The Ministry of SUITs Page 2

  “I know I’m not a hero, David; I don’t do my own laundry.”

  The bear roared and took two lumbering steps toward the boys. Jack looked around to see if there was anything he could use to defend himself. Ideally a tranquilizer gun.

  The road was deserted. Everyone had fled into the local stores or was safely locked inside their cars. It should be noted that the people inside their cars were not quite as safe as they thought they were. Bears have been observed in the wild smashing windows to get to food inside cars. Essentially the people in the cars looked to the bear a little bit like the way baked beans in a tin look to humans.

  There was a building site to Jack’s right. The builders had abandoned all their tools and clambered up the scaffolding, from where they safely watched the unfolding drama. A large nail gun was lying on the ground where a builder had dropped it.

  Jack looked at the other side of the road. There was a small French-style café with a few tables and rickety chairs outside.

  He took a deep breath and a feeling of certainty came over him.

  “Right, David, I’ve got a plan. The minute I move you start running in the opposite direction.” Without any further hesitation, Jack sprang into action.

  * * *

  MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK

  BADLY CONSTRUCTED SCARECROWS

  JOB PROSPECTS

  Secretly all scarecrows wish to improve their construction slightly and get a better job as a store mannequin. The work is similar (standing about all day), the hours are similar (again … all day), but there are two important differences between the job of scarecrow and store mannequin. Firstly, a store mannequin gets to work indoors, which is a huge benefit in our uncertain climate. Secondly, store mannequins get to wear all sorts of delightful new clothes whereas scarecrows end up with a variety of hand-me-downs that are inevitably full of holes and patches. Shabby though they may be, scarecrows still have a sense of self-esteem.

  * * *

  3

  THE CHAIR OF DESTINY

  Jack leapt forward and David took off running in the opposite direction. Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw David running. Many of their school friends had discussed what David’s body had been built for. It certainly wasn’t running. Watching him run was a bit like watching an episode of You’ve Been Framed. You knew something was going to go wrong, you just weren’t sure of exactly when. Predictably enough, David fell over in a heap of flailing arms and legs.

  Now Jack’s plan had to work; otherwise they would both end up as a bear’s breakfast.8

  The builders who were watching from the safety of some scaffolding had expected Jack to leap into the back of their tool van and grab something from there. Maybe a sledgehammer to smack the bear with. Maybe he would go for the dropped nail gun to try and shoot the bear.

  But Jack didn’t go for the tool van. Instead, Jack leapt toward the café. One of the builders wondered if maybe he just wanted a croissant.

  Jack did not want a croissant.9

  The bear let out a final roar and moved toward him like an enormous, foul-smelling, furry carpet. Jack grabbed one of the rather rickety wooden chairs that was sitting outside the café.

  The bear took a swipe at Jack with one enormous paw, its claws glistening with blood. Jack swayed backward. The claw swished the air past Jack’s face. A drop of bear sweat landed on the tip of Jack’s nose.

  The builders watching from the safety of their scaffold cheered, but Jack didn’t feel elated. He knew that he had avoided death, but if his next move didn’t work, then he would be in serious trouble.

  Jack raised the rickety chair and yelled, “Yah!” He’d seen it in a circus once. A man had kept a lion at bay with a chair. Jack thought the same might hold true for bears.

  “Unless that bear really, really wants to have a sit-down, that young boy is going to die,” muttered one of the builders unhelpfully.

  The bear had pulled its massive paw back to take another swing at Jack, but suddenly its eyes focused on the four legs of the chair. There seemed to be a look of fear on the bear’s face.

  The people in the cars were surprised. The builders on the scaffold were stunned. But Jack was probably the most shocked of all. A large part of him had expected the bear to smash the chair with one enormous paw. Instead the bear seemed strangely unnerved by the chair.

