Pup Idol

by Anna Wilson

  It was a funny thing – I had never liked Frank’s jokes much before, but that day he was being mega-amusing.

  ‘Listen,’ said Frank, looking a bit more serious, ‘do you want to go back to the obedience class tonight, or what?’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘Phew!’ he replied. ‘That means I don’t have to either. I was only going cos Mum said I had to help you out.’

  An idea was creeping into my head very slowly. I was not sure it was such a good idea, but it seemed a better one than waiting around for Molly.

  ‘Frank,’ I said, ‘maybe you could still help me out. That is, if you wanted.’

  I decided to tell him about my idea. After all, what had I got to lose? And as I told him, Frank started smiling again, and I thought maybe I had just come up with the Masterly Plan to end all Masterly Plans.

  11

  How to build an Agility Course

  Frank came round after school with Meatball and we announced to Mum together that we were not going back to Mrs Woodshed and her enormous Bosom. I had told Frank that if he backed me up, Mum would listen. And I had been right, especially when Frank said (quite surprisingly and totally UNPROMPTED by anything I had suggested): ‘It would be a pleasure to help Summer train Honey, Mrs Love.’

  ‘Well, all right then,’ Mum said in her most begrudgingest manner.

  And then Frank did a brilliant impression of Mrs Woodshed saying, ‘Sit!’ in a growly voice.

  Mum frowned and said, ‘Hmm, I see. She does sound like a bit of a nightmare.’

  ‘I never thought I would say this, Frank,’ I said as we went out into the garden with some ice creams, ‘but – thanks.’

  Frank grinned and I think he went a bit red too, but it was difficult to see under all the footy-dirt on his face.

  ‘So, what did you think about my Masterly Plan?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t watch Pup Idol and I’ve never done any of this agility stuff with Meatball,’ he said, ‘but if you think we can manage it, I say we give it a go. The only thing is, do you think Mr Elgin will mind if we bring our dogs into school?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘It’s for charity, isn’t it? And he said he wanted “unusual acts” for the contest – well, you can’t get much more unusual than two dogs doing an agility course in the school hall!’ I said in an exclamatory manner.

  ‘Yeah, all right!’ said Frank, getting quite excited. Much like Molly’s enthusiasm, my exclamatory manner can be quite infectious sometimes.

  He finished off his ice cream and then we started setting up the course that I had spent the weekend planning. Mum had finally agreed that I could do this, as long as she didn’t have to help in any way, and as long as I tidied up afterwards.

  She had actually looked quite pleased when Frank had said that he would help me. She’d even asked if he wanted to stay for tea. I thought that was rather unnecessary and a bit Over The Top, but I couldn’t really say anything now that he was helping me in the Talent Contest. Especially if it meant that we would go on to win and beat Molly and Rosie in their ‘gorrrrrgeous’ tutus.

  We kept Honey and Meatball inside while we set up the course. Meatball made a beeline for Honey’s basket and settled down for a snooze.

  Honey followed us to the door, and when we went out she watched us through the cat flap, her long nose peeking out as if to say, ‘What are you guys doing?’

  ‘We should start with a jump,’ I said. ‘What I need is a pole of some kind, and something to rest it on.’

  ‘OK. Have you got a broom handle – that might work?’ Frank suggested.

  I had never realised that boys could be so helpful and, though I dare to say it, nice. We went to the cupboard under the stairs where Mum keeps all the cleaning equipment and had a bit of a RUMMAGE – which means we moved things around a bit to see what was there. Mum hates me rummaging in the broom cupboard so I had to be careful not to mess up what she calls her ‘System’, which means how she has put the cleaning products and things away. This seems to be to throw all the brooms against the back wall of the cupboard and then prop them up with buckets and tins of polish and piles of rags. It looks more like a Chaos than a System. But even in a Chaos like this, Mum always knows when I have rummaged too much, so I had to be careful.

  Just as Frank and I had got everything that we needed from the cupboard and our arms were Full to the Brim with stuff, April came in through the front door. She had been at her office at Stingy and Gross or whatever it is called, and she made a big thing of plonking her briefcase down and sighing in a dramatical manner to show how tired she was after a day of flicking her hair and filing her nails and answering the phone in a posh voice.

  ‘What on earth are you up to now?’ she asked.

  ‘Not much,’ I mumbled, through an armful of brooms and buckets.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said April in her sarkiest of tones. ‘Does your boyfriend always go around with cobwebs in his hair, then?’

  Boyfriend?

  ‘Come on, Frank,’ I hissed, avoiding contact with his eyes in case he went along with the whole ‘boyfriend’ idea and said something to embarrass me further. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

  Frank followed me back out into the garden and helped me prop up a broom on two garden chairs so that it looked like one of the jumps on the telly. We made a couple of jumps like this. Then we made a seesaw with a plank of wood balanced on a log. For the tunnel, we got my old nylon collapsible tunnel which used to be tied on to a tiny plastic climbing frame when I was a baby. Now it was kept in the toy box which, embarrassingly I still had in my room. Lastly, we stuck a load of bamboo sticks into the grass to make a slalom like on Pup Idol. It looked really professional!

