by Ros Asquith
“Well, she’ll obviously never wear those,” said Dinah as we shoved it all into a cardboard box.
I felt rubbish about taking the stuff, even if it was from Dreary Dora. “Isn’t this stealing?” I asked Dinah.
“Nah. If it’s a member of your own family, it’s um, borrowing,” said Dinah, looking ever so slightly worried. “No, let’s call it recycling.” She grinned.
It all took longer than we thought so, armed with our loot and worried by the thought of Chloe having to hold back the hordes of eager pet owners, we ran towards the park.
“Maybe no one will turn up and we can just return all Dora’s stuff,” I said, half hoping it would be true.
It was not. We heard the animals long before we saw them. And the closer we got, the louder the hullaballoo became. There was barking, squeaking, clucking, neighing, snorting and something that sounded very like trumpeting.
“Ohmigod, I hope nobody’s brought an elephant,” I said.
“We should have put a maximum size limit,” said Dinah. “And what’s that roaring sound?”
We turned into the park really scared about what we might see. Maybe some joker from the zoo had bought a coach load of tigers. In fact, there were more animals in the park than even I had expected. Loads of kids had brought their pets along and their pets were just thrilled to pieces to have so many chums to play with.
The roaring turned out to be a dog who looked like a Rottweiler crossed with a rhino. “Don’ be scared, ov ’er,” said a small spiky boy in clothes so much too big for him that he did look scarily as if parts of him had been eaten. “Daisy’s really friendly. Loves kids.”
“For a snack? Or her main meal?” said Dinah.
DOGS MUST BE KEPT ON LEADS, THIS IS A CHILDRENS PLAY AREA said a big sign, but no one paid any attention to it. I could see why. After all, if three goats, a cow (yes, a cow) two horses and four pigs could wander about, then why not let the dogs off the lead too?
Mrs Chang’s daughter Mae was there with a bird cage, but the birds in it were either very exotically tiny or had flown away. Burly Bert‘s son Shane was there with a tortoise. I barely had time to wonder if it was Einstein (do tortoises have teeth?) because Chloe was running towards us, scarlet with indignation.
“Where’ve you been? You never said the whole TOWN would turn up,” she fumed, as though it was all my fault. Which I s’pose it was.
Dinah sprang into action, threw the box full of Dora’s loot to the ground and jumped up on a nearby park bench. “Welcome to the Great Genius Animal Contest!” she yelled. How wonderful to see so many of you here! May I introduce the judges! Trixie Tempest, well-known animal lover and fighter for Furry Rights, Chloe Caution, who has a pet ant, and myself, Dinah Dare-deVille, horsewoman and animal lover. We are determined to show the world that animals are people too.”
This was met with a chorus of jeers and cheers, and an old bloke with two cows (who didn’t seem fazed that all the other entrants were either children or animals about a millionth the size of his) muttered, “People are animals, that’s for sure.”
Dinah ploughed on, asking the contestants to form an orderly queue. “We’ll do it in alphabetical order,” she said.
“I’ll be first then,” said a long thin boy with a long thin rabbit.
“Rabbits begin with R, don’t they?” said Dinah, puzzled.
The boy blushed. ”Her name’s Abba.”
“No, no, we have to do it by species. We don’t know all the animals’ names, you see,” she added kindly because the boy looked on the verge of tears.
The contest was not exactly a huge success.
I was hoping someone would produce an aardvark, as I was thinking it would be Very Extremely interesting to meet one in real life. Or better still, an ape doing sign language. But the first contestant was an ant.
Its owner, a small girl dressed in what looked exactly like a sack, claimed it could tell the time.
“Whassa time?” she bellowed at it. The ant nibbled a leaf. “See?” shouted Small Sack. “’E’s nibbled three bites an’ it’s three o’clock.”
The ant was booed off and the Sack stumbled away cursing, saying she had bought it up from an egg and this was all the thanks she got.
Chloe was pulling at my sleeve. “Anty can walk the tightrope,” she whispered.
