Uncle Rory's Time-Travelling Tent

Uncle Rory’s Time Travelling Tent

Peony, Gilbert and Clemmy were sitting in the kitchen listening to The Flight of the Conchords.

“What’s your favourite Flight of the Conchords song?” said Gilbert.

“Mine’s the one about the Hiphopapotamus,” said Clemmy.

“Why’s that?” asked Gilbert, inquisitively.

“Because they keep saying ‘motherflippin’’. That’s such a funny word.”

“I’m the motherflippin’!” shouted Gilbert.

“No, I’m the motherflippin’,” said Peony.

Just then Mummy walked in the room, carrying a mop and a bucket and with a certain expression on her face. You know the one: the one that says, ‘okay kids, it’s time to do some chores’.

Gilbert tried to make a break for it. He ran towards the front door.

“I’ve got some homework to do,” he said, as he slid past the moppet and buck.

“Moppet and buck?” said Peony. “Don’t you mean ‘bucket and mop’?”

“Sorry,” said the author.

“No problem,” said Peony. “Now can we get back to the story?”

“Sure thing,” said the author, “but where was I?”

“You were just about to type a sentence describing how mum was going to try to get us to do some chores,” said Peony.

“Thanks,” said the author, tapping keys on the keyboard, and enjoying the sun in the hammock.

A cool breeze blew, rustling the leaves in the trees; softly wafting the clothes on the line; gently rocking the hammock.

Birds tweeted. The Gilbert not in the story came to see what was happening, leaning over daddy’s shoulder.

“How about drawing the waterfall?” said mummy. “I’ve never seen it. Could you describe it?”

Gilbert walked back into the kitchen. In his head he was thinking about a chicken taco he had eaten three days previously, while on a roadtrip through the desert. Actually, he was thinking about four or five chicken tacos, all at the same time.

That was the kind of guy he was: not one of those kids who could only think about one taco at a time, and not even only four or five, but even as many as six or seven.

One time he even thought about eight chicken tacos and a plate of nachos. But that was a pretty special occasion, and he wasn’t sure if he could do it again. Probably if he sat down and made a special effort. Probably if he concentrated really hard.

Probably if there was an event in the Olympics for thinking about chicken tacos Gilbert would win it.

“I must ask daddy,” he thought, “when this silly writing competition is over, if they have ‘Thinking About Chicken Tacos’ at the Olympics. Or maybe the Commonwealth Games. Or at least there must be a Kent Local Championships.” And in his head he pictured himself standing on a podium in his blue and white striped track suit bending over to receive a medal from the Queen while the national anthem played; while TV cameras zoomed in on his proud smile; while the crowd stood cheering and applauding; while the commentators told all the millions of viewers at home how amazing his achievement was; and while the whole world watched as he was crowned ‘Champion of Thinking About Chicken Tacos of the Entire World and Universe and Beyond.’

Meanwhile, back in the story, Peony, Clementine and Gilbert had an idea.

“You know what?” said Clementine.

“What?” said Peony and Gilbert.

“Well,” she said, with a delicious little cunning happy smile on her face, and a twinkle in her eye, “do you remember how Rory said that his tent was a time-travelling tent that could take people back in time?”

“Oh yeah!” said Peony. “I think I know what you’re going to say.”

“What’s she going to say?” asked Gilbert. “Is she going to say that we should eat some bean-a-ritos and play Marco Polo in the river?”

“No,” said Peony, “I don’t think that’s it. I think she’s going to tell us that – “

“Let me speak!” shouted Clementine, really really loud, so that everyone jumped, and even the neighbour’s Mexican dogs were startled and afraid, and wondering why people had to make so much noise.

“Sorry,” said Peony.

“Pish,” said Gilbert.

“Hey,” said mummy, “am I just going to be standing here with his muppet and bock – sorry, I mean ‘bucket and mop’ – while you guys whisper over there about how to get out of doing your chores? It doesn’t seem very realistic that you would have all this time to talk while I’m just standing here, now does it?”

