CHAPTER SIX
The talons were gripping me tightly and it really hurt. I craned my neck round to look at the bird. It was like something out of a horror film. When you see birds pecking about on the lawn they can look quite cute. But when you see them really close-up they’re about as cute as a great white shark. This one had a cruel, curved beak and blank, psychotic eyes. It was planning to eat me, and it wouldn’t suffer a moment’s remorse. Scientists say birds are descended from dinosaurs, and all I can say is, I believe it.
‘I wish I was my normal size again!’
The bird gave a squawk of surprise. Its talons slipped off me. And I started to fall at accelerating speed to earth, which, now I was normal-sized again, was capable of killing me. I was also completely naked, as I’d forgotten to wish my clothes would grow with me.
‘I wish I was ten centimetres again!’ I got the wish out just before I hit the lawn. So I didn’t do myself any serious damage, but it was an uncomfortable landing. Now I was tiny again, each blade of grass was about thigh-high, and as thick as my hand. It also felt very hard and coarse – more like reeds than grass.
This was turning out to be a stressful day.
I wished for my clothes back. I also wished that the bird would have a really bad headache for the rest of the day. A bit spiteful, maybe. But after all, that was nothing compared to what it would’ve done to me.
Evan had watched all this from the roof, and now he jumped down beside me on the lawn.
‘Wow, that was close!’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘That was a sparrowhawk! They’re quite rare round here, you know.’
‘They can’t be too rare for me.’
‘But you have to admit, they’re magnificent birds.’
‘What?’
‘They’re magnificent birds.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if one had just carried you off.’
‘Yes I would.’
‘No you wouldn’t.’
‘Yes I would.’
‘All right then, let’s see. I wish a sparrowhawk would come along and carry Evan off.’
Down it swooped. Evan’s face as he was carried off, dangling from its talons, featured three big circles – his round, astonished eyes and his round, gaping mouth.
It sounds mean, I know. It’s just . . . when it’s so easy to wish for something and you know it’ll come true straight away, you often find yourself wishing for stuff before you’ve really thought it through.
In no time Evan was a speck in the distance. I wished the bird would bring him back unharmed and put him down on the ground beside me. So it came winging its way back, and as Evan came into focus I saw that now his face wasn’t defined by three circles but by three straight lines. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were set in a line of crossness.
‘Do you still think it’s a magnificent bird, then?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, it’s magnificent. But you’re not!’ His face was flushed and he was panting slightly. ‘Look!’ He pulled up his shirt to show big red weals where the talons had gripped him.
‘All right then, I wish those red marks were gone.’ At once Evan’s skin was back to its pale, unmarked, flabby normality. ‘Happy now?’
‘Not really.’
‘Well, what else can I do?’
‘You could try saying sorry.’
Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate being told to say sorry. I’m happy to say it if I feel sorry, but as soon as someone orders me to say it, I stop feeling it. So I really didn’t want to say it. But then, I didn’t want Evan to carry on feeling annoyed with me. So . . .
‘I wish Evan didn’t feel annoyed with me any more.’
‘I don’t,’ Evan said. He grinned. ‘I’m not annoyed with you at all.’
‘Well, that’s all right then. What shall we do now?’
‘I’m getting a bit hungry,’ said Evan.
What a surprise.
Still. I s’pose I was kind of peckish myself. ‘What shall we have?’
‘Burger and chips?’
‘Coming right up. I wish for two Burger King Whoppers and fries . . .’ Then my mind took a leap. ‘Giant-sized!’
Wow.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of giant-sized food. And there it was, steaming, smelling delicious, two boxed burgers, each one about the size of a van. And next to each one, a bag as high as my head, with golden fries poking out of it like planks of wood.
I pulled one of the chips out. I had to use both hands. It was too hot to hold for long, so I wished for it to cool down, just a little bit, and then I took a bite.
Hmm.
It wasn’t quite as delicious as I’d thought. For a start, the outside was a bit leathery – of course it was about fifteen times as thick as before, so quite hard to bite into. Also, when you’re not much bigger than the chip yourself, you notice just how greasy they are. That is, very greasy indeed. And the fine dusting of salt they have, well, when you’re ten centimetres tall it’s not a fine dusting at all but chunks of rock salt, each one about as big as a grain of rice. I took a few bites all the same, but soon got tired of it and put the chip down in the grass. So did Evan.
‘Perhaps the burgers will be better,’ Evan said.
It was hard to wrestle the boxes open, so I just wished they’d open up. We each climbed into a box. The burger came up to about my waist, and by leaning forwards and spreading my arms I could just about touch both sides. I saw Evan was tearing chunks out of the bread and then pulling out fistfuls of burger to put in them – effectively making mini-burgers, which turned out to be the only way we could eat them. Even then it wasn’t easy. We couldn’t eat the sesame seeds, they were far too big and hard, so we had to pull those out and throw them away. The sauce and mayo and stuff inside, well, there was such a lot of it, buckets of it, and it got all over my clothes, adding to the grease stains the chip had already left there. The lettuce was thick and fibrous, like giant raw cabbage leaves. And the meat was coarse and gristly and fatty.
It was fun, because it was so weird. But it wasn’t particularly nice to eat. Soon I felt sick and had to stop. Evan battled on gamely for a bit, but eventually even he had to give up.
We lay on the grass – I wished for a miniaturized patch so it would be more comfortable – and sipped on glasses of Coke I’d wished for – micro-sized, like us, otherwise the bubbles would have been too big to swallow.
