by Anna Wilson
‘I have to say, Semolina,’ said Marble, using the name Mrs Fudge hated so much, ‘I am, for once, more than a little bit satisfied. In fact, I am the happiest I can ever remember being. It’s as if the machine has read my mind!’
‘Oh!’ said Tallulah.
‘Grr!’ said Smug.
‘What’s the matter?’ Dash asked, but Marble was talking over the top of the girl and her pug.
‘Yes! This is amazing,’ she was saying. ‘I shall be recommending this machine to everyone I know in Crumbly-under-Edge. These Foghorns are obviously geniuses. I should like to meet your grandfather, young lady,’ she said to Tallulah. ‘He clearly knows more about what a woman wants than, I’m sorry to say, Mrs Fudge does.’
Raphael had been under strict instructions not to mention Smug’s role in the invention, for the obvious reason that no one would believe a dog could have invented anything.
‘Hey!’ protested Dash. ‘You might look all lovely with your new hair and that smile on your face, but there’s no need to be—’
‘What’s the mutt yapping about now?’ said Marble, her smile fading rapidly.
Pippa scooped him up and nuzzled him against her cheek. ‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘You have to admit this machine must be marvellous if it can make Marble Wainwright happy.’
But Dash merely growled.
That does it, he thought. The next chance I get, I’m going to have a snoop around the Foghorns’ place and find out as much as I can about this family. There is something fishy going on – I just know it!
12
Astonishing Transformations
Marble’s experience with the hairdressing machine soon set tongues wagging in Crumbly-under-Edge. Customers flocked to the salon to have their own ‘Foghorn Treatment’, as it had become known.
And the funny thing was that Marble had not needed to brag as she usually did. One look at her was enough to set people chattering about ‘miracles’ and ‘astonishing transformations’. People kept coming up to her and crying out, ‘Excuse me, but I must say your hair is simply marvellous! Where did you get it done?’ And they were always shocked with the answer. Not so much because Marble told them she had been to Chop ’n’ Chat, but because they had not realized it was Marble Wainwright they were talking to!
Coral Jones was a prime example. ‘Oh, goodness!’ she twittered when she saw it was Marble she was standing next to in a queue in the butcher’s one morning. ‘I – I didn’t recognize – that is, you look so different – that is, I don’t mean to imply that you don’t usually look so—’
‘It’s all right, Coral. I know what you mean,’ said Marble, simpering and batting her eyelashes. ‘I don’t usually look so beautiful. I’m not a fool. I know I am a bit of a potato-face. But this machine, well, it’s changed my life! I’ve never been happier. You have to try it, Coral.’
So of course Coral did try it. And then Mrs Prim did, and then Millicent Beadle and then Mrs Peach. And they all looked so gorgeously glamorous that they too were soon walking around shouting the machine’s praises from the rooftops (not literally, you understand, as that would be terribly dangerous and ever so annoyingly noisy too).
And then there were the boys who had seen Raphael’s new style. Kurt immediately rushed to book an appointment to have his blue Mohican changed to a shaved, cropped style with a jagged ‘K’ carved into the back of his hair. There were a few wispy blue bits left in the spiky sticky-uppy part on top of his head, but Kurt was quite pleased with that. (Mrs Fudge was also very relieved that she no longer had to separate six eggs to get the whites to make Kurt’s Mohican stand up straight. She had always complained that she did not know what to do with so many yolks. ‘There’s only so much ice cream and custard an old lady can get through,’ she used to say.)
Now you might think that this is where the story should end. After all, everyone was happy, Mrs Fudge had more help than she could have dreamed of, she had two wonderful assistants who got on like a house on fire and more satisfied customers than ever. And of course Pippa felt she had done better than anyone, for she had a brand-new friend, two lovely dogs to spend all her spare time with and school was not a chore any more.
However, if you were hoping for a short read, I am sorry to have to disappoint you, for I am afraid we have not reached the ‘happily ever after’ part yet.
You’re telling me!
For a start, Dash was far from feeling happily ever after. He could not see why Smug the pug was good news for anyone, particularly himself.
