by Alan Nolan
Contents
Title Page
Chapter One: A Dog’s Life
Chapter Two: Animal Crackers
Chapter Three: My Furry Friend
Chapter Four: Dogged Determination
Chapter Five: Too Drool For School
Chapter Six: Different Day, Same Old Dog
Chapter Seven: A Low Down, Dirty Dog
Chapter Eight: Hoist The Jolly Roger!
Chapter Nine: Hot Digital Dog
Chapter Ten: Captive Canine
Chapter Eleven: A Dog-Gone Shame
Chapter Twelve: A Malodorous Mutt
Chapter Thirteen: Duck Rescues Dog!
Chapter Fourteen: Lucky Dog! And Cat! And Duck! And Ostrich! Etc! Etc!
An Extract From ‘Conor’s Caveman’
About the Author
Copyright
Chapter One
A Dog’s Life
Scritch. Scritch, scratch scritch.
Scritch again. Then another scratch.
And, after a while, just for good measure, a bit more scritching.
Despite having no intention of doing so, Sam Hannigan woke up.
What is that noise?
She lifted her head of shaggy, curly ginger hair off the pillow and listened.
She couldn’t hear anything.
Maybe the noise that woke her up was part of a dream she was having? It had happened before – like that dream she had once where she was paddling her feet in a lake watching baby ducks splashing about beside a waterfall while her brother squirted her with a high-powered aqua-blaster water pistol and she really, really needed a wee and then she suddenly woke up and she was all–HOOWWWWWWLLLLLLL! Nope. Definitely not a dream. She had most categorically heard that noise. HOOWWWWWWLLLLLLL!
She threw back the bed covers, adjusted her one-size-too-small pyjamas and padded barefoot across the threadbare carpet to the window.
She didn’t bother to turn on the light – the bulb had gone a couple of weeks before and Nanny Gigg hadn’t replaced it yet. Nanny Gigg claimed it was because she was afraid of heights and couldn’t stand on a stool, but Sam knew it was because her granny couldn’t afford to buy a new bulb. Sam and her brother, Bruno, had just started a new term in school, and schoolbooks aren’t cheap.
Sam looked out the window from her dark bedroom. A huge yellowish moon hung silently in the sky like a big, uncooked pizza base. Mmm, pizza. Sam’s tummy grumbled; she always fancied a snack when she woke up in the night. The trouble was, the fridge was usually empty. Bruno routinely ate any leftovers or treats that Nanny Gigg put back into the fridge after dinner. ‘He’s a growing lad,’ Nanny Gigg would say. He’s more like a bottomless pit, thought Sam. He practically inhales chicken legs, biscuits, bars, tomatoes, milk, orange juice and apple juice – he never leaves anything behind. Except for eggs, of course. The only food Sam’s brother wouldn’t eat was eggs – he wouldn’t as much as look at an egg. Luckily, Sam liked omelettes.
Sam opened up the window and peered out into the long, messy garden at the back of their house. She could just about make out the rusty wheelbarrow that sat in the centre of the overgrown lawn and, beyond that, the silhouette of her grandad’s inventing shed, locked up and mostly ignored since Daddy Mike went missing years before.
She listened. Scritch. Scratch.
Aaaah. She knew what it was – it was …
HOW-HOW-HOOOOOOOOOO OOWWWWWWLLLLLLL!
… next door’s dog, Barker.
Sam craned her neck and squinted into the darkness to the left of her garden. Sure enough, she could just about make out a sandy-coloured shape moving slowly around in a tight circle in the murky night.
Ahh, thought Sam, poor Barker. They’ve tied her up again in the garden. That’s so mean.
Barker was a big dog, a bit bigger than Sam herself, and Sam was a big fan of animals – big ones and small ones.
She loved all types of animals – horses, cows, sparrows, owls, moles, voles, crocodiles, koala bears. She loved dogs most of all, but Nanny Gigg said they didn’t have enough money for a dog. For her birthday the year before, Sam had hoped for a dog but ended up with a goldfish. She called it Rover, even though the only place it ‘roved’ was round and round in circles in its bowl. She told all her friends it was a dogfish.
When her teacher, Ms Sniffles, asked the class to name the animal each child would like to be if they had a magic wish, most of them said they would be lions, so they could scare their brothers (Sam could relate to that); some said birds, so they could fly high over Clobberstown and away from school; but Sam said she’d just wish to be a dog.
