How To Get The Family You Want by Peony Pinker

by Jenny Alexander

  Everyone looked at her as if she was one sandwich short of a picnic, and then Dad said what we were all thinking.

  ‘We can’t keep him – Jan will go mental!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ goes Gran. ‘She’ll love him. I mean, what’s not to love?’

  Dennis’s fur was much softer than any dog’s or cat’s. His nose twitched all the time, making his whiskers jiggle, and he had the sweet fresh smell of new hay.

  Gran said he was two years old and he had to live indoors because that was what he was used to. But the man had assured her he was fully house-trained. He could be relied upon to do all his pees and poos in the litter tray.

  ‘You can put it beside his hutch in the space under the stairs.’

  The space under the stairs was always crammed with stuff we couldn’t be bothered to put away such as shoes and beach bags. Gran organised us as we cleared it out and installed Dennis’s things. It was crazy but, as Dad always says, Gran’s like a force of nature. When she gets enthusiastic about something it’s no good trying to stand in her way.

  Gran put Dennis down on the floor so he could investigate his new home. He hopped across to his hutch and gave it a good sniff. We had filled the bedroom end with fresh hay and covered the other end with newspaper. One bowl was full of rabbit food and the other one full of water but he didn’t seem hungry because he hopped in, sniffed them, rubbed his chin on them and then hopped back out again.

  He hopped around the room after that, rubbing his chin on everything as if he had the itchiest chin in the world. Then he sat under the table and started washing his nose with his paws.

  ‘He’s sweet,’ Primrose said. She doesn’t really like animals but Matt was animal-mad like all the Teversons, so she was probably thinking Dennis would be an added attraction when he came crawling back.

  ‘Yes, he’s nice,’ agreed Dad. He was probably thinking it could have been worse – Gran could have gone out and got us a dog!

  Dennis finished washing and hopped across the room. He backed up against the cupboard under the sink and did a pee. Then he dropped six little round poos beside the puddle and hopped back under the table again.

  ‘I thought the man said...’

  ‘You’d better pop down to the shop and get some kitchen-roll, Dave, just in case he takes a while to settle in,’ said Gran. ‘And perhaps it would be a good idea to buy a book about looking after rabbits from Polgotherick Pets as well.’

  Dad went to the shops and Primrose disappeared upstairs to do her hair for the trillionth time. Gran and I sat on the floor with our legs stretched out in front of us. We kept very still, and eventually Dennis got brave enough to come out from under the table. He crept towards us with his body pressed low to the floor, stopping every few seconds to check we still weren’t moving. Eventually he got brave enough to come right up and sniff our feet.

  ‘I told you I would think of something,’ Gran said, with a grin. ‘Have you noticed it’s already working?’

  I gave her a quizzical look.

  ‘You’ve spent two whole hours together getting Dennis settled in and you haven’t argued at all. I bet you even forgot for a while just how annoying Primrose and your dad can be!’

  ‘Yes...but what about when Mum gets home?’

  The mention of Mum seemed to remind Gran that she had to be somewhere else. She was having tea with Auntie Bee.

  Typical! She gets a hare-brained idea then leaves everyone else to pick up the pieces, like starting the B&B and then leaving Grandpa to cook the breakfasts.

  When Gran got up, Dennis shot back under the table. After she had gone, I stayed sitting on the floor and about nine hours later he got his confidence back enough to come and sniff my legs again. Then he got really brave and hopped over my knees. The second time he did it I tried to catch him but that sent him scuttling straight back under the table.

  He didn’t seem that keen on making friends but that was probably just as well considering the minute Mum got home she would one hundred per cent definitely say he had to go.

  Chapter 6

  One Week’s Trial and Two Kinds of Poos

  Primrose was taking pictures of Dennis under the table with her phone. Every time it flashed, he thumped hard on the floor with his back feet. Flash, thump! Flash, thump! Flash, thump!

  ‘You should send one to Matt,’ I suggested. ‘He’d like to see Dennis.’

  ‘I’m sure he would,’ she agreed, haughtily. ‘And perhaps he should have thought of that before he abandoned me in my hour of need.’

