Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon

  “Tiny Jack!” Little Harry sang. “Tiny Jack.” As though it were the name of a favourite playmate.

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “Of course we do.”

  “But,” said Tiny Jack, “what about all my cars?”

  “Good question,” admitted the Commander. “It is a very fine collection.”

  “Not wishing to worry anyone,” said Lucy, “but if the effects of the Miniaturizer are temporary, doesn’t that mean that the things that Tiny Jack miniaturized — things like Mount Everest and Basildon — won’t they go back to their normal size?”

  “Yes, of course,” said the Commander. “That’s part of the design.”

  “So, for instance, Mount Everest will be here. Won’t Mount Everest sort of . . . not fit? Won’t it completely burst the bubble?”

  “I’ve never tested the burst-proof bubble with an actual Himalaya,” admitted the Commander, “but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work. The ship on the other hand . . .”

  “Château Bateau will be crushed like a paper cup,” said Lucy. “It will be nothing more than a pile of junk, doomed to orbit the world forever, bound by the chains of gravity to a meaningless —”

  “Yes, quite,” said Mum, adding “Everest” to her list. “So, Tiny Jack, are you going to come with us? Or are you going to stay here all alone?”

  “Bound by the chains of gravity,” said Lucy, “to a meaningless cycle of lonely —”

  Tiny Jack flinched when she said the word “lonely.” He was not afraid of Mount Everest. But he was afraid of lonely.

  “Can I have a lift?” he said.

  There was a petrol pump at the side of the racetrack. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang drank thirstily, just as she would before a big race. Jem put the Zborowski Lightning back in its place, engaged the sun dome, and drove Chitty over the edge of the ship and into space. She spread her wings exuberantly and, without Jem steering her, flew a deft loop around Château Bateau. When she passed the Taj Mahal, where the moon buggy was parked, they all saw her dip her wings.

  “I think Chitty likes the moon buggy,” said Jemima.

  “Of course she does,” said Mimsie. “Chitty is one of a kind and so is the moon buggy.”

  The massive Tiny Jack sat on the backseat, wedged between Little Harry and Jemima. His huge head blocked out most of the rearview mirror. So it was only when Mum suggested that Little Harry turn around and wave good-bye to the moon that anyone saw it.

  “Craft approaching aft,” said the Commander, feeling very naval all of a sudden.

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!” yelled Little Harry.

  As always, he was right.

  There, thundering after them, blazing like a comet, was the golden Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with Nanny at the wheel.

  What had happened was this:

  When the Toy Box took off with Nanny inside, it floated around, heading for deep space and the utter doom of the nanny. All the time, Nanny held her nerve. Just as the Toy Box was about to slip off into infinity, there was a jolt. It had snagged on the left minaret of the Taj Mahal. Nanny knew this was her chance. She clambered out of the window, scrambled down the tower, clinging on with her lethal red nails, and clawed her way in through one of the windows.

  Down the stairs she ran and out of the broken gates, just in time to see racing-green Chitty Chitty Bang Bang fly off into space with her little charge on board.

  As she ran down to the deck there was a loud rumbling followed by an earsplitting pop that seemed to rock the burst-proof bubble. The full-size “World of Leather — Basildon” went tumbling past the bridge. Then came a terrible shaking and rattling. Everest was returning to its proper size.

  Nanny grasped the situation immediately. The buildings and monuments that Tiny Jack had miniaturized for his game were returning to their normal size. This, she thought, will not be fun, fun, fun. She cranked up the engine of the golden Chitty. She flew.

  Racing-green Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flew like never before. She angled her wings, swooping into terrifying dives, thrilling rolls, impossible climbs. She seemed to be dancing with excitement.

  “She’s never gone so fast,” said Jem.

  “She never could resist a race,” Jeremy said with a grin.

  But Jem knew that she was not racing for fun. She was running in fear. He could feel her rivets shivering, her carburettor pounding. On her tail was the only car in the universe that could compete with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. That car was golden Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  Racing-green Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hurtled through space, every wire and rivet straining, like a hunted deer. She tried to shake the other car off her trail by every trick she knew.

