Cow Belle Beauty Queen
Page 1
Leena Parkkinen
Translated by Ruth Urbom
Illustrated by Katja Wehner
COW BELLE BEAUTY QUEEN
Published 2013 by Little Island
7 Kenilworth Park, Dublin 6W, Ireland
www.littleisland.ie
First published as Miss Milky Ray by Teos in Helsinki in 2011
Published by agreement with Stilton Literary Agency, Finland.
Copyright © Leena Parkkinen 2011
Translation copyright © Ruth Urbom 2013
Illustrations by Katja Wehner
© 2013 Boje Verlag in the Bastei Lübbe GmbH & Co. KG
The author and translator have asserted their moral rights.
ISBN Paperback 978-1-908195-31-9
ISBN ePub 978-1-908195-81-4
ISBN mobi 978-1-908195-82-1
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing Data.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design by Oldtown Graphic Design; illustration by Katja Wehner.
Typeset in PNM Caecilia Light by Oldtown Graphic Design.
Printed in Germany by CPI – Ebner & Spiegel, Ulm.
Little Island receives financial assistance from
The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.
This work has been published with the financial assistance of FILI–Finnish Literature Exchange.
The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of Ireland Literature Exchange (translation fund), Dublin, Ireland.
www.irelandliterature.com | info@irelandliterature.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
M ilena was brushing her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. She had to do it carefully, because otherwise the stitches in her tongue might get torn. A month ago, Milena had been in an accident where two cars drove – bam! – straight into each other. The cars split in two like melons, and Milena had got such a fright she’d bitten right through her tongue. There had been a lot of blood. Almost as if Milena had been dipped in ketchup.
Other than that, she was in excellent health. As healthy as any ordinary eight-year-old could be, even though she had stitches going across her tongue, just like a patchwork quilt. Sometimes she imagined she was a patchwork herself. A machine made up of various bits of skin and organs that did the things it was supposed to do (such as brushing its teeth right now), and not a girl called Milena at all.
There were just three puffs to go before bed. Milena had to make the most of them, because her mum timed them with a stopwatch. She would have thought that grown-ups, who didn’t get told to brush their teeth and get under the covers, would KNOW how to have fun doing important things, but no. (Milena often thought things to herself in capital letters. Especially because she knew her mum hated them.)
Suddenly Milena heard splashing noises coming from the bath. She pricked up her ears and froze for a moment. The plughole squelched as if a massive submarine were swimming in the bath. Get ready for a fight, Milena thought to herself.
She crept cautiously over to the shower curtain and raised her toothbrush. Even an idiot knows that bogeymen are really scaredy-cats, despite their fierce looks, and that a quick attack is the best defence against them. With a swift movement, Milena took hold of one corner of the shower curtain and pulled it aside.
There was a cow in the bath. It was scrubbing its back with the loo brush, and there were soap bubbles coming out of its nostrils.
‘Would you put the curtain back, please?’ said the cow. ‘My skin can’t take the draught.’
Milena opened her mouth, but all her best smart remarks had deserted her. She pulled the shower curtain closed again, climbed up and sat on the toilet lid, tucking her feet underneath her. She counted to ten and opened the curtain a tiny bit.
The cow was lounging in the bath. It didn’t even bother to look embarrassed. Instead, it was singing ‘Row, row, row your boat’ out of tune.
‘Milena!’ Milena’s mum called out from downstairs. ‘Have you got tummy-ache or something? Why are you moaning and groaning?’
Milena could hear the theme tune to WestEnders, her mum’s favourite soap, in the background. That meant Mum wouldn’t bother her for half an hour. Milena would have the situation sorted by then. It was no use getting grown-ups mixed up in anything. They always started offering you vitamin pills and chatting to people in white coats.
‘Everything’th fine,’ she called back. She had a slight lisp because it hurt to speak.
‘Who was that?’ the cow asked.
‘That’th my mum.’
‘Mums don’t seem to know much about music,’ the cow said. ‘But what can you expect from humans, when they’ve got noses like that?’
