The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  It had grass, of a sort. I mean it LOOKED like grass, but it had a sort of nasty look in its eye, even though grass doesn’t have eyes. I suspected Cousin Pinkerbelle had been breeding really tough grass as well.

  Pink grass.

  Punk grass.

  Pink punk grass with teeth.

  And the roses, at least I supposed they were roses, didn’t look like any roses I’d ever seen before.

  There were bushes of roses, sort of loitering like a gang of prickly-legged muggers wondering how they could steal your purse and stick you full of rose thorns at the same time.

  There were climbing roses, clambering over what I supposed was the castle, except all you could see were leaves and thorns and more big blobs of pink, that somehow looked more like accidental bloodstains than the flowers you see down at the florist on the way home from school.

  There were rambling roses that had spread across the grass and looked like they were planning to jump on us as soon as we turned our backs.

  And all of the roses looked like they’d take a bite out of your jugular if you tried to sniff them…(Your jugular vein is the big one in your neck that carries most of your blood. It’s the best one to stick your fangs into, if you’re into that sort of thing. You learn all sorts of interesting facts like that when you have a vampire as a teacher.)

  And every rose was jellybean pink, just like the road, except for the leaves of course, which were green, but a sort of ferocious green, like a swimming pool that’s been left without chlorine too long and decided to have a life of its own.

  And the flowers were sort of mean-looking, too, like they were staring at you out of the corners of their eyes when you weren’t looking. (You may think flowers don’t have expressions. Well, you haven’t seen Cousin Pinkerbelle’s garden!)

  ‘Er, Phredde,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure about this garden.’

  Phredde landed on my shoulder and looked at the roses thoughtfully. ‘Cousin Pinkerbelle sure has a green thumb,’ she remarked.

  Green thumb? More like green tentacles.

  ‘What’s she been feeding these things?’ I asked.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Phredde carelessly. ‘Maybe they just feed themselves.’

  Great. They probably captured burglars and postmen and trapped them with their thorns and then digested them.

  I eyed the nearest rose warily. It gazed back at me with a blank bloodthirsty pink glare.

  ‘Phredde, how the heck are we supposed to hack our way through this lot and rescue your cousin?’ I demanded.

  Phredde stared at me. ‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘You’re the one that knows the story.’

  ‘But Phredde…’

  ‘How did the Handsome…’ Phredde gave a delicate shudder on my shoulder. ‘How did the Prince hack his way through the garden?’

  I tried to remember back to when I was a little kid and Mum read me these dumb stories as a reward for not drinking the soapsuds in my bath.

  ‘I think he used his sword.’ I gave the rose next to me a look. ‘A really sharp big sword that went hack hack hack.’

  The rose failed to react. It knew I was bluffing.

  ‘Oh.’ said Phredde.

  I glanced at her. ‘Can’t you magic up a sword? Hey, how about magicking up a barrel of herbicide instead? We could splash it over everything then come back when it’s all dead.’

  ‘Pru!’ Phredde stared at me in horror. ‘Cousin Pinkerbelle would never forgive me! She won’t let anyone even pick the flowers in case they damage one of the new shoots!’

  Well, from the look of her flowers I would have thought Cousin Pinkerbelle would have been more worried they’d have bitten someone’s arm off at the elbow, but I didn’t want to insult Phredde’s family, or their roses. And maybe I was just being paranoid. I mean they were just flowers…

  ‘Okay, if we can’t hack the undergrowth with a sword, and we can’t zap the whole place with herbicide, how do you suggest we get inside the castle?’ I demanded.

  ‘Let’s try the back door,’ suggested Phredde reasonably. ‘Maybe Cousin Pinkerbelle left a key under a stone in the moat.’

  Which sounded easy enough, but first we had to find the back door. I had a horrible feeling that Cousin Pinkerbelle’s garden extended all the way around the back of the castle too—it was the sort of garden that once it had swallowed a castle, it kept it swallowed. I mean it wasn’t going to regurgitate it easily.

  But I just shrugged sort of peaceably and started to tramp my way across what might have been a lawn, if I hadn’t had the feeling the grass was trying to tunnel its way into my joggers and start digesting me.

