How To Get The Family You Want by Peony Pinker

by Jenny Alexander

  ‘He must have been so scared,’ she said. ‘Thank goodness you managed to find him.’

  While we were setting the table Gran asked Mum about the garden up at Nash House.

  ‘They’ve offered me the job if I want it,’ said Mum. ‘But I don’t know...’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Well they want to lose all the lovely old features like the brick paths and out-buildings and lay lots of gravel. They reckon that’s what buyers are looking for. They’re probably going to do something similar with the house.’

  Mum took the lasagne out the oven and put it proudly on the mat in the middle of the table. It was bubbling hot and bright purple. Gran obviously hadn’t seen a beetroot lasagne before because she nearly passed out in surprise.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Gran?’ asked Primrose.

  Mum said it was probably the shock of hearing what they were going to do to Nash House.

  ‘Someone should make them an offer for it just as it is,’ she said. ‘Then they could do it up the way they want to, which hopefully wouldn’t mean covering the whole place with concrete and gravel.’

  ‘You know what?’ goes Gran. ‘I might just do that!’

  We all gawped at her.

  ‘That’s my news,’ she said. ‘I’ve handed in my notice and I’m moving back to Polgotherick!’

  Before anyone had a chance to say anything, Mr Kaminski appeared at the front door looking very smart. His hair was combed back and he was wearing a brand new cardigan.

  ‘Hello, hello – is good time to call?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mum. ‘Come in and have some supper.’

  ‘Aaah...’ sighed Mr K, sniffing the air. ‘Is beetroot, yes?’

  He must be the only person in the universe except Mum who actually likes beetroot. She laid an extra place between Primrose and Gran.

  ‘My mother’s just told us she’s moving back to Polgotherick,’ said Dad.

  Mr Kaminski’s face lit up. ‘Is wonderful news!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Well, it’s all to do with a new job I’ve got in mind,’ goes Gran. I knew it wasn’t just about giving up the surf school!

  ‘I’m thinking of getting my skipper’s certificate and doing boat trips round the harbour,’ she said.

  This seemed like a surprisingly good idea, so we all nodded encouragingly. But it’s not good to be too encouraging when Gran gets an idea, because sometimes it means she straight away has another one.

  ‘You’re a sea-faring man, Viktor,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come in with me?’

  Dad looked worried. ‘Just as long as he’ll still have time for the problem page.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the problem page,’ goes Gran. ‘I’d forgotten about that. How’s it going now, Viktor? Did you tell them the family that plays together stays together, like I said? That’s why I got Dennis for this little family here.’

  Mum and Dad looked astonished.

  ‘Well, you did all seem to be a bit...stressed,’ mumbled Gran.

  Luckily for her, at that very minute we heard someone coming up the front steps. It was Matt.

  ‘I just came to see how Dennis is doing,’ he said.

  ‘How nice!’ goes Mum. ‘Come in and have some pudding.’

  Pudding was Mum’s famous rhubarb upside-down cake, where you take a perfectly nice cake and float it on a stringy soup of revolting rhubarb. Bad timing, Matt!

  Sam stood huffing behind the safety gate. You could tell he was getting a whiff of something much more interesting than rhubarb.

  ‘Will Dennis be all right with Sam?’ Matt asked.

  ‘I should think so,’ said Mum, ‘but it might be best if he stays outside until after we’ve eaten.’

  Matt left Sam on the front step and came inside. He squeezed in next to Primrose.

  ‘You were awesome when Dennis went missing,’ he said to her. ‘Shouting out like that, getting everyone together, organising the search. You were amazing.’

  Primrose did a sort of sob of joy and flung herself at him. He caught her like some giant floppy beach-ball and held on. It looked like Matt was back.

  Matt and Primrose sat beaming at each other while Mum turned the rhubarb upside-down cake out onto a big plate and Dad microwaved the custard.

  You can choose your friends, Gran said, it’s just your family you’re stuck with. Matt had a chance to stay away from Primrose but he chose to come back. It was a bit mysterious, but brilliant, especially as we might need someone to help pick up the pieces when the exam results came out.

  After supper Matt let Sam in. Dennis shot into his house and wouldn’t come out. He kept thumping his feet, making the boxes rattle.

