Trixie and the Dream Pony of Doom

by Ros Asquith

  All this research gave me a few clues, so that when Clara said it was time I gave Fungus a good grooming to see what colour he really was, and produced a thing that looked like a scrubbing brush, and a thing that looked like a paint stripper, I knew that one was called a dandy brush and the other was a curry comb.

  Well, a dandy brush may be good for getting a little bit of mud off a posh horse that has got its fetlocks a trifle dusty after a brisk day’s scampering over hill and dale ridden by Camilla Fotherington-Pyke-Turbot, but old Fungus was what Grandma Clump would call “a different kettle of fish”. (Must check what this really means.) I spent about five hours on Wednesday grooming him and I realised what Mum is going on about when she is trying to scrub Tomato’s dungarees after he has been having a mud fight with his little fiends from nursery.

  Only last week I told her to stop moaning and fling them in the washing machine like everyone else. And she sighed and said, “One day you will have to do all the washing, and one day you might have a baby, and then you will know.”

  And now I have Fungus. And I do know.

  “To get him really clean, you’re going to have to shampoo him,” said Clara. And she gave me a foaming bucket, which is how I discovered that Fungus was not a piebald pony at all. (Piebald is black and white patches, like a cow.) As I shampooed him, all the white came off! He was completely black from head to hoof, except for a cute white star on his forehead.

  “He’s been dyed!” said Clara.

  “Why would anyone do that?” I asked.

  “Beats me,” she shrugged. “Still, he’s come up nice, hasn’t he? Looks years younger. I think I misled you about his age, actually. He’s not that long in the tooth after all.” It was true. Fungus looked quite perky suddenly.

  I yawned. It seemed weird, but I thought, If everyone spends so much time giving their ponies fancy hairdos, maybe dyeing them isn’t that unusual either.

  Two days later, as if Fungus knew half term was nearly over and he wanted to please me before I went back to dreaded school, Fungus zoomed through the bending poles!

  Well, I wouldn’t say he zoomed, but he went respectably fast. Maybe there was hope!

  I begged and pleaded with Mum to let me have the next few days off. “You could say I’ve got chicken pox. It’s going around.”

  “You had it last year,” Mum reminded me.

  Of course, Mum didn’t agree that training a pony for a bending race was a good excuse to miss a week’s schooling. That is absolutely typical of teachers, even the Very Extremely nice ones, like my mum. They think that school is about education, where in fact it is Real Life that is education.

  “A bending race is hardly that important,” she said.

  “Look, training Fungus is a once-in-a-lifetime’s chance. The gymkhana’s on Saturday and if he wins, it means … it means …” I nearly told her the truth at this point, about how the stables might keep Fungus if he won. But I knew she would be Very Extremely upset with me for lying about how Dinah’s dad had fixed it all up, so I bit my tongue and just stood there.

  “Yes? What does it mean?” Mum looked beady.

  “He’ll get a rosette,” I said lamely.

  So I had to race to the stables at 6.00 a.m. every morning for training, and then go to boring old school and sit gazing at the horrendous beak of Warty until I was FREE at 3.20 p.m! And then I realised that days can be amazingly long things, with school just an annoying bit in the middle of them.

  It’s incredible that normally school seems to take the whole day, whereas if you have a truly exciting thing that you’re doing (like me and Fungus did), you realise how much time there is before and after school. So I ran to the stables before school each morning with armfuls of carrots and apples, and galloped straight there again after school. Fungus always gave a little whinny of pleasure when he saw me. Or maybe was the carrots. And he was getting brilliant at the bending.

  I took a deep breath and filled out the form to enter him for the gymkhana. OK, I’d probably fall off and make a fool of myself, but at least I’d have tried.

  There days before the horse show, the bombshell fell.

  “You know Fungus is going to have to go tomorrow evening, don’t you?” said Clara. “Mr Whippet’s on the six o’clock flight and he’ll be furious to find a strange pony in the paddock.”

  “But look how good he is at bending!” I cried. “We only need two more nights! Then he’ll prove himself!”

