Nelson sat in the driver’s seat and stared at the driving controls. Due to his lack of a right leg, Uncle Pogo’s van had been refitted so that the brake and the accelerator could be operated from a single lever next to the steering wheel, rather than by foot pedals. Forward to go faster, backward to brake. The monsters eagerly crowded behind Nelson awaiting takeoff. Until now, Nelson’s only experience of driving was several goes on the bumper cars at the amusement park (where he always tried to avoid bumping into people), playing the latest Grand Prix racing game on his PlayStation until he had completed every level and his thumbs were numb, and driving a tractor in a field at the end of the school fête last summer. None of these qualified him to drive a van through the streets of London, but they were better than nothing, I suppose.
“Had to be a van, didn’t it? Couldn’t have had a nice car with proper seats,” grumbled Spike from the back of the van, and Stan would have almost certainly given him a thump if it wasn’t for all those cactus needles sticking out of Spike’s green skin.
Nelson turned the key in the ignition, the engine started, and the monsters cheered.
“Wait a minute. Even if I can drive this thing, I don’t know the way,” said Nelson, whose view through the windshield was now blocked by Hoot, who stood on the hood, having been voted out of the van by all the other monsters for smelling so strongly of Brasso.
“Map! You need map, Nelly-son!” shouted Nosh, who had just found a coil of rubber hosepipe in the back of Pogo’s van and was now chewing it like you or I might chew licorice laces (or those really weird-tasting red ones).
“I wish I had my uncle’s false leg. It’s got a GPS and everything,” Nelson sighed.
“Ah, this leg you speak of—I may just know where it is,” said Miser, dashing to the back of the van and rummaging around in the trunk he had brought with him.
“Wait, Miser, you didn’t steal my uncle’s leg, did you?” said Nelson, turning around in time to see Miser lift the leg out of the trunk.
“I … I merely borrowed it,” said Miser guiltily as he pushed his way back through the cluster of monsters and thrust the leg into Nelson’s lap.
On closer inspection Uncle Pogo’s leg was even more impressive than Nelson had realized. Like an advent calendar, the leg was covered in lots of little doors, but instead of dates, each door was labeled with what could be found inside. Nelson found the letters GPS at the front of the leg where you and I have a shinbone, and as he pushed the tiny door it popped open to reveal a small and very thin remote control.
“Please enter your destination,” said the robotic female voice, and Nelson began tapping at the keypad.
H … E … A … T … H … R … O … W …
“You have selected HEATHROW AIRPORT. Please proceed to the end of Box Elder Drive and take the first right onto Lemington Road,” said the voice, and once again the monsters cheered.
But now came the real test. Nelson was only eleven years old and was about to drive to Heathrow Airport in the middle of the night. This is not only illegal, it’s downright stupid.
Nelson pressed the pendant against his chest. Instantly he was rewarded with a great wave of certainty, and without really thinking about what he was doing, he pushed the lever and the van jolted forward. Hoot fluttered into the air above the van and landed on the roof with a loud thud.
Beep! Beep! A red light flashed on the dashboard, saying that the hand brake was still on. “Oh, I don’t know how to take the hand brake off,” wailed Nelson in a panicked voice.
“I’ll do it!” growled Stan, promptly reaching forward, grabbing the hand brake from next to the driver’s seat, and ripping the entire thing out as if it was a bad tooth.
With no hand brake, the van suddenly shot forward, clipped the pavement, and narrowly missed a lamppost.
“You weren’t supposed to rip the whole thing out!” protested Nelson, who was now trying to keep the van on the road and off the pavement.
“Whatever,” growled Stan, clearly embarrassed, and threw the hand brake over his shoulder.
Crush jumped into the space where there had once been a hand brake and laid his head on Nelson’s leg.
“Honk.”
“Thanks, Crush,” said Nelson. “Just don’t wriggle around or I might crash.”
“Turn right onto Lemington Road,” repeated the voice in the leg, and Nelson did just that. He wasn’t going very fast and was hunched over the steering wheel like a crazy old lady, but in his head all he could think was, Oh my God! I am driving!
* * *
Exactly one minute and sixteen seconds after they had left Uncle Pogo’s house, the orange car that belonged to Nelson’s neighbor Hilda Mills came racing past them. The small battered vehicle dragged its exhaust against the tarmac, like some kind of cruel punishment for being a useless exhaust pipe, screeched around the corner, drove up onto the pavement, and smashed into the front wall of Pogo’s garden. For a moment it just sat there crumpled against the bricks and debris, hissing steam like a kettle. Then the driver’s door opened. But it wasn’t Hilda who got out; it was the great hulk called Brian. For a moment Brian stood in the glow of the security light, like a visitor from another planet, before he began walking up the path toward the front door.
By the time Brian had broken into the house and found it to be empty except for a sleeping Uncle Pogo, Nelson and his monsters were already on the highway and halfway to Heathrow Airport. Unfortunately for Nelson, he had left a clue to where they were going: the computer on Pogo’s desk was still showing the last thing Nelson had been searching for—flights from Heathrow to Brazil.
