How To Get The Family You Want by Peony Pinker

by Jenny Alexander

  ‘This is not good...’

  Dad unplugged the fridge. He brought the plug out from under the work surface and a length of wire came after it. The wire looked as if it had been sliced open. You could see the metal strands inside. Dennis!

  The gap between the cupboards and the fridge was so narrow we thought he’d never be able to squeeze through, so we hadn’t bothered to cover the wires at the back.

  Dennis wasn’t in his hutch, or underneath it, or on the roof, which were his three favourite places in the night. We found him under the table. His eyes were wide and his nose was twitching even more than usual. I dropped on my knees and reached under, not worrying he might try to bite me. I got my hands round his behind and slid him across the floor towards me.

  All the whiskers had gone from one side of his face, snipped short and frizzled at the ends.

  ‘Is incredible,’ Mr Kaminski gasped. ‘He bites wire, he should be dead.’

  Mr Kaminski was looking half-dead himself, with his hair sticking out and his skin kind of grey. Mum did what she always does at such times – she made everyone a cup of tea.

  As we sat round the table, gradually warming up and calming down, Dad told Mr Kaminski all about our camping catastrophe.

  ‘It’s been a birthday trip when everything went wrong,’ Mum said. ‘But I bet we’ll look back on it in years to come and think it was quite funny.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I thought to myself. ‘I’ll look back on it as the birthday when Mum was too busy to make me a cake, Dad was too lazy to organise my trip properly, and Primrose spent the whole time trying to find a patch of signal for her phone. I’ll remember it as the time yet another of Gran’s great ideas went pear-shaped; the time when Dennis lost half his wonderful whiskers and nearly got himself killed.’

  Chapter 13

  A Magnificent Mansion and the Family Facts of Life

  ‘Peony!’

  Miss Thomson stopped me as I was about to leave. It had been the longest school-day since the dinosaurs roamed the earth so I wasn’t that delighted.

  ‘Yes, Miss Thomson?’

  ‘Is something wrong? Only I’ve noticed you don’t seem quite your normal self today.’

  ‘No, I’m fine...thank you.’

  She gave me that X-ray look you sometimes get from teachers which makes you feel like they can see right through you. I looked down at my shoes, and finally she nodded and let me go.

  My chat with Miss Thomson meant I was a bit late getting home. As I turned the last bend on the zig-zag path before our house I heard a weird noise that sounded like an animal in pain. I stopped for a few seconds to listen. My heart sank. I knew that noise – it was Primrose!

  Primrose’s bedroom was at the front of the house. She had her window wide open and the sound of her wailing was wafting out.

  ‘Ohhh...ohhh...o-o-ohhh...’

  She must have heard from Matt at last, but not the news she wanted to hear. It was so embarrassing. How could she make such an exhibition of herself? All the neighbours would hear. So would the tourists strolling past and the boy putting leaflets through letterboxes. They could probably hear her down at the beach and up on the top road. She could at least shut her window.

  The sound of Primrose wailing didn’t do anything to help me with my own bad mood. It wasn’t just about my birthday trip. Lots of special days go wrong, like Primrose’s 13th birthday party at the ice rink when three people ended up in casualty, or that Christmas when we all went down with food poisoning. You can get over that kind of thing, it’s just life.

  The problem was Dennis. It was one thing to poo all over the place or bite someone’s hand or need barriers that tripped the neighbours up, but it was quite another thing to nearly set fire to the house while everyone was away for the weekend, and that’s what could have happened when he bit through the wire, according to Mum, Dad and Mr Kaminski.

  Dennis wasn’t just a bit of a health hazard – he was a disaster waiting to happen, and even I could see now that he would have to go.

  Dad was sitting in the sunshine doing some work on his laptop when I got home. There was a heap of empty boxes stacked up in the corner of the yard that Mum’s new gardening equipment had come in. Having nothing but a patch of concrete out the back meant we had never had any need for things like lawnmowers, hedge-cutters or strimmers before.

