Shrinking Ralph Perfect

  Jack put a hand to his cold black heart. ‘Touched. Quite moved.’

  Penny grimaced and plumped her hair. ‘Could I bring it round tomorrow? Say about…eleven? Perhaps we could have a coffee as well?’

  ‘Perhaps we could share it now?’ Jack said.

  That had Ralph clenching his fist. He didn’t like the way Jack had said that at all.

  ‘No,’ said Penny. ‘Ralph has to stay at home. He’s grounded tonight.’

  ‘All the more for us without him, eh?’

  ‘Mister Bilt!’

  Jack showed her his smiling teeth. ‘Popped round to ask a favour, actually.’

  ‘Then ask,’ said Penny, composing herself.

  ‘Need a pair of rubber gloves,’ the builder said eerily. He craned his body forward, his dark eyes glinting like sugared currants. ‘Big ones. I’m doing a little experiment.’

  Elevenses With Jack

  Whenever Ralph was frightened, he played football in his head. He wasn’t good at football. Not on a pitch, anyway. No one ever picked him for the school eleven. Mr Carpenter said he had one right foot, one left foot and neither knew which way the other was kicking. That was why, in Games, they always put him in goal. This suited Ralph well. You didn’t have to run around much in goal. You could lean against the posts in quiet moments and imagine you were holding the line for England, making breathtaking saves from Brazilian strikers who could bend a ball twice round the planet and back but still not hit the netting behind your hands. In real life, of course, it was never like that. But, boy, Ralph was good at soccer in his head.

  That night, he needed to be. Never mind two, he needed to play a game of three or four halves to keep his pounding brain at bay. If he once stopped tipping shots over the crossbar or parrying headers away at close range his brain would start to boil like a pan of soup. Glop. Glop. Bubble. Gloop. Then egg-shaped swellings would erupt in his skull as hideous notions popped into his head, each more gigantic, more fantastic than the last. Each involving a pair of rubber gloves.

  What could Jack want with a pair or rubber gloves?

  Mum had loaned him her very best pair. They were cherry red, oversized and reached way up her forearms. They had double-thick padding and the finger ends were bloated. They made Mum look like a circus clown.

  They made Jack’s eyes pop out on stalks.

  ‘Ideal,’ he’d called them. ‘Just the ticket.’

  That was the moment the footy kicked off inside Ralph’s head. A game of frantic, all-night action. But in the pauses, the set plays, the corner kicks, the rebounds, the time spent waiting for the crowd to return the ball into play, his mind began to conjure up dastardly experiments. Little experiments. Involving electricity. For outside, rain was slapping the windows. And every now and then, a fork of lightning would bleach the curtains and tangle with the shadows. In these brief high-voltage moments, Ralph’s mind would pitch into the room next door. And there would be Jack, hunched over his fish tank and shrunken house, haloed by a grisly pale-blue light, wielding a pair of smoke-charred electrodes joined to a lightning rod on his dog-servant’s collar by wires fat with the zing of current. And all that was saving him from crackling like pork were Mum’s rubber gloves…rubber gloves…rubber gloves…

  ‘Hey you, wake up.’

  ‘No, don’t fry the ants!’ Ralph screamed. His bedroom swam into focus. His poster of Batman. His computer, blinking. His clothes lying in a heap on his chair. His mum with a vacuous look on her face. Everything normal. Phew.

  ‘I was thinking of boiling them for a change,’ she said. ‘Up. Get. Now, please.’ She dangled a smelly sock over his nose.

  Old socks. Vomarama. Always did the trick. Ralph sprang up like a rifle target. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Daytime,’ his mother said dryly. She threw a fresh sweatshirt at him. ‘Wear this. We’re going visiting, remember?’

  A quick dream fragment scorched Ralph’s mind: Jack grinning, wild with laughter, wringing his rubber-gloved hands as he approached…

  ‘No, Mum. We can’t. It’s a trap. We mustn’t go.’

  His mother tossed a pair of jeans onto the bed. ‘I baked a cake,’ she said. End of argument.

  It was an apricot-jam sponge. A triple-decker special. The top was garnished with real fruit slices and mouthwatering dollops of freshly-whipped cream. The very second Ralph saw it, he wanted to beat his boyish chest and become a Neanderthal gateau hunter. He could wrestle alligators for that cake. Overturn dinosaurs. Hand-fight orcs. That cake had to feel the clamp of his teeth. Forget Jack, that cake was his.

