Trixie Fights For Furry Rights

by Ros Asquith

  “And now you never read to me. You only ever read to Tomato!”

  Mum looked stricken. “Would you like me to?”

  “Er, yes,” I said, because suddenly I really liked the idea of being tucked up warm and cosy with someone reading to me about a giant rabbit. “But Dad does it better.” This was true. Dad always used to read putting on all the voices and sometimes adding silly words to make me laugh, while Mum always read as though her life depended on getting to the end of the book and then slamming it shut. “You were always in a hurry.”

  “Oh dear. Was I? I suppose I always am,” said Mum sadly, looking at her watch. “And now I’m late as usual.”

  “Late for what? It’s six thirty in the evening!”

  “Parents’ meeting.” And she was off.

  “How do you teach kids to read?” I bellowed at her back.

  “With patience!” she screamed back.

  Next morning, Dinah and Chloe grabbed me on the way to school. “Do you know who she is, that Goodchild woman?” Dinah said excitedly.

  “A monster,” I said.

  “Right!” said Dinah. “My mum knows all about her. She’s apparently always in the papers, filthy rich, winning awards for this and that. Her family runs Goodchild’s clothes business. You’re probably wearing something of hers right now.”

  I shivered and looked myself up and down. I couldn’t see anything that looked obviously as if it had once been a puppy, though I was a bit worried about my trainers.

  “And Goodchilds make a lot of parka jackets. And you know what THAT means!” said Dinah.

  “Erm, not exactly…”

  “Parkas have fur collars!”

  “But it’s fake fur, isn’t it? Mostly?” I said hopefully.

  “Well, that’s what it says on the LABEL…But I looked on the Internet and it says some of these coats have fur made from dogs and cats!”

  Help.

  “Look, I hate her all right, but we don’t know for sure that she makes her stuff out of pets,” I wibbled.

  “Aha,” said Dinah. “But I’m going to find out.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to ring up Lady Horrible and tell her I’ve got a big supply of dog and cat fur, is she interested? If she is, we’ve got her!”

  Dinah is Very Extremely brilliant at doing other people’s voices – she is bound to be a world-famous actress one day, so if anyone could be a fake Fur Bandit and fool Lady Dragon, she could. But I was still worried.

  “It’s a great plan, but even if she is an animal murderer, it won’t stop my mum selling the puppies to somebody else,” I said gloomily. “That’s why I’ve still got to prove they’re just as human as we are.”

  “How’s that going?” Chloe asked me. I caught Dinah winking at her.

  “Not very well,” I said. “I think maybe Bonzo has learning difficulties. But I’m not going to give up yet.”

  “Maybe you’re not showing them something that relates to their lives,” Chloe said.

  “Are you mocking me?” I said, waiting for another blast of sarky jokes from my so-called friends.

  “No, I’m serious,” Chloe said. “You could do a book just for animals. Or a magazine would be even better!”

  “Yeah,” said Dinah, smirking, “with horoscopes for horses, called Horse-o-scopes. And pin-ups, like ‘Stallion of the Month’”

  “Yeah,” said Chloe, “and Doggy-Treat recipes, and beauty tips like how to style your mane and tail.”

  “Then if they won’t read that, they won’t read anything,” said Dinah.

  “You’re just laughing at me,” I moaned. “But I’ll prove it to you. I know! Let’s have an animal talent contest! To find the cleverest pet. Anyone can put their pet in, whatever it is, and there’ll be prizes. I bet we’ll find one that proves me right.”

  “Well, it’ll be a laugh, if nothing else, I suppose,” Dinah said. “All right. But first of all I’m going to catch the Red Dragon and unmask her for the foul animal-exploiter she obviously is. According to my mum, she got rich by getting the work done in places like China and Korea, where they pay low wages. So if I pretend I’m from China, she’ll probably talk to me. Trouble is, I don’t know how to do the accent.”

  “What about the Chinese lady in the chippy?” said Chloe. “We could drop in there for chips on the way home from school and get her talking so you can hear her voice.”

  So that’s what we did. Poor old Mrs Chang can’t have talked so much in years.

