The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  ‘That’s about as good as I can get it!’ I panted. ‘Have you found a rock?’

  ‘Got one!’ called Miss Richards from the back of the cave. She and Mrs Olsen rolled a great dusty boulder out from the gloom towards us.

  ‘Do you think the carpet will be able to lift it?’ worried Phredde.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘But it’s our only chance.’

  The teachers rolled the boulder onto the carpet.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked Phredde.

  She nodded. Her face was white and her wings were buzzing like a wasp gone berserk, which is always a sign that she’s pretty terrified.

  ‘Take care!’ I said.

  ‘S-sure,’ said Phredde. She lifted her chin. ‘What can happen to me?’

  Well, she could be swallowed by a rhoetosaurus or crushed by a falling boulder or drowned in dinosaur doo, but it didn’t seem helpful to tell her any of these things, so I just said, ‘You’ll be right!’ encouragingly.

  The carpet with Phredde and the boulder on it lifted three centimetres off the cave floor.

  ‘Higher!’ cried Miss Richards.

  ‘I’m trying!’ yelled Phredde. ‘It won’t lift!’

  ‘Maybe if we give it a shove!’ I suggested.

  Miss Richards and Mrs Olsen and I bent down and put our fingers underneath. ‘One…two…three…lift!’ ordered Mrs Olsen.

  The carpet shot up over the dinosaur doo out the small slice of daylight left at the top of the cave.

  ‘How are you going?’ I yelled.

  ‘F-fine!’ came Phredde’s voice, a bit unsteadily. ‘I just have to get behind and lift its tail then…’

  ‘Gggzzzzzzarrrrrmmmmfff!’ shrieked the rhoetosaurus, as a large, dusty boulder rolled off the carpet and into its…

  ‘Got it!’ yelled Phredde. ‘And it’s blocked the diarrhoea and everything!’

  ‘VVVVmmmmfffftttt! Zzzzppppttttxxxxsssstttt!’ shrieked the rhoetosaurus, bouncing round and trying to see what had happened to its rear end.

  ‘She’s done it! She’s done it!’ Bruce and I joined hands and began to dance around the cave—but cautiously, as that brown tide was still creeping in fast.

  Phut!!!!

  Bruce and I stopped dancing.

  ‘You know,’ said Mrs Olsen, ‘that sounded just like

  the noise of a boulder popping out of---’

  AAAAAGGGGLLLE!!!!

  There was the sound of large rhoetosaurus-sized feet galloping off into the distance. The flying carpet appeared at the lip of the cave again. ‘And that,’ said Phredde, ‘is the sound of a rhoetosaurus who’s had enough!’

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Mrs Olsen. ‘They’re an endangered species too.’

  ‘How come?’ asked Bruce.

  ‘Well, there aren’t any in our time,’ said Mrs Olsen. ‘So that makes them pretty endangered.’

  ‘Huh,’ I said, stepping back even further as the dinosaur doo edged towards me. ‘I think we’re pretty endangered too right now! Phredde, get the carpet down here NOW!’

  All of 3.19 seconds later we were aboard the carpet, and heading out of that cave—fast.

  Chapter 14

  Fishing with Phredde

  I felt like I’d never really appreciated fresh air before.

  We flew over the swamps and into the pine forest—well, they looked like pine trees to me, the sort you’d hang lights on at Christmas, but Miss Richards consulted her laptop and said they were auracarias.

  Anyway they were big and green and dark-looking, and underneath were ferns and other bushy things and all around us were hills with more aura-thingy trees and a soft blue mist coming down, so it looked like some twit had spilt flour which was wafting all over the landscape.

  ‘I wish I’d brought my cardigan,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it did say to bring jackets on the information sheet you took home,’ said Mrs Olsen, in a rather unnecessarily smug tone, I thought.

  The information sheet had also said we were going to the Big Koala Wildlife Park, not the Big Jurassic Wildlife Park. But I didn’t say anything, firstly, because Mrs Olsen is my teacher and arguing with teachers doesn’t get you very far (i.e. basically only to the Principal’s door) and, secondly, because a crowded flying carpet is not a place to have an argument.

  Miss Richards looked up from her laptop. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘Australia is still joined to Antarctica now!’

  ‘Antarctica!’ exclaimed Phredde. ‘Where’s all the snow then?’