‘Notheth?’ Milena asked. She was starting to sense that this encounter could have gone a lot more smoothly all round.
‘Yuck,’ said the cow. ‘Human noses. I can’t stand them.’
‘Why’th that?’ Milena asked, covering her own nose with the palm of her hand.
‘They look just like caterpillar holes,’ said the cow. ‘A little bump with two hollows in it. I half-expect something white and slimy to come slithering out at any moment. But then again,’ the cow continued, ‘I suppose you can’t expect everyone to have as fine a muzzle as this.’
Milena thought the cow looked a bit self-important as she massaged her face with the brush.
‘Do you know that’th a toilet bruth? It’th for cleaning the loo.’
‘Oh?’ said the cow. ‘Aren’t your loos clean?’
‘Erm, never mind,’ Milena snorted. The cow was really and truly starting to get her goat. ‘Tell me, are you thome kind of bogeyman?’
‘A bogeyman!’ the cow snorted, raising its muzzle. ‘I’m a first-class Ayrshire: 600 kilos, not including my horns.’
‘You look much slimmer than that,’ said Milena. She wondered whether Ayrshire was a word in some bogeyman language.
‘I’m sure I don’t,’ the cow sniffed. ‘No one in our family line ever weighed less than 520 kilos. Not even my little sister Donatella, who’s a Pirkkala piebald on her father’s side. But we don’t talk about that. A cow has to accept her family, even when some of them are real beasts.’ As the cow guffawed at her own wit, she got soap in her eyes and had to rinse it out.
‘But what are you doing in MY bath?’ Milena asked.
‘Having a bath,’ the cow replied. ‘My dear little calf, you don’t appear to be particularly bright. And it’s not terribly pretty to sit there with your mouth gaping open, but then again, you human calves aren’t raised all that well. What can one expect from the sort of people who don’t start each morning with some nourishing hay stew and calcium powder? No wonder your heads stay so small.’
The cow got out of the bath and wrapped a red striped towel around its horns.
‘You can’t tell how smart someone is from how big they are,’ Milena maintained.
‘Now now, little calf. Are you claiming you’re dumber than a hamster? My name is Semi-Skimmed Tetra Pak,’ the cow said. ‘You could at least be civilised enough to introduce yourself.’
‘My name ith Milena.’
‘You humans speak with a strange accent. If you were a cow, I’d say you had a lisp.’
‘You’re the one with a lithp,’ Milena snapped illogically.
Then she explained about her tongue and a
ll about the accident and why her mum spent all day just lying on the sofa eating ice cream. And why they’d rented this house for the whole summer. And how Milena was worried about whether she’d ever learn to speak normally. Or would she spend the rest of her life as an outcast who couldn’t even spell the word ‘squirm’ without lisping?
‘Why on earth would you want to spell “squirm”? S-K-W-O-R-M. There’s no sense in that. Worms generally haven’t got any sense. They just muddle up your belly. One of my sisters had a tapeworm. The poor dear lost so much weight her farmer used her as a picket fence.’
‘That’th not how you thpell it.’
‘You’ll see,’ Semi-Skimmed said. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t worry too much about conversations with one-bellies. They’re boring. You yourself haven’t said much of interest in this conversation.’
‘One-bellieth?’
‘That’s what we cows call you. Chewing the cud is associated with more mature thought processes.’
‘But it’th not thpelt ETH-K-W-O-R-M. There’th a Q in it.’
‘How do you know? Have you ever read a cow spelling book?’
‘No.’ Milena wanted to add that she hadn’t even heard of such a thing until that very moment.
‘Cow spelling books never use a Q in the middle of a word. We think it’s vulgar.’
Semi-Skimmed drew out the last word, making her muzzle shudder. That made her look just like Milena’s Auntie Ulrika, who was very la-di-dah, as Mum said.
‘MILENA!’ Mum shouted from downstairs. ‘Stop sploshing around in the water. Do you know how much it costs to heat water?’
