ALSO BY
JACLYN MORIARTY
The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone (2017)
First published by Allen & Unwin in 2018
Copyright © Text, Jaclyn Moriarty 2018
Copyright © Illustrations, Kelly Canby 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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Australia
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ISBN 978 1 76029 718 3
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For teaching resources, explore www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers
Cover and internal design by Romina Panetta
Set by Romina Panetta, with hand lettering by Kelly Canby
www.jaclynmoriarty.com
TO MY BRAVE AND BEAUTIFUL NIECE, MADDIE, THE FIRST CHILD TO VISIT THE KINGDOMS AND EMPIRES.
TO MY OTHER LOVELY NIECES, ALSO ADVENTURERS: ANNA, EMILY AND PIPER.
AND TO MY CHARLIE, WHO CAN RUN AS FAST AS FINLAY.
CONTENTS
MAP
OPENING WORDS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
CHAPTER 99
CHAPTER 100
CHAPTER 101
CHAPTER 102
CHAPTER 103
CHAPTER 104
CHAPTER 105
CHAPTER 106
CHAPTER 107
CHAPTER 108
CHAPTER 109
CHAPTER 110
CHAPTER 111
CHAPTER 112
CHAPTER 113
CHAPTER 114
CLOSING WORDS
EXTRA CLOSING WORDS
MEMO
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
I was taken by Whisperers at 2pm, so I never pulled the lever for the laundry chute.
That’s what bothered me most.
I live in the Orphanage, see, and the laundry cart comes once a week to collect our dirty laundry. If it’s your birthday that week, you get to pull the lever.
Some of the children stand back and watch the clothes slide down the chute. Little smiles on their faces. When it’s done, they walk away, still smiling.
They have hearts that are dead easy to please, those kids. Some children pretend they are the clothes themselves. They pull the lever, then squawk and screech: Where am I going? Oh, I’m just a simple nightdress belonging to Avril, and I never thought to have such an adventure!
SPLAT.
Waaah! WHERE AM I? Is this a LAUNDRY CART? It is!! But I don’t WANT to be clean!
And so on. They’re pretty funny.
But one child?
Here is what he does when it’s his birthday.
He jumps into the chute. Rockets down along with the skirts, dresses, petticoats and drawers, and hits the cart with a THUD. (It’s a soft thud, since the clothes are like a pillow, so don’t worry.) The cart horse, Clodswald, twitches his nose and says pfft, but the Orphanage Director, Lili-Daisy, who stands on the pavement supervising, well, she screams. She screams like the Sirens. Or like the dentist has his pliers clamped around her favourite tooth.
The whole thing is crackerjack. The ride down the chute, the thump into the cart, Lili-Daisy’s screams. Doors fly open up and down the street and everyone runs out in a fright. ‘What is it? What’s happened? Oh Lili-Daisy, for goodness sake, he does this every year. Would you hush?’
Better laugh than the cinema.
Anyhow, it’s me. Finlay. I’m the child who rides the laundry chute each year. But not this year. Not my eleventh birthday. The Whisperers got us at two, and the laundry cart doesn’t come till three. This is way ahead in the story, though. A lot happened before that. I’m only saying it upfront because it bothered me so much, the missing out.
FINLAY
Finlay here.
I’m starting the story, but a girl named Honey Bee takes over in the next chapter. You’ll miss me then. You’ll say, ‘Oh, I wish that Finlay was back, I liked him.’
You won’t like Honey Bee. Trust me on that. This is her fault. With some people, you don’t like them and it’s not their fault? They’re accidentally annoying? But with Honey Bee, it’s her fault.
Don’t worry, though. I’ll be back. Honey Bee and I are taking turns.
The story begins on the day of the Spindrift Tournament. That’s an annual competition that take
s place on the Spindrift Town Green. (Annual means once a year. Spindrift! is my town.) At the Tournament, the local schools compete in athletics. (Athletics are running, high jump, and so on. Compete means—Listen, you can look things up in the dictionary if you don’t know what they mean. Otherwise, this will take forever).
That morning, I woke up and dropped straight out of bed onto the floorboards to do my push-ups. I do twenty first thing every morning. Only did seventeen that day, though, not wanting to wear myself out before the Tournament.
Glim’s bed is by the window and she was kneeling on her pillow, drawing pictures in the mist on the glass. She’s not much of an artist, if I’m honest. But she tells us all crackerjack stories each night, pressing her nose against the glass as she speaks. (She likes to watch the goings-on in the Town Square.)
