by Anna Wilson
‘Come on, Honey-Bun. Come and see your lovely whelping box,’ I said in a soothing way.
herself heavily on to the newspapers. And closed her eyes.
Molly laughed. ‘Honey seems right at home already.’
It was fantabulous, I thought. Everything had gone really well with our preparations and we had had no worries about Honey’s pregnancy.
Personally the only problematical thing that I could imagine happening was April seeing Nick, which was obviously going to happen when he came to help with the births.
Then I suddenly remembered what Mum had said about making ‘someone else’s dreams come true’.
Was this all part of a Molly-style Masterly Plan cooked up by Mum to get Nick and April back together?
By Christmas Eve Molly and I were starting to get a bit jittery – in other words, we were beside ourselves with nerves and panic. It was Day 63, which meant the next day was D-Day!
‘What shall we do, Molls?’ I asked. ‘We can’t sit here looking at Honey all day.’
‘Let’s do some Christmas decorations,’ Molly suggested. ‘This place doesn’t look very Festive, does it?’
I agreed. ‘Mum’s been too busy working cos she’s taking extra holiday when the pups arrive,’ I explained. We had a Christmas tree in the sitting room, but that was it.
So we set to, distractivating
ourselves, using tinsel and sparkly things that we found in a box in the cupboard on the landing. Unfortunately it didn’t take long to finish the decorations, as my house is not very big. So we were soon back in the kitchen at Honey’s side, watching her every breath with worry and concern.
I didn’t want to leave her for a second, but it soon became obvious that I was going to have to, if I needed the loo, for example.
Molly was anxious that she was not going to be allowed to stay, as her parents were having a party that evening.
‘Mum always asks a couple of random-ish aunts and some neighbours,’ Molly said, curling her lip in a most disapproving manner. ‘It’s deadly dull and yawnsome and I have to be polite and answer questions about school even though it’s the holidays!’
I agreed that it was mega-unfair. ‘But surely she will make an Exception for Honey’s Big Day?’ I asked.
‘She’d better!’ Molly said, making her face look quite scarily THREATENING in nature. I would have given in to her if I was her mum, that’s for sure.
While we were trying to think of a way to get
Mrs Cook to let Molly stay with us for another day (and possibly a night!) Mum staggered into the kitchen looking severely UNSIGHTLY.
‘You two have been making a lot of noise–’ she said Wearily. ‘Oh! I love the decorations! . . . But . . . where’s Honey?’ she added, looking round the room.
Honey had gone from her basket!
‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘She was with us a second ago.’
We all rushed around a bit madly, looking for her. I hoped she hadn’t run away. I had read in Perfect Puppies that dogs in the wild will try to find a quiet spot away from the rest of the pack to have their litters. Maybe Honey had left the house to get away from us?
‘It’s OK, she’s taken up RESIDENCE in her den,’ Molly said importantly, coming out of the back room. ‘In other words, she has moved in there, which I think must be A Sign that something is definitely happening.’
‘Oh. My. Goodness!’ I cried, and rushed in to check on her. She had been pacing up and down but was now very quietly lying in the whelping box. I bent down to look at her.
‘Do you think she’s panting?’ I asked Molly worriedly, checking again in Perfect Puppies for ‘Signs That Your Dog May Be Going into Whelp’. ‘I am not at all sure that her breathing is in any way normal.’
Molly bent closer to Honey to listen carefully. ‘I think she’s just snoring,’ she said.
Mum stirred her tea with a biro, which she then stuck behind her ear. ‘I think we should call Nick and ask him to come over,’ she said in a vague and distractivated manner, pouring the tea on to her toast.
I nodded enthusiastically. ‘And Frank too,’ I said.
Molly started to breathe in deeply as if she was going to say something that would vastly contradiction what I had just suggested, so I quickly added, ‘Remember, Frank’s been through this all before with Meatball, so he’ll know if Honey is ready for the Whelping and Giving Birth MALARKY or whether she is just in fact snoring.’
