Eva Ibbotson - The Abominables

But like so many great artists, Mr. Bellamy was a little bit excitable . When his son (after playing truant) told him that he had hidden five yetis in the bridal suite and was going to go with them to England, Mr. Bellamy reacted rather strongly. But the egg whisk that he threw whizzed past Con’s left ear, the bag of flour exploded in midair, and as for the wooden spoon — well, Con had had so many wooden spoons thrown at him in his short life that it might have been a raindrop for all he noticed it. And when he had got his father to agree that the yetis couldn’t stay in the bridal suite and that they might as well go to England as anywhere else, he went off to the garage to wait for the lorry.

There were one or two very tough characters who brought the lorries, and no wonder. It was a punishing journey, and toward the end the roads were unspeakable. But when the lorry came at last, a gigantic, articulated truck with eighteen wheels, the driver who stepped out, blinking with exhaustion, was one Con had never seen before. A big, burly man with a big ginger beard — the kind you could have stuck a pencil in and it would have stayed there. But what struck Con most was the tattoo on the man’s freckled forearm. Not an anchor or a sailing ship or a heart with “I Love Daisy” in it but … a pig .

Somehow as soon as Con saw that, he knew that he could trust him. A man with a sensible thing like a pig tattooed on his arm had to be all right.

“Excuse me,” Con said, getting off the pile of tarpaulins on which he’d been sitting, “I know you’re tired but could I talk to you? It’s important.”

“Sure,” said the ginger-haired man, whose name was Perry, short for Perrington, which his mother had believed to be a Christian name. “Let’s hear it.”

“Actually,” said Con, “I think you’d better see it. Only it’s a secret and I mean that.” And he led Perry up to the bridal suite and knocked in the way that he and Ellen had arranged.

“They’re making themselves beautiful for the journey,” whispered Ellen as she opened the door.

They certainly were. Grandma had found some scissors and was cutting her sixteen enormous toenails, bits of which were shooting across the room like shrapnel. Lucy had vanished under a pink cloud of talcum powder and, in the bathroom, Uncle Otto, who was a very hygienic yeti, was gargling.

“We had a lovely sleep,” said Ambrose, bounding up to Con. “Is this another friend for us? Does he know about that bear called Winnie?”

Perry did not go through the business of pinching himself to see if he was awake. He just wasn’t a person who dreamed about yetis with blue bedsocks round their necks wanting to know about Winnie the Pooh. Perry’s dreams were quite ordinary ones, about missing trains or having to play the piano to a huge audience wearing only his underpants.

“All right,” he said to Con. “Describe. Explain. Tell.”

So Con told him about the secret valley of Nanvi Dar and about Lady Agatha and how he had promised to get the yetis safely to Farley Towers.

“And I want you to take them back in your lorry, instead of whatever you were going to take. It’ll be all sealed up: they’ll hibernate. No one’ll see them.”

“Oh, yes? And when I’ve dropped them off and get back to my bosses with an empty lorry, what then?”

Con fished in his pocket and handed Perry the little bag that Lady Agatha had made out of the hem of her nightgown.

“Wow!” said Perry when he had opened it. “The real stuff. You mean I can give them the price of the goods. The lorry, too, if it comes to that. And there’d still be money left over.”

“For you,” said Con. “A reward for taking us.”

“Us?” said Perry. “Are you coming, too?”

“I promised I’d deliver them. And I’d like Ellen to come, too, if I can square it with my father. I really can’t go making braids on people’s stomachs.”

Perry nodded. “There’s room in the cab, just about.”

He stood looking down into the little flannel bag. Perry had done a lot of things since the day he’d said “Open wide” to a lady called Gladys Girtlestone and decided he wasn’t cut out to be a dentist. He’d been a dishwasher, a road mender, and a lumberjack, and now he was driving lorries.

But not forever. Perry had a dream, and it was a dream to do with pigs.

Perry loved pigs. He loved their fatness and their slowness and their little suspicious eyes and their disgusting habits. He loved Gloucester Old Spots, which look as though someone has spilled paint on them, and he loved Large Whites, which aren’t white but the pink of apple blossoms in the spring. He loved Tamworths, which fatten like a dream, and he loved Saddlebacks and Windsors and those black, square, hairy pigs that come from Suffolk.

And what Perry wanted more than anything was to have a pig farm and to breed a completely new pig, the Perrington Porker, which would be a pig to end all pigs, the best pig in the world.

Only, of course, to start a pig farm you need money …

“I’d have taken those crazy animals of yours anyway,” said Perry, “because I like them. But if there’s a reward, I’ll have it. Now I’m going to sleep for twenty-four hours. Then I’ll go down to Jalpaigun and pick up the load I was supposed to take back. It’s mostly dry goods — spices and such-like, and cloth. I’ll drop it at the nunnery — they’ll make sure it gets handed out to the poor. Then I’ll fix the customs forms and the paperwork one needs to get across the borders and change some of the gold into cash for the journey. So … let’s see … I ought to be ready to leave again by Thursday night. Can you have the yetis in the hotel garage just after midnight? There shouldn’t be anyone around then.”

Con nodded. “Thanks,” he said, holding out his hand. He’d have liked to say more, but just then Lucy said, “Sorry!” and began to choke horribly on the talcum powder. You could say a lot about looking after yetis, thought Con, as Ellen climbed onto a chair to thump Lucy on the back, but not that it was easy .

It was midnight on the following Thursday. It had taken the yetis a long time to leave the bridal suite because they had to say good-bye to everything—“Good-bye, bathroom,” “Good-bye, toothpaste,” “Good-bye, electric light”—and that of course had made them sad and so they’d cried. But now they stood in the hotel garage, staring at the huge eighteen-wheeled, canary yellow truck that was to take them to Britain. On the trailer was an enormous metal container almost as big as a railway carriage. It, too, was painted yellow and on it, in big black letters, were the words COLD CARCASSES, INC.

“What’s a carcass?” said Grandma suspiciously.

Con and Ellen exchanged glances in the light of the lorry’s headlights.

“Well, er, it’s sort of … a cow after it’s been … you know … ready for eating.”

“I thought as much,” said Grandma grimly. “Well, if anyone thinks I’m traveling halfway round the world labeled a cold carcass — let alone a cold carcass with ink on it — then they can think again.”

“Cows are our brothers, you see,” explained Ambrose, and the children sighed because they had a feeling that everybody was going to be the yetis’ brother, and though they approved of this and knew it was right, it did seem to make things rather complicated. But fortunately at that point Clarence, who hadn’t understood about the carcasses, said, “’Ox,” which turned out to be “Box,” and started climbing into the back of the lorry. After that, the other yetis got in, too. There was a big, wide rack for each of them, a bit like a ship’s bunk, and a passage down the middle, and a tiny peephole at the end through which they could see into the cab of the lorry and the people in the cab of the lorry could see them. Lucy oozed over the edge of her rack a bit, but on the whole they admitted that it was very snug and comfortable.