Mega Sleepover 2
“Yes, boss,” said Dad. “Any more orders while you’re away?”
“Yes,” I said. “Kindly collect me at eleven in the morning. And don’t be late!”
When we arrived at Rosie’s we went straight upstairs and dumped our sleepover kits on her bedroom floor. She’s right, her room does look a bit funny with no wallpaper, just plaster on the walls, but her mum lets her put posters up, so it doesn’t look boring; it’s dead colourful in fact. She’s got Oasis, Blur and Leicester City football team, loads of pictures of dogs and people out of the soaps on her walls. Rosie’s soppy about soaps.
Her dad’s promised to come round soon and decorate, so her mum says she’s allowed to write on the walls, which none of the rest of us are allowed to do in our bedrooms.
Rosie said we could help her if we wanted to. It was so cool. We wrote loads of jokes, like What did the spaceman see in his frying pan? An unidentified frying object. And What do you do if you find a blue banana? Try to cheer it up.
Rosie said it would certainly cheer her up, when she was lying in bed at night, to read those jokes.
“Just think,” I said, “in about a zillion years…”
“When the aliens come,” said Lyndz.
“…they might take this wallpaper off and find these jokes.”
So then we got into writing messages to Martians and it all got a bit silly. One of them was a bit rude. We had to scribble it out before Rosie’s mum saw it. It’s a good job we did because just then she came in to tell us to come down for tea.
“Great,” said Kenny, “I’m ravishing.”
“Don’t you mean ravenous?” said Rosie’s mum
“I’m ravishing, too,” said Kenny, pulling one of her silly faces.
“You’re weird, you mean,” I said. Then she chased me downstairs to the kitchen. Rosie’s mum had laid out a great spread for us with paper cups and plates and fancy serviettes, just like a party. She’s dead nice. She’s going to college to learn to be a nursery nurse. Rosie has an older sister, Tiffany, but she’s always out with her boyfriend, Spud. Her brother Adam was there, though. We’re really getting used to Adam now. It was strange at first, talking to someone who can’t talk back to you, but Rosie’s mum can tell us what he wants to say because he sort of spells it out with his head and she can understand him. So can Rosie some of the time, if he does it slowly.
We had pizza and salad and oven chips, and ice cream for afters. The pizza was OK, but it wasn’t a patch on my dad’s. The ice cream was heavenly, though: pecan and toffee fudge. Mmm, mmm. Rosie’s mum sat and fed Adam, because he can’t feed himself, and then she sat him on her knee to give him a drink through one of those baby feeder cups. All the time we were eating he was watching us and listening to what we were saying.
“What are you grinning at?” Rosie said.
Adam stopped drinking because he was choking a bit.
“That’s what comes of trying to drink and grin at the same time,” said his mum. Then Adam started shaking his head. He was trying to spell something. It was a poem he’d made up, while he’d been watching us have tea. Rosie says he’s always making up poems…and jokes. Rosie’s mum started spelling it out.
“F-I-V…Five?” she said. Adam nodded then spelt out some more.
“Little…Piggies? Sitting…in…a…row? R-O-S…Rosie’s the F-A-T-T…” Rosie started to squeal, “Tell him to stop.”
Her mum grinned. “OK, young man, that’s enough. Remember your manners.”
“You’re the little piggy,” Rosie told Adam.
“That’s about right,” their mum said, wiping his chin.
After we’d eaten Rosie said we could explore her house. There are five bedrooms on the first floor, then a staircase which leads to two more rooms, right up in the roof. In places, I could only just stand up straight without banging my head on the ceiling. The rooms were full of packing cases, cardboard boxes and old bits of furniture. There were no light bulbs up there, so when it started to get dark we couldn’t turn on the lights and that made it really spooky.
We played Hide and Seek and Murder in the Dark all over the upstairs and in the attic rooms, squealing and rushing around. There were no light-bulbs up there so we had to use our torches and that made it really spooky. But in no time it was nine o’clock and Rosie’s mum came to tell us to get ready for bed. We didn’t argue. Actually, we were looking forward to going to bed. That’s the best bit.
Rosie’s room only has one bed in it but it’s a double bed. It’s coo-ell. None of the rest of us has a doule bed. She’s so lucky. We all tried to fit into it, like playing Sardines; we just piled on top of each other. But there was no way we could sleep like that.