‘That pug lives up to his name at least one hundred times a day,’ he grumbled under his breath, as Smug sent him off on another errand. ‘He has walked in here and made himself top dog! My home is not my own any more. But none of the others can see it.’
And that was partly true.
It was one million per cent true!
Actually, I think you’ll find that, technically, it is impossible to have one million per cent as, strictly speaking, ‘per cent’ means ‘out of one hundred’ and—
Oh, do be quiet.
As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, it was partly true. As charming and as helpful as Smug was, he did seem remarkably pleased with himself. To make matters worse, Smug was also quite bossy. He did seem to take rather a lot of pleasure in barking out his commands so that Pippa and Mrs Fudge knew how to use the machine (for even Tallulah did not entirely understand how it worked). And he especially enjoyed barking out commands to Dash, which was extremely annoying for the little dachshund.
‘Pippa and I were once a team,’ Dash was frequently heard to grumble. ‘And now she has got Tallulah and I am thrown together with Mr Bossy-Boots and Mrs Fudge is too busy to notice.’
That was the other thing: Mrs Fudge was run off her feet. Again! She had begun by being nicely busy. Then when Mrs Prim and Coral and all the others had spread the word further afield Mrs Fudge found that she had become very busy. But pretty soon Chop ’n’ Chat had become what can only be described as too busy.
The trouble was the customers wanted their appointments at once because they suddenly could not bear to be the only person in Crumbly-under-Edge who was not sporting the latest Foghorn makeover. This meant she had queues of people waiting, needing tea and cakes and sympathy too, and of course they all brought their dogs and wanted them pampered while they waited.
‘Pippa, dear,’ said Mrs Fudge one afternoon. ‘I wonder if you could take over. I feel quite worn out. I am going to have to put my feet up.’
Pippa could not believe her ears. Normally Mrs Fudge liked to keep an eye on Pippa’s jobs in the salon, just in case she got ‘carried away with the scissors’.
‘Are you sure?’ Pippa asked.
‘Yes, yes. The machine runs itself once you’ve pressed a few buttons, so you can get on with the dogs, and I am sure Tallulah will know what to do in the kitchen,’ said Mrs Fudge, yawning. ‘I’m just going to have forty winks. I’ll be upstairs if you need me, but I’m sure you won’t.’
Pippa was delighted. ‘I’m sure I won’t need any help at all!’ she trilled, and skipped off to the salon to make sure everything was in order.
How little did she know.
13
Pippa Takes Control
You could say that the trouble started when Pippa was asked to take over. But really I suppose that is a trifle unfair, for if Mrs Fudge had not accepted Smug’s machine into her establishment in the first place, none of what followed would have happened.
However, there can be no denying that the trouble properly started when Pippa called a meeting to discuss how things would be handled while Mrs Fudge was having a break.
‘Let’s face it,’ said Pippa, ‘Mrs Fudge needs more than forty winks. She needs about a million and forty. If not forty million.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Dash. ‘We get your point. So let’s get rid of the infernal contraption and go back to doing things the old-fashioned way. For one thing, we’re neglecting the dogs.’
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‘That’s where Smug comes in,’ said Pippa, her turquoise eyes flashing with excitement.
‘Of course, I should’ve known,’ snapped Dash.
‘What have you got in mind?’ asked the little pug, taking off his spectacles and licking them thoroughly clean.
‘I was wondering . . .’ said Pippa. She paused and caught Tallulah’s eye. ‘Smug, do you remember the bath tub you showed me at your house? We-e-ell . . . when Raphael came to have his hair cut, you did say that you could invent a dog-grooming machine if we wanted it.’
‘That is correct,’ said Smug. Dash snarled but Smug ignored him. ‘Go on.’
‘I think it would be brilliant if you could invent such a machine for the dogs at Chop ’n’ Chat,’ Pippa said. ‘That way we would have more time to care for the customers and listen to their chatter. And if Mrs Fudge wanted to take things easy and concentrate on baking and tea-making, she would be free to do that.’
