The Biggest Gingerbread Man in the Isles

The jigsaw piece had been warm in Felix's pocket since breakfast, and by the time the toast had gone cold it was glowing gold right through his trousers.

"It's doing the thing," said Felix, who had been standing very still for almost a minute, which for him was a personal record.

Alex held out his hand. Felix took it. The kitchen went gold at the edges, soft as a held breath, and then it wasn't the kitchen at all. It was warm air that smelled of cinnamon and hot butter and something being taken out of an oven at exactly the right moment.

Biscuit Town sat in a golden bowl of hills, all round houses with biscuit-tiled roofs and chimneys puffing out little sweet clouds. Bunting hung between the lampposts, piped in white icing on flags of shortbread. In the street, a ring of children were skipping, and they were all chanting the same thing.

"Run, run, as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Man!"

On the far side of the town, a very steep hill of crumbs ran down towards the water, and children were sliding down it on the lids of biscuit tins. They went very fast. One of them landed in a hedge. The hedge was shortbread, and it took it well.

A man stood in a doorway holding up a single digestive biscuit, quite high, like a torch.

"Why's that man holding a biscuit?" said Felix.

"Ssh," said a passing skipper.

The sign above the bakery said GARIBALDI'S. BAKERS. ESTABLISHED BEFORE YOU. In the middle of the square, on a cooling rack the size of a barn door, sat something enormous under a white sheet. It was very nearly as tall as the bakery.

"Don't look yet," said a voice behind them. "He's still setting."

• • •

The voice belonged to a short, round woman in a flour-white apron, with a rolling pin tucked under one arm like a sword. Her badge said Mrs Garibaldi, Head Baker and Opinions.

"You'll be wanting to know what all the fuss is," she said, before either of them had asked. "It's Snap Day."

"What's a Snap?" said Felix.

"You'll know the old story," said Mrs Garibaldi. "A gingerbread man jumps off the baking tray and runs away. 'Run, run, as fast as you can.' Everyone chases him. The dog, the cow, the farmer. And at the end of it a fox..."

"Eats him," said Felix.

"Quite," said Mrs Garibaldi. "Rotten ending. Nobody shared." She tapped the rolling pin against her palm. "So Biscuit Town does it properly. Once a year we bake the biggest Gingerbread in the Isles and give him a lovely day. At sundown he is snapped into pieces, very respectfully, and everyone has a bit for luck. That way nobody is eaten alone."

"That's still eating him," said Felix.

"He is a biscuit," said Mrs Garibaldi. "And he's never moved a muscle. Not once. He's a statue."

Alex was looking across the square. On the far side, a fox in a waistcoat stood on the cobbles, quite upright, holding a tin. His badge said Mr Rusk, Snapping and Seconds. All around him, for a good three yards in every direction, the cobbles were completely empty. People walked up to the edge of the empty bit, saw him, and went round.

"Why is everyone standing over there?" said Felix.

"Ssh," said Mrs Garibaldi.

At that moment Mr Rusk looked up at the highest shelf of the bakery, which was twice his height. He crouched, and went up it in a single bound, and came down again with a larger tin. It took him no effort at all. He did not look pleased about it.

Behind them, something under the white sheet rustled.

• • •

The sheet slid off, slowly, like someone getting out of a bath.

The Gingerbread Man was bigger than the bakery door. He had three gumdrop buttons, white icing eyebrows, and a piped smile that had gone on very slightly crooked. He blinked. Then he sat up. The cooling rack gave a long, worried creak.

The whole square stopped. The skipping stopped. The man in the doorway lowered his digestive, then thought better of it and raised it again.

"Oh!" said the Gingerbread Man. He looked at his own hands. They were the size of dinner trays. He laughed, a delighted, wobbly laugh, and a few crumbs fell off his elbow and pattered on the cobbles. "Oh, I'm really here!"

"Hello," he said, to nobody in particular. Then to Mrs Garibaldi, with great warmth: "Hello. Are you the one who made me? Thank you. It's very nice."

