And, yes, of course, many of the parents quietly wondered why their babies seemed to weigh more than a bowling ball all of a sudden – but maybe that just meant they were healthy?
But really all anyone wanted to do was welcome their very advanced and clever darling babies back with open arms, put them to bed, make sure the cat flaps were locked and go straight back to sleep.
‘The rest of the babies will be arriving back in Starkley soon too,’ said Alice, darkly. ‘Ready for the BABY BOOM.’
‘Thanks for your help in finding them,’ Hamish said, turning to Horatia. She smiled, pleased to have done something good for a change. ‘If you want a story . . .’
He hesitated. Should he really be telling her this? But she had proved herself to be trusted, hadn’t she? He made a decision.
‘If you want a story then come to the Beautiful Baby Competition tomorrow in Starkley town square,’ he said.
‘I’m supposed to be there anyway for the paper. Is that where you think the Baby Boom will be?’
Hamish nodded.
‘Something’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘They’ll all be gathered together and if enough babies get angry and magnify their emotions, they’ll be heard by babies for miles around. Babies all over the region will join them. Then babies all over the country. We’re talking about a baby-pocalypse. We need to keep our eye on Boffo and watch out for Scarmarsh.’
Hamish was trying to look brave and like he knew what he was doing. The truth was he wasn’t sure that even the PDF could stop Scarmarsh this time. There’d be no relying on help from Dad. Hamish had to deal with Scarmarsh on his own.
Well, that wasn’t true. He had his friends. And they’d coped before.
‘The problem with babies is they’re unpredictable,’ said Alice, wisely. ‘Who knows what’s going on inside their heads most of the time? Sometimes you’ll pick one up and he’ll just blow a raspberry in your face. We need to read up on them – get inside their minds. Find out what makes them tick.’
All this sounded great, but she had no idea how she was going to do it.
And just then – just as their old enemy, Horatia Snipe, was about to walk away – her eyes lit up like a baby’s novelty nightlight.
‘I think I know who can help,’ she said.
Ten minutes later, the PDF were outside a dark and empty shop on Frinkley high street. It was a takeaway. They rang the doorbell for what must have been the tenth time. ‘Kebabaret!?’ said Alice, looking up at the sign, which was of a woman doing a high kick next to a kebab pole. ‘Why did no one tell me you could get kebabs in Frinkley?’
‘It’s fairly new,’ said Horatia. ‘I’m ashamed to say I gave it a terrible review in the Frinkley Starfish. I didn’t even try one of the kebabs. I think that may have affected business.’
Alice rolled her eyes at her and pressed the doorbell again.
‘Isn’t it a bit late for food?’ asked Venk, and Buster kicked him in the shin as if to say, Don’t ruin this for me!
The upstairs window squealed open. ‘Who is it?’ yelled a woman in curlers.
‘Nurse Pickernose!’ said Horatia. ‘My name is Horatia Snipe and—’
Immediately, Nurse Pickernose started throwing whatever she could at Horatia. Fruit. Old jam jars. A chicken shish kebab.
‘HORROR-ATIA SNIPE!’ she yelled. ‘What was it you said in the newspaper about my kebabs? Oh, yes. “CHICKEN SHISH? MORE LIKE CHICKEN SHEEEEESH!” Oh, but you gave my rivals a great write-up!’
‘Really Fried Chicken and Discount Kebabs are owned by my bosses!’ cried Horatia. ‘I’m sorry!’
‘You even got MR ELBOWS TO GIVE ME THE ELBOW!’ screamed Nurse Pickernose.
Clover shook her head, disapprovingly.
‘That guy Elbows is an absolute dingbat,’ said Alice, as the good nurse took her slippers off and lobbed them straight at Horatia’s noggin.
‘Wait!’ pleaded Horatia, her hands in the air. ‘Please, listen! It’s a matter of life and death! We need your advice!’
‘My advice?’ said Pickernose. ‘My advice on what?’
‘Babies!’ said a desperate Hamish. ‘There’s a problem with the babies and only you can help!’