“Give me some room,” yelled Kenny who was right in the middle. “It’s too hot in here.”
“I’m falling out,” yelled Lyndz.
“Can’t you breathe in?” yelled Rosie.
“All night?” I said. “Get real.”
So in the end we decided two of us would have to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. We tossed for it. Oh, great. Guess who lost? Me, of course. And Fliss, who moaned on and on about how it wasn’t fair, even though it really was.
After we’d been in the bathroom we sat up in our sleeping bags with our sleepover diaries. At least the rest of us did; Fliss was too busy playing with Gazza.
Kenny was scribbling away like mad, she’d finished before I’d even thought about mine. She slammed her diary shut, “That’s me done,” she said.
“Read us what you’ve put,” said Lyndz.
“What’s it worth?” she said, which is Kenny’s favourite question.
“If you do, I’ll let you hold Gazza while I write mine,” said Fliss.
“Oh, great big hairy deal,” said Kenny. But then she said, “OK.”
She started to read hers out: “Today is Friday. We are sleeping over at Rosie’s house for the first time and it is awesome. I wish I lived here. It’s the best.” Rosie started to smile; she was dead pleased with that. “Tomorrow, we are going to the Pet Show at the Village Hall and if Merlin wins a rosette I will tie it to his tail. We are at war with the M&Ms…again. They had better look out.” She slammed her diary shut and said. “Now, give, give, give, give, give.” She held out her hands for the hamster.
“You promised you weren’t going to talk about that,” complained Fliss. But she passed Gazza over while she wrote hers.
Then everyone wanted a turn, so we played Pass the Hamster for a bit. When Rosie went to the bathroom she brought back a toilet roll which was just about used up. She tossed it onto the bed and Kenny put Gazza down so he could wriggle through it, like a tunnel but he seemed more interested in filling his pouches with it.
Next Fliss read us what she’d written: “I haven’t got a pet to take to the you-know-what so Rosie is letting me keep Gazza at her house. It is very kind of her. She is my best friend. She can take him out and play with him whenever she likes – as long as she is careful.”
Kenny looked at me and rolled her eyes. Sometimes Fliss is unreal. It was then that Rosie came up with her other idea. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t such a good idea, but at first we thought it was.
“Why not take Gazza tomorrow?” she said to Fliss. “You can pretend he’s yours. No one’ll know.”
“Yeah, why not?” said Kenny.
I nodded too. I thought it was a great idea, because, if Fliss had a pet to take, it would mean we could talk about the Pet Show, without her moaning on.
“I don’t know,” said Fliss, doubtfully, “what if someone recognises him?”
“How would they?” said Rosie. “One hamster looks much like another.”
“What if there’s anyone from school there?”
We thought about that. It was unlikely our teacher, Mrs Weaver, would be there, but what about other people from our class? And then, as if it had dawned on us all at once, I said, “Oh, no…” and everyone joined in, “The M&Ms.”
They’d be sure to recognise Gazza. Those two didn’t miss a thing.
“Oh, well, it was a good idea while it lasted,” I said.
“Hang on,” said Kenny, “You could keep him in a box, or something, until they do the judging. The M&Ms’ll be too busy with their own pets. They’ll probably be in different rooms. I doubt if they’ll put the cats and dogs together with the small pets.”
“Yeah. Good thinking, Batman,” I said.
You could see Fliss was tempted, but she was still worried about it. Fliss always gets her knickers in a twist if she does anything wrong in case she gets found out. But she really wanted to join in with the rest of us, so in the end she said, “OK, but you’ve all got to promise not to tell anyone, though.”
We all made the Brownie promise and just then Rosie’s mum came in and told us to turn off the lights and settle down. I was sure she hadn’t heard us but Fliss went bright pink, as if Rosie’s mum could read her mind. When she got up to put Gazza in his cage, she dropped him twice. Fortunately both times he landed on the bed. At last she put him in his cage, but she was so nervous she didn’t fasten the cage door properly. It was nearly an hour before we realised and by then Gazza had completely disappeared.