Mrs Garibaldi sat down in a sack of flour.

"Hello," said the Gingerbread Man to the skippers, who stared. "Hello," to the man with the digestive, who held it higher. "I'm Humphrey. Humphrey Gingerly. I don't know how I know that. Hello," to Felix, and to Alex, "are you new? I'm new."

"We're visiting," said Alex.

"I'm Felix," said Felix. "You're massive."

"Thank you," said Humphrey.

Then he looked across the square, past all the people, at the lonely fox in the middle of the empty cobbles.

"Hello," said Humphrey. "You, at the edge. In the waistcoat. Hello."

Mr Rusk didn't move. His mouth opened and shut again. His ears, very slowly, came up.

"Everyone seems awfully pleased," said Humphrey, turning back, beaming. "What happens at sundown?"

• • •

"Ah," said Mrs Garibaldi, from the flour sack.

Nobody had ever had to explain Snap Day to the Gingerbread before. It had never come up.

"It's a... very old tradition," she said. "There's bunting."

"What's a Snap?" said Humphrey.

The whole square looked at Mr Rusk, because he was the Snapper, and because nobody else wanted to.

Mr Rusk stepped forward. He cleared his throat. He held the tin very straight. He was clearly thinking of something else entirely, and in his panic he fell back on the only voice he'd ever been given for the job.

"A Snap," said Mr Rusk, "is the ceremonial division of the Guest of Honour, at sundown, by order of the town."

There was a pause.

"Division," said Humphrey.

"I'm sure that we can—" said Mr Rusk.

But Humphrey's eyes had gone to the tin, and then to the hundred faces looking at him, and then to the bunting, which he now saw was quite a lot of bunting for a party that nobody had mentioned to him. "Oh no," said a hundred people in a hundred slightly different ways. Mrs Garibaldi had gone the colour of uncooked pastry. "Nobody said... he was never supposed to... oh dear, oh dear."

Humphrey stood up. He stood up quite a long way.

"Run, run," he said, in a small voice. Then, in a bigger one: "Run, run, as fast as you can! You can't catch me! I'm the Gingerbread Man!"

And he was over the bakery wall in a single stride.

"He's getting away!" said Felix, and went after him, which was how most things in Felix's life began. Alex sighed, and followed.

• • •

The Gingerbread Man ran down the high street like a very large, very polite avalanche. Washing lines went up in his wake. A baker's boy carrying a tray of buns ducked, and the buns, remarkably, stayed on the tray. He left a trail of small golden crumbs behind him, one every few strides, like a polite arrow.

Behind them all came Mr Rusk.

He did not run. He leapt. He cleared the fountain, then the post office, then the roofs of three whole houses, landing on each chimney in turn like a very large and determined game of hopscotch.

"THE FOX!" shouted Felix, pelting along the cobbles. "Run, run, as fast as you can!" he added, because it seemed to be the rule.

"He's very fast," puffed Alex.

"He's the FOX!"

Alex didn't say anything. He was watching Mr Rusk. The fox kept shouting something, every time he landed, a few short words that the wind took away before they got anywhere. And every time he leapt, he came down a little short of the Gingerbread's heels. It wasn't what Alex would have called a hunting kind of short.

"Tin lids!" cried a voice. Mrs Garibaldi was hurrying up the street, flour trailing from her apron, with two biscuit-tin lids under one arm. "Everyone goes across the Bay on a tin lid, it's the only way over the Beans, don't ask how I know." She pressed them into the boys' hands. "Catch him up and tell him nobody is snapping anybody! And mind Mr Rusk. He is very fast, and very correct."

The crumb trail led out of the town, down a long slope of sand, to a place where the land simply stopped being land. Ahead of them the sea was orange and glossy and slowly, slowly bubbling. Humphrey's last footprint was already sinking into it, by itself, like something being unpacked.

"Beans," said Felix, delighted.

