Rusty felt himself redden like he did at Gundarra South Public School when Miss Chester made him read pages of an unfamiliar book aloud in front of the entire class. But then Miss Einstein nodded. ‘A most interesting thought, Rusty Mulligan. I can see why clever little Bongo has chosen you as his human companion. I’ll think on what you’ve said.’
She smiled at them all. ‘There’s much to think about for all of you too, I know. And lots to explore. Take the rest of the day to look around or to recover from your trip. We’ll start in earnest tomorrow. See you at nine o’clock sharp.’
CHAPTER 28
A CLEVER BIRD, ARTISTIC DOGS AND AN UNUSUAL GOAT
‘Kashikoi.’
Rusty couldn’t believe it. Sora had said another word.
Kashikoi.
He didn’t understand it, but it was a word, according to Akira.
It was the children’s second day on the island and Mr Moretti sat at the front of one of the classrooms on the Orwell Floor. Akira and Sora, Rusty and Bongo were there for a private lesson. According to Miss Einstein, birds and reptiles had many similarities. She suggested Mr Moretti, with his herpetology and ornithology background, might be able to coax the best from both animals.
‘Well done, Sora,’ exclaimed a surprised but pleased Mr Moretti. ‘You really are a quick learner, aren’t you? What does kash-whatever-it-was mean, Akira?’
‘It means clever,’ Akira replied proudly, stroking Sora’s back.
Bongo continued to stare out the window, just as he’d done all lesson. Mr Moretti taught in a more traditional manner than Miss Einstein’s wild dancing and singing extravaganza of the previous day. This involved carefully pronouncing words to the animals and waiting courteously for several seconds to see if they could repeat them. He wrote animal-friendly words in neat lettering on the whiteboard (chew, sniff and dinner were the words for today) and pointed at them with a ruler. Finally, he used the words in a sentence (‘Spot sniffed his tasty dinner, before chewing it up and swallowing it. Delicious!’).
Granted, there was an interlude where Mr Moretti had them all hold hands and repeat some weird, humming chants, but generally it was all pretty normal stuff. And it had worked. For Sora.
Didn’t Bongo want to talk? Was it too difficult for him? Rusty bit his nails — or ‘chewed’ them — as he’d unsuccessfully willed Bongo to say. ‘Maybe we could do some more singing?’ he suggested, remembering Bongo’s hissing during the previous day’s session with Miss Einstein.
‘Rusty, you are worried about Bongo, are you not?’ Mr Moretti probed in his charming Italian accent. ‘Please do not be worried. Sora has said two words, yes, that is true. But Bongo will speak to you when he is ready. Be patient. Trust in Bongo.’ He smiled and put down his ruler. ‘Let’s have a break. How about I take you four to visit the Williams Floor? That’s a fun level. Then we’ll go outside to the gardens; get some fresh air.’
Rusty picked up Bongo, set him carefully on his outstretched forearm and followed the others from the room. Sora led the way, flapping his wings and chanting kashikoi and kirei over and over.
Bongo, Rusty thought desperately, please speak to me.
As if he heard his owner, Bongo lifted his beady black eyes to Rusty’s.
Come on, Bongo, Rusty willed his pet, focusing so hard on the idea of Bongo’s first word his brain felt fit to burst.
The lizard opened his mouth, his blue tongue slowly emerging from between sharp little teeth. Then, quick as a flash, Bongo licked out and seized a small fly that had stupidly landed less than a tongue-length away on Rusty’s wrist.
He munched serenely.
Rusty sighed.
‘Good chewing, Bongo,’ Rusty said, failing to keep the despondency from his voice. ‘But maybe next time say the word instead of doing it.’
They made their way back along the red hallway. Laughter spilled out of a room a few doors along and Rusty couldn’t resist peering in.
Easels had been set up facing the front of the room, each one with a small mirror on it. Behind each easel stood a dog on hind legs, and beside each dog was a table set with a palette of paints.
Well, I never, thought Rusty. Artistic dogs!
As he watched, the teacher, an older woman with a grey beehive and cat’s-eye spectacles, began to speak. ‘Your challenge today, my canine friends, is a self-portrait. Look in the mirror and paint what you see. Remember to consider form, light and — since we are using oils today — texture.’ She clapped her hands once in a dramatic fashion. ‘Begin.’
