How To Get The Family You Want by Peony Pinker

by Jenny Alexander

  After he had gone Mum and Dad had a big row about who would actually be cooking this lovely supper. Monday was always Dad’s busiest day for deadlines because the paper went to press on Tuesdays. ‘Just because you work 24/7 that doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t working too, you know!’

  Luckily they couldn’t go on too long because Mum had to get back to the Beach Hotel’s hedges and Dad had to go to his cricket match. Primrose went to do a facial peel, which was supposed to make her look radiant. She still thought Matt would cave in and come over any minute. That’s how well she knows him.

  ‘It isn’t working, is it?’ I said to Gran. ‘Having a pet really doesn’t seem to be pulling us together.’

  ‘You always get teething troubles,’ said Gran, cheerfully. ‘Give it time.’

  ‘So, will you come over and make the supper tomorrow?’ I asked. She shook her head. She had to go home in the morning because the surf school had a busy week coming up.

  ‘But I’ll visit again in a few weeks’ time,’ she said.

  I love my Gran but sometimes I do wish she was less of an ideas person and just a little bit more boring.

  Chapter 8

  The Felt-tip Trick and the Bad, Bad Bunny

  The next day at school I kept thinking about Dennis, all on his own at home. I wondered whether he was using his litter tray. I hoped he wasn’t bored. The book said rabbits could get bored if they didn’t have anything to play with, so I had tied a carrot on a piece of string and hung it from the underside of the table before I left. He would probably have eaten it all by now.

  No-one else was in when I got home but Primrose would be back soon. The first thing I noticed was that there weren’t any pees and poos on the floor – they were all in the litter tray. Well done, Dennis! I moved it a few inches further over towards the space under the stairs.

  Then I spotted Dennis sitting on top of his hutch, half hidden by the bumper pack of kitchen rolls. I couldn’t get at him from above so it was no good trying to pick him up. He’d just go mental and shoot off round the room like a rocket.

  I peeped under the table to see how he had been getting on with his carrot. It was completely un-nibbled. The nearest table leg, on the other hand, was covered in tooth marks. Dennis had gnawed great chunks out of the varnish leaving scratches and patches of pale bare wood.

  I sat down on the floor to get a closer look at the damage. Dennis hopped down off his hutch roof and came over. He was very sweet to look at but considering he was single-handedly wrecking our kitchen, Gran might have done more for family harmony if she’d given us a herd of galloping rhinos.

  Primrose arrived home and Dennis shot back up into his hidey-hole behind the kitchen-rolls. She dropped her bag on the floor with a big sigh. Then she took her earphones out – well, my earphones, actually, which Dad had only said she could use for doing her revision, not to take to school.

  ‘What is the matter with him?’ she grumbled, as she poured herself a glass of water.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t say anything in the book about eating furniture.’

  ‘Not him, Peony,’ she snapped. ‘Matt! How could he mess me about like this?’

  ‘So he hasn’t texted yet, then?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  I thought it was a bit much her taking it out on me when she was the one who got herself into this mess.

  ‘Maybe when you said he needn’t bother coming round any more, he thought you actually meant it,’ I suggested.

  ‘Well, I might have meant it at the time, but I obviously didn’t mean it forever.’

  ‘You’d better text him then, because that will no way be obvious to Matt. Why don’t you ask him round tonight?’

  She sat down beside me on the floor with her phone in her hand.

  ‘Woah!’ she said, suddenly noticing the table leg. ‘Mum’s going to freak.’ Then, because she’s got the attention-span of an earwig, she straightaway asked, ‘Do you really think I should text him?’

  I nodded and, to my surprise, she started texting.

  ‘You could fix that with a brown felt-tip,’ she added, not looking up.

  Big sisters are ninety-nine per cent nuisance but one per cent good advice because they’ve been around longer and know more tricks and dodges. I dug around in the table drawer, found a dark brown felt-tip pen and started colouring in the pale patches.

  The felt-tip trick worked a treat. You could hardly see where Dennis had chewed the varnish off. Primrose paced up and down all the time I was doing it, fretting about whether she should have sent that text.