  ‘Dennis is out here if you’re looking for him,’ Dad said. ‘He seems quite keen on cardboard!’

  Dennis was sitting in one of the boxes, washing his face. He always looked his most adorable when he was washing. I sat down nearby and he came out to say hello, lying just near enough for me to stroke him but too far away for me to pick him up.

  ‘Do you think Mum still wants those boxes?’ I asked Dad.

  He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Can I have one then?’

  In the book it said you could make a house for your rabbit out of a cardboard box. You just had to close the top and cut some doors and windows for him to hop in and out. I wanted to make Dennis’s last few days with us especially nice for him.

  I chose the lawnmower box because it was big and sturdy. I stuck the top down with Sellotape and tried to cut a door, but the scissors wouldn’t go through.

  ‘Want some help?’ asked Dad. He got a sharp knife and asked me where I wanted him to cut.

  We cut a door big enough for Dennis to squeeze through. Then we moved right away from it. Sure enough after a few minutes he got curious and went to investigate. He pushed at the flap with his nose. He scratched at the sides of the door with his front paws. He nibbled bits off it. When he had adjusted the door to his satisfaction he wriggled inside.

  Dennis was delighted with his little house. We could hear him scrabbling and scratching around in there. I went to get some hay to make it cosy.

  ‘You know what?’ said Dad. ‘Why don’t we make him an upstairs?’

  I coaxed Dennis back out with a bit of biscuit so Dad could cut a hole in the roof. Then he got another box and cut a hole in the bottom of that and put it on top. He stuck it down with lots of Sellotape. He cut a little window too so Dennis could look out.

  As soon as we let him go back inside, Dennis hopped into his upstairs and peeped out of the window. Dad looked at me. Yes – we should make a third floor! He got another box.

  Dad decided to take Dennis’s house indoors before it got too big to move. I followed with all the other boxes. One of them was long and thin so we made a tunnel for Dennis from his house to his favourite sunny spot in the corner by the radiator. One was small and square so we stuck it on the side as a spare bedroom.

  Pretty soon we had used all the boxes and we stood back to admire our handiwork. We hadn’t just made a house – we had made a magnificent mansion! We could hear Dennis thumping and jumping and scratching away happily inside.

  The phone went and Dad picked it up. I could tell from his side of the conversation that it was Mum and she wasn’t going to be home for tea. Some woman from Polgotherick Properties had asked her to look at a garden on her way home.

  ‘You know Nash House?’ Dad said, as he put the phone down. Of course I knew Nash House. Everyone knew it. It stood at the end of a grassy path that ran towards the headland from the top end of our terrace. No-one had lived there for years.

  The garden was like a jungle and the house was falling apart because when the old man who owned it died, they couldn’t find the nephew he had left it to. Well it turned out the nephew was living in America and now they’d finally found him he wasn’t interested in the house at all.

  ‘He wants to sell it,’ Dad said. ‘He’s getting it done up first because he doesn’t think anyone’s going to want it in the state it’s in.’

  ‘So are they going to ask Mum to do the garden?’

  Dad nodded. He said Mum was over the moon because she’d always wanted to have a proper nosey around up there. A high stone wall ran right round the property and the gate was boarded over and padloc
ked, so you couldn’t even get a glimpse of the garden through the bars.

  ‘I can see why she’s keen,’ he sighed. ‘But I wish she would rein it in a bit. I mean, she can’t ever do anything by halves, your mother. Look what she was like when she worked at the Green Fingers Garden Centre. We couldn’t move in here for rescued plants!’

  ‘Gran says that’s just the way she is,’ I said. ‘She’s like a busy bee that loves to buzz around.’

  ‘What, you’ve talked to Gran about this?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t like Mum being out all the time either. But Gran says you can’t change someone’s nature – you just have to live with it.’

  ‘I see,’ goes Dad.

  ‘You can’t change a lazy old lion either,’ I said. He knew who I was talking about all right!

  I told him gloomily that Gran said you could choose your friends but you couldn’t choose your family. You had to get on with them whatever they were like. Those were the family facts of life.