  ‘Lie down, Sam,’ said Matt. Sam lay down and I sat beside him, stroking his wiry old fur. After about five hundred hours Dennis finally plucked up the courage to peep out of one of his windows.

  Sam’s nose twitched and his ears went up.

  ‘Stay,’ said Matt. ‘Good boy.’

  Dennis crept out of his front door, flattening his body to the floor. He stood stock still, staring at Sam.

  ‘This is Sam,’ I told him. I put one hand on Sam’s back and held the other one out towards Dennis. Dennis came to sniff my fingers. He sniffed all the way along my arm. Then he started sniffing Sam. Sam kept completely still, looking up at Matt.

  See, that’s the thing about Sam. He’s clever. He understands. He knows what you want him to do, not like Dennis who’s adorable but dizzy. They were chalk and cheese, like Jess and Toby at school when you came to think about it – Jess so brainy and Toby so practical. I didn’t love one more than the other – I wanted them both.

  Dennis was getting bolder. He sniffed all the way along Sam’s side. He started to nibble his fur! Sam was giving Matt his do-I-really-have-to-put-up-with-this? look.

  Matt gave Sam the slightest little nod and Sam stood up. Dennis froze. It’s what rabbits do, because they think if they keep completely still you can’t see them. Of course, it works better with brown rabbits in the wild.

  Sam sniffed him. He prodded him with his nose. Then he sat down again.

  ‘They’re going to be friends,’ said Matt.

  Later, I took Sam for a walk. The sun was going down over the sea but the air was still warm. I stood at the top of the steps while he slowly worked his way down. Then we set off towards the harbour together.

  Sam stopped every five seconds to have a sniff around and that meant I had to slow down too. I started to notice things; the petals falling off the roses outside Crab Apple Cottage, two cigarette ends wedged between the cobbles, a spider’s web shuddering in a gateway.

  When you walk with Sam you don’t only start to notice things – you start to think about things too. I thought about the wishes I had written down on my piece of paper. I remembered Gran saying those were the kind of wishes that won’t work. I had felt so fed up when she said that, but now I was glad.

  If Dad hadn’t been lazing around reading his paper, scoffing and dropping his biscuit, no-one would have noticed Dennis was missing. And if he hadn’t wasted so much time messing around when he was a boy he would never have learnt how to throw stones and shin up trees and jump down off eight-foot walls. A lazy old lion might sleep most of the day, but watch out when he springs into action!

  If Primrose hadn’t been such a drama queen she would have been too embarrassed, like me, to shout out at the top of her lungs and make everyone come running. We would have knocked on doors and politely asked passers-by if they had seen him, and then we wouldn’t have got to him in time, before the cat closed in.

  If Mum hadn’t been working her socks off cutting grass all over Polgotherick the people selling Nash House wouldn’t have heard of Garden Angels and then none of us would have known about the gap in the wall and the parsley on the other side.

  And if Gran wasn’t an ideas person we would never have got Dennis.

  ‘It’s a surprising thing,’ I said to Sam, as we sat down on the harbour wal
l. ‘But I suddenly do feel happy to have the family I’ve got.’

  I’m sure he understood.

  Also by Jenny Alexander

  How 2B Happy :-)

  Get the happy habit! Bursting with funny stories, things to do and great advice, this is a brilliant book for anyone who wants to feel good and get the most out of life.

  ISBN 9780713675597

  This electronic edition published in February 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Text copyright © 2011 Jenny Alexander

  Illustrations copyright © 2011 Ella Okstad

  First published 2011 by A & C Black

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square,

  London, WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  The right of Jenny Alexander and Ella Okstad to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN 978-1-4081-6586-7

  Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books.

  You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers

  Will Gran move back to Polgotherick? Will Mr Kaminski still have time to help Dad with the problem page? And will Peony still choose Toby and Jess when the cool kids at school want to be her friends? Find out what happens next in:

  How to Get the Friends You Want by Peony Pinker

  ISBN 9781408152362

  Read on for a sneak preview...

  Chapter 1

  Dad on Breakfast-time TV and Dennis’s Mad Dash

  You know when something exciting happens first thing in the morning and you just can’t wait to get to school and tell your friends?

  But then your rabbit, Dennis, kicks orange juice all over your big sister’s school bag and she gets in a bad mood and says, ‘What friends?’