  ‘Let’s make some toast,’ I said, ‘while we’re waiting for him to reply.’

  It was a tense wait, considering that if texting didn’t work it would be my fault for suggesting it.

  ‘Send him a picture of Dennis too,’ I said, thinking I might as well get it in the neck for two failed texts as for one.

  She sent the picture while I put the marge and peanut butter on the table and found some knives and plates. We were spreading our toast when Primrose got the text-tone. She jumped, dropping the marge lid on the floor in her hurry to read it.

  She stared at her message in disbelief. ‘He isn’t coming,’ she said. She showed me his text:

  you finished with me, can’t come anyway, exam tmo, Matt

  ‘He didn’t even put love, or a smiley, or let’s talk. He didn’t even say about Dennis,’ she said.

  It did seem surprisingly cold for Matt, who is usually lovely.

  ‘What exactly did you say to him?’

  She scrolled through her messages and read her text.

  I have decided to forgive you. You can come round tonight

  Way to make someone feel like coming back to you!

  Just then she got a second text – it said,

  what’s with the rabbit?

  She texted back that Dennis was living in our kitchen but he’d be gone by next week, sad but true.

  We waited but Matt didn’t text again.

  ‘This was a stupid idea,’ Primrose said. ‘Now I feel like an idiot. I should never have listened to you!’

  ‘I said you should text him. I didn’t say you should send him a sniffy message from the top of your high horse and make him run a mile.’

  ‘Whatever,’ goes Primrose. ‘Anyway, he needn’t think I’m going to forgive him again!’

  There was a funny squishy noise coming from under the table. We both bent down to look. It was Dennis licking a big lump of marge off the lid Primrose had dropped. She reached out to grab it off him...and he bit her!

  Primrose screamed. She pulled away, bumping her head under the table. Dennis thumped his back feet on the floor.

  ‘You’re frightening him,’ I said.

  She shoved her hand under my nose.

  ‘He bit me!’ she yelled. ‘Look at that – blood!’

  Dennis grabbed the lid in his teeth and made off across the kitchen with it. He dragged it to safety under his hutch.

  ‘Yes, but could you be a bit quieter? Rabbits don’t like noise.’

  ‘I don’t care about that!’ shouted Primrose. ‘I don’t even like him! He’s turning out to be a complete pain. He bit through my earphones yesterday and now he’s bitten me. Wait till I tell Mum!’

  She stormed out of the kitchen and stamped off up the stairs. I got the barbecue tongs out of the drawer and tried to get the marge lid off Dennis, but he wasn’t having any of it. Rabbits must really like the taste of marge.

  Mum came home with a quiche from the baker’s, and then Dad brought a bag of salad – they must have done a deal on who was making supper. Mr Kaminski arrived as we were setting the table. He stepped very carefully over the barrier and delivered his newly-baked lemon babka safely into my hands. He was wearing a smart shirt and his white hair was combed back.

  ‘Your grandmother is here soon, yes?’

  When I said she wasn’t coming he looked like the boy Father Christmas forgot.


  Mum said, ‘Supper’s ready. Where’s Primrose?’

  At that very moment, Primrose came down the stairs holding her arm as if her hand might fall off if she let go. She had about fifty plasters stuck over the bite.

  ‘I need a rabies injection!’ she announced.

  Then she launched into a great long moan about how Dennis had bitten her when she wasn’t even doing anything, unless trying to stop him from munching his way through a plastic lid and probably getting poisoned counted as provocation. What if she got an infection in the wound, and her hand swelled up to five times its normal size? She would get carted off to hospital and they would pump her full of drugs. But what if the drugs didn’t work and they ended up chopping her hand off? It could happen!

  While Mum was peeling away the plasters Mr Kaminski tried to get Dad to talk about the problem page. He felt really bad about never answering any of the letters about family stuff and he had brought the one from Frantic Mum to talk about again. It had been most helpful, he said, talking about it before, but for some reason he didn’t seem to feel any more confident about answering it.