  The problem with magic gardens is that they just go on and on…

  We slogged our way between the flowers for about an hour—well, I slogged and Phredde rode on my shoulder—and while we weren’t exactly attacked by mutant rose bushes I had the feeling they were thinking about it, and I was getting awfully sick of pink.

  I reckoned we were maybe a quarter of the way around the castle and there was no sign of a break in the garden at all. I mean if anything the roses over the castle walls were even thicker.

  ‘I’m pooped,’ I said to Phredde. ‘I want a drink and something to eat and something to sit down on and…’

  ‘Okay,’ said Phredde agreeably. ‘How about that seat over there?’

  I glanced at the seat suspiciously, in case it was really a carnivorous plant in disguise.

  But it looked like an ordinary garden seat, except it was pink, by an ordinary garden pond, with ordinary lily pads and a tiny pink fountain and even a couple of ordinary lilies. Pink, of course.

  It was all so ordinary I was worried.

  ‘Come on,’ said Phredde. ‘You said you wanted to sit down.’

  She fluttered over to the seat and perched on the back and went PING! in a thoughtful sort of way, and there was a bottle of passionfruit and raspberry juice with all those lovely drips down the side you get when it’s really cold, and a great bowl of iced watermelon and a giant sponge cake oozing cream and strawberry jam.

  So I ambled over to have afternoon tea.

  It was sort of peaceful there in the garden, sitting with Phredde in the sunlight slurping away at watermelon and passionfruit and raspberry juice and getting splodges of cream and strawberry jam all down my T-shirt.

  The only sounds were the occasional honk from the traffic down below, and the odd burp from the roses (I didn’t want to know what they were digesting) and the croak of a frog out on a lily pad…

  ‘Bruce…Bruce…Bruce…Bruce…’

  ‘Er, Phredde,’ I said.

  ‘Glup,’ said Phredde, her mouth full of sponge cake. She never accepts that since her mouth is tinier than mine, she has to take smaller mouthfuls.

  ‘Can you hear that frog?’

  ‘What frog?’ said Phredde, swallowing her sponge cake.

  ‘The one that’s saying: Bruce Bruce Bruce Bruce.’

  Phredde blinked. ‘Bruce?’ she asked.

  ‘Bruce,’ I agreed.

  ‘BRUCE!’ croaked the frog, as it suddenly splashed off the lily pad and landed on the ground by my feet. ‘Bruce!’

  I stared at the frog.

  The frog glared back at me.

  It looked just like any normal frog. It wasn’t even pink. It was sort of brownish-green with cream stripes and big fat googly eyes. Just an ordinary frog. Except this one was bigger than Phredde and it was glaring up at us.

  ‘Bruce,’ it croaked again.

  I tried to think of something intelligent to say.

  ‘Um,’ I said.

  The frog stared at me with its bulging eyes. Then it glanced at the sponge cake.

  Then it glared at me again.

  ‘Look,’ it croaked. ‘My name’s Bruce. What’s yours?’

  ‘Um,’ I said again. I mean it had taken me by surprise.

  ‘It’s just good manners to tell someone your name when they tell you theirs,’ the frog added, in a self-righteous tone.<
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  ‘Er…I’m Prudence,’ I said.

  ‘And I’m Phredde,’ said Phredde.

  ‘Good,’ said the frog. ‘I’m Bruce. Now we’re introduced.’

  He looked at the sponge cake casually. ‘You don’t have any of that spare do you?’

  Well, we’d only eaten about four slices of it, so I passed it down to ground level.

  The frog…Bruce…peered at it for a second with his froggy eyes. Then his tongue darted out and glop! Most of it was gone.

  ‘I didn’t know that frogs liked sponge cake,’ I said.

  Well, I know it wasn’t the brightest thing to say, but what else can you say when you’re stuck in a magic garden with a phaery, ferocious-looking roses and a frog named Bruce?

  ‘They don’t,’ said the frog. ‘Frogs mostly feed on small insects, and occasional greenery, though some species have been known to…’

  ‘But you…’ I began.

  The frog went glop! again with his tongue, and that was the end of the sponge cake.

  ‘I’m not an ordinary frog,’ he said, licking the last of the cream and strawberry jam off his chin.

  Well, of course he wasn’t. He lived in a magic garden, for one thing. AND he spoke English. Even though I don’t know much about frogs I do know that most just speak frog.

