How To Get What You Want by Peony Pinker

by Jenny Alexander

  Contents

  Chapter 1 The Jack Russell and the Pit Bulls

  Chapter 2 The saviour of the sick and the accidental agony aunt

  Chapter 3 Better in the morning… worse than ever in the afternoon

  Chapter 4 Homeward Bound and Dad’s first ‘Dear Daphne’

  Chapter 5 Choc-chip cookies and shoe-box beans

  Chapter 6 The Day of the Triffids and Mr Kaminski’s very green greenhouse

  Chapter 7 How to get what you want and Mum’s famous gooseberry crumble

  Chapter 8 Mr Plant-poisoner Pryce and the pencil-tin

  Chapter 9 Ditching Daphne and don’t talk about the dog

  Chapter 10 Poor Lollie and Becky’s brainwave

  Chapter 11 Two-faced tricksters and sugar sandwiches

  Chapter 12 The East Lane Emporium and desperate measures

  Chapter 13 Feeling stupid and falling apart

  Chapter 14 Cornish honeycomb ice-cream and a red rag to a bull

  Chapter 15 Way to go, Dad, and thank you, Annabel!

  Chapter 16 A cowardy custard and a cunning plan

  Chapter 17 Dad in the shed, not hiding from the dog, and the return of the Pekinese

  Chapter 1

  The Jack Russell and the Pit Bulls

  You know when something bad keeps happening such as, for example, your big sister, Primrose, brings her horrible new best friend home every single day after school?

  And you’ve got no reason to suppose that today will be any different but you just can’t help hoping that, by some kind of magic, it might be?

  And then you get home and there they are – Primrose rummaging in the cupboards for something to eat and Bianca, sitting on the kitchen table swinging her feet… and your heart sinks into your boots.

  Well, that’s what happened to me the day I decided enough was enough.

  ‘Look who’s here,’ said Bianca, as soon as I walked in the door. Primrose didn’t bother to look. She went on rummaging. I felt as welcome as a slug in a welly.

  I was hungry myself but I couldn’t get a snack or Bianca would call me Peony Podge and say I looked like a walrus. I saw a walrus on David Attenborough the other night and it looked like a big bag of blubber.

  Bianca swung her stick-thin legs. Her school skirt was nearly up to her knickers. I don’t know how she gets away with it. I don’t know how she gets away with wearing so much make-up either, or that red stripe in her hair. She pulled her pony-tail tighter.

  ‘What are you staring at, Pea-brain?’ she snapped. She’s got lots of names for me and none of them are nice.

  I went upstairs. The kitchen takes up the whole of the ground floor of our house, and the sitting room takes up the whole of the floor above. Then there’s my bedroom and Primrose’s above that and finally Mum and Dad’s bedroom and his study in the attic. All the houses in Harbour Row are very tall and thin.

  I chucked my bag in the nearest armchair, grabbed the remote and flung myself down on the settee. With any luck, Primrose and Bianca would stay downstairs. They couldn’t go out because Primrose was supposed to be looking after me until Mum or Dad got home from work.

  Five measly minutes, that’s all I got, and then they came crashing up the stairs.

  ‘Bye-bye, Peony Pudding!’

  Bianca yanked the cushion out from behind my back.

  ‘We’re going to play Disco Divaz.’

  Primrose snatched the remote and switched on the PlayStation.

  ‘But I’m watching the Dog Whisperer.’

  ‘Tough,’ said Primrose. ‘There’s two of us and only one of you.’

  It obviously wasn’t fair because Bianca didn’t live in our house so she shouldn’t count, but when I said so before it just made things fifty billion times worse. No exaggeration.

  I went upstairs. Primrose’s bedroom door was shut. I walked into my own room, closed the door and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Boom badda boom badda boom badda boom badda boom… The backing track kicked in and then Primrose and Bianca started screeching into their microphones like a couple of strangled cats in the room below.

  Surely Primrose couldn’t seriously think they had any chance of becoming pop stars? But you never knew. Since she had started hanging out with Bianca she hadn’t just turned nasty – she had turned stupid too.