She glared suspiciously at the author and knitted her brow. The guy typing felt a little quiver of fear. Well, he’d pretty much always been frightened of strong, beautiful women, just about his whole life. Maybe it was something to do with the nurse who had delivered him, the way she’d held his feet just after he’d been born; the way she’d shushed him the first time he wanted to cry.

Or maybe it was that dental assistant when he was eight years old; the one he thought had pulled his thumbs until they were really, really long, as though they were made out of elastic.

Though probably that was just the laughing gas.

In any case, he knew he’d made a booboo: he knew that she was right. It wasn’t realistic at all that mom would have made her entrance and then been silent while the kids figured out how to escape that damned and dreaded mucket and fop – I mean – well, you know what I mean: ‘pucket and – no, that’s not it – and –

Oh no: no one can figure out where this sentence is going; what we need is –

“Stoooooooooooop!” cried Clementine. “It’s simple: mum came in, put down the bucket and mop – see,” she said, “it’s not difficult to get that right – and then she said something about how she’d be back in a minute to put me and Gilbert and Peony to work –”

“Gilbert, Peony and I,” mum interrupted – and she was right.

“– because,” continued Clementine, “she had to go and help daddy with his diarrhoea, after he’d woken up in the night and realised he’d shit the bed and made the sheet a little bit brown and – ”

“Hey,” said the mummy, who wasn’t in the story, “no swearing.”

“But you swear, mummy,” said Gilbert, “remember when you saw that snake and said – “

“Yes, okay, Gilbert,” said the mummy who wasn’t in the story, “we all know what I said when I saw the snake.”

“You said – “

“Enough!” said mummy. “Please don’t remind me of that. At least, not till later: it’s just that we’ve got a story to tell and it really should have made more progress than this. Not your fault, kiddies, it’s this silly author, forever getting distracted by real life versions of characters in the story but also outside the story, as well as talking about his own sitting in the hammock typing away, which is kind of immaterial to the main thrust of the narrative, which really ought to moving along quicker than it is, and –“

“I’m lost,” said Clementine. “I don’t know what’s happening. Which one am I? The one in the story or the one outside the story? Which one is Gilbert? Which one are you?”

“I’m lost too,” said Peony. “How many of me are there? I think there’s two, but maybe there’s even more than that.”

“Oh, you girls,” said Gilbert. “it’s easy: first of all, there’s the main narrative of the story, which currently has the three of us sitting in the kitchen having just talked about our favourite Flight of the Conchords song; then mummy walked in with the splocket and flop – I mean, ‘picket and dop’ – and now we’re listening to Clementine tell us her idea about how to get out of chores while mummy helps daddy clean up his poorly bumpipe after his nighttime diarrhoea adventures. Meanwhile...”

“Wait,” interrupted Peony, “so which one are you?”

“I’m the one who keeps walking in and out of the house to see what’s going on while everyone else writes, and while an imaginary version of mummy tells the author where he’s going wrong.”

“But why is the author even in the story?” said Peony. “Shouldn’t authors be invisible, like good waiters, merely there to serve the reader, and not get in the way?”

“That’s mainly true,” smiled Gilbert, “though some writers do find it fun to put themselves in their own story.”

“Well I don’t like it,” said Peony, “it seems a bit egoistic to me. Also tends to complicate things a bit. Also – “

“Can we please get on with the story!” shouted Gilbert. “All this diverting and talking about people commenting on the story when they’re supposed to be in it doing cool things is driving me batty. Hell’s teeth, man! Just get on with it. There’s only fifteen minutes left and you’ve barely even made any progress at all!”

“Goddamn,” said the author, shaking his head and trying to ignore the cries of the real life Clemmy as she whined about how she couldn’t think of anything to write, “this really isn’t easy at all.”

“Waaaah-waaaah-waaaaah,” said Clemmy, sounding actually quite like an eighteen month-old baby, and not a five-year-old girl at all.