  ‘I’m in disguise,’ said Bruce conversationally. He hopped up onto the seat beside me.

  I moved away a bit…just a little bit, so he wouldn’t think I was rude. I mean I know frogs don’t really give you warts, but still…

  ‘What are you in disguise as?’ I asked.

  ‘A frog of course,’ said Bruce, affronted. ‘Can’t you tell? Actually I’m a Crinea signifera. Crinea means lily pad…well it might mean that, no one’s quite sure. And signifera means sign bearer, which refers to my markings. Actually the markings of all the Crinea frogs can vary considerably. You’ll find that…’

  ‘No no no,’ I interrupted the lecture. ‘I don’t mean what are you now! I mean, what were you before you were disguised.’

  ‘Me? I’m a handsome prince,’ said Bruce. That’s when Phredde screamed.

  It took a while to calm Phredde down.

  Meanwhile Bruce finished off the iced watermelon and was just starting on the passionfruit and raspberry juice (I’d have known he wasn’t a real frog by then even if he hadn’t told me—I bet real frogs don’t know how to drink out of bottles).

  ‘Hey,’ he asked. ‘Is there any more sponge cake?’

  ‘No!’ said Phredde indignantly.

  She fluttered up onto the top of my head…she only does that when she’s really furious…and gazed down at him. ‘And if we’d known you were a handsome prince we wouldn’t have given you any to start with. So there.’

  The frog…Bruce…blinked. It was a sort of frog-like blink, but it was human too. I guess frogs don’t blink the way we do.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked. He sounded hurt.

  ‘Handsome princes. Huh!’ snorted Phredde from her position on top of my head.

  ‘It’s not my fault I’m a handsome prince,’ said Bruce. ‘Anyway, that’s why I changed myself into a frog.’

  ‘Er…why?’ I asked

  Bruce peered at me through his froggy eyes. ‘To escape from the Princesses of course. You know what my mum has by her bedside?’

  ‘I can guess,’ I said.

  ‘The Directory of Phaery Princesses!’ exclaimed Bruce indignantly, as though he hadn’t heard me. ‘Phaery Princesses!! Yuk! Can you imagine anything worse?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Phredde. ‘Handsome princes.’

  Bruce stared at her suspiciously. You could see that the thought had just occurred to him.

  ‘You’re not…’ he began.

  ‘She is,’ I said. ‘Phredde, meet the Handsome Prince. Bruce, meet the Phaery Princess.’

  And then I bowed, just like Mrs Olsen showed us how to do after the Christmas concert at school.

  Well, you’ve never seen such dumbfounded people…I mean phaeries…or frog and phaery…well, you know what I mean.

  I sat in the middle of the pink garden seat and Phredde sat on one side, and Bruce on the other, both keeping as far from each other as they could.

  It was time someone did something. Namely me.

  ‘Look Phredde,’ I said. ‘Don’t you see what’s happened here?’

  ‘No!’ said Phredde.

  ‘Bruce is just what we need!’

  ‘He’s NOT what I need!’ flashed Phredde, her wings shimmering like a butterfly who’s drunk six cups of coffee. ‘You’re just like Mum! You…’

  ‘No, listen, you dimwit! He’s what we need to wake up your Cousin Pinkerbelle. Just like in the story. The Sleeping Beauty was woken by the kiss of the Handsome Prince…’

  ‘What! Me!’ Bruce gave a startled hop and nearly fell off the seat. ‘I’m not kissing any Sleeping Beauty. Yuk!’

  ‘Why not!’ flashed Phredde. ‘Don’t be so selfish! Poor Pinkerbelle’s under a spell and can’t wake up till she’s kissed a prince and now you’re refusing to save her!’

  ‘But if I get kissed by a princess I’ll turn back into a handsome prince!’ wailed Bruce.

  ‘Don’t you want to be a prince again?’ I inquired.

  ‘Course not,’ said Bruce. ‘I’d rather be a frog. I went to a lot of trouble to turn into a frog, and I don’t want some gloopy princess mucking it all up. Hey, did you know that frogs have been around for 180 million years?’

  ‘No.’ I said politely. To be honest I didn’t care how long frogs had been around for.

  ‘Well, they have,’ said Bruce. ‘It’s really great being a frog. Bruce! Bruce! Bruce!’ He gave his frog-like croak again. Well, almost frog-like.

