‘Of course, dear,’ Mum said. ‘It’s always good to see young people keen on their schoolwork.’ She nodded in my direction and added, ‘This one’s not so keen on his schoolwork, unfortunately.’
Sally looked down at me with a friendly smile as if to say, I’m your new babysitter and we’re going to get along great! But I wasn’t taken in. Every kid knows you can’t judge a babysitter until your parents have left the house. That’s when you really find out what you’re up against. But at least Sally was young. The old ones always try to get you in bed early so they can watch all their soap operas on TV.
Dad’s horn sounded in the driveway, meaning it was time to leave, and Mum got all in a fluster. ‘Now, my mobile number is above the phone so if you have any trouble just give me a call,’ she said to the babysitter.
‘Yes, Mrs Cake.’ Sally nodded responsibly.
‘Now behave yourself for Sally, Angel Cake,’ Mum added, kissing my cheek and leaving a big smudge of lipstick behind. I rubbed my cheek as she hurried out to the car and we both waved as they drove away.
‘Angel Cake?’ Sally chuckled as she closed the door. I shrugged as if to say, Don’t ask!
I’ve had a lot of trouble with babysitters in the past, the granny from outer space being only one example. So you can imagine I was very suspicious of Sally to begin with. But she seemed very nice and normal and even let me have crisps and biscuits while watching my programmes on TV. So eventually I stopped worrying and settled down for a quiet evening.
‘What’s that?’ I asked as Sally arranged all her books on the table and pulled a great big jar of brown goo from inside her bag.
‘It’s my science project from school,’ she said, turning the jar and studying its contents. ‘I have to hand it in to my teacher tomorrow. I’ve been working on the formula for weeks now and I think it’s almost finished.’
‘What’s it meant to be?’ I asked, gazing through the glass as the gloopy brown liquid churned and bubbled like volcano lava.
‘Runny Chocolate!’ she declared excitedly. ‘It’s a brand-new kind of chocolate that I invented all by myself.’
‘What’s different about it?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ said Sally. ‘Like the name says, it’s runny. It doesn’t set hard like normal chocolate, which means you can eat it with a spoon, drink it with a straw, or just dip your hand in and then lick it all off.’
‘Wow!’ I said. ‘Can I try some?’
‘When it’s finished. But first I have to add the secret ingredient,’ Sally said, glancing at her watch. ‘And I’m afraid it’s already past your bedtime.’
I grumbled as Sally sent me off to bed, but decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to give the-babysitter-who-could-make-chocolate any trouble. I knew when I was on to a good thing.
But as I lay in bed I couldn’t help wondering what was going on downstairs and whether Sally had added the secret ingredient. After five minutes of tossing and turning I decided to sneak down and see how she was doing.
Peeping through the banisters I saw my babysitter flicking through her science books, mixing different ingredients into the jar and scribbling things down in her notebook. She had big plastic goggles on over her glasses and looked just like a mad professor.
Sally stirred up the jar with a big wooden spoon and occasionally lifted it out to sniff the bubbling goo. Each time she added something new and then stirred the whole thing up again. This went on for quite a while until eventually she reached inside her bag and carefully pulled out a smaller jar.
The secret ingredient! I thought.
Sally held the small jar up to her face and the amber liquid inside seemed to glow. ‘Honey to make the Runny!’ she said to herself, and then slowly poured it into the bigger jar.
Sally stirred the concoction three times, set the spoon down, closed the notebook and took a long deep breath. She eyed the jar carefully, dipped her finger inside, twirled it around and scooped out a big fat blob of Runny Chocolate.
I held my breath as she popped it in her mouth.
Sally concentrated as she absorbed all the flavours and her frown slowly turned into a smile. She helped herself to another scoop and her smile grew into the biggest grin I’ve ever seen.
She’s done it! I thought. My very own babysitter has invented a brand-new kind of chocolate!
I had to get a closer look! My plan was to ask for a glass of water as though I’d been asleep and just happened to wander downstairs. I’ve done it loads of times with babysitters and they always fall for it. But as I approached, yawning and rubbing the pretend sleep from my eyes, Sally’s belly made a very unusual sound that stopped me in my tracks.
Boing, boing, boing, it went, like a distant bongo drum.
I completely forgot my excuse for being out of bed and stared at Sally as her belly-drum grew louder and louder, grumbling and groaning like rocks in a washing machine. Sally stared back at me with a very worried look on her face,
and then burped like a foghorn before disappearing under the table.
Sally burped and belched and blew off like a set of windy bagpipes. The table shook, the tablecloth billowed out and the jar of Runny Chocolate rocked backwards and forwards, slopping all over the place.
I froze to the spot, not knowing what to do, when the table suddenly stopped moving and everything went scarily quiet.
GULP!
I lifted the corner of the tablecloth.
‘Sally?’ I whispered, peering nervously underneath. ‘Are you OK?’