  The golden Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was not fooled.

  When green Chitty tried to confuse her pursuer with thrilling rolls, her pursuer did the same.

  She tried to outrun her other self on impossible climbs, but her other self followed her. Both streaked ever closer to the Earth.

  Ahead of them a faint glow encircled the Earth. The Earth, too, has a burst-proof bubble to protect it. It’s called the atmosphere. As they got nearer, Chitty flashed up this message:

  ADJUST ANGLE

  OF APPROACH!

  “What does that mean?” asked Jem.

  LESS STEEP

  MORE SPEED

  said Chitty, adding,

  PLEASE!

  Earth’s atmosphere is a layer of gases that churns around the planet, like water flowing over a stone. If you want to come back into the atmosphere, you have to make sure your spacecraft — or a space car — hits it at just the right angle. Too steep and you will end up as a blazing fireball plunging to your doom. Too shallow and — just like a stone skimming the water — you will bounce off into infinite space, where you will keep accelerating until you turn into a bunch of photons.

  Jem didn’t understand this. Nor did his dad, or his mum, or Little Harry, or Mimsie, or the Pott children. Even the Commander knew nothing about the physics of re-entry. Jem just saw that boiling bubble of breathable gas and thought, Right. He accelerated, he raised the wings to take Chitty into a dive, and SMACK — the great green car bellyflopped onto the top of the atmosphere and spun off into space. Chitty flashed her headlights, revved her engine, sounded her Klaxon, but what good could any of that do? They were drifting toward infinity. They could already feel Chitty picking up speed as she slid through the frictionless wastes of space. There was no turning round now. There was no braking. There was no escape.

  Suddenly she lurched backward. Her passengers were hurled forward in their seats. Jem’s head hammered into the glass of the sun dome. It was as though someone had lassoed Chitty and was now dragging her backward. Bumper first, she plunged back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

  “Now do you see why seat belts are important?” said Dad, as they tore through the clouds and winds.

  “What’s going on?” shrieked Tiny Jack.

  The answer to his question was that Nanny had got the angle of approach exactly right. Golden Chitty had slipped in through the top of the atmosphere as if she were slipping under a duvet. So great was the power of the strange molecular attraction between the golden Chitty and the green that once the golden Chitty got through, she pulled the green Chitty after her.

  Now they tumbled through the upper air. They fell so fast that Jem and the others were pushed down into their seats. Jem pushed his arms forward, trying to reach the steering wheel. It was like swimming through marshmallow. As his hands grabbed the wheel, a mechanical arm popped out of the dashboard and shoved a gumdrop into his mouth. “Thanks,” said Jem, as thousands of metres below a city spread out beneath them.

  “Where are we?”

  The dome of St. Paul’s ballooned beneath them. The Houses of Parliament glittered beside the river.

  “London!” whooped Jemima. “We’re going to crash-land on London!”

  “Slow down!”

  “How!? We’re in free fall!”

  ??
?Parachutes?”

  “Haven’t got any!”

  “Of course!” exclaimed Dad, clicking his fingers. “The directional booster engines! We’re saved!”

  “Tragically I never finished them,” said the Commander. “They don’t work. So we’re not saved.”

  “Have a bit of faith.”

  “Not to be rude, but what would you know about . . .” began the Commander. But Dad had already reached over and flicked the switch. There was a whirring sound under the floor — the sound of a row of small atomic hair dryers shifting into place. They fired up. They shot great plumes of hot air down at the ground. Chitty hovered, bounced, and then began to lower herself gently out of the sky.

  They drifted over the Thames, losing height all the time. Chitty swung north of the river, over the city. “Careful!” cried Mum as Nelson’s Column rose up in front of them. Nelson himself stood nonchalantly leaning on his sword, staring Chitty straight in the headlamps, not in the least bit bothered that his hat seemed to be made entirely of bird poo. Jem twitched away from him and they circled down into Trafalgar Square and landed next to one of the fountains.

