The Phredde Collection (46 page)

‘Prudence…’

‘Yes, Mrs Olsen?’

Mrs Olsen sighed. ‘Prudence, I have told you before, pets are not allowed at school.’

‘Yes, Mrs Olsen.’

‘It was upsetting for poor Mr Ploppy Bottom, I mean poor Mr
Plothiebotham
, to be carried off in the beak of a gigantic…what is your pet again?’

‘She’s a
Dromornis stirtoni
, or Demon Duck of Doom, Mrs Olsen,’ I said. ‘And Cuddles SAID she was sorry.’

‘Did she?’ asked Mrs Olsen, interested. ‘I didn’t hear her.’

‘Well, she did quack,’ I explained.

Mrs Olsen sighed again, showing her vampire fangs.
‘That was after she dropped Mr Plothiebotham into the hippopotamus pond, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, Mrs Olsen,’ I said. ‘But Cuddles likes ponds. She would have thought Mr Plothiebotham could play with the hippopotamuses.’

‘I don’t think Mr Plothiebotham is very fond of hippopotamuses,’ said Mrs Olsen.

Or phaeries. Or vampires, I thought, no matter what he says. Or me, because he’d given me a detention at lunchtime too, which wasn’t fair, because I’d called Cuddles off right away. Well, almost right away. As soon as I’d stopped laughing, anyway.

‘Cuddles just wanted to eat the boys’ toilets again. I think she likes the taste.’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Olsen.’

‘All right, Prudence,’ said Mrs Olsen. ‘The boys can use the infants’ toilets again. You can go back to your seat now. You’re quite sure Cuddles is back home?’

I nodded. ‘Phredde PING!ed her back to the moat. She’ll be happy there till I come home.’

For some reason the piranhas never try to skeletonise Cuddles. In fact they keep out of her way. Maybe Demon Ducks of Doom don’t taste as good as cows, or pineapple and sausage pizza, or Mark’s guinea pigs—but that was an accident. Well, almost.

I trudged back to my seat and looked around. It all looked normal, just like it had been last term, which was reassuring after Mr
Plothiebotham.

There was the coffin, the storeroom and Mrs Olsen’s flask of blo…red stuff on her desk, and the blinds pulled down to keep the daylight out. And there was Phredde perched up on the back of her seat, Amelia looking studious even before there was anything to look studious about, Edwin with his mouth open and
Bruce with his mouth open too, about to zap a passing fly…

I forced my gaze away.

‘Mrs Olsen!’ Phredde had her hand up.

‘Yes, Phredde?’

‘Why did you call the Batrock Central School a mob of bloodsuckers?’

Mrs Olsen’s face set like concrete. ‘That is none of your business, Phredde,’ she snapped. ‘Now, open your books to page…’

‘But, Mrs Olsen,’ persisted Phredde. ‘It
is
our business. If we’re going to play football with a mob of dangerous bloodsuckers we have a right to know!’

‘Nonsense!’ snapped Mrs Olsen. Then her face lost a bit of its concrete look. ‘But it is your business, isn’t it?’ she whispered. ‘Oh, this is so embarrassing. It is so terrible for a vampire to have to admit.’ Her fangs grew longer, till they were sticking out right over her lower lip, just like they always do when she’s upset.

Mrs Olsen sat down at her desk and shook her head. ‘The Batrock vampires have a reputation. They are…old-traditional vampires,’ she whispered. ‘They practise somewhat old-fashioned ways.’

‘You mean they lift their hats when they meet a woman and let girls through the door first?’ enquired Bruce.

Mrs Olsen shook her head. Her face was white. Well, okay, it’s always white because she’s a vampire, but now it was even whiter than usual.

‘You mean…’ asked Phredde nervously.

Mrs Olsen nodded. ‘Old-fashioned ways means sucking blood from living creatures! They hunt their prey! They turn into bats! Well…’ she admitted. ‘I too
turn into a bat sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of a flutter now and then. But I do not sleep hanging from the rafters! I do not seize my prey and stick my fangs into their jugular! I do not suck their warm, sweet blood…’

‘Er, Mrs Olsen,’ said Phredde even more nervously. ‘I think we get the idea now.’

‘Blood!’ cried Mrs Olsen. ‘Warm, sweet bloo…’ She blinked. ‘I am so sorry,’ she whispered. Her Ruritanian accent was even stronger now. ‘I am forgetting myself.’ She took a deep gulp of the blo…red stuff in her flask. ‘Now, turn to page 22…’

‘Vampires,’ muttered Phredde hollowly.

‘Blood-sucking bats,’ I said, even more hollowly. I bit into my foccacia. It was pretty good, but even a black olive and sun-dried tomato foccacia with cheese and lettuce isn’t much comfort when you’re faced with a blood-sucking football team.