  “You’re all very chatty today,” she said as she doled out three lots of mushy peas and four bags of chips. (Chloe needed two.) Mrs Chang must have wondered why we asked her what her favourite animal was, whether she had a fur coat and all sorts of other daft stuff about running a business, how many haddocks she sold and all, whatever. We wanted to hear her say as many key words as possible including DOG and CAT and FUR and TRADE and POUNDS.

  Chloe and me were halfway down the street, with Dinah lagging behind, when we heard Mrs Chang shout, “Stop thief! They’ve stolen my battered sausages!”

  We leapt out of our skins and looked round in terror to see Dinah bent double with laughter. Dinah is amazing. She had only listened to Mrs Chang for a few minutes, and she could already imitate her voice perfectly.

  “You nearly choked me!” I spluttered.

  “But you are, really, a genius,” said Chloe. “How do you DO that?”

  Which made Dinah’s day.

  “OK, so I can do the voice. But what am I going to SAY?” Dinah looked worried.

  “Tell her you want to meet her to talk about a business proposition,” Chloe said. “Tell her you’ve got a big supply of…er, materials…at a very attractive price. That’s the kind of stuff business people go on about.“

  “And we could put Tony Scribble on to it!” I suddenly thought. “That reporter from the Bottomley Gazette who wrote about my nit farm. You know, the one who looks like a set of rabbit’s teeth held together by spots. He could listen in on the meeting and then blow her wicked plans wide open!”

  After about six tries, we found a working phone box. We didn’t want to be traced by using a mobile or a phone at home. Dinah rang the number the Dragon had left with my mum.

  “Hello, can I speak to Lady Goodchild?” she said, in her fab new Chinese accent.

  There was a long silence while the butler or maid or whoever it was, went off to find Dragon Lady. Dinah was all excited now and she was brilliant!

  Me and Chloe were straining to hear what Lady Goodchild said, but we couldn’t. All we heard was Dinah’s bit and it was cool. She said her name was Dinah Yen and that she had a supply of the kind of material that “busybodies” had made very hard to get these days. She was sure someone as successful as Lady G would appreciate what she meant and it was a once-only offer that was too good to miss. Dinah then nodded a lot and wrote down a date. Then she said “Goo-bai” and hung up.

  The date was this coming Monday.

  “Oh no, that’s parents’ evening,” Chloe groaned. “Couldn’t she do it sooner?”

  “She’s away in Korea,” Dinah said. “Don’t worry, it’s fixed for two hours before the parents’ thing. There’ll be plenty of time. I gave her the address of that old warehouse of my dad’s in Mink Street. Only one problem, of course.”

  “What???” Chloe and I asked.

  “ME, you airheads. How am I supposed to meet her? Do I look like an old Chinese fur-smuggler?”

  We had to admit she didn’t.

  “What have we done?” murmured Chloe tragically. We were now sure that Lady Goodchild was the spider at the centre of an international puppy-slaughter ring. Who knew what might happen if she caught us out?

  “Well, she doesn’t have to see you, does she?” I said slowly. “I mean, this is a big secret sneaky criminal thingy, isn’t it? You could hide in the shadows, tell her it’s better she doesn’t see your face. Then she won’t be able to give you away when she gets tortured by special Animal-Rights age
nts.”

  “We don’t want to scare her off,” Chloe warned.

  “All right, don’t tell her about the agents. But a secret identity would be OK. Crooks are always doing that in the movies. We’ll be hiding in the somewhere in the warehouse. Behind boxes or something.”

  “OK, I’ll do it,” Dinah decided. “Just don’t run away and leave me if things go wrong.”

  “We won’t,” I answered for me and Chloe. But I sounded braver than I felt. In my heart of hearts I thought we could always just not go to the meeting with the Red Dragon. But I didn’t want to say so, not yet…

  That night, when Mum had got back from work knackered as usual, I badgered her for more information about reading. (I wonder why they say that? Did they used to set badgers on people until they told you what you wanted to know?)

  She reeled out a whole long list about how complicated the process of learning to read is and how it takes some kids ages, and she told me a few bits and pieces about boring reading schemes and flash cards, and all sorts of stuff which I could feel going in one ear and straight out the other without pausing to stop in my brain.