Mum pointed the dripping-wet biro at me.
‘You call Frank and I’ll call Nick,’ she said, sounding like a policewoman in a highly Tense and Critical telly-type drama.
‘Don’t do that,’ said a quiet voice.
‘April!’ said Mum, jumping so high in the air she nearly smashed the dangly-down light that hung from the ceiling. ‘You’re up early.’
‘Yes,’ said April simply. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mum.
No one could think of anything else to say. Except Molly.
‘Is it because you are worried about Nick and the Bottom Shuffler?’ she asked. Mum and I glared hard at Molly, but she continued. ‘Cos if it is, you are being a bit silly, if you ask me. I mean, I’ve only heard about this woman from Summer, but she sounds like a Right Nightmare. Why would Nick want to go out with a Right Nightmare when he’s got a lovely girlfriend like you?’
What was Molly doing? I thought, the nerves and panic I was already feeling rising like a SICK SENSATION in my throat. ‘I bet if you had a Sane and Sensible conversation with him, you would discover that it is all In Your Mind and that Nick still loves you just as much as you love him,’ she went on, ignoring me staring at her so hard my eyeballs were beginning to hurt. ‘In fact, why don’t you call him now and use Honey as an excuse to get him round here, and then we’ll give you some Space to sort it all out?’
Where in all the earth did Molly learn how to be so psychiatrical about other people’s relationships? I wondered. I could not imagine that April would in any way appreciate being told how to solve her Lover Life Problems by a ten-year-old. I glanced quickly at April and winced a bit as I waited for the Inevitable Explosion . . .
‘You know, Molly,’ April said, sighing, ‘I think I might just do that.’ I almost nearly choked.
Minutes later April was smiling for the first time in weeks. ‘It turns out he couldn’t sleep either,’ she said, coming off the phone. ‘He’s coming round right now.’
This at least had the helpful result of getting Mum to snap to her senses and realize that she looked like a monster from the Living Dead. ‘Oh my goodness, I’d better have a shower and get dressed!’ she cried, leaping up the stairs two at a time.
So that is how Nick ended up round at our house with a huge box of chocolates as well as his Important Vet Bag. I wondered where he would have got such a big box of chocolates at such an early time in the morning, but then I thought, if I was a grown-up who lived on my own, I would probably have huge boxes of chocolates On The Go all the time, so he must have just got it out of the larder.
Nick’s eyes went so gooey when he saw April that I thought I would really be sick on the very spot in front of them, so when Frank arrived I was very relieved that he and Molly and I could ‘leave the Love Birds to it’, as Mum would say.
‘Let’s have a look at Honey’s den,’ Frank said.
Aha! I thought. You think that Molly and I are useless girls and that we will not have been able to sort out a den without your manly help. ‘Prepare to be amazed!’ I said, pushing open the door to the back room to find . . .
‘HONEY!’
‘Is she . . . ? Is that . . . ?’ Molly whispered.
Frank gave a low whistle. ‘Blimey – she’s got a move on,’ he said.
Honey – had – had – a – PUPPY!
While we had been making phone calls and worrying about love lives and waiting for Frank to turn up, Honey had quietly given birth.
‘I KNEW that was her panting earlier!’ I said to Mol
ly a bit accusingly. ‘You said she was snoring!’
‘Well, it sounded like snoring,’ Molly protested.
‘Er, I hate to break up the fight and everything,’ Frank said, for once being quite sensible, ‘but don’t you think we should get your mum or Nick – or both of them? Honey might have another one any minute.’
Frank was right. I had read in Monica Sitstill’s book that:
There are no rules for how much time there is In between puppies. I have seen some dogs whelp every ten minutes and some have a puppy every twenty-four hours.
Soon the house was like a beehive full of active bees. We were all talking at once. Mum was boiling the kettle over and over again so much that I did think for a split of a moment that we might end up with no electricity left and that could be quite astronomically treacherous, as then Nick would not have any light left to see by if the last puppies were born in the middle of the night.