  I didn’t bother to mention she’d also said you could learn to like them, because I didn’t believe it.

  Dad said, ‘Look, Peony, I’ve been meaning to tell you, I’m really sorry about your birthday trip. I should have organised it better.’

  Then he got all embarrassed and started searching through the cupboards to see what we could have for tea.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we do a supermarket order online – you could help me decide what we need. Let’s fill up the cupboards and try some new recipes!’

  ‘Seriously?’ I said.

  ‘I’m bored with beans,’ goes Dad. ‘I’m thinking – how hard can it be to cook a curry?’

  Chapter 14

  The Wailing Stage and the Wonder of Dennis

  The supermarket couldn’t deliver the food we ordered until the next day but now that Dad had had the idea, he was determined to try and cook a curry. He had another dig around in the cupboards and came out with a tin of tomatoes, a jar of curry powder and some chick peas. Then he found a few sad carrots, a soft potato and some sprouting onions in the bottom of the fridge.

  Following the recipe on the side of the curry powder he somehow managed to produce a notbad curry. All right, you had to mix it with a lot of rice or else it would blow the top of your head off, and all right, the rice was thick and sticky like mashed potato – but I didn’t care. It wasn’t beans, and it gave Primrose something else to think about apart from Matt.

  She disappeared back upstairs after supper and Dad put the leftover curry and rice on a plate for Mum to warm up in the microwave later. He was dead chuffed with himself. She was going to be so impressed!

  Unfortunately, the first thing she saw when she came in was Dennis’s mansion. Well, you couldn’t really miss it. Dad and I were putting a tall chimney made out of toilet rolls on the top. Dennis didn’t need it but it definitely added to the look.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Mum. ‘Honestly, Dave! You’ve got time for messing around with boxes but you can’t be bothered to cook a proper tea for your children!’

  Dad said he had cooked a proper tea tonight, as a matter of fact, and she would find hers in the microwave all ready for heating up. Plus, he had ordered a whole lot of food – actual vegetables and stuff – from the supermarket so he could make proper teas for the rest of the week. That took the wind out of her sails!

  Mum looked at the shopping list Dad had printed off for her. She peeped under the plate-cover.

  ‘Well...this is incredible,’ she goes. ‘And on a Monday too, your busiest day.’

  Dad stopped trying to stick the chimney on. He had forgotten all about his match reports! He grabbed his notes and laptop and dashed off up to his study.

  As Dad opened the door to the stairs we clearly heard the sound of Primrose sobbing on the settee. I told Mum she had been like that on and off since we got home from school. Matt must have finished with her.

  Mum looked worried. After Mushy Marcus finished with Primrose she had got stuck in the wailing stage for weeks.

  ‘I tried to talk to her,’ I said, ‘but she told me to go away.’

  I followed Mum upstairs. She perched on the end of the settee until Primrose shifted her legs and let her sit down properly.

  ‘Are you all right, honey-bun?’ said Mum, stroking her leg.

  ‘No-o-o-o!’ Primrose wailed. ‘Oh, Mum – Matt doesn’t want to go out with me any more!’

  She sat up and pitched forwards, burying her face in Mum’s shoulder.

  ‘Did he send you a text?’ asked Mum, giving her a hug.

  Primrose felt around on the cushions behind her and found her phone. She brought Matt’s message up on the screen. Mum read it.

  ‘But Primrose darling,’ she said. ‘All he says here is that he wants to cool things for a while.’

  ‘That’s what people always say when they want to end it!’

  ‘Maybe you’re right, but I don’t think they normally add, “Let’s talk about everything when the exams are over.”’

  ‘He’s just trying to let me down gently!’

  Mum said had it occurred to Primrose that Matt might mean exactly what he said? He was a bright young man; he would want to work hard and do well.

  ‘He’d want a girlfriend who works hard and does well too,’ she said. ‘Look, he says, “Good luck in your exams.”’

