartoon, they’d land on an iced-up pond in the middle of nowhere and skid all the way to the other end. For non-cartoon ducks however, this was highly disturbing.
So according to the sacred number three, a club member needed to be replaced. Plus there were no ducks, which was obviously a major problem. It is harder to shoot ducks which aren’t there than just about anything. The proposition was then, that if Bill could locate the truant ducks (after all, he had an aeroplane), he would be inducted as a life member into the Maramarua Duck Shooting Club.

Billie, right now could well be a good time to broach the subject of alcohol. As you know, alcohol is yeast excrement, excrement being a fancy word for shit. Yeasts are pooing alcohol in their bubbly vats in quite the same sort of way that A249 periodically rains down cow excrement from above, saving that a gin and tonic tastes better. I am wildly guessing you may know this for yourself already.

Some while ago I used to be a farmer myself, just like Eliza Tenfold. In the middle of a drought one time, I wrote a miniature song that went like this:

Rain you bugger, rain
Rain right in my drain
Won’t you rain like champagne
Rain you bugger rain

Maybe one day I’ll sing you that song, all of 17 seconds of it.

The strange thing is: a 750ml bottle of champagne, or in fact any kind of bubbly, will disappear faster than a 750ml bottle of anything else.
I have learnt this after a lifetime of study.
It would appear the bubbles take up some of the space in the bottle.
You see? Even volume has a mind of its own.

And Billie, I’m supposing you know by now that you’re a good part Irish. Why I bring this up I have no idea, except that a lot of pennies dropped when I learned I was a good part Irish myself.
Well, I guess A249 is a good part Hereford. Yeasts are a good part fungus.
But enough of this.
I thought we were talking about ducks.

So, one whole six months ago, off went Bill aboard his beloved Zelda, winging his way back to Grey Lynn Park and wondering where all the ducks had gone. Surely, there was no point trying to bring them back when their ponds were frozen over. But might it be possible, with the right technology, to un-freeze a pond? Was there a duck-finding app he could download? Was there a herb anywhere that understood the migratory proclivities of ducks?

By the time Bill landed on No. 2 field, which was actually the main sports field at Grey Lynn Park (I think I’ve mentioned that before), avoided the goalposts, taxied Zelda back to the aeroplane shed, guided A249 to her garage flat and eventually greeted Billie Snr with a kiss, he had decided that the ducks were gone for good. Dead ducks, so to speak.
As it was a beautiful afternoon, Billie Snr had decided it might be a good idea to eat outdoors. It wasn’t justice to waste a good afternoon. So Bill and Billie Snr set up a picnic blanket in the garden.

Over the course of the dinner Bill spilled the beans. The ducks were gone. The ponds were frozen over. Doc Brewer had suddenly died on account of his drinking. A perfectly good shotgun probably lay languishing somewhere.
“I know where the ducks are,” Billie Jnr piped up.
“Do you now?” said Bill.
“Ducks!” said Crescoptovix, as if it were a new word.
“They’ve gone to find a story writer,” said Billie Jnr.
“A story writer?” asked Billie Snr with a forkful of banana salad mid-air.
“A proper children’s storyteller,” said Billie Jnr. “For example, three year olds can’t normally talk the way I do. Normal parents don’t drop vegetables from the sky and repeat everything their kids say. And who’s ever heard of banana salad? This story is very silly.”
“This story?” echoed Bill.
“The story we’re in.”
“We’re in a story,” nodded Bill as if he understood.
“A very silly one!” With that, Billie Jnr placed her uneaten mushroom pudding on the picnic blanket, stood up and marched off. Billie Snr thought to call after her but instead sighed. Billie Jnr was plainly in some sort of a huff.
“Ducks gone,” said Crescoptovix.
Billie Snr’s loving eyes met those of Crescoptovix, and then her husband’s. The Bill and Billie Williams family were living in some sort of story? Well, she’d heard of stranger ideas: Time, gravity and volume were universal constants. Ducks were stoics. The All Blacks would win the next World Cup.
But normal? Where did little Billie get that word from? What did it mean?


P.S. Funnily enough, Billie, ducks are dinosaurs. Small lightweight ones, you could even say. Of course, if you’re trying to avoid a sudden gravity bump, it’s helpful if you can fly.



A DUCK STORY

Little Billie Jnr had a mind of her own. There was no arguing with it.
Having finished washing up the dishes, and with Billie Jnr and Crescoptovix playing in the ping pong room, Bill and Billie Snr began unpicking the moral entanglements at hand. Could a proper storyteller be somehow found by way of the absconded ducks? And if so, what on earth would it be like to live in a normal story?
“Look at it this way,” said Bill while stuffing a tea towel down the insinkerator. “It’ll be like an adventure.”
“Say that again, Bill?”
Bill switched off the insinkerator which had been making a sound not unlike that of the call of the common brushtail possum. “It will be an adventure,” he repeated.
Certainly, the insinkerator’s call was one of the ugliest sounds mother nature had so far invented.
Billie Snr put down her glass of sage and puha wine. “And if we cow-tow to everything that happens to float through Billie Jnr’s head, then what?” she wondered. “We’ll end up running around in circles. We’ll never get our lives back.” With this, she picked her glass back up and examined the greenish glow of the wine. “I like our life,” she said wistfully.
Bill considered this for a moment. “Are not parents already living in their children’s stories, one way or another?”

The ducks weren’t that hard to find. Duck finding apps these days were pretty good. That was the least of the problem. The ducks had all flown down to the Waitomo area and were living in underground caves where the water was virtually impossible to freeze. What they found to eat down there was hard to say but at least they had the light of the glow worms to go by.
The tougher issue would be convincing the ducks to come out of their caves so they could get shot at by whiskey-drinking humans in funny hats.
As for unfreezing the above-ground ponds, that was a problem Bill was still only beginning to grapple with.
Of course, finding a proper storyteller was next to unthinkable.
And therefore worthwhile.

Three things were essential when confronting such a daunting task: An aeroplane. A family. A decent supply of vegetables. A cow. And a hemp rope.

One by one, Bill lowered his entire family down the hemp rope through the small hole in the ground which he had found on his app, and then climbed down himself, the rope being hitched to A249 who had the job of pulling everyone back up, minus the vegetables which had already gone down ahead. The kind of vegetables that ducks might look kindly at.
When Bill finally reached the bottom of the cave, surrounded by a generous pile of splattered vegetables, Billie Snr, Billie Jnr and Crescoptovix were nowhere to be seen.
“Billie!” he called out.
“Will-ee,” the cave echoed back. Caves have the unusual talent of being able to recreate any noise a mouth can utter, but not before it has uttered it. Certain birds have this capacity as well, I believe. But not ducks.
“Is anybody there?” Bill cried.
“Has Cheryl got a hair?” the cave replied.
“Where are you?”
“Air Raru?”
This particular cave sounded like it had only just woken up, maybe a little hungover.
There was nothing for it. Anyway, there was only one way to go. Down. Bill could hear the sound of running water which was in the middle of a similarly complicated conversation with the cave, though somewhat hushed, as if they had a secret together.
Darker and darker became the cave, and still no sign of his family. But for the million glow worms glittering like the stars in heaven and faintly lighting his way, events were turning ever more serious, which was itself worrying.
If he turned on his torch, the glow worms all but disappeared. “Better the stars,” Bill decided and turned the torch off.
In a short time, Bill reached the underground river which was serenely, and yet determinedly, flowing somewhere. No ducks. No boat. No family.

“You’ll be William Williams,” a voice said.
Bill turned about but could see no one.
“You are worried about your family,” the voice continued.
“I am,” said Bill without being able to stop himself. “Do you know where they are?”
“Do you know where you are?”
“In a cave.”
“Cave is a generic term. If you say you’re in a cave, you might as well be anywhere.”
“Then where are we and where is my family? Do you know where we are?”
“Your family has gone to meet the Storyteller. And you have come to meet me.”
“Then who are you, please tell me?”
“My name is Old Man. I am a spirit.”
“What is a spirit?”
“What is normal?” the voice answered.
Bill was momentarily flummoxed at this. A question answering a question. It was like trying to remember a worrying dream. A concept that didn’t exist? The word and the lips that uttered it? A cave full of poetry?
“Well answered. Would you like a drink?”
“But I didn’t answer,” Bill countered.
“I believe you did.”