  One of Dad’s favourite sayings is ‘never do today what you can put off until tomorrow’.

  ‘Let’s discuss it over coffee in the morning,’ he said.

  Mr K didn’t look very happy about it but before he could say anything Dennis hopped down off his hutch roof, giving Dad a perfect opportunity to change the subject.

  ‘I’m surprised you’re willing to show your face, young Dennis,’ he said. ‘Because it sounds like you have been a bad, bad bunny!’

  Chapter 9

  Choc Sauce and the Last Chance Saloon

  Here’s a top tip you won’t find in You and Your Rabbit – never let your rabbit go anywhere near margarine. After Mr Kaminski had gone home Dad went to the pub, Mum got Stella round to do some paperwork in the sitting-room upstairs... and Dennis started producing a third kind of poo.

  I won’t go into details in case you’re eating your tea but he was like a walking squeezy bottle of chocolate sauce. It squirted out of him so fast, in five minutes the whole floor was covered in smelly spits and splats. I grabbed some kitchen roll and started trying to clean it up quick, but he just kept doing more and more.

  Primrose was outside in the yard, sighing into her socks, but she never lasts long without an audience so she soon came in looking for someone to grumble at. She stood in the doorway gawping at all the little heaps of scrunched-up dirty kitchen roll and puddles of poo.

  ‘He’s got the runs from eating that marge,’ I said. ‘You’re the one who dropped the lid so you should help me clean it up.’

  ‘Not happening!’ said Primrose. ‘Wouldn’t be happening even if I didn’t have an open wound from where he blooming bit me.’

  ‘Well, at least you could check he’s OK. He’s gone under his hutch and I’m worried about him.’

  ‘Read my lips, Peony,’ she goes. ‘I do not care whether he’s OK. I do not like him. I am officially Not Interested in that vicious little brute!’

  ‘But...’

  She stuffed my earphones into her ears and picked her way through the clumps of kitchen roll to the stairs.

  ‘And use some disinfectant,’ she said, as she left, ‘or we’ll all end up catching it.’

  I didn’t think humans could catch rabbit-runs but just to be on the safe side I got the disinfectant out from under the sink. I poured some into a bucket and topped it up with hot water like they do at school if someone’s been sick. Then I bunged all the bits of dirty kitchen roll in the bin and got the mop.

  Mopping is actually a lot more difficult than you might think. In no time at all, the floor was soaking wet and the more I mopped, the wetter it seemed to get. I went and put my wellies on.

  I topped up the bucket because it was nearly empty, and when I turned round again there was Dennis standing by my feet looking up at me. On the upside, he hadn’t died from diarrhoea – on the downside, he was knee-deep in disinfectant. Supposing it was bad for him, like marge? He would lick it off cleaning himself and then... I scooped him up and stood him in the empty sink.

  I ran the tap lukewarm and washed Dennis’s feet. He was a bit droopy and didn’t struggle at all. Then I lifted him onto a tea-towel and dried him off. I was going to put him in his hutch while I finished mopping the floor but he looked so sorry for himself that I wondered if he might let me hold him.

  I sat down on a chair with Dennis in my lap. He didn’t jump off. The fur on his back was thick and soft; his ears were velvety and very warm. It says in You and Your Rabbit that rabbits don’t sweat, so if they get hot they let the heat out through their ears. I hoped he didn’t have a temperature.

  Anyway, there I was in my wellies, with Dennis on my lap and the kitchen looking like one of those news stories about people whose houses have got flooded, when Mum and Stella walked in.

  ‘Maybe I’ll skip that coffee, Jan,’ goes Stella. She shot through on tip-toes, stepped over the barrier and was out the front door faster than John Foster, the fastest boy in school.

  Mum pressed her lips together and took a deep breath.

  ‘It’s not his fault,’ I mumbled. ‘H-he ate some marge and got the runs and I was trying to clean it up but then...’

  ‘Put him in his hutch,’ said Mum.

  She picked up the mop and by some miracle, instead of making the floor get wetter and wetter, her mopping seemed to dry the water up.