  ‘Hands off,’ said his mum, tapping his wrist. They were standing at the door to Number 9 and Ralph had just reached for a squirt of butter filling, bulging seductively from the middle and upper layers.

  ‘Can’t I just—?’

  ‘No. You don’t touch this cake. Not even if Mr Bilt wants to share it.’

  No cake? Ralph was taken aback. His mum had never engaged in gastronomic torture before. Why start now?

  The door to the house swung open. Jack, dressed in a moth-eaten pin-striped suit, stood to attention when he saw the gift.

  ‘Exquisite,’ he whispered.

  And Knocker agreed. The little terrier begged and tried to sit up. But that cruel combination of intense nasal twitching and lack of a good leg made him topple over with an awkward bump.

  ‘Come in,’ Jack said, coughing a cloud of smoke from his lungs. He stubbed his cigarette out on the step, then yanked Penny down the hall.

  Ralph closed the door behind them. He looked down at Knocker, who was whimpering pathetically and licking his stick. ‘Bengy?’ he whispered. The dog didn’t respond. ‘Bruce?’ Ralph tried. ‘Pongo? Monty? Rover?’

  ‘Knocker,’ Jack roared from within the front room. ‘Git in here, now.’

  Knocker pricked his ears. Down the hall he knocked.

  So that was his name, then: Knocker. Poor mutt.

  The ‘lounge’ was little changed from the last time Ralph had been here. Jack hadn’t made any effort to tidy. Apart from the sofa, all available surfaces were gridlocked with mugs or unwashed dinner plates. Papers flew amok. Tools were scattered carelessly about. If anything, there was more mess now than before, especially around the wardrobe cabinet, where bits of curly wire and some scraps of twisted metal were littering the floor. Jack had done some work on it. There was now a long mirror on the back wall of the cabinet and two narrow sets of vertical tracks, running down the insides from top to bottom. Around head height (Jack’s head height), two three-pronged forks of thin sheet-metal poked out into the room like misshapen, old-fashioned railway signals. They were attached to a pair of trolley wheels and were clearly meant to roll up and down the tracks. But why? To what immoral end?

  Amazingly, Penny beat Ralph to the question. Nodding at the cabinet she said, ‘My goodness, what on earth is that?’

  Ralph quickly scanned its base for the van. Drat. It wasn’t there. He took a sideways glance at the trestle table, too. But the fish tank was covered and it was still too early for an ‘innocent’ inquiry about what lay beneath the plastic sheet.

  Jack laced his fingers under his chin and put himself between the cabinet and Penny. ‘Later,’ he said, with excruciating sleaze. ‘Cosy yourself. Take a seat, do.’

  Penny looked at the sofa and swallowed.

  ‘Allow me,’ said Jack. He brushed away a heap of blackened matchsticks, then beat the sagging cushions half-dead, spraying brick dust and fag ash into the air. He robbed a Sunday paper of its Home and Garden supplement and spread a few sheets out over the seats.

  They crumpled and tore as Penny sat down. ‘Thank you. Erm, where shall I put the cake?’

  ‘On the floor,’ said Jack, ‘anywhere you like.’

  Penny glanced at the slavering Knocker.

  Jack reached down and shut the dog’s mouth. ‘Wouldn’t touch it. Trained to perfection.’

  Unconvinced, Penny put the cake by her ankles. ‘But you’ll have a p
iece, won’t you, Mr Bilt? I hope you like sherry. I, erm, dashed a little into the mix.’

  Strange, thought Ralph. She sounds as though she’s begging him. In his experience, no one had ever needed to be begged before to taste his mother’s cooking.

  Jack’s tongue did an ugly circuit of his lips. ‘Coffee,’ he suggested. ‘Lubricates the crumbs.’ He spat into the watering can beside Knocker’s bowl. To Ralph’s disgust, the terrier knocked up and licked the rose.

  Jack clinked three mugs against Ralph’s chest. ‘Wash these,’ he said. ‘Coffee’s on the fridge.’

  Ralph looked at his mum. She gave a frugal nod. ‘Bring plates as well – and a big knife, Ralphy.’

  Jack slanted his eyes.

  ‘For the cake, Mr Bilt.’

  With a hand across his midriff, he bowed to her.

