by Hilary McKay
“They don’t mind,” said Lulu cheerfully. “I take home all sorts of things. They never mind. Even when I took home four rabbits all at once they didn’t. I’m always looking for new things for my rabbits to play with. They’d love your leaves!”
The Bossy Man stood thinking for a very long time.
“All right,” he said at last. “You take my leaves for your rabbits. I’ll give up the bonfires. We’ll see how it goes.”
“The Bossy Man is giving me all his leaves for my rabbits,” Lulu told her father as she brushed the dogs that night.
“All of them?” asked her father. “All of them! All those great heaps that blow in from the park?”
“Yes. It’s so he doesn’t have to burn them in a bonfire. It’s a Hedgehog Club thing.”
Lulu’s father groaned and her mother asked, “Are there anymore Hedgehog Club things we should know about?”
“There’s closing the gates,” said Lulu, ticking them off on her fingers. “But we always do because of the dogs. Not having bonfires. No giving them bread and milk because it makes them sick. And the New Old Lady’s slugs and snails. Poor little things.”
“Why are they poor little things?” asked Lulu’s mother.
“Because she’s been feeding them poisonous slug pellets,” said Lulu. “She’s killed hundreds! She told me! But she’s not killing any more. They’re coming here to live instead. The Hedgehog Club is going to collect them every day.”
“Oh are they?” said Lulu’s mother. “Well, please don’t show them to me when you bring them home. It all seems like a lot of work for one small hedgehog. Are you sure Mellie and the boys will help?”
“They’ll love to,” said Lulu.
Chapter Four
Autumn
After school was a busy time at Lulu’s house. There was homework to do, the two dogs to play with, and the rabbits and guinea pigs to feed.
There was a tortoise whose old brown shell needed polishing with olive oil and a parrot to be sprayed with a mist sprayer to remind him of long-ago African rains. And now there were slugs and snails to collect and gates to check and leaves to wheel in barrow loads from the Bossy Man’s house.
There was a tunnel now under the fence to Charlie’s garden, and another on the other side, dug by Arthur and his father. That was nice of Arthur’s father, who had just put a new fence all around his garden.
“He likes hedgehogs,” said Arthur. “And he said to tell you not to forget the pond in the empty garden. He says it should have a ramp so that if Sonic-for-Short falls in he can get out again, and he said to let him know if you want a hand making one.”
The pond was something Lulu had forgotten, and she was very glad Arthur’s father had remembered it. She helped Arthur and his father make a ramp out of a spare piece of wood and an old rubber doormat cut into strips, and all three of them crept into the empty-house garden to put it into place.
“How do hedgehogs survive in the wild?” asked Lulu’s father. “With no one to feed them cat food and collect them slugs and snails and rescue them from bonfires and make them houses and ramps and tunnels? Not to mention the leaves! How many more thousand tons of leaves do you think will fit into this garden?”
“Are you really mad?” Lulu asked him.
“Am I ever really mad?”
“No,” said Lulu.
At night, when Sonic-for-Short came out, every moment of trouble was worth it. Lulu smiled with happiness as he rustled through the dry leaves and explored under the ivy. Slowly, slowly the hedgehog, a little round shape in the evening shadows, made his way to the gap under the fence.
Then, suddenly, he was gone.
“He’ll be quite safe,” said Lulu to comfort herself. “He’s being a wild hedgehog. He’s doing what hedgehogs do.”
All the same, in the night Lulu often woke up to stare out her bedroom window, wondering. And in the mornings she could not wait to race out into the garden.
Had Sonic-for-Short come home?
Would there be snoring or not?
Snoring!
There was definitely snoring.
“He came home safe! He came home safe!” called Lulu to her parents at breakfast, to Nan down the phone, to Mellie and the boys on the way to school. “We let him go and he came home safe!”
Day after day Sonic-for-Short came home safe.
“It’s working!” said Lulu. She was so pleased that she didn’t care how many leaves she wheeled away from the Bossy Man’s garden. She didn’t mind how many slugs and snails she collected from the New Old Lady. She didn’t mind how grumpy Charlie became when she reminded him to close his gate. She didn’t even mind that Henry was being suddenly mysterious.
“I can’t help with the leaves,” he told Lulu and Mellie, “or the slugs and snails. I’m busy. So’s Charlie. Hedgehog stuff. Soz!”
“Soz!” said Mellie, staring. “Soz! Did you say soz?”
“Yeah, soz! You know, sorry,” said Henry. “I’ll show you when it’s finished!”
Henry swaggered away with his hands in his pockets. With his spiky hair and his puffy jacket and his little short legs he looked so like a hedgehog himself that Lulu could not stop laughing.
“Soz!” said Mellie again. “Henry is just not cool enough to say soz instead of sorry! And what is he going to show us?”
They found out the next day. A hedgehog house. A hedgehog house in Henry’s garden.
“A luxury hedgehog house!” said Henry proudly.