  Miss Richards shook her head. ‘Antarctica in the Jurassic was a lot warmer than now,’ she said. ‘I mean than then…I mean than back in our own time,’ she sighed. ‘It does get confusing.’

  I nodded. It wasn’t just confusing. It was cold and damp and the magic carpet smelt of dinosaur doo—or maybe we did—AND I WANTED TO GO HOME! Or at least to the Big Koala Park and have a chocolate milkshake with extra ice-cream and a hot dog with extra tomato sauce and…and…and anything extra the twenty-first century had to offer!

  But it was no use turning into a wimp.

  I swallowed bravely. ‘How about we go fishing?’ I suggested.

  Miss Richards brightened. ‘What fun!’ she said. ‘I’ve always wanted to try to rig up a fishing line and hook out of everyday stuff!’

  Fun! Phredde and I exchanged glances. I’d rather be playing my Nintendo or sailing my pirate ship or…or just about anything that didn’t involve being trapped in the past. But it looked like fishing was the only way I was going to get any lunch.

  Well, you try fishing without a fishing line! Believe me, it is possible, because Phredde and Bruce and I did it—and Miss Richards and Mrs Olsen too, of course. But it took some work.

  First of all, we found this river, winding its way through the not-quite Christmas trees and down to this big lake. It was a prettyish lake—you almost expected to find a caravan park along the banks, except caravan parks weren’t going to be invented for another 144 million years. But, like Miss Richards said, it also looked like the sort of lake that big Jurassic-type human-, phaery- and frog-eating monsters would love to make their home in. So we avoided the lake and brought the flying carpet down on the riverbank instead.

  It was almost like a picnic ground, if you forgot that there was damp and squidgy moss on the ground instead of nice normal grass. And the flapping things up in the sky—but luckily a long way up—didn’t look like magpies or even seagulls, and no-one was going to cut down any of the trees behind us to sing ‘Jingle Bells’ under for another 144 million years.

  Apart from that, it looked pretty good.

  Miss Richards gazed around. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘First of all we need a fire. You three kids go and find some dry wood—there should be plenty under the trees and---’

  ‘Scream if you see any monsters,’ added Mrs Olsen.

  ‘Don’t worry. We will,’ I promised.

  ‘And we’ll,’ Miss Richards took a deep breath, ‘we’ll look up the laptop to see how to start a fire by rubbing two bits of wood together. I’ve always wanted to try that too!’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said. Teachers like weird things sometimes.

  So the three of us marched into the trees and Miss Richards was right, there was lots of dry wood. But eight armloads later (which isn’t really heaps of wood because phaeries and frogs can’t carry much and I was getting tired), Miss Richards and Mrs Olsen still hadn’t worked out how to get a fire going, even though Miss Richards was rubbing two sticks together like mad.

  ‘Maybe they have to be modern sticks,’ I suggested. Miss Richards glared at me.

  ‘Maybe if you just rubbed a bit faster,’ put in Mrs Olsen.

  Miss Richards glared even more.

  ‘Maybe it’d be easier to use matches,’ added Phredde.

  Miss Richards started to glare at her then stared instead. She dropped the sticks. ‘You have MATCHES?’ she shouted.

  ‘Sure,’ said Phredde. ‘Remember?’ she said to Mrs Olsen. ‘You said that we had to bring a jac
ket in case it rained and a hat in case it didn’t and matches to light the barbecue at the Big Koala Park?’

  ‘Why didn’t you say…?’ began Miss Richards, then just grabbed the matches instead.

  Well, a lot of words I’d never heard later (librarians must learn some really interesting words from all those books they work with) and in another twenty minutes (it still took a while to get that fire lit), the flames were blazing up into the mist and it was warm and, let me tell you, even the Jurassic looks better when you don’t have goosepimples.

  It was going to look a lot better when we had some tucker too.

  Miss Richards suggested we all tie our shoelaces together and then she made a hook out of one of Mrs Olsen’s bobby pins (luckily she wears this bun at the back of her neck that needs lots of bobby pins because we broke the first two we tried to turn into hooks) and Bruce zapped a nice fat beetle to use for bait.

  Ten minutes after that Miss Richards pulled in our first catch of the day.

  We looked at it.

  ‘It’s…it’s nice and big,’ said Phredde encouragingly.

