by Holly Webb
“Our lovely Jack Russell died three months ago,” the lady was explaining. “He was twelve, so we should have expected it, I suppose. But it was still a shock. We weren’t thinking of getting another dog, not for a while, anyway. But then we saw Posy in the paper…”
“She is lovely,” Lucy agreed, smiling at Emily and Maya dithering by the hooks with the leads on, as though she could tell what they were trying to do. “Here’s her pen, look.”
Luckily Posy was on her best behaviour. She looked angelic, with her little brown ears pricked up excitedly, and her tail blurry with wagging. Even the boy, who’d been completely silent until now, crouched down and made a fuss of her, telling her how beautiful she was.
Emily and Maya exchanged relieved, triumphant looks, and headed off to walk the dogs.
“I just wish there were loads of nice families like that,” Emily sighed, as they were dragged off towards the fields.
“It’s going to look amazing,” Emily said admiringly, watching her mum smooth the green fondant icing over the huge cake. They’d made lots of cakes this week, and put them in the freezer ready for the party the next day, but this one was special.
Emily’s mum had said that as it was the shelter’s tenth birthday party, as well as a fundraiser, they really ought to have a special celebration cake. Emily had looked at her hopefully – her mum was brilliant at cakes. She made the best birthday cakes ever. Emily’s last one had been a glittery ice rink with tiny icing people skating on it, because they’d taken her friends skating as a birthday treat.
“I don’t suppose we could make one?” Emily had asked hopefully.
“Well, there is some of that special butter from the farm down the road left,” her mum had pointed out. She was trying to sound as though she needed to be persuaded, but Emily knew she loved making cool cakes.
Quite a few people from school had bought tickets for the party – Mrs Angel the head had let the girls talk about it in assembly, and then sell tickets at lunch break the next day. So they had some money already to buy the things they needed – decorations, and the rosettes for the dog show, and most importantly, the ingredients for the party food. They’d made sure to put on all the posters that the food would be from local farms, and it was all organic, and animal-friendly, which meant that they had to search carefully for the best places to buy it. One of the farm shops had a bakery too, and were going to deliver twenty loaves of sliced bread to Maya’s house the next morning – she had the biggest kitchen, and it was going to be turned into a sandwich production line.
“I think I’m going to try and keep on buying from that farm shop,” Emily’s mum said now, as she stood back and looked at the green cake. “I know it’s more expensive, but the eggs were amazing. The cakes have turned out really well. And it’s so good to think about the animals being really well looked after.”
“Especially when you see those poor chickens at the shelter,” Emily said, shuddering. “With all their feathers pecked out.”
Her mum looked down at the cake. “Chickens! I wasn’t going to put any chickens on it, do you think it matters? I’ve only made cats and dogs, and the guinea pigs.”
“They’re the best bit,” Emily said, peeping into the ice cream tub where her mum had put the little icing models. “They’re so cute. Although I love it that you made Barney and Whiskers and all the others. You really are clever, Mum.”
Her mum smiled. “It was fun – and you had all the photos, so it wasn’t that difficult. It isn’t as if I was trying to make models of them standing up, that would have been much harder. Once I’ve added a few little flowers, and some bunches of grass sticking up, hopefully it’ll look like they’re all just having a rest in the field.”
“Mmmm, after they’ve all worn themselves out chasing each other,” Emily said, giggling. “Oh, wow, I’d better go. I told Mrs Everett I’d be round to walk Charlie at three.”
She hugged her mum, and let herself out of the back door, hurrying round the side of the house to the lane. She looked happily up at the wide stretch of blue sky. They’d been so lucky with the weather! She’d told the others that it always rained round her birthday and now they were in the middle of a heatwave. They needn’t have worried about making sure they had somewhere to go if it was wet. Still – if it was as hot as this tomorrow, it would probably be good to have somewhere shady to sit.
She fetched Charlie from his house, and they set off to walk back up the lane towards the woods. Emily thought it would probably be cooler there. But by the time they were passing her house, Charlie was already panting, and she was wishing she’d brought a hat, and a bottle of water.