But Sally was gone. All that remained was a pair of plastic goggles and the stinky smell of rotten sprouts. I scratched my head and wondered what could have happened. Had she evaporated? Disappeared into thin air? Did the Runny Chocolate make her shrink or turn invisible?
Mum gets cross when I lose a library book, or a sock, or even a button off my shirt. So I could just imagine how much trouble I’d be in if she thought I’d lost a whole babysitter!
Then I heard something strange behind me, something burping and belching loudly with smelly sprouty breath and a tumbling, grumbling stomach. I knew it had to be Sally, but the shadow cast over me was a whole lot bigger than it should have been.
I turned round slowly to find Sally standing over me. She was now roughly twice the size she had been. Her massive shoulders were hunched forward and great heavy arms dangled at her sides. Her large mouth was full of crooked yellow teeth and she was dribbling all down her chin.
In fact the only way I even knew the monster was Sally was because she was still wearing pigtails and glasses.
The Sally Monster looked very confused, and as I smiled helplessly up at her she furrowed her massive bushy brows and grunted. Then she leaned forward and sniffed my hair as if trying to work out whether I was food or not.
The Monster was Sally my babysitter, but it was obvious the Sally Monster had no idea who or what I was, and if I didn’t do something quickly I could end up being dinner.
‘ARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!’
I screamed at the very top of my voice. Which, by the way, is the only sensible thing to do when confronted with a monster, especially a big, stupid one who doesn’t know the difference between people and food.
The Sally Monster was frightened by the noise. She clasped her huge hands over her ears and began running around the room in a panic, crashing into and crushing everything that got in her way.
It seemed the Sally Monster was more afraid of me than I was of her, so I had to try to calm her down before she wrecked the whole house. But when I tried to approach, she leapt up on to the light fitting and dangled there, shaking like a leaf.
The monster peered down at me the way a frightened elephant looks down at a mouse.
‘It’s OK,’ I said in my most soothing voice. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
The Sally Monster frowned at me again and I actually felt sorry for her.
‘Come down, it’s OK,’ I said. Her eyes widened a bit as though she was beginning to trust me, and, after a few mo
re minutes of coaxing, she eventually jumped down.
Holding her big heavy hand I led the giant, bumbling Sally Monster to the sofa and sat her down. ‘There, there,’ I said, patting her hand. ‘There’s a good monster.’
Sally was just beginning to calm down when our cat Fatty leapt up on the arm of the sofa and set her off again. The Sally Monster screamed and hid behind her pigtails as Fatty sauntered casually along the back of the sofa.
Fatty didn’t show the slightest interest in the Sally Monster. He had his eyes on something far more interesting.
The fat cat leapt from the corner of the sofa and on to the table with a thud, which was the most energetic thing I’ve ever seen him do. Being the laziest, greediest cat in the world there was only one thing he could be after. The jar of Runny Chocolate!
I jumped up and grabbed the jar before Fatty could stick his head inside.
The Sally Monster was still hiding behind her pigtails so I decided to get rid of the strange brown goo once and for all before it could do any more damage. I took the jar into the bathroom and flushed its contents down the loo. Phew! No more monsters for me!
But when I took the empty jar back to the table I was greeted by a horribly familiar sound.
Boing, boing, boing, it went, like a very distant bongo drum.
I looked down and Fatty was staring up at me with a very strange look on his face. The cat had Runny Chocolate stuck to his whiskers and all round him there were sticky brown paw prints across the pages of Sally’s books. The goo had spilled on the table and greedy Fatty had licked it all up.
As the drums in his belly grew louder, Fatty started burping and belching and blowing off like a mini windy set of bagpipes. And with each smelly outburst he grew bigger and stranger and scarier.
The Sally Monster peered at Fatty through her pigtails and smiled. An ordinary cat had frightened her, but now that Fatty was all misshapen and monsterish she really liked him.
They immediately started playing together, and when I say playing I mean charging around the living room, jumping all over the furniture and making as much mess as it’s possible for a monster babysitter and a monster cat to do.
I kept my back to the wall because I didn’t want to get in their way and end up squashed into the carpet. But eventually they wore each other out and collapsed on to the sofa, their burps and belches soon replaced with loud rumbling snores.
My mouth fell open when I looked around at all the mess. It was like a herd of angry elephants had stampeded through the room. Then I heard another frightening sound, but it wasn’t the boing, boing, boing of a distant bongo drum, it was something much, much scarier.
It was the jingle jangle of keys in the front door.
GULP!
Mum and Dad came in – and stopped abruptly. They looked at me, they looked at the room, and then they looked back at me again. Mum opened and closed her mouth a few times but nothing came out. It was as though she couldn’t quite find the words.
Eventually she did find the words and shrieked them at the top of her voice: ‘WHAT ON EARTH HAPPENED IN HERE?’
Dad quickly sloped away because that’s what he usually does when Mum raises her voice.