  “If Whippet finds him here I’ll be dead meat,” said Clara, “whether he can win prizes or not …”

  Where could I keep him for two nights? I needed a Big Idea, something that would get me and Fungus out of this hole.

  “I know!” said Dinah, as we huddled in the quiet corner at break time. “The garden!”

  Yesss! Dinah’s garden is huge. Why didn’t I think of that before? “But won’t your mum mind?”

  “I don’t mean our garden; my mum treats her lawn as if it was a posh carpet. I mean yours.”

  “Oh, you mean our scruffy little garden?”

  “Yes.” Dinah saw the look on my face and backtracked quickly. “No offence, but I mean, Fungus was used to that horrid little yard.”

  “So our horrid little garden will seem like a palace?”

  “Oh, don’t be so touchy. You could keep him in your mum’s shed.”

  My mother’s shed is not a place that me or Harpo or the puppies or Tomato are ever allowed into. It is where she does Very Extremely embarrassing things like write poems and make papier mâché plates that no one uses, and plant little hopeless plants that wave one pathetic tendril in the air before frizzling up.

  “But what about MY mum and dad? They’ve got feelings too, you know. And plants.” I thought of the rest of our garden, which is full of Dad’s old planks and gadgets and has only about three plants that can survive Tomato and the puppies.

  “We don’t even have a side entrance. Mum would go mad. And I told her, I promised her, that your dad would stable Fungus.”

  Dinah looked really ashamed for the first time. “Trix, I’m sooo sorry,” she said. “Look, I’ll beg the stables. I’ll tell them it’s all about Animal Rights and that Fungus has a right to a nice field. I’ll offer to pay them for a week.”

  But when we got back to the stables straight after school, Fungus was tethered outside waiting for us to collect him. Clara had put out an oversized old horse blanket and a bucket with some pony treats and hay in it as a farewell token.

  “Please, please can he stay just another two nights? We’ll pay,” Dinah asked.

  Clara shook her head. “No way. Sorry, but Mr Whippet could turn up any time now. I’m already scared he’ll notice there’s been a pony in the field anyway. I’ll have to pretend it was one of ours. I could lose my job.”

  We mooched off. Poor little Fungus, forced to wander from place to place without a home in the world …

  “Maybe we should take him back to Fairfield Park,” said Dinah.

  “With Bullet Head and the Rottweilers? Never!” I said. “I’ll take him up to the common and sleep rough with him. We’ll be gypsies together and never go to school.”

  I was warming to this idea when Dinah said, “School! Of course! We could keep him in the playground!”

  “Dinah, you’re a genius. He can live in the old bike shed. Of course he can. And we can tell Hedake it’s all about Animal Rights. And learning about animals. And we can give the infants rides. We’ll make out he’s a present to the school.”

  Chloe looked doubtful, but then she always does.

  “Got a better idea?” said Dinah.

  So Chloe carried the bucket, Dinah carried the moth-eaten old blanket and I led Fungus in the direction of St Aubergine’s Primary.

  Of course, we met a few people we knew and definitely didn’t want to run into on the way back from the stables. It seemed as if everyone from school had just spilled on to the streets. It’s amazing that they can spend so much time kicking each other’s ba
gs over hedges, shouting insults at strangers and trying to squeeze about twenty of them into shops with “only 2 schoolchildren allowed” signs in the window.

  Big Barry and Freddy Jones saw us with Fungus and had to clutch on to each other to stop falling down on the pavement laughing.

  “What the ****’s that? Your mum?” said Big Barry in the end, when he’d got his breath back enough to shout. (I can’t repeat the letters that go where the stars are because this book is specially written for children who don’t know any bad words, heh-heh.)

  “Get lost,” said Dinah, who never hangs back at times like this. “Go and ask if anybody’s handed in your brain yet.”

  Big Barry made a rude gesture that I won’t draw for fear of this book being banned and me being sent to prison, where I wouldn’t see Fungus again for years or maybe EVER. Freddy Jones blushed and made an unrude gesture in Barry’s direction, like “I’ve never seen this idiot before in my life.” I really like Freddy.

  A small crowd of jeering Year Sixes had now gathered around Fungus, who looked pleased with all the attention. Poor daft thing, I thought at first. But then he looked at me, not at them, and I could have sworn he winked.