  “Yah!” shouted Jack as he poked the bear in the midriff with his chair. “Scram. Or I’ll … I’ll chair you, I suppose.”10

  The bear gingerly lowered itself down onto four paws. It sniffed the chair cautiously and took two steps backward. For a moment Jack and the bear locked eyes, then the bear turned away and bounded off down the street.

  Jack put the chair down.

  Then he sat on it.

  “That,” he said, “was unexpected.”

  David came over and stood in front of Jack.

  “I fell over,” said David.

  “I saw that,” said Jack. “I scared off a bear using a chair.”

  “Everyone saw that,” said David.

  All the people who had locked themselves in their cars were opening the doors now. One of them started clapping and before long Jack was the recipient of a hardy round of applause.

  “Oh yes, clap now. A few minutes ago you were perfectly happy to lock your doors and let us get eaten!” shouted David.

  The people looked slightly sheepish and the clapping petered out. They wandered back to their cars and switched on radios to try and drown out the sounds of the shame they had echoing in their ears.

  “Let’s see if he’s okay,” said Jack, indicating the man in the pin-striped suit who had been attacked by the bear.

  The man was conscious now and was sitting up. There was a large gash on his right temple where the bear must have hit him. His suit was ripped and covered in blood, but most of the wounds seemed relatively shallow.

  “Are you all right?” asked Jack, helping him up.

  “Mmmm. Can you count my limbs for me?” asked the man.

  David did the necessary mathematics and answered the man. “Four limbs in all.”

  The man looked down at himself. “Four limbs. Good. Two of the arm variety and a corresponding number of the leg variety—and they seem to be in the correct sockets.11 All present and correct. In which case, the answer to your question is yes. Yes—I am okay.”

  “You were attacked by a bear,” said David helpfully.

  “Yes, I noticed that too,” said the man with more than a hint of sarcasm. “I was tracking the bear. Unfortunately he seems to have escaped.”

  “You’re a bear hunter?”

  “A bear hunter?” laughed the man as he picked up his umbrella. “Good gracious, no. And if I was, I wouldn’t make a very good one, would I? No—I work for…”

  The man paused. “Well, let’s not talk about who I work for at the moment. Now, what are your names?”

  “Look, we’d love to stay and chat,” said David, “but we’ve got to get on the bus and go to school.”

  The bus driver beeped his horn and leaned out of his window. “Are you getting back on?”

  The man with the umbrella waved the bus driver on. “Carry on, sir; I shall walk these two young gentlemen to school.”

  “Right you are,” said the bus driver as he drove off.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” grumbled David.

  “Don’t you want to know why you managed to defeat the bear?” asked the man.

  Jack’s eyes lit up. It was exactly what he wanted to know. “Yes. I’d really like to know that.”

  “You are either a very bright or a very lucky boy,” the man said.

  “Brave but stupid, I’d say. If it had been me, I would have grabbed that nail gun and tried to shoot the bear,” said David.

  “In which case the bear would have eaten you. You see, our young friend here chose the one thing in the vicinity that could save him from a bear attack. A wooden chair. Bears are terrified of wooden chairs.”

&nb
sp; Jack thought about when he had grabbed the chair. He had known it was the right thing to do, but he hadn’t been sure why. If he hadn’t found out why, it would have irritated him all day. “So tell us, then, why are bears afraid of wooden chairs?”12

  * * *

  MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK

  BEARS

  FATALITIES CAUSED BY NAIL GUNS

  There are no records anywhere in the world of a bear being killed after being shot by a nail gun. If you shoot a bear with a nail gun, you aren’t going to end up with a dead bear. You’re going to end up with a very annoyed bear. Although it will be a very annoyed bear that you’ll be able to hang a picture on.

  * * *

  4

  A DANGEROUS UMBRELLA

  For the first time Jack really looked at the man in the pin-striped suit. Despite having been recently attacked by a bear he didn’t have a hair out of place, and although his shirt was torn it was still neatly tucked into his trousers. His eyes were a steely color and they fixed on Jack, making him feel slightly unnerved. The man looked exactly like a spy would look if he was trying to infiltrate a top-class, Savile Row tailor.