  ‘And it’s sort of fish-like,’ I added.

  ‘The tentacles are probably full of protein,’ added Miss Richards bravely.

  Phredde and I threaded a big, long, thin stick through its mouth and out its bum and we took turns holding the stick over the fire till the fish—well, thing—was cooked. Till it was black in some spots and smoking in others and smelt cooked anyway. It didn’t actually smell of fish, but then we were in the Jurassic and there weren’t any chips or tomato sauce to eat with it either.

  The fire died down to glowing coals. We looked at the, er, sort-of-fish.

  ‘I’ll try it first,’ said Miss Richards. She broke off a bit of tentacle and chewed it bravely. We watched her, just in case she turned blue or something.

  Miss Richards swallowed. We waited to see what would happen.

  Miss Richards took another bite, so I did too, and so did Bruce and Phredde.

  I chewed, then kept on chewing. After a while I managed to swallow.

  ‘That was…um, delicious,’ I said bravely.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Phredde. ‘Especially the tentacles.’

  ‘Tasted just like chicken,’ said Bruce.

  ‘But you hate chicken,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bruce. ‘That’s why I said it tasted like chicken.’

  I took another bite. ‘It’s really not too bad,’ I said. ‘Not once you get used to it.’

  Bruce looked around for some beetles or mosquitoes. But the beetles had all gone—maybe they didn’t like the mist—and maybe mosquitoes hadn’t been invented yet because there weren’t any of them either. So Bruce took another tentacle and began to chew it.

  ‘By the way,’ he asked Miss Richards, ‘what are we eating?’

  Miss Richards shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Remember that we only know what animals were around in the Jurassic from fossils. No-one has found any fossils of this creature yet.’

  ‘Wow!’ I said. ‘We’ve discovered a new species. Can we name it?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Miss Richards doubtfully.

  ‘How about Prudence-osaurus?’ I suggested.

  ‘I like Phredde-osaurus,’ said Phredde.

  ‘Bruce-osaurus sounds better,’ argued Bruce.

  ‘Well, I caught it,’ Miss Richards pointed out modestly. ‘So it should be librarianosaurus.’

  We gazed at the remnants of the librarianosaurus, smoking gently on the fire. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I bet this is the first barbecue in the world! We’ve invented the barbecue too!’

  Mrs Olsen looked hungrily at the librarianosaurus.

  ‘You could try some too,’ suggested Phredde.

  Mrs Olsen shook her head. ‘Thank you, Ethereal, but vampires just can’t digest meat. Or fish. Or librarianosaurus I suppose either.’ She sighed deeply. ‘I’ll just have to stay hungry till we get back home.’

  ‘But what if…’ I began, then stopped. I didn’t even want to think about not getting home.

  I didn’t want to think about what might happen if Mrs Olsen got really hungry either. I mean, okay, she and her family had a really cool arrangement with the abattoir so they got the bl…, er, red stuff and the butchers got the meat, but I wondered if even a super nice teacher-type vampire like Mrs Olsen might start looking hungrily at our necks if she went too long without a decent meal of, er, red stuff.

  ‘Well, how are we going to get home?’ demanded Bruce, gnawing a librarianosaurus bone.

  ‘I have an idea,’ said Miss Richards slowly.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘How about Bruce and Phredde try to PING together? Two small PINGs might just make a large enough PING to get us back.’

  Phredde looked at Bruce then shrugged. ‘It’s worth a go,’ she said.

  ‘Anything is worth a go,’ I added, looking round at the not-quite Christmas trees and the rippling lake in the distance. I had a horrible feeling those ripples were not caused by the breeze because there wasn’t any. Breeze I mean.

  ‘Alright,’ said Miss Richards. ‘Phredde, you and Bruce hold hands and---’

  ‘No way!’ said Phredde.

  ‘I’m not holding hands with anyone,’ added Bruce. He glanced at me. ‘Well, almost nobody, anyway.’

  ‘Alright,’ said Miss Richards hastily. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter if you hold hands or not. But when I say three, PING. Alright? One, two, three…’

  PiNg!!

  Chapter 15

  Forward in Time

  I looked around.

  Gum trees! Lovely tall, white-trunked gum trees! I had never been so happy to see a gum tree in my life! I was so happy I could have hugged one, but I didn’t because I’d have looked like a total dork in front of everyone.