So I took a deep breath and told Mum the whole story.
When I finished Mum didn’t say anything. I think she needed a moment to take it all in. Then she wandered casually over to the sofa.
‘These monsters here?’ she said in a calm level tone.
I looked over and saw Sally fast asleep on the sofa with Fatty curled up peacefully on her lap. They were not big or burping or monsterish at all.
In fact they looked just like a regular babysitter and a regular cat taking a pleasant nap.
‘But…’ I said feebly.
‘I suspect there’s only one LITTLE MONSTER in this room,’ Mum said sternly. ‘And that LITTLE MONSTER is going to have a lot of tidying up to do in the morning.’
As usual there was no point in arguing because no one would ever believe me.
Sally woke up a moment later and even she couldn’t remember what really happened. And she had the cheek to be cross with me for flushing her science project down the loo.
Sally collected her books from the table and frowned at the sticky brown paw prints all over the pages – sticky brown paw prints that mysteriously got bigger and bigger. Then she peered inside her notebook at the completed recipe for Runny Chocolate and a tiny smile flickered across her face.
So maybe I’ve not seen the last of the Sally Monster!
School trips are generally OK. You still have to learn stuff because there are workbooks to fill in, but most of it is drawing, which I like doing anyway. And the teachers are in a better mood than usual.
Some of them even wear trainers instead of shoes and crack jokes, which is kind of embarrassing. But nothing is more embarrassing on a school trip than being the child of a parent who has volunteered to help for the day.
‘Oh, Angel Cake, you really are a mucky little monkey!’ Mum sighed as she licked a tissue and scrubbed it across my face.
The other kids giggled and whispered as Mum weaved her way back to the front of the bus, while I stared at my shoes and prayed for the ground to swallow me whole.
Before we left home Mum had given me a lecture about behaving myself and not making up stories about dive-bombing bats or any other nonsense.
(On the last school trip to the local caves I got into a huge amount of trouble with an army of giant bats – but I’ll tell you about that another time.) This time we were going to a museum to see things from ancient Egypt so I wasn’t too worried. How much trouble could I get into in a dusty old museum?
The museum was huge and as my class snaked its way through the different rooms I trailed along right at the back and hoped Mum would ignore me. My plan was working very well until I lingered too long over a glass case with a boy mummy inside and got left behind.
The label said the boy mummy had been the same age as me, which was hard to believe because he was only half my size. My workbook said people were much smaller in those days but I think being made into a mummy had more to do with it.
Before they wrap you up in bandages they do lots of things to make you shrivel up like a prune.
I was just wondering how crinkly the mummy was under his bandages when a terrifying sound echoed through the whole building. I nearly leapt out of my skin.
‘ANGEL CAKE! YOU’RE AS SLOW AS A SLUGGISH SNAIL!’ Mum shrieked. ‘WILL YOU PLEASE REJOIN THE GROUP IMMEDIATELY!’
With my face glowing as red as a tomato I hurried to catch them up.
The whole class had gathered around a big lump of yellow stone with squiggly lines and pictures on it.
Our history teacher Mrs Marsh was telling the class that the squiggles and pictures were actually ancient Egyptian writing called hieroglyphics, and if we turned to page six in our workbooks…
GULP!
I frantically rummaged through my bag but the workbook wasn’t there. I would definitely be in trouble if I owned up to losing it.
Mum would start sighing and talking at the top of her voice again, calling me a Silly Billy or Forgetful Elephant or something embarrassing like that. I already had two Angel Cakes to live down and I couldn’t risk any more.
There was nothing else for it, I HAD to find my workbook!
Mum was busy talking to the other teachers using their first names (she called Mr Jenson ‘Bob’ and she called Mrs Marsh ‘Mary’, which was very strange because you don’t like to think of your teachers having proper names). So I sneaked back the way I’d come, searching the floor for my workbook. Eventually I saw it next to the mummy case where Mum had made me jump. I picked it up, heaving a sigh of relief, and then I noticed something odd.
The glass case that had contained the boy mummy was empty!
I went round the side of the case. The lid was slightly open and there were pale dusty footprints zigzagging away from it on the shiny marble floor!
GULP!
Looking around I saw a few people wandering through the displays. But none of them was small and thin and wrapped in bandages. And none of them was screaming, so they probably hadn’t seen the mummy either.
There was a mummy on the loose!
I had two choices: I could either sneak back to my group with my workbook and stay out of trouble, or I could follow the footprints and risk getting into tons of trouble.
Hmmm…
Shoving my workbook in my rucksack, I set about tracking the trail of dusty footprints.
I hadn’t gone far when I found a strip of bandage. I picked it up and carried on a little further – and found another, and another, and another.
You’d think people might wonder why a kid was wandering around the museum on his own with what quickly became a big bundle of dirty cloth, but they were much too busy peering into glass cases and studying guidebooks to even notice.
Jake Cake: The Werewolf Teacher Page 2