  “Normally bears live in the woods,” the man began to explain. “In many ways they are the king of all they survey. There really isn’t another animal in the woods that could defeat a bear.”

  “What about a lion?” asked David.

  “Well, the one time I saw a bear and a lion fight, the bear definitely won. Anyway, as I was saying…”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Jack. “You saw a lion fight a bear once?”

  “Yes, it was an office party that went badly wrong.”

  Jack was about to ask another question, but the man headed him off. “Look, do you want to know why bears are afraid of chairs or not?”

  “Sorry for interrupting,” said Jack.

  “Mmmm. You are a very impetuous boy…” The man waited for Jack to supply his name.

  “I’m Jack; this is David.”

  The man shook both their hands vigorously. “Very good. My name is Grey. Now, we were discussing bears. In a forest the bear is king. Top dog, or rather top bear. Except for one thing.”

  David’s eyes lit up. “There’s a bigger animal that lives in the forest?”

  “Not an animal,” said Grey. “It’s a…”

  “A tree,” Jack said.

  Grey tilted his head to one side and looked at Jack. His eyes narrowed, as if he was looking at a very hard math equation. It made Jack squirm.

  “Quite right, Jack. The only thing that the bear isn’t king of is the tree. Trees are bigger than bears. Did you know that bears scratch and bite trees with their teeth and claws? Now, biologists13 will tell you that they’re sharpening their claws. But think about it. That’s a ridiculous explanation. Have you ever used a knife against a tree? It won’t make it sharp, it makes it blunt.”

  Jack nodded at this. When he was seven years old he’d tried to make a tree house in the garden. In order to get wood he had tried to cut down a cherry tree with a kitchen knife. His mother had been furious when the knife was returned with an edge that was as dull as a double math class on a sunny day.

  Grey continued, “So if they aren’t sharpening their claws on the trees, why are they doing it?”

  Something popped into Jack’s head. “Because they’re attacking the trees?”

  Grey took a step backward. Jack had read about people taking a step back in surprise, but this was the first time he’d ever actually seen it happen in real life. “How did you know that?” asked Grey.

  “Jack’s always thinking about things like that. He thinks too much if you ask me,” said David.

  “Thinks too much?” Grey mused to himself. “Jack, I think I should speak to you by yourself.”

  “And how will you do that?” asked David. “I’m right here.”

  Grey opened his black umbrella. “Here, hold this.” He thrust it into David’s hands.

  “What?” David said. “But it isn’t raining.”14

  “Oh,” said Grey, “I don’t suppose it is, is it?” Grey snapped his fingers and the umbrella abruptly closed up again. Unfortunately as David was holding it, it snapped closed on his head, also half pinning his arms to his sides.

  “Mmmmphhhh,” said David as he frantically ran around trying to free himself.

  “What have you done?” Jack cried.

  “I just want to talk to you without your friend interrupting us.”

  David was running up and down the street and making muffled yet indignant noises.

  “The umbrella won’t hurt him. He’s perfectly safe,” Grey reassured Jack.

  David chose this point to run slap-bang into a lamppost. The noise of his nose crashing against the metal rang out.

  “Perfectly safe?” asked Jack.

  “To be fair, I said the umbrella wouldn’t hurt him. Which is true. It was the lamppost that hurt him. But let’s move him away from the traffic just in case.”

  Between the two of them they escorted David into a chair outside the café. David sat in it silently.

  “There you go,” said Grey, smiling. “He seems to be a lot quieter now … Well, either that or he’s concussed.”

  “Concussed!”

  “He’s probably not concussed. It really is a very high-quality umbrella. Thick material, frightfully waterproof.”

  Jack thought to himself that wasn’t really a recommendation. Most umbrellas were waterproof. It was their role in life to be so. However, relatively few umbrellas were lamppost-proof.

  “Okay,” said Grey, “so why do you think bears attack trees?”

