You Knew Full Well I was a Snake, Chapter Three

Back at the café, Flashsatsumas had piled up his empty plates so was only too aware how the situation stood. Waiting for Miss Ugly to return with Mini-Flash Juniper safe and sound was proving to be more than he could take, and every interminable minute that passed seemed to increase the likelihood of something having gone wrong. Flashsatsumas didn’t need to look at Pat and Maureen to know they felt the same, so instead he was concentrating on what toys remained and the discarded packages strewn across the table. These Flashsatsumas turned endlessly over in his hands one by one, at his wits’ end for some opportunity he may have missed. His card, Juniper’s card, Maureen’s cats, Pat’s box…

On this last was a painting of the product and several accompanying photographs. The whole must have been in front of Flashsatsumas twenty times before something dawned on him.

“Pat,” he ventured, holding the box. “Can I…?”

“Mate, if it’d help our Jen I’d give you everything in me room,” Pat replied.

Flashsatsumas, hardly daring to breathe, wrenched open the lid and dragged out the cardboard interior. Loose from this was a little polythene bag, containing another action figure with a helmet to go over his head. He looked like a nasty type to Flashsatsumas, who didn’t hesitate to toss him and his accessory aside.

That left the lining, and secure inside it, the vehicle driven by this ill-favoured man.

There it lay, gleaming and new, with four chunky tyres and slick black bodywork. A potent piece of kit in anyone’s book.

“The man’s a baddie,” Flashsatsumas began, slow and hushed. “And his vehicle transforms, but only when he’s operating it. So does that mean the machine itself isn’t inherently…?”

Next second the boys were overturning their chairs.

“Maureen, get me five more slices of this cake to go!” cried Flashsatsumas, clutching up vehicle and satchel alike. “Pat, to the car park!”

There were traffic lights outside a bowling alley and darting across the road here was Jenny’s last smart move, for the van was hot on her heels again, and her manoeuvre meant it had to go on and circle the roundabout at the clock tower before entering endgame. Jenny however, who was exhausted from her flight through the elements, had been counting on a side-entrance to the funfair in this one corner she’d previously visited. If however there was such a thing, a maze of low walls and little round-backed bridges and open-hatched outlets smelling of doughnuts stood between it and Jenny’s baffled senses.

The van buffeted roughly by and skewed screeching to a halt. Then before Jenny had a chance to double back, it jettisoned for the final time its empty grey exterior.

What reared up from the exposed undercarriage was akin to an enormous snake, its skin of shocking-green steel. Hinges running its segmented length, which coiled it unseen in automotive disguise, now revolved to unfold the horror so its spade-shaped head hung high above Jenny before the thunderous sky. Twin fangs of chrome flicked like switchbades and clicked. The rain-lashed reptile was making ready for its terrible terminal plunge.

Jenny had coped with the duckling, but at this she screamed.

Then all at once were explosions, blossoming loud on the scaly one’s hide that it twisted back to defend itself and uttered a hideous hiss. Heroes were rounding the island’s curve, forging through the storm to bear Jenny aid, and she whirled with beating heart to behold them. It was her friends, Pat gripping the handlebars of some souped-up black quad-bike, while Flashsatsumas and Maureen clung behind him. Only two of the all-terrain tyres were in contact with any terrain, so steeply did the saviours list as they swung out of clock tower orbit, and from that pair of landlocked wheels fanned a frothing trail of spray.

Pat resumed fire with the double-barrelled cannons, while his steed from front fender to headlamp opened and unfurled a mechanical arm, at the end of which was a circular saw.

This started to spin, precipitation bouncing wildly from its blurry diamond-tips.

The snake seemed to decide it wasn’t quite in the mood after all.

In an instant its head had shot through a loop of what it was attached to, and an instant later the whole was bound like an arrow for the beach. Tracking such speed with the naked eye would have been feat enough, let alone through other means. Suffice to say the last tint of green was long gone amid dismal seafront mist by the time Pat applied the brakes, noisily mangling and crunching to ruins the van’s abandoned husk.

Soon the bus back was bumping on its way, carrying with it four friends who had chosen seats towards the rear which faced each other. Condensation clouded the windows, for the afternoon had brought no let-up, and there wasn’t a dry sock or stocking to be found. The rain-spattered bags were spread all around, and it had on the whole been quite an outing. Flashsatsumas felt he ought to commence an apology on related themes, but this only made Pat laugh.

“Mate, are you kidding?” he grinned. “Dream come true, that was. I’ve bought ’em lots of times, but I’ve never gone bombing along on one before!”

“Do my cats next,” added Maureen eagerly.

Flashsatsumas wondered she could say that after the last two days, but lacking a sound grasp of Earthling irony he didn’t ask her what could possibly go wrong.

Mini-Flash Juniper, her memory and identity restored by the contents of Flashsatsumas’s satchel, was holding the card on which Miss Ugly had come. They’d all hurried back to the park, but there’d been nothing there besides the signs of a terrific struggle by the pipes, and not a trace of either a fledgling ballerina or fowl. Nobody knew enough about what Miss Ugly had been in the first place to determine what this signified as to her fate.

Pat gave Juniper a supportive smile, which she returned.

“This may be the only picture of her I’ll ever have,” she told him. “Not that I need one. Things like that always eventually disappear, Pat. But the time when she was here, and we were too, won’t. Even when I’m old, though I must admit I can’t imagine that, it’ll all still be there. And so will she.”

Seldom in his non-existent life had Pat known such an urge to hold somebody’s hand.

And, as with the smile, it was not unreciprocated.

The day’s single ray of glowing gold broke through the black above the sea, as the doughty old double-decker rolled for the coast road and home.

END OF CHAPTER THREE