  “That was one bumpy landing,” said Tiny Jack.

  “The antigravity paint doesn’t work as well as I thought it would,” said the Commander.

  “It burned off on re-entry,” explained Lucy.

  “Ga GOOO ga!” exclaimed Chitty, as though she was glad to be back on Earth.

  Flocks of panicky pigeons exploded around them at the sound of her Klaxon. But they were the only sign of life.

  “At least we’re on Earth again,” said Dad as Chitty lowered her sun dome.

  There was a terrible splash. Nelson’s head, complete with his bird-poo hat, smacked into the fountain.

  “More tidying up to do,” muttered Mum, adding “Put Nelson’s head back on his statue” to her to-do list. Jem looked up and saw a twenty-three-litre racing car ploughing down toward them. Nanny. He spun Chitty once around the fountains to confuse her golden self and then roared off down Piccadilly. Around Hyde Park Corner she thundered, up Park Lane, down Oxford Street, a right turn down Regent Street, and across Trafalgar Square again, heading east this time, parallel to the river, always with that other Chitty blazing gold behind them.

  Nanny was not a great driver. At the corner of the Mall she smashed through a red phone box. As she raced the wrong way around Hyde Park Corner, she ricocheted off a red postbox.

  “Can’t we somehow tell her that if she catches up with us, it will possibly be the end of the universe?” asked Mimsie. “I’m sure if we put it to her politely, she would understand.”

  “Fun, fun, fun,” whooped Tiny Jack.

  “The Destruction of the Universe isn’t something she would want to miss,” said Lucy.

  Along the Strand, Nanny chased them. When Jem drove straight into the river and Chitty ploughed across the water to Southwark, she kept after them, smashing another postbox as she came.

  “If only London knew,” mused Lucy, looking toward the city and the Bank of England, “that if we slowed down just a little, the entire city — maybe the whole universe — would fold up like a Monopoly board being put back in its box.”

  “I hate Monopoly,” said Jemima.

  “So do I!” said Lucy.

  “We’ve got so much in common,” said Jemima sweetly.

  “For instance, we’re both most likely going to die any minute now. Do you actually have a plan, Jem?” asked Lucy. “Or are we just going to keep the universe going by speeding around the outskirts of London forever?”

  “No,” said Jem as he hit the deserted M20 and raced into Kent.

  “No, we’re not speeding around forever, or no, you haven’t got a plan?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a plan.” Jem smiled. He swung north on the A229, went straight across the traffic island, and took a right at the lights. Nanny was still on his tail. He pressed his foot on the accelerator but he didn’t need to. From somewhere deep within her engine, Chitty found a new burst of speed. Her bonnet seemed to stretch forward like an athlete crossing the finish line.

  “This stretch of road is strangely familiar,” said Mum, though the countryside around them was nothing but a green blur.

  There were no signposts, but if you knew where to look, there was one lying in the grass at the side of the road.

  “Jem! Careful! This is —”

  “I know.”

  They were speeding toward Bucklewing Corner — the slipperiest and most unpredictable bend in the world.

  “Please don’t crash, Jem,” said Mum, clutching her to-do list. “We’ve made such a mess of the world. I want to fix it all.”

  But Jem knew the bend was coming. He pulled out into the middle of the road, leaving lots of space on the inside. He slammed on the brakes. Chitty seemed to understand the plan. She slowed right down, as if graciously standing back to let her other self through a door.

  When drivers try to break the world speed record — driving cars that go five or six hundred miles an hour — they sometimes try to step out of the car when it’s still doing sixty miles an hour, because sixty miles an hour feels just like you’ve stopped after you’ve been doing six hundred. Something similar must have happened to that lovely racing-green Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because although she thought she had slowed right down and was now ambling through the bend, she was in fact still going very fast. Far too fast for the bend.

  “Look out!” screamed Jem as branches clawed the windscreen and twigs scratched his eyes.

  “No!” bawled Dad as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang sailed over Bucklewing Scrap and Salvage.