  ‘O-o-o-oh!’ Primrose let out another great wail. ‘I’ve been stupid, I’ve been a pain! He did want to go out with me and now I’ve driven him away!’

  There was no arguing with that. But Mum said of course she wasn’t stupid; she had just got really stressed about exams and Matt would understand that.

  ‘No-o-o-o-o! It isn’t just exams – I’m always like this. I hate myself!’ cried Primrose.

  At that point Mum said that possibly, perhaps, sometimes Primrose might be just a little teeny tiny bit highly-strung...but there was really nothing wrong with that.

  I don’t know whether it was Mum’s pep talk, or the thought that Matt would prefer a clever girlfriend, or the fact that after all this build-up Primrose had her first actual exam the following day, but she did stop crying eventually. She went upstairs to wash her face and do some revision.

  Mum sat back with a sigh. ‘Poor Primrose. She really does make life hard for herself.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be such a drama queen.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she wants to be so stormy,’ Mum said. ‘I should think she’d much rather be sunny and settled like you.’

  That made me feel cross. Just because I didn’t thrash around making a big fuss about the slightest thing, that didn’t mean I was always sunny inside. Right now, for example, I was definitely overcast.

  Mum didn’t seem to notice. ‘Maybe your sister needs a bit more Mum-time,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve let my work get out of hand, when here she is in the middle of exams and struggling with her love-life too.’

  This made me even more cross. What about me and Dad? I didn’t say anything, though.

  ‘It’s hard starting up your own business,’ Mum said, ‘but you have to keep a grip on the things that really matter. Maybe Stella wouldn’t mind doing more than half the work for the time being, as her children have all grown up and left home.’

  Suddenly, we heard a huge crash from the kitchen. There was nobody down there but Dennis. We ran downstairs to find out what had happened. His mighty mansion was lying on its side and Dennis was sticking up out of the window, trying to wriggle out.

  Mum pointed out that Dennis was a heavy rabbit and his house was tall and light. Therefore, if he made it to the top floor, the whole thing would obviously be unstable. She got hold of him under the armpits and hauled him out. He looked too startled to try and bite her.

  ‘See, Dennis is another reason I need to cut back on my work,’ goes Mum. ‘Look what happened because I was too busy to check the safety measures you lot put in place – he nearly died. What’s more, he could have burnt the house down! We’ve all got t
o be a lot more careful with him from now on.’

  ‘S-so – Dennis doesn’t have to go?’

  ‘No,’ said Mum, ‘it’s far too late for that.’ She put him down on the floor. ‘He might be a proper little nuisance but he’s a member of the family now. We’re stuck with him.’

  So Gran was officially a genius. Things had worked out exactly as she had said – all we had to do was hold on to Dennis for a few weeks, and now everyone was so used to having him around, there was no question of letting him go.

  What’s more, although it was hard to see how it had happened, I couldn’t help noticing that right now Primrose was upstairs revising, Mum was working out how to cut down her hours, and Dad had proper meals planned for the whole week. Could that be, in some weird way, down to Dennis? You had to wonder.

  Chapter 15

  Losing Someone you Love and Getting your Head Blown Off

  Dad and me converted Dennis’s mansion into a bungalow. Mum said on the upside it meant he wouldn’t break his neck jumping around in there, but on the downside it took up three times as much of the floor.

  I was trying to teach Dennis some tricks before the weekend to show Gran because she had managed to get a few days off to come and visit. You and Your Rabbit was not encouraging. It said rabbits weren’t famous for their brain-power and it would take a particularly clever one a whole lifetime to learn to recognise its own name.

  Dennis was turning out to be an Einstein of the rabbit world, in that case. He definitely looked up when I said his name, and he more than looked up when he heard the sound of a biscuit breaking or a slice of toast popping up. He came and sat on your feet until you gave him some.

  Before long, I had taught him to beg by holding a piece of food just too high for him to reach. You had to give it to him as soon as he was up on his hind legs, though, or else he’d drop back down on all fours, turn his back on you and sulk.