‘What kind of dog?’ snuffled Ms Sniffles, blowing her nose on the sleeve of her manky jumper. ‘A husky at the North Pole or a greyhound at the dog track?’
‘Neither,’ said Sam. ‘Just an ordinary dog. A nice, old, tubby, friendly doggy dog.’
Ha! Be careful what you wish for!
HOW-HOW-HOOOOOOOOOO OOWWWWWWLLLLLLL!
Sam heard a window opening. Her eyes darted to the left and peered into the darkness. Something brown and shoe-shaped flew through it.
A shoe! thought Sam. A size-eleven brogue, if I’m not mistaken! (She was, it was a size ten.) Her thought – and Barker’s howl – was cut short by the size-ten brogue connecting with the dog’s rear end.
‘Shut up, you dumb mutt!’ roared a voice from the murk. ‘Some of us are trying to sleep!’
Sam glared at the source of the voice (and, most likely, the shoe): Mr Soames – the Hannigans’ next-door neighbour. Sam wrinkled her freckly nose. Mr Soames was always mistreating poor Barker. Barker wouldn’t be howling and scratching at the fence if Mr Soames didn’t leave her tied up at nighttime, outside in the freezing cold. This kind of thing drove Sam bananas. She hated people being mean and cruel to animals. She balled up her fists and ground her teeth. Her face turned red. She stretched out of the window and yelled, ‘Hey! You can’t throw your manky shoe at Barker. She’s just a poor defenceless dog!’
‘Who’s that? Samantha Hannigan?’ came the voice from the darkness. ‘You can shut up and all! Mind your own beeswax and go to bed, you interfering ginger busybody!’
Next door’s window slammed shut, making Sam jump. In the darkness below she could hear Barker whimpering a sad, quiet, beaten-down whimper, her lesson learnt.
That bully, thought Sam. She stared out her window into the blackness for a while, then she nipped to the bathroom for a quick wee and got back into bed. Poor old Barker.
She was awoken (again) by a knock on her bedroom door. She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. Huh? Suddenly the boor burst open wide on his hinges, slamming into the wall, knocking a framed photo of an armadillo onto the carpet and making Sam’s Irish dancing trophies jump in unison on their shelf.
Her brother, Bruno Brian Bartholomew Hannigan, stood in the doorway wearing his favourite pair of old, polka-dot pyjamas. ‘It’s your early morning call!’ he trumpeted. And then he trumpeted from his opposite end.
PPAAAAAARRRRRRR
PPPPPPPPP-PPPPP!!
Sam jumped out of bed. This was a regular occurrence and she knew the drill. ‘Get out, Bruno!’ she cried, holding her duvet over her mouth and nose as she ran to open the window. The SMELL! It was atrocious! ‘I can’t breathe that, I’m a vegetarian!’
‘Ahhhh,’ said Bruno, showing his sharp, fang-like teeth as he took a deep sniff of the rotten pong, ‘the sweet scent of last night’s burgers, regurgitated just for you. Regurga-burgers, if you will!’
‘I said GET OUT!’ shouted Sam, She threw her alarm clock at Bruno, but missed and hit the wall beside the door where it smashed, cogs and little hands and bells going flying across the bedroom floor.
Ah well, th
ought Sam, it didn’t work properly anyway – a bit like Bruno.
Bruno was eighteen months older than Sam and was almost a teenager. He was also eighteen centimeters taller, and much stronger. And quite a bit meaner.
He enjoyed playing dastardly, despicable tricks on Sam. Bruno delighted in being unpleasant to his little sister and was always thinking up schemes to make her life a misery. Most of the time this involved using some gadget or gizmo he unearthed in Daddy Mike’s inventing shed. The shed was locked up and Bruno wasn’t meant to go in there, but he considered himself to be a rebel (as well as a bit of a junior criminal genius) and had his own method of getting into the shed – wriggling in through a loose board in a rear wall. He regularly rummaged around the dusty piles of half-built inventions and crackpot contraptions that their grandad had been tinkering with before he disappeared. Bruno hadn’t a clue what most of them did. He never looked at the notes or blueprints Daddy Mike had left behind, but that was the fun of it – trying out some weird-looking gadget on an unsuspecting Sam, just to see what would happen.