Talking to a cave was an excruciating affair. It made one thirsty.
“What kind of drinks do you have down here?” Bill asked the Old Man.
“One kind. It’s right in front of you. But you have to get all the way in. Watch out for the ducks.”
Somehow, without knowing why, Bill lowered himself into the river. He cupped his hands and took a good mouthful. He crept down until only his head was sticking out. He looked to where the Old Man might have been. Then, he plunged right under.
“Farewell, son,” said the Old Man.
And there they were, the ducks! Dozens and dozens of ducks, swimming underwater. In the dark. Under the million glow worms. As if that were normal.



A NORMAL STORY

Crescoptovix, Billie Jnr and Billie Snr waited and waited. Why hadn’t Bill followed them down into the cave? After a minute, Billie Jnr began screaming at the top of her lungs “Daaaad! Daaaaad! Daaaaaad!”
Billie Snr held the rope in one hand and peered up at the tiny hole of blue sky.
Crescoptovix too joined in on the rope-holding and screaming.
But Bill never came.
They called out to A249.
No answer.
Billie Snr let go of the rope, turned and looked down the cave. Cresoptovix followed suit and Billie Jnr stopped screaming.
The hemp rope hung limp, like a breath never taken.
And where did all the vegetables get to?
Billie Snr said: “Children. We’re here to find the ducks. The Storyteller, isn’t it? Let’s not get waylaid. Dad will be ok. He’ll find us. Or we’ll find him. Let’s go and look for the ducks and the Storyteller. They must be here somewhere.”
“I know which way to go,” said Billie Jnr suddenly lighting up.
But there was only one way to go.
Down.

For a one and a half year old, Crescoptovix turned out to be a natural rock climber, up or down or roundabout, on all fours or standing. Billie Snr kept a torch on him and Billie Jnr kept a torch on the way ahead. They took it slow. Sometimes Crescoptovix needed a hand along a ledge or down a sudden drop.
Deeper and deeper into the cave they went, the air cooler, the rocks closer, the path ever more narrow.

Their way suddenly opened out into a good-sized cave whose floor was partly a pool of water. Strange rock formations, looking like the roots of a long forgotten tree, hung from the ceiling. Other upside-down rock-roots climbed up off the floor to meet them.
“Let’s have a rest,” said Billie Snr.

Sitting beside the pool, Billies Snr and Jnr opened their knapsacks and laid out a small picnic on the rocks.
“I like this cave,” said Crescoptovix.
“I do too,” said Billie Snr.
After a while, Billies Snr and Jnr turned off their torches. The glow worms lit up the cave as if it were a palace.

Picnicking like that among the stalactites and stalagmites and glow worms, somehow, one after the other, Crescoptovix, Billie Jnr and Billie Snr fell asleep.

Billie Jnr was brought back to her senses by the tap tap sound of a typewriter. Tap tap tap. Tap tap. She sat straight up and looked over at her sleeping mother and brother in the faint light of the glow worms. Then she stood up and began searching the cave with her torch. Finally, she walked off to investigate.

Climbing through a small opening in the far wall Billie Jnr found another reasonably sized cave, though somewhat smaller. The Storyteller sat at her desk tapping away at an ancient typewriter, a candle by her side. It didn’t matter what key she pressed, it all sounded the same. Tap tap tap. Even chords sounded the same, if a little louder. She stopped her tapping and looked up at Billy Jnr who was now standing next to the desk. Billie placed her torch by the candle. “Play me another one,” she said.
“All these notes sound the same,” confessed the Storyteller.
“Please do keep playing,” said Billie Jnr. “What is this instrument called?”
“A Blickensderfer,” said the Storyteller pointing to the brand name. She began tapping again.
“Why are you wearing a dressing gown?” Billie Jnr wanted to know.
The Storyteller looked Billie Jnr up and down, as if she might not want to answer. “I just got out of bed, if you have to know. Every morning I go straight for the Blickensderfer and clunk out a few tunes.”
“Morning’s over,” announced Billie Jnr. “Even lunch is over.”
“Down here, morning and lunch are pretty much indistinguishable.”
“Then how do you know when to get out of bed?”
“When I wake up, usually.”
Billie Jnr thought about that.
“Do you know where the ducks are?” she finally asked.
“You sure ask a lot of questions,” said the Storyteller still tapping away. “I believe the ducks are swimming with your dad on level 2.”
“My dad? You know where my dad is?”
“I believe I do.”
“Level 2? Where is level 2?”
“Two floors up.”
Billie Jnr went silent for a moment while the Storyteller kept tapping. Then she said: “I want to be in a proper story. Can you write me a proper normal story?”
Again, the Storyteller eyed up Billie Jnr. “Hmm. A proper normal story.” She tapped some more keys. “Maybe.” Tap tap tap. “Maybe I…” tap tap “could. What’s wrong with the story you’re in?”
“It’s very silly,” said Billie Jnr flatly.
“Silly? What is silly?” asked the Storyteller.
“Well,” said Billie Jnr taking a deep breath. “I’m in a cave. My dad is swimming with the ducks on level 2, our family having climbed down the same hole in the ground, but different. Lunchtime being over, my mum and brother are both asleep, no doubt travelling at the speed of light and attaining to infinite mass. A249, our Angus/Hereford cow who can fly and who is even now patiently waiting for us on the top floor, has perfected the art of raining down poo from the sky as if it were a miracle. And right now, I’m talking to a Storyteller who plays the typewriter. With an ounce of luck, she may yet be my one and only chance at sensible. I shouldn’t even know what a typewriter is. I shouldn’t know what infinite mass is. I shouldn’t know what ‘indistinguishable’ is. I SHOULD BE A NORMAL LITTLE GIRL IN A NORMAL STORY.” To emphasise her case, Billie Jnr spoke in capitals and put her hands on her hips.
“Hmmm,” said the Storyteller. “Extremely interesting.” She stopped her tapping. “And yet quite do-able.”

And just then, Billie Jnr woke up in her bed. She peered around the room. She could hear her Mum in the kitchen.

And here Billie (I mean the Billie neither senior nor junior), I must interrupt. It seems like you’re still only eight months old but I can’t tell how old you are anymore. I’ve lost all sense of time. Is it dinner or breakfast? Summer or winter? Are we still in the middle of a global pandemic?
Maybe you could set me straight? No hurry.
Certainly, funny things happen if you’re travelling in the great big now. For example, Crescoptovix and Billie Snr have just turned up. We’re all of us infinitely huge, such that it’s hard to tell us apart. Maybe we’re the same but don’t quite know it yet.

As for what the Billie Jnr may be getting up to is another question.


P.S. It is perfectly within the realms of acceptable behaviour to refer to people as the Billie Jnr, or the Crescoptovix, as long as they’re not actually physically present at the time. Just thought I’d let you know. Obviously, Crescoptovix is here right now, so I can’t refer to him that way.
P.P.S. I’ve been sending your dad and mum these stories as I write them and your dad, for one, is not so keen on all my philosophising.
P.P.P.S. But I like philosophising.




PART TWO

WISHFUL THINKING

DEAR EFFY

Dear Effy. So Billie Jnr wakes up in her bed, the strange dream of caves and typewriters and ducks fading quickly away.
But Effy, do you really want me to tell you the rest of this story, the story of Billie Jnr’s newly normalised life?
I didn’t think so.
Anyway, I can’t.

Quite evidently, the Storyteller’s magic fix to Billie Jnr’s problem not only implied a normal life for Billie Jnr but for everyone else as well, including her Mum and Dad. Including the clouds, the neighbours and the neighbours’ pets. Including sports fields and whichever kind of aeroplanes you got floating around.
Including me!
I’m not sure if Billie Jnr properly considered this at the time, that it is very difficult to normify one’s personal life without normifying the entire shemozzle.