After Rosie’s mum went out we lay in bed and counted to twenty-five before we sat up. Sitting up in the dark, with our torches turned on, whispering, is the best thing about sleepovers, I think. Sometimes we tell stories or sing songs or tell jokes. Sometimes we pretend we can talk to ghosts but that can get a bit too scary. Later on, when it’s really quiet and we know the grown-ups aren’t coming back in, we get out our midnight feast. But it was too early so we decided to finish off our Sleepover Club membership cards.
We’d got some old ones we’d made right at the beginning, but now Rosie’s joined we decided we’d make some new ones with photos and everything.
Do you want to see mine? Isn’t it excellent? Not as good as Fliss’s, though. Hers looks dead posh. She got her mum to take her into Leicester to get a proper passport photo done. The rest of us had to cut up old photographs. I had to cut my face out of a picture at my Uncle Alan’s wedding when I was little. Everybody started laughing at it, so I told them what my gran always says, “Small things amuse small minds!”
On the back of the cards we wrote our names, ages, addresses and hobbies. When we’d finished them we signed them. Well, the rest of us did. Kenny did this weird squiggle that looked as if someone had nudged her elbow. Then we passed them round and read each others’.
“I didn’t know your hobby was stamp collecting,” I said to Fliss.
She went a bit red. “It isn’t but I didn’t know what else to put. I don’t really have a hobby.”
“Course you do,” said Lyndz. “You go to Brownies, don’t you? You go to dancing classes and gymnastics. You’re interested in fashion.” She reeled off a few more.
“Oh, I didn’t realise they were hobbies,” said Fliss, grabbing her card back. She’s so dozy. She scribbled away and soon ran out of space.
For my hobbies I wrote: Reading, Brownies, Pop Music, Collecting Teddies and Acting. I just lurv being in plays. It’s the best.
Kenny had written: Football, Swimming, Gymnastics, Snooker, Brownies.
Rosie had put: Netball, (I’d forgotten that), Soaps (she’s mad about them), Pop Music and Brownies.
Next I read Lyndz’s. She’d written: Horses, Painting, Horses, Brownies, Horses, Cooking Horses.
“Cooking horses?” I said.
“Let me see that.” She grabbed it back from me. She’d just missed out the comma. “Oh, very funny, I don’t think.”
I thought it was very funny, actually, and so did Kenny. We creased up.
Later on, when we were sure Rosie’s mum wasn’t coming back, we got out the food, put it in a big bowl and passed it round. I’ll tell you what there was: sherbet dabs, Black Jacks, Love Hearts, a Snickers bar, six marshmallows and a packet of Original Pringles. We all tucked in straight away.
“D’you think we should give Gazza something?” said Fliss.
“It doesn’t seem fair leaving him out,” Rosie agreed.
But really there was nothing apart from Pringles we thought a hamster might eat and we weren’t really sure about those. We decided we’d try him just with a couple of crumbs to see. Fliss got out of her sleeping bag and went to get him.
That’s when we realised he’d gone.
“He’s not here,” she wailed. “Oh, help, where is he?”
I jumped up as well, just to check, because Fliss is always losing things, even when they’re staring her in the face, but this time she was right: he wasn’t there. And when we turned on the lights he wasn’t anywhere else we could see either.
We stripped everything off the bed and searched all five sleeping bags. We looked under the bed. We emptied all our sleepover kits out in a pile in the middle of the floor. There were leggings and T-shirts and socks and knickers and slippers and toilet bags and torches and hairbrushes and teddies and sweet packets from the midnight feast. And we still couldn’t find him.
Fliss was nearly wetting herself. She kept saying over and over, “I’m going to be in such trouble with Mrs Weaver. I’m going to be in doom forever.”
And just then Rosie’s mum came back in. “My goodness, what’s all this noise?” she said. “Whatever’s going on?”
So then we had to tell her, Gazza was gone.
She helped us search the room all over again. But in the end she said, “Well, there’s nothing else we can do tonight. We’ll just have to hope he comes back when he’s hungry. The door’s been closed, so he must still be in the room somewhere. We’d just better make sure Jenny doesn’t get in here tonight.”
“Oh, no,” said Fliss horrified. “Would she eat him?”
“Probably not, but the poor hamster might die of fright if he saw her.”
“But where can he have gone?” said Fliss, nearly in tears.
“We’ve looked everywhere, Mum,” said Rosie.