‘Shh,’ Milena shushed the cow. ‘If Mum thees you here, there’ll be an awful racket.’
Milena had learnt that her mum got terribly upset around anything unusual. The other day Milena had brought home a lovely sleek grass snake that had a kind, longing expression. It seemed to be begging to be allowed to sleep on Milena’s pillow and eat from the same bowl of breakfast cereal as she did. But when the snake wriggled its way out of Milena’s pyjamas at breakfast and into her mum’s bowl of yoghurt, Mum had leapt onto her chair and screamed with her hands over her ears. Milena had to take it back to the ditch that was its home.
Milena knew this cow business had to be sorted with the minimum of fuss – otherwise there’d be weeping and wailing all over again. You could always count on adults to make an awful lot of noise.
Semi-Skimmed wasn’t interested in Milena’s mum. She dried off the steamed-up bathroom mirror and inspected her eyelashes in it. Milena had to poke her in the side and explain twice why it was so important that her mum didn’t find out about Semi-Skimmed. She put two pairs of woollen socks that her granny had knitted onto the cow’s hooves to soften her steps.
Downstairs the TV was blaring. The lovers in WestEnders seemed to be in the middle of a massive row, and Mum’s eyes were glued to the screen.
One, two, three – Milena counted the steps to herself as she followed the cow downstairs. Then, all of a sudden, it happened: halfway down the staircase, Semi-Skimmed slipped. (Milena had to admit that maybe the woollen socks hadn’t been the most brilliant idea.) Whump, whump, the cow bounced down the rest of the steps with her legs outstretched. Milena froze in terror. For a moment there was total silence. The feuding soap-opera characters just glared at each other.
‘Milena,’ Mum began. ‘What on earth …’ Just at that moment, the main character in the soap said, ‘But Gladys, I’m actually your brother,’ and Mum’s voice trailed off.
Semi-Skimmed staggered up off the floor and tiptoed over towards the front door. Her previous boastfulness was gone. Milena could see that she was as embarrassed as a fully grown cow could possibly be. Her tail hung limp and her horns were tilted. She slipped out the door so quickly that Milena started to think she’d imagined the whole thing.
The next morning there was a smell of fresh grass in the air. Milena had dreamt about the cow and how it chewed clover in a meadow. The dream felt real – Milena could almost hear Semi-Skimmed burping.
She ran downstairs, where her mum was squinting at the coffee maker. Milena switched the coffee maker on and dashed out the door. The meadow was empty. Milena checked everywhere – even in the ditch, although she knew that Semi-Skimmed wouldn’t be able to hide in the knee-deep ditch, even if someone was threatening her with a vitamin injection.
Milena went back home, where she found her mum staring at a full cup of coffee that had gone cold. Milena poured herself some coffee from the jug and filled the remaining two-thirds of her cup with milk. Normally she didn’t really care for coffee, but nothing seemed to make sense this morning. What was so great about drinking this stuff?
After her third cup of coffee, Milena’s mum snapped out of her trance and ordered Milena to go and brush her teeth. Brushing your teeth in the school holidays is ridiculous, but Milena didn’t raise an objection. You just couldn’t discuss anything sensible with Mum before lunch, like how they absolutely needed to get a trampoline for the garden if Mum expected Milena to get good marks in PE.
While she was brushing her teeth Milena checked in the bath just to make sure, but it was empty. She went into her room and jumped onto the bed.
‘Ow,’ came a noise from the bed. ‘It’s not terribly civilised to prod others with your hooves.’
‘What are you doing in my bed?’ Milena leapt to her feet and stared at the duvet, which bulged and rose into a shapeless form until the cow’s muzzle poked out from underneath.
‘Oh, did Goldilocks eat everyone’s porridge? What do you think? I’m warming up. It’s freezing outside, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ Semi-Skimmed’s words were slightly muffled.
When she looked more closely, Milena could see biscuit crumbs on the cow’s muzzle.
‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this,’ Milena said in a stern voice, just like the hunky man in WestEnders, but the cow didn’t seem to hear her.
‘Have you got any more of those chocolate-coated ones with pink sprinkles on top?’
‘Yesterday you were saying how grass is so nutritious and beneficial for the brain,’ Milena said.
‘Grass is overrated. The right food for cows is chocolate biscuits. But we’ve got to discuss something important now. You’re very prone to idle chitter-chatter. I suspect you haven’t been raised properly,’ Semi-Skimmed said.
‘I’ve raised myself,’ Milena replied, because she took the view that bringing up children was something that shouldn’t be left to adults. Most of the time they were wrapped up in the mass media and something called ‘meetings’, which involved sitting in a little room eating pastries.
‘You’ve got to help me,’ Semi-Skimmed pleaded, taking a wrapper from under the duvet and handing it to Milena.
Milena stared at it. It looked like an ordinary chocolate-bar wrapper.
‘This is my ticket to becoming the Princess of Meadowville,’ said Semi-Skimmed, gazing at Milena with her moist cow eyes. Milena stared open-mouthed at her. ‘You’ve got to help me win the Cow Belle Beauty Queen pageant.’
Milena thought this sounded ridiculous and sat down on the floor. She found the packet of biscuits, which Semi-Skimmed had nicked almost all of, and started munching as the cow spoke. The biscuits didn’t taste as good without milk, but it would have felt wrong somehow to drink milk in the presence of a dairy cow.
Semi-Skimmed was talking so excitedly, it took Milena a while to understand what she was on about. But here’s a brief summary: once every three years, the Milky Ray chocolate factory selected the prettiest cow in Meadowville. As well as the title of Cow Belle Beauty Queen (which all the cows craved), the winner would get her photo printed on every Milky Ray-bar wrapper during her three-year reign.
‘The current title-holder is Hefty Hoofington, that old heifer. You wouldn’t believe the way she’s been swanning about, even though everyone knows her father’s a Belgian blue.’
‘Belgian blue?’
‘They’re supposed to be posh,
but in fact they’ve got two bums. Inbred beasts.’ Milena was about to ask about the bum thing, but Semi-Skimmed carried on with her commentary. Hefty and Semi-Skimmed were clearly old enemies, and they were related on their mothers’ side.
‘She wasn’t raised in the same cowshed as me, but close,’ Semi-Skimmed explained. Hefty had tormented her even when they were young calves. Dared her to eat poisonous buttercups, which upset all of Semi-Skimmed’s stomachs. Egged her on to wade into a lake with a steep shoreline. Once she even shoved Semi-Skimmed against an electric fence and claimed it was an accident.
Even as a calf, Hefty had been big – a real bruiser – and chocolate brown. Cows like that can often have a hard time of it too.
‘The truth is, I really do weigh only 500 kilos. I’m the smallest cow in my whole family,’ Semi-Skimmed admitted, her muzzle drooping. ‘I haven’t got a chance.’
‘Never mind,’ Milena said, feeling sorry for the cow. ‘I’ll help you!’
Semi-Skimmed perked up. ‘Really?’ She charged over to hug Milena, but the girl jumped out of the way in the nick of time. Even a petite Ayrshire weighing several hundred kilos delivers a lot of force with a hug. Semi-Skimmed didn’t seem to mind and just jumped up and down, making the floorboards in Milena’s bedroom groan.
‘First, you’ve got to tell me everything that’s involved in the competition. Then we can draw up a training programme. I’ve watched enough films to know about all that stuff,’ Milena explained.
The lakeside meadow was the safest place to practise. The shore was too muddy for swimming and the meadow was too remote for sunbathers. People had kept pigs there in the past, but now not even a single trotter-print remained in the soil. The only thing left was an old tumbledown fence from the pigpen.
‘The toughest part is the talent competition,’ Milena said. She had put on her best red tracksuit because she thought this session would require special effort. ‘What are you thinking of doing for that?’