Or lunchtime detention.

‘Anyway,’ pointed out Phredde. ‘YOU have nothing to worry about. If any vampire tried to bite you whatever it is protecting you will FLOING! you to safety.’

‘Well, you can PING! any vampire that attacks you into a cockroach, then squash them,’ I told her.

Phredde brightened. ‘So I can!’ she said.

‘Hey,’ I said, cheering up. ‘Maybe whatever it is will FLOING! me out of detention!’

Phredde frowned. ‘Detention probably isn’t life-threatening enough for a FLOING!’

‘We’ll see.’ I felt definitely better now, and it wasn’t
because I’d seen Bruce hop away when Amelia sat down next to him. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’d better get up to Mr Ploppy Bottom’s office.’

Bruce was already there when we arrived. He was sitting on one of the chairs along the wall. Chairs aren’t designed for frogs to sit on, so his long shiny feet sort of hung over the seat.

‘Hi, Bruce,’ said Phredde.

‘Hi, Phredde. Er, hi, Pru,’ croaked Bruce, a bit nervously. I wondered if he was afraid I’d do THAT to him again. ‘Did you have a good holiday?’

‘It was okay,’ said Phredde. ‘A giant gorilla tried to swallow Pru but…’ I elbowed her in the ribs. ‘Um, it was fine,’ said Phredde, just as Mr Ploppy Bottom’s door opened a few centimetres and Mr Ploppy Bottom slid out into the corridor. He shut the door quickly behind him and pasted on his I-am-a-concerned-and-caring adult smile.

‘All here?’ he said, calm and friendly. ‘Good. Now, children…’

Children? Huh! You can have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen when grown-ups start addressing you as ‘children’.

‘I don’t want you to think of this as punishment,’ said Mr Ploppy Bottom, as kind and concerned-looking as can be. ‘This is just a little get-to-know-you talk. Do you understand?’

None of us said anything.

‘I said, do you understand?’ repeated Mr Ploppy Bottom. His smile had slipped a little bit.

‘Yes, Mr Ploppy Bottom,’ we chorused.

The smiled slipped a bit more. ‘That’s
Plothiebotham
,’ he said, not quite as kindly as before. ‘I
want this to be a friendly school. Do you understand? I want us all to be equal here.’

‘Does that mean that us kids can go in the staff room and use the staff toilets and give teachers homework?’ began Bruce.

Mr Ploppy Bottom’s smile had headed back to the Jurassic now. ‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘Don’t be stupid, boy. I mean no one—do you understand me?—NO ONE is going to use magic in my school!’

‘No magic!’ gasped Phredde.

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Ploppy Bottom smugly.

‘But what if a giant slug oozes across the oval and is about to squash the library, or a volcano erupts and…’

Mr Ploppy Bottom gave a little laugh. ‘The chances of a volcano blowing up the school yard are highly unlikely!’

‘One did last term!’ Phredde informed him. ‘And I had to PING! everyone to safety.’

‘That is enough! If there is any rescuing to be done, I will do it! That is what being a Principal means. And you, boy,’ he said to Bruce. ‘You will stop being a frog! Immediately.’

You could have heard a feather drop off a
Dromornis stirtoni.

‘Stop being a frog!’ croaked Bruce.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Ploppy Bottom. ‘Now!’

I held my breath. Bruce hadn’t even stopped being a frog for my birthday party, even when I’d done THAT to him! Was he going to do it just because a teacher told him to?

‘But I LIKE being a frog!’ cried Bruce.

‘I would like to be a rock star,’ snapped Mr Ploppy Bottom. ‘But we can’t all have what we LIKE.’

The silence stretched some more. Then Bruce shook his froggy head. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘And why not?’

‘Because it’s against the new school rules,’ said Bruce smugly. ‘You just said no magic at school.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Ploppy Bottom, puzzled. ‘But what has that…’

‘I’d have to use magic to stop being a frog,’ said Bruce reasonably. ‘And I wouldn’t want to break the school rules, sir.’

Mr Ploppy Bottom took a deep breath. ‘Very well. You may turn yourself out of being a frog in your own time. But you hear me well, boy. If you aren’t back to normal by the time Batrock Central arrive, you will not be allowed to participate in the game! Or the dance! Or anything!’

He suddenly seemed to remember he was supposed to be nice. The beam appeared like magic again, except of course it wasn’t magic because that was now against school rules. ‘Now off you run and get your free ice blocks. Dismissed.’ He scuttled back to his office, opened the door a crack, then slid inside.

Phredde and I stared at Bruce. Bruce stared at the floor.

