The Beak Speaks Read online

  Some other books by Jeremy Strong

  DINOSAUR POX

  FATBAG: THE DEMON VACUUM CLEANER

  GIANT JIM AND THE HURRICANE

  THE HUNDRED-MILE-AN-HOUR DOG

  I’M TELLING YOU, THEY’RE ALIENS!

  THE INDOOR PIRATES

  INDOOR PIRATES ON TREASURE ISLAND

  THE KARATE PRINCESS

  THE KARATE PRINCESS TO THE RESCUE

  THE KARATE PRINCESS AND THE LAST GRIFFIN

  KRAZY KOW SAVES THE WORLD

  THE MONSTER MUGGS

  MY DAD’S GOT AN ALLIGATOR!

  MY GRANNY’S GREAT ESCAPE

  MY MUM’S GOING TO EXPLODE

  ORGANISING DAD

  PANDEMONIUM AT SCHOOL

  PIRATE PANDEMONIUM

  SIR RUPERT AND ROSIE GUSSET IN DEADLY DANGER

  THE SHOCKING ADVENTURES OF LIGHTNING LUCY

  THERE’S A PHARAOH IN OUR BATH!

  THERE’S A VIKING IN MY BED

  VIKING AT SCHOOL

  VIKING IN TROUBLE

  Jeremy Strong once worked in a bakery, putting the jam into three thousand doughnuts every night. Now he puts the jam in stories instead, which he finds much more exciting. At the age of three, he fell out of a first-floor bedroom window and landed on his head. His mother says that this damaged him for the rest of his life and refuses to take any responsibility. He loves writing stories because he says it is ‘the only time you alone have complete control and can make anything happen’. His ambition is to make you laugh (or at least snuffle). Jeremy Strong lives near Bath with four cats and a flying cow.

  Jeremy Strong

  The Beak Speaks

  PUFFIN

  With many thanks to Mirjana, Srdjan and Andrija, for all their hospitality and friendship

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2003

  10

  Text copyright ©Jeremy Strong,2003

  Illustrations copyright © Rowan Clifford,2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Contents

  1 Dinah: Sausage Dogs and Custard

  2 Mark: How to Organize Dad

  3 Dinah: Too Many Ladies in Waiting

  4 Mark: The Madwoman from Romania

  5 Dinah: Introducing Arnold

  6 Mark: The Midnight Visitor

  7 Dinah: The Dark House

  8 Mark: Dad Falls in Love, I Think!

  9 Dinah: Spot the Dog

  10 Mark: More Mad Stuff

  11 Dinah: How to Make Play Dough

  12 Mark: Trouble – Big Time

  13 Mark: The Great Escape

  14 Dinah: Mynah Bird to the Rescue!

  15 Mark: Rescue!

  16 Dinah: The Marvellous Madwoman

  17 Mark: Everyone Should Know This Cure

  18 Mark: The Wedding

  Dinah’s Epilogue

  1 Dinah: Sausage Dogs and Custard

  Dogs! Useless creatures. Brains like porridge. And the one at the vet’s clinic was an excellent example of just how useless a dog could be. When I saw that bit of plastic water pipe I laughed so much I nearly fell out of my bird cage. The tube had been brought in by a spotty girl and she placed it carefully on the examination table.

  ‘What have we got here?’ asked Mr Peter. (He’s the vet and my hero. Oh yes, just you wait and see!)

  ‘It’s me dog,’ the girl answered with a sniff. (It wasn’t an upset kind of sniff – more of a sniffy sniff, like her nose was blocked and she didn’t have a hanky.)

  ‘A dog?’ mused Mr Peter, and there was a muffled ‘wuff’ from deep inside.

  The girl nodded. ‘Ran in there after a rabbit, didn’t she? Rabbit came out the other end, but the dog didn’t. Stuck in there, isn’t she?’ Sniff.

  That sniffing was getting on my nerves. I wanted to shove one wing under her nose and say, ‘For heaven’s sake, blow!’ But Mr Peter was all patience.

  ‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ he said, lifting one end of the tube and peering down it.

  Sniff. ‘That’s ‘er back end.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Mr Peter. ‘Good thing I’ve had five years of training to spot things like that. OK, here is what I’m going to do. This is a bottle of cooking oil. I’m going to dribble this down the inside lining of the tube to make it nice and slippery like so, and we leave it a few moments for the oil to work right the way down. There we are, and now we give the tube a little shake and whoops! Out comes Fido!’

  ‘‘Er name’s Chantelle,’ sniffed the girl.

  Chantelle? Ooh la la! Manky Mophead would have been a better name. Do you know what came out of that tube? It wasn’t a dog. It was a long, thin mess of tangled, slimy fur that just so happened to have four tiddly legs, a silly tiddly head at one end and an excuse for a tiddly tail at the other. It was a long-haired dachshund – you know, a sausage dog – and boy, did it look daft! Oh yes!

  But then dogs are often like that, aren’t they? They’ve no pride, no sense of style at all. Me, I’m the Style Queen.

  It’s because I’m a mynah bird. Mynah birds have natural finesse. Finesse – that’s French, you know. It means good taste and elegance. I’m well educated, you see – I speak a bit of French, a bit of English – shows how cultured I am. Mynah birds are famous for speaking well, and I’m one of the best.

  ‘Good evening, sir. Dinner will be served in the dining-cage at eight.’ See? That’s posh talk, that is. Mynahs don’t do any of that awful screechy-squawky ‘‘Allo!’ business you get from parrots. Parrots are rubbish, but mynah birds, we’re something different. We’ve got style. Oh yes.

  Unlike this dachshund, which was slithering about on the table trying to stand up but failing because every surface was covered with cooking oil. I couldn’t help laughing. Well, it was funny! I was in hysterics, hanging upside down from my perch and banging my head on the cage floor.

  ‘I have done many strange things in my animal clinic,’ explained Mr Peter, ‘but I’ve never had to shake a dog out of a tube before.’

  The girl sniffed again and tried to pick up Chantelle. ‘Urgh. She’s all gunky.’

  ‘Wipe her over with a towel when you get home. She’ll be as right as rain in no time. Just don’t let her fall on the barbecue.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Joke,’ explained Mr Peter.

  ‘Joke?’ Sniff.

  ‘Never mind,’ sighed Mr Peter. ‘Bye-bye.’
<
br />   ‘Wuff,’ said the dog.

  ‘Don’t swear,’ said Mr Peter. I was on my back in my cage, kicking my legs in the air and screaming with laughter. The girl glanced across at me.

  ‘That bird all right or is she choking on something?’

  ‘Dinah likes to show off,’ said Mr Peter.

  The liar! The great big liar! I do NOT show off. AND I HATE BEING CALLED DINAH! What a daft name. Dinah the Mynah, I ask you! I could see that dachshund smirking at me too. Stupid dog.

  I hate dogs. They think they’re so clever, just because they can run and jump and fetch sticks and stuff. I mean, what use is that? Just suppose I went flying off, got a stick and brought it back for you. I put it down at your feet and I say, ‘There you are, I’ve brought you a stick, look.’

  And you’d say: ‘What do I want a stick for?’

  And I’d say: ‘I dunno.’

  And you’d say: ‘I dunno, either. Go and put it back.’

  You see what I mean? What are sticks for? They’re for trees, that’s what. Trees have sticks on them and what I say is, leave them there. Dogs are just stupid.

  Mr Peter’s a good vet. I owe my life to him. He saved me from almost certain death. Oh yes. My previous life was terrible. I was being held prisoner by animal smugglers. They kept all these animals locked away in stinking cages, waiting to be sold. Like slaves, we were. I managed to escape from my cage, but I couldn’t get out of the room. Want to know what they used to catch me? A vacuum cleaner.