While Mum was boiling the kettle into oblivionation and Molly was jumping up and down and Frank was pretending that he was grown-up and checking off things from the checklist, Nick reappeared from his Quality Time with April, eating Quality Streets, and said:
‘You’re going to have to ask everyone to calm down, Summer.’ Now that he’d seen Honey, he’d obviously clicked out of Gooey-eyed Boyfriend Mode and into Professional Vet Mode. He was rummaging through his big bag and getting out his rubber gloves and his telescope-thingie for listening to Honey’s breathing and he was asking me to fetch all kind of things.
Honey meanwhile was the calmest of all of us, and was gently licking her new teeny-weeny baby and nuzzling it.
‘We’d better get ready,’ Nick said. ‘She may have another at any minute.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But can’t I just have a peek at this one?’
I was desperate to hold it, but Nick said that it was important that Honey wash the puppy and cuddle it before we did.
‘If we touch the little one straight away, then it’ll have our smell and Honey might reject it. It’s really essential that Honey bonds with her babies the minute they are born. Watch – very soon the puppy will start suckling. It’s amazing how fast they get to work.’
‘Wow! It’s just like what it says in my book,’ I said. ‘They really do know what to do by Natural Instinct!’
I was desperate to get Mum and Molly and Frank in the room to see the other puppies being born, but Nick said that we shouldn’t have too many people there at the same time. ‘It’s quite chaotic out there – we don’t want that level of noise and excitement around Honey. She might get agitated, and that wouldn’t be good for her or the pups.’
So one person was allowed in at a time.
Mum was really keen to get in there, I knew, but she very kindly said that Molly or Frank could go first. Frank was surprisingly gentleman-like about it and said Molly could go first, which was a good thing as I could tell by the expression on Molly’s face that she was definitely not prepared to be at all ladylike.
‘It’s all right,’ said Frank, grinning. ‘After all, I have already seen a litter of pups being born. I was there for all of Meatball’s, so it’s only fair that you go before me.’
Molly narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath and I wondered if she was going to come out with some cutting remark about ‘OOOOOOOH! You’re such a know-it-all bog, Frank Gritter,’ but she just grabbed the opportunity to go and see Honey instead.
Honey had one puppy while Molly was in with her, and then nothing happened for hours and hours and hours. We all hung around the kitchen, dozing off in the chairs with our heads on the table, or trying to stay awake by eating lots of mince pies and snacks that Mum had bought for Christmas Day.
Every so often, Nick would go into Honey’s den to check her heart rate and blood pressure.
‘It’s OK, she’s doing fine,’ he kept reassuring us. ‘It’s quite normal for there to be big gaps like this. I’m not going anywhere -I’ll keep checking on her. If there is a problem of any kind I can’t deal with here, then I’ll whisk her off to the surgery.’
Boy, was I pleased Nick was there.
And it seemed I was not the only one . . .
‘Thanks for coming, Nick,’ April said, giving him a kiss on the cheek. Nick blushed. Normally I would have felt churningly sick seeing my sister kiss anyone, but bizarrely, I actually felt a WARM AND HAPPY FEEDING flutter in my tummy.
‘Nothing could keep me away,’ he said, gazing into my sister’s eyes, and I thought perhaps he wasn’t talking about Honey’s puppies.
In the end we all started talking about sleeping arrangements, as it was pretty obviously going to turn into a night of waiting.
‘Mum said I could stay,’ grinned Molly, putting down the phone. ‘She said, “Think of it as one of your Christmas presents.” Do you think that was a cryptical way of saying that at the end of all this I might be able to have one of the puppies?’
I secretly thought that it probably definitely was not, but I didn’t want to upset Molly so I just said, ‘Mmmm!’ and then quickly turned to Frank.
‘What about you, Frank?’ I asked. ‘You should stay too.’
Frank shuffled his feet and muttered, ‘Awright. I’ll call Mum.’