A couple of weeks before, on the morning of a big Irish dancing competition that Sam was competing in, he crept up behind her and stuck a dusty plastic hat-like device he had found under a pile of papers in the inventing shed on her head. The device was labeled Colour Change 2000, and it did just what it said on the label: when Bruno flicked the switch on the side it started to make a purring noise and in three seconds flat it had turned Sam’s hair from a lovely gingery red to a bright fluorescent green! Sam, alarmed at having a plastic bowl with wires coming out of it jammed on her head, was even more alarmed when she looked in the mirror and saw that her hair looked like the main float in the Clobberstown St Patrick’s Day parade. She had to wear one of Nanny Gigg’s wigs while dancing in the competition. (Nanny Gigg had plenty of wigs, of all different styles and colours. She liked wigs almost as much as she liked hats.) The wig fell off during a particularly energetic jig in round two, and Martha Maguire and her sidekick, Abbie Cuffe – two girls in Sam’s dance class – had slagged her unmercifully.
When she got back to the house, Bruno had another pleasant surprise for her. Under the pretence of giving her an apology hug, he smeared the back of Sam’s coat with Stay-Put Putty, another of Daddy Mike’s crazy inventions, and stuck her high up on the side wall of the house. Sam was stuck fast for an hour and a half (she had to admit it: Daddy Mike’s inventions may be batty, but they sure did work) until she was spotted by her best friend, Ajay, who happened to be walking down Clobberstown Avenue. Ajay had to use a ladder to get her down.
But all that paled in comparison to what Bruno got up to on the previous Thursday afternoon. Sam came home from school as usual, and, knowing that Nanny Gigg would be out at her yoga class, let herself in using the door key she kept in her sock. As soon as she walked in the door, Bruno pounced on her from behind and tripped her up by hooking his leg around her ankle. Sam ended up flat on her back on the kitchen lino, dazed and wondering what just happened. Her wondering was cut short by a shriek of ‘Geronimo!’ as Bruno leaped in the air and landed on Sam’s chest, pinning her to the floor.
‘Get off me, Bruno,!’ she wailed. ‘You’re squishing me!’
Bruno took the opportunity to let go of a little fart – not a loud one like he did most mornings in Sam’s bedroom, just a quick S.B.D. (Silent But Deadly).
‘Holy moley, the SMELL!’ Sam choked and gagged, trying to get her hands to her nose, but Bruno squeezed both her arms tight to her sides with his knees. She was well and truly stuck.
Bruno roared laughing for a few seconds, then he went quiet and his face became calm. ‘Here, Sam,’ he said pleasantly, ‘do you like treats?’
Sam was so surprised by this change in tone that she had to think hard – did she like treats? ‘Yeeeesssss …’ she answered warily.
‘But tell me this,’ continued Bruno, ‘do you like tasty treats?’
She again reluctantly replied in the affirmative.
‘Do you like tasty, chewy treats?’ Bruno was smiling down at her as she lay flat out – the sight of his mongoose-like teeth was a little unsettling.
‘Yes, I like tasty, chewy treats, Bruno!’ She wriggled, but it was no use; Bruno’s weight was sticking her to the floor as surely as if he had coated her back with Stay-Put Putty again.
‘But! Tell me this, oh sister of mine, do you like tasty, chewy, crunchy treats?’
‘Yes, yes, yes, Bruno! Of course I do!’ Sam cried.
‘Okay, final question,’ smirked Bruno. ‘Do you, Sam Hannigan, like tasty, chewy, crunchy, doggy treats?’
‘I said I do, Brun–’ Sam cut herself short. ‘Hold on, doggy treats?’
Bruno started to howl,
HOW-HOW-HOWWWWWLLLLLLL!
From under his jumper he produced a pack of Jolly Roger Dog Biscuits. ‘I thought,’ he said, giggling evilly, ‘seeing as you like dogs so much, you’d probably like the same kind of treats that dogs do!’
With that, he grabbed Sam’s nose in one hand and shook out the box of dog biscuits onto her chest with the other. Sam kept her mouth clamped shut and was struggling to breathe. Still holding her nose with one hand, Bruno lazily picked up a dog biscuit and gave it a sniff. ‘Mmmmm. Meaty goodness …’
Sam had almost had enough. Her face, usually a pinky-orange thanks to her freckles, was turning an alarming shade of red. She gave in and opened her mouth to take a breath when, quick as a flash, Bruno jammed the dog biscuit straight into her open mouth! Sam’s eyes gaped wide.