  That’s right! They sucked me right up it. SHLOPP! I disappeared backwards up the tube. Have you ever heard a squawk in reverse? It goes sort of KWAUQS! Sounded like I’d swallowed a cork. It took off most of my feathers. But when they opened up the machine I skedaddled like my bottom was on fire! I whizzed out through the door and took to the air.

  It was a nightmare. My feathers were falling out all the time and I

  was losing power and eventually I just couldn’t keep going. I went into a nosedive (actually it was more of a beak-dive) and – Spladdash! – I plunged straight into Mr Peter’s garden pond. That was a stroke of luck!

  He rescued me. I didn’t have many feathers left. I was all in the nuddy and me the Style Queen! The shame of it. But the feathers grew back eventually and he’s looked after me ever since. I still have nightmares about that other place, but I’m safe now, with Mr Peter and his children.

  Mark and Tamsin are great. They give me loads of nibbly things to eat when Mr Peter isn’t looking, and they let me out of the cage much more than he does.

  Mark’s the oldest. He takes life very seriously, but he looks like an idiot – and I mean that in the nicest possible way. You can never be sure what he’s going to appear as. He’s mad about animals, like his dad. He spent all last week pretending he was an archerfish, squirting jets of water at flies. He got soaked. Tammy got soaked. I got soaked. Mr Peter got soaked… and then rather cross.

  This week Mark is busy being a leopard. He’s dyed his blond hair with leopard spots. He goes creeping about the place, sneaking behind the chairs and then pouncing on people.

  Mr Peter spilled his dinner last night when Mark suddenly ambushed him from under the table. Mr Peter was not pleased, surprise, surprise.

  ‘I’m a leopard, Dad. I’ve got to practise my hunting skills.’

  ‘Well, now you can be a leopard cleaning the carpet.’

  ‘I don’t think leopards clean carpets in the wild,’ Mark pointed out.

  ‘Well, if this leopard doesn’t clean this carpet, this leopard is going to be in very big trouble. Does this leopard understand?’

  So the leopard cleaned the carpet.

  But the real reason why Mark is so serious, despite his leopard-spot hair, is because of his dad, Mr Peter. (Full name: Peter Draper, Veterinary Surgeon, of the Small Paws Animal Clinic – there, now you’ve been properly introduced.) Mark and Tammy haven’t got a mum, you see. She went off to America with someone else. Mr Peter says she flew there, but he must be making that up. She had such thin arms – she’d never even have taken off, let alone flown. Ha ha. Mynah joke.

  Mark and Tamsin only get to see her about once a year. They were pretty cut up about it, but they’ve settled down a lot. It happened about two years ago and now Mark reckons he’s got to look after his dad. He talks to me a lot, you see – that’s how I know. He says he’s second-in-command.

  ‘There’s nobody else to look after him,’ he told me. ‘It’s all down to me, and I know what’s wrong.’ He thinks I don’t understand what he says, but of course I do. I mean, I don’t just have style, I’m intelligent too.

  I just looked at him. Sometimes it’s best to keep quiet, especially if you’re a bird. People don’t expect you to say anything too brainy. If you do, they come over all funny I kept quiet and waited to hear what he’d say next.

  ‘What Dad needs is a girlfriend.’

  ‘SQUAAA$**&%*WKKK!’

  OK, so maybe that wasn’t a very intelligent thing to say, but I was shocked. I was thinking, hang on, chum, you can’t go around picking up girlfriends for people, especially not for your own dad! But Mark was serious. I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘He can share his work with her and he’ll have someone to talk to. Tammy can have a new mum and she can come and live here and she can make custard without lumps for us, because Dad’s always has lumps in it, Dinah, you know it does.’

  That last bit was true enough, but I still thought it was a bit much. Just because you don’t want lumps in your custard doesn’t mean you can go round grabbing girlfriends for your dad, does it? Anyhow, what was Mark planning to do? Was he going to put all girlfriends through a custard-making test before he allowed them anywhere near his dad?