Nurse Pickernose’s face softened.
Babies.
The one word that meant more to her than ‘kebabs’.
The one thing she missed more than anything.
Her little Frinkley wrinklies.
But no. She had turned her back on that way of life once and for all!
‘I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT BABIES! NOT SINCE THEY ALL WENT MAD THAT NIGHT AND PEED ON ME! IT WAS LIKE A CO-ORDINATED ATTACK, I TELL YOU!’
She put her hand on the window frame, ready to shut it again.
‘Please, Nurse Pickernose,’ tried Hamish. ‘Once a nurse, always a nurse. And if the world needs a nurse’s expertise, isn’t it a nurse’s sworn duty to give it?’
Alice nudged Hamish, impressed. That was a good line.
Nurse Pickernose looked uncertain. Hamish had struck a chord with her. Now he just needed to seal the deal.
‘Activate your angel faces!’ whispered Hamish, and the PDF beamed as many delightful, innocent smiles at her as possible.
‘I’M COMING DOWN TO LET YOU IN! WHO WANTS CHIPS?’
Midwife Crisis!
The kids learned a lot from Nurse Pickernose in just seconds.
Mainly how not to decorate a room.
It seemed Nurse Pickernose had really thrown herself into the world of fast food since things hadn’t worked out with the peeing babies.
She had chicken-tikka-masala-coloured wallpaper. She had a bed shaped like a bag of chips. She had a sleeping bag that looked like a pitta bread. (You had to slide in one side and then zip yourself up.) She had pillows that looked like pickled onions, a rug that looked like a slice of processed meat, pyjamas with peas all over them and chicken-nugget slippers.
Nurse Pickernose also taught them that their plan wasn’t half as clever as they’d hoped it was.
‘No, no, no, no, no!’ she said, when Elliot had explained what they’d come up with so far. ‘Babies just won’t go for that kind of thing! You have to get into the mindset of a baby if you’re to conquer one!’
And so she’d sat them down on some baked beanbags and helped them draw up a battle plan.
‘You’ll need soft toys. Songs. Snoozes,’ she said.
I’ll be honest – it didn’t sound like much of a battle plan.
But Hamish’s dad always said you had to know your enemies. You had to understand how they think. Well, that’s very difficult when your enemies are babies. Who knows how those oddballs think? It’s not like you can gain much psychological insight just by looking at them. Even if you could read their minds, you’d struggle to work out what they were up to.
A typical enemy-baby’s thought process might be: It’s very difficult to know quite what a baby’s big plan is, just as it’s difficult to know what a bird’s favourite hat is or what the moles on your arm dream about when you go to sleep.
Of course, some people never grow out of those kind of random thoughts, and go on to live rich and rewarding lives, usually either as teachers or presidents. But, when you have a pack of these miniature lunatics all banding together and acting as one, well, it can spell danger.
‘This explains a lot!’ Pickernose said. ‘I’d thought all my babies had finally turned on me that awful day in the nursery! But they hadn’t. They were simply picking up on the emotions and actions of one baby in particular! Boffo Quip!’
Using nothing more than a kebab wrapped in tinfoil, she trained the PDF in the rudimentary arts of baby whispering. Each of them took turns holding the kebab and whispering reassuring things to it. Now they had a better idea of what they had to do when a baby was upset, when they might be about to throw a tantrum, when one needed more chilli sauce – that kind of thing.
As the gang prepared to leave her flat, Hamish turned to Nurse Pickernose.
?
??Will you help us?’ he asked. ‘It’s not really our area of expertise. And don’t babies require . . . specialists?’
Nurse Pickernose smiled.
‘My days of dealing with babies are over,’ she said, before her eyes turned misty. She cast a sad look at her medical skateboard, now under a glass dome on a plinth in her room, never to be ridden again. ‘That day in the nursery, I made two promises to myself. One: Never go back. And two: Always carry a moist towelette in case someone pees on you.’