  I tried to block out the noise by reading my new library book, Incredible Dogs. It was full of true stories about, well, incredible dogs. True Story Number One was called ‘George, a Little Hero with a Great Big Heart’. It was about this nine-year-old Jack Russell terrier who was out for a walk with some children when a pair of Pit Bulls suddenly attacked them.

  The Pit Bulls went for the smallest child, who was only four, and they would have killed him if George hadn’t dived in to defend him. The Pit Bulls let go of the child and turned on George instead. He didn’t have a chance. But through his incredible courage he saved the children, even though it cost him his life. The people in the town where he lived put up a statue of George to honour him and he was awarded the highest medal an animal can get for bravery.

  I’ve always thought that if I was a dog I would be a Jack Russell terrier. ‘Bold and friendly’, it says they are in The Bumper Book of Dogs. Also ‘intelligent and brave’. That might sound big-headed but I’m obviously not going to choose a breed that’s supposed to be ‘wimpy and dim’! Mentioning no names, in case you’ve got one.

  Boom badda boom badda boom badda boom badda boom… The noise was so loud it was making the house shake. Three pencils rattled across my desk and threw themselves on the floor in despair. I didn’t want to spoil the rest of the stories by trying to read them with bad singing battering my eardrums.

  Picking up the pencils gave me an idea. I made a poster that said:

  Big sister, age 15. Free to good home.

  Underneath, I did a picture of Primrose.

  When I had finished I sat back to admire it. Then I crossed out ‘good home’ and wrote ‘anyone who will have her’ instead. It felt good imagining someone coming to fetch her and take her away. But the good feeling didn’t last because just then, Primrose and Bianca moved on from raps to power ballads.

  No-one should have to hear my big sister Primrose and her horrible new best friend sing power ballads. I put my hands over my ears. The only way out of the house was back down through the sitting room. I didn’t want to go past them again, but I couldn’t stand it. I was in agony! Seriously, the police could use Primrose and Bianca to force confessions out of people. ‘Own up, or they do Endless Love…’

  I crept down the stairs and tried to slip past without them noticing but they stopped singing and pressed Pause. They glared at me.

  ‘Stop spying on us, Pea-brain,’ said Bianca.

  ‘I’m not spying on you. I’m not even interested in you!’

  ‘Ooh!’ They raised their eyebrows at each other. They mimicked me. ‘I’m-not-even-interested!’

  Then they laughed and Bianca said, ‘I don’t like you hanging around us all the time, and Primrose doesn’t like it either.’

  As if it was possible to avoid them in number 13, Harbour Row.

  ‘Neither does Annabel!’ added Primrose.

  They both snorted with laughter. There was nobody except us three in the room. I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Who’s Annabel?’

  ‘That’s for us to know and you to find out,’ said Bianca. ‘Now go away and leave us in peace.’

  Peace! That was rich. I trudged on down to the kitchen. The noise started up again. The back door was blocked by a half-dead cheese-plant and anyway there wasn’t anything out that way except the yard. The gard
en of our house got sold off years ago, before we even moved here. Now Mr Kaminski next door’s got a big L-shaped garden he never uses and we’ve got the bit by the back door that hardly gets any sunshine.

  I went out the front door, pulled it shut behind me and sat down on the top step in the sun. I found myself thinking about the story of George and I wondered, could I be as gutsy as him? If I was George, then my Pit Bulls would be Bianca and Primrose. They were much bigger than me, they were meaner, and also it was two against one.

  The problem was, I had no more chance against Primrose and Bianca than George had against the Pit Bulls. You can be as brave as you like, but let’s face it, if you’re small you won’t win on your own.

  I would never normally tell tales – ask anyone. I didn’t tell the day Primrose bunked off school or the time I saw her and Bianca smoking at the beach. But enough was enough. Something had to be done.

  Chapter 2

  The saviour of the sick and the accidental agony aunt

  ‘Hello, Peony!’