  Jack shrugged. “I don’t know … Umm, bears are bullies?”

  “Eureka!” yelled Grey, who was doing a little dance around Jack. The dance was frankly ridiculous. Jack felt embarrassed for the both of them. Normally Jack did not feel embarrassed for other people. However, Grey looked as if he was too busy dancing to be embarrassed, so it seemed the polite thing to do.

  Grey stopped dancing. “You got it in one—bears are bullies. And bears attack trees because trees are the only thing that’s bigger than them in the woods. Of course after attacking half a dozen trees, a bear realizes that a tree is much tougher than he is. Trees don’t flinch, don’t bleed, don’t scream. Trees seem invulnerable to the bears.”

  Jack shook his head. “Still not getting it. So why are bears scared of chairs?”

  “Easy!” said the still-jubilant Grey. “Bears know that trees are tough. And yet you appeared to the bear as if you were a man who could not only kill a tree, but one who could bend and shape a tree’s body into the shape of a wooden chair. You had power over a tree!”

  Jack thought about this. It sounded ridiculous, but also completely logical. If the best a bear could do to a tree was leave a few claw marks, it would be terrified of anyone who had taken an enormous piece of timber and turned it into a chair.

  “Wow,” said Jack. “So that’s why lion tamers use chairs as well.”

  “Precisely, most woodland and forest animals are scared of a person holding a chair, because it shows that they can kill trees. Jack, my boy, you are quite brilliant.”

  Jack smiled. He had always wondered why lion tamers used chairs. Now he knew. He loved explanations because they made the world slightly more organized, slightly more sensible.

  “We could use a boy like you, Jack,” Grey said. “If you’re interested, come and visit me at my work.” He walked over to David and, with a flick of his wrist, freed him from the umbrella. David sullenly rubbed his bruised nose as Grey turned sharply on his heel and strode off.

  “Wait a minute,” Jack called after him. “You could use me for what? And anyway, how do I know where you work?”

  Without breaking stride Grey shouted over his shoulder. “Jack, if you’re half the boy I think you are, you’ll be able to figure out where I work without much trouble.”

  Jack watched as Grey walked into the distance. With most other boys that would
have been the last that they saw of Grey, but Jack was far too curious to allow that to happen.

  * * *

  MINISTRY OF S.U.I.T.S HANDBOOK

  JUNGLE AND WOODLAND ANIMALS

  FEAR OF CHAIRS

  Anyone with any level of education is clearly aware that most woodland-, forest-, and jungle-dwelling animals are scared of chairs.

  However, it is important to state that not all animals are afraid of chairs. Elephants aren’t, for example. Elephants are big enough to push over trees and therefore aren’t even vaguely scared of them. However, elephants are scared of pianos as they think the white keys are all made of ivory. This is the reason why you never see an elephant at an Elton John concert. Which is a shame, really, because elephants love touching, romantic ballads.

  Incidentally, elephants are wrong about the white keys on pianos being made from ivory.

  * * *

  5

  A GIRL CALLED TRUDY WHO HAS A REPUTATION FOR MOODINESS

  Jack and David ran through the school gates and sprinted into the main building in a desperate bid to avoid being late. David had been trying to move more quickly than was sensible and ran smack into a girl. They both tumbled to the ground in a flurry of limbs.

  Jack started over to help them up, but before he had even completed a single step the girl was already on her feet. She had moved almost impossibly fast, so quickly she almost seemed to blur.

  David was on his feet again and he dusted himself off. However, he had barely been on his feet for five seconds when he fell down again and curled himself into a tiny ball.

  “Umm, what are you doing?” asked Jack.

  David untucked his head from the ball he had curled himself into. He looked rather like a tortoise wearing a school uniform. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Well, you could,” agreed Jack, “but it wouldn’t make any sense.”

  David unfurled an arm and pointed at the girl he had run into. For the first time Jack really looked at her. It was Trudy Emerson.