Magic Ink

A MYSTERIOUS PIG IN FANCY DRESS RUNS WILD!

If you noticed I spelled ‘chapter’ wrong at the top of the page, CONGRATULATIONS! I’m just making sure you’re awake.

You may think it’s a bit crazy to start a book with a wrongly-spelled word. Well, with the story I’m telling, you’d better get used to crazy. And I should warn you, we’re talking bonkers, fruit-loops, round-the-bend, round-the-twist, round-and-round-the-mulberry-bush-then-round-an-extra-twisty-bendy-fruit-loop crazy. Not throwing the book away in disgust? Good. Then I’ll continue. . .

The whole thing started when we saw a pig in a top hat running wild through the house. By we, I mean my whole family: Mum, Dad and Lib.

Lib – or Liberty – is my little sister. My stupid, whiny, annoying little sister.

She was the first one to see the mysterious pig. . . and to hear it, for that matter.

I was asleep at that point.

Who am I?

Glad you asked.

I’m Stew Penders, and this is my book.

Confession: it’s my first go at writing a book and I’m feeling my way a bit. So, please. . . bear with me.

There – a picture! I feel happier when there are drawings involved, you see; I’m more of a comic book kind of guy. I’ve been writing and illustrating my own comics since forever.

Well, OK, I may have exaggerated slightly there. But from now on, I won’t. I don’t need to. This true-life story is crazy enough already.

I’ll prove it. Let’s get back to the night it all began. . .

There was Libs lying in her strange, unfamiliar bed – unfamiliar because we’d only moved into my granddad’s old house that very day, and he’d left lots of old furniture behind, and Libs had whined and whined until Mum and Dad shut her up by saying she could have Granddad’s big, wooden, sleigh-shaped bed in her room.

Anyway, there she was, surrounded by stuffed animals and princesses and all that rubbish, when suddenly. . .

Snuffle – snuffle —

There’s a sinister snuffling outside her bedroom door.

PIIIIIIIIG!!! Lib shrieked from across the landing, with way more exclamation marks than I can be bothered to write right now. "PIIIIIG! In my BEDROOOOOOM!!! It’s got a hat on! Big, fat, hairy PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG!"

Luckily for the accuracy of this eyewitness account, that was when I woke up. Nine times out of ten, my automatic response would be to shout something brotherly like, LIB, SHUT UP AND STOP BEING SO DUMB!

But, on this one-tenth of times, I didn’t.

Partly that was because I was in a strange bedroom too, and got confused ’cos I didn’t know where I was for a few seconds. But mainly it was because I heard a throaty squeal carry above Lib’s cries. And, fair play to her, it did sound exactly like the sort of noise a big fat hairy ‘PIIIIIIG’ might make.

Nah, that’s crazy, I told myself. Isn’t it?

I checked my watch and saw it was after two in the morning. A split-second later I heard Dad throw open the door to his and Mum’s room, which was next door to mine, and shamble outside.

Something must’ve got in through the old cat-flap. . . he said, sounding sleepy and confused. I don’t get it – I boarded the hole up with a piece of two-by-four, a good match for the door, it should’ve held, no problem. . .

Dad is a bit of a Do-It-Yourself whizz – or so he likes to think. Eight times out of ten his DIY does it back to him.

But this was no ordinary night.

I was wide awake by now, and waiting for Dad to give Lib a roasting for being stupid, annoying, whiny etc and for making stuff up. But the next moment, he was shouting too!

Bryony! (That’s my mum’s name, sorry, should’ve mentioned that.) "Bryony, there really is a pig!"

I almost jumped out of my unfamiliar bed in shock. I heard more squeals and snuffling (by now it was hard to tell whether they were coming from Lib or the pig), quickly followed by a loud thump as Dad fell over.

AAAGH! he shouted. And then my mum joined in with the caterwauling. Or pigerwauling, I guess. Her conversation with Dad went like this:

Mum— A pig?

Dad— Yes, a pig! It got past me, don’t come out!

But, a PIG?

Yes! A pig. Must’ve got in through the—

"You mean there’s a PIG IN THE HOUSE?"

YES, there’s a massive pig up here, it’s dressed up in—

"Did you say A PIG?"

YESSS!

Their bellowed duet seemed to go on for ages; I can’t be sure, because around then I zoned out. Why? Possibly because my unfamiliar bedroom door had suddenly burst open. . . Yellow brightness had flooded in like a strike of lightning. . .

And there was Liberty’s pig, poised dramatically in the doorway. Weirdly, I saw that it was wearing a hat – a big, black top hat, like some posh type would wear maybe a hundred years ago. The pig even seemed to have a curly moustache under its snout (a trick of the light, right?!) and its pink, pudgy body was squeezed into a funny kind of coat.

Luckily, I’m not one to panic in the face of strange goings-on and weird events. I’m calm in a crisis, yeah? Stew Penders – the comic book king of cool heads. I stayed smooth and in control and I. . .

Oh, who am I kidding?

I yelled my bum off.

Yep, that was what my scream was like – right down to the bold capital letters and seven exclamation marks.

Well, you try meeting a pig in fancy dress in the middle of the night on your first day in a new home! See how you like it!