  Ralph took the mugs into the kitchen. The place was revolting; a playground for bacteria. On every single plate crammed into the sink there were hardened remains of corned beef, new potatoes and fruity brown sauce. Some lifestyle. Some diet. Was that all Jack ate? Corned beef, potatoes and the odd bowl of porridge? He moved the mixer tap to a crockery-free zone, filled the kettle and washed the mugs.

  He turned to the fridge. The coffee wasn’t there. O-kaaay, that meant he could search the cupboards. He did so. Quickly. All of them, bar one (a canned food hoard), were Mother Hubbard bare.

  The kettle clicked off. Ralph thought again. He hadn’t looked in the fridge itself. He yanked the door open. The foil top jiggled off a half-empty milk bottle. Ralph reached in, intending to take it, but found his eye drawn to an object on the central shelf. It was the box Jack had carried under his arm when he’d first arrived to look at Annie’s house, the day the Salter gang had been dispensed with.

  Ralph felt his heart begin a deep pump, pump. He took the box out. It was fixed by a single clasp, nothing more. Trembling, he crouched down and opened it. A luminescent, pale-green light immediately began to radiate forth. Ralph dropped the lid fast and pushed the box further into the fridge before opening it again, very, very carefully. The green light bounced around the shiny white surfaces, fogging the clouds of his cooling breath. Its source, he could see now, was some kind of stone, pulsing with an energy from deep within.

  Dare he touch it?

  He shut the box.

  He opened it again.

  His eyes shone green.

  His heart pump, pumped.

  He shut the box again.

  He opened it wide.

  His heart pump, pumped.

  He took the stone.

  He wrapped it in a tissue and put it in his pocket, then closed the fridge door and stood up quickly.

  Knocker was sitting in the doorway, watching.

  Ralph fell back against the window in fear.

  But the dog did not alert its master. Something clearly wasn’t right with the mutt. His eyelids had settled to halfway open and he was swaying gently, even though he was sitting. For one moment, Ralph wondered about the stone. Could it be controlling Knocker? Or making him sick, like kryptonite did to Superman? Ralph turned his pocket towards the dog. Knocker seemed no worse for the movement. But he grizzled and slavered and that gave him away: there were greasy smears of butter filling all around his jowls.

  ‘The cake,’ Ralph whispered. ‘You’ve eaten the cake.’

  The cake, the whole cake and nothing but the cake.

  Knocker raised his stick and promptly broke wind, then stagger-knocked back to the lounge again.

  Ralph followed, pinching his nose. Just as he suspected, the cake plate was clean.

  Amazingly, his mother hadn’t seen it. She was peering at Jack and he was peering at her. ‘Small confession to make,’ he was saying, mincing his hands in his mesmerising way.

  Ralph gulped and touched the stone in his pocket. He didn’t know why, but he felt comforted by it.

  Knocker trumped again and rolled onto his back with his three good legs and his stick in the air.

  ‘Confession?’ said Penny.

  ‘Tiny secret,’ said Jack. He held up the rubber gloves and flapped them limply. ‘Not really a builder,’ he said.

  The End of the Pier Show

  ‘INVENTOR?’ The word screeched like a missile from the back of Ralph’s throat, echoing Jack’s supposed ‘confession’.

  ‘Ralph,’ said his mum, in one of those ‘we’re in company, remember?’ voices.

  Ralph jutted a finger. ‘But he’s not an inventor, Mum. He’s—’

  ‘Ralph!’ she snapped, making Knocker bark drunkenly. Ralph glanced at the dog. He was blotto. Plastered. Just how much sherry had Mum put in that cake – that cake she was desperate for Jack to try? He bit his tongue. Now wasn’t the time to ask. When his mother’s tone sharpened up like this, it was possible to understand how a joint of meat felt when she drove a long metal skewer through it. Besides, he wanted to hear Jack’s tale.

  ‘Inventor?’ Penny repeated.

  ‘Cherished childhood ambition,’ said Jack. ‘Been a builder. Messy. Didn’t take to it much.’

  ‘Then you’re not doing up the house?’

  Jack creased his nose. ‘Needed a workshop, somewhere quiet.’

  Penny nodded and let her gaze rove. She winced at the sight of a dead mouse in the corner. ‘And what do you invent, exactly?’

  Good question, thought Ralph. Go for it, Mum. It’s obvious he’s lying. Toothpaste him. Squeeze the truth out of him. Now.

  Jack flippered the rubber gloves together. A glint lit the centres of his quick, grey eyes. ‘Attractions,’ he said. ‘Slot machines. Novelties.’