Rusty watched a large black Labrador pick up a paintbrush and dip it into black paint. The dog frowned in concentration as she swept the brush over the canvas.
Rusty smiled and left them to it. As they walked on, a deep voice began singing in another language. They found the source two rooms down.
Standing at the front of the room, singing his heart out, was a fluffy-bearded grey and white goat. The chosen song was ‘O Sole Mio’, and the goat halted when he caught sight of Rusty and the others. ‘I’m very sorry. Am I disturbing you? Miss Einstein said I could practise here.’
‘Ah, no, not at all,’ Rusty stammered. ‘You are very good.’
The goat nodded graciously. ‘Opera is my passion. I hope to be the first goat to perform at Teatro alla Scala!’
Rusty and Akira looked at each other, eyes wide. An opera-singing goat!
‘Come along, children,’ Mr Moretti said, shepherding them towards the lifts. ‘There’s much more still to see!’
CHAPTER 29
TABLE TENNIS AND CHOC-CHIP COOKIES
They took the lift to level −4 and emerged into a royal blue corridor.
Mr Moretti led the way. He kept turning around and smiling. After passing a few classrooms, he stopped at one and gestured for Rusty to open the door. The usually reserved Italian hopped from foot to foot and his eyes shone.
Puzzled by Mr Moretti’s excitement, Rusty pushed the door open. Beside him, Akira gasped. The large room looked to be a sports court of some kind. Six mice had lined up at the far right wall and six sheep were on the left. Six large balls sat in a line in the centre of the room. Between them, standing to one side of the room, was a chestnut-coloured pony with a wild mane hanging across one eye in a roguish manner.
‘Three, two, one!’ called the pony.
All twelve animals ran towards the centre of the room. Suddenly balls flew back and forth. One bounced off Rusty’s leg and was soon head-butted back into play by a galloping woolly sheep.
‘Dodgeball!’ said Mr Moretti. ‘It is one of Miss Einstein’s favourite sports.’
It seemed an unfair competition. How could the tiny mice beat the much larger sheep? But three at a time, the mice gathered behind a ball, somehow flinging it towards the sidestepping sheep, who of course made bigger targets. The room was filled with squeaks and baas and scrabbling hooves and scratchy claws, and moments later it was over. The winner, apparently, a tiny black and white mouse.
Rusty, Akira and Mr Moretti cheered, and the mouse bowed.
Mr Moretti ushered them out. ‘I love the Williams Floor,’ he murmured, smiling. ‘It’s so much fun.’
The next room held a table-tennis table. An excitable, hopping white rabbit somehow played against a somewhat-uncoordinated cow with a paddle in its mouth.
Then, in the next room, cats were hunched over sewing machines. One appeared to be making a cat-sized T-shirt from fabric patterned with little fish. Another was embroidering a cushion cover with the slogan ‘You had me at meow’. Several cats sat in a circle, their knitting needles flying. Rusty thought they were making feline sweaters. After a few minutes, a large tabby started paying a little too much attention to the fluttering Sora, and Mr Moretti led them away.
Rusty could smell what was happening in the final room of the Williams Floor before Mr Moretti opened the door. So when he saw the ovens and fridges and stovetops he wasn’t surprised. ‘Choc-chip cookies!’ he said to Akira. ‘They smell delicious.�
�
The pets were working in groups. Mice and guinea pigs scurried along benchtops littered with chocolate chips and slippery with butter. A horse stirred a big silver bowl with a wooden spoon. A Pomeranian covered in flour ran in circles, a cloud of white rising off him like a miniature tornado.
When Mr Moretti closed the door and they wandered back towards the lift, Rusty was in better spirits. Surely if pets could learn to do all those things — to cook, sew and play sports — then Bongo might learn to talk.
His lizard hadn’t shown much interest in Mr Moretti’s tour, Rusty had to admit, but they had days still to go. As they entered the lift, he stroked his pet’s soft skin and felt a little more hopeful than he had an hour earlier.