‘“It’s not about tricks,” I reminded her. “It’s about IQ.”
“You have to be very clever to walk a tightrope,” said Chloe.
“Look, you’re a judge. You can’t enter as well.”
Chloe looked hurt, but I stood firm.
Next was a badger, who was hauled on to the bandstand by a weasely boy of about fifteen. I thought keeping badgers as pets was illegal, and the badger obviously agreed as it immediately made a run for freedom. But it was headed the wrong way! I heard a horrible squealing of tyres and I was all for calling off the whole show, but Dinah promised me she could see badgerkins skipping happily down the High Street with his ‘owner’ in hot pursuit. There was a car swerved on to the pavement, but nobody appeared to be hurt. So we ploughed on.
The next category was cats. We zipped through them really fast because all they did was sit about yawning. Until we came to Fenella, a Persian fluff ball who was a whizz at counting according to her owner, a small girl in a red velvet dress and patent leather shoes, who obviously thought this was a party.
The little girl held up one finger and the cat said, “miaou” (or however you spell cat words).
Then she held up two fingers and the cat said, “Miaou, miaou.”
Then she held up five fingers and the cat said, “Miaou, miaou, miaou, miaou…” and then there was a long pause. I swear it, even the goats and pigs shut up.
Then…“Miaou.”
The silence turned into a huge cheer.
“She’s cheating!” shouted a boy with a very sad-looking ginger cat. “She’s pinchin’ it!” And she was.
Chloe whispered we should report her to the RSPCA but Fenella looked so fat and happy I let it go.
I bet you’d like to know what the cows did, but unfortunately we never found out. Well, there was one thing they did a lot of, which after a bit almost everyone at the contest had obviously trodden in, but we didn’t think that could be their claim to a high IQ.
Just as the red velvet girl was lisping, “Where’th my prithe?” a distinctly different noise mingled with the mooing, snorting, barking and caterwauling. It was the outraged shouting of four ginormous police officers and one very angry park keeper, all of whom were walking Very Extremely fast towards us. The park keeper’s arms were waving about like an octopus in a gale.
“This is a public park! Can’t you see the notice?! All dogs to be kept on leads! Remove these animals immediately! Who’s in charge here?”
“Doesn’t say you can’t bring in a cow,” said the old bloke, but he was the only one who stayed around to talk. There was a flurry of paws, claws, hooves, tails, fur and beaks, and suddenly it was just us and some chicken feathers.
“Run!” shouted Dinah.
And we did.
It wasn’t till we got back to mine that we realised we’d left Dora’s box of stuff in the park.
“We can’t go back,” said Chloe. “They’ll arrest us. What a disaster.” For once Chloe’s gloom suited the occasion. Nobody said anything for a bit.
“Sorry, Trix,” Dinah said, “but I don’t think we really proved that Bottomley’s full of animal brainiacs just waiting for the chance to be discovered. We found out how stupid a lot of their owners are, but we could have worked that out without going to all this trouble, or me getting it in the neck from my boring sister tomorrow either.”
“OK, OK,” I said grumpily. “But it only proves their owners don’t understand them, getting them to do all those daft tricks. It’s not the animals’ fault.”
“Well, what could the cow have done that was clever?” Dinah demanded to know.
“Wear a nappy,” Chloe murmured. “L
earn to drive a milk float.”
But we didn’t have time to blame each other. The next Big Stress was nearly upon us. Dinah’s meeting with the Red Dragon, disguised as the evil animal fur dealer.
We borrowed my mum’s best black suit and Dinah’s mum’s patent leather high heels. Dinah’s mum collects shoes, so we were pretty sure she wouldn’t miss a pair for one day.
“And there’s a Very Extremely grand pair of designer shades that she keeps in her holiday drawer,” said Dinah.
I found a massive wide-brimmed black hat that my dad sometimes wears to football matches, when he wants to make himself look like an Italian football manager. People standing behind him tend not to find this idea so much fun.