“Shall we stop and get them?” she said to Charlie, and he flapped his tail at her wearily. “You can have a nice big bowl of water too,” she told him comfortingly. “I’ll tie you up outside the back door. There’s a good shady bit there.”
Emily hurried into the house, and filled up an old plastic bowl with water, admiring the cake again as she went past. If she was quick, maybe she could help Mum put the cats and dogs on it later – Charlie wasn’t going to want a really long walk in this heat.
By the sounds coming from upstairs, Mum was trying to get Sukie to have an afternoon nap, and it wasn’t going very well. Toby and James were out in the garden somewhere – probably up the apple tree. She took the bowl of water outside, and Charlie started to gulp it down greedily. “I’ll be back in a minute. I’ve just got to find my hat,” she said, patting him.
Eventually Emily ran the hat down under her bed, covered in dust, and she dashed back down the stairs, hoping that Charlie hadn’t got too impatient waiting, and started chewing on his lead or anything like that.
She could hear Toby and James from halfway down the stairs. They were back in the kitchen now, and they were excited about something. Toby was doing that crazy laugh that made Mum really worry whenever she heard it. Emily sped up, but just as she came in the kitchen door, she saw Charlie dance into the kitchen, with his lead flapping loose.
“Why did you untie him?” she yelled crossly. “You should just have left him alone!” Then she gasped. Charlie had spotted the cake, and she was too far away to stop him. He jumped up at the table, his front paws actually in the cake, and turned his head sideways to wolf as much of it as he possibly could. “Get him down!” she wailed. But it was too late. The cake was ruined, and she could hear Mum coming down the stairs.
Quickly, Emily grabbed Charlie’s collar, and hurried him outside, tying him to the fence. Then she went back into the kitchen, where her mum was staring at the cake, and James and Toby, obviously thinking that they had eaten it. For a minute, Emily was tempted to blame her brothers too. If she told Mum it was Charlie, it was just going to make her even more certain that they couldn’t have a dog…
Emily sighed. Mum wasn’t going to let them have one anyway, so it wasn’t as if it mattered. “It wasn’t them, Mum,” she said sadly. “Well, it sort of was because they let Charlie off the lead. I’d tied him up in the garden while I came back to get my hat, and a drink for us both because it was so hot. He ate the cake.”
“That lovely little spaniel?” Mum said, staring down at the gaping hole in the side of the cake.
“Mmmm. He likes cake.” Emily sniffed. “I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have brought him into the garden.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Do you think we could cut the eaten bit off?” she asked, gulping. “It was going to be so beautiful…”
“No…” Her mum shook her head. “No, I don’t think we could, Ems. Not if we’re going to serve it to people.”
Emily nodded. She wanted to scream at Toby and James about how unfair it was and how they’d ruined everything, but somehow she was just too tired. She’d been dashing around organising things, and phoning people, and emailing newspapers all week. She just couldn’t cope with anything else. What if this meant it was all going to go wrong? Emily slumped down on one of the kitchen chairs, and folded her arms on to the table.
&nbs
p; “Hey… I only meant that we’d have to make another one,” her mum said gently. “We’ll do the birthday cake, Ems, don’t cry.”
“Sorry, Ems,” Toby said, looking at her worriedly. “We’ll help.”
“Go and finish walking Charlie,” her mum told her. “Sukie isn’t going to sleep, is she? We’ll get her up and go and get the stuff we need from the farm shop instead. Then we can all make the new cake.” She hauled Emily out of the chair. “Go on. Walk that dog. He needs to work off half a cake now, as well.”
Emily raced back into the barn, looking for her mum. She’d been in there all afternoon, sorting out the teas, which had gone really well – everyone had loved the cakes, especially the new and improved unchewed birthday cake. Everyone had cheered, and they’d had to make an on-the-spot tombola to decide who got the slices with the different dogs and cats and guinea pigs.
But then there had been all the tidying up afterwards, while the girls organised the mask-making, and the games. Most of the volunteers from the shelter had been helping with the “Meet the Pets” sessions, with guinea pigs, and some of the calmer, friendlier dogs, so Emily’s mum hadn’t had a huge lot of help. Emily was sure she needed some time off.
