In which Bill meets some new Unusualness. And then he decides to visit somewhere that he really, really shouldn’t and no matter how loudly we shout at this book, he won’t hear us saying that he should just go home and have some bread and honey instead. If only Uncle Shawn could help… But will he be able to? Will defeating P’Klawz be too much for him? We can hardly bear to think about it.
While all this Unusualness was happening to the llamas, Badger Bill was walking along the seashore. He really wanted to tell someone a joke, but Uncle Shawn was nowhere to be seen. So Bill said out loud to the breeze, “What’s the difference between a piano and a fish?”
There was no answer.
Bill asked the sand the same question, but the sand didn’t say anything, either.
Then he walked down to the very edge of the water, near where Uncle Shawn had been making his Unusual noises and patting the water. Bill asked again, “What’s the difference between a piano and a fish?”
There was no reply. But just as Bill turned round to begin walking back to the farmhouse, he heard a very deep, bubbly, watery voice say, very slowly, “YOOOU CAAAN TUUUNE A PIANOOO. BUT YOOOU CAAAN’T TUUUNAAA FIIISH.”
Bill looked down at the water and caught sight of two very enormous and clever eyes peering up at him. One of the eyes winked.
While he ran away as fast as a badger with short but elegant dancer’s legs can run, Bill thought to himself, “I really am a very brave badger. But eyes in the sea – that’s Too Unusual for me!”
And he kept on running.
By the time Bill stopped, he realized that he was in the village of Pandrumdroochit.
“I wonder if Uncle Shawn patting the sea has made it Unusual?” thought Bill. “Oh no – that means he might be suffering from really bad Unusualness… What shall I do?”
And then Bill noticed the shiny sign that Dr P’Klawz (who wasn’t really called P’Klawz and wasn’t really a doctor and who was just a big fibber with a nice suit) had put outside his office.
It said:
Bill couldn’t remember seeing the sign before. But maybe if the famous Dr P’Klawz was right here, he could help Bill find out if everyone at the llama farm was suffering from Unusualness.
Bill put out his paw and opened the door…
Elsewhere in the village of Pandrumdroochit, Uncle Shawn was in Mrs MacDonald’s garden, crunching a toffee. (It was covered in sand from his pocket.) He was sitting in an apple tree, next to Mrs MacDonald’s cat, Bob. Mrs MacDonald looked up at them both. “He knows how to climb down, he just doesn’t want to,” she said.
“Yes.” Uncle Shawn nodded, tickling the cat’s tummy. “He likes company and he especially likes firemen, don’t you, Bob? That’s why you pretend to be stuck, so the firemen have to come and rescue you.” Bob purred but admitted nothing. Uncle Shawn waved a jam sandwich at Mrs MacDonald happily. “Would you like half of my last sandwich?”
“No, no. I’ll go and call the firemen. Would you like some tea with that?”
“Yes, please,” said Uncle Shawn. He swung his feet in the air and enjoyed the view. From up here, he could see all the way to the sea and the llama farm.
At that moment, P’Klawz popped up from behind a rose bush. (He had sneaked all the way there from his office.) “There is no time for tea! Behold! I am the world-famous Unusualness doctor! I am Doctor P’Klawz!”
“You’re Doctor Pickles?” asked Mrs MacDonald – she’d never met him before, because she didn’t go out much. “I don’t really like pickles, they disagree with me.”
“Not Pickles!” snapped Dr P’Klawz. Then he remembered he was trying to seem nice and he smiled like sunbeams rattling around in a freshly scrubbed toilet. “I am Doctor P’Klawz. Allow me to show you the leaflet I pushed through your letterbox earlier. I think you will find that you didn’t read it carefully enough.”
“I didn’t read it at all. There are leaflets coming through my letterbox all the time just now. I use them to light the fire.”
“Do realize how dangerous that might be?”
“No, I’m very good at lighting fires. I’ve been doing it for years.”
“I mean it is dangerous not to read my leaflets!”