And I tried to work out, in my head, what exactly having all these wishes meant and what I was going to do with them. I mean, so far, all I’d done was mess about. Was I going to carry on doing that? Well, maybe. It was pretty spectacular messing about, after all. But . . . it might get boring. No, not even boring, that wasn’t the right word. More sort of . . . unsatisfying. Like just playing at life, instead of actually living it. Because when you can have whatever you want, without any effort at all – did anything actually mean anything?
‘Sam?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You could wish for anything, couldn’t you?’
‘No limits?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well . . . I wonder if . . . you could . . .?’
‘What?’
‘I was just thinking . . .’
‘What?’
‘You know.’ He looked at me with a kind of hopeful, pleading expression.
‘What?’ Maybe you’ll think it was pretty dumb of me, but I couldn’t work out what he was trying to lead up to.
Just then, a distraction occurred. ‘Hey, look at that!’ I said.
A line of ants was marching up the side of one of the burger boxes. And another line was heading for the discarded fry. But when I say ants, you have to realize that, from our perspective, these really were big, bad boys. Each one was roughly the size of a lobster.
‘Oh my God!’ said Evan. He wandered over to look at them more closely. So did I. They took no notice of us, just kept on filing past like robots. ‘They’re kind of horrible, aren’t they?’ Evan said. ‘Like little monsters. Or aliens.’
‘I wonder what they’d look like if we were really small?’
We looked at each other.
‘I wish we were one millimetre tall!’ I said, and the world changed.
The blades of grass were no longer reeds, but trees. They towered over our heads, casting a green gloom. The soil under our feet wasn’t smooth but rough and chunky, full of clods and pebbles. And the ants – the ants! They were as big as rhinos now. You could actually hear the swoosh of the grass they parted, and hear their feet – if ants have feet. You know what I mean, the ends of their legs – grating on the pebbles as they tramped past.
In Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, if you’ve seen that film, the kids meet an ant in the garden and make friends with it. It’s a cute ant and it communicates with them by squeaking and twitching its antennae, and it lets them ride around on its back. I have to tell you that that film is totally bogus. There’s nothing cute about ants. They’re cosmically ugly. When you see them close up in supersize it’s amazing how crude and unfinished they look, like they’re bolted together out of spare parts. They’ve got horrible, big goggly eyes which are completely empty of expression, and coarse hairs like steel wires sticking out of their legs, and great big mandibles dripping with some sort of horrible saliva. They’ve got a sort of pungent, acidic smell to them as well, like a mixture of sweat and vinegar. You can just tell, looking at them, that they have no soul, no intelligence whatsoever, they are just dumb machines blindly following a programme. Creepy or what? I felt a sudden, senseless desire to kill them. Destroy them all.
‘Shall we?’ I go.
‘What?’
‘Blast them.’
‘But why?’
‘It’ll be fun.’
‘But it’s killing for fun, isn’t it? Like hunting. And I don’t agree with hunting.’
‘Neither do I. But come on, Evan, these are ants! They haven’t got any feelings. Look at them!’
‘Well . . .’
I could see he was wavering. ‘I wish we had a bazooka each, just the right size for us to hold but powerful enough to blow up an ant!’
And there, in my hands, was this sort of steel tube with a trigger and a telescopic sight. I lifted it on to my shoulder and looked down the sight at the nearest ant. I aimed at its bulky, bulbous head and pressed the trigger.
Wham!
A stream of yellow fire shot out and hit the ant. It burst into flames and fell over, with its six legs jerking about randomly.
A second later another streak of flame shot out from Evan’s bazooka and another ant went up in flames and fell over.
The other ants took no notice. They just skirted round their fallen comrades and headed straight on for that burger. And I think it was this that convinced me that the ants deserved no mercy at all. They didn’t even care about each other, so why should I?
I pumped the trigger again and again and again, and so did Evan, and the big lumbering brutes collapsed, burst into pieces, writhing and kicking, with no idea what had hit them. I realized I was laughing, and so was Evan.
It had been a dry summer. The flames from the burning ants soon caught the surrounding grass. In no time a forest fire had started. Me and Evan retreated, still firing, but the flames were roaring towards us. I felt the heat searing my face.
‘Sam!’ Evan shouted. ‘Do something!’
‘I wish we were full-size!’
Blast. I’d forgotten about the clothes again. The doll-sized outfits we’d worn lay torn and tattered on the grass, and we were both stark naked.
‘All right, I wish we had our clothes on, obviously!’
We stood on the lawn, with the little ring of fire flickering at our feet. The ants were running around in circles, tiny, confused black specks – the burger called them on while the flames drove them away.
I felt suddenly sorry for them. The poor little things didn’t know what they were doing, they just followed their instincts. I started to stamp out the flames, and so did Evan. I tried to avoid stamping on any ants. But that was impossible, of course.
When the fire was out, I felt a bit silly and ashamed of myself. What had we just been doing? It was like we’d gone mad.
‘I wish all those ants we’d killed were alive again,’ I said.
Evan nodded in agreement. ‘What’s the matter with us? With all those wishes – you could do anything in the world – and we’re wasting our time killing ants!’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, instead of killing things, we could . . .’
‘What? Look, if there’s something you want me to wish, why don’t you just tell me?’
Evan bit his lip. ‘You mean you can’t guess?’
‘Nothing’s coming to me.’
‘Well – have a think, OK?’
‘OK.’ He’d gone all serious. I couldn’t work out why he was acting so weird.
‘I’m gonna go home now,’ Evan said.
‘OK. See you tomorrow.’
At the garden gate he turned back. ‘Just one more thing . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘Could you wish for a burger for me to eat on the way home? A normal-sized one?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Was that it – the thing you wanted me to guess?’
‘No,’ Evan said. ‘That wasn’t it.’