Bruno let go of her nose and clamped up her chin with both hands, forcing her mouth to close around the bite-size, cartoon bone shape of the Jolly Roger Dog Biscuit. ‘Eat it. EAT IT!’ he whooped.
‘Ha haaah! I knew you were a dirty dog, Sam Hannigan! Good doggy! Good doggy! Ha haaah!’
He got up off Sam and, with a guffaw and a final tiny trumpet toot from his rear end, he stomped out of the kitchen, leaving Sam on the floor with a chestful of crumbs and a mouthful of dog biscuit. Sam let her head drop back onto the lino and tentatively chewed the biscuit. It actually doesn’t taste too bad, she thought. I wonder if there’s meat in it? Ugh, Bruno – one day I’ll get my own back for this …
But today was Saturday and she still hadn’t been able to think of a fitting payback for Bruno. She supposed she just wasn’t evil enough to come up with a suitable scheme.
Sam stood at the bedroom window that she had opened to let out the smell of Bruno’s latest wake-up trump and tried to think of revenge plan. Where did Bruno even get the dog biscuits that he made her eat? They didn’t have a dog!
That reminds me, she thought, poor Barker! Like she had done during the night, she leaned out the window to look into next door’s rubble-strewn garden. Daylight didn’t do it many favours – it was quite a mess. Not as messy and overgrown as the Hannigans’ garden, but messy all the same. She couldn’t see Barker.
She clicked her tongue, tlik, tlik, tlik tlik, and called softly, ‘Barker. Here, girl. Barker.’ There was a creak and Barker stuck her head out from under a broken kitchen door that was leaning against an abandoned fridge halfway down the garden.
Poor mutt, thought Sam. That’s where she has to sleep. She must be freezing every night. ‘Good girl, Barker,’ she whisper-called. ‘Good, good doggy.’
Just then next door’s back door opened and Mr Soames came out of his kitchen holding a sweeping brush and what looked like a can of dog food. Barker’s head perked up and her pink tongue lolled out of her mouth.
Poor creature, thought Sam, watching unseen from above. She’s starving.
Mr Soames stalked across the scruffy garden towards Barker, looking like every blade of grass his feet crushed on the short journey made him smile inside. His outside, however, wasn’t smiling – it was sneering.
‘Here, you dirty mutt,’ he said to Barker, holding up the can of dog food. ‘I was going to give you this’ – Barker sat up, which wasn’t easy for such a big dog, and started to drool
. She really was hungry – ‘but you were such a noisy, no-good nuisance pain-in-the-neck last night, I’m not going to give it to you.’ He tossed the can over his shoulder and it CLANNNGED loudly against the door of a broken, rusty gas cooker lying in the long grass.
Mr Soames lifted the sweeping brush. ‘You can have a taste of this instead!’ With that, he started whacking poor Barker with the head of the brush.
Barker cowered and whimpered.
Sam was so shocked that she couldn’t even shout out at Mr Soames. She ground her teeth and dug her toes into the carpet as she watched him walk back across his garden to the kitchen.
I’ll get him for that, she thought. One day, I’ll get him for how he treats that poor dog. If Sam had a naughty list (and she did), Mr Soames had just moved himself up into number-one position.
Chapter Two
Animal Crackers
‘Mr Soames is such a bully,’ said Sam as she went into the kitchen. ‘He was being really mean to Barker. I saw him out my window.’ It was Saturday and she didn’t need to be dressed yet, but after Bruno’s ear-piercing and pungent morning call and then watching the pitiful sight of poor Barker being battered, she decided to get up, get dressed and get out of the house. Besides that, Ajay was due to drop over.
Nanny Gigg turned around from the toaster. ‘Old Soapy Soames is a bit of a prune all right, in more ways than one – he’s never out of that bath of his. That’s why he’s always so wrinkly looking. And come to think of it, I’ve never seen him wear anything but pyjamas, even on the bus. He IS nasty, though. He treats that dog like doggy doo doo.’
The toaster popped suddenly and, like lightning, Nanny Gigg shot out her hand and caught the two slices of toast in mid-air as they soared towards the ceiling. ‘Gotcha!’