“Mum! It’s time for the dog show. It’s going to be brilliant – you should see the costumes for the fancy dress. Do you want to go and watch it? If you tell me what to do, I can finish clearing up in here.”
Her mum smiled at her. “You can’t miss it, Ems. Anyway, I’m almost done. I was just making sure we’d put the paper plates in a recycling bag – Maya reminded me about that earlier on. I was just going to stuff it all into one to make it easier… But she came and helped – she even put all the leftover cucumber and carrot sticks in a bucket to take home. She said she was going to feed them to her worms? Does she have a worm tank, or something? I wouldn’t have thought of her having pet worms, somehow…”
“It’s a compost bin with worms in it,” Emily told her mum, helping her sort through the bag of rubbish. “She showed me. It’s quite cool, but it does smell. You know she’s super-careful about recycling everything. She’d actually quite like to have a pig, so they can feed the rest of the food scraps to it, but then they’d have to make it into sausages when it got big, and Maya says she couldn’t do it.”
“I don’t think I could, either,” her mum agreed. “That’s it – we’re done! Let’s go and watch the dog show.”
Emily and the others had got up massively early that morning, because there were so many last-minute jobs to do – including making the ring for the dog show. Izzy’s dad had lent them some sticks to bang into the ground, and some thin rope to wrap round them, so they could make a roped-off area for the dogs and owners to walk round. Lucy had quite a few big groundsheets and tarpaulins, so they’d put those down round the ring for the audience to sit on. The dog show was the last event of the day, and everyone seemed to be looking forward to it.
Emily’s mum sat down with her dad and Sukie, Toby and James, and quite a lot of bits of cake. Emily hurried over to where Izzy was sitting at the corner of the ring, taking last-minute entries. She had a box in front of her full of pound coins – the dog show had been a fab fundraising idea, and quite a few people had brought their dogs and decided to enter on the day. Poppy had made a beautiful poster with pictures for all the different classes to go next to the ring – her waggiest-tail dog looked like it was about to take off. The rosettes for the winning dogs were pinned all along the bottom of the poster, too.
Maya was standing on a box at one side of the ring – they’d decided she had the loudest voice. Lucy and Mrs Everett were sitting on either side of her, wearing sashes, which Poppy had made, that said Judge. It all looked very official.
“Welcome to our dog show. The first class will be the musical sit. Please can all dogs entering come into the ring. And if you’d like to enter, and you haven’t paid yet, please see Izzy over there!”
Poppy was sitting next to Mrs Everett with Maya’s speakers and her iPhone. They’d downloaded a children’s choir singing “How Much is that Doggy in the Window?” for the music, and then Maya’s dad had suggested an Elvis song, “Hound Dog”, as well.
“Everyone walks their dogs round the ring, and the last dog to sit when the music stops will be out,” Maya explained, trying not to laugh as the very smart-looking Red Setter at the front of the line turned round to glare at the tiny dachshund who was trying to sniff his bottom. “Music!” she whispered to Poppy.
Lucy hurried over to the other side of the ring, so that she could see better, and the dogs set off. Emily watched anxiously as the music stopped, and Lucy and Mrs Everett looked to see who would be sent out of the ring. Their big worry with the dog show was that people (and dogs) might argue if they didn’t agree with the judging. That was one reason Emily hadn’t wanted to judge the different events themselves. She reckoned people were more likely to argue with ten-year-olds. Mrs Everett could do a very headmistressy glare, and Lucy had a professional, don’t-argue-I’m-a-judge face on, much stricter than she usually looked.
Luckily, the first dog’s owner couldn’t really disagree, since it was the dachshund, and he refused to sit down at all. “Never mind,” his owner whispered to Emily as she hurried out of the ring. “You should see his costume for the fancy dress!”
In the end the smart Red Setter won – it was pretty impressive, actually, Emily thought, for a dog with such a lot of leg to sit down so quickly. She sighed. All the dogs’ owners looked so proud of them, and there were lots who were younger than her. The Red Setter belonged to a boy in the year below her at school, who was delightedly fixing the red rosette on to the big dog’s collar.