Daddy looked up from his work and shook his head.

“The death of thought,” he said, wisely and sagely, while Gilbert glared at the author.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Gilbert, “I’ll count to three, and if you don’t get back to the main point of the narrative – which, I’m guessing by the title, is something to do with a time travelling tent – I’m going to go around the side of the garage, pick up one of those rusty machetes, walk back here, and chop off one toe for each minute of my life you waste, you rotten curséd scoundrel, you.”

“Gulp,” said the author, trying desperately to usher his thoughts in the right and necessary direction – and yet, even now, still writing about things outside the story, such as this imagined ushering of thoughts and –

“One,” said Gilbert, holding up an imaginary knife and relating clearly with the expression in his eyes what would happen if the author didn’t stop this madness – even this current madness, which is still not the story at all – and –

Just then, there was a enormous smash of glass; and the appearance of two boots crashing through the window; and a masked man in a cape and hat, holding a sword, came swinging on a rope and landed next to the hammock.

“It’s Zorro!” cried Gilbert, gleefully, and clapping his hands together.

“That’s weird,” thought the author, “he came swinging on that rope through the window from the inside (I hope by the way that when mummy is reading this – assuming that she agrees to do so – that she utilises the italics).”

“Enough!” cried Zorro. “Unhand that computer! Give it to me! You’ve proved yourself categorically and undeniably unsuited to the task, and despite being given multiple opportunities, have refused time and time again to the tell the really rather excellent story of what happened when these three darling and wonderful kiddies had their chore-avoiding adventure with the time-travelling tent!”

The author quivered. He quivered so much he tipped over the hammock and fell face down in the dirt. Sand got in his mouth. And some poo.

“Pfff,” he spat. “Diarrhoea. Daddy’s diarrhoea. Daddyrrhoea.”

“Ha!” laughed Gilbert, “that’s actually quite good.”

“Best thing he’s written all day,” smiled Zorro, “but now it’s time for a real man to take over the reins.”

Zorro reached down for the computer. Cracked his knuckles. Looked at the keyboard. And then started to cry.

“Actually,” he said, “thing is...I don’t know how to type. Nobody ever told me. Not my mummy. And certainly not my daddy – he left home when I was three years old; I never saw him again. I...”

Zorro blubbed. He lifted his mask and wiped multiple tears from his eyes.

The children looked at him with sympathetic expressions on their faces – well, the girls did, anyway.

Just as Peony was handing him a piece of toilet paper (unused) Gilbert came running at him with the machete.

“Yaaaaaaaargh!” he screamed, “all I wanted was a simple story of how Peony and Clementine and I travelled through time to escape doing chores by sitting in Rory’s tent and going on amazing adventures through dinosaur times and even into the future where there are flying cars and laser weapons and people have robot bodies and heads that live in jars and you silly grownups have had to go and spoil it all with your meta ramblings and existential woes masquerading as pseudo-clever pontifications when it would be so much easier just to get on with it and – “

“Okay then,” said the author and Zorro together, both now crying – both holding one another in a consoling embrace – “you do it.”

They held out the computer to Gilbert. Gilbert threw down the machete – poor old Zorro half jumped out of his skin – and took in his hands and began to type.

“Once upon a time,” he wrote, “Peony, Gilbert and Clemmy were sitting in the kitchen listening to The Flight of the Conchords.”

“What’s your favourite Flight of the Conchords song?” said Gilbert.

“Mine’s the one about the Hiphopapotamus,” said Clemmy.

“Why’s that?” asked Gilbert, inquisitively.

“Because they keep saying ‘motherflippin’’,” said Clemmy.

“Wait a minute,” said the author, “isn’t this just the same story again?”

“So it is,” said Gilbert, with a strangely wicked smile upon his face, “but that’s because...”

“Hold on,” said Clemmy, “does that mean...?”

“Oh my God,” said Peony, “all this time I thought that the unnamed author typing in the hammock was Rory but...”