Smug bowed his head. ‘I think I could turn my paw to something suitable,’ he said.
Dash’s snarling increased in volume.
Smug glared at him, then said to Pippa, ‘As it happens, I have been playing around with a new idea in the Inventionary. It needs a bit more work, but it’s ninety-nine per cent there.’
‘Oh nonononono!’ Dash exploded. ‘You can’t be serious about this idea, can you, Pippa? I mean, think of what you are doing! You are letting machines take over! What will it be next? A machine to deliver all the post so that poor Raphael is out of a job?’
‘Actually that’s not a bad idea,’ Tallulah commented. ‘He could do with a rest now and again. He does whizz around a lot.’
‘He LIKES “whizzing around”!’ snapped Dash. ‘Just as we like caring for our customers ourselves instead of pushing buttons and pulling levers. And just look at what you have done to Mrs Fudge! She is more worn out than ever and her house is not her own any more. Her business has taken over her life, and her at age it just is not fair . . .’
As Dash went on and on, Smug tapped Pippa on the knee and slid her a little note. She glanced at it. It said:
It’s that code, Pippa thought. Now, she was not as brainy as Tallulah, so it took her a few minutes to work it out, but luckily Dash was still ranting and raving, so by the time he had finished, she had decoded it.
‘Hee hee hee!’ She burst into a torrent of giggles.
Hackles immediately went up the length of Dash’s back, making him look like a ruffled feather duster. ‘I don’t see that there is ANYTHING to laugh about!’ he barked.
‘Moaning minnie!’ Pippa chortled, repeating the last two words of the coded message (work it out for yourself if you don’t believe me). ‘Too right – moaning MINI-ature dachshund!’ she whispered to Smug.
‘It is very rude to whisper,’ snarled Dash.
Pippa chewed the insides of her mouth to stop the laughter and said, ‘Dash, you are being ridiculous. Come on – we need to help Smug by giving him all the information he needs. Tally, grab a piece of paper and we’ll jot down everything we can think of about pooch-pampering to help Smug finish the design.’
And so the two girls sat at the kitchen table and brainstormed what would be needed to create the ultimate Foghorn Pooch-Pamperer, and Smug nodded or frowned at their suggestions and took notes and chipped in with his own comments on what he might need.
Meanwhile poor Dash sat in his dog basket by the stove and sulked and plotted and grumbled to himself.
This is no good, he thought. I am wasting time by sitting around feeling sorry for myself. I need to take action. I am going to sniff my way over to where the Foghorns live. I shall do some snooping around. I would like to take a look at this latest so-called ‘invention’ of Smug’s before he gets to wow everyone with his cleverness again.
And with that he tiptoed out of the kitchen, zipped out of the back door and was away without anyone noticing he had gone.
‘So we need a shampooer and a dryer, of course,’ Pippa was saying. ‘But different breeds need different settings. For example, you can’t use the same amount of shampoo on a chihuahua as you do on a St Bernard.’
‘Elementary,’ said Smug.
‘What?’ Pippa jumped. That was the word Dash used when they were problem-solving. She glanced anxiously at the miniature dachshund to see if he had noticed, but Dash, of course, was no longer there. Pippa heaved a sigh of relief. He must have nipped out into the garden, she thought.
Tallulah chipped in, ‘Yes, it is obvious you cannot use the same amount of product on such vastly differing surface areas,’ she said. ‘I had already thought of that.’
‘However,’ said Smug, scribbling away, ‘we should make certain of our calculations in any case. We don’t want to get the quantities wrong.’ He had soon covered the entire kitchen table in paper filled with what looked to Pippa to be incredibly complex sums.
At least the actual table hasn’t been scribbled on this time, she thought.
Eventually Smug sat back in his chair and gestured to his calculations. ‘Tell me if you spot any inconsistencies, Tally,’ he said.
Tallulah’s mouth was twisted in concentration as she scanned the pages. ‘Hmm, I see,’ she said. ‘There are many things to be taken into account.’
Pippa felt a twinge of worry. I hope they know what they are doing, she thought.