  “Stay calm, everyone,” ordered the Commander as sparks flew and glass shattered.

  “Fun, fun . . .” whooped Tiny Jack, delirious with excitement, but before he could finish his whoop he was knocked out cold by an oncoming branch.

  “Dinosaurs!” yelled Little Harry as a great golden bolt of a bonnet slammed right into the back bumper. The last thing Jem saw was the number plate GEN II flying through the air. The last thing he heard was Little Harry’s happy yell: “Dinosaurs!”

  Little Harry is always right.

  Imagine seeing every photograph of yourself that has ever been taken, all at the same time. This is how it felt to Jem. He could see himself staring up at a tyrannosaurus as its nostril twitched and its eye swivelled.

  Here he was with his hands covered in oil, helping his dad sort out the nuts and bolts of a camper van on a hot summer pavement in Zborowski Terrace.

  There he was running after that camper van as it tumbled off a cliff.

  Here he was ducking bullets in New York.

  There he was trying not to let his friends see that he was actually vaguely interested in his geography lesson.

  There he was walking on the moon.

  He saw himself whispering into the seemingly smiling radiator of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  He saw every place he’d been to, every adventure he’d ever experienced with Chitty, all in the same moment.

  Is this it? he thought. Is this my life flashing before my eyes?

  But he saw other pictures, too, pictures that he wasn’t in.

  Here was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang crossing the line in record-breaking first place at the Brooklands Lightning Short Handicap 1922. Here she was going completely crazy as she smashed into the timekeeper’s shed.

  Here was the Count breathing on her bonnet and polishing it with his handkerchief.

  Here was her original owner, Count Zborowski, climbing from the wreckage.

  Here was the inside of a shed full of spider webs and empty paint tins. He somehow knew that this was where Chitty had waited — broken — for years, for the Pott family to find her.

  Here she was on a sandbank in the English Channel with a picnic of cold sausages, jam puffs, homemade lemonade, and Crackpot’s Whistling Sweets.

  There she was parked outside Monsieur Bon Bon’s famous “Fooj” shop in Calais.

  He saw the Earth
rushing toward her far too fast — France, Spain, Africa, the Indian Ocean . . .

  Somehow the life of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was flashing before his eyes along with his own.

  Finally there were branches rushing toward him, twigs snapping in his face, strange birdcalls sounding all around, dinner-plate butterflies folding and unfolding their wings as they moved through the wet air incredibly slowly, a bubbling chorus of frogs, a howling of monkeys . . . Hang on, this wasn’t Bucklewing Scrap and Salvage. Where was this?

  He looked around. He scratched his head. “Did someone fiddle with the Chronojuster?” he said.

  “Are we dead?” asked Jeremy. “Is this heaven?”

  “Can’t be,” said Lucy. “Tiny Jack is here.”

  The huge, lumbering bewildered figure of Tiny Jack had come to and was standing next to Dad, scratching his head. “Is this fun?” he asked. Then, “Ow!” he said, looking down at his feet.

  “What is it? A python?” asked Mum, who was always ready for a bit of python fighting.

  “No.” He bent down. There was one long, spiky red stiletto. He had stepped on the heel. The insole was smouldering. It was all that was left of Nanny.

  “Shhhh.” Tiny Jack was distracted by something that was coming toward them through the trees. A little boy with red hair just like his own. The boy didn’t seem to notice them at first. He was running, calling over his shoulder, “If you want me, you’re going to have to come and find me!”

  “Shhhhh,” said Tiny Jack again, as if he had just spotted the rarest and shyest animal on Earth. “That’s me. I remember this day . . .”

  From somewhere in the distance Mum heard herself calling, “Red! We’re going! You have to come now!”

  “You’re just saying that to trick me!” squealed the little boy, laughing. “If you want me, come and find me!”

  “I know this day,” said Tiny Jack. “When I was small, I was playing hide-and-seek in the forest. I was really happy. You called me. I went and we all got into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and you took me away from here. I thought we were going on a little trip. But you took me away and I never came back. I never saw this place again. I was never happy again.”