“That’s right,” said Gilbert, with an expression of triumph, “I fooled you all. The writer is me. The Gilbert in the story is me. And the two Gilberts outside the story too. There are loads of us. We are everywhere. We are legion, and legendary, and leisurely (American pronunciation) too.”

Mummy said the f-word. So did Peony. And so did Clementine.

Zorro fully removed his mask, only to reveal another Gilbert.

“Quick,” shouted Clementine, “let’s go to Rory’s tent!”

So she and Peony and mummy and daddy – who was clutching his buttocks, so as to keep them from exploding – raced across the yard as fast as they could, while about seven dozen Gilberts chased wildly after them.

They got to the tent. They unzipped the door. They gasped as they saw – no! it couldn’t possibly be! – yet another Gilbert lying in there asleep.

“What’s going on?” cried Clementine, “my poor old brain won’t take this!”

Just then Rory came strolling in after peeing in the grass.

“Quick,” he said, “get in the tent – we haven’t got much time.”

They all dived in and he zipped up the door behind them.

The Gilberts were getting closer and closer – though you’d have thought they’d have been there by now, what with the tent only being about three seconds away, and when you factor in for the delay of the stopping one they saw Gilbert, and the little bit of dialogue but...

Well, they weren’t. There was still time. Just like in a movie – or, indeed, in an episode of Zorro.

“Thing is,” said Rory, calmly, as though they had all the time in the world, when they clearly didn’t, “Gilbert’s having a dream. He’s dreaming that he’s writing a story. And the story has come true – in a way.”

“What do you mean ‘in a way’?” asked Peony.

“What I mean,” he said, ignoring the clumsy way the author was using dialogue as a plot exposition tool, “is that we’re all actually inside Gilbert’s dream, including the Gilbert that was writing the story.”

“So, in a sense,” said Peony, “we don’t actually exist?”

“That’s correct,” said Dan Brown, “and neither does the Gilbert who is writing the story. He’s just in the dream. And when the dream is over, the story is too.”

“So everything will go back to normal?” asked Clementine. “All we have to do is wake him up?”

“Yes and no,” said Dan Brown, looking idly at a cup, “the problem is, if we wake him up now, there will be too many hydrogen atoms in the superheated magnesium coil sprocket, and that could literally mean the end of life on Earth as we know it.”

“You mean – ” said Peony.

“Yes, that’s right,” whispered Dan Brown, while simultaneously peeling the skin off a second-hand onion, “the dissolution of the coil sprocket would cause such a distortion to the space time continuum that a black hole would form right there where the snake hole is, and –“

“You mean –“ said Peony again.

“Indeed,” he nodded sagely, and everyone understood, even though it was far from clear where that sentence was going.

“So what should we do?” asked Clementine.

“Oh, that’s easy,” said Dan Brown, “since this is a time-travelling tent, all we have to do is go back in time to just before Gilbert fall asleep – probably via dinosaur times first, so as to have lots of adventures, and give a sense that everything was going to go wrong – and, either tell him to dream of something harmless, like cheese or chicken tacos – or both, if we so wish – or just not let him fall asleep in the first place.”

“How would we do that?” asked Clementine.

“Just sat fire to his socks or something,” said Dan Brown. “No one can sleep while their socks are burning.”

“Just like the song,” daddy mused, “’How Can We Sleep While Our Socks Are Burning?’”

“Midnight Oil?” said Rory.

“No thanks,” said daddy, “I never drink oil after ten thirty” – and they all laughed.

Meanwhile, the screaming crazy horde of Gilberts and Zorros was getting closer – which is hardly surprising, really, when you consider how much story time has passed, and how short the distance they had to cover was.

“Okay,” said Dan Brown finally, after a little siesta, “all we have to do is this: all think of a date – the time a couple of minutes before Gilbert fell asleep should be good – and while we’re doing that can someone play this drum so as to jump start the time travel mechanism that makes the whole thing work? It will need to be someone with excellent timing and rhythm.”