  Mum didn’t come straight up but hung her bag on the railing and started hauling the wheelbarrow out from the storage space under the front steps. I didn’t answer, so then she had to look at me properly.

  ‘Everything all right?’ she asked. But before I had a chance to answer, she said, ‘I won’t be two ticks,’ and trundled the wheelbarrow back up the hill. I hate it when she does that.

  The houses in this part of Polgotherick were built before anyone had cars, on steep zig-zag pathways that go all the way down to the harbour. You have to park on the road at the top and walk down, and if you need to bring something big from the car you have to go back up and fetch it in your wheelbarrow.

  Quite a lot more than two ticks later, Mum came back. She parked the wheelbarrow at the bottom of the steps and wiped the sweat off her forehead. There was a huge plant in it that looked like a load of outsize tulip leaves tightly crammed into a bucket. The tips of the leaves were mostly brown or missing.

  ‘Can you give me a hand with this aspidistra?’

  It was hard to get hold of the pot underneath all the leaves and when we did, it weighed a ton, so after the first few steps we had to put it down and have a rest. Mum stood on the step below, stopping the pot from toppling with her foot. It seemed like the perfect time to tell her about Primrose and Bianca. If she tried to take off in the middle of me talking, the aspidistra would be a goner.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Primrose and Bianca are being horrible to me.’

  They had turned the music down, just like they always did when Mum was about to get home. And they said I was a suck-up!

  Mum sighed.

  ‘You and Primrose have always had your ups and downs,’ she said.

  ‘This isn’t ups and downs. For one thing, there aren’t any ups any more. She never watches Neighbours with me or helps me with my homework or tells me about her day. She’s horrible all the time.’

  Mum bent down to pick up the aspidistra again but I didn’t move. She glanced up at me. I crossed my arms over my chest so she could see that I wasn’t going anywhere until she listened to me.

  ‘OK, I’ll have a word with Primrose,’ she said. ‘Now can we shift this aspidistra, please?’

  I still didn’t budge.

  ‘Tell her she can’t have Bianca round after school any more.’

  Mum’s face lit up as if a light-bulb had gone on inside her head.

  ‘Oh, I see what this is all about,’ she said. ‘You’re feeling left out. I know Primrose can be a bit full-on when she has a new best friend, but things will soon settle down.’

  She nodded towards the aspidistra as if to say, ‘Now can we move it?’ But I looked straight past her at the sparkling sea and the boats bobbing way down in the harbour. They looked like toy boats in a big blue bath.

  Mum took a deep breath. It was the one that means, ‘I’m not annoyed right now but I will be very soon.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell Primrose that she can’t have her friends over after school, Peony. You wouldn’t like it if I said you couldn’t have your friends over, would you?’

  ‘My friends are nice,’ I said. ‘They aren’t mean and nasty like Bianca.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve got such a bee in your bonnet about Bianca,’ said Mum. ‘She seems fine to me and she’s certainly cheered Primrose up.’

  I couldn’t argue with that. Before Bianca came along, Primrose had been in a moochy mood for nearly a month because her boyfriend Marcus had dumped her. She holed herself up in her room every day after school and only came down for supper, when she just sat there pushing her food around the plate as if it was a scientific specimen that had turned out to be not very interesting.

  Mum and Dad were really worried. I was sure one of the reasons they both liked Bianca was that they were grateful to her for getting Primrose out of her mega-mooch.

  Mum bent down and picked up her side of the pot in a that’s-enough-now kind of way. We wrestled the aspidistra up the last few steps and put it down just inside the door.

  ‘Hmm… where are we going to put it?’ she said, scratching her head.

  The big window at the front was already crammed with sick plants she had brought home from the Green Fingers Garden Centre because she couldn’t bear to throw them away when her boss told her to. The windows and the glass door at the back were full of plants too. All they needed was a bit of TLC, she said. That’s tender loving care. Well, I was thinking, what about some TLC for me?

  We heard Primrose and Bianca coming down the stairs. They came into the kitchen wearing bikini tops and shorts, with beach towels under their arms. Primrose had never bothered about the beach before, but she and Bianca had started going down there most days recently. They probably thought they were so good looking they might get spotted by a talent scout or something.