  “But what’s the really earliest thing? You know, like a toddler might understand?”

  Mum frowned. “Well, I suppose the first thing I tried to teach you was to count to ten and to know your colours, but most kids start nursery not knowing those things and it doesn’t do them any harm. You can try to cram too much information into a child when really it should be just making mud pies.”

  “Why are you a teacher then, if you think kids would do better making mud pies?”

  “Someone’s got to do it,” groaned Mum. “Now, off to bed.”

  I couldn’t sleep for worrying. I kept thinking that animals have the right to be free, like kids do, so why force them into disgustrous schools and stop them from running about sniffing each other’s bottoms?

  On the other hand, I had to save the puppies from the Red Dragon, and how else could I do that except by proving they understand stuff as much as a child does?

  Eeek.

  But the next day I had a whole lot more to worry about.

  “Won’t we just get the same bunch of losers who turned up to the Amazing Talking Dog show?” Dinah asked.

  Me, Dinah and Chloe were sitting on my bed trying to design a poster to advertise The Great Genius Animal Contest which we’d decided to hold on Saturday. You might remember the Talking Dog Show from my first fantastic book, The Amazing Doggy Yap Star. It ended in a series of unfortunate events.

  “Do you remember Gertrude the curtain-eating goat?” said Dinah.

  “Yes, and Humphrey the harpooning hamster. And the ham sandwich getting wedged in your mum’s CD player. And the bath full of chicken feathers,” I nodded.

  “And Orrible Orange Orson dissolving a slug with salt,” added Chloe, shivering.

  “Euk. Well, anyway, this won’t be anything like that,” I said. “That was about doing stupid tricks. This is about having real intelligence. And we’ll do it outside, in the park. We can use the bandstand as a stage so we can’t wreck the place. We’re not charging money either – we’re just finding the cleverest animal in Bottomley.”

  “So we can teach it Shakespeare in, erm, just ten days,” said Dinah.

  “It was SIGN LANGUAGE the chimpanzees learnt!” I shouted. “I am fed up with you not believing any of this.”

  “What about prizes?” said Dinah, deciding to avoid the argument for once.

  “How about that horrible orange party dress your auntie gave you? The one that was two sizes too big,” I suggested.

  “Ohmigod, yes,” Dinah gasped, ‘it almost fits me now, so I’ve run out of excuses for not wearing it. If we give it away I can say I just got felt-tip on it accidentally and had to throw it away. Bit of a rubbish prize though, isn’t it? And supposing a boy wins? I can’t see Dennis or Sumil in that dress.”

  “Maybe William, though,” I considered.

  “Yeah,” Dinah pondered, “maybe William. But I think the dress is too disgusting for a prize. My sister’s got loads of stuff she never wears and loads of books she never reads and CDs she never listens to.”

  Dinah’s Big Sister Dora is not my favourite person, as it happens. She has none of Dinah’s wit, wisdom, talent or sense of fun. She is like a head teacher disguised as a teenager. I couldn’t imagine her having any stuff a self-respecting kid would want to win, but I said, “Great, and we can buy a fat box of choccies for second prize.” “Who’s ‘we’?” said Dinah. “I’m broke.” “We’ll think of something. First, we’d better do the posters.”

  Here are the posters we made. Mine is the best, as usual. But we decided to use them all for variety.

  Dinah scanned them on her mum’s fancy computer and we went on printing them until the printer ran out of ink, after which we stuck a message on it saying IT WAS LIKE THIS WHEN WE GOT HERE.

  Then we went out to put up the posters, mostly on trees and lampposts, although we persuaded Burly Bert the Demon Barber, Mrs Chang at the chippy and Mr Bunn at the bakery (yes, I know, it’s just like Happy Families here in Bottomley) all to put one in their shop windows.

  “My boy Shane could bring old Einstein along,” chuckled Burly Bert. “Talk about sharp. Opens cans wiv ’is teeth.”

  Who’s Einstein? I wondered. I had visions of an alligator, but it seemed the wrong moment to ask.