As you know Effy, nothing exists on its own.

So now I can’t write stories anymore because everything is normal. To repeat, I myself have been normified, and it is simply not possible to tell a normal story, as I think you can probably tell, Effy, if you go through your various books for one year olds. I guess it’s just as well you’re in this story and I managed to keep you out of the one with that crazy cave-dwelling typist. Otherwise, you wooda probly dun got normifized yerself!!
How did I keep you out of it?
Well, actually, it wasn’t hard. You weren’t born yet.

But alas, I was in that story.

So get ready, Effy. This is how normalness goes..

At first, even I don’t especially see the Storyteller’s normification of the universe to be anything so dramatic. Well.. it’s true, over time, I do notice that I can’t write stories any more, but instead I put this down to the effect of the Covid jab. Either which way, Effy, this inability to write makes me a little sad. As you know, I like writing stories.
But not to take anything lying down, I commence immediately to invent an anti-jab medicine which will effectively reverse any conceivable negative effect of the Covid jab and which consists of nothing but vodka and strawberries.

Hmm.. Maybe it takes some time. I can’t properly say if it’s working yet..

And then I notice that there is an extraordinary amount of roadworks wherever I go.
Yesterday I drove downtown. I haven’t been downtown for a while (believe it or not) and lo and behold, the whole thing’s changed. Now there’s pretty much more buses than cars. Buses with nobody in them. Downtown has been canonically rearranged so as to push the case of pedestrians, cyclists and buses. As far as I could see, this has resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of pedestrians and a drastic increase in the number of empty buses.

But back to the roadworks. Most of the roadworks seems to be designed in order to create more traffic congestion. Well, there are already T2 and even T3 lanes. T3 lanes?? Who’s ever heard of three people in one car unless you’re going on holiday or to the beach? Not even buses or trains have three people in them, most times. The theory here must be, on the ideological pretext of hating all things automobile, you hijack random publicly owned lanes (calling them T2 or T3) which you then know no one will be able to use without collecting a fine. Wango bango! You’ve significantly reduced the availability of usable streets and hopefully annoyed the very people who finance your kind of idiocy.

Following right along from the T lanes, the current roadworks trend seems to be the creating of raised pedestrian crossings. You’ve got to admire this kind of shit – it’s a very subtle kind of expensive annoyingness.

I am sorry for swearing, Effy, but someone is trying to kill my city. Hopefully, as you’re only one year old, you won’t notice my bad language. But if somehow you do, I’m sorry.
Swearing, I have to tell you, is perfectly normal here in Normalville.

Even more significant than the pedestrian crossings is the funding allocated to the restriction of road space by creating cycle lanes. But with these new cycle lanes, if I’m not wrong, half of all cyclists will yet prefer to hold up traffic on the normal street.

Effy. Have I lost you? There must be a way out of this roadworks nightmare! This normalness everywhere. I’m not sure if the vodka and strawberries will do it.
Effy. Maybe you can help me. Maybe together we can find the way forward to anything resembling interestingness, given that I’m stuck down here in Normalville and can’t write.
Just cos I don’t like normalness, Effy, doesn’t mean I’m immune from getting stuck in it. Anyway, getting stuck in normalitude was Billie Jnr’s great brainwave.
But maybe you could somehow rescue me and Billie Jnr, Bill and Billie Snr and everyone else. Save us all. Especially the clouds. Normal clouds, Effy?? Eeeeeeeeek!!

You can’t even imagine a normal world, Effy. It is unthinkable. Imagine hearing the most extraordinary birdsong ever, so outrageously beautiful that you can’t help but burst out laughing. Well, in Normalville, what happens is people hear the birdsong and say: That’s the song of the thrush. Thrushes sing like that. It’s normal. That’s why they call them song thrushes.
And it’s like we don’t even hear the song!!
And likewise with everything else!!
It’s about as sad as not being able to write.
It’s like a world with no stories.
So waddaya reckon? I’m done with this place. Me and the clouds want to walk out the door, up the path and never come back.
Hop on a bus with hardly anyone on it.
Ride in the T2 lane.
No family, no roadworks, no vodka and strawberries.
Would that be normal?

Meanwhile, I’m all haunched down here on St Heliers beach, right close to the normal water. It’s 6.05pm. I’m putting this message in a paper cup and floating it out to sea. I hope you get it.

P.S. Actually, when you think about it, the vodka and strawberries must be working just a little bit.
P.P.S. I’m betting there is at least one normal book out there somewhere, Effy. Marcel Proust maybe.
P.P.P.S. In your world, Effy, you probably have B2 lanes which buses use in case they have more than two passengers on board.

OK SO

Ok. So I guess I’m going to have to wait a wee bit. Be patient. You can’t expect a prayer to be answered straight away, can you Effy? Not even with the vodka and strawberries. Meanwhile, I can tell you some more stuff about Normalville, just in case you ever feel like visiting.

For a start off, no one does anything here without getting paid. It seems that the importance of food, clothing and shelter cannot be overestimated. I’m not sure if money has a use apart from these basics, Effy, but sure as day Normalville will find a way of trading in it. Normal people are just super nutty about trading. They can even trade in trading. If there ever was a pollution crisis for instance, normal people would fix it by trading in pollution.
Trading fixes everything.
Things not tradable, Effy, can hardly be said to exist.
So much I guess for the fate of clouds.

“Like a woman who can’t smile,” I think.

Uh oh.. I just had a thought! The woman who couldn’t smile. Where that came from, I don’t know. Seems like a negative thought but at least it is one. There are normally no original thoughts in Normalville, Effy. Only ideology, which is like borrowed thinking. Someone else’s thoughts. Thinking without thinking. And people gravitate to these ideologies according to their level of attraction to the underlying stupidity of the particular ‘ism.’

So much for the fate of thoughts.

Now Effy, a thought like “the woman who can’t smile” is a contradiction in terms. By nature, all women can smile. By not being able to smile, you’d be clearly revealing yourself not to be a woman.
Not only that but a woman’s smile is a very beautiful thing.
You can see how, in this world I’m living in, such a thought has come through in the negative.
So then, to put it in the positive, the question becomes: what would make a woman smile?
Now we’re getting somewhere, isn’t it?
And now I’ve got another idea..
Effy, did you send me that thought?? About the unsmiling woman?
I am supposing that it was just a test thought. A dummy run. A loosener. I do not suppose for a moment, Effy, that you can’t smile, even if you are but a one year old woman. You just wanted to see if my brain was turned on.
And, Effy, given that thought travels at the speed of light, it’s hard to tell how far away you are from me. It might easily be that you are 240 thousand miles away.
That would put you on the moon. Or maybe a spaceship.
It might be you’re right next door, in a parallel universe so to speak.
It may be, I could reach out and touch your hand right here sitting in my normal kitchen chair, listening to the oven fan.. to Kath watching her movies on the computer.. all the while ignoring the cat who gets paid in food.
Wherever you are, my advice is: stay there. Let me figure out how to get to you.
Meanwhile, we can communicate by thinking.
Hopefully.

How to make a woman smile, Effy? For that, you’d probably need a sense of humour, something eerily absent from any ideology whatsoever.

So Effy. I got one question: How the hell do we get out of here? I mean, how do we escape this dump?
Answer: “In your pocket.”
Hmm. That’s not really an answer.
Even so, I feel in my pockets.
Nothing.
“But at least I’m having thoughts,” I think.
Look in your pocket. Look in your pocket is also like a thought, only without quotation marks.
Like an echo.
Like living in a cave.
Ha. The cave. I’d almost forgotten.
That Storyteller must know how to get us out of here.
Hang on a second. That Storyteller was also in the typewriting duck story. Is it possible that she might have self-normalised in sympathy with the rest of us?
And is it possible therefore that any kind of interesting world is no longer strictly possible? Like a dead burger? A conspiracy theory? Like a positive outcome from an ideology?