Tallulah looked at her. ‘Smug will check through the sums as he builds the machine to make sure that there is a different setting for each breed. He has possibly not considered every single type of dog. We’ll just need to run a few experiments at home first.’
‘OK,’ Pippa said. ‘So then there’s things like clipping,’ she told them. ‘Some breeds need it, some don’t, and some need to be done by hand rather than with an electric clipper. Border terriers, for example: they look better if they’ve been hand-stripped.’
‘Ouch,’ said Smug. ‘That sounds painful.’
‘Not at all.’ Pippa shook her head. ‘Trust me. You just use a special stripping knife, or you can even use your fingers. The dogs who have it done actually like it.’
‘If you’re sure,’ said Smug doubtfully. ‘I can attach a tool for that. I will put in some mechanical hands, such as the ones that are used in the hairdressing machine.’
And so the conversation went on, with the three friends discussing in detail how to put together a device that would do all the jobs Mrs Fudge and Pippa usually did, but at twice the speed.
‘This is going to be brilliant, if I do say so myself,’ sighed Smug.
14
Dash Does Some Detecting
Meanwhile, Dash was making swift progress in finding his way to the Foghorns’ place. He had run out of Mrs Fudge’s garden and around to the front of the house and was already down Liquorice Drive.
‘I shall follow Tallulah’s and Smug’s scents and track down their house,’ he said to himself. ‘It shouldn’t be too hard. That pug reeks of self-importance and Tallulah has a particularly pungent waft of Miss Clever-Two-Shoes about her.’
He put his long pointy nose to the ground and followed the niffs out to the main road that led into Crumbly-under-Edge. He had soon left the shops and the park behind him. Dogs he knew barked out greetings and asked him where he was going, but he did not hear them, he was concentrating so hard. He passed the neat rows of houses with their white picket fences in the newer part of town, and still the scents led him on.
Suddenly the Smuggy-puggy scent of pleased-with-himself-smugness and Tallulah’s cleverness became overwhelming.
‘If I didn’t know for certain that they were still with Pippa, I would say they were both right here,’ he said aloud.
He chased his tail round and round as he sniffed and sniffed at the powerful odours. Then at last he looked up ahead and realized that in his race to follow the scent he had taken himself all the way to the other side of the town. It was an area he was unfamiliar with. He certainly did not recognize the gate he had stopped at: it was rusty and hanging
off its hinges at an odd angle, and it creaked noisily as it swung in the chilly April breeze.
‘This place looks as though it has been empty for years,’ Dash mused as he looked down the path, which was overgrown with weeds. The front door had been painted white once upon a time, but now the paint was peeling off it and the brass knocker and the letter box were dull and dirty with age. (None of this had made the slightest impression on Pippa when she had visited. She had been far too excited about the scooter-mobile and about visiting her new friends’ home.)
The door was open a tiny crack, Dash noted with puzzlement.
He tiptoed around the side of the house to investigate at the back. ‘It is odd that I cannot seem to pick up any other scents,’ he said to himself. ‘Surely I should be able to sniff out Tallulah’s grandfather as well . . . unless . . . unless he doesn’t exist!’
Dash sat back on his haunches and pondered. ‘What wouldn’t I give for a couple of nice crunchy bones to help me think through this conundrum,’ he said. ‘This is another one of those two-bone problems. But there’s no way of getting a nice crunchy bone around here, so I shall just have to rely on good old common sense.’ He closed his eyes, all the better to concentrate. ‘Let me think . . . No one, not even Raphael, has seen hide nor hair of this grandfather person. And yet Tallulah must have someone to look after her. Even I know that Smug, however marvellous he is, is a dog, and therefore cannot look after a human child. Unless – oh no!’ Dash shivered. ‘What if Smug is her grandfather? What if he is a spy of some kind and has invented a way of turning himself into a dog so that he can go undercover?’ Dash felt a ripple of panic run through him. ‘I have to get back to the salon and warn Pippa,’ he told himself. ‘But she’ll want proof. If I don’t bring proof, she will just tell me off again for making everything up and being jealous.’