Near the swimming pool there was a beauty parlor and Joe stared through the open door as one of the grannies lay back in what looked like a dentist’s chair. The beauty specialist was a small, foreign-looking man with a wig and a mustache that didn’t quite match. The granny he was working on already had two cucumber slices on her eyes, two straws up her nose, and a thick white cream on her lips.
“Oh yes, Mrs. Grimstone,” he was saying. “To bring out the beauty of the skin, to give it back its youth, it requires natural products only.” He produced a bucket and scooped out a handful of something brown and steaming. “That is why I use only the finest quality buffalo dung. Rich in minerals and vitamins. High in protein. It will draw out the natural color.”
Joe moved away as the beauty specialist slapped the first handful of the stuff on Mrs. Grimstone’s cheek.
There was a fashion shop on the ground floor where Joe watched grannies trying on all sorts of brilliantly colored clothes. One granny was standing in front of a mirror, having squeezed herself—with great difficulty—into an impossibly tight leopard-skin leotard with a black top and brilliant red headband, which now matched her brilliant red face.
“Gorgeous, Mrs. Hodgson,” the shop assistant was crooning. “Quite gorgeous! You don’t look a day over eighty-five!”
Next to the fashion shop was a health-food store. The window was filled with pills and bottles, strange roots and powders . . . all of which were designed to make whoever swallowed them feel young again.
“I particularly recommend raw-garlic-and-seaweed cocktail,” the owner was saying. “Just two mouthfuls and I guarantee you’ll find yourself running—”
. . . running for the bathroom,” Joe thought to himself, and went on his way.
In the next twenty minutes, he covered the entire hotel and came to two inescapable conclusions.
The Stilton International had been built by grannies, for grannies, and was run by grannies.
And everyone who came there wanted to be young again. They were obsessed with it.
So where, he wondered, did that leave him?
The thought was still on his mind as he joined Granny for dinner. This was served in a large room with ten round tables, each seating eight or nine grannies. Joe was joined by the four grannies he recognized from the card game at Thattlebee Hall—Granny Anne, Granny Smith, Granny Adams, and Granny Lee—as well as two other grannies he didn’t know. None of them spoke to him, although Granny Adams spent several minutes examining him through her inch-thick spectacles until the first course was served.
The first course was quail’s eggs. The grannies fell on them like wolves.
Joe remembered an old phrase he had once heard. “You can’t teach Grandma to suck eggs.” He could certainly see it was true now as the ninety grannies in the room grabbed the miniature eggs, smashed the shells against their plates, the tables, or indeed one another, and then sucked out the contents. Soon the whole room was filled with the sound of slurping as the balls of glistening white were vacuumed. Granny Smith—the fat granny—was enjoying hers so much that she wasn’t even bothering to remove the shells. Joe wondered if there might be a prize for the granny who sucked the most eggs, and that made him think of the Golden Granny Awards he had seen advertised.
He turned to Granny. “What are the Golden Granny Awards?” he asked.
Granny looked at him suspiciously. “Never you mind,” she snapped. “They’ve got nothing to do with you.”
“Past your bedtime,” Granny Smith added, picking a piece of eggshell out of her teeth.
“When is his bedtime?” Granny Lee asked.
Granny looked at her watch. “Now!” “But…” Joe began. He glanced at the kitchen door, which had just opened. A waiter was carrying in a vast silver dish of poached eels with mashed potatoes. Joe blinked. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I am a bit tired.”
Joe got up and left the room. As he went he felt himself being followed by a hundred and eighty eyes (three of them glass). He saw one granny nudge another and point, heard a soft chuckle as his name was whispered. “Jordan… that’s the boy…Ivy Kettle’s boy…”
The first eels were being served as he left. Netted, boiled, and stretched out on a plate…Joe knew exactly how they felt.
Of course he didn’t go to sleep.