One strange thing about ideology, Effy, is that it sticks to the modus operandi of a gospel. Against all odds, ideologues learnt that much.

P.S. Where are Bill and Billie, you ask? Billie Jnr and Crescoptovix? A249 and Zelda? Eliza Tenfold and Senseless Johnson? All stuck here in Normalville? Actually, I don’t know. Maybe I should go and find them.
P.P.S. That was a sad joke about you potentially coming here, Effy. Please do not ever come here. You wouldn’t like it.
P.P.P.S To be perfectly clear, Effy, in Normalville we think it’s perfectly normal to be living on a giant ball floating in space around a star, along with a few other giant balls.. around a star that’s floating around in a galaxy that’s floating around with billions of other galaxies.. et cetera..



OUT THE GATE

On the spur of the moment, the one year old two foot something Effy decided to run away from home.
Or more precisely.. walk away from home.

In her gumboots, in her daring purple trousers & unicorn patterned top, she took the number one concrete path towards the gate and the driveway. Conversely, the number two concrete path led to another gate and straight out into the paddock.
Of course, Effy couldn’t count to two, or even one.

By a stroke of good luck, the number one gate was open. From there she tramped down the gravel driveway and onto the road, also gravel. Then, without looking back to the cream coloured house in the field with its green roof and fence on every side to keep out the sheep, Effy instinctively chose the westerly direction and kept on walking.
Past the railway bees in their little apartments.
Step after step.
On a road full of stones.
Of course, some of her steps were more artistic than others.

Eventually, when she got to the first big corner in the road, she did look back. Back along the dusty road and up the driveway to the fenced off house. She hardly recognised her home, it seemed so small. It seemed like a toy. She reached out as if she might grab it but just then a certain Chris Gotobed came barrelling around the corner in his Holden ute. At the very last second, he spotted Effy in the middle of the road, veered suddenly to the left and hurtled through the scrub and down the bank.
Chris Gotobed was a local of the area and always drove at breakneck speed, possibly in the hope that he would one day run someone off the road. Alas, Mister Gotobed had now run himself off the road.

It could be he smashed his way down the bank, hit a hump in the ground just before the railway line and catapulted his ute straight onto the empty flat deck carriage of a train that happened to be passing by.
It could be, in this way, Chris Gotobed ended up in Whangarei.
It could have been, while waiting for his ute to get straightened out in Whangarei, he met the love of his life who happened to be called Lettuce. So, this Lettuce and Chris could have got married and stayed in Whangarei.
But none of this we’ll ever know.

Effy meanwhile, still pondering the unreachable nature of toy homes, stood transfixed amid a cloud of dust and the echoing of flying stones.
Like a lot of things in nature, the more you studied stones, the more admirable they became. For example, they could fly.
She turned back from where the Holden ute had careered into the scrub and kept walking.

After some while on the road, Effy got befriended by a bus. Pulling up behind her, an AT bus carefully swerved past and then stopped about twenty yards in front of her, as if waiting for something.
As Effy caught up to the bus and walked along the side of it, she couldn’t help touching its tinny blue and grey walls to see if it was real. No one had ever seen a bus up close before. Least, not a real one.
As she neared the front, a door swooshed open. She looked up the steps. There was nobody inside. Effy climbed up the steps on all fours. She checked out the rest of the seating. The bus, it seemed, was empty.
The door closed “swoosh.”
“Please take a seat,” a woman’s voice came over the intercom. Effy looked up to where the voice had come from and noticed a little blue box above the windscreen. She nodded her head several times, then turned to the nearest seat and climbed aboard.
“And where are we off to today?” continued the voice.
Effy was silent.
“I’m so glad you’re on board. You’re my first customer this week. I was starting to get.. well.. I came out to the country to see if.. you know.. I was feeling.. a bit.. and here you are!”
Effy nodded. If talking to a melancholic self-driving bus seemed slightly disorienting, Effy wasn’t giving anything away. She resolved to give it a go, especially as the little blue box had a picture of a star on it.
“You might be ready for a nappy change?” the starbox was saying. “Or something to drink?”
With her most considered expression, Effy shook her head. “Djushboch dre’usht ibrashij,” she said in her archaic Slavic dialect.

P.S. No one makes Holden utes anymore, Effy. That brand of car has retired. It’s on a pension living by the beach. Or, if you happen to be reading this somewhere in the distant future, it’s probably passed on.
P.P.S. Come to think of it, hardly anyone names their daughter Lettuce anymore.
P.P.P.S. No one knows what ‘alas’ are either.
P.P.P.P.S. But as you can see, Effy, it is indeed possible to count to zero.



EFFY WOKE UP

Effy woke up.
Momentarily, she forgot where she was.
Who she was.
She gave herself a moment.
She’d woken up, it seemed, in a bus going somewhere, bouncing along.
How did that happen?
“Krahcscz ush oofshlp?” she thought.
She pulled herself up off the seat and looked out the window.
A world flying by.
“Welcome back,” said Starbox. “We are currently on our way to St Heliers in the T2 lane.”
“Swursht,” thought Effy.
“You may well have thought T2 to be an extremely truncated form of the game of cricket, Effy,” said Starbox. “But no. In the T2 lane it is simply that we drive at twice the speed limit. That way, hopefully, we won’t be holding anyone up and we get to where we’re going a whole lot quicker.”
“Ahrgrshleh! Basb khlssh’t.”
“Indeed so,” replied Starbox. “Incidentally, if you would prefer me to speak in a different way.. in your own tongue perhaps.. then all you have to do is say the word. The 15,043 different languages I speak include one or two obselete Slavic dialects. This may suit you better.”
“G’brispshni,” Effy shook her head.
Out the window, toy homes were flashing by at a good old rate, the fences around them all purpose built, it seemed, to keep out gorillas. Effy knew a lot about gorillas. They were cuddly. Maybe too cuddly.
“We’re off to find your Grandpa,” Starbox added.
“Grapa,” thought Effy. “Glosht anch bishkdush darsh. Oschb ischt shni shchen’n,” which is roughly to say: That old Grandpa sure is a weird word, with not one single ‘sh’ in it.
And as for that so called Grapa which was lost and which was hers.. But right then, Starbox slammed on the brakes. “Oh my gosh,” Starbox cried out. “I think I’ve run over a cyclist!”
With the bus having screeched to a halt, the doors swooshed open. Effy nodded her head twice, let herself down off the chair and shimmied down the steps. She looked under the bus and immediately spotted the problem. Starbox had run over an idea. It was a blue idea, meaning to say: an idea of weight. But right now it was smashed up.

Certainly, this smashed up blue idea had put himself in harm’s way, illegally floating down the T2 lane with no rear vision, no protection to speak of, and only half a thought of highlighting his vulnerability to the world. Not what you’d call a hi-viz idea.
It might be, with his peculiar turn of mind, this blue idea was some kind of activist, thinking it to be rightfully his lane and everybody else could just push off, even if he knew they probably wouldn’t.
Ideas leastways, if this one was anything to go by, were practically begging to be run over.

