Lynne Banks - Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes To Sea

Harry was just going to crackle something comforting when George came over and boldly twisted his feelers around Josie’s.

“Don’t you worry, Jgn. I’m right beside you. I won’t let anything bad happen.”

She rubbed her head against his gratefully. “Thank you, Grndd,” she said. Harry lifted one feeler quizzically, and George saw it and looked away. He knew it meant, “Promises, promises.” George couldn’t really stop anything bad happening and George knew Harry knew that, but Josie didn’t know, and Harry wasn’t mean enough to tell her.

At last a different movement began. It was a sort of slow rocking and swaying, and it went on and on. Sometimes it was a very strong, frightening movement that threw them about and had them slipping and sliding among the bananas. Sometimes it was quite gentle. They got used to it, and began to think of their nest in the yellow-curves as a sort of home from home.

The worst thing by far was the cold. They weren’t used to being cold and they had no defence against it. Luckily for them, this wasn’t a refrigeration ship – you can’t freeze bananas – but the hold was kept chilled to keep the fruit fresh on its journey, and this was very hard on the centeens. They had to keep moving about as much as possible. As for keeping damp, this was a major problem too.

What they did in the end was venture out of the crate and explore the hold of the ship until they came to a crate that held potatoes. Potatoes are generally stored and shipped with earth around them. Earth is damp, and this was how the centeens managed not to Dry Out. But there weren’t many living creatures in the dirt, so they had to keep returning to their original straight-up-hard-thing to find food.

There was no shortage for any of them. Quite a lot of creatures had found their way into the crate along with the bananas, including the second tarantula. Before the voyage ended, most of them had ended, too.

Josie happily ate banana. She wouldn’t be tempted by any of the spiders, beetles or even a small and very tasty snake that the others brought her.

“No, really. I couldn’t,” she would say, humping her mid-sections in polite disgust, and turning her head away. “I’ll just eat my nice yellow-curve, thank you.”

“Aren’t you getting bored with it?” asked Harry after three nights and days.

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter,” she said. “No-meat-feeders like us must not make a fuss.” This is a direct quote from Beetle, a language that always rhymes. If any Hoo-Min vegetarians among you would like to use it – please, be my guest.

“All the more for us then,” said George, who was a bit hurt that she didn’t like anything he brought her.

But despite Josie’s no-meat-feeder-ism, they liked her. And she liked them. As time passed, they crackled a lot to each other. Harry and George told Josie their adventures, and she told them some that she’d had. They already knew from Belinda that centias could be brave. But when Josie told them about a time when she’d gone up a tree to escape from a hairy-biter, been swooped at by a flying swooper, fallen off right on to a Hoo-Min’s head, and then run down his whole huge body (“Almost as big as the tree!”) with him whacking at her with his big front feet, and got away, they thought she was almost as brave as they were.

After many days and nights, the ship docked and the crates in the hold started to be unloaded.

The centeens realised that a change was happening. There was light again, coming from above. Soon their straight-up-hard-thing was swinging upward and then downward.

It wasn’t long before they were moving again, the jiggling noisy movement they’d felt before. There was no doubt now that they were a long, long way from home, because the smells were all different. And the air was, too.

“It’s cooler here,” Harry said, questing about with his feelers. “Drier, too,” George said uneasily. “Oh, I want my basket!” moaned Josie.

“I thought no-meat-feeders didn’t fuss,” said Harry.

“Only about food,” Josie said. “We can fuss about anything else.”

“Speaking of food, we’ve eaten everything,” said Harry.

“I know,” said George. “We’ll have to get out of here and hunt soon.”

But it seemed to them a long time before the jiggling stopped and the crate was finally lowered to the ground.

There was a lot of noise going on all around them, and many new and alarming smells and vibrations. Most of it, they knew at once, came from Hoo-Mins. Peering out and feelering around, they could see and sense and smell them. The most gigantic, fast-moving, terrifying things in the world – and they were everywhere! Running around on their two legs, making loud noises to each other, and moving lots of big things from place to place.

“Hoo-Mins are so weird!” said George. “What are they all doing? They don’t seem to be hunting, or eating, or tunnelling – and what else is there? I can’t make it out at all.”

“Oh, I know!” said Josie. “It’s do-diddle. They do-diddle all the time, I’ve watched them.”

“What’s do-diddle?”

“It means rushing about doing things that don’t make sense – that we’d never bother about. I don’t know if it’s to do with their food or their nests or what. It’s just – do-diddle.”

They looked at her, puzzled and curious.

“Do you watch Hoo-Mins a lot, then?”

Josie looked rather uncomfortable. “Well, er – yes. I do watch them. From time to time. But I don’t understand any of it really.”

“Tell us more,” said Harry.

“Well,” Josie said. “This straight-up-hard-thing, for instance. I watched them do-diddle that. It wasn’t like this to begin with. It was just flat pieces of a tree. After they’d do-diddled it, it was like it is now, a different shape, big enough to hold all these yellow-curves and move them about.”

George and Harry looked at each other. She wasn’t just a pretty poison-claw. She was clever.

“So what are they do-diddling now?” asked George.

They watched crackle-lessly for a while. Then Josie shrugged (a centipedish shrug of course, by hunching her front two segments).

“They’re just moving things about,” she said. “They do that a lot. They’ve probably got some kind of plan, but I don’t know what.”

None of them did, but you can, because I’ll tell you.

Their crate had been brought to a big covered market. All the bustling and do-diddling was the Hoo-Mins preparing to sell the produce inside them.

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