Besides, I wasn’t really scared for myself. All I could think was—Don’t touch my superhero comics! Please! It took me my whole life to collect them and some of them are worth a bit, and bite-marks and trotter-prints are going to seriously reduce their value. . .

In case you hadn’t figured it out, action comics are kind of important to me. What could be more important than super-powered characters in long underwear having fights?

My mum’s always despaired of me for being such a comics nut. If I’m not reading about superheroes, I’m drawing my own strips. But, right now, with all of us yelling and shrieking and swearing and falling over, that’s exactly what me and my family needed: a superhero. Someone to answer our cries and come bounding to the rescue.

But at that moment, it all boiled down to just two things – a boy in bed, and a pig in top hat and tails with a dodgy ’tache. Each staring at the other.

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the pig WINKED. . .

THE PENDERS CONTENDERS

I might just spell a chapter correctly, one day! But don’t hold your breath.

There’s an old saying that goes something like, ‘When heroes don’t exist, it is necessary to invent them’. Pretty deep, huh? So, how might my family measure up as superheroes?

Let’s weigh up the odds in the big battle – Pig versus Penders – fact-file-style!

So, you see, even if they were superheroes, three-quarters of my household would be no real use against a killer pig in the middle of the night.

But what about me?

As that bacon-sandwich-in-training stared at me – his top hat cocked at a rakish angle and a glint in his eye – it was almost as if he could see through the outward form of a startled boy to spy the superhero within. The star of a thousand homemade comics, the hero I’d always longed to become. Stew Penders, also known as. . .

Never mind the pig, I hear you shout. Let us read and enjoy Stupendous Man’s adventures right away!

Well, I understand where you’re coming from. I’ve been writing and drawing his comic-strip exploits my whole life and right now I’m redrawing and rewriting them (since the earliest ones were a bit basic).

They will be available to read some day. But for now, I’m afraid you HAVE to mind the pig.

In my household, we minded him very much.

After a few seconds’ staring at me, the improbable pig suddenly decided to make like the Hulk’s trousers – and split. He turned and ran squealing down the stairs, pursued by Dad, with Mum’s wails and Lib’s screams still ringing in his pink pointy ears.

Within a few minutes, all went quiet. Dad came back and reported that the pig had escaped through what was left of the catflap. The board Dad had used to block it was lying outside on the path to the back door, like it had been prised off. For now, he’d wedged a couple of heavy boxes in front of the hole to keep out any other loopy wildlife.

A pig in fancy-dress! Dad attempted a chuckle. Most likely a neighbour’s idea of a practical joke. You know, we’re newbies to the area so they’ve set us a kind of crazy entrance exam. I’ll ask round in the morning – right now we should just forget all about it and go back to sleep.

And so, an uneasy clam settled on the house. Oh, all right then, an uneasy calm. But frankly, if there was a mad clothed pig running around there could easily have been an uneasy clam about too.

We wanted to believe there was a normal explanation; and at gone two in the morning, you’re ready to believe almost anything.

Libby crashed out eventually after some hugs from Mum and a couple of way-past-bedtime stories from Dad.

It took me longer to drift off, though I was super-tired. I was still awake when the quiet snorts and snufflings started up again. This time from the ceiling.

Or rather, through the ceiling.

The noises were coming from the room above mine. The attic. The attic that my granddad had locked up twenty years ago, and banned anyone from going near. . .

I buried my head under the pillow and told myself the noise was in my imagination. I also told myself my carpet was made of marshmallows and that I would one day marry a satsuma.

The three statements were about as believable as each other. But at least the thought of my fruity wedding distracted me long enough to smother my pig-radar and push out some zzzs in the end.

THE MORNING AFTER

(But you can read it now if you like)

I was woken from a confused dream about marshmallows and small oranges around 8.30 by the sound of banging. It was Dad getting busy with his hammer, nailing a board over the catflap again. He was taking no chances on the pig returning.

I thought about the way the pig had seemed to wink at me. Imagination, I told myself. Got to be. Probably had something in his eye. And the moustache had to be a falsie.

But what about the noises I’d heard in the night? Could there be another animal trapped up there (apart from the uneasy clam, obviously)? Perhaps there was another way in? I couldn’t really see a pig climbing a ladder to get in through a hole in the roof. There again, I wouldn’t have imagined a pig in a top hat before last night either.

I trudged down the stairs in my dressing gown. I’d been up and down those seventeen steps no end of times before, since I was old enough to crawl, in fact – but to think they were our stairs now and not Granddad’s seemed really very odd.

I’d always loved my granddad and couldn’t believe he wasn’t with us any more. . . that he’d gone to that great comics convention in the sky.

I also couldn’t quite believe he had left his savings, his house and everything he owned to his only son – my dad.

On top of that, I also couldn’t believe how quickly Dad had stuck our old house up for rent – fully-furnished – so my family could make a new start here on the outskirts of a big town, fifty miles away from our old life in the country (which, by the way, I REALLY LIKED).

But what was completely unbelievable was this: instead of using Granddad’s money to take us all on a mega-cool vacation, or to buy himself a sports car, or to