  She wasn’t even joking.

  Dad came back with a four-pack of kitchen rolls and a little book called You and Your Rabbit. He gave it to me as Primrose was still half under the table trying to get the perfect shot. Then he stashed the kitchen rolls on top of Dennis’s hutch, pulled one out, and went to clean up the pees and poos on the floor in front of the sink. There was quite a collection by then.

  I flicked the pages and found a section about ‘Your rabbit’s noises’. Generally rabbits are silent animals, it said, but they may growl if excited and they may scream if they get really, really scared. If they feel alarmed they thump hard with their back feet to warn other rabbits of possible danger.

  ‘Stop taking photos,’ I said to Primrose. ‘That thumping means you’re frightening him.’

  She pulled out from under the table so I could see her face and not just her bottom. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought he was messing around.’ Primrose might be a prize pain in virtually every way but you can say this for her, she isn’t cruel.

  As soon as she pulled out and Dennis wasn’t cornered any more he hopped off towards the sink and did another pee and a bunch more poos on Dad’s newly-wiped floor. Dad pursed his lips. Primrose and me laughed.

  ‘Put him on his litter tray so he gets the right idea,’ I said. ‘Maybe he just can’t remember where it is.’

  Dad tried to pick Dennis up, but Dennis went to bite his hand and he jumped back like a pup with a jellyfish. Primrose and me laughed again, which made Dad more determined, and after a few more tries he finally got hold of Dennis and dropped him gently in his litter tray.

  Dennis flicked his back feet, scattering cat litter all over the place, and hopped straight out again. Then he ducked past Dad and did few more poos on the floor in front of the sink. Primrose and me laughed so hard even Dad saw the funny side.

  I looked up house-training in the book. It said when you move your rabbit to a different room he will choose his favourite place to do his pees and poos, and that’s where you have to put his litter tray. Once he’s using it all the time, you can edge it gradually into the place you actually want it to be.

  Dad cleared up the mess and we put Dennis’s litter tray on the floor in front of the sink. Dennis rubbed the edges of it with his chin and then hopped in. I looked up ‘itchy chin’ in the glossary and found a section called ‘chinning’. It said rabbits rub their chins on things to say ‘this is mine!’ So maybe he really was settling in. I mean, he had claimed pretty much everything he could reach in the whole room by then, including all our feet.

  Dad said he had things to do, which basically meant he was getting out of there before Dennis had a chance to do any more mess on the floor. Primrose went to get changed again because Matt would be finished at the cafe now and could therefore appear on the doorstep at any moment.

  I read in the book that rabbits are nervous around new people. You had to bear in mind, it said, that almost every animal rabbits meet in the wild would probably like to eat them. So Dennis wasn’t being unfriendly with all his hiding and trying to bite – he just wasn’t sure about us yet.

  I lay down on the floor on my back and shut my eyes. I thought that way he couldn’t feel scared of me. I heard the soft sound of his furry feet as he hopped a bit nearer. I felt his whiskers on my bare foot and nearly burst into giggles.

  Dennis sniffed all the way up the side of my leg, then the side of my body, then my cheek. He sniffed my ear. His huffy breat
h sounded really loud and I was a bit worried he might bite me. I don’t know how I managed to keep still. He huffed across the top of my forehead. Then I got this really odd feeling, like a gentle tugging. He was nibbling my hair!

  Suddenly the front door opened. Dennis shot back under the table. Mum, seeing me lying there in the middle of the floor, screamed. She dropped down on her knees.

  ‘Dave! Something’s happened to Peony!’

  Dennis thumped his back feet. Bang! Mum looked up. She screamed again. Then she noticed the hutch in the space under the stairs and the litter tray on the floor in front of the sink.

  ‘What the...?’

  ‘His name’s Dennis,’ I said, sitting up. ‘He’s a present from Gran.’

  Dad appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘How dare your mother dump this animal on us without so much as a by-your-leave? Or were you in on it?’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t!’ goes Dad.

  ‘Well you should have stopped her.’

  ‘How?’

  It was a fair question. Mum changed tack.