The next morning, at 8 a.m., the first thing the gang noticed as they sat up in their beds was the smell that now seemed to hang over Starkley.
As Alice drew back the lightning-bolt curtains in her room in Viola Road, it was like a low dark cloud was draped across the other houses around town.
‘Cinnamon,’ she said, sniffing the air.
And then she pulled on her combat shorts, laced up her army boots, checked the blue streak in her hair and slid down the bannister to her front door.
‘Can you pick up some eggs on your way home, love?’ called her mum, but Alice was already on her scooter halfway down the path, sailing towards Hamish’s house to collect her friend.
As her hair flapped behind her, she wove round bollards and bounced off pavements, whooshing and scraping the ground as she rounded the corners.
Everywhere she looked, doting parents were pushing prams towards the square for the competition.
People carriers and Sharm! cars were dropping off excited families, who’d made their babies look as shiny and lovely as possible. Not one of these parents seemed ready to admit that something weird had happened to their babies in the night. Not one of them seemed ready to admit that their babies had got a lot . . . well . . . bigger.
Dads had babies strapped to their chests as usual – but the babies were now almost as big as they were, their hairy legs bopping against their father’s, and their enormous feet trailing along on the ground.
Some babies were literally wedged into car seats, and needed the help of the taxi drivers to pull them out.
Others walked alongside their bigger brothers and sisters, wearing their mum’s dungarees and towering over their siblings.
Of course, all the parents thought this was fabulous.
‘It’s the organic carrots we buy,’ said a lady being dragged past by her baby. ‘They may be pricier but you can see the benefits!’
This had been another stroke of genius on the part of Scarmarsh. Parents only want to see the best in their children.
Take you, for example.
You and I both know that there has never really been a stinkier, grubbier child than you.
You and I both know that you smell of moss and bits of old bark.
But your mum? Your dad? They think you’re epic.
You and I both know that you spend most of your time thinking about cakes or what’s on telly.
But your parents? They think you’re a genius, sent to save the world!
You and I both know that when you dance you look like a weird fish gasping for air.
Your parents? They think you’re a rare talent with a unique and original dance style.
So these dingbat Starkley parents – and the dingbats coming in from Frinkley – simply thought their babies had had an extra growth spurt. One that made them special. They decided their ear-blistering temper tantrums were merely the frustrated cries of an artistic genius. That the fact that they were now big enough to wear their dad’s shirts was a compliment to their father somehow.
It’s exactly why the angel-face trick works so well. Grownups want to believe the best of children.
The smell of cinnamon grew more intense as Alice whizzed past the town clock, where already the Beautiful Baby Competition banner had gone up and the seating had been arranged.
At 9 a.m., all manner of babies would sit on those chairs, and those chairs would then collapse under their weight and have to be replaced by special, reinforced chairs.
The point was, Alice decided, if she and Hamish didn’t do something fast, the BABY BOOM would begin.
Baby,
Get Back
When Alice arrived at Hamish’s house at 8.15 a.m, she was in a state of real panic.
‘These are BIG babies!’ she said, rushing straight to his window and watching a mother struggling to push a buggy while a ginormous infant sat bolt upright, eating a leg of lamb. ‘I don’t know what else Scarmarsh put in that Formula One at the petrol station, but let’s just say these babies are some healthy-looking meatballs!’
Hamish was exhausted. He’d been up most of the night, trying to work out what Scarmarsh’s next move would be.
If all the giant babies were guided by Boffo, then Hamish needed to know how Scarmarsh controlled him.
He’d made a list, as Hamish likes to do.
None of it seemed quite right.
But somehow, at some point, Scarmarsh would have to give a signal. And that signal would trigger Boffo, which would trigger all the other babies. The cries and screams of all of the babies at the competition would be the start of the BABY BOOM.
Hamish didn’t like to imagine what might happen next.