At ten o’clock exactly he crept back downstairs, avoiding the elevator in case the noise gave him away. The hotel was in half darkness, the front doors locked, the reception area empty. The receptionist was still behind the desk, but she had fallen asleep.
10 p.m. The Elsie Bucket Conference Room…
Although Joe hadn’t been inside the room on his tour of the hotel, he found it easily enough, following the sign out of the reception area and past the health-food shop. As he padded along the thickly carpeted corridor toward a pair of heavy wooden doors, he heard a woman’s voice, amplified by a microphone system but still muffled by the wall.
“And welcome, ladies and ladies, to the annual Golden Granny Awards…”
There was a round of applause.
Taking his courage—and the handles—in both hands, Joe opened the doors and quickly stepped inside. He would never forget the sight that met his eyes.
The Elsie Bucket Conference Room was enormous. It was a long, low-ceilinged room with a wooden floor and a stage at the far end. It had seats for about two hundred and fifty people and every one was taken. Joe realized that, as well as the grannies in the hotel, other grannies must have traveled from all over the country to be here. There were grannies in every seat—two to a seat in places. There were more grannies standing at the sides and yet more grannies hunched up on the floor in front of the stage.
The stage itself was decorated with a rippling wall of gold in front of which hung a sign: THE GOLDEN GRANNY AWARDS. The awards themselves—little statuettes of golden tortoises—were arranged on a nearby table. There was a granny sitting at a piano while an elderly man addressed the audience. Joe thought he recognized him as someone who had once done magic tricks or something on television—but that had been about five years ago. His name was Dan Parnell and he was wearing a red dinner jacket and a silver bow tie.
Joe had entered the room at the very back. He slid behind a row of spotlights and watched with bated breath.
“As you know,” Dan Parnell said, “every year we give out these awards to the grannies who have most distinguished themselves in certain fields.”
“I’ve never been in a field!” someone shouted from the back, and all the other grannies screeched with laughter.
“The tortoise lives for many, many years,” the man went on. “And this is why our awards take the form of a tortoise. Do you know, ladies, that the combined ages of everyone in this room add up to twenty-two thousand five hundred!”
This news was greeted by a huge round of applause, catcalls, and stamping feet. Joe watched nervously as the spotlights trembled and shook. Dan Parnell held up a hand for silence.
“Nobody wants to be old,” he went on. “Let’s face it! Being old is beastly. And it’s not just the wrinkles and the false teeth.” He pulled open his mouth to show his own, which glinted in the light. “It’s not just the aches and the nasal hair. What hurts is having to stand by and watch young people take over. That’s what I hate. That’s what we all hate.”
There was another explosion of applause that went on a full ten minutes.
“But we can have our revenge!” Dan Parnell continued at last. “We can get in their way. We can upset them. We can do all sorts of things if we set our minds to it—and we can have a lot of fun. That’s what these awards are about, and without any more ado, let’s get on with the presentation.”
Joe peered out as Dan Parnell went over to the row of tortoises. The granny at the piano played a few dramatic chords. The grannies in the audience clapped and punched the air with clenched fists.
“The first award is for the longest time getting on a bus. This award has been won this year by
Rita Sponge, who managed to take a staggering three-quarters of an hour getting on a nineteen bus at Piccadilly Circus!” There was a burst of applause, but Dan held up a hand for silence. “And—wait for it—she then managed to spend another twenty-three minutes looking for her bus pass! An amazing one hour eight minutes in total!”
This time the applause was loud and sustained as Granny Sponge—a tall, drooping woman with wet red eyes—came onto the stage to collect her award.
“The second award is for the longest line in a post office. Again, another record, ladies and ladies. Forty-five people kept waiting for over half an hour in the Bath post office. And the man behind her actually had a nervous breakdown! Step forward, Doreen Beavis!”
Granny Beavis was small and lively. She was so excited by her award that, having snatched it, she actually fell off the stage. But this only delighted the other grannies all the more.