Mrs Gritter was totally mega-cool about it. She spoke to Mum for a bit and told her, ‘It’s so exciting – it makes me feel quite tearful to think of one of Meatball’s babies becoming a mum! Call me in the morning, won’t you?’
‘This certainly will be a Christmas to remember,’ Mum said as she put the phone down.
She was right about that in more ways than one.
It was the strangest night of my whole life ever. I had been on sleepovers before where we had tried our hardest to stay up all of the night by chatting non-stop. But Mum had always ruined it by coming in every five minutes and saying things like ‘I am not going to ask you again –’ (this was a load of rubbish, as she always DID ask us again – and again, and again ...)‘– will you please SHUT UP! Some of us have work in the morning . . .’ (also untrue, as we mostly had sleepovers at the weekend and Mum did not work at the weekend). Actually, it was not always Mum’s fault that we did not stay up all night. Even when we tried our hardest by singing the words to our favourite songs really quietly so that Mum couldn’t hear, or by talking non-stop or by having our torches on underneath the duvet, our eyes had this annoying habit of closing and then, before we knew it, we were asleep. (Which is sort of obvious – if you knew you were asleep, you wouldn’t actually be asleep, would you?)
I had said to Mum, ‘There is no way that I will need to sing a song to keep me awake on the night Honey’s puppies are born.’
But even though it really was the most exciting few hours of my life, my eyes were actually beginning to close a bit while Molly was having another turn in the whelping room.
I was sitting in my Den (i.e. the non-playroom) on my favourite beanbag listening to Frank, who was telling me again all about what it was like when Honey was born. I was trying very hard to concentrate, but weird things kept happening to my brain.
Frank was saying, ‘And then, you just wouldn’t believe it, two came out almost at once! Poor Meatball, she was a bit confused. One minute she had one little puppy to lick and cuddle and then there were four . . .’
And I thought to myself, ‘I’ll just close my eyes for a couple of seconds while Frank tells me about this so that I can picture it in my head . . .’ and the next thing I knew, my brain was sending me pictures of Meatball having one hundred puppies at once that had grown wings on their backs and were floating around the den. And Meatball, who had suddenly acquired the gift of human speech, was shouting up at them to, ‘Jolly well come back down this instant and do as you’re told.’
But the puppies just ignored her and laughed and shouted: ‘Summer! Summer!’ ‘Wha-a?’ I sat up and shook my head, which felt a bit blurry. ‘What’s going on?’
‘You were nodding off again,’ said Frank.
‘No, I wasn’t!�
�� I said crossly. Frank was laughing at me. ‘Yes, you were! And you were dribbling too.’
I huffed. ‘I do not dribble,’ I said, but I quickly wiped my sleeve across my face just in case.
‘OK,’ said Frank, in his annoying teasing voice, ‘if you weren’t asleep just then, what was I talking about?’
‘Meatball’s puppies,’ I said, not mentioning the flying bit.
‘Oh, right,’ said Frank.
Ha! Sussed him out . . .
‘Anyway, don’t nod off again, will you? Nick just came out and said that Honey’s had two more pups and he thinks she’s only got one to go and then she’s done.’ ‘WHAT?!’ I shrieked. ‘TWO more! You could have told me! Don’t let me go to sleep again, whatever you do!’ Frank grinned.
‘So what have you two been up to while I’ve been with Honey?’ Molly had reappeared and was looking at me and Frank in a sneery way that made me feel uncomfortable and anxious.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked quizzically.
‘Look, Summer – when are you going to admit that Frank’s your boyfriend?’ Molly asked impatiently.
Frank’s face went such a deep red that I thought he’d forgotten to breathe. He rushed out of the room muttering something about needing a glass of water.
I was so embarrassed and angry about what Molly had just said that I couldn’t speak.
‘OK, Summer – I think we’re gearing up for the last pup. Summer? Are you all right?’ It was Nick.
‘Ye-es,’ I said, avoiding Molly and following Nick back into Honey’s den.
‘Do you want to come too, Molly?’ Nick asked.