Mr Moretti remembered he needed to meet briefly with a teacher on the Albert Floor, so Akira, Rusty and their pets tagged along. While they were waiting outside one of the science labs, Sora fluttered away and Akira followed. She stopped at a doorway and halted, open-mouthed. As Rusty joined her, she turned to him, eyes wide, and said, ‘Pigs.’
He looked in the room. They were pigs. And they were building a flying machine.
CHAPTER 30
PIGS MIGHT FLY
The laboratory was far more high-tech than any Rusty had seen before. Stainless steel benches were home to unattended glass and chrome machinery that whizzed along merrily, to what purpose Rusty couldn’t say. Tubes and computers intertwined with one another at intervals around the room, connected to who-knew-what. In the far corner, a shiny silver robot with red globes for eyes stood twice Rusty’s height. The robot’s head turned from side to side, its laser-emitting eyes strobing the laboratory as if protecting the pigs as they worked. The effect, Rusty thought, was more than a little terrifying.
And the pigs were at work.
There were six of them, two small pigs and four large ones, congregated around what appeared to be a futuristic, three-wheeled tricycle. Attached to the top of the tricycle, however, was one large, curved, triangular wing, like the ones Rusty had seen atop the hang-gliders that soared from the cliffs of Sydney out and over the sea.
‘Are those pigs building an aeroplane?’ asked Rusty, turning to Mr Moretti, who had followed them inside. Rusty thought he’d seen everything by now, but pigs building a flying machine really took the cake.
‘Yes,’ Mr Moretti replied.
‘But . . . how?’ Rusty managed, dumbfounded.
Two of the pigs were on their hind legs, reaching their forelegs up as they worked on the aircraft. The rest stood on four hooves. And that formed the crux of Rusty’s query: pigs have cloven hooves. How on earth could they use all this equipment?
Mr Moretti shook his head as if in agreement at the very craziness of the idea. ‘I can’t tell you how, Rusty. It shouldn’t be possible for pigs to use computers and electronic equipment too, or indeed, for a dog to paint a picture with a little paintbrush, no? But, somehow, they can. In virtually every case of an animal furthering his or her education here at Miss Alice Einstein’s School for Talking Pets, we’ve found their lack of fingers — or, more significantly, their lack of opposable thumbs — has not prevented or restricted their learning. Whether they have claws or paws or hooves or talons, as an animal learns to talk and then to study other disciplines, their bodies just . . . adapt.’
The pigs noticed the open-mouthed children. A black and tan pig, who must have been five times Rusty’s weight, lumbered over to them and gave a pleased snort. ‘Good morning,’ the pig said in a clear, deep voice. ‘I’m Van. Welcome to Advanced Aeronautics. Come in and meet the rest of the team.’
Akira and Rusty glanced at one another before following Van. Mr Moretti spoke to them softly as they entered. ‘Pigs are incredibly smart, children. They love a good roll in the mud on occasion, it’s true, but don’t let their enjoyment of the dirtier elements of the natural world fool you. The pigs in this room have more mathematical ability in their cute, curly tails than most humans have in their whole bodies.’
‘Kashikoi,’ Sora agreed from Akira’s finger.
‘Once, I even heard Nader Heydar ask them for advice.’ Mr Moretti nodded, sounding awestruck.
The pigs turned to their guests expectantly as Van continued. ‘We’ve been working on the design and assembly of our aircraft now for about seven months, and as you can see, it is coming along nicely.’ Van smiled modestly, then gestured to the pigs, who waited politely. ‘This is our team. Here we have Red, Bob and Babs.’ The three remaining large pigs smiled. ‘And over here we have Nan and Vin.’
Nan and Vin were smaller, each about the size of an overgrown house cat. They looked exactly like cute little piglets. Nan was pale pink and wore neat, black-rimmed spectacles, while Vin was light brown, with chocolate-coloured splotches all over him.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Nan with the voice of a fully grown pig. How Rusty could tell the age of a pig by its voice when in fact he had never before heard a pig speak was another mystery to add to the many mysteries he was uncovering at Miss Alice Einstein’s School for Talking Pets.
Akira and Rusty glanced at one another. Nan noticed their surprise. ‘That’s right. I’m not a piglet, I’m a miniature pig — and I’m fully grown. My breed is commonly known as a pot-bellied pig, but to be honest I find that term a bit offensive,’ she said, but then she grinned and jiggled her belly unselfconsciously and Rusty could see it was actually quite rotund. ‘I’ll be eighteen years old tomorrow, you know. I’m small even for a miniature pig.’