  ‘Just one thing,’ said Frank. ‘How will you do the slalom in the school hall?’

  I tutted and rolled my eyes to give myself time to come up with a good answer, as I had not thought about this. ‘We’ll use Blu-Tack or something. Honestly Frank – you really must learn to think Laterally instead of Literally.’ I don’t think he understood, as he just shrugged and helped me stick the last bamboo cane into the grass. Then he said, ‘Right, I’ll go and get Meatball.’

  ‘No, not yet,’ I said. I was quite enjoying doing some bossing around for a change.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cos we have to train one dog at a time, or it will be Utter Mayhem,’ I said importantly. ‘And as it was my idea, I think I should start with my dog first.’

  Frank huffed a bit, but he agreed in the end, especially when I said he could have another ice cream. While he was getting it from the kitchen, I got Honey and called her to come to the first jump.

  Monica Sitstill had said, ‘The maximum height of the jump should be as tall as the dog’s shoulders.’ I measured Honey against the broom on the chairs and realized that the jump was a little bit higher.

  ‘Never mind, Honey,’ I said. ‘Monica Sitstill probably meant that was how high the jump should be for those rescue dogs on Pup Idol. They’ve had a much more deprivational life than you, so they are probably not as fit. You are a pedigree dog, so I’m sure you can jump higher.’

  Honey will normally do anything for a bit of food, and I knew from watching Love Me, Love My Dog, and reading the book too, that treats were the best thing to use when training dogs. So making my voice sound Full of Authority, I faced Honey and I told her, ‘Honey – lie down.’

  As I said ‘lie down’ I showed her a treat which I then hid in my fist. Then I lowered my fist to the ground. Honey followed the treat with her nose, which made her nose go level with the floor, and then she lay down completely at which point I gave her the treat as a reward.

  ‘You are a clever girl!’ I said. ‘Now, you can have another treat if you do a jump for me.’

  I made her stay where she was, then I walked around the jump that I had set up and, holding another treat up high I called out: ‘Jump!’

  Honey looked at me in a puzzled kind of way with her head on one side, and
then she sprang up on her HAUNCHES (that is, her back legs) and for one JOYOUS second I thought she was going to clear the jump.

  But instead she came crashing through the broom, snatched the treat right out of my hand with her teeth, and flung me to the ground, pinning me down with her front paws and licking me all over my face.

  Frank of course came back outside at that very moment and laughed his face off in a rather unhelpful manner.

  ‘OK, you do it then,’ I said sulkily. He was most obviously not used to being in any way a Team Player.

  Frank still had half his ice cream in his hand, so he put the whole thing into his stinky mouth in one go and swallowed the lot in the way that only a show-offy boy can do.

  It turned out that he was not any better at getting Honey to do the jump though. He tried about a thousand million more times, but she kept crashing through it to get the treat. We both got fed up with her and told her off.

  ‘OK, let’s try something easier,’ Frank said eventually.

  ‘Yeah – what about the A-frame?’ I suggested. The A-frame was a sort of high-up walkway that we’d constructed out of three planks of wood so that it looked like a giant ‘A’. HENCE, as Molly would say, the name ‘A-frame’. Bit obvious really.

  Anyway, the A-frame turned out to be even more of a truly calamitous disaster than the jump. Honey would not walk up it at all.

  In the end, I climbed up it myself and held out a treat to see if she would come on with me.

  The treat idea worked, er, a treat! Honey did follow me, but unfortunately it was in quite a boundsome manner, and all the bounding and pounding on the planks of wood meant that the A-frame became rather wobblyish and then quite a bit more wobbly and then, just as Honey reached me and the treat, the whole thing collapsed in a heap with me underneath it.

  ‘Help! Frank! Help! Honey’s squashing me!’ I screamed.

  To make matters worse, Meatball suddenly appeared from nowhere, saw the heap of planks and Honey going crazy doolally and, with a leap of delight, landed right on top of us.

  ‘Frank!’ I screamed again. ‘Why did you let Meatball out?’

  Frank did not reply. He was helpless with laughter. Eventually I managed to wriggle and get my head out, so that I could at least breathe.

  ‘Har-har-har!’ Frank was actually roaring with laughter now, hopping around and pointing at us. ‘Now that is something we should work into the act! We could dress you up as a clown and then we’d be bound to win!’

  I wanted to say something suitably cutting and sarcastic and clever to shut up his stupid laughing and wipe it once and for all from his dirty, idiot face, but just at that moment Honey and Meatball’s rough and tumbly game sent them crashing into one of the jumps in our carefully laid-out agility course and then they went crashing through the seesaw and the slalom poles, until they had wrecked everything. I ran after them, screeching at them to stop and succeeded in being thoroughly ignored.

  Frank did not help at all even a tiny bit. He did not try and stop them and he did not try to save the agility course. He just laughed.

  So much for my Masterly Plan.

  I told Frank in No Uncertain Terms (which means I made it very clear indeed how I was feeling, which was sore and angry) that I would no longer Require his Assistance for the Talent Contest.