“Well, I have been quite busy.”
“PANDRUMDROOCHIT IS TURNING UNUSUAL!”
“Pandrumdroochit is a very happy village,” said Mrs MacDonald. “Sometimes visitors come to our tea room and fall asleep before they can have their tea because it’s so peaceful.”
P’Klawz made his voice sound as soothing as honey and lemon. “You are a busy lady and have no time to think, so I will think for you. Up in your tree, you have a cat who will not obey you. That is Unusual.”
“No, it’s not,” called Uncle Shawn, who was studying Dr P’Klawz very carefully with his clever blue eyes. He grinned. “Cats never obey people, because they have plans that human people don’t know about.”
“Then how do you know? You’re people,” said Dr P’Klawz, being very sly. But he started to scratch his ears and elbows and bottom, because Uncle Shawn’s happiness was making his skin itch. P’Klawz murmured to Mrs MacDonald, “You have an Unusual man talking to your Unusual cat. No one should ever talk to cats, because they cannot answer. And that man—”
“They answer if you listen. I’m Uncle Shawn. Hello, Mr Pickles.”
“It’s P’Klawz. Doctor P’Klawz,” Dr P’Klawz lied. Then he smiled like a whole warehouse full of lavatories and threw Uncle Shawn a shiny white card that said: DR P’KLAWZ – CALL AT ONCE IN CASE OF UNUSUALNESS.
P’Klawz gave Mrs MacDonald a card, too, and said sneakily to her, “That Uncle Shawn is sitting in a tree. Grown-ups must never sit in trees. It is far too Unusual.”
“But it’s fun,” said Uncle Shawn. “And I am not a grown-up. I decided when I was a boy that I would never turn into a grown-up and I never have. I am just a tall human person.” Uncle Shawn swung his feet in his big mahogany shoes in front of Dr P’Klawz’s grinding teeth.
“You’re meant to be grown-up and miserable! You are not supposed to throw jam sandwiches at people’s windows!” shouted P’Klawz. “You are not supposed to climb trees or have fun! YOU ARE COMPLETELY UNUSUAL!”
“Thank you.” Uncle Shawn smiled. “I try my best.” And he stared at Dr P’Klawz as if he was thinking that his jam sandwich was more likely to be a real doctor than P’Klawz. Uncle Shawn was very clever at knowing people.
Uncle Shawn’s general happiness was making P’Klawz’s teeth skreeeee as loud as a large man on a tiny bicycle with rusty brakes. “You must be treated immediately – skreeeeee – for all your terrible Unusualness before it spreads to everybody else!”
“Spreads like fun and happiness, you mean?” asked Uncle Shawn gently.
“Skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” said P’Klawz’s teeth. “You need locking up until you are miserable and then locking up some more!”
And then he remembered that Mrs MacDonald was listening and whispered sweetly to her, “We only lock all the doors and windows in my Institution to keep out draughts.” (This was a very big fib.)
P’Klawz took out his pocket watch and made it spin. “This is my Unusualness detector.” (This was a fib.) “Look at how it is shining…” The watch sparkled and sprookled so much that it dazzled Mrs MacDonald and made her thinking fuzzy.
“That’s just a broken old watch,” Uncle Shawn pointed out.
P’Klawz purred to Mrs MacDonald, “Allow me, gentle lady, to escort you indoors away from all this Unusualness. A normal, usual person can catch Unusualness from an Unusual person, so you shouldn’t ever go near one. And you certainly shouldn’t let one sit in your tree. Probably you should cut the tree down and saw it into little bits and burn them.”
“But it’s my favourite apple tree,” said Mrs MacDonald. “My grandfather planted it and it gives me wonderful apples every year.”
“Are they Unusual apples?” asked P’Klawz, and his eyes glittered.
“They are Unusually Tasty and Juicy.”
“Then they should be burned, too.”
“I normally make them into pies and crumbles. I give some to the firemen.”