All of Henry’s family had helped to make it. Henry’s father was a carpenter; there were lots of spare pieces of wood stacked behind Henry’s shed. Henry’s mother had given him her old window shade for a roof. It had a pattern of bunches of grapes all over. Henry’s grandma found him a fluffy purple bath mat to use for a carpet, and a matching purple towel for a hedgehog bed. Even Henry’s hamster was useful. Hamster treats were heaped in a corner.
“They were my idea,” said Charlie.
“It’s a palace!” said Lulu.
“Fantastic!” said Arthur.
“Very purple,” said Mellie.
“I like purple,” said Henry. “But the best thing about this hedgehog house is, anytime I want to know if anyone’s inside I can just take off the roof !”
Henry took off the roof to show them.
“I wouldn’t like that,” said Lulu, “if I was at home asleep in bed and a giant came and took the roof off to see if I was in!”
“I’d love it,” said Henry, and he took off the roof several times a day.
Sometimes Charlie’s cat Suzy was inside.
“See!” said Henry. “Animals like it!”
Suzy had been very pleased to discover a private purple den with hamster treats inside, but she hated having the roof taken off. She rocketed away at the sound of Henry’s footsteps.
“If Sonic-for-Short comes to live here, you won’t keep taking the roof on and off, will you?” asked Lulu anxiously.
“Only very carefully,” said Henry.
Without meaning to, the Hedgehog Club had divided into different jobs for different people. Arthur checked the pond ramp. Charlie closed his gate. Henry added luxury extras (like doormats and a chimney) to his purple palace. Lulu and Mellie collected leaves and slugs and snails.
“We do the most,” said Mellie. “Unless you count Arthur’s XBox,” she added enviously. The boys counted playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Arthur’s XBox as Hedgehog Club work. They did it every day after school.
“Lucky things,” said Mellie.
The leaves did not take long, but the slugs and snails took ages, especially the way Mellie collected them. Mellie did not like touching slugs and snails. She picked them up with a spoon.
“Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight …” counted Lulu, as she dropped snails into her snail-collecting bucket.
“Two, ugh! Three …” counted Mellie. “Lulu, Lulu, help! They’re climbing up the sides of the bucket again!”
The New Old Lady covered her eyes at the sight of Lulu’s bucket and said, “You are very brave girls!”
“You won’t forget about no bread and milk?” Lulu reminded her.
“No, but it does seem ridiculous!” said the New Old Lady. “Our hedgehogs always ate bread and milk.”
“Should I get my library book again?”
“No, no, no!” said the New Old Lady hastily, and hurried indoors.
Every evening now, Sonic-for-Short set off on his trip around the gardens. He explored them all. In Arthur’s he posed for photographs. At Charlie’s he met Suzy, who jumped backward, bristling in horror. In the New Old Lady’s he was dazzled by flashlight, as the New Old Lady inspected her visitor.
“He’s very small,” she said to Lulu the next day. “Ours was twice the size!”
“What happened to yours?” asked Lulu.
“Oh, vanished, like they do,” said the New Old Lady. Lulu patted her hand and did not say what she thought.
“I’ve seen her several times,” said the Bossy Man, when Lulu visited to collect his leaves. “Are you sure you want all this trash for those rabbits?”
“Oh yes!” said Lulu.
“I’ve been pruning as well. There’s a great pile of sticks.”
“Rabbits like sticks to bite on,” said Lulu. “It’s good for their teeth. I can take them too if you like.”
Henry hadn’t seen Sonic-for-Short in his garden, but that was not surprising. He never seemed to see anything until he walked right into it. He had stopped putting hamster treats in his hedgehog house because Suzy ate them.
“Suzy eats anything except cat food,” said Charlie proudly. “Ice cream, jam, chips, and cheese!”
Henry heaved the roof of his hedgehog house and peered inside.
“Still no hedgehog,” he complained.
“He does come to your garden, though,” said Lulu.
“How do you know?”
“Hedgehog poo,” said Lulu. “Look! All under your trampoline!”
“What! That’s disgusting!”
“I thought you’d be pleased!”
“Why did you show me? Now every time I jump I’ll be thinking about poo!”
“I thought you wanted Sonic-for-Short in your garden!”
“I do! I just don’t want poo!”
Henry gave another disgusted look at his trampoline and said, “Anyone who likes can borrow it!” stomping off to his shed. He came out again carrying his skateboard.
“I’m fed up of this Hedgehog Club,” Lulu overheard him complaining to Charlie later that afternoon. “Poo everywhere!”
“I’m fed up of being nagged about our gate,” Charlie replied. “The second Lulu hears it squeak she comes around roaring like a tiger!”
“I thought you’d started climbing over it.”
“I have, but it’s no good with a bike …”
“The boys have stopped wearing their Hedgehog Club badges,” Lulu said to Mellie a few mornings later.
Mellie, who wasn’t wearing hers, looked guilty.
“And the Bossy Man never did. He just put it in his pocket.”
“Nan wears the one we made for her,” said Mellie.
“That’s because she’s Nan, not because of the Hedgehog Club,” said Lulu. “She wears it like she wore those pasta earrings we made her. And the acorn necklace, and the scarf you wove her out of parts of socks.”
“Nan loved that scarf!” said Mellie. “I made it specially on that weaving thing she gave me. I don’t know why everyone laughed at it.”