The twins, Eli and Taya, were reading newspapers under the covers. They always do that. They’re big for ten, Eli and Taya, so each morning it’s like a pair of boulders have got a hold of a paper each and climbed under the blankets to read.
I won’t describe what the other kids were doing, as that would take too long. Also, I don’t remember. Three beds were empty: I know that. Amie, Connor and Bing had all been taken. Back then, we didn’t know who or what had taken them. Jaskafar would have been on top of the wardrobe, because that’s where he always ends up. He climbs there in his sleep. It took Lili-Daisy about six months to stop screaming about this.
‘A rat! A rat on the wardrobe!’ she shrieked, the first time she saw him there.
‘I am not a rat,’ Jaskafar replied, waking up. ‘I am a five-year-old boy’—and he bumped his head on the ceiling and realised where he was. ‘A five-year-old boy on a wardrobe!’ He was that surprised.
Everybody scolded Lili-Daisy for calling Jaskafar a rat.
‘Jaskafar looks nothing like a rat!’ we shouted.
‘Still. Have a gander at his teeth,’ Daffo observed. ‘They stick out a bit.’ Then everybody shouted at Daffo to shut his trap. But he did have a point.
‘They stick out in a cute-little-boy way,’ Glim said. ‘Not a rat way. Also, he doesn’t have a tail—we’d have noticed if he did.’
Glim also had a point.
Lili-Daisy had pulled Jaskafar down from the wardrobe and apologised for calling him a rat. It was just she could only see his hair at first, she explained; that’s where the mistake had come in. Then she sat on a bed, Jaskafar on her lap, and made up a song:
‘Not a rat! Not a rat!
But a dear little boy, oh drat!
Oh drat that I called you a rat!
Oh, how foolish I can be
When I’ve not had my morning tea—‘
‘And when you’ve had your morning tea,’ I interrupted—and now I had a point. Lili-Daisy can be foolish any time of the day. She raised an eyebrow at me and carried on singing:
‘Oh drat!
You’re not a rat!
If you were, I’d get a cat!
To eat you!’
Jaskafar had been very cheerful and said, ‘It’s okay! You can call me a rat if you like.’ But we all bellowed, ‘No!’ except Daffo, who said, ‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’
Lili-Daisy sang more loudly, and then it was time for breakfast.
But the next day, Jaskafar was on the wardrobe again and Lili-Daisy came in and screamed, ‘A rat!’ Anyway, she got used to Jaskafar being on the wardrobe in the end.
On the morning of the Spindrift Tournament, everyone was trying to brush Jaskafar’s hair at the breakfast table. Lili-Daisy was dabbing at his face with a washer. Avril was brushing dried mud from his shoes. Jaskafar himself wore a thoughtful expression on his face.
‘What if I accidentally eat the flowers?’ he asked.
He had a special job that day, you see. The Queen and the Prince were coming along to the Spindrift Tournament as part of their tour of the Kingdom, and Jaskafar was the child chosen to give the Queen a bunch of flowers. Queens always need bunches of flowers. I don’t know why. I think they have a special interest in them.
‘What if I accidentally eat the flowers,’ Jaskafar repeated, ‘before I give them to her?’
We asked if he was in the habit of eating flowers and he said no, he’d never done it before. Well then, we said, it probably wouldn’t happen today. Glim suggested he eat extra toast so as not to have an appetite for flowers.
I was having trouble eating breakfast myself. It’s not that I get nervous on the day of the Tournament, it’s just that it seems like grasshoppers are kicking each other around in my belly. Here is what always happens at the Tournament: I win most of the boys’ events. My best friend Glim wins most of the girls’ events. My other best friends, the twins, being a boy (Eli) and a girl (Taya), and both big and strong for their age, win the rest of the events between them.
Between us, we make the Orphanage School the champions of the Spindrift Tournament. Every single year. Which is a big responsibility. I think that’s why there were the grasshoppers.
This year, Sir Edgar Brathelthwaite Boarding School was competing in the Tournament for the first time. That school is just outside town, and they’re usually too rich and important to join in. But Millicent Cadger, Local Councilwoman and Director of the Spindrift Tournament, had begged them to come today, on account of the Queen and Prince attending. Royals need the better sort of children, see? The sort who polish their faces and shoes, and tilt their chins at the sky.