  ‘Well, it can’t stay. Put it out in the yard till we’ve worked out how to get rid of it.’

  I said Dennis couldn’t go outside. He was an indoor rabbit. He would catch a chill. He would be unhappy!

  ‘But he’s house-trained,’ I added. ‘He won’t be any trouble.’

  ‘No trouble!’ Mum exploded. ‘Who’s going to feed him? Who’s going to clean him out? Who’s going to clear up his mess?’

  Dad said he would be in charge of clearing up accidents – he showed Mum his stash of kitchen rolls. I said I would feed Dennis and clean out his hutch. Primrose, who had come to see what all the noise was about, said she would help with feeding and hutch-cleaning too, and do dry sweeps. ‘But I’m not wiping up wee-wees,’ she added. ‘That’s just disgusting!’

  ‘Let’s get this straight,’ said Mum. ‘The plan is for Dad to do cleaning up and you girls to cooperate together? It isn’t going to work, is it?’

  ‘Couldn’t he have a sort of trial period?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Why?’ said Mum. ‘Oh, I see! You’re scared of telling your mother we won’t be keeping her mad present. You want to put off getting rid of him till after she’s gone home.’

  ‘Have you got a better idea?’

  Mum made up her mind. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘The rabbit’s got one week. After that, if he’s increasing the mess-and-stress levels in the house, he’s got to go.’

  She went to have a shower and get changed out of her work clothes. Primrose, pouring a glass of water at the sink, spotted something weird in Dennis’s litter tray. It looked like a small squishy slug. But on closer inspection, it was a poo.

  I had read about this. Rabbits do two kinds of poos – small dry round ones and squishy ones they actually eat so they can get the goodness from their food twice over.

  ‘He normally eats those ones,’ I said.

  ‘Yuk...gross!’ goes Primrose.

  Dad sloped off towards the stairs. Primrose checked her phone. She looked in the mirror. Then she went to do her nails. I looked at Dennis. It seemed to me he had about as much chance of passing his trial period as Primrose had of passing her exams.

  Chapter 7

  Gloomy Tunes and Teething Troubles

  When I got downstairs the next morning Mum had already gone to work. Dad wouldn’t be up any time soon and then he’d be off to watch a cricket match, and Primrose never got up until lunch-time on Sundays.

  The door of Dennis’s hutch was open. We hadn’t shut it the night before because we thought he should be able to get to his litter tray if he wanted to go in the night. I looked in the bedroom end and he wasn’t there. I looked under the table...no Dennis. I searched the whole kitchen but I couldn’t find him.

  I was beginning to panic when I noticed the back door was ajar and the washing was flapping on the line. Mum must have hung it out before she left and forgotten to shut the door. I went out into the yard.

  Dennis was nibbling a plant in one of the big pots, stretching up on his back feet to reach. When he saw me he made a dash for the sunlounger, diving for cover like a minnow in a rockpool. Two enormous seagulls sitting on the wall screeched at each other as if to say, ‘Where’s our dinner gone?’

  Our yard was sunk into the side of the hill with a wall round it. Mr Kaminski’s garden, which was L-shaped, rose steeply beyond. Dennis wouldn’t be able to get out but it still wasn’t safe for him to be outside on his own.

  Anything might happen. He might eat something poisonous – he might be attacked by gulls or cats. I stayed where I was, keeping still, and after what felt like five years he crept out from under the sun-lounger. He slowly sidled up and sniffed my bare toes.

  I swooped down and scooped him up. I knew how to do that now from reading You and Your Rabbit. You had to approach from above so the rabbit didn’t see you coming. It seemed a bit of a mean trick but I wanted to get him inside.

  The problem was, indoors was full of dangers too. In the book it said rabbits think wires are like roots, and when a rabbit is digging a burrow he bites through roots. There were wires all over the place in the kitchen. It was amazing Dennis had survived the night.

  I almost wished Mum had made us take him back straight away instead of giving him a one-week trial. By the end of the week, I would be a nervous wreck!

  The first thing Gran said when she arrived was, ‘Why the long face?’