  The river had gone, and the rippling lake too, and every one of those dismal-looking trees (I didn’t think I’d ever feel really friendly about Christmas trees again). And there was grass! Sort of tufty, not really lawn-type grass, and I bet it had never seen a lawn mower. But it still looked just like the bush-type grass you’d expect a Big Koala Wildlife Park to have.

  ‘Home!’ I yelled. ‘You did it! Phredde, Bruce, you did it!’

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Bruce modestly.

  ‘Yes it was,’ said Phredde. ‘I’ve never worked so hard at a PING in all my life!’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said ‘We’re back! Let’s find the others! And the kiosk and the souvenir stall.’

  ‘We might even see a koala,’ said Mrs Olsen hopefully. She looked around. ‘Which way should we go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Richards. ‘How about we just jump on the carpet and fly in a circle? That way we’re sure to come to the entrance of the park somewhere.’

  ‘A slow circle,’ Mrs Olsen added to Phredde. ‘We don’t want to accidentally zap back into the past again.’

  Nothing much makes Phredde embarrassed, but she did look a bit pink then. ‘I don’t have enough magic left to PING us anywhere, remember?’ she said. ‘Look, I am sorry about taking us into the past. I mean, I didn’t mean to…’

  I stared. I’d never heard Phredde sound so apologetic before.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It was kind of interesting.’

  ‘And the prehistoric beetles were delicious,’ said Bruce.

  ‘I’m sure it was very educational for us all,’ said Mrs Olsen firmly.

  ‘I never thought I’d get to practise my karate on a rhoetosaurus,’ added Miss Richards.

  Suddenly a rumbling broke the tree-and-breeze-type silence around us. For a second I thought it might be another rhoetosaurus galloping towards us, but then I remembered I didn’t have to worry about rhoetosauruses any more. We were home—well, at the Big Koala Park anyway.

  And the noise was just my tummy rumbling.

  ‘Let’s get going!’ I said. I didn’t add, let’s find the kiosk and get a triple-decker hamburger with extra beetroot and a
banana milkshake, but that’s what I was thinking.

  So we climbed aboard the flying carpet again. It was a bit of a squash with five of us—Phredde can normally perch on my shoulder, but flying carpets get a bit breezy and she might have blown off, especially without any magic to divert the wind. So I was squashed between Miss Richards and Bruce, which made me kind of wish he’d change back into a phaery prince, ’cause frogs are sort of squishy to squash up to. If we ever started seriously going out, I decided, I’d have to ask him to magic himself into human, er, phaery form, but maybe big phaery form—maybe he could fix it so I was the only one who saw him like that too.

  ‘Last one to see a koala is a snot bucket!’ yelled Phredde happily, as the carpet rose above the tufty grass and began to zoom forwards. It was a sort of sedate zoom though, without Phredde’s magic behind it.

  It’s kind of fun flying a magic carpet through the trees, especially when you don’t have to worry about a rhoetosaurus bobbing out at you. In fact, I decided that riding a flying carpet was the best way ever to go through a Big Koala Park.

  ‘Hey, there’s a koala!’ yelled Bruce, pointing to the branch of a gum tree.

  Phredde snorted. ‘Koalas don’t have tails, dumb dumb.’

  ‘Manners, Ethereal,’ said Mrs Olsen warningly.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Phredde, not sounding sorry at all. ‘But look at it! That’s not a koala! It’s got a long furry tail and a great big nose.’

  ‘It’s a possum,’ I said.

  Miss Richards flicked open the laptop so it stuck into my back. ‘Actually I think it’s a tree kangaroo,’ she said. ‘How interesting! You only find them up in North Queensland these days.’

  ‘These days?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, according to this they may have once lived all over Australia.’ She peered at the tree kangaroo. At least it was doing what koalas do during the day. In other words, nothing much at all. In fact it was asleep. ‘I always thought that tree kangaroos were much smaller than that. This must be an extra large specimen.’

  ‘I think it’s great how you know so much,’ said Bruce admiringly. A bit too admiringly, I thought.

  ‘It’s just a matter of knowing how to look up the information,’ said Miss Richards. ‘You know, you should think about being a library monitor, Bruce, like Prudence and Ethereal. Any time you want to---’