• • •

Beans-on-Toast Bay did not hurry. The beans slid along in a thick orange tide, bubbling gently, at about the speed of a thoughtful snail. Here and there, great slices of toast stood up out of it like rocks, each one a long, long way from the next.

"He's gone right through it," said Alex. Across the bay, a trail of footprints was filling in, slowly, a long way out.

"He's got massive feet," said Felix. He put his tin lid on the beans, stood on it, and shoved off with both hands.

The lid went nowhere. Felix went sideways. He came up with a single bean on his head, like a hat. "It's NOT working."

He tried again. This time he sat down, and the lid began to turn, very slowly, in a complete circle, like the world's slowest roundabout. Alex watched him go all the way round.

"It isn't fighting you," said Alex.

"It's definitely fighting me."

"It's just slow." Alex stepped carefully onto his own lid and leaned, a very little, to the left. The lid slid left. He leaned forward. The lid slid forward. "You don't push it. You agree with it."

Felix tried it. He leaned. The lid slid. He leaned further, and the lid went quicker, and the beans parted and closed behind him with a soft, thick plip.

"I'M AGREEING!" shouted Felix, going backwards.

By the time they'd both got the way of it, the shore was shrinking behind them, and the bay opened up ahead, wide and orange and warm. Alex found, without quite knowing why, that he was picking up golden crumbs as they passed them, where Humphrey's trail ran across the toast. They seemed like the sort of thing you shouldn't leave lying about.

• • •

They came ashore on a toast rock the size of a bus. It was very comfortable and slightly warm. Felix lay on it, spread out like a starfish, picking beans out of his hair.

"It's like being inside a sandwich," he said, "that's inside a different sandwich."

Alex sat on the edge. After a moment, because his hand was in his pocket anyway, Felix took out the jigsaw piece and held it up.

It warmed. It flickered gold. It sneezed one small spark and went out.

"Not yet," said Alex.

"I just wanted to see," said Felix, and put it away.

They sat for a while. Out across the beans, the other toast rocks stood in a long line, much too far apart for anyone to jump. Anyone except somebody who could clear a post office.

"Riddle," said Alex. "What chases someone as fast as it can, and keeps landing just behind them?"

"A rubbish fox," said Felix.

"Or one who doesn't want to land on them."

Felix thought about that for several seconds, which is quite a long time to think about anything when you are Felix. Then they both turned round.

Far back across the bay, a long way from any toast rock, Mr Rusk stood waist-deep in the beans. He had missed his landing. He was holding the tin neatly above his head, to keep it dry, and he was saying something very politely to the beans.

"He's stuck," said Felix, with some satisfaction.

"Mm," said Alex.

Ahead of them, over a harbour wall, hung a large wooden sign. PIZZA PORT. TOLLS PAYABLE BEFORE PANIC.

• • •

Pizza Port smelled of warm bread and oregano. The quay was made of enormous round pizza bases laid edge to edge, and the boats were tied up with thick, shining strings of stretched mozzarella. Stalls sold things on sticks. At the harbour gate stood a very small, very broad man in a tall paper hat, behind a booth with a very large ledger.

His badge said Mr Capers, Tolls and Tutting.

"Toll is one pepperoni coin each," said Mr Capers. He tutted. It was a long one.

"We haven't got any," said Alex.

Tut. "Rules are rules."

"Did Humphrey have any?" said Felix. "The big gingerbread? He'd have come through here."

Mr Capers stopped tutting. Something in his face went quiet. "He came through at a very great speed," he said. "Didn't have a coin on him. He stopped, though. Looked down at me, with those eyebrows. Said hello. Said sorry about the size of himself. Left me a crumb." He looked at the booth for a moment. "I haven't had a hello since the Tuesday before last."

Felix looked at Alex. Alex took the handful of crumbs from his pocket and put one on the counter.

"We haven't got any coins," said Felix, "but hello. And sorry. And we're in a hurry."

Mr Capers examined the crumb. He tutted, very softly, and it was clearly a tut of approval. "Past you go," he said. "Mind the bridge. It's a cheese-pull. It doesn't like to be hurried. Forty years I've worked that crank and I've never once hurried it."