  ‘Can’t you turn yourself back into a frog again as soon as you’ve kissed her?’ I demanded.

  Bruce fidgeted beside me. ‘Well, I suppose…’ he began.

  ‘But what about the rest of the story?’ demanded Phredde.

  ‘What about it?’ I asked.

  ‘As soon as Sleeping Beauty, I mean Cousin Pinkerbelle, wakes up she falls in love with the Handsome Prince and they get married and live happily ever after. I don’t want my cousin married to a frog!’

  ‘Married!’ croaked Bruce. ‘Me! I can’t get married! I haven’t even left school yet! Mum and Dad’d never let me! They’d have pink kittens!’

  ‘Well there you are—you’re safe then. We’ve got to risk it,’ I insisted.

  ‘What do you mean, WE have to risk it,’ muttered Bruce. ‘You’re not the one who has to kiss a princess.’

  ‘Look, if it’s the only way to wake up Sleeping Beauty, then that’s what we have to do. We can’t just let her sleep for a hundred years.’

  I gestured at the garden. ‘Look what’s happened to this place in just a week! If this garden’s let go for a hundred years it’ll take over the whole of Australia!’

  One of the rose vines behind me gave a twitch, and began to wind thoughtfully around my ankle. I gave it a kick.

  ‘Back off,’ I hissed, then stood up. I reckoned that I had to keep Phredde and Bruce moving before they had time to think up more objections.

  So off we went.

  I walked, Phredde flew, and Bruce hopped beside us while the roses watched and sort of licked their chops.

  Of course we still didn’t know how on earth we were going to get into Pinkerbelle’s castle. But at least the prince part seemed settled, so maybe the rest would sort itself out too.

  We’d gone about another quarter of a kilometre—that castle was BIG—and the silence was really starting to get to me. I mean there was no way Phredde and Bruce were going to say anything to each other, so it was up to me to get the conversational ball rolling.

  ‘Where do you go to school?’ I asked Bruce. (Yeah, I know that’s one of those drippy questions that adults always ask kids as soon as they meet them, but it was the first thing that came into my mind.)

  ‘Don’t go to school at the moment,’ said
Bruce. ‘Mum’s trying to find a school that doesn’t mind that I’m a frog. But most of the head teachers she’s talked to say they don’t have facilities for frogs at their school.’

  ‘Is your Mum a frog too?’ I asked.

  ‘Course not,’ said Bruce scornfully. ‘She’s just a normal Phaery Princess like everyone else. Except Dad of course. He’s a Phaery Prince.’

  ‘I bet our school would take you,’ I offered, ignoring Phredde’s scowl. ‘I mean no one pays any attention to Phredde now…well, not much attention anyway, not unless she fills the swimming pool full of green jelly just before swimming carnival or stuff like that. And our teacher’s a vampire too.’

  ‘A what?’ croaked Bruce in alarm.

  ‘A vampire. But she doesn’t suck blood or anything. Her family has an arrangement with the abattoir. Humans get the meat and the vampires get the blood.

  ‘Of course she says it’s a bit congealed by the time they get it, but luckily she’s a good cook, so they have blood soup and blood rissoles and blood sorbet and…’

  Bruce was looking a bit green, which would have been all right if he’d been a green frog, but he wasn’t, he was a brown one, so I changed the subject. ‘But it’s not a bad school, as schools go,’ I finished.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Bruce.

  He didn’t sound enthusiastic, but then what kid…or frog, for that matter…sounds enthusiastic about school?

  So we kept on walking…or fluttering or leaping, as the case may be…and I was getting hotter and hotter, and feeling like maybe we should stop for some more passionfruit and raspberry juice, with maybe cherries and lamingtons this time, when suddenly I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

  ‘Phredde,’ I said.

  ‘Mmmm?’ said Phredde.

  ‘I think that rose bush is following us.’

  ‘What? Which one?’

  ‘That one.’ I pointed.

  Phredde squinted at the rose bush. ‘It doesn’t seem to be moving to me. Anyhow rose bushes can’t move. I bet you just imagined it.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine it. I’m sure it was moving—I could just see it out of the corner of my eye. Then when I turned around to look at it properly, it stopped.’