“He could be under the floorboards, who knows. Come on, now, let’s have this light off and you girls settle down.”
“I don’t want to sleep on the floor any more,” said Fliss.
“I’ll swap with you,” said Rosie.
So Fliss dragged her sleeping bag onto the bed and Rosie and I got into our sleeping bags on the floor. We cuddled our teddies and Rosie’s mum turned out the light.
“It’s very late,” she said, “I think you should try to go to sleep, now. Goodnight.”
For quite a long time, we all lay in the dark and no one spoke. Rosie kept turning over, Lyndz sucked her thumb, Fliss was sniffing a bit. It sounded as if she was crying. Then I heard Lyndz whisper, “Don’t worry. He’ll turn up.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” Fliss sniffed. “I’ll be left out again.”
I felt sorry for Fliss too but I didn’t know what to do. I turned over and tried to get to sleep. I’m always the last to drop off. My brain won’t seem to go to sleep for ages after I go to bed, so I was lying there, thinking everyone else was asleep by now, when I heard this noise. It was quite close. In fact it sounded as if it was right underneath my pillow, right under my ear.
Rosie whispered, “Frankie, are you awake?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Can you hear that noise?”
I could and I knew exactly what it was: Gazza was on the move.
I sat up and turned on my torch. We crawled out of our sleeping bags and pulled back the carpet. Rosie doesn’t have a fitted carpet, like the one in my bedroom. She just has this big square rug in the middle of the floor. We rolled up one side of it and followed the sound and shone our torches down the crack between the floorboards.
“I think I can see him,” Rosie hissed. We both got so excited we banged heads. “OW,” I yelled. Suddenly all the others were awake.
“What’s going on?” said Kenny, jumping out of bed.
“Is it morning?” said Lyndz, rubbing her eyes. She’d only been asleep ten minutes!
“I’m sure I can see him,” Rosie said again.
I wasn’t sure I could, but I could certainly hear him moving about. Soon the others were crowding round us, Fliss was shivering in her nightie.
“Move back,” I said. “You’re in the light.”
“Try and coax him out with some Pringles,” said Kenny, getting one and crumbling it between her fingers. “Look what we’ve got for you,” she said, poking the crumbs down between the floorboards. She posted as much through as she could and waited. But still nothing happened. So we tried some more, until we’d pushed a whole Pringle down.
“If you keep pushing food through to him he’ll never come out,” said Rosie. “In fact if he eats too much he might get so fat he can’t fit back through the hole.”
“Good thinking, Wonder Woman,” I said. Rosie’s pretty clever at times.
Next we tried tapping messages on the floorboards above his head and flashing our torches on and off. But we couldn’t get him to come out.
Then Kenny got silly and started shining her torch up Fliss’s nightdress.
Fliss shouted, “That’s not fair, just because I’m the only one in a nightdress.”
So then we shone them up each other’s pyjama legs instead, until Rosie hissed at us, “Shhh, my mum’ll be in and then there’ll be trouble.”
I was ready to get back into my sleeping bag anyway, I was getting cold.
“Let’s finish off our midnight feast,” said Lyndz. But first I made a little trail of food.
Rosie’s mum had said Gazza would soon come back if he got hungry. So we crushed up the last few Pringles – there were only three left but as Kenny pointed out that would be a feast for a hamster – and laid them in a trail from the spot where we had heard him, all the way back to his cage.
When all the food was gone Lyndz started dozing off again. Lyndz is always the first to go to sleep. She’d already got her thumb in her mouth and her eyes kept closing. Kenny dug her in the ribs. “Wake up,” she said, “let’s sing our song before you nod off.”
We’ve got this Sleepover song that we always sing before we go to sleep. I bet you’ve heard it before.
Down by the river there’s a hanky panky
With a bullfrog sitting on the hanky panky
With an Ooh, Aah, Ooh, Aah,
Hey, Mrs Zippy, with a One-two-three…Out!
At the end of each verse one of us lies down. This time I was the one left sitting up in the dark on my own. It felt scary, but in a nice way. You know what I mean?
I turned off my torch and snuggled down into my sleeping bag. I must have fallen asleep straight away and I didn’t wake up until the morning, even though I had a horrid dream about being chased down tunnels by hamsters with pouches full of Pringles.
