‘Glue.’
The girl wrote the word down on a sheet of paper in front of her. ‘And when I say glue,’ she added, ‘I don’t mean that namby-pamby stick-the-inside-of-the-toilet-roll-
to-the-empty-cornflakes-packet stuff they give you at school. I mean serious glue, the sort that people use to accidentally stick their hands to broken vases and have to go to hospital to get them removed.
She wedged her knees under the table, tipped back her chair and chewed her pencil thoughtfully. ‘To get the vases removed,’ she added, by way of explanation, ‘not their hands’.
Something scuttled across the table in front of her. Oddly enough it was a hand, a perfect five-fingered model – nothing very spectacular about it, except that it lacked the normal wrist, arm, shoulder and other body attachments one normally associates with hands.
The girl raised her eyebrows and made a soft tut-tutting noise. Just as the hand dived off the edge of the table, she scooped it up with a swift, practised movement, as if she’d been saving reckless limbs from certain death all her life.
‘See what I mean,’ she told her brother Joe, who was standing over by the kitchen sink, doing the dishes. She held the hand up for him to inspect. ‘We have got to get some glue.’
The sight of his sister waving a disembodied hand aloft didn’t appear to trouble Joe.
‘I’ll wash it, will I?’ he offered. ‘It looks a bit grimy under the nails.’ And without waiting for an answer, he took the hand and plunged it into the washing-up bowl with the dishes.
The girl meanwhile returned to her piece of paper. ‘Extra strong,’ she wrote beside the word ‘glue’. Then she turned to the figure sitting opposite her. ‘There’s no point hiding them under the table,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Come on.’ She turned her hand into a gun and pointed. ‘Stick ‘em up.’
The figure flinched guiltily and raised its arms.
This was Franklin Stein, a person whom the two children had variously introduced to people as their uncle and their little brother. He was in fact a shop dummy.
However, with his wide blue gaze and firm chin, he looked more like one of those handsome handyman types you see in television advertisements for power drills and electric screwdrivers. Though, of course, handyman types usually have a pair of hands with which to be handy.
‘Oh for goodness sake!’ snapped the girl. ‘You’re not wearing any at all!’
Franklin gasped, ‘Oops!’ His firm chin waggled. His wide blue gaze gaped and made a great show of being astonished at the sight of the screw protruding from each of his wrists.
The girl sighed. ‘Sometimes I think you do it on purpose,’ she said.
Her name was Gertie Stein. Not so long ago, she and Joe had been ordinary, straightforward children. They walked. They talked. They scattered sweetness and light, and the occasional empty crisp packet most places they went. Then they met Franklin – who also walked, talked, and scattered hands, legs, and the occasional headless torso most places he went.
As a result, Joe and Gertie were now deeply weird. Who wouldn’t be? They had a dark and disturbing secret to hide. They were obsessed. Gertie, for one, was obsessed with glue.
‘The reason I’m banging on about it is because it’s incredibly important,’ she said. ‘If we glue Franklin together, no one will be able to tell he’s a dummy. He’ll be safe.’ She gave Joe three seconds to take in what she was saying, then: ‘Got that?’ she barked. ‘Good, that’s settled. Let’s go buy some glue.’
Joe felt his body tense with fear. Terrible things happened when he let Gertie rush him. She mustn’t be allowed to rush him. He fished Franklin’s hand out of the washing up bowl, dried it with painstaking care on a dishtowel and stepped across to the table in slow motion to screw it back onto Franklin’s left wrist.
The thought of actually gluing the hand onto the wrist made Joe’s mind reel. What if they glued the right hand to the wrong wrist? What if Franklin didn’t like it? The whole thing seemed so drastic and fraught with dangers and difficulties. Worse, it was once-and-for-all, no-going-back, irreversible.
‘I’m not sure about this,’ he said slowly.
‘Well I am,’ said Gertie. ‘So let’s go.’
Joe began grumbling like a volcano. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he wanted to know. ‘Quit pushing me about. What a nerve.’ Suddenly he exploded. ‘As for you!’ he yelled, ‘No! No! No!’
He spun on his heel and flicked the dishtowel like a whip. ‘Hands off!’
A packet of biscuits careered along a shelf and crashed to the ground. Everyone stared as a large pink hand detached itself from the packet and began to delicately pick its way through the litter of crumbs across the floor.
It had a chocolate hobnob clutched tightly in its palm.
‘That does it!’ snapped Joe. He grabbed the hand, gave it a sharp shake, and screwed it onto Franklin’s right wrist.
‘If you can’t keep your hands under control, then it’s glue for you,’ he growled. And he stuffed the chocolate hobnob into his own mouth, to show that he was a hardhearted wretch and there was no point trying to get round him
Franklin gaped. This was so unfair! This was so untrue! He’d been practising his hand control for days now. He was sure his hands could do anything Joe and Gertie’s hands could do – and more. Could they send their hands on dangerous, secret missions? Could they get their hands to seek out chocolate goodies? Could they help themselves to a hobnob without getting out of their chairs? No they could not.
