Ghastly Gob Gissimer

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Ghastly Gob Gissimer - book excerpt

Chapter 1: The Talagom of Trywalla

Gissimer was the meanest of all the Talagom who lived in Trywalla. He and his fellow Talagom were settlers, having come from the far-off land of Ombrakerton. They were made welcome in Trywalla because they were tinkers — that’s a rather old-fashioned word for people who make pots and pans. It was said that the people of Ombrakerton produced pots and pans like no one else.

You see, in lands like Trywalla there was no gas or electricity, so there were no such things as microwave ovens or electric kettles or gas cookers, like our houses have today. Today, if we want a cup of tea or coffee, we simply turn on the electric kettle and boil up the water. In Trywalla, however, the only way of making a cup of kallow — that’s a drink in Trywalla made from the leaves of a plant that grows up the side of the Oryx trees — was to draw some water from the well and then boil it up over a wood fire. It was SUCH a lot of trouble. Mind you, the people of Trywalla didn’t mind too much as they reckoned that kallow was the best tasting drink in the whole of Universaria. And so it probably was, as it tasted like a mixture of chocolate and raisins mixed with honey. Yum!

All this meant that if you wanted to cook a meal, you couldn’t just turn on the oven like we do today. You’d first have to go and collect the wood from the forest and make a fire. Now every house in Trywalla had a type of central heating because the fire was always in the middle of the house.

Don’t ask me why it always had to be in the middle of the house, but it did. If you tried asking the people of Trywalla why, they would simply shrug and say, “That’s the way it’s always been.” You see, in Trywalla, people had a very set way of doing things.

Of course, I can almost hear some of you who are very intelligent asking questions like, “Where did the smoke go? Did the houses have chimneys?”

There was no chimney, but every house had a hole in the middle of the roof to let out the smoke. Smoke in Trywalla was really amazing because it didn’t spread out and fill the house like smoke tends to do here. The smoke was so well trained it went straight up and out of the hole in the roof. Of course, this meant that when it rained that some of the rain came into the house, but no one really seemed to mind because the rain was always warm to the skin.

In fact, when it rained in Trywalla, all the mums would get their children to stand under a very large funnel in the centre of the village so they could have a shower. You ought to have seen them — they were SOOOOO sweet — laughing and playing as the water ran down and the mums scrubbed their little backs with the sowen plants — that’s a bit like a sponge that grows on the banks of the Cederbower River.

One thing you would have found unusual was that all the children had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. What’s more, their hands and feet were hairy. In fact, the people of Trywalla were hairy all over except on their faces. This meant you could grow a beard anywhere except on your face. It was polite to keep your hair fairly well washed and brushed because otherwise all sorts of funny creatures could come and live in it!

Chapter 2: “Ghastly-Gob Gissimer!”

Now if you ever visited Trywalla in those days, perhaps the last person you would want to meet was Gissimer, who nevertheless is the main subject of this tale. Gissimer lived all on his own for the simple reason no one else particularly wanted to go near him unless they had to.

The reasons for this were quite numerous. First, he never washed or brushed his hair so if you went too near him you had to watch out for the little creatures who would jump from his fur into yours. Now they were quite friendly little creatures — they didn’t bite because they lived off the oil that was in the fur — but it was considered rather impolite to go round with little creatures living in your fur.

Added to that, Gissimer never brushed his teeth. Now you know that all good parents in our country tell their children to brush their teeth at night before they go to bed. Some even insist on it three times a day after meals! Such people often put up little notices in the bathroom about what will happen to you if you don’t brush your teeth regularly. They have pictures of children with half their front teeth missing or sitting in a chair with a terrified look as they are about to be tortured by the dentist’s drill!

Anyway, Gissimer’s parents had obviously never had those sorts of pictures hanging up in their bathroom, so his teeth — and particularly the bottom two which stuck out of his mouth — were horrid and yellow. Also, his breath smelled something awful when he talked to you. The children used to joke that when you talked to Gissimer it was like putting your head down a smelly drain. They used to call him rude names like “Ghastly-Gob Gissimer” — not to his face, of course, but behind his back.