* * *
“For Heathrow Terminal 5, take the next exit,” said the GPS, as if this was a perfectly simple thing to do. However, for Nelson it meant swinging the steering wheel to the left and swerving slowly across two lanes in order to head down a ramp toward a roundabout. The monsters howled with excitement, extracted as they were from the bit of Nelson’s little soul that secretly loved mayhem. Nelson had gotten used to the levers—they were easier to use than the go-cart he had driven once on vacation—but it was the other cars on the road that were his concern. He was going slower than everyone else, which provoked a lot of honking of horns.
“Are we nearly there yet?” moaned Spike, and his answer came in the form of a 747 roaring overhead.
“At the roundabout take the third exit,” said the navigation system.
For Nelson, entering the roundabout was like entering a giant game of bumper cars. Sweat poured down his back and glistened on his forehead. He’d pulled his hood up so that no one would notice that an eleven-year-old boy was driving a van by himself, but that was making him hotter still.
“You missed the turn, you idiot!” bellowed Stan.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t help having you lot shouting at me, you know.” Nelson’s voice wobbled. His mouth was so dry you could have lit a match on his tongue, and he didn’t dare take a hand off the wheel to wipe his brow for fear of crashing. The monsters cackled and scoffed as Nelson drove round the roundabout again, waiting for the GPS to tell him which exit to take. Unfortunately the instructions were interrupted by the ringing of the phone in Pogo’s false leg.
“Oh no! I don’t know where to go. Which one is the third exit?” said Nelson in his new stressed-out voice.
“This is Pogo. I’m sorry I can’t take your call at the moment, but please leave a message after the beep and I’ll get right back to you … Beep!” went the answer machine in the false leg and then a voice that Nelson knew began to speak.
“Pogo? Mate, it’s Doody. Look, sorry to call you in the middle of the night, but I’m in the Westminster labs and, well, we found some blood on one of them things you discovered, the table with all the needles, so I wondered if either you or that little nephew of yours had fallen on it. It’s just that the blood is fresh, so I wanted to check that you was all right and not hurt or nuffin’. All right. Call me when you wake up, yer lazy so-and-so—Beep.”
Nelson was getting dizzy from all these laps of the roundabout and was desperate to be told which exit to take.
“Take the third exit for Heathrow Airport,” said the navigator, and finally, after ten torturous laps of the roundabout, Nelson steered the van in the correct direction.
“I hate roundabouts,” he muttered. Even though there were a lot of cars on the road that approached the airport, they all moved more slowly now and it was easy to stay in just one lane and follow the signs. They entered a tunnel that filled the van with orange light and the monsters marveled and cooed at the effect it gave.
“You have arrived at your destination,” said Pogo’s leg as the van emerged on the other side, and the monsters cheered, but the truth was that they hadn’t quite arrived yet. There were various buildings to choose from, and Nelson had no idea where to go. Arrows and signposts seemed to multiply in front of him like some kind of baffling card trick. He slowed right down, but a car behind him honked in frustration before pulling up alongside them, winding down a window and shouting something rude at Nelson. Nelson kept looking straight ahead and just hoped the angry driver could not tell he was a kid. Hoot had been flying low enough to hear what was going on and decided to show his support by doing what birds do best, which is pooping on car windshields. If Hoot had been a normal-sized bird the driver would not have had cause for alarm, but Hoot was the size of a dog and his glittering golden poop was as large as a cow patty, which meant that when it hit the windshield the driver screamed and had to make an emergency stop.
“I don’t know where I’m going, and you are not helping me!” said Nelson through clenched teeth, but this altercation had forced Nelson to stay in his lane, which actually turned out to be a good thing as it led directly to the terminal for flights to South America.
* * *
Nelson stopped the van with one of the front wheels up on the curb just before it hit a suitcase belonging to a family who were unloading luggage from their car.
He turned off the engine and sat back in his seat. Only now did he realize he had been in a tense, hunched position ever since they’d left his uncle’s house. They weren’t even out of the country yet, but Nelson felt as if he couldn’t possibly go any farther, and had it not been for a traffic warden approaching he would have happily stayed in the van for at least another twenty minutes, just to get his breath back.
“Oh, great, now we’re going to get a parking ticket,” said Spike in his usual monotone, as Nelson quickly scrambled over the seats to stay out of sight.
Once the warden had passed, Nelson and the monsters jumped out the back doors. Nelson kept his hood up and looked around to check that no one had noticed anything peculiar, but luckily for them, the airport was busy with flustered people in a rush to catch their plane, just like they were.
“What are we gonna do with the van?” said Nelson, but none of the monsters were listening. Miser had stolen the trolley from the family next to them, and the rest of the monsters were all loading the trunk onto it. “Uh-oh, Nelson’s gonna drive again,” cackled Stan, and all the monsters piled on.
“Excuse me, that’s our trolley,” said the mother of the family at the next car.
Nelson looked awkward and opened his mouth, but words did not come out.
“Tell her to get lost,” grunted Stan, but the best Nelson could come up with was a squeaky “Sorry!” as he pushed the trolley as fast as he could into Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport, with the monsters laughing at him all the way.