If only Charlie hadn’t eaten the cake – this would have been such a good way to persuade Mum and Dad that they could have a dog. She smiled sadly as all the dogs lined up for the waggiest-tail competition, but then Izzy nudged her. “You’re entering the next class, you’d better get ready!”
“What?” Emily stared at her.
“The sausage-catching! Mrs Everett organised it. She’s got one of her friends who does dog-training classes to be a judge instead, so you and Charlie can enter without anyone saying it isn’t fair. It’s that lady over there, she’s been looking after Charlie. Look! And hurry up, Maya’s announcing the waggiest tail already!”
Emily turned to see Mrs Everett handing over her sash to another lady, who was beckoning her to take Charlie’s lead.
“Good luck, Emily!” Mrs Everett said, laughing. “Not that I think you need it. Charlie’s a natural. Although he’d be even better if it was cake, of course…”
Emily went pink. She’d told Mrs Everett what had happened – she’d had to, in case Charlie had made himself sick with too much cake. Luckily Lucy had opened the coolbox with the sausages, and Charlie yapped at her. He knew exactly what was happening, even if she didn’t.
The dogs lined up, sitting next to their owners at the far end of the ring, and Lucy walked along, throwing sausages for them to catch – only the dogs who actually managed to jump and catch their sausages went through to the next round. A Jack Russell got disqualified for racing up to Lucy and just nicking sausages out of her hand, so there were only four in the first round. Emily was a bit worried that Charlie was smaller than the others – what if he couldn’t jump to catch the sausage so well? Two of the dogs had already missed, and the dog next to them, who’d managed to catch his sausage, was a huge German shepherd. Emily was starting to see why dog owners argued about show entries – she felt like asking for Charlie to have a shorter throw. Or maybe a bigger sausage…
“Ready?” she whispered, as Charlie watched the German shepherd wolfing down his sausage, and he looked up at her, his ears pricked.
When Lucy threw the sausage at him, Charlie launched himself into the air, and caught it at the top of his leap. Emily was prepared to swear he’d actually eaten it by the time he hit the ground. Then he looked up at her smugly, as everyone clapped.
; Lucy was much further away for the next round, and now there were only the two dogs left in. The German shepherd missed, and everyone gasped – but he didn’t look very worried. He was quite happy to eat the sausage off the floor. Emily wondered worriedly if they had enough rosettes for a tie. Maybe she’d better just give the rosette to the German shepherd if Charlie missed too.
Lucy threw the sausage a bit wide, and Emily was sure Charlie wouldn’t get to it, but he managed an amazing sideways leap, and just reached it, snatching it out of the air as if he was the world’s hungriest dog.
“You did it!” she told him, hugging him as he gobbled up the sausage and licked his whiskers smugly. It was definitely the best class to win, as far as Charlie was concerned. He hardly even noticed his rosette being tied to his collar, he was too busy making sure he hadn’t missed any bits of sausage.
“Come on, you,” Emily told him lovingly, as she took him over to sit at the side again. “We can watch the fancy dress now. I really want to see Billy – Poppy wouldn’t say what he was going to be. Oh, and that dachshund…”
The fancy-dress dogs paraded into the ring, with all the audience laughing and cheering.
“Oh, wow!” Emily clapped loudly as Poppy walked past, with Billy dressed as a medieval horse, with an Action Man in cardboard armour on his back. His long nose was quite horsey, so he looked amazing, even though he was quite clearly sulking. Charlie jumped up excitedly and barked at the black Labrador who was following Billy, and Emily shuddered. The black dog was wearing a horribly realistic tarantula costume, with extra legs sticking out of a fluffy black waistcoat. The legs were bent at just the right angle, and it looked very spidery.
The dachshund was the best, though, and Emily was glad when Mrs Everett announced that he was the winner. He was a tan-coloured dachshund, so he did look quite like a sausage, and his costume was a bun. There was a bit of red and yellow fabric as the ketchup and mustard, and he looked like a huge hot dog on four little legs.