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Space KeBob 7 was about a fifteen-year-old named Space KeBob with a huge skull that was built up using bone grafts. Six extra brains were stored inside his skull, which had little partitions in it sort of like the chambered nautilus, and he was able to connect up to each of the brains by unplugging a wire and connecting to the next brain, so that if he wanted to think like, for example, a wise old Native American man, he plugged into that plug and connected up to that brain, and if he wanted to think like a falcon, he connected up to a tiny little falcon brain. The six extra brains plus the boy’s personal brain he was born with equals seven, which was why ‘Space KeBob 7’ was the most logical name for the show. Nory wasn’t wild on seeing it, because she had seen plenty of the episodes and they usually had some sort of enormous space-dragon with a gargling voice. Also it didn’t make sense because if you were the bad guy it would be quite easy to take a little dab of modeling clay and press it into a couple of the boy’s brain plugs and Space KeBob 7 would immediately be Space KeBob 5, and a little more clay stuffed in a few more sockets, he’d be Space KeBob 3, then Space KeBob 2, and then he would be right back down to his own brain, with nothing else to rely on, and it wouldn’t be a popular show anymore and would just be a shy little slip of a cartoon about an average kid in space.

But Kira was passionately interested in seeing it, since she almost never had an opportunity to, so they watched it from start to finish. Nory got very sleepy. She had woken up early that morning, and again gone right to the Art Room with Littleguy. Littleguy had seen some styrophone packing chips in a box and said, ‘They look like tato chips.’ So Nory stapled together a bag of pretend potato chips out of them that said:

EVER LASTING

CRISPS

** Now Even Freasher **

Nory wasn’t allowed to eat the kind of Prawn chips that Pamela usually brought in for break except on special occasions because they had an artificial fragrance of sugar in them and Nory’s parents didn’t want her to possibly get brain damage from a chemical molecule that dressed up in a sweet disguise as if it was sugar when really there was nothing sugary about it, so that your brain didn’t know how to clean itself out after the feeling of sweetness was gone from your mind. Kira didn’t care for Prawn chips — but they really were wonderful because they dissolved on your tongue almost as if they were that kind of super-sour candy that foams up on your tongue.

Finally Space KeBob 7 was over and Nory and Kira went up to Nory’s room and Nory showed Kira her dolls. Kira was polite about them, but not as interested as she might have been. She did like the little metal cars on the edge of the bathtub that changed color depending on whether they were dipped in cold water or hot water. So they played with the color-changing cars for a while. Kira didn’t seem to want to try to get a story going about them, though, the way Debbie probably would have.

45. Nogl Erylalg

Wimpole House was a long quease of a drive away. The farm was good. Some of the rare cows had huge heads and quite bulging eyes that looked as if they might plop out onto the hay. That might explain why they weren’t as successful as the kinds of cows farmers used now. One black cow nipped Littleguy’s finger when he was feeding it some green pellets and the finger turned red. Littleguy cried but then he bravely went on to feed the goats, which turned their heads to fit their horns under the bars of their cage — their lips were soft and speedy over your hand, taking the crumbles of food, and they stretched their necks out so far sometimes that they cut off their breathing a little against the bars and you heard them making choking noises, like a dog when he pulls at his collar. But because there were bars you didn’t feel nervous the way you could feel with the beady-eyed swans by the river.

The house had a crunchy stone path going up to it. Crunchy paths were very important to this kind of fancy palace-house because then when you walked into the house the feeling of walking on a real floor or a real rug would feel unusually wealthy and very hush-hush. Also the gravel helped to clean off any dung or mud or other nonsense from your shoes, although there was much less anonymous dung nowadays than in the days of the wives of Henry the Eighth, for example.

While they were walking up, a little girl bumped her head on a place under the stairs up to the house and cried without any exaggeration, for it had been quite a sharp bump. Nory’s father bought two children’s guidebooks, so Nory and Kira could both have one. The Wimpole children’s guidebook wasn’t quite up to the snuff of the Ickworth children’s guidebook, but what could you do? The main thing about the afternoon basically was that it was a totally different experience going around a Stately Home with Kira because Kira was infinitely competitive, so that if the guidebook said, ‘Can you find such and such a teeny little bell-pull they used to attract the servants?’ then Kira was off in a frantic dash and scrabble to find it before Nory did.

Tables and paintings and chairs and hidden doors went flittering by from room to room that Nory couldn’t look at because she was trying to keep up with Kira. She didn’t want to race, but then again she also didn’t want to lose if Kira did want to race, and Kira definitely wanted to race. Not that they were running, either, just going as fast as they could while pretending to be very calm and smooth and angel-may-care. They came to a picture of a girl walking her dog. ‘Oh, what a lovely painting,’ said Kira, but Nory looked at her out of the corner of her eye because she wasn’t so completely sure Kira actually liked the painting all that much. Kira was just pleased to have gotten there first, possibly, since it was mentioned in the children’s guidebook and Kira was so competitive. Nory had wanted to arrive at the painting at least at the same time as Kira, so that she could admire it without a feeling of having lost a race, because she was a fan-and-a-half of dogs in things like paintings and statues, mainly because she so very much wanted a dog of her own, craved for one, and couldn’t have one, and Kira did have one, a golden retriever, which was just exactly the kind of big, hairy, smelly dog that Nory desperately wanted and couldn’t have because, for one thing, the English government locks up every single dog that comes into England for six months to make sure it doesn’t have a plague.

So, because Nory felt a trifle cross, she said, when they were both in front of the painting of the girl walking her dog: ‘Hmm. Her shoes aren’t perfect, and the dress could go higher up.’ Then she said, ‘Let alone the strange pink sleeve floating out behind her. Also, her hat could be improved. It looks like it’s about to jump the gun. The dog looks a bit vicious, too. He could be improved.’

‘Well!’ said Kira, with some chin in the air and some humphing in the voice. ‘I guess you don’t like that painting very much at all, do you?’

‘I like the ground quite a bit,’ said Nory, ‘and the light catching on the rocks. The bush is good, and the houses, there’s plenty I like, but it’s true — the whole middle part of the picture, including the girl and her hat, is not exactly my taste.’