  ‘Clean that sink out! Put that tea-towel in the washing-machine! Take those wellington boots off and stop making filthy footprints on the floor!’ She barked orders at me while she mopped.

  When she had finished she shoved the mop and bucket out in the yard, slammed the door shut and told me she had enough on her plate without all this nonsense. It was one thing after another and how could she ever get her business up and running when she was always having to clean up after us lot?

  ‘And don’t cry!’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ I blubbed.

  Mum calmed down as quickly as she had flared up. She gave me a hug. ‘I’m sorry, Peony,’ she sighed. ‘I’m not cross with you. I’m cross with your father. And Gran – she really doesn’t help. Buying us a house rabbit – I mean, what was she thinking?’

  I couldn’t tell Mum what Gran was thinking because it just seemed nutty now. But sometimes although Gran’s great ideas don’t work the way she thinks they’re going to, something good can come out of them.

  The bed-and-breakfast, for example – that was a disaster but it did mean they got pots more money when they sold their house than they would have done before they converted it into a B&B, and then they could afford a really nice house in Spain with a pool and everything. Not that that ended up the way Gran thought it would either, but still.

  Dennis wasn’t going to make my family any less of a pain and he wasn’t even much of a pet, not like a dog you could train or a cat you could cuddle up with. He wasn’t like lovely old Sam.

  But Dennis was better than nothing. I had never had a pet and I was pretty sure I never would have if Gran hadn’t gone out and got Dennis without asking Mum and Dad.

  I knew I would end up doing all the work, feeding him and cleaning his hutch, covering up for him when he wrecked things. But whatever happened, I was determined to try and hang onto him.

  ‘Peony,’ Mum said in a you-aren’t-going-to-like-this kind of voice. ‘You do realise that Dennis has to go now, don’t you? This is the third time he’s been a danger to life and limb, what with Mr Kaminski nearly breaking his neck falling over the barrier and Primrose getting that nasty bite and now the whole of the kitchen – the kitchen, mind, the place we prepare food and eat – being covered in germy deposits.’

  ‘But he’s in his trial period,’ I protested. ‘He’s got another four days.’

  I was still feeling a bit wobbly from before and it seemed a good moment not to try and hold back the tears.

  Mum sighed. ‘All right, he can have one more chan
ce,’ she said. ‘One more, Peony – I mean it. That rabbit really is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon.’

  Chapter 10

  ‘You’re the Boss!’ and Birthday Plans

  I was sitting at the computer in the kitchen talking to Gran on Skype. Dennis hopped over and nudged my foot. I lifted my toes and he flattened himself to the floor, pushing his head underneath them. When rabbits do that they’re saying, ‘You’re the boss!’ I read about it in my book.

  It was Friday evening and ever since the marge mishap Dennis had been different. He was more friendly towards me and less friendly towards Primrose. It was her own fault, really. After he had bitten her she had made this big thing of being scared of him to get the sympathy vote. He could be minding his own business or having one of his mad random dashes round the room and she would suddenly screech and jump up on a chair.

  ‘Come off it, Primrose, he was nowhere near you,’ I would say. But Mum fell for it every time. ‘He has bitten her, Peony. It’s not surprising she feels nervous around him.’

  The problem was, after a few days Dennis seemed to make up his mind that if she didn’t like him then he didn’t like her either. Then he really did start growling and running at her ankles whenever she came near. He tried to nip her, and although it doesn’t say so in the book I’m pretty sure that means ‘Watch out – I’m the boss of you!’

  ‘How’s your week been?’ Gran asked. The picture was a bit slower than the sound, but it was brilliant to see her face. We used to Skype all the time before the summer visitors arrived and the surf school got so busy.

  I told her we had managed to move Dennis’s litter tray bit by bit all the way into the space under the stairs now. I mentioned the table leg, and the fact that no-one seemed to have noticed. Then I gave her the full story of what happened when Dennis ate the marge.

  ‘But he hasn’t had any more mishaps since then,’ I said.

  ‘It sounds as if he’s passed his trial period with flying colours!’ goes Gran.