But sometimes, for a dare, one of the children would creep under his window and shout, “Ghastly Gob Gissimer!” and then he and his companions would run away as fast as they could. Gissimer would be really angry and come out and yell at them, but all he could ever see were little hairy bodies running away in the distance.

Of course, those of us who have been brought up properly know you should never do things like that, especially to an older person, but some children (and their parents) can be really cruel to people they don’t like. But with all that, it must be said that it was very hard to like Gissimer, not just because he was untidy and smelly and covered in little creatures, but because he was also breathtakingly mean. In fact, he had a reputation of being the meanest Talagom in Trywalla. There was even a saying about him that, “Once Gissimer gets hold of a cooley shell he makes it a prisoner for life!”

In case by now you’re wondering what a cooley shell is, let me explain. In Trywalla they didn’t have money like we have. There were no pound coins or dollar bills or credit cards or cash machines. The only thing they had was cooley shells. Cooley shells came from a shellfish that lived at the bottom of the ocean. They were quite rare — a bit like gold is to us — and so they were very valuable, especially the larger ones.

When a cooley shell came into the village, the village valuer would examine it and tell everyone how much it was worth. He would measure the distance across it one way and then the other. He would then squeeze it between his thumb and forefinger (that’s the one nearest to his thumb) to see how much quality it had. The harder the shell, the better the quality and the more it was worth. As cooley shells tended to get harder with age, the older ones were worth more.

After the valuer had examined the cooley shell, he would think for a minute, then grunt three times, shake his shaggy head, and say, “This is a five (or a one, or a ten or a twenty),” depending on how much he had decided it was worth, the value being a combination of how big and how hard the cooley shell was.

The cooley shells were used in nearly the same way as we use money, apart from the fact there were no banks in Trywalla. That meant you had to keep the cooley shells in your house in a box with a lock on it. Mind you, the people of Trywalla were generally very honest and if anyone was caught stealing that person was made to work for the person they stole it from until they had worked off the value of what they stole. Rather a better system than putting people in prison, I think!

Well, Gissimer was not aperson to take any chances, and he had an enormous box that was bolted to the floor of his house where he kept his own cooley shells. And it there were lots and lots of them. In fact, the whole box was literally crammed full of shells — big ones, medium ones and small ones — all sizes. You see, Gissimer’s one object in life was to collect as many cooley shells as he could, and to make himself as rich as possible.

Each week on a certain day, Gissimer would have a ritual where he would open the big box, take the shells out, give them all a polish, then count them as he put them carefully back in the box. They used to say of him: “If only he took the same care of his appearance as he does of his cooley shells, he might almost make a handsome Talagom.” But of course, they always said it as a joke, because no one ever believed that Gissimer could look handsome, even if he cleaned his teeth and brushed his coat non-stop every day for a thousand years!

Chapter 3: The Miserable Old Miser

Now there was nothing wrong with Gissimer having cooley shells any more than it is wrong for people to have money in the bank and savings accounts and things like that. The problem was that he didn’t share his wealth with anyone. He never helped any of his family who were in need because he didn’t have a family — oh, just one niece and her children who he hardly ever spoke to. She was really poor as she had to bring up her children on her own, but Gissimer never helped her out at all. So Yuvanta (that was her name) and her dear little children had to go into the woods looking for any kallow they could find growing low down on the Oryx trees.

The best kallow grew near the top of the trees, but Yuvanta never allowed her children to climb that far, so they had to make do with the inferior sort. When they got it home, they didn’t drink it themselves — they were too poor for that. They prepared it then sold it in the market so that Yuvanta could have some money to buy food with. She also took in washing from the wealthier folk in Trywalla — not that there was much, because people didn’t wear much — and the children helped out by chopping firewood.