"Thank you," said Alex.

That was when something very large landed behind them.

• • •

It landed on the booth.

Mr Rusk came down across the whole width of the harbour gate, out of the sky and through the toll booth, and for a moment the quay disappeared in a cloud of splinters and oregano. A hundred pepperoni coins went across the pizza bases like very small, very spicy wheels.

When the dust settled, Mr Rusk was sitting on the remains of the ledger with a strip of bunting round his neck. He was still holding the tin.

"That," said Mr Capers, "is two hundred coins."

Mr Rusk stood. He brushed himself down. "I do beg your pardon," he said. "I shall— By order of— I will pay every—"

Felix stepped in front of him with both arms out. "STOP CHASING HIM."

"I only wanted to tell him—" said Mr Rusk.

"That he's tasty!" Felix cut in.

"NO," said Mr Rusk.

It was louder than he had meant, and it surprised him. The gulls on the harbour wall looked round.

"Tell him what?" said Alex.

Mr Rusk looked at the boys. He looked at the tin. His mouth opened.

Out over the harbour, something went TWANG.

Everybody turned to look.

• • •

The cheese-pull bridge was a long, shining cobweb of mozzarella, slung from the quay across the water to the far side. Humphrey was on it.

He was about halfway across. He had stepped onto it at a run, and his feet had stuck, and the harder he had pulled, the more stretched he had become. He was now a good deal thinner than he liked and a good deal taller. His feet were still stuck. The bridge sagged under him toward the harbour, where the water was red and rather bubbly.

"I'm fine!" he called. "Please don't come! Run, run— I mean— help!"

Mr Capers ran to the crank, a great wooden wheel at the end of the quay. He took the handle, and bent, and straightened up with a face of pure agony. "My knees," he said. "They went in the spring. I can't crouch. Forty years." He looked at the boys. "You'll do it."

"We've never—" said Alex.

"You don't wind cheese," said Mr Capers. "You ask it to come along. A pull is just a push that's decided to wait."

Felix and Alex took a handle each. Felix turned it hard. The bridge went twang and two strands flapped loose. Alex turned it a little, then stopped. The bridge sagged, and Humphrey's toes dipped into the harbour.

"Slow," said Alex. "Together."

They turned it slowly. They turned it together. The strands drew tight, one by one, and the bridge lifted out of the water, higher and higher, and Humphrey came up with it, with a noise like a very large plaster being peeled off a very large knee, and landed on the quay with a thump and a small cloud of crumbs.

"Third time," said Felix.

"Third time," said Mr Capers, and tutted, and it was a very good one.

• • •

Humphrey lay on his back on a pizza base, getting his breath. Crumbs fell from him faster than he liked. He was exactly the height he had started out at, and he patted himself all over to check.

"I've lost a button," he said, and his voice wobbled.

Mr Capers appeared with a small fishing net. He leaned over the edge of the quay, and after a moment lifted out a gumdrop, dripping and red, and held it out. "Third from the top," he said. "I keep a drawer."

Humphrey pressed it back on. It went on slightly sideways. He sat up.

"We came to tell you something," said Felix.

"That I'm going to be divided."

"No. They're not going to."

Humphrey looked out at the harbour. "They were all so pleased," he said. "Everyone. All the bunting. And nobody asked me." He said it quietly, and quite plainly, and nobody said anything for a bit.

"We won't let anyone," said Felix.

"Nobody's going to snap you," said Alex. "Mrs Garibaldi said so. She said to tell you."

"Then why is there a fox?"

"I don't know," said Alex. "Yet."

Humphrey looked at the two of them. Then he pressed a crumb into each of their hands, gently, one at a time. "For luck," he said. "That's what you do with a biscuit, isn't it? Share it."

Alex put his in his pocket with the others.

A shadow fell across the quay, and kept on falling.