“And now we come to the Elsie Bucket Difficult Shopper award. A very close vote this year. Congratulations to Enid Crabb, who spent the whole day in Harrods and had every single video recorder demonstrated to her three times without actually buying one. Also, congratulations to Betty Brush for buying half an ounce of every single meat on display at her local supermarket, a performance that took three hours and kept sixty-one people waiting. But I’m afraid you both lost by a head to this year’s winner, Nora Strapp, who spent so long complaining about a pen she had bought at Woolworth’s that the manager eventually committed suicide. Well done, Nora!”
Everyone applauded (apart from Enid Crabb and Betty Brush). Nora Strapp picked up her award and pranced off the stage.
Joe watched, unbelieving, as the other awards were presented. There was an award for the most unnecessary visits to a doctor and an award for the most absurd reason for telephoning the police. One granny picked up an award for causing the worst scene at a wedding, while another was unable to pick up her award for causing the most violent argument in a family because she was still in the hospital.
Joe’s granny didn’t win anything, but Granny Smith got an honorable mention for the most damage caused when trying to be helpful.
An hour later, the last award had been given and Dan Parnell had left the room to huge applause. Joe was just preparing to sneak back to his bedroom when another granny took the stage. She was older than anyone in the room. Looking at her, at the hundreds of wrinkles on her face, at the white hair reaching down to her shoulders and her trembling, clawlike hands, Joe would have said she was well over a hundred. There were terrible blotches on her cheeks. Her eyes were completely empty.
“And now…” she screeched—she had a terrible, sandpaper voice—“the moment we have all been waiting for! But before I go on, I must introduce our uninvited guest!”
Our uninvited guest…
Somehow Joe knew who the old woman was talking about and he went hot and cold at exactly the same time. She was gazing at him now, her eyes as welcoming as a shark’s. He took one step back.
A huge net fell over his head, reaching down all the way to his feet. He looked up and realized that there was a balcony running along the back of the hall, that there were another ten grannies up there, and that he had been observed from the moment he had come in. It had been they who had dropped the net. Now another four grannies ran forward and seized the corners. He tried to struggle, but it was hopeless. He had been netted like a North Atlantic cod.
Joe squirmed and kicked, only entangling himself all the more. Somewhere in his mind he swore never to eat another fish stick. But it was too late for that.
“Bring him forward!” the old woman cried.
With the cackling of the grannies all around him, Joe was dragged onto the stage.
8
THE GRANNYMATIC ENZYME EXTRACTOR
“You all know me,” the oldest granny exclaimed.
Joe was on the stage beside her, struggling and straining. The grannies had not only tied him up—that would have been bad enough. They had also fastened him into a straitjacket that they had evidently knitted themselves since it was made out of pink wool.
“My name is Elsie Bucket,” the woman went on, “and I am the oldest granny in Great Britain. One hundred and six years old today!”
There was loud applause from the audience, but Elsie Bucket did not smile. She held up a gray, skeletal hand for silence.
“Yes,” she said. “I have received seven telegrams from the Queen. Seven telegrams! But have I so much as received one single present? Not on your bippy!” She sniffed. “So much for the Queen!”
She walked slowly to the front of the stage.
“I am old, and like you, fellow grannies, I do not wish to be old. All my life I have thought about this. I was so afraid of being old that I never actually enjoyed being young. Fortunately, however, I was a brilliant scientist. It was I, for example, who invented the telephone. I can’t tell you how angry I was when my sister called me to tell me it had already been invented. Even so, I managed to invent the telephone bill. From there I went on to invent the electricity meter, cable television, and later, the wheel clamp.
“However, my greatest invention has taken me sixty years. It is here tonight. You, dear grannies, have all brought with you one component—as I asked you to do in this very room last year. What a wonderful achievement! From a simple light-bulb to an electrostatic de-energizer, from a long-life battery to a teaspoon of nuclear fuel, you have all brought exactly what I asked of you. But here I must say a special thank-you to Ivy Kettle.” Joe stopped struggling and glowered at his granny, who was sitting in the third row with a smug look on her face. Elsie Bucket gestured at her. “It was Ivy who provided us with the single most important—and potentially the most difficult—component of all. He may be small and rather unhygienic. But he’s real. He’s alive (for the time being). And he’s here. She brought us a boy!”