“You must set fire to the Unusual apples and crumbles. Then bury them,” Dr P’Klawz said soothingly. He shooed Mrs MacDonald away from the tree and watched her go inside. Then he hissed up at Uncle Shawn, “Soon no one will want to see you and your Unusual clothes and your Unusual hair and your Unusual shoes and your Unusual face. They won’t want to be your friend any more. Someone as Unusual as you shouldn’t have any friends.”
This made Uncle Shawn’s blue eyes even bluer while he thought a lot and decided things. “You are not a nice man,” he said. “And I do not think you are a doctor.”
“Shall I tell you a secret?” asked Dr P’Klawz.
“Oh, I love secrets, yes,” said Uncle Shawn.
Dr P’Klawz made his voice into a shivery, cold whisper and told Uncle Shawn, “You are right. I am not nice at all and I hate you, Uncle Shawn. Everywhere I have gone, everyone has told me that you are the happiest man they have ever met.”
“That’s nice to know.” Uncle Shawn smiled.
Dr P’Klawz’s pointy, pinky nose sniffled the air. “You even smell like happiness. And you’re exactly like yourself and nobody else, and that’s what makes you happy all over and it must be stopped! One way or another I will squish the happiness and Unusualness right out of you.
“That’s horrible,” said Uncle Shawn.
“I know! It’s wonderfully horrible, isn’t it?” said Dr P’Klawz, and he made a noise like very old swamp monsters wheezing, which was what he did instead of laughing. “In the end, this whole country will be free from happiness. No fun, no laughter. No singing. No dances. No whistling. NO UNUSUALNESS.”
Uncle Shawn quietly asked, “Are you sure that you’ll like what you get in the end?” Because he always wanted to give people the chance to change their minds when they were doing something silly. “If there is no happiness anywhere, then you won’t be happy yourself, you know…”
But P’Klawz grinned like a whole showroom for baths. “Everyone will be exactly the same and everyone will be miserable, and my skin will stop itching and my ears will be comfortable and my teeth will be quiet and my head won’t ache. And whenever I feel sad, I will think that you have no friends any more and that without your Unusualness you will be nobody at all, and that will make me laugh and laugh.”
Uncle Shawn rubbed at his wibbly wobbly hair to make himself feel brave, “Ha! Well, you shouldn’t have told me all that, because now I will tell everyone the truth about you and they will stop reading your leaflets, and they will have extra fun, just to annoy you.”
“Nobody will even listen to you, because nobody is speaking to you. They will just ignore you. Because you are Too Unusual.” And P’Klawz made a noise like someone scraping a pebble along sandpaper. This was what he did instead of giggling. Then he stepped neatly away – tip, tip, tip – on his very shiny shoes, under his very shiny hair that looked like paint.
This left Uncle Shawn with Bob the cat. After a while, when the firemen didn’t arrive – because Mrs MacDonald hadn’t called them – Bob got bored and climbed down from the tree all by himself. He went to sleep on the roof of the shed in a patch of sunshine.
Uncle Shawn swung his feet and thought big thoughts about Dr P’Klawz. “It’s not right for this pretend doctor to frighten people and make them sad. And I do not like the sound of his Institution, not one teeny tiny bit.”
At that very moment, a huge grey van went past. On its side – in darker grey letters – was painted: INSTITUTION FOR MAXIMUM SECURITY AND UNUSUALNESS CURING – COLLECTION SERVICE.
Peering out of its tiny, barred window was Hughie, the little boy who wanted to be a spaceman. P’Klawz had hypnotized Hughie’s mum to make her send Hughie to the Institution to cure him of his Unusualness. But really P’Klawz just wanted to squish all the fun out of him so that he would end up as grey as the van he was being taken away in. Hughie’s face looked very sad, even when Uncle Shawn waved and smiled.
“Well now. This all needs fixing, doesn’t it?” said Uncle Shawn. He felt nervous in his tummy. “I think I have a plan, but it is a scary plan… Oh dear.” 