The next morning there was still no sign of Gazza. When I first woke up, I thought he’d come back. Fliss was squealing as if he was crawling over her face or something. In fact it was Kenny up to her tricks. She was using Fliss’s pony tail to tickle her neck. The first couple of times Fliss just brushed it away, without opening her eyes. Then she must have woken up and remembered the hamster on the loose because she just started to squeal, “AGGHHHH!” After that we were all awake and on the move.
One of the other great things about Rosie’s house is the wide staircase. We had mega sleeping-bag races sliding down on our bottoms two at a time. It was excellent until we had to stop because Lyndz split her sleeping bag. She wasn’t worried because it was an absolutely ancient one that used to be her brother’s. It was already in holes and she was dying for a new one. I’d have been in BIG trouble.
Then we made up a new game for our International Gladiators Challenge. We took it in turns to do a mad dash down the stairs, past the others armed with pillows or squishy poos. (A squishy poo is a sleeping bag filled with clothes for whacking people with.) It was magic!
Adam sat in his chair in the kitchen doorway watching us and bouncing up and down with excitement. We all felt sorry that he couldn’t join in and afterwards Lyndz said we should make up some special events that he could join in with, which I thought was a neat idea. At least Adam was coming with us to the Pet Show later because, after all, Jenny’s really his dog.
We were having such a great time none of us wanted to go home when our parents came to collect us. But we had to because we all needed to get our pets organised.
Gazza still hadn’t turned up by the time we left, but Rosie’s mum said, “Don’t worry we’ll keep on searching.”
Fliss looked dead miserable. She said there was no point in her going home because she didn’t have a pet to get ready. As if we didn’t all know that!
Rosie said “You could stay here and help us look for him, if you want to.” So that cheered her up a bit.
When I got home Mum was giving Pepsi a bath, which she hates. She doesn’t like water at all. She never jumps in the river like other dogs, she even runs away if Dad turns the hose pipe on in the garden. So I had to hold on to her to keep her in the bath, while Mum shampooed her and then rinsed her off. Then, even though we put the gas fire on and sat her in front of it, she shivered as if she was freezing. Dad rubbed her until she was nearly dry and then I brushed her.
We had to trim some tangled bits of fur from her ears. They do get messy because they hang down in everything. But Dad said, “Never worry. You won’t see from a distance.”
When we’d finished, she looked so adorable, I told her it didn’t matter what the judges thought. I thought she was the most beautiful dog in the world. And I gave her a big hug and she gave me a big lick.
We’d arranged to meet at the Village Hall at two o’clock. Brown Owl told us the hall wouldn’t open until two-thirty but we couldn’t wait to get there. I was first because Mum and Dad dropped me off on their way to the supermarket. They said they’d come back later to watch us. It was starting to rain, but I’d got my kagoul on.
I took Pepsi onto the field behind the Village Hall for a few minutes and then she sat down patiently near the entrance, while we waited for the others. My tummy was full of butterflies. I was already feeling excited and now I was starting to feel a bit nervous so I was glad when Kenny’s dad drove up and dropped her off.
Kenny was in her Brownie uniform, the same as me, and she was carrying Merlin in a brown cardboard box with holes in the lid. Her dad had made a rope handle so she could carry it without Merlin turning somersaults inside. She lifted the lid to show me, but I just took a quick peep and kept my distance. Pepsi was much more interested than I was but we tried to keep her away because whenever she got close to the box we could hear Merlin racing round in circles, scrabbling to get out.
Rosie came next with Fliss. They were walking towards us and Fliss wasn’t carrying anything, so Kenny said to me, “Uh-oh, it doesn’t look as if Gazza’s turned up.” But even from a distance we could see she was smiling.
“Have you got him?” I shouted to her.
She frowned at me, as if I’d said something wrong. When she got closer she hissed, “Do you want to tell everyone? It’s supposed to be a secret, remember.”
Kenny said, “There’s nobody here, yet.”
“No, but walls have ears,” she said. Then she stood close up to us and held her kagoul pocket open. We peeped in and there he was, a bit dusty-looking, but otherwise OK.
“How did you get him out?” whispered Kenny.
“We had to take the floorboard up in the end. It was Adam’s idea.”
“Where is Adam?”
“Mum’s bringing him later. Where’s Lyndz?”