“A boy! Oh, joy! A boy!”
The grannies had all gone into ecstasies like very religious people at a prayer meeting. Joe felt the blood rush into his face as they all gazed at him, screeching and clapping, pointing and grinning. One granny had become so excited that she had gone red in the face and keeled over in her chair—but everyone ignored her in the general chaos. Joe was certain that at any moment he would wake up in bed. It was all a nightmare. It had to be. To be tied up in a pink straitjacket in a Devonshire hotel with over five hundred grannies hooting at you—that sort of thing just couldn’t possibly happen in the real world.
Except that it had. This was no dream.
“And so, fellow grannies, no more talk! No more waiting! Let us do what we have so looked forward to doing. And let me show you my invention. Grannies—I give you…the Grannymatic Enzyme Extractor!”
There was a hush in the room as the gold curtain slid back and even Joe gasped when he saw what had been constructed there at the back of the stage.
At first he thought it was an electric chair. An ordinary wooden chair was indeed part of it, with coils and wires twisting around the legs and vanishing under the seat. But there was much more to it than that. A maze of glass pipes and tubes zigzagged and spiraled away into a line of bottles, some of them empty, some of them filled with a dark green liquid. A circular gauge reading EMPTY in blue and FULL in red hung from a tangle of wires, with a golden arrow waiting to travel the distance between the two. The object that looked like a glass-and-steel tuba—Joe had seen it briefly in the reception area—was now suspended above the machine. Joe realized it could be lowered onto the head of whoever sat there. It in turn was connected to a complicated metal structure surrounding the chair and—Joe swallowed hard when he saw this—there were no fewer than thirteen large hypodermic syringes pointing inward, attached to it at different levels. Joe imagined himself sitting in the chair (somehow it wasn’t very hard to do) and saw that there would be two needles pointing at his ankles, two at his knees, two at his thighs, one at his stomach, one at the small of his back, two at his elbows, two at his neck, and one—the highest—at
the center of his forehead. The syringes, big enough to inject a horse, were built into gold magnetic coils. All of them were wired up to work automatically.
The whole ghastly contraption was connected to a control desk a few feet away. This was made up of the usual array of dials and gauges, flashing lights and buttons that he had seen on every episode of Star Trek. The only difference was that it had also been decorated with a small lace cloth and a flower in a pot. There was a comfy armchair behind it for the operator to sit in.
“Take him!” Elsie Bucket commanded.
Joe lashed out as the four grannies who had captured him pounced on him again, giggling and wheezing. But he was helpless. As old and as weak as they were, there were four of them and he was pinioned by the straitjacket. They pulled him, dragging his heels across the stage, and tied him into the chair. Two leather straps went over his legs, two more across his chest, one on each arm, and a final one around his throat. There was nothing he could do.
He sat, facing the audience, half blinded by the spotlights that were trained on him. He could just make out the small round heads staring at him like so many coconuts behind the glare, but he was aware only of the thirteen needles pointing toward him. His hand grappled for a wire or a circuit he could pull... anything to sabotage the machine. But he had been tied too tightly and the chair had been too well designed. Gritting his teeth, he slumped back. Now he could only wait.
“The Grannymatic Enzyme Extractor!” Elsie Bucket announced, moving into the light. “Last year, you will recall, we tested my elixir of life, the secret potion that would make me and all my dear granny friends young again. Over one hundred ingredients had gone into my elixir of life! Avocado oil, ginseng, yogurt, royal jelly, raw oysters, ox blood, iron oxide, zinc, milk of magnesia, yak’s milk, cactus juice, the yolk of an ostrich egg, and much, much more. But it didn’t work. And why didn’t it work? Because there was one missing ingredient.