  I explained about Mum leaving the back door open and Dennis being outside on his own and the kitchen being full of dangers too. Gran went straight into action. We had to build some barriers in case people forgot to shut the doors! We had to get some plastic tubing to cover all the wires!

  ‘But it’s not worth doing all that for just one week,’ I protested.

  ‘What do you mean, one week?’

  I told her about Dennis’s trial period. She smiled and put her arm round me.

  ‘No-one would ever seriously want to get rid of a lovely rabbit like Dennis,’ she said. She seemed to have forgotten that was exactly what his last owner did.

  Gran told me to take Dad a cup of tea while she measured up how much tubing we would need to cover the wires. It would be too hard to do the whole house so she reckoned we should concentrate on the kitchen. It was a big room, plenty big enough for Dennis to run around in.

  She said we would need low barricades across the bottom of the doors to keep Dennis in, in case anyone forgot to shut them. Knee-high should do because he was rather a fat rabbit and therefore not very bouncy. All us humans would easily be able to step over them.

  Dad was not delighted to be woken up on a Sunday morning, and he was even less happy when I told him why. Gran was at the DIY store and she expected all hands on deck to help with the work as soon as she got back.

  ‘All hands?’ he said. ‘Even Primrose? On a Sunday?’

  No-one actually dared to wake Primrose up, and in the end she wandered down all on her own, droopy and bleary-eyed, when Dad started drilling and sawing.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  I explained about the doors and the wires and the roots.

  ‘Even a rabbit can’t be so dim he’d mistake a wire for a root,’ she said. ‘That’s just nuts.’ Then she poured herself some cereal and sat down. She put her phone on the table beside her bowl, found some music and plugged her earphones in. You could see from her face that she was listening to gloomy tunes so it didn’t take a genius to guess she still hadn’t had a grovel-text from Matt.

  We were so busy building barricades and covering wires that no-one noticed Dennis under the table looking at the loop of wire from Primrose’s earphones, dangling over the edge. No-one saw him creep up to it. No-one saw him stretch up on his hind legs and snip clean through it with his teeth.

  Primrose tapped her phone. She pressed some buttons. She took her earphones out, and saw the wire.

  ‘He’s bitten my earphones off!’ she wailed. ‘Now what a
m I supposed to do? I can’t revise without music! I’m going to fail and it’ll be his fault. Well...and Matt’s,’ she added.

  There aren’t any shops around here that sell stuff like earphones so Dad said he would order some new ones for her online.

  ‘They’ll be here tomorrow and in the meantime you can borrow Peony’s.’

  Charming! I mean, first she calls me nuts for saying Dennis might mistake a wire for a root, then she swipes my earphones when it turns out I was right!

  We had just finished making the kitchen Dennis-proof when Mum came home for lunch. ‘It’s like Fort Knox in here,’ she said, stepping over the barrier and closing the door after her. She noticed the plastic tubing on the wires. ‘Is all this really necessary?’

  Dad said yes it was, because it meant we could leave all the doors open and not have to worry about Dennis getting out. He opened the front door again to demonstrate.

  Just then Mr Kaminski came up the steps, carrying a cake.

  ‘I bring babka!’ he goes. ‘Is Polish cake... aaargh!’ He banged into the barrier and pitched forwards into the kitchen. Dad made a grab for him.

  Mr Kaminski somehow managed to hold onto the plate and not fall flat on his face but the cake flew up in the air. It spun like a Frisbee across the room and smacked into the far wall.

  Mum checked that Mr Kaminski was all right; then she told Dad that his safety features were a hazard. They would have to go, but that didn’t matter because so would Dennis.

  ‘When I said he could have a week I was only thinking about mess-and-stress,’ she said. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me that having a house rabbit might be dangerous.’

  Mr Kaminski protested that it wasn’t Dennis’s fault. ‘I am not careful,’ he said. ‘I am looking at babka.’

  We all looked at the heap of lemony lumps and crumbs lying on the floor. Mum said she would like to invite Mr Kaminski to have supper with us the next day, by way of saying sorry. He was delighted. ‘I bring new babka,’ he said.