Once she had all this clobber on, Dinah looked absolutely amazing. About thirty-five. And if she was mainly going to be a mysterious figure in the shadows, the whole scary scam looked as if it just might work.
“You’ll have to wear some lippy too. In case you can’t stop her getting up close.” I said.
We fixed it for Jolene and her Big Dad to be waiting at the warehouse on Monday. I borrowed my dad’s video camera and my mum’s digital camera. We were as ready as we could be. But even though we were going to have Jolene and Melchior with us, I was scared stiff of the Red Dragon. And I wasn’t much looking forward to parents’ evening either. My magazine had turned out OK. I was quite proud of it in fact, but I hadn’t taught a single puppy to read a single word and I hadn’t found any animal geniuses. My head was a jumble of puppies and red giants.
That night, to get myself to sleep, I tried rehearsing my speech for the parents’ evening and I finally drifted off with Bonzo snoring gently in my ear.
“Oh, Bonzo,” I remember muttering. “How much longer will I hear your sweet soft snore?”
The Big Day.
We spent all day at school fixing up the display for parents’ evening. All the projects were laid out on two big trestle tables. Ours looked OK, with my magazine, which was ten whole pages in full colour, Dinah’s Animal Rights posters with lots of heartbreaking stuff about battery chickens, and Chloe’s very careful Insects-of-Bottomley survey. With a stroke of Chloe-like genius, she had attached it to the paws of a very cute teddy bear, so it looked like he was reading it.
“I wanted to do it being read by an ant, since they are going to take over the world and there are far more of them in Bottomley than people,” she explained to Warty-Beak. “But people think teddies are cute, so I am trying to make the project appealing to the masses.”
Warty scratched his baldy head. It is rare that he is lost for words, but Chloe’s giant brain quite often has that effect on adults.
Dennis and Sumil had expanded their Lego adventure playground by adding some of the attractions of the town of Bottomley to it. They’d included Chang’s Chippy, a pool table and a swimming pool which they’d filled with real water. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find any Lego swimming figures, so it was full of astronauts. But it looked great. It was the most work I’d ever seen them do and only goes to prove that if you can get kids interested they will work hard.
We raced for the loos the moment the bell rang and stuffed Dinah into Mum’s suit. Clutching the cameras, we galloped over the road to the old warehouse.
As we turned the corner of Mink Street, I could swear my trainers screeched like racing-car tyres. We stopped dead. An enormous man was barring the way in.
The Dragon’s got here first with her minders, I thought. My insides turned to jelly.
Chloe squeaked a tragic little squeak as though a great boot had squashed her flat.
But then the big man smiled. “Hi, girls, you must be Jolene’s friends. I’m her dad, Melchior,” he said, holding his has hand out to shake ours. “I thought it might be an idea to bring some back-up,” he added, pointing to a small wiry mongrel with pointy ears which he had on a lead.
I recognised the dog from the photo Jolene had shown us. I still didn’t think it looked as if it would be all that good in a fight, but it was very pleased to see us.
“He’s called George,” Melchior explained. “Say hello, George.” George sprang up on his back legs and waved his front paws in the air. We all clapped.
“Time’s flying,” Jolene said, scurrying up to join us. “Hadn’t we better get on with it?”
Dinah waited on the corner of the street. We had to be sure Lady Goodchild arrived alone.
Me and Chloe and Jolene and Melchior tiptoed inside. It was dim and scary. All the old stuff stored in there threw strange shadows, but there was enough light for the video camera to get a picture. We hid ourselves behind some boxes while Dinah stood just inside the door, ready to back into the shadowy interior. She was shaking. I wondered what we had let ourselves in for.
We waited for ten minutes, and every one of those minutes seemed like a day. You know how it is, with time. When you are bored in a maths lesson it mopes along like a snail with the flu, and when you’re having the time of your life it’s as whizzy as a greyhound. When you are Very Extremely anxious it goes slowest of all.
Finally we heard a purposeful click clack of high heels and there stood the Red Dragon, silhouetted in the doorway, looking even taller and wider and scarier than I remembered.