We were not worried about the Boarding School kids winning anything. They just lazed about on cushions eating cake all day, as I understood it. They’d be clueless about sport. Even if they tried it, they’d run into a wall or a tree, on account of their chins pointing up. We knew we would win.
We washed up and set off for the Tournament.
And that is the beginning of the story.
(Honey Bee will probably say no, no, I cannot abide that beginning. She’ll try to tell you a different one. Ignore her.)
Okay, here she is. It’s Honey Bee. Good luck.
Honey Bee
Ahoy there!
I am Honey Bee, and I completely agree with Finlay about the beginning of the story. It did start on the day of the Spindrift Tournament.
I do not know what crackerjack means, but I did like Finlay’s chapter.
He is funny! The joke about me being annoying, especially. That had me rolling on the floor. But he’s right that you’ll be missing him. I’ll try to be quick.
I live at Sir Edgar Brathelthwaite Boarding School.
The morning of the Spindrift Tournament, we marched around the courtyard, chanting the school motto, as per usual.
‘Brathelthwaite students are
Better than the best!
Brathelthwaite students
Put us to the test!
We will conquer all
We are ever so tall
We will never ever fall
We will never drop the ball
We would never have the gall
To come second!
What?
Second?! [then you must pretend to spit, as if you’ve tasted something nasty]
No way!
We will come first!
Ohhhhhhhh
Brathelthwaite students,
We are fine and well-pressed,
We are faster and stronger and much better-dressed,
We are—we are—we are the BEST!!’
Uncle Dominic, who is Deputy Headmaster, swished his horsewhip about as we marched. He only does that for show, of course, and has never horsewhipped a student.
Oh, other than Carlos. Uncle Dominic did horsewhip Carlos the day he kicked the windowpane out of the school’s second-best carriage. It had filled with smoke, you see. Madame Dandelion had tossed her cigar inside and the seat caught alight. Carlos ought never to have damaged school property, Uncle Dominic said—he ought to have squeezed himself and the other children into a corner and waved the smoke away. Never mind that little Reenie has asthma and was turning blue,
Uncle Dominic said.
Uncle Dominic also horsewhipped Sarah-May, I just remembered, when she accidentally dropped a tray of fine china. She was carrying it down the stairs for deportment class. Woodlice had gotten into the floorboards and her foot cracked right through a step, causing her to drop the tray. But never mind that, Uncle Dominic said, she ought to have guessed about the woodlice.
Oh yes, and Jeremy, when he was thrown from a dragon during prelim officer training and broke his ankle—he was horsewhipped too. (The dragon had been spooked by a snake.) Jeremy ought to have held on, Uncle Dominic said. Brathelthwaite students never ever fall. It’s in the chant.
I just thought of four or five more children who have been horsewhipped, but I must get on. Suffice to say, Uncle Dominic has (practically) never once horsewhipped a child. After we finished marching and chanting, we filed into the sports field for our daily sprints and drills. Next, onto the Dining Hall for breakfast, where Sir Brathelthwaite, our headmaster, gave a rousing speech about the Tournament. He is a fine-looking man, Sir Brathelthwaite, little and dapper, with a moustache and a perfectly bald head. This glows fiercely under the school’s chandeliers and you often see him patting it affectionately. Another thing he often does is brush down his immaculate suit jacket. He wears bright white shirts that flare out from his jacket sleeves dramatically.
My Uncle Dominic tries to dress the same way, but he is a much larger man, and his buttons tend to pop. Also, he’s always getting those flaring shirtsleeves in his soup.
‘Today, my fine students,’ Sir Brathelthwaite said, ‘the Queen and Prince are going to be dazzled by your athletic prowess! The people of Spindrift will be stunned!’
We all nodded as we buttered our croissants and sipped our tea.
‘Now, the little local schools,’ Sir Brathelthwaite continued, and he counted them on his fingers, ‘—Spindrift Public, Harrison Boys, Thea Ashley Girls and the Orphanage School—will not be accustomed to seeing such skill. I ask myself: ought we to let them win an event or two, so as not to crush their spirits?’
We waited, curious to know how he might answer himself.
‘No! We ought not!’
Ah.
‘It would be wrong to hold back!’ Sir Brathelthwaite continued, and he gave his own head an encouraging little pat. ‘The local children deserve to see the splendour of true athletics. Certainly, they will be horribly depressed by their defeat, but I think, in the end, they will be grateful. Watching you will be rather like a pageant to them!’