Effy crawled under the bus to see if she could drag out and resuscitate the blue idea.
“Youdschsstk,” she told Starbox once she’d dragged him up the steps and into the bus where she sat him down on the floor. Quite evidently, this was a boy idea.
She looked him up and down. He was totally blue and transparent, as if made of some kind of living intergalactic jelly. Even his pointy hat was the same kind of blue. “Ishplumisht ursh?” Effy wanted to know.
With no response, she reached out and carefully touched his nose.
But this idea was plainly in no condition to talk. He just stared straight ahead.
So Effy decided to feel through his pockets to see if there was anything interesting in there.
That suddenly got the blue idea’s attention. He raised his eyebrows and held them there. He made strange movements with his eyes while all the rest of him stayed rigidly still.
But waddya know, in his breast pocket there was a small feather! Well, that certainly was interesting!
Effy waved the feather about. She stroked it. She waved it again, the mute blue idea all the while looking decidedly alarmed.
She suddenly held the feather out to the blue idea. He in turn slowly raised his hands palm-up, his whole body turning yellowy green as he did. Effy let the feather drop into his hands. He then turned blue again and calmly swallowed the feather as if it were holy communion. Then he said “I have come to help find your Grapa, the one who is stuck in Normalville,” without moving his lips.
“Eeesh! Oubshp isck u brockoosh’n!” replied Effy, meaning roughly “Uh oh! You are talking inside my head!”
“Yes indeed,” replied the blue idea in his blueish boyish voice. “That is the way of thoughts. But we must even yet rustle up some other thoughts to help us, and then I suppose we’ll all be speaking to you from inside your head as you so wonderfully put it.”
“Wooshish schsp?” Effy wanted to know.
“Well,” said the blue idea standing up, “one thought leads to the other, isn’t it? Maybe Starbox will run them over one by one on the way to your Grapa’s. And then you’ll need to drag them all into the bus like you did with me. After that you’ll maybe want to listen. And then you’ll need to..”
The blue idea left off what he was saying.
The door swooshed shut.
Effy too stood up.
Off started Starbox down the T2 lane.
On the way to running down another idea.
Maybe a purple one.
Hopefully.

P.S. Some say, Effy, that there is no such thing as pre-Viking Slavic. But patently, you yourself are living proof that some people talk a lot of hot air.
P.P.S. “Let your word be yea or nay, for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” According to Matthew, Jesus said that. From a head-gesturing perspective, Effy, I believe this makes you a Matthewite.
P.P.P.S. In actual fact Effy, ideas, even weighty ones, have no mass at all and are consequently very difficult to smash up.

FUNNY HA HA

Luckily, by the time the AT bus got to St Heliers, Starbox had managed to run over four more ideas: one red one, two yellow ones and another blue one. And Effy had got to drag them all into the bus as predicted.
So now there were five ideas of various shades on the bus, all yabbering away in Effy’s head.
One of the yellow ones was saying: “It being the case that we’re living in at least two universes coexisting in time and space.. let’s say one interesting and one boring.. then how on earth would it be possible to rescue someone who refuses to be interesting? Such as little Billie Jnr for example?”
“And where is the Billie Jnr by this time?” piped up the other yellow one. “In St Heliers? I don’t think so. Why are we even going to St Heliers?”
“Well,” said the new blue idea, “to find Grapa obviously. But it isn’t just Grapa, or Billie Jnr is it? It’s everyone. It’s the whole world needs to be rescued, can’t you see? And the whole world won’t fit into this bus, will it?”
“Whole world my bottom!” said the red idea. “And where would we take this so-called whole saved world if we could? Let those who want to stay in normalness be, I say. It’s a free world. Let’s just get to Grapa’s and see what happens.”
But just then Starbox pulled over. “We are here,” she announced.
The variously coloured ideas went suddenly quiet and looked out the window.
The door swooshed open.
Effy climbed down.
“Wait here, won’t you,” said the original blue idea to the others while floating down the steps after Effy. “We don’t want to frighten Grapa with too many ideas.” He and Effy headed off along the street. The original blue idea was wondering how on earth they were going to rescue anyone stuck in drab normality when in fact everything was so fantastically interesting. A person rescued like that would hardly survive. The shock would be unbearable. At least Effy would be able to recognise her Grapa. And they had the address. Not only did Starbox speak 15,000 or so languages but she also knew where everybody lived. Even normal people.

The front door to 3/15 Bermuda Road was open, so Effy and the original blue idea waltzed straight in.
More stairs. Stairs were everywhere.
At the top of the stairs was a living room with a kitchen in it. A living room with a kitchen looking out over east Auckland.
A middle aged woman in a dressing gown was slumped over a very old fashioned looking typewriter. As if rousing herself out of a daze, she looked up. “Effy,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here. Right now, I can’t see where this story is going. I thought maybe you’d have an idea. On second thoughts, I see that you do.”
“Breesht Grapa?” Effy wanted to know.
“Grandpapa is off driving a truck,” said the Storyteller, “delivering black plastic bags to supermarkets. And he doesn’t even believe in plastic bags, does our poor Grandpapa. Well, at 67, he cannot afford to retire, can he? When he comes home, I suppose Grandpapa will renew his fixation with the Russia-Ukraine war while knocking back endless glasses of rosé.”
“Breesht Nana?”
“Nanna, at this very moment, is working on behalf of the New Zealand government providing transitional housing in the central city to drug addicts so that everyone can feel comfortable down there. One assumes that the drug suppliers will also want to live close by. But you sure got a lot of questions.”
“Buosbstsh ijj djo’dcsht?”
“Me, myself and I? Doing here? You mean, here right now?” The Storyteller paused for effect. But just then the other four ideas plus the ghost of Jimi Hendrix and a Ouija board showed up, all straight through the wall and without an invite.
Waiting in the bus without anything much better to do, the four other ideas had decided to hold a séance. After some to and fro, they’d settled on Jimi Hendrix for a candidate to call up from the dead. So with their Ouija board with all its letters of the alphabet and a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ for easy to answer questions, plus the small upside down tumbler, they’d summoned up the man himself.
As it happened, Jimi too was at a loose end.
So here he was, although he could only answer yes or no, or otherwise spell his thoughts out on the board.
But then, as soon as Jimi appeared, they’d all suddenly realised they were needed right away. Here in this very room looking out over east Auckland.
“Thing is,” said the Storyteller, “now that everyone’s here..”
There was a silence..
“Y-E-S,” said Jimi. Sadly, there was no question mark on the Ouija board.
As if channelling Jimi, the original blue idea suddenly zoomed off around the room, did a couple of loops, and then flew straight through the Storyteller’s brain, coming out the other side and ending up on the window sill.
“..thing is,” continued the Storyteller, “I’ve been suffering from writer’s block these past two years. Can’t write a single line to save myself.”
There was a momentary silence.
“You could write about us,” suggested the four other ideas in unison.
In a virtuoso display of clear mindedness, Jimi darted about the Ouija board: “Y-E-S-W-R-I-T-E-A-B-O-U-T-U-S-A-N-D-A-B-O-U-T-E-F-F-Y-W-A-L-K-I-N-G-A-W-A-Y-F-R-O-M-H-O-M-E-A-N-D-T-H-E-A-T-B-U-S.”
“Gush ish n’urshpe Grapa ev drulshsht?” Effy wanted to know.
“Oughtn’t we save Grapa from normalitude?” the original blue idea plaintively repeated in English. “Maybe by now, little Billie Jnr has reconsidered her position,” he added.
“Billie Jnr..” echoed the Storyteller, as if in a dream.
And then she disappeared.

That’s the thing about story tellers. Sometimes they’re there.. and sometimes they’re not.

P.S. Plastic bags, Effy, pretty much sum up the logic of normal times: Something invented to be thrown away, made out of something pretty much indestructible. In point of fact, the plastic bag is a good metaphor for the human being of any time.
P.P.S. Effy, you may or may not know that Jimi Hendrix was a famous guitarist from the last century. I certainly thought he was pretty good at the time. But now I realise that he was in reality “the great escape artist.” No prize for guessing what he was escaping from.
P.P.P.S. Try saying the word “does” fifty times one after the other, Effy. There is no stranger word than “does.” A stranger word does not exist.

PART THREE

SEAHORSE

FORK HOIST DANCING

Dear Matea
Seeing how you are the only one who reads these stories, with Billie and Effy not yet being of reading age, I was figuring you should have a chapter all for yourself and I’d have to write the whole thing in an American accent, you living in California and all.
I was thinking this very thing just now as I was watching a video on the life of Martin Merleau, a French academic of some sort who happened to die when I was four.

I know I’m not supposed to bring up the subject of death in a children’s book, Matea, but I’m all death’d out from having grown up on a farm. On a sheep and cattle farm in the King Country you sure learn a lot about death. It’s like an everyday thing. But actually, you learn a whole lot about everything on a farm, including birth. Including ducklings who can walk on water. Including blackberries. Including everything except yachting.