  “Where d’you put the money in?” somebody asked, looking under Fungus’s baggy tummy.

  “It’s one of them things out of Crash Bandicoot, innit?” somebody else said.

  “No it’s not, it’s a dog,” Big Barry said, seriously. “Prob’ly a cross between a mongrel and a different mongrel.”

  “It looks like my brother’s bedroom stuffed into a bag,” said. Ditzy Debbie.

  “It’s my Uncle Norry,” said her friend Mandy, “only with more teeth.”

  Fungus smiled at this point, or that’s what it looked like. They all hooted with laughter, and he smiled even more and nuzzled Ditzy Debbie.

  “He smells a bit,” she said. “But he’s cute.”

  “Like your boyfriend Elvis,” said Mandy, nudging her in the ribs. The boyfriend bit is true. Ditzy Debbie is only eleven and Elvis is thirteen and they have been seen snogging in the back row of the Bottomley Odeon. The whole school talked about nothing else for weeks, so now Ditzy Debbie thinks she is the Queen or something.

  “Where’re you taking him?” asked Big Barry. He was stroking Fungus now. “It’s a horse,” he said to me, as if I might have thought he was stupid or something. AS IF. “It’s a horse, all right.”

  “To school,” I said. “We couldn’t keep him where we were keeping him, and school’s the only place we can think of.”

  “Be locked up by now,” said Freddy Jones. “But I know where Jack Sparrow keeps the key.” (Jack Sparrow is the school caretaker. We don’t know his real name, but he got this one from his pirate’s eye-patch, his strange drunken walk and telling you lots of stuff in a very serious way in a voice you can’t understand. Unfortunately he looks a lot more like that old Rolling Stone Keith Richards than like Johnny Depp.)

  We took Fungus to the school gates. The crowd was getting bigger now – it was like being the Pied Piper. With a lot of Year Sixes milling about so he couldn’t be seen from the road, Freddy Jones was over the fence in a flash and disappeared into the bushes. He was back a couple of minutes later with Jack Sparrow’s keys, and unlocked the gate. “He always goes to the pub about now,” Freddy said.

  Everyone piled through the gate, which was good because any nosy parkers spying from adjoining windows would just think, How nice to see the sweet happy children of Bottomley doing extra school activities.

  We led Fungus to the bike sheds and tethered him. He seemed happy enough. It was funny to see such a crowd of cool kids in hoodies and croptops fussing over him, though a few didn’t quite know how you’re supposed to talk to a horse. “Pretty Polly,” said one. “Sit!” said another. “Boyakasha!” said a third. But Fungus seemed to know they all liked him. Hours flew by.

  “Quick!” said Ditzy Debbie, making us all jump out of our skins and Fungus shy so I had to stroke his neck to reassure him. “Jack’s coming back!”

  Everybody scattered like in a cartoon. Me and Dinah and Big Barry found ourselves hiding behind Fungus as it was the only place left. I threw the big blanket over his head so you couldn’t see anything much of him except his sweet wizened old face and big brown eyes.

  We could hear a big burp so we knew Jack Sparrow was close. HORRORS! He stopped right outside the bike shed and leaned against the wall. Fungus stuck his head out of the open window before we could stop him.

  “‘Allo, mate,” said Jack Sparrow. “Got a light?”

  Me and Dinah stared at each other in horror, but Big Barry reached into his hoodie, pulled out a lighter and reached around Fungus’s neck to the straggly half-smoked cigarette hanging out the corner of Jack Sparrow’s mouth.

  “Thanksh,” he said and burped again. “I don’t go drinking much normally you know,” he said, half to Fungus and half to himself, “but I jusht won a packet on the horshes.”

  Fungus seemed excited by hearing this, so we held him tight and tried to pull the blanket closer round his face.

  “Nyeeaahhhmmmm,” Dinah said, obviously aiming somewhere between an agreeing noise and a horse noise. She ended it in a muffled giggle.

  “Course, money isn’t everything,” Jack went on.

  “Nawwww,” said Dinah sympathetically.