  Well, that’s what happened to me the day that Dad got on breakfast-time TV.

  It was still dark outside when I woke up but there was a strip of light under the door so I knew someone else was already up. It couldn’t be Primrose because she’s as sluggish as a sloth first thing in the morning. I read about sloths in ‘Animals of the World’. They move so slowly they actually get moss growing on them – true story.

  I put my dressing-gown and slippers on and went downstairs. There was no-one in the sitting room, which is on the floor below my and Primrose’s bedrooms, so I went on down the next flight of stairs to the kitchen. All the houses in Harbour Row are very tall and thin.

  Mum was sitting at the table eating a slice of toast.

  ‘You’re up nice and early,’ she said. ‘Well I suppose it isn’t every day a person’s dad gets on breakfast-time TV!’

  She got up to put some more toast on. ‘I just hope he makes it... You know what he’s like.’

  One of Dad’s favourite mottoes is, ‘Better late than having to set the alarm,’ so the chance of him getting to the studios by 7 o’clock wasn’t high. I was actually half hoping he wouldn’t manage it because, under the circumstances, he would almost certainly make a fool of himself if he did.

  ‘I’d better wake Primrose up,’ Mum said, glancing at the clock. ‘She’d hate to miss it.’

  She went off upstairs and I gave Dennis a corner of my toast. Rabbits are supposed to like lettuce and leaves but he prefers bread and biscuits. Maybe it’s an indoor-rabbit thing.

  When Mum came back down she made some tea and we took it upstairs to the sitting room to drink in front of the TV. We shut the stair gate so Dennis couldn’t come up. He mostly lives in the kitchen because it’s one hundred percent rabbit-proof, unlike the rest of the house. Dad’s made gates across the front and back doors as well as the stairs, to keep him in.

  The book says rabbits are fully house-trainable, which is true. What the book doesn’t tell you is that your fully-house-trained rabbit is like a chewing machine. He’ll nibble through anything he can get to – furniture, wires, floor coverings, door frames. He’ll even nibble the plaster off the corners of your walls. It’s like those giant ants on David Attenborough that march into your house and munch their way through until there’s nothing left but a few sticks and a pile of rubble. I’m not saying Dennis has got that far yet, but he’s definitely working on it.

  ‘Primrose!’ Mum yelled up to her again as there still wasn’t any sound of movement from her bedroom. ‘It’s going to be on any minute!’

  There was a crash and a loud groan, followed by a grumble. A slow th...ump-th...ump on the stairs, and about fifty hours later, Primrose appeared. Her eyes were half-closed and her hair was all over the place.

  ‘W-what’s going on?’

  ‘Dad’s on breakfast time TV – remember?’ said Mum.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ goes Primrose. ‘Have I got time to get some breakfast?’

  ‘If you’re quick.’

  Primrose quick? Fat chance! She staggered down to the kitchen, mumbling and rubbing her eyes. We heard her fumbling around. The programme started with some clips of what was coming up. Dad hadn’t only got there in time – he was going to be the first one on the sofa.

  Mum called down to Primrose that she’d better hurry up or she would miss it.

  ‘Our first guest this morning is Dave Pinker, the man behind the Dear Daphne page on the Three Towns Gazette. Dave was last night voted Best Agony Aunt of the Year at the prestigious Association of Agony Aunts Annual Presentation Dinner!’

  Primrose arrived just in time as the camera panned across to Dad. She had a bowl of cereal in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other. She put the orange juice on the floor by her feet so she could eat the cereal once she had geared herself up to it. Like I said, in the mornings Primrose is slo-o-o-o-w.

  ‘So, Dave,’ said the presenter. ‘Congratulations on winning this award. What, would you say, is the secret of being a great agony aunt?’

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Dad said, with a modest shrug.

  It was true – he didn’t have a clue.

  And don’t miss Peony’s first hilarious outing...

  How to Get What You Want by Peony Pinker

  Peony wants a lot of things. She wants a dog, she wants her dad to stop being the world’s worst agony aunt, and she really wants to get rid of Primrose’s horrible best friend Bianca. Then Mr Kaminski next door tells her the secret of how to get what you want, and Peony decides it’s time to put a stop to Bianca at last.

  ISBN 9781408132876