• • •

Mr Rusk landed beside Humphrey, as lightly as a cat onto a cushion, and before anyone could say a word he scooped him up. He did it in one arm, very gently, the way you lift a tray of eggs.

"HEY!" said Felix.

"Oh!" said Humphrey.

"I'm so sorry," said Mr Rusk. "I haven't time."

And he was gone. He went from the quay to a toast rock, and from that toast rock to the next, and his bounds across the bay got smaller and smaller, until he was a dot on a dot on a bay of orange beans. Behind the mountains at the end of the bay, the sun had gone the colour of an apricot.

"He's TAKEN him," said Felix.

"The lids are too slow," said Alex. "We'll never make it before sundown." He turned and looked at the bridge, hanging taut and shining over the water. He looked at the crank. He looked at his own tin lid. "Mr Capers. If you wound the bridge as far as it would go, and then let it go..."

"It's never been done," said Mr Capers.

"Has it been tried?"

"By a goat."

"What happened to the goat?" said Felix.

"It sends cards," said Mr Capers.

Alex had a good deal of experience of building things. They wound the crank, together, slowly, until the whole bridge sang like a bowstring and the catch clicked home. Alex set his tin lid down where the strands met the quay, and sat on it. Felix sat in front of him.

"Right," said Mr Capers. "Hold on tight, and whatever you do, don't—"

"Is it fun?" Felix cut in.

"Extremely," said Mr Capers, and pulled the pin.

• • •

Flying across Beans-on-Toast Bay on a tin lid turned out to be about ninety per cent beans. They went over one toast rock, and then another. They passed a seagull, which dropped its chip. They came down in a long, whistling arc over the roofs of Biscuit Town with their hair standing straight up behind them, and landed in the sacks of flour outside the bakery, which broke their fall and then, being flour, went everywhere.

When Felix sat up, he was white from head to foot, with two clean circles round his eyes.

The square was full. The whole town stood in a ring under the bunting, in the red light of the setting sun, and nobody was skipping. In the middle of the empty cobbles stood Mr Rusk with the tin in his paw. Beside him stood Humphrey. Both of them were very still.

"It's sundown," said Mrs Garibaldi, in a very small voice, as if she hoped nobody would hear.

"DON'T SNAP HIM!" shouted Felix, and a puff of flour went off his head.

Nobody moved. Mr Rusk didn't say anything. Humphrey looked down at the fox, then across at the boys.

"He picked me up very carefully," said Humphrey, quite unsure. "He hasn't said a word. He's a very good carrier."

The sun touched the top of the hill.

Alex got to his feet and wiped the flour from his eyes. He didn't shout. He thought about it, and about the riddle, and then he did the harder thing, which was to walk up to a very large fox and just ask.

"Mr Rusk," said Alex. "What did you want to tell him?"

• • •

Mr Rusk put the tin down on the cobbles. He did it carefully, as if it might go off.

"I have been the Snapper for eleven years," he said.

His voice was quite steady. His ears were not.

"Eleven Snap Days. Every year they hand me the tin, and they look at their shoes. Nobody has sat beside me at the table. Nobody has stood within three yards. I've measured." He looked at the empty cobbles around him. "I thought that was simply what the job was."

"This morning," said Mr Rusk, "he looked across the whole square and said hello. Nobody has said it first to me in all my life."

Humphrey made a small sound.

"I wasn't going to snap him," said Mr Rusk. "I never was. Not him. Not ever. I only wanted to catch him up before anyone else did, and tell him so. And then he ran so fast, and I didn't know how to say it, so I shouted 'come back, we're not going to' as loud as I could, and the wind took the rest. So I carried him home, to say it in front of everyone. And when I got here, I found I couldn't get the words out."

"That was what you were shouting?" said Humphrey.

"Come back," said Mr Rusk. "Please. That was all of it."

The square was silent. Mrs Garibaldi, who had an opinion about everything, looked at the circle of empty cobbles around the fox, and for once did not have one.