‘Tanti auguri, Nan,’ Mr Moretti congratulated her. ‘I know Miss Einstein has something special planned for you, but you’ll have to wait until later to find out what it is.’
‘Oh, don’t tease, Mr M,’ Nan said, but she looked happy, nonetheless. ‘Can you introduce us to your friends?’
‘Of course. Here we have Rusty and Bongo, and Akira and Sora.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said the pigs, their baritone voices harmonising beautifully.
‘You are building an . . . aircraft?’ asked Akira, sounding enchanted by the very idea. ‘I would love to fly.’
‘Yes, young lady, we most assuredly are. An ultralight. This marvellous machine we are making will be powerful enough to carry a pig.’
The children must have appeared sceptical as they looked at the — it could not be denied — enormous pigs. Nan noticed their disbelief and laughed. ‘Well, probably not Babs or Van or Bob or Red,’ she conceded. ‘But it will have enough torque to get Vin or me into the air, maybe even both of us at once. The big guys have to sit this one out.’
The black pig bristling with wiry grey hairs, who’d been introduced as Red and was the largest of the group, spoke. ‘Look, it’s nice to meet you all, but we need to get back to our work. We want to have this thing in the air by the weekend. We promised —’
‘Don’t get your tail bent even further out of shape, Red. We have plenty of time,’ interrupted Nan with a nonchalance that suggested she was used to the big pig’s grumpiness.
‘What’s on this weekend?’ Rusty asked.
Nan and the other pigs snorted with delight. The red-eyed robot’s lasers strobed faster at the noise and Sora flapped into the air in alarm before settling back on Akira’s finger.
‘We’ve challenged the goats from the back paddock to a race. We’re going to fly Marguerite — that’s what we’ve named our ultralight — from the top of the cliffs down to the rocks, and the goats are going to clamber down as fast as their hooves can carry them. It’ll be the most exciting event the island’s seen since Nader’s bunch of cats created that submarine and raced BJ’s speed boat back to the mainland. Remember, Red?’
The black pig forgot his impatience for a moment and chuckled. ‘Oh yes. What a day!’
The pigs snorted among themselves.
‘OK. We’ll leave you to it then,’ Mr Moretti said, herding the children and their pets out the door as the pigs said their goodbyes and gathered back around the ultralight.
‘We definite
ly need more thrust,’ Van’s voice drifted from the room.
‘No, no. It’s Bob’s ratios. They’re out, that’s the problem.’
Rusty shook his head as the door closed behind them. Suddenly, something struck him. He slapped his knee and started laughing, then found he couldn’t stop.
Akira and Mr Moretti stared at him. ‘What’s so funny?’ Akira asked.
He laughed harder, gasping for breath and wiping the tears from his eyes. ‘The pigs,’ Rusty managed between sobs of laughter. ‘They’re building an aircraft.’
‘Yes, it’s amazing, certainly,’ replied Mr Moretti. ‘But what’s so funny about it?’
Rusty took a breath and calmed himself before answering. ‘It’s like I told my friend, Charlotte, before I left Australia . . . pigs might fly.’
CHAPTER 31
A TALKING DOG AND A HUMAN HEDGE
They made their way outside, Rusty still chuckling, and sat on the grass to eat green apples that Mr Moretti pulled from somewhere. Sora beat his little wings and flew up to sit in the high branches of a nearby tree.
‘I’m going to stretch my legs and have a look at some of these animal-trees,’ Akira said. She gestured at the nearest animal-shaped hedge. This one was a rather vicious-looking German Shepherd dog the size of a car, its body outstretched, ears flattened against its head as it chased a ball. Several metres ahead of the dog tree, a small hedge had been trimmed into a rounded ball.
‘I’ll take a walk with you.’ Mr Moretti stood up and stretched. ‘Rusty, do you want to come?’
But the weak warmth of the sun had made Rusty tired. ‘No, thanks, I’ll just rest here for a bit,’ he said, laying back and staring at the blue sky. He could hear Bongo chomping on an apple near his left ear.
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