‘Can control them!’ he protested. At this, his two hands unscrewed themselves from his wrists and made off down his legs. Franklin watched them go, then threw Joe and Gertie a smug look, and waited for them to say: ‘Wow, that’s fantastic! Remote-control hands? How do you do it, you prodigy, you genius, you fantastic freak?’
But Joe and Gertie said nothing of the sort. All they said was, ‘Oh, Franklin, you don’t deserve hands if you can’t look after them.’ Then they rounded up the hands, shut them away in a drawer, sellotaped a pair of gloves to Franklin’s wrists and frogmarched him to the front door
They left a note on the kitchen table, of course, to let their parents know where they’d gone.
‘MUM AND DAD,’ it read.
‘Gone to the shops. Franklin’s hands are in the cutlery drawer. Don’t let them out. They’re in disgrace. We’re taking the rest of him with us. Trust us, we’ll be back soon.’
It was a good note – confident, reassuring and packed with vital information. Pity it wasn’t framed and hung on the wall, because it was a note that deserved to be read, not left to waft off the kitchen table onto the floor, where it was bound to fall into the wrong hands.
10.02 am
As they set off down the front path, Gertie explained the plan. ‘OK gang,’ she said, ‘this is what we do. We go into town. We go straight to Woolworths. We buy some glue. We stick Franklin together and,’ she turned to Franklin and clapped him in the chest, ‘eureka!’
Franklin stopped walking so as to devote his full attention to what Gertie had just said.
He was only four weeks old but he knew what a prodigy was, because he was one. He knew what a fantastic freak of nature was – and a dork – because he was those things too. He knew what xylophones, yachts and zebras were, because he’d seen them in a book. But none of this knowledge was any help at all when it came to understanding Gertie’s plan. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more Franklin saw that Gertie’s plan was completely meaningless to any person who didn’t know what ‘Woolworths,’ ‘glue’ and ‘you reeker’ were.
Yes, he was that person.
Of course, he could have asked. But he was a gang-member. He couldn’t be expected to make a complete dork of himself in front of the other gang members. So, instead, he just muttered, ‘Huh, Woolworths! Fantastic freak,’ and followed Joe and Gertie down the path.
‘You’re not a freak, Franklin,’ said Joe, taking his arm and giving it a comforting pat.
‘At least, not for much longer,’ added Gertie, taking the other arm and squeezing it. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Joe and me are going to sort you out. We’ve got everything under control.’
No they hadn’t! Franklin was sure they hadn’t. As Joe and Gertie propelled him out through the front gate, he flapped his strange new woolly-glove hands.
‘Can control them, so there!’ he grumbled. And added darkly, ‘You’ll see.’
10.05 am
The house next door to the Steins was set back from the lane behind a high beech hedge. So if their neighbour, Miss Daisy Roberts, hadn’t been upstairs, admiring the view from her spare bedroom window, she would never have noticed the Steins’ new houseguest lurching down the lane, with a child dangling from each arm.
Miss Roberts took a keen interest in the houseguest. So much so, that she actually stood on a chair to get a proper look at him.
‘Ah,’ she murmured. ‘That’s a great improvement.’ He had abandoned his bare-foot hippy look and was at last wearing a decent pair of shoes.
Combined with a pair of jeans and a jumper, the shoes transformed the houseguest. He was no longer the rather pathetic figure Miss Roberts had met in the Steins’ kitchen a month ago. He was… how should one put it?
‘Respectable,’ said Daisy Roberts decisively.
And a respectable influence was what those children needed. They were wild and out of control. Miss Roberts knew this because she had recently discovered Joe and Gertie hanging around her garden in the middle of the night with a man who appeared to be paralytically drunk. Clearly they hadn’t the least idea of how to behave.
No, as far as Daisy Roberts was concerned, Joe and Gertie needed close adult supervision, and she was pleased to see the houseguest providing it. ‘I expect he’s taking them into town to buy them a treat,’ she thought.
Smiling indulgently, she gazed down into the leafy lane until long after the three of them had passed. Suddenly she narrowed her eyes. What was that coming down the lane? It looked like two pink crabs – the sort that you get served up as a starter at smart hotels. They advanced slowly down the centre of the road, marching side by side.
But, reflected Miss Roberts, closing her eyes and pressing her wrinkled brow against the cool window pane, surely the crabs don’t turn pink until you cook them. And how could two cooked crabs walk anywhere, let alone down a country road twenty miles from the sea?
‘You’re seeing things, Daisy,’ she told herself. ‘You’re overwrought, you’re upset and you’re seeing things.’
It’s true, she was upset. And no wonder. Her least favourite great nephew had invited himself to stay. He was coming today. He was going to stay the night. Daisy raked her fingers through her wispy white hair and groaned.
The nephew in question always made sure that time spent with his aged relative wasn’t entirely wasted by busying himself with outstanding chores – combing his hair, cleaning his nails, tidying out his pockets – he always yelled dutifully when spoken to, and he always, without fail, ate her out of house and home, as if it would be a wicked waste of good food not to do so.