  Mrs Chang was interested too and started on about a friend’s cat who could skateboard. “It’s not about party tricks though, it’s about finding animals with a really high IQ,” said Chloe.

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs Chang. “IQ. Mine’s 156.”

  “What’s IQ?” I asked Chloe on the way out.

  “Intelligence Quotient,” said Chloe, looking at me in amazement.

  “So is 156 high?” I asked.

  “Mmm. Genius nearly,” said Chloe.

  “Then why’s she running a chippy?”

  “Clever people never earn money. They often do jobs like that,” said Chloe dreamily. I bet Chloe’s IQ is at least 170.

  I was encouraged by Burly Bert and Mrs Chang. I was sure there would be loads of brilliant genius animals in Bottomley. All we had to do was to find them and soon they could be running the world. I would vote for the Dog Party, no problem. They would definitely be the party to put grass over all the streets. Maybe we’d have to have a few cats involved to bury the poo though.

  We had a tough time persuading Mr Drugg, even though Chloe talked to him for ages about liquorice.

  “I can’t take posters unless you pay me,” he said.

  “It’s only for a few days, till Saturday,” I pleaded. ”All the other shops have said yes.”

  Mr Drugg swivelled his eye. “All the other shops aren’t making their living from a noticeboard,” he grumped. “If you pay, that’s fine.” Then he took a closer look.

  “Interesting…” he stroked his knobbly chin. “I may know of just the animal you’re looking for.”

  “Great! Then it might win the Grand Prize on Saturday,” I beamed. And eventually he let us put up the poster for free.

  We pinned loads more to lampposts after that and I saw yet another sad poster for a missing cat. It was pinned to a tree and written in red felt-tip, obviously by a kid, and it had gone all runny in the rain. There was a very small blurry photo of the cat, who looked like about a thousand other cats. It made you want to cry.

  “The plot thickens…” said Dinah, staring at it. She looked at her watch. “Gotta go. I’ll be late.”

  Late for what? I wondered.

  Chloe came back to mine and I moaned about Dinah and how she wasn’t taking any of this very seriously. “I don’t think she’s going to go to the meeting with the Red Dragon,” I grumped.

  “Well, maybe she shouldn’t,” said Chloe. “It won’t be very safe.”

  “Safe. All you care about is safe. The puppies aren’t safe.”

  “Well, show me what they can do.”

  So here�
��s what I did to impress Chloe. I put Bonzo outside my bedroom and hid a juicy Fidoburger under my pillow. Then “Bonzo,” I shouted. “There is a juicy Fidoburger under my pillow. Find the Fidoburger.”

  repeated this experiment three times, each time putting the Fidoburger in a different position.

  Each time I told him where it was and each time he went straight to it!

  “See? He now understands a whole lot of words.”

  Chloe was being very quiet and very not excited. Why is it that no one believes in my Great Animal Intelligence Project except me?

  Finally she said, “Have you tried to get him to find anything else? Like a book? Or, erm, a cup?”

  “No. Why would he want to find a book or a cup? He just wouldn’t bother. Like when Warty-Beak tells us to count lorries going past the playground. We don’t bother. We just make it all up.”

  “Ye-e-s,” said Chloe doubtfully. “So why not ask him to do it with a ball? He likes balls, doesn’t he?”

  “All right, if you insist.”

  It didn’t work.

  “Er…have you noticed dogs rely on their sense of smell quite a lot?” Chloe asked.

  Then the penny dropped. Bonzo could SMELL the Fidoburger. He wasn’t listening to what I was saying; he was just following his nose.

  Oh boo.

  “What about sign language? They’ve taught it to chimps,” I said to Chloe. I had a feeling this was something Chloe the Brainiac might know about, and I was right.

  “Well, you can sign all the letters of the alphabet and make loads of words and phrases. This is the one for Food:

  “The closed right hand goes through the natural motions of placing food in the mouth. This movement is repeated.”

  “Then you can do phrases – stuff like ‘What’s your name?’ – but I don’t think most of them would be that interesting to a dog. And, of course, chimps having fingers. Don’t know if you’ve found any on Bonzo, but most dogs haven’t got them.”