  “Want one?” Jack Sparrow said, turning to Fungus – whose head just looked like one big hoodie – and offering him a cigarette. Fungus gratefully ate it.

  “That’s a new one,” Jack said, chuckling. He burped again. So did Fungus, or that’s what it sounded like.

  We were almost in hysterics underneath. Especially when Fungus started weeing very loudly over Big Barry’s expensive trainers – though Barry wasn’t too pleased.

  “Yeech!” he shouted. “Knock it off!!” Dinah and I kicked him and clutched each other.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Jack Sparrow said. “When you got to go, you got to go.”

  “Well,” said Dinah in a deep, croaky voice. “See ya later.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, blowing smoke rings. “See you around.” And he weaved off towards his little caretaker’s house.

  We tucked Fungus in for the night and went home.

  I was determined to be first in to school so I could check out Fungus before all the other kids arrived. We’d sworn Big Barry and Freddy Jones to secrecy, but I was worried the others might let the cat out of the bag. Or the pony out of the shed. It was the first day I’ve ever looked forward to going to school, which goes to show how Very Extremely wrong you can be.

  When I got there, Jack Sparrow was waving his arms insanely in front of the bike shed, teachers were scurrying about in all directions and an alarmed Hedake was flying across the playground.

  I summed it all up in a nanosecond. Jack had obviously woken up remembering that there was something funny in the bike shed. “Stay away!” he was yelling. “We have an intruder. Call the police!”

  Frightened that Fungus would be shot by an anti-terrorist crack squad, I didn’t stop to think. “It’s not a burglar,” I bellowed. “It’s a horse.”

  Mrs Hedake stopped in mid flight. “A HORSE? In the bike shed?”

  A strange silence fell like a strange silent blanket. Seconds passed, or maybe hours.

  Then a breeze of giggles behind me grew into a gale of laughter, because just at that very minute Fungus poked his little furry face out of the bike shed window and whinnied, happy to see me.

  “I can explain everything,” I said.

  Well, it didn’t matter how much me and Dinah and Chloe and Freddy Jones and all begged and pleaded with Mrs Hedake. She was, in the manner of head teachers all over the world, oddly un-keen to have a pony in the playground.

  “But he would teach us all about animals, which is good for the environment.”

  “And carrots and oats and hay and how they grow, which a lot of kids don’t know about.”

  “And farriers and dandy brushes
…” (Hoping to blind her with science.)

  “And he could give the little kids rides.”

  “And teach us all Respect.”

  “And think what a star attraction he would be at the school fair. He would raise loads of money.”

  “And he would be very important for the National Curriculum. Our SATs results would improve.”

  The money and the National Curriculum and the SATs results were what Granny Clump would call our Trump Cards. But unfortunately, although I could see a tremor of emotion whisk across Headake’s mug at these Key Words, which usually make teachers kick up their heels for joy and think you are a highly intelligent and responsible student who will Go Far, she remained firm.

  It was absolutely Out Of The Question, she said, as though each word had a capital letter. Completely Inappropriate, she said, Health and Safety Issues, she said. And some more teachery stuff that I couldn’t listen to because my heart was in my boots and all I wanted was to take Fungus with me to a desert Island and frisk in the foam with him all my life.

  But worse was to come.

  Old Hedake sent everyone to classes and took me to her office.

  “I’ve been trying to contact your parents, Trixie, without any luck,” she said.

  I breathed out. The last people I wanted involved in this were Mum and Dad …

  But then Hedake continued, “I’m afraid that if you can’t find an alternative home for, er, Fungus, I may have to call Meadowlarks, who, er, specialise in, um, horse removals …”

  “Meadowlarks?” I asked. “Where will they take him?”

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ll find a nice place for him to live, a nice meadow somewhere, probably with, er, larks singing,” she said. But she had a distinctly shifty look in her eye.

  “But it’s the gymkhana tomorrow!” I cried. “It’s Fungus’s only chance! Surely he could stay one more night!”

  “Trixie, I know it’s hard, but your pony is obviously quite incapable of winning anything at a gymkhana. I’m afraid he really is only good for one thing. And that is … retirement. I’m afraid Meadowlarks is the only solution.”