“Mrs Yen?” she called.
“Lady Goodchild?” came a voice from the shadows. Dinah sounded perfect. What a star.
“That’s correct,” Lady Goodchild said. “Shall we talk?”
“Forgive me staying concealed,” Dinah said. “It’s better for both of us.”
“How does she do know what to say?” I whispered to Chloe.
“I wrote her a script,” she whispered back. “People in books go on at each other like this all the time.”
“Ssssh,” hissed Jolene, her hand over the microphone on the video camera. “It’ll sound like a fix if you keep talking like that.”
“I understand,” Lady Goodchild was saying to the shadowy Dinah. “So what’s your proposition?”
Dinah told her she knew a major supplier of “felines and canines”. I was well impressed. She meant cats and dogs.
Lady Goodchild seemed Very Extremely interested. I was surprised she was talking so loud. I knew it would record really well.
“So you have a supply of canines and felines here in Bottomley? Ready to collect?”
“Yes and I can supply a great deal more.”
“Where are you storing them?”
“Mandleton,” Dinah said. “A secure address. Forgive me if I do not share it with you until the arrangements are complete.”
“And your price?” smiled Lady G. “Competitive, I assume?”
“Naturally,” Dinah said. “There’s no profit in it if you pamper the animals.”
“You’ve come alone, of course?” said Lady Goodchild, peering round. I felt as if her horrible green eyes were boring through the boxes we were hiding behind.
“Of course,” said Dinah.
“That was careless…” Lady G paused, then called out: “Gentlemen!” Figures sprouted from the darkness as if by magic.
“MELCHIOR!” I screamed.
“Er, there’s rather a lot of them,” protested Melchior, not moving. “And I hate to say this, but they look like cops to me.”
Me and Chloe tried to run out between their legs but they grabbed us. There was a sickening crunch. Help? Was it Chloe’s neck snapping? Had my nightmare come true? No. Chloe had dropped Mum’s camera under the cop’s enormous feet.
“Go easy, Robbie,” Melchior said. “They’re only a bunch of kids.”
“Oh hello, Melchior,” the leading policeman said. “Didn’t recognise you without a pair of scissors in your hand.”
“You coming in to the salon soon? I still don’t think that hairstyle goes with your helmet.”
“You’re probably right. Let’s try something different next time.”
“I hate to interrupt this,” Lady Goodchild said, “but would you mind getting on with arresting that woman
…” (pointing to the elusive black-clad figure of Dinah) “…who’s obviously an unscrupulous animal-smuggler?”
“Not exactly, Robbie,” Melchior said to the policeman. “She goes to the same school as my daughter Jolene.”
Dinah stopped skulking in the shadows and came out, pulling off the shades and hat, revealing that the lippy had smudged across her face, making her look like a circus clown. Kicking off her mum’s high heels, she certainly didn’t look like an unscrupulous animal-smuggler – more like somebody who’d turned up late and rather cross for a bad school play rehearsal.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Dinah said defiantly to the policeman. “It’s HER you want!” (pointing at the Red Dragon). “She murders animals for experiments and sells them for coats when she’s finished with them.”
“That’s right!” I squeaked, trying to wriggle free of a policeman’s grip on my shoulder. “She’s an Animal Assassin! A Puppy Murderer!”
Lady Goodchild took a long look at me. I was trembling in my trainers.
She looked. And looked. And then smiled.
“I know who you are too,” she said to me quietly. “You’re the little girl who didn’t want to sell her puppies.”
Something had happened to Lady Goodchild. She wasn’t looking angry or mocking or even horrible any more. She looked kind. Her eyes twinkled. She turned to the policeman. “PC Roberts, I owe you an apology. Well, perhaps we all do. There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding.”
Lady G gave Dinah a funny, sideways look. It seemed a little bit cross, but a little bit impressed too. “I’m sure we’ll all be seeing you on TV soon, my dear,” she said. “That was a remarkable performance.”