‘What’s wrong with the boy?’ demanded Daisy Roberts. ‘Does he think I’m blind? Does he think I’m deaf? Does he think that only young people need to eat?’ She glared at the cooked crabs in the lane, who quickened their steps as if uncertain where this last question might lead.
Daisy sighed, climbed down off the chair and got on with tidying the spare room. ‘And what’s he coming here for?’ she wanted to know. ‘He’s doesn’t like old people.’ It was true. By a clever combination of yawning and wincing, her nephew always managed to suggest – without using any words at all – that old people should be packed away out of sight, preferably in narrow wooden boxes underground.
‘God give me patience,’ sighed Daisy. She jabbed the sheets into folds and allowed herself the luxury of punching the pillows. That’s when she realised.
‘Of course, how silly of me!’ she exclaimed. ‘They weren’t crabs at all. They were hands. I imagined a pair of hands lurking in the lane because secretly, subconsciously, I’d sooner throttle that boy than let him in the house.’
She stopped in the middle of straightening the eiderdown and smiled ruefully. If only it were possible to behave like that. If only you could take revenge on people who treated you without respect. But of course she couldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t. Of course those hands in the lane weren’t real.
10.33 am
Revenge was not a word in Franklin’s vocabulary, neither was respect. But you don’t have to swallow a dictionary to have feelings. And the way Franklin’s feelings felt about being thrust into washing up bowls and cutlery drawers was totally what a nerve, quit pushing me about. As for being addressed as ‘you reeker’... No! No! No! Reek was a word associated with smelly shoes and stinking lavatories. Even Franklin knew that. This is why halfway into town, he found it necessary to tell Gertie that she was the inside of a toilet, so there.
The effect was immediate, and highly gratifying.
‘Excuse me?’ said Gertie, drawing herself to her full height and flushing red for danger. She glared at Joe. ‘Did you teach him to say that?’ she demanded.
Joe shook his head. At which point Franklin called him a namby pamby stick and.surged off ahead muttering, ‘Huh, empty cornflakes,’ a phrase he obviously regarded as the ultimate in sneering put-downs because he kept repeating it.
‘Listen to him.’ Gertie was scandalized. ‘Where does he get it from?’
‘Well he doesn’t get it from me,’ snorted Joe, ‘If that’s what you’re suggesting.’
But this was precisely what Gertie was suggesting. ‘You should listen to yourself,’ she told Joe. ‘You’d be amazed at some of the things you come out with.’ And before Joe could open his mouth, ‘No, don’t say anything,’ she warned. ‘You’ve really got to watch your language in front of him. He repeats everything.’
‘He repeats everything!’ snorted Franklin, with a toss of his head. ‘He repeats everything, huh, toilet-roll… He repeats everything, that’s what you’re suggesting?’ Then he snapped his mouth shut and refused to repeat another word. Clearly, he was in a huff.
By the time they burst through the glass swingdoors into Woolworths, Gertie was in a huff too. She was hissing away to herself like a kettle. ‘Petty!’ she muttered. ‘Ungrateful!’ and ‘What a complete dork.’ When she finally came to a stop in front of the glue display, she’d completely forgotten why they’d come.
‘We are here because we care about Franklin,’ Joe reminded her. ‘We’re his friends and we want to buy him some of this glue.’
Yes, that was it. Gertie pulled herself together and pulled out her purse. ‘For your information, this is going to cost me two weeks pocket money,’ she snarled. ‘No, no, don’t thank me!’ She snatched a tube of glue and flounced off to the the lady at the cash desk, who told her she was breaking the law.
‘I don’t believe it,’ spluttered Gertie, as they tumbled onto the pavement outside the shop. ‘Children aren’t allowed to buy glue! Have you ever heard anything so mad?’ She flung herself against the plate glass window, crossed her arms and scowled. After a moment she said: ‘OK, here’s Plan B. Franklin looks like an adult. He can buy the glue.’
‘Please,’ said Joe. ‘Can we all try and live in the real world here.’ He squeezed the empty woollen glove on the end of Franklin’s wrist. ‘He’s not wearing any hands,’ he pointed out.
Franklin gazed through the glass swing doors into the shop. ‘Not wearing any hands,’ he agreed and his lips curved into the first smile he had worn all day. ‘Plan B?’ he murmured. It seemed to strike him as a great plan because all at once he flung his arms round Joe and Gertie. ‘Glue for you,’ he cooed. ‘You’ll see.’
Joe and Gertie laughed. They could’t help it. This was the Franklin they knew and loved, all good will and gormlessness. ‘Care about you pocket money friends,’ he told them and their hard hearts melted. Wasn’t it sweet, and so typical of him, to want to lend a hand when he had no hands to lend.
‘Oh Franklin, I’m sorry we put your hands in the cutlery drawer,’ said Joe.
‘It’s just we can’t trust them to behave properly,’ explained Gertie, and was appalled to be immediately proved right by a pair of cooked crabs, which came scuttling out of Woolworths, making thumbs-up signs and bearing tubes of glue they hadn’t paid for.