If the BABY BOOM was strong enough, other babies would hear it – maybe babies in Peppermill, Urp or Thackeridge – and they’d join in
Then their BABY BOOM would be picked up by babies in nearby shopping centres, nurseries or crèches, and the noise would multiply and spread like a baby computer virus – until eventually, some weeks later, babies in Bogota and infants in Iceland and tots in Tottenham and newborns in New York would all join the cause!
And rise up against the grown-ups.
Last night, Hamish had seen a small glimpse of that kind of chaos, and it was not something he wanted to happen on a global scale.
The question was: how could they stop it?
‘So how do we stop it?’ said Alice, clapping her hands together, certain that her friend would have a plan. But Hamish didn’t.
‘We should call the others,’ he said, picking up his walkie-talkie. ‘PDF HQ, are you there?’
He thought Clover, Buster and the others would have been up late too, wracking their brains.
But no one responded.
He pressed the CALL button again.
‘PDF HQ, this is Hamish, come in.’
He listened but all he could hear was static.
‘All the radios are still on the blink!’ said Elliot, shaking his head, when Alice and Hamish had arrived at Garage 5 after rushing there in a tizzy.
Clover, Elliot and Venk were already there, but their walkie-talkies weren’t working.
Hamish remembered what Horatia Snipe had said about the radio stations disappearing. Scarmarsh was making sure that everyone got their news from one place – the Frinkley Starfish – which meant he could control public opinion. But that was dangerous, wasn’t it? Because anybody could write anything, couldn’t they? Like that the PDF were running away from babies, when of course they’d been running away from demon babies. Of course, if you miss out the word ‘demon’, it’s a completely different story!
Scarmarsh’s genius had been to take what the people of Frinkley had and use it against them.
He had taken their suspicion of Starkley – and used it against them.
He had taken their paper – and used it against them.
He had taken their babies – and used them against them.
But that didn’t explain why the walkie-talkies didn’t work . . . But the radio stations vanishing might be a clue?
‘Maybe that’s how he controls Boffo?’ Hamish said. ‘Could Scarmarsh be using radio waves somehow?’
‘Hmm,’ said Clover. ‘Boffo doesn’t strike me as a radio-controlled baby. I didn’t even know you could buy them.’
‘Okay!’ said Buster, striding into the room and interrupting their conversation. ‘I’ve made a few modifications to the van. We should be ready for anything, no matter what this Baby Boom is.’
‘H
ow did you get on, Clo?’ asked Alice.
‘Oh, I think you’ll be very happy with what I came up with,’ said Clover. ‘Though of course I’ll need a volunteer.’
A volunteer? For one of Clover’s plans?
Everybody immediately looked at Venk.
And do you know what?
‘I’ll do it!’ he said, proudly, and Buster smiled at him.
Venk had been waiting for a moment like this. A moment in which everyone turned to him. The only problem was, if everyone had turned to him, maybe that meant it wasn’t such a great thing to volunteer for. Obviously, one of Clover’s plans would mean dressing up somehow, and Venk wasn’t really one for dressing up. But no matter! The team had looked to him and he had risen to the challenge. How bad could it be?
Suddenly there was a THUMP-THUMP-THUMP on the garage door.
It was Horatia Snipe, dressed very smartly indeed.
‘You look nice,’ said Alice.
‘Well, I thought I’d better make an effort,’ said Horatia. ‘Seeing as I’m hosting the Beautiful Baby Competition.’
‘You’re hosting it?’ said Alice, who still didn’t quite trust Horatia. ‘Why didn’t you mention that yesterday?!’
‘I did tell you I was going to be there, I just didn’t go into detail . . .’ Horatia said, sheepishly. ‘The Starfish is sponsoring it so of course that means that, well—’
Alice rolled her eyes. ‘Let me guess. A Frinkley baby will win?’ she said.
Horatia nodded, sadly.
‘I’m supposed to give all the awards to Frinkley babies. Apart from STINKER OF THE YEAR, which I’m free to give to any baby from Starkley. I’ve been told to go on the radio in a few minutes and say it’s been a cracking year for beauties in Frinkley, but that Starkley babies all look like fat, bald hamsters.’