  ‘Hello, Mrs P,’ Bianca said, all sweetness and light. ‘Would you like me and Primrose to move that plant out to the yard for you before we go to the beach?’

  ‘No, that’s OK, Bianca,’ said Mum. ‘I haven’t really decided where I’m going to put it yet and anyway, Peony’s here so she can give me a hand.’

  Primrose and Bianca sauntered off down to the beach. I wished I had special powers so I could zap them with hate-rays and send them rolling down the zig-zag paths all the way to the sea. Crash, splash, gurgle – gone!

  ‘Let’s have a cup of tea while we’re thinking about it,’ said Mum. I wished she had special powers so she could read my thoughts. If she could see that what I was thinking she might take a bit more notice.

  As the kettle was reaching the boil, Dad got home. He crashed straight into the aspidistra.

  ‘For crying out loud, Jan!’ he grumbled, squeezing past. He put his laptop down on the table and flopped down on the nearest chair. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see he was having a difficult day.

  ‘You won’t believe what Ed wants me to do now.’

  ‘Table tennis?’ asked Mum. ‘Tiddly-winks?’

  Dad’s a sports reporter on the Three Towns Gazette. Ed is his editor. I always thought it was short for Edward but come to think of it, maybe it’s actually short for ‘editor’.

  ‘Daphne’s gone missing and that means we haven’t got an agony aunt, so Ed wants me to take over until he’s managed to track her down.’

  ‘You!’ gasped Mum. ‘An agony aunt?’

  ‘Well, exactly,’ said Dad. ‘He says I haven’t got much work now the football season’s over so I can do it in my spare time. Which is hardly the point. I mean, just look at these.’

  He unzipped the front of his laptop case, took out a bundle of letters and emails and slapped them down on the table.

  ‘How am I supposed to know what to say to Worried of Trethornden, who thinks the reason her husband left her is because she’s got wobbly thighs? I haven’t even seen her thighs!’

  Mum shook her head. ‘I really don’t think you should agree to do this,’ she said. ‘Tell Ed you
can’t.’

  ‘That’s what I did. “I can’t do it,” I said. But he said, “Yes you can, and you’re going to, unless you want to lose that cushy sports reporting job.” He reckons everyone else in the office is too busy.’

  Dad sifted through the letters, reading bits out.

  ‘“Dear Daphne, I’m scared of doorknobs… Dear Daphne, Next door’s cat treats my garden like a toilet… Dear Daphne…”’ He stopped reading. ‘I’m Daphne,’ he groaned, ‘and these people think they’ve got problems!’

  Now normally I wouldn’t have even tried to talk to Dad about stuff like Primrose being horrible but under the circumstances, with him suddenly being an agony aunt and all, I thought it might be worth a try.

  ‘Dad,’ I said. ‘Primrose is being really horrible to me, not just normal horrible. And it’s all the time too, not just when she’s in a mood.’

  He blinked as if I had asked him to grow wings and have a fly around.

  ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, give me some advice,’ I said. ‘After all, you are an agony aunt, and that’s what agony aunts are supposed to do.’

  Dad looked at Mum. She shrugged.

  ‘I think Peony’s just feeling a bit left out because Primrose is spending so much time with Bianca,’ she said. ‘We all know how full-on Primrose can be when she’s got a new friend. It’ll soon settle down.’

  ‘There you are then,’ said Dad. ‘It’ll soon settle down. No need to get your knickers in a knot.’

  So that was that. Anyone would think a saviour of the sick – even if it’s just sick plants – and an agony aunt – even an accidental one like Dad – could come up with something a bit more caring than ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’

  Mum poured out the tea and opened a new packet of custard creams. Trying not to think about that walrus on David Attenborough, I took two and went upstairs to watch Neighbours.

  If you aren’t naturally a snitch it can be tough when you work yourself up to tell on your big sister and nobody takes it seriously.

  Chapter 3