  The thing is, when Mark gets serious about something it’s time to watch out. Every now and then he gets these Bright Ideas, and if it’s not Mark thinking of something, it’s that crazy friend of his, Sanjeev. (It was Sanjeev who put the leopard spots on Mark’s hair.) The problem is that Mark’s bright ideas nearly always lead to trouble.

  And this latest idea was not simply going to lead us into trouble. It was going to take us straight to The Dark House, the most terrifying place I have ever seen. It was a return to all my old nightmares.

  I mean, we all nearly DIED!

  2 Mark: How to Organize Dad

  I’m going to be a vet when I grow up, like my dad. He’s fantastic. He stopped a lion coughing once. Can you imagine trying to cure a lion of anything ? I’d have been scared stiff, but my dad, he just went straight up to it and said, ‘Open up, chum!’ And the lion opened its mouth and Dad tipped a spoonful of cough medicine down its throat and then came home. It’s true; Dad told me.

  I think working with sick animals is a great job. Sometimes Dad brings the smaller animals home and Tammy and I help look after them. That’s how we got our mynah bird. Almost all her feathers had come off. She almost died, but Dad saved her. We call her Dinah and she goes everywhere with us. Dad’s always talking to her. Mynahs are terrific at learning words and Dad has taught her loads. He takes her into the surgery with him and sometimes I go too and help him. It’s all part of my plan to become a vet like him.

  I reckon that if you want to do something in life, then you’ve got to get yourself organized. It’s no good waiting for it to happen. I’ve already started practising to be a vet. I’ve often watched Dad at work and I’ve picked up loads of information from him. And I like to actually try and be different animals, so that I can understand how they think and feel. I’ve read tons of books too – hundreds and thousands, I expect.

  My friends at school are always bringing in animals for me to sort out. Last week Jade brought me a robin with a stuck beak, and

  Sanjeev is always bringing me problems. Yesterday he had two worms that had tied themselves together in knots. Actually Sanjeev brings me so many animal problems I sometimes think that he’s deliberately testing me or something. Anyhow, I get lots of practice.

  When I get old
er I’m going to be a proper vet and I shall give cough medicine to sick lions (if I’m brave enough) and mend elephants and stick broken ostriches back together and things like that. I shall probably travel the world, looking after animals.

  My dad’s the best vet there is, but he works too hard. He’s always rushing around, seeing to sick animals, and when he’s not doing that he’s coming to school to pick me up, or taking Tammy to playgroup or the childminder. He never stops.

  And he’s lonely. I just know he is. He’s only got me and Tammy now. I watch him sometimes, when he thinks he’s by himself. I keep an eye on him and, to tell you the truth, sometimes I think he’s going a bit mad with the loneliness. I often hear him talking to himself – at least that’s what I thought it was and then I realized he was talking to Dinah the Mynah. How weird is that?

  He doesn’t just teach her words – he talks to her, like she’s a real person, almost like she’s his wife or something. He tells her what he’s been doing, and how me and Tammy are doing at school, and how he cut himself cooking, and the state of Tammy’s socks and all the sort of useless rubbishy stuff that he used to talk about with Mum, until she went off.

  Dinah the Mynah sits there cackling and nodding as if she understands everything he says. Definitely weird.

  So I reckon that what Dad really, really needs is a girlfriend. Then he can marry her and she can come and live here and he’ll have someone to talk to and he’ll be happy.

  It was my teacher who gave me the idea. Miss Pettigrew is quite nice, even though she’s about a hundred years old. She’s retiring at the end of this year. She keeps telling us that we are her Very last class’, and she seems ever so cheerful. But she will make us do Country Dancing.

  I hate Country Dancing. Miss Pettigrew goes to an Irish dancing club and she makes us do it as well. We have to stand there with our arms quite still and make our legs flip about all over the place. Sanjeev always manages to fall over and knock down everyone else. We end up looking like some sort of World Champion Pick-Up-Sticks Competition. I think he does it deliberately.