Page 26 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

Everything Dozy had done threatened this. Maybe the fairy didn’t realise it, but by attacking the LEZ, they’d endangered the tenuous safety of all extraordinary creatures! Frida could picture Jeff and Maisy on the other side of those thorns in their deckchairs, eating scones and saying triumphantly, ‘Well, it’s about time something like this happened, isn’t it? Good on that fairy, I say.’

She wanted to rip their scones out of their hands and set their deckchairs on fire.

With no idea what to do next, she slipped through a side door into Ground Control, shoving a sleeping corpse out of the way, and grabbed her Kiss the Keeper travel mug from her locker. She wrapped her hands around the familiar feel of the handle, before filling it with cold coffee from the Watering Hole. It tasted like shit, but at least it tasted normal. Back outside, perched on Grace’s bonnet, she sipped the most depressing drink on the planet and ate three dry-as-dust energy bars she’d found in Antony’s glove compartment. The LEZ was all she’d ever wanted since she’d been a tiny thing, no bigger than a grunkle. It was her home. It had been her mum’s home, and now Dozy was killing it with yellow roses, of all things.

A furious sob escaped her, followed by a sharp kick to Grace’s wheel. Then she kicked again, harder. As pain shot up her ankle, she hopped around, swearing and clutching her boot, just as a noise exploded from one of the little box trees planted along the road. Frida cried out, lurching backwards in alarm. Homicidal box trees!

‘Don’t hurt me!’ she squealed.

When the tree made no reply, she felt embarrassed. Well, that tops it, she thought, now I’m speaking to box trees. She gave herself a stern talking to. She was a zookeeper, current holder of over thirty tattoos and proud owner of three trophies that said she could beat a stone giant in a staring match. She was also the daughter of Ada Rose – waitress, single mother, friend-to-all-creatures (including box trees), and firm believer that anything was possible.

When the box tree rustled again, with a bit more determination this time, she studied the dense leaves seriously. She heard a pop, an animated crackle, a sharp sizzle – then out from the tree exploded a swarm of two-headed storm monkeys.

She almost dropped her coffee mug.

‘Rida, Rida!’

‘Jellybean?’ she cried.

Suddenly, the little layby was full of electricity. Monkeys swung around her, a squall of heads and tails and tiny paws, fizzling and crackling, shouting over and over,

‘Rida, Rida!’

‘Rida, Rida, Reeeee!’

‘Rida Reeeee!’

Was that her name they were saying?

She laughed and then snorted in unequivocable relief as the largest storm monkey (the approximate size of a fluffy cricket ball), plopped with a satisfied sigh onto her shoulder and stuck both his tongues in her ear. His twin heads were haloed in miniature clouds, two marble-sized lightning storms crackling into being between his bat-like ears.

‘Ree! Snap! Big fires,’ he peeped as he nuzzled her neck warmly. ‘Awake! Yes, awake!’

She gathered him into her arms, blinking back tears of rapture and confusion as his electricity skittered through her. Jellybean ‘Chaos’ Capone was a ghost-white furball with two perfect mohawks, matching moustaches and moon-yellow eyes. His pupils were pinpricks as his two heads swivelled, the friction between them creating the tiny storms between his ears.

The other monkeys – Jellybean’s troop, aptly named the Jellies – flipped and catapulted, a dizzying blur as they swung from the hedge to Grace’s bonnet and back again, bursting with words and sounds and lightning. Baked Potato, Cream Pie, Hamlet, Jan, Jonesy, Keanu, K-Pop, Marta, Mojito, Ned, Oops, Peanut, Shirley Temple, Twiglet and Wednesday. A whirlwind of white, grey, black, copper and scarlet.

She craned her neck back to Jellybean in wonder, and gasped, ‘How? How are we awake when no one else is?’

‘Ree!’ he trilled, storms popping in delight.

The sound of her name mended something that, a few seconds ago, had been in danger of breaking. But then he went on, his voice sizzling with unalloyed glee. ‘No sleeps! Lots of sleeps. Tree. World. Break. EXPLODE!’ One head crackled. ‘No sleeps. Big crash. Flee, flee! Big change! No sleeps!’ The other head fizzed.

His voice was storm-tossed poetry.

Lucky had spoken in full dragonish sentences. Raz in colour. The Noz’s single hello had been a soft and shy staccato, brushing her frontal lobe. Dozy, different again, had voiced things that blew through her mind like crackling leaves. Each unique voice seemed to be a doorway to a world she’d never known existed.

But Jellybean? He flung his words electrically from one head to the other, as if every thought had to happen at once, the elated friction between his brains sparking lightning. Too fast, too raw, too everything. She could barely follow what he was saying, what any of the monkeys were saying.

‘Jelly,’ she asked, laughing. ‘Slow down! Do you know what’s going on?’

‘Fizz and pop,’ one head trilled as he shoved his long, fluffy tail into both his mouths. ‘Big sleeps. Big trees. Big dragon fire. Ree go into the dirt, down and down,’ chirped the other head through a mouthful of fur. ‘Pink crackles, pink crackles!’

And then Cream Pie – her fur entirely white except for her fuzzy brown ears – shrieked as she unearthed a discarded popcorn bag. It was pandemonium after that. The monkeys descended in a whirlwind of teeth and thunder. A stray spark set the bag on fire, and Frida found herself hopping around in quick frantic leaps to stamp out the flames whilst avoiding being bitten by food-rabid storm monkeys.

A wild bubble of joy welled up in her chest. It felt so good to deal with a problem she could actually solve. To have a tiny chaotic order of the LEZ back. She tried a few more times to ask Jellybean what was going on, but he didn’t give her any more information than he had already – it was all just wild crackles and jubilant thunder. For a moment, she wondered if she should try and herd them back to their habitat but by then Jellybean had flopped onto Grace’s front dash as if he wasn’t going anywhere, and Shirley Temple had done a massive Number Two on Grace’s passenger seat.

Truly, how could she argue with that?