“They didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Only because I recognized the socks.”
Mellie sniffed.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got a cold,” said Mellie. “And …”
There was a pause while Mellie waited for Lulu to ask “And what?”
Lulu didn’t.
The pause became longer.
“Slugs and snails!” said Mellie suddenly.
“What about them?”
“Picking them up with spoons!”
“Mellie?”
“Every day after school I think ‘Oh good! I can go home!’ and then I think, ‘Oh no! I can’t. I’ve got to go and pick up slugs and snails with spoons!’”
“I thought you liked it!”
“OF COURSE I DON’T LIKE IT!” shouted Mellie.
“Oh.”
“And now I’ve got this cold and I don’t think it would be good for me.”
“It would! Fresh air!”
“I don’t want fresh air,” growled Mellie. “I want to go home and watch TV!”
Lulu became a Hedgehog Club on her own.
It was true that Nan wore her badge whenever she came to visit.
The New Old Lady smiled and asked for Hedgehog Club news.
The Bossy Man resisted the great temptation to light bonfires.
Charlie continued to climb over his gate.
Mellie asked, almost every day, “How’s Sonic-for-Short?”
Henry still looked carefully under his trampoline before he bounced on it.
Arthur began to save up for Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
But that was as hedgehoggy as they got.
Leaf collecting, slug-and-snail hunting, and washing up the empty cat-food saucers were left to Lulu alone. The nights got darker and slugs and snails became harder to find. The pile of the Bossy Man’s leaves and sticks in Lulu’s garden grew enormous. Lulu’s father looked at them unhappily. Lulu’s rabbits did not look at them at all. The New Old Lady hinted more than once that warm bread and milk would be just the thing for a small cold hedgehog these chilly evenings.
And then Sonic-for-Short vanished.
Chapter Five
Winter
When?
Lulu did not know. There were two days of wind when no one could have heard an elephant snore, never mind a small hedgehog. And then the wind was mixed with icy rain, so cold it was nearly snow. And in the middle of all this weather Lulu became ill. Her throat hurt and her eyes were sore and she ached all over, and then she began to sneeze and sneeze. So she was put to bed with ice cream and tissues and terrible yellow medicine from the doctor. And Mellie was kept out of the way in case she caught it too.
While Lulu was ill she could not look after her pets. The tortoise was asleep for the winter in a box of hay, but the rabbits and the parrot, the guinea pigs, and the two bouncy dogs all had to manage without her. Her parents looked after them instead.
“And Sonic-for-Short too?” croaked Lulu when she was well enough to speak.
Her mother and father looked at each other, and then rushed outside with a double helping of cat food and left it by Sonic-for-Short’s house.
“Was there snoring?” croaked Lulu.
“What?”
“If you bend right down next to his house you can hear him snoring.”
“Lulu, do you know it is almost snowing out there?”
“Is it?”
“Sleeting and howling!”
“Can I go and see?”
“NO!” said Lulu’s mother and father, but Nan, who had come over to see how the invalid was, actually picked her way down to the end of the garden and bent down to the hedgehog house and listened.
She was a good nan.
“I think I may have heard something,” she told Lulu. “It was hard to tell, but I think I might!”
In the morning I can see if the cat food has been eaten, thought Lulu as she lay in bed that night.
In the morning the cat food looked like terrible half-frozen soup. Hungry birds had found it and lef
t dozens of footprints in the icy mud. It was impossible to tell whether a hedgehog had been there too.
“When can Mellie come and see me?” asked Lulu in despair.
“Poor Mellie’s got this as well, now! Try and eat your soup!”
Lulu ate her soup. She swallowed her medicine. She tried so hard not to cough she nearly exploded.
“I’m better!” she announced, long before she really felt like doing anything but lying on the sofa, and before anyone could stop her, she wobbled outside.
She couldn’t hear snoring.
The latest saucer of cat food had not been touched.
How long had it been since she had last seen Sonic-for-Short?
More than a week!
Had Charlie’s gate been left open any time in that week?
“Are you still going on about that?” asked Charlie grumpily.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t leave it open. I suppose it might have blown open.”
“Did it blow open?”
“It might have. A little.”
Lulu checked the pond in the empty garden. The ramp had half sunk and was covered in slippery fallen leaves.
“You forgot about Sonic-for-Short!” said Lulu to Arthur.
“Forgot!” said Arthur. “Forgot! Do you know I spent almost all my birthday money on Sonic the Hedgehog 2!”
“I didn’t forget her!” said the New Old Lady proudly. “But I thought you’d lost interest in the poor little thing!”
Lulu shook her head.
“Anyway, I remembered!” said the New Old Lady. She sounded pleased about something. She sounded like someone who was about to explain they had been right all along.
She did.
“Every night this week I’ve put out a nice large plate of bread and milk!” she told Lulu. “And every morning it has all disappeared! So what do you think of that?”
The Bossy Man was just as bad.
“Bonfires?” he asked. “You think I’ve been making bonfires in this weather? I shoveled up the last of the garden stuff and put it in the trash.”