Now Matea, if you translate the name Monsieur Merleau into American it comes out as Mister Seawater.
So there, in an offhand moment when I should have been concentrating on the video, you have the fully formed Mr Martin Seawater, destined surely to become some character in a book.

In that case, I thought, Mr Seawater might as well start out on his new life right now.

So here we go..

But what will he be, this Martin Seawater? A detective? A criminal? An internet personality?
Well.. no.
Actually, a fork hoist operator.

Have you ever seen an electric fork hoist dancing, Matea?
I have.
I straight away called it the practice dance.
It was very beautiful to watch.
It was only afterwards that I realised this fork hoist guy was not practising at all but trying to put his stacks of pallets in perfect order. Like just for fun. Up and down and all four sides.
But some things are too beautiful to describe.
Too smooth.
Too graceful.
You could even see this for yourself, Matea, if you happened sometime to turn up at the Inwards Goods section of your local supermarket.
But I have seen it in warehouses so huge you’d swear you were in a sci fi movie.

That’s the really strange thing about life, isn’t it? That when you feel like you’re really living.. when you are suddenly and impossibly alive.. it feels exactly like you’re in a movie.
That’s probably why the movies caught on in the first place, Matea.. because they’re more like life than life is.

“So Martin Seawater drives a fork hoist..” Doesn’t that just seem like the beginning of a brilliant poem? I guess we’ll soon see if it is or isn’t. But it is a truism, Matea, that one doesn’t drive a fork hoist. One operates one. Like a digger operator. Or a machine operator. If all one did was drive this machine, it might well be able to move somewhere, but it certainly wouldn’t be able to do its job.

You can see however that I’ve gone off plot with my language. American people don’t speak like that, do they? No self-respecting American would ever refer to a person as “one.” Like one does this or one does that. Much unlike the French, who call a person “one” all the time.. except they say “on,” which is like their word “bon” but without the “b.” I am wildly assuming you know the French word “bon,” Matea, as in “bonjour.”
From this, Matea, if you look closely, you can see that the word “one” is really a French word. We got it from them. We got it from them and began mispronouncing it right from the time the Normans invaded England in the year 1066.

But Matea, let’s leave this Martin Seawater and his dancing forklift aside for the moment. Let’s consider him enough introduced. I’m sure we’ll catch up with him later. Instead, we should probably go find the Billie Jnr, wherever she is. Or we might say, given the circumstances, whoever she is. No one’s heard from that little girl in quite a while. Maybe she’s bigger by now? Maybe she’s sick of normality?
Who knows?

I suggest we go by Seahorse.

What is true about infinite velocity, such as when travelling by Seahorse, Matea, is that it is possible to arrive at your destination before you actually get there. Check it out in advance, so to speak. The obvious problem being that you then have to wait around for the real you to turn up.. whenever and whoever that is.

And God knows why it’s called a Seahorse. It looks more like an open air flying saucer. That is to say, a smallish flying saucer with no apparent top that could fit three or four people max. And maybe a cow, at a stretch.
Plus it doesn’t fly in the sea like penguins do, but in the air. Excepting that when it’s flying at infinite velocity, the air pretty much gets left behind, as you might expect. Even so, the Seahorse can travel at stately speeds too.. like the speed of a trotting horse, say.. or in fact, at any speed.

But as usual, Matea, I’m waffling on about nothing and not getting on with the story, isn’t it? Why do I do that? Do I like the sound of my own voice? Is the story so short it needs padding? Am I getting paid by the paragraph?

Well, Matea.. I just write until the story comes to me.
I’m like, waiting around for the real me to show up.

P.S. Actually, ducklings can’t walk on water. They can, however, sprint on water. After the fashion of Jesus, you’d say, only faster.
P.P.S. Before now, Matea, I’ve only ever been in (or on) a Seahorse once, in the King Country as it happens. I’m very old fashioned like that. You’ve probably been in (or on) Seahorses millions of times. The Seahorse I was in (or on) was going quite slowly at the time and without a top, although I’m supposing it has a top when traveling at infinite velocity, isn’t it? Maybe an invisible top.
P.P.P.S. Maybe high, maybe low. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe rain, maybe snow. Maybe, maybe, I don’t know.



GOD’S EYEBROWS

At the Seahorse stand on McKelvie St I can see there is just one empty, lonely Seahorse floating waist high and nobody wanting a ride. We cross the street and walk right up.
“Welcome. My name is Andrew. Please climb aboard,” the Seahorse says.
There are boy Seahorses, and there are girl ones.
So I drag myself aboard, there being no steps. This is more difficult than it sounds. Then I look around.
“Matea,” I say, and reach down to give her a hand up. And Matea scrambles aboard.
I don’t know who made up the rules for the Seahorse industry but obviously someone who likes the idea of people looking foolish.
Aboard, there are no seats and you have to make do as best you can, slipping around on the inside of a saucer.. for that is exactly what a Seahorse is: a real ceramic saucer, but big enough to fit three people plus maybe a cow. No instrumentation, no blinking lights, no speaker system, no levers, no lid, no teaspoon.

Evidently, Andrew already knows where we want to go because, without a word, he sets off up McKelvie St, climbing higher and higher in the air until we clear the buildings. Then we turn towards the sea.
“Where are we going?” I venture.
“That is exactly what I was going to ask,” replies Andrew.
“Sorry. I assumed you knew where we want to go.”
“And how would I know that?”
“Well.. I don’t.. I’m sorry.. I’ve only been on a Seahorse once before, a long time ago. I can’t remember. You can see.. I’m..”
“So where do you want to go?”
“We want to find Billie Jnr,” I say.
“Do you have an address?”
“No.”
“Well, how then do you expect me to take you to this Billie Jnr?”
“I don’t know.. I just thought..”

There is a gap in the conversation. I can tell Andrew is getting a little grumpy with me.
But just then, Matea pipes up: “How many Billie Williams Jnrs are there in the world?”
“Three,” says Andrew.
“Three,” I repeat forlornly.
Andrew says nothing.
“Only three? How do you know that?” Matea wants to know.
“It’s my job to know where everyone lives,” says Andrew in his off-hand kind of way.
“Ok,” says Matea, “so where do these three Billie Williams Jnrs live?”
“One of them’s right over there,” says Andrew.
“Where there?” says Matea.
By now, I’ve learned to shut up.
“There,” says Andrew, and before you can even think of thinking, we are hovering in the playground of some school. There’s no way of knowing which school because it all happens so quick.
“Where are we?” Matea asks, holding her nerve.
“Newton Primary,” says Andrew.
“Wait here,” Matea tells me. “I’m going to see if Billie Jnr’s around.” With my help, Matea clambers down to the ground. And then she strides off towards the closest yellow-painted classroom.
Andrew and I, meanwhile, maintain an awkward silence.
I wonder to myself if Andrew has to wait for the real him to turn up as well. Or does that somehow not apply? Eventually, I straight out ask him. But he doesn’t answer.
I raise my eyebrows. I thought it was a valid enough question.

Eventually, Matea comes back shaking her head. “Wrong Billie Jnr,” she says, and I drag her back into the saucer.
“Two to go,” she says. “That one was a teacher, a grown up lady.”

Like smoke from a chimney, Andrew the Seahorse drifts up into the sky until we can again see across the city.
“Which way now?” asks Matea, but just then a cow in an orange suit goes flying right past.
“Wow!” I say.
“Hey!” says Matea.
“Hmmm..” says Andrew.
“Follow that cow!” orders Matea in a voice that cannot possibly be disobeyed.
Immediately, Andrew heads after the cow at about the same speed as she, that is to say, at flying-cow speed. “At least someone knows where she’s going,” he mutters.

As we pull up alongside the flying cow, our hair being blown sideways by the wind, we can even read her fluttering ear tag: G361. And G361 peers at us curiously with one great eye, as if to say: “Hmmm.. well I never..”