Humphrey bent down, slowly, until his enormous face was level with the little fox's.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," said Mr Rusk. His voice went. "I'm very glad you came after me."

"I'm very glad you did," said Humphrey. "Nobody's asked me anything all day. I think we might try asking each other."

• • •

"But the Snap," said Mrs Garibaldi, at last, in a voice that cracked a bit. "The town has always... the bits for luck. We can't just..."

Humphrey laughed. It was a gentle, wobbly laugh, and a few crumbs fell off his elbow and pattered on the cobbles.

Alex reached into his pocket and took out everything he had been collecting since the town gate. He held it out in his flour-white hand. A little pile of golden crumbs, from the beach and the beans and the toast rocks and the toll booth.

"He left these everywhere," said Alex. "Every time he stopped, somebody said hello. The man at the toll booth hadn't had one in ages. And there's the baker's boy, and the lady with the washing." He looked round the square. "That's what the luck is, isn't it? It was never the bit that gets broken off. It's the bit somebody gives you."

"I do shed when I laugh," said Humphrey, slowly. He looked round at the whole silent ring of faces. "If anybody wanted one. I could give them out. Properly, one at a time. If they'd like to come and say hello."

Mrs Garibaldi took out a handkerchief the size of a tablecloth and blew her nose in it with the sound of a small ship.

"Well," she said. "That's the best Snap Day idea I've heard in a hundred years."

They did it right there. The baker's boy came first, and said hello, and got a crumb. The lady with the washing was next. The skippers came, with their ropes, and the man from the doorway, still holding his digestive, though he said hello with the other hand. And one by one, people who had walked round the edge of the empty circle for eleven years walked straight across it, to the fox, and said it to him as well.

Mr Rusk said hello back to every single one. He was quite out of practice, and by the end he'd got rather good at it.

• • •

Mrs Garibaldi laid the long table in the middle of the square, right across the empty cobbles. She made all the place cards herself, with her own pen. Humphrey's said Guest of Honour. The boys' said Visitors. The last one she wrote with great care, then crossed out, and wrote again.

It said Mr Rusk, Sitting.

"Where are we all going?" said Humphrey, as the lamps came on.

"To the table," said Mrs Garibaldi.

"Oh," said Humphrey. He looked at the whole town. "Then there's no hurry. Walk, walk, as slow as you like." And he took Mr Rusk's paw in one huge hand, and the two of them walked across the square at exactly the speed of someone who has nowhere else to be.

The whole town followed, in no sort of order. Nobody went round anybody.

Mr Rusk sat at the middle of the table, at Humphrey's right hand. On his left sat the baker's boy. Felix sat across from him, and Alex next to Felix, and on and on down both sides, every chair full, every one with somebody's hello in it. A long way down the table, the man from the doorway finally put his digestive in his mouth. It took him a while. Nobody asked.

Felix, who had been looking for a moment at the sky, put his hand in his pocket. Gold light spilled out through his fingers, bright and steady.

"It's working," he said. "It's actually, really working."

"I know," said Alex, and he took Felix's hand under the table.

"Goodbye!" called Humphrey. "Thank you! Come back and say hello!"

"Goodbye!" said Mr Rusk, and he waved, with the whole of his paw, with a crumb in it.

The lamps went gold. The square went gold. And then it was the kitchen, and the toast, as far as anyone could tell, had not gone any colder.

P.S. A week later a letter arrived at the house with no stamp, and no address, and a smell of oregano. It was a very long invoice for two hundred pepperoni coins, in very small handwriting, and at the bottom it said: Paid in full by one fox, four hundred hellos and a biscuit. Tut. Capers.

P.P.S. At the park the next Saturday, a small boy was sitting on the end of a bench by himself, the way people sometimes do. Alex walked straight up and said hello. Felix, who had been about to kick a ball at the bench, said it too. The boy said hello back, and shifted along.

That evening the new piece went into the puzzle in the playroom. It clicked into its gap, and a little golden square joined the picture: a round town, a long orange bay, and a very small fox sitting beside someone very large.