“Clementine can do it,” said Peony, “she’s great on the drums. ‘Clem-in-time’, they call her, she’s so metronomic and accurate.”

“Okay,” said Dan Brown, the hero of the whole thing, and he handed Clementine the drum. “Just go like this – bang – bang – bang – bang – and we’ll all concentrate on getting back to the right time and everything should be okay.”

Clementine started banging out her rhythm, just as the hero Dan Brown had shown her.

Then, suddenly –

“Quick!” shouted daddy, “they’re almost here!”

Clementine banged. Everyone squeezed their eyes tight shut in concentration. The tent started shaking and juddering and whirling, just as though it was travelling through time.

“Hold on!” shouted Dan Brown, heroically, “this is the crucial bit!”

The tent was full of stars. Angels and demons swirled and hovered around everybody’s heads. Black holes and supernovas blinked into and out of existence. Daddy did a poo.

Then everything was silent.

Everybody said, “wow”.

There was no noise whatsoever: no screaming Gilberts; no tweeting of birds; or tapping of keyboard; or mummy saying the f-word over and over again.

“We made it,” said Peony.

They all looked down at Gilbert lying on Rory’s amazing mattress, and smiled.

“I think I’ll take a nap,” said Gilbert – the real Gilbert – the genuine, actual Gilbert – and not one of the phoney ones at all – and everyone laughed and shouted “nooooo!” and he looked at them confused.

“Why not?”he said.

“Oh,” said Peony, “it’s a long story. And not a very good one, I’ll wager.”

“Hahaha,” everybody else said. “Great joke, Peony. ‘I’ll wager.’ Hahaha.”

They were all smiling and relieved, just like at the end of a corny TV show when all the danger has been averted and nobody cares anymore or acts like real people.

Still, at least there wasn’t a ridiculous twist in the tale, like other corny TV shows.

Or was there?

“Oh my God,” said Dan Brown, who had unzipped the tent and was looking into the yard.

“What is it?” everybody asked, all at the same time, in perfect unison.

“Peony,” he said, “what time were you thinking of when I said, ‘let’s all think of the time just before Gilbert fell asleep.”

“Well,” said Peony, “I must confess, I think I thought of dinosaur times also. Maybe just a little bit.”

“And you, Easterly?”

“Er...dinosaur times too.”

“Matt?”

“I was thinking about going back to the time just before Gilbert fell asleep.”

“Really?”

“No. Not really. I was thinking about whether or not travelling through time would sort out my diarrhoea. And dinosaurs.”

Dan Brown rolled his eyes. He asked Clementine, Rory, and even the sleeping Gilbert, and they all said that they had accidentally been thinking about dinosaur times.

“Why?” said Clemmy, “does it matter?”

“I’ll say,” said Dan Brown. “Take a look at this.”

He threw back the tent door. Everybody gasped.

Outside the tent was a T-Rex, a brontosaurus, and a whole flock of those big dinosaur birds that begin with the letter ‘p’ that nobody can spell.

Pterradactyls – or something like that.

“The f-word,” said mummy, “eff eff eff eff eff.”

“Don’t worry, mummy,” said Gilbert, “everything will be okay.”

They all stepped gingerly outside of the tent and looked around. Dinosaurs were everywhere. They were the only humans around.

“How will we ever get out of this?” wondered Clementine.

“I don’t know,” said Rory, “but probably it’s going to be a really excellent adventure. I’m sure it will all make a great story one day – or maybe a whole series of great stories, if we end up travelling to loads of different other times first, before we finally make it back home.”

“Yes,” said mummy, “for example: Victorian times; Roman times; Egyptian times; that sort of thing.”

“Anything’s possible,” said Peony. “Anything at all.”

“Well,” said Dan Brown, “it all depends on who’s writing it.”

Everyone laughed – even the T-Rex, whose massive eye was right next to them all.

“Hahahahahahahaha,” they said.

What a weird, lame ending for a story.