Unbelievably, we follow G361 right above Grey Lynn Park and continue on out west. “Grey Lynn Park,” I remark to Matea above the noise of the wind, pointing down. We both poke our heads over the lip of the saucer to get a better look and, right then, my hat blows off and drops unevenly through the air as if struggling to remember which way to go.
Strangely, Bill and Billie Snr’s house is missing. Like it never was there.
Of course, Matea has only ever read about Grey Lynn Park and never actually seen it in the flesh before.

We sail over the harbour, out toward the Waitakere ranges.
No liquid cow poo nowhere.
Maybe G361 is done for the day. Or she needs a fuel stop.

Behind, in the distance, we can make out the drone of an aeroplane.

G361’s parachute suddenly opens, the air catching her up, dragging her above.
Andrew the Seahorse slows to a dawdle.
It seems like G361 is suspended up there, refusing to come down.
The noise of the aeroplane groans louder and louder..

Matea looks at me directly.
She can almost hear my brain ticking over.
And I can nearly hear hers.
Is that Bill, or has vegetable bombing finally caught on?
Have we ourselves somehow jumped on (or in) that bandwagon?
And how can we be slurping around here in this saucer, supposedly staring each other in the face, when one of us should be at school in California and the other delivering plastic bags to supermarkets?

P.S. It’s quite odd when you think about it, that of the three existing Billie Williams Jnrs in the world, one is teaching in Newton and one used to live in the suburb right next door, even if the house is apparently now gone.
P.P.S. There’s no need for me to take offence at Andrew the Seahorse’s snide remarks, Matea. I long ago gave up arguing with saucers. I don’t even argue with teaspoons anymore.
P.P.P.S. Not sure why this chapter is called “God’s Eyebrows.” It could just as easily be called “Elgin Foot Ago” or “Help! I Got Eaten By A Goat!” or “Poo Jokes.” All I can say is: some people actually do have heavenly eyebrows.
P.P.P.P.S. Whichever way you look at it, Matea, we are all of us characters in some story, isn’t it? And does that mean we can’t see things ‘in the flesh?’ Or be in two places at once? Of course not.



POO JOKES

G361 slowly drifts to ground and the aeroplane lands behind a row of trees. Andrew the Seahorse drifts just close enough to the ground so that it’s gonna be awkward to get out.
“Let’s go and help G361 with her parachute,” suggests Matea.

By the time Bill arrives, we already have the parachute rolled up.
“Hello,” he says. “I’m Bill.”
“Howdy,” I say.
“Hi,” says Matea.
“Do I know you?” Bill wants to know.
“Not really,” answers Matea. “We’ve read about you. You’re famous. Lots of people know about you. You’re famous in America too, where I live. But this is my great uncle. Uncle Tomato. You might know him. He lives here in Auckland.”
Bill studies me closely. “Hmm..” he says, shaking his head. “Can’t say that I do.”
Bill and I shake hands.
“My name is Matea,” says Matea and she also shakes hands with Bill. “We’re looking for Billie Jnr.”
“Billie Jnr,” repeats Bill. “Well, right there is a very sad story. My Billie got eaten by a goat. As you know, goats will eat anything. Lucky she had her cell phone with her, so we could talk to her for a couple of days before the battery went flat. And now we don’t know where that goat has gone. We have no idea where Billie Jnr is. G361 and I go out searching every day. But it’s been two years and nothing.”
Matea and I politely ignore the fact that three year old little girls are too big for goats to eat. They also don’t properly know how to use cell phones. Plus, goats are herbivores. And how would you even know which goat had eaten Billie Jnr even if it had. But just then an enormous goat about the size of a ten storey building reaches down with its crazy goatie beard and munches all three of us plus G361 and Andrew the Seahorse. We hardly see it coming. We get swallowed whole.

Getting eaten by a goat is like going to junk sale heaven. The amount of random stuff a ten storey goat can eat is mind-boggling. Rusty bed frames. Surfboards. Stereo systems. Wheelbarrows. Hair brushes. Kid’s toys. Rubbish bins. A dinghy on a trailer. A playground swing. A farm gate. A knitting machine. A full size mirror. Various TV’s. A wardrobe full of glam-rock clothing. An entire collection of gardening books.. and so on and so on.
Lucky for us, Andrew is there. That smug saucer snaffles us up quick as a flash and keeps us out of the trash. Plus he knows where he’s going and who lives there. Before you know it, Bill, Matea and I are crouched beneath the cow called G361 and we’re in the goat’s brain, hovering here and there at an awkward distance from everything.
And it appears like whoever was in control of this goat’s brain has long since abandoned ship and the brain is now running on autopilot, with the sole directive: “GO FORTH AND EAT.”
Or maybe goats are just born like that, without a pilot.

So eventually we all clamber out of the saucer, last of all G361.
Bill takes a close look at the unmanned controls.
Matea is transfixed by the two huge video screens above Bill, featuring a “live” ten storey goat’s-eye view of the world.
G361 is content to check on the state of her parachute, as though there might be some silage in there.
Andrew the Seahorse is hovering in the middle of everything.
And I am watching a little girl’s fingers poke around the corner of a console.

“Billie Junior?” I say. “Is that you?”
Bill immediately looks at me and then turns to see what I am looking at.
Half of Billie Jnr’s face peers up at her dad.
She steps out from her hiding place.
And then there is an almighty wail. Bill swoops Billie Jnr up in his arms and swings her round and round. Who’s wailing and who’s not wailing, who’s laughing or who’s crying is hard to tell. Sometimes, things can be happy and sad all at the same time.

Fairly soon, a little more accustomed to our very happy news with the return of Billie Jnr, we are all sitting on the floor of the goat’s brain, all except for G361, who’s not given to the custom of sitting anywhere. But she does lend an ear, having left off her parachute sniffing.
“You’ve been this whole two years in the brain of a goat?” Bill asks Billie Jnr.
“Maybe,” says Billie Jnr.
“What did you eat?”
“Grapes and strawberries.”
“Where did you get those?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did you wash your clothes and clean your teeth?”
Billie throws her hands in the air. “I did it,” she says, simply.
Well, one thing has changed, I think to myself. Billie Jnr now talks like a proper little girl and can’t say big words no more, like “enthusiasm” or “counterintuitive.”
And so, we all get to hear Billie Jnr’s amazing tale, all in little words, of how she survived inside a goat for two years. Someone should write a book about that.
Finally, I ask Bill “Where is A249?”
“Did she too get eaten by a goat?” Matea wonders.
“No,” says Bill. “That too is a sad story. One day when we were out flying and A249 was looking to land in a football field, she miscalculated and touched down on the nearby empty flat deck carriage of a train on its way to Hamilton or Wellington or somewhere, and I never did get to see the A249 again. I mean, there was only so far Zelda and I could follow that train. There goes a crap-load of flight training out the window, was my first thought. But one morning not too long after, shooting imaginary ducks with Senseless Johnson and Eliza Tenfold, standing on the porch as we were.. well, it all came flooding out. I couldn’t help myself. A249 was gone, potentially never to fly again. Eliza and Senseless could see how distraught I was. And so, eventually, we made another deal. Anyway, long story short, it turns out that Angus-Hereford cows are sky-diving naturals, so I was back up and running in next to no time with G361 excepting that, pretty soon, we were looking for Billie Jnr instead of you-know-what.”
“Oh! Now that you’ve found Billie Jnr,” exclaims Matea, “you’ll be able to get back to doing you-know-what!”
“Well,” says Bill. “I reckon we have to get out from this goat’s brain first, isn’t it?”
Everyone is quiet. None of us have ever escaped from a goat’s brain before.
Lucky for us, Andrew is there. “What would make a goat sneeze?” Andrew asks enigmatically. “And where is the steering wheel?”
Well, plainly, goat’s brains don’t have steering wheels, you can tell that from a mile off. But what Andrew the Seahorse is getting at still stands. For a start, we should surely be able to figure out the controls of this derelict goat’s brain and guide it anywhere we like. And second, we should be able, at any time, to fly out its nostrils.