‘I’ve been a frog every since I was a tadpole,’ whispered Bruce. ‘I can’t change back now! Maybe for an hour or two, okay…but not all the time I’m at school.’

‘But if you don’t you’re off the footy team!’ cried Phredde. ‘You’re our star player.’

‘I’m only the star player because I can jump higher than anyone else,’ muttered Bruce. ‘And zap the ball halfway across the oval with my tongue. If I’m not a frog I won’t be anyone’s star player. I’ll just be…’ his voice broke off.

I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for him, or angry with him. So I was both. Which meant I forgot I wasn’t talking to him because being two things at once takes up a lot of your brain.

‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘Maybe the Batrock kids will vampirise the whole school and we won’t get to play football at all.’

‘Thanks,’ said Bruce emptily. ‘I think.’

And then the hippopotamuses roared and it was time to go back to class.

Nothing happened that afternoon. No ogres attacked, no Ancient Egyptian princess threw me into a pit of vipers. The blackboard didn’t turn into a blob of alien, kid-sucking jelly. We learnt the basics of trigonometry and Bruce swatted a few silverfish that had been dumb enough to hide in our textbooks—boy, can that tongue STRETCH—but I wasn’t interested in what Bruce did so I paid no attention at all, not even when he zapped a blowfly that landed on my pen.

We were all pretty quiet that afternoon. I guess the news that your school is about to be invaded by blood-sucking vampires has that effect. Even the arrival of the pizzas didn’t cheer us up much. Mrs Olsen kept muttering things like ‘How could he do it?’ and ‘Blood, blood! There will be blood everywhere! You’ll find the answers at the back of the book, Amelia. Blood!’

Finally the hippos roared again and it was time to go.

Cuddles was waiting for me in the castle moat when I got home. The piranhas looked glad to see me too. Their little toothy faces had a sort of hunted look.

‘Quack,’ said Cuddles, clambering out of the moat and showering me with dirty moat water and a few piranha tails.

‘Yeah, I’m glad I’m home too,’ I told her. And I was.

It had been a confusing sort of day. A new head teacher is bad enough, but what with a vampire sports day, not to mention the Halloween dance and Bru…other things, I was feeling pretty bushed.

I fed Cuddles her bag of doggie food (she’d quacked really loudly when she saw the ad for it on TV so I decided that she must like doggie biscuits. Mark reckons she actually wanted to eat the pack dogs that were on the ad going yum, yum, slobber, slobber by their bowls of doggie biscuits. That’s werewolf brothers for you. Mark just has to SEE a corgi and he starts drooling).

‘Quack,’ said Cuddles, pulling the bag out of my hands and eating that too, just as Mum came in.

‘How was school?’ Mum asked. (Adults are programmed to ask that question, if you ask me. I bet as soon as you turn twenty-one they slap a hi-tech computer thingie on your head that zaps your brain and pre-programs you to ask any person under eighteen
How was school?
as soon as you see them. You just count how many times some adult asks you that this week; then you’ll see I’m right.)

I gulped. How was I going to tell Mum that I’d accidentally volunteered us to billet a blood-crazed vampire that hunts its prey?

‘Er, Mum,’ I said.

‘Mmm? Gark is doing roast gryphon for dinner. Do you want mashed potatoes or baked potatoes?’

‘Both,’ I said. I like potatoes. I like roast gryphon too. Phredde’s mum sends one over sometimes—they get a couple delivered fresh from Phaeryland every week. Phredde’s mum says the frozen gryphons you buy in the supermarket these days have no taste at all. ‘Er, Mum, I said we’d billet this kid on Thursday night.’

‘Okay, I’ll tell Gark to make up the Very Orange Bedroom,’ said Mum. ‘Gark was going to do pizzas Thursday night. I don’t suppose you know if this kid is
vegetarian? Gark can do a very nice eggplant and artichoke pizza.’

‘I’m pretty sure this kid won’t be vegetarian,’ I said honestly. ‘There’s a dance at school on Friday night. A Halloween dance. Er, I can go, can’t I?’

For one wonderful second I thought Mum might say, ‘No, I’m sorry, Prudence, we have to go and visit Great Aunt Agatha that night.’ Not that I have a Great Aunt Agatha. But maybe there was one hanging around that I didn’t know about.

But Mum just said vaguely, ‘Yes, of course. I’ll go and tell Gark about the potatoes,’ and wandered off.

I could have told her, of course. I could have said,
Hey, don’t worry, Mum, I bet this kid’ll eat anything that’s going. Or sitting at the dining table. Or breathing. And Gark won’t have to worry about pizza because we’ll all be vampirised!
But mums stress-out over the smallest little thing. I think it’s a thing that happens when you start to get old, like over thirty or something.

So I said nothing. Nothing at all.