  ‘You are of no use in helping me to train my dog, and what is more it seems that you cannot even control your own dog.’ I said this with my hands on my hips and my nose in the air.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Frank, which was not the reaction I had been expecting, I must admit. I had thought he might at least say sorry. ‘Do your stupid agility course on your own. I’ve got a much better idea for the Talent Contest anyway.’

  And he stormed off, taking Meatball with him.

  So that’s all the thanks you get for agreeing to let a boy come to your house and for giving him, not one, but two ice creams.

  12

  How to Make Up After Falling Out

  Unfortunately I did not get on very well with the agility course once Frank had gone. In fact, that is what Molly would call a Serious Understatement, which means that under the statement ‘I did not get on very well once Frank had gone’ is actually another more truthful statement which is ‘I made a total and complete disaster-area tragedy of everything’.

  The truth of the matter was that none of my rehearsals for the Talent Contest got any easier the whole of that week. Whatever I did, Honey just did not seem to understand the tricks I wanted her to perform. I kept holding out treats and repeating the commands, just like they did on Pup Idol, and she kept running at me like a cow in a shop full of china cups and then she would knock me flying and take the treat.

  The final straw came on Friday, after yet another long week of being ignored by Molly and giggled at by Rosie.

  I got home and decided to have one last attempt at training Honey to go through the tunnel. I led her out into the garden and made a big fuss of her.

  ‘Honey, if you do this for me, I promise I’ll get you the biggest, juiciest chew that pocket money can buy.’

  She seemed to understand that I was being serious, because she put her head on one side and her big brown eyes looked right into mine as if she was really listening to me.

  ‘Honey, where are you— HONEY! STOP!’

  She had not been listening to me at all. She had been looking at Cheese and Toast, our two lazy cats.

  ‘HONEY!’

  They had gone for a snooze in the tunnel and Honey had decided to pounce.

  Honey always made the mistake of thinking the cats wanted to play with her. It was always a very BIG mistake.

  Honey hared into the tunnel after the cats, who started making a huge hissing noise, which normally means ‘Don’t come near if you value your nose’. When that didn’t stop Honey, the cats decided to escape and zoomed out the other side of the tunnel in a streak of black and white, like a pair of cartoon moggies. Unfortunately, Honey tried to escape after them, but she was too big to shoot quite so easily through the tunnel.

  She got stuck.

  And as if this wasn’t bad enough, she carried on running even though she was stuck.

  So now there was a red tunnel with a golden head and a golden tail, running around the garden, chasing after Cheese and Toast.

  Cheese and Toast are not the brightest of cats in the history of FELINE intelligence, and instead of running into the house or up a tree to get away from Honey-the-Moving-Tunnel-Dog, they panicked and jumped on to the seesaw. Honey then leaped on to the seesaw too, which made the other end ping up violently, and of course this sent the cats flying into the air.

  Cheese seemed to glance in horror at Toast as they were both catapulted in an arc across the length of the garden while Honey kept chasing after them, still firmly wedged into the red tunnel.

  I grabbed the hose, turned it on and started chasing after all three of my crazy pets, as I thought this might stop them in mid-tracks. But it didn’t, so I screamed ‘STOP!’ at the top of my lungs instead.

  It was no good. It was very bad, in fact – total complete badness and Mayhem.

  I flumped down on to the grass and burst into tears.

  And then I heard someone laughing. Oh great, I thought. Mum has come out to laugh at my latest disaster. She’s probably brought April and Nick and half the neighbourhood with her. After all, I am such a comedy show of hilarious Proportions. Or maybe, even better, Frank the smelliest boy in town has come back to GAWP and tell me again what a mega-clown I am.

  Slowly I stood up and turned to see . . . Mum and . . . oh no! Molly. She would have to come round at this precise moment and be a Witness to this total Disaster and Calamity, wouldn’t she? I thought, How am I going to talk my way out of this one? She is never going to want to be friends with me now that she, like Frank, has seen what a clown I have become. She will go into school on Monday and tell the whole class what a waste of space I am and how I am never going to win the Talent Contest in a mi
llion years with my pathetic dog-show idea and . . .

  I had forgotten that I was still holding the hose, and as I was thinking these sad thoughts I suddenly realized that Molly and Mum were getting completely soaked . . .

  Before I had time to panic and think that this was turning into the nightmare of all nightmares, Molly shouted, ‘WATER-FIGHT!’ at the top of her lungs and flew at me with a full watering can.

  I was now soaked right through to my skin.

  Molly was giggling so much I thought she might possibly split both of her sides in true life.

  Even Mum was laughing.

  ‘This is MEGA!’ Molly squeaked, and grabbed a bucket which she filled with water and threw over me as well.

  Mum then grabbed the hose off me and showered me and Molly until we shrieked and screamed, ‘STOP!’

  At last Mum turned off the hose and, still laughing her whole face off, she went inside to get us some towels.

  ‘We haven’t had a water-fight for like AGES!’ Molly said, throwing her soaking wet arms around my soaking wet neck.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. We hadn’t hugged each other for ages either. In fact, there wasn’t much we’d done together for ages.

  Molly seemed to know what I was thinking and looked a bit embarrassed. Then she said, ‘Is this, er, your act for the contest?’