P.S. What is silage, you ask? Well, all I can say is: it smells like poos. Unbelievably, cows seem to like it.
P.P.S. So Billie Jnr’s life hasn’t been normified after all. Either that, or normal life is even more interesting than normal life. This all leaves a lot of questions for that shifty Storyteller.
P.P.P.S. Imaginary ducks, Matea, are sometimes known as clay pigeons, which are kind of like Seahorses only upside down and a lot smaller. Clay pigeons, it has to be said, look nothing like clay pigeons, pretty much in the same way that Seahorses look nothing like seahorses.



ELGIN FOOT AGO

Bill and Billie Snr showed everyone around their new house out in Oratia, even if Andrew the Seahorse and G361 the Angus-Hereford cow were too big to come inside. Of particular interest were Billie Snr’s new surrounding gardens which were truly magical, such that you could easily get lost in them, especially if you happened to be about the size of Crescoptovix.

What happened to their previous house in Grey Lynn was a mystery. It was quite simply that one morning the entire family woke up in a new house, out in the country in Oratia. What could you say?
Except that, come to think of it, A249 and Zelda woke up in an adjacent barn.
But as the days went by, and Bill having discovered an airstrip right in the next door paddock which no one seemed to use.. and Billie Snr thinking that the quality of the local soil was a vast improvement on Grey Lynn.. and Billie Jnr and Crescoptovix every day exploring their new environs.. well.. fingers crossed.. they would keep waking up where they were!

For sure, Bill went back to have a look at Grey Lynn Park, but there was nothing there. No house, no gardens, no aeroplane shed. No cow’s studio apartment. Nothing left except for one single tree that Billie Snr had planted a long time ago.
Funny that.

Down at the Richmond Rovers Rugby League Club, which was the hub of the park, no one recognised Bill. He didn’t recognise them either. It was as if time had moved on, jumped a decade or something.
“Where’d the parkie house get to?” Bill asked, pointing up the hill.
“Demolished a couple of years ago,” Sonny replied.
“That’s a pity,” said Bill. “Where did the family go?”
“Dunno.”
“So, no parkie no more.”
Sonny shook his head in agreement. “Yeah nah.”

Gee, you can tell we’re getting towards the end of all these stories, can’t you, Matea. You can fair smell it.. all these loose ends looking to snuggle up together, hoping that they can form an honest thread..

Maybe we are already at the end and we’re just waiting for the real story to turn up.

So how did we escape from that giant goat’s brain?
We flew out the nostrils of course!
Ok. To be absolutely correct, G361 parachuted out.

But what about Effy and the self-driving AT bus? Jimi Hendrix and the five ideas? What happened to them?

Yes Matea. You can easily picture how this all ends. You can even..

Hang up a bit. Not so fast..

Aboard his Blickensderfer electric forklift, Martin Seawater is unloading a pallet of black plastic bags at the Inward Goods section of the Grey Lynn Countdown supermarket. Just one pallet. One beautiful pallet. Then, having replaced the full pallet with an empty one, he elegantly reverses the forklift and stops not too far from the truck cab, where the truck driver stands out of the way. The truckie walks over with his paperwork and pen. Martin Seawater takes the paperwork but not the pen. He has his own pen tucked in his breast pocket, it being a point of honour in the fork hoist business to have your own pen. He signs at the bottom and hands the consignment note back.
“Thanks mate,” says the truckie.
“All good,” says Martin Seawater, and he smiles. “Have a good weekend.”
It is Friday, around 2pm. Cut-off time for deliveries to supermarkets.
The truckie too smiles. And right then, just as he is about to turn around and walk back to his truck, a hat falls on the truckie’s head. It falls out of the sky and on his head exactly as if it had never gone away. A black fedora. The forkie and the truckie stare at each other, their smiles awkwardly fixed to their faces.
What could you say?
Eventually, Mr Seawater forces himself back to business and moves on to the next truck, even though there’s no next truck there. And the truckie gets in his truck and starts the engine. He adjusts the mirror and admires himself. He doesn’t even adjust the hat or take it off to look at it properly. It’s just too lucky.

A black fedora? Could be that same hat that got blown off, Matea, when we was chasing a flying cow aboard Andrew the Seahorse.
Or it could be another hat.

And so, with his new hat, and having delivered his last pallet, the truckie heads back to Rio Transport base, which is in fact a carpark belonging to a school in Onehunga.

On a side note, Matea, Grey Lynn Countdown is soon to become Grey Lynn Woolworths, as if it were disguising itself and thinking that no one will ever recognise it. Thinking that people have become bored with the same old/same old, and then that people will think to themselves, gee, let’s go visit this new supermarket.

Yes, Matea. It is true that supermarkets can think.

P.S. Did you know, Matea, that what we now call pens were once made out of feathers.
P.P.S. There’s no point in having a rear vision mirror in a delivery truck, Matea, unless you want to study the back of the cab. Instead, it’s got a camera. Even so, for no good reason, some delivery trucks have them anyway.
P.P.P.S. I’m really sorry, Matea. These story titles are getting sillier and sillier. But what can you say?



SAY THIS

Say this: So Martin Seawater drives a fork hoist.
Say it even if it’s technically incorrect.
Say: Mr Martin Seawater at the end of a long day tells his wife about the hat falling out of the sky and landing right on the truckie’s head, pointing the right way up and everything, and with a slight tilt as if the truckie were going: I know something you don’t.
Say Martin Seawater’s wife’s name is Churny.
Say she is Indian.
Indian from India.
Say so is he.

Say this. Say: That was a magic hat and it blew off someone’s head. Say: the cow was going sideways and the wind looked puzzled.
Say.. I’m sick of colons and I want some dots.
Say.. See? I make the rules around here.
Say seesaw.
Say seesaw Churny Seawater five times fast.

Ask: Who the hell knows how it all ends except for supermarkets and people who watch TV?
Ask anyone you like.
Ask the supermarkets and the people who watch TV.
Ask why?
Ask a black and white Darlek from the sixties and watch it slowly explode.
And then ask: what’s that got to do with anything?

Say Effy. Say Billie.
Say your own name.
Say the real me and Andrew the Seahorse.
Say A249 with a rope.
Say where are you now uncle Potato?
Say: with Eliza Tenfold and Senseless Johnson and Crescoptovix and we’re all infinitely huge.

Say sorry, wrong vegetable.
Say Starbox.
Say Doc Brewer and a stream going somewhere.

Tell how we all got swallowed by a ten storey children’s book and how Bill got famous.
Tell how the normal world don’t exist and how there’s only one world, the real one. The real one with weightless thoughts and sudden downpours of frogs.

Say you hate epilogues and say it like you mean it.
And then explain how glow worms glow and caves come to babble.
Explain how ducks can swim underwater and how they can hold their breath so long.
Explain to the Storyteller that there’s a deadline to meet and that she’s holding up the whole shebang.
Explain also that we need illustrations and who the hell’s gonna do them? Sonny from Richmond Rovers?

Say a single table tennis table and a lawn mower that won’t start.
Say that’s what you’re looking at right now.
Say you can’t abide big words no more.
Explain that you’re rummaging around in a goat’s gut and what it smells like.
Say INTERESTING! THAT’S WHAT IT SMELLS LIKE!
Say it in capitals and put your hands on your hips.
Stamp your foot like a ewe.
And then describe the look on the Old Man’s face.

Say you should be at school but you’re too busy running over ideas.
Say: how many colours are there in the rainbow and you only got four of them. Then remove the ‘u’ from the word ‘colours’ and put a question mark at the end.
Say you’re thinking of going shopping for something at the new supermarket.
Say you’ll go by air like plants do.
Say you’ll think of what it was you wanted when you get there.
Say plastic bag Wednesday.
Say checkout lady.
Say a village in Mexico.
Say a full stop backwards.
Say it’s the end.

THE END