  Ralph gave a snort of contempt. ‘Prove it,’ he said, inviting yet another scowl from his mother. He didn’t care. She’d be grateful to him later. Jack Bilt was lying through his tar-stained teeth.

  Jack, who’d been crouching like an eager slip-fielder, snapped his shoulders back and said, ‘A demonstration, I think.’

  He marched to the wardrobe. Before Ralph or his mum could say another word, he had fitted the gloves over the protruding metal prongs so that they resembled a grotesque pair of hands. He flicked a switch somewhere. The cabinet lights began to pulse. He turned to Penny. ‘You or the boy?’

  ‘No,’ cried Ralph. ‘He’s going to miniaturise you, Mum!’

  ‘Oh, Ralph,’ she tutted, ‘just be quiet a second, will you?’ She looked steadily at Jack. ‘What is that device?’

  ‘I call it…The Frisker,’ Jack said proudly. ‘A curiosity. A jest. A quite…shocking experience.’

  Penny stood up.

  Ralph gasped. ‘Mum, no!’

  She took his hand off her arm and tapped his wrist.

  ‘Step up,’ said Jack, ‘for the End of the Pier Show.’

  Penny touched her lip. ‘Are you saying that you’re building a series of amusements? For a seaside arcade of some kind?’

  ‘In one,’ Jack said. ‘Roll up, do.’ He curled an inviting hand.

  Penny approached the lights, stopping between the outstretched gloves.

  Now Ralph was desperate. But what could he do? If he spoke about the van or the house or the cellar then Jack would know he’d been snooping around. But if he didn’t…

  ‘Which way do I face?’ asked Penny.

  ‘Into the mirror,’ Jack said wormily.

  ‘No,’ cried Ralph and thrust a hand into his pocket, intending to bring out the stone he’d found in the box in the fridge. It was his only hope, he thought. Distract Jack and make him spill the truth. But he hit the wrong pocket, and by the time his mistake had been realised, Jack had set The Frisker in motion.

  With a whup, whup, whup, the rubber hands clapped down over Penny’s body, from her shoulders to her hips to her ankles and back again.

  She wriggled.

  She giggled.

  But she didn’t disappear.

  The motor died. The red gloves shuddered to a rubbery stop. ‘You are clean,’ a tinny voice squeaked from a small speaker grille on the front of
the device. ‘No bulges. No hidden weapons.’

  Penny patted her tummy, blew a kiss curl and smiled. ‘I don’t know about bulges,’ she said.

  ‘Again?’ asked Jack, and hit the switch anyway.

  Whup. Whup. Whup. Off the hands went.

  Penny Perfect squealed like a dizzy schoolgirl.

  Ralph couldn’t believe it. Total embarrassment. He laid his fists by his sides in disgust. Mum was actually enjoying this. She’d always liked fairgrounds and magic shows and stuff, but what had happened to her desire to find Tom? Someone had to force the issue here. Someone sensible. Someone who knew the terrible truth. ‘What’s that, under there?’ He pointed at the trestle table.

  Jack’s eyes tapered down to slits. ‘None of your bloomin’ business,’ he hissed. He switched off The Frisker. ‘Cake?’ he asked Penny.

  ‘Knocker’s scoffed it,’ said Ralph.

  ‘All of it?!’ Penny whirled round and gaped at the empty plate.

  ‘Git up,’ snarled Jack, giving the dog a toe poke in the ribs.

  Knocker scrabbled to his feet, bumping one leg of the trestle table and rocking its cargo back and forth. Jack lunged forward and threw his arms around it, catching it before it could topple to the ground. The stolen transgenerator blinked on his wrist, its green light matching the stone in Ralph’s pocket.

  ‘Show us what’s under the sheet,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s the coffee?’ Jack growled.

  ‘Where’s Tom?’ Ralph hit back, bold as you like. He was feeling strangely confident now. He felt sure that the stone he’d found in the fridge was connected with the workings of the particle displacer. He had that stone. And Jack didn’t know it.

  ‘Tom?’ Jack’s mouth curled into a sneer.

  ‘Mr Jenks,’ said Penny, parting her lips with a nervous tongue. ‘The plumber who came here to quote for a job.’

  Jack raised his chin. ‘What’s Jenks to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Penny, picking her nails. ‘Nothing at all. It’s just…he was going to do some work on our house as well and, erm, you were one of the last people to see him. We were wondering if you could throw any light on his disappearance?’