Читать книгу The Sleepover Club at the Carnival - Sue Mongredien - Страница 4

Howdy, fans, Kenny here. You know, the quiet, shy, retiring, polite one! What do you mean, you don’t believe me? Oh, OK, then – I’m the loud, rude one who’s always getting us into trouble. Satisfied?

Hey, what are you doing upside-down like that anyway? What? You’re NOT upside-down? Oh – silly me! You just LOOK upside-down, that’s all. In fact, everything looks upside-down – because I’m upside-down! Derrr! I’ve been practising for the world record in standing on your head, you see. The only thing is, after a while, you forget you’re the wrong way round and it seems perfectly normal to be staring at people’s feet. My dad keeps saying that being upside-down all the time means my brain is getting squashed, and it’s only a matter of time before it turns to mush. I don’t THINK I believe him, but then he IS a doctor, so maybe he knows something I don’t?

Hang on a second while I turn the right way again. There, that’s better! Let’s go and sit out in the garden, shall we? I hate staying indoors when the weather’s nice. Why stay inside four boring walls when you can practise your cartwheels up and down the lawn?

Anyway, I’m glad I saw you, because the others voted for me to tell you all about the Cuddington Carnival and what we did for it. “Kenny,” they said, “as the best, funniest, cleverest and most entertaining storyteller of all of us, you MUST tell all the Sleepover Club fans what happened at the carnival. We’re begging you!”

OK, OK, so the others didn’t quite say all of that. But as Frankie pointed out, a lot of what I’m about to tell you is MY story. And as animal-mad Lyndz would say – you might as well hear it straight from the horse’s mouth! (Not that I’m a horse, but… Oh, you know what I mean.)

Have you ever been to a carnival? Believe it or not, I HADN’T until last week. Now I’ve been to one, I want to go to lots more – they are so megatastically awesome! And the only thing that’s keeping me from being completely gutted that this year’s carnival is all over, is the fact that it’s half term now. We’re off school for a week, yippee! But if the carnival had just finished and we still had to go back to school – that would just be too traumatic for words!

Anyway, I’d better get on with the story. The rest of the Sleepover Club is coming over for lunch in a bit, and you know what a load of blabbermouths they are – they’ll just want to interrupt me all the time. And we don’t want that, do we?

Well, the first I heard about the Cuddington Carnival was from my mum. She’s a pretty good source for juicy gossip, and always knows what’s going on around Cuddington. She helps out as a receptionist at my dad’s surgery and also does some hairdressing from home, so one way or another, people are always telling her their news – which she then tells to my grandma on the phone. That’s when I start earwigging.

Over the years, I’ve built up quite a good gossip radar in my ears. There are certain words that my radar always picks up on, however boring the rest of the talk is. For example, here’s a typical conversation between Mum and Grandma on the phone. Mum tends to do most of the talking so this is what I hear:

“Recipe for lemon cake… drone, drone… Alison Parker’s new baby… drone, drone-Mrs Ellis’s sciatica… drone, drone… Emma’s boyfriend…”

PING! That’s where my ears prick up. Emma’s my oldest sister and she never tells me anything about her love life, even though I’m always trying to find out the gory details. Excellent blackmailing material, you see – not to mention all the fun I can have winding her up! But although Emma won’t tell ME anything, she often confides in Mum, and that’s where the gossip radar comes in handy. It means that once Mum starts yakking on to Grandma about it, yours truly gets to find out what’s going on, too!

So a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in my favourite eavesdropping position – at the kitchen table, pretending to flick through one of Emma’s magazines, with one ear firmly tuned to Mum. This time, I heard:

“Cathy Clayton’s new hairdo… drone, drone… Jim’s working too hard… drone, drone… Molly’s piano exam… drone, drone… plans for the carnival…”

PING! Carnival? What carnival? What was she talking about? I immediately tuned in fully to hear more.

“Yes, Sheila Adams told me about it,” Mum was saying. “At the end of the month… Oh, you know, floats and dressing up and bouncy castles, I should think… Mmm, well, she’s asked me to help out with some baking, as there are going to be stalls in the main street. I was wondering if I could get your chocolate cheesecake recipe off you… Yes…”

My radar switched itself off at the recipe word. Dull City! Then I had to wait impatiently while Mum finished chatting before I could find out any more about the carnival.

Click! The second that I heard her put the phone down, I swung round in my chair. “Mum, what were you saying about a carnival?” I said at once. “I couldn’t help overhearing…”

She grinned at me. “I thought I could feel the breeze of a pair of ears flapping behind me,” she said. She was pretending to be cross, but I knew she didn’t mind. Let’s face it, we both know where I get my nosiness from. “I was just telling Grandma that Cuddington is going to have a carnival at the end of the month. Something to do with Cuddington being one hundred years old. I’m going to be doing some baking for it, and—”

“But what IS a carnival exactly?” I burst out, not wanting to hear another word about Mum’s baking plans. “I mean, what’s going to be happening? Is it just a load of soppy dancing and stuff?”

She thought for a moment. “I think it’s all a bit up in the air still,” she said. “Yes, there’ll be dancing and music and bands playing, I should think. Then there’s probably going to be a parade with different floats, and people all dressed up. There’s going to be a funfair on the green with lots of rides and a bouncy castle. And stalls and sideshows up and down the high street. That sort of thing.”

I bounced off my chair and jumped up and down with excitement. “Excellent!” I said. “Wait till I tell the others!”

I was just about to get on the phone and ring round the rest of the Sleepover Club to tell them the news but Mum looked at her watch. “Not so fast,” she said. “I promised Emma she could use the phone after I’d finished. And by the time SHE’s done with it, it’ll be your bedtime.”

“Oh, Mu-um!” I moaned. Emma’s sixteen and spends HOURS on the phone. It must be a weird teenage thing because Rosie’s big sister Tiffany is exactly the same. Never mind my bedtime, it would practically be breakfast time by the time Emma had finished gassing away to her mates.

“I’m sure it can wait until school tomorrow,” Mum said briskly. “And anyway, it’s high time you had a bath, young lady. Look at the colour of your neck! What have you been doing – rolling around in mud or something?”

“Of course not!” I said grumpily, going up to the bathroom. Well, I wasn’t about to tell her I’d been timing myself doing circuits of forward and backward rolls around the garden, was I? Especially as I’d managed to kick quite a lot of her flowers in the process.

So even though I was bursting to tell everyone about the carnival, I wasn’t able to say anything until the next day at school. And even THEN, it didn’t go according to plan.

I went up to school extra fast the next morning. Yeah, I know – that’s not like me at all! Even though I’m pretty speedy on my feet most of the time, the journey to school somehow takes me a lot longer than if I’m going to the swimming baths or to a footy match or something. Strange, isn’t it? It’s as if my feet just can’t bear to take me to such a boring place. Well, that’s my theory anyway.

The others were already in the playground when I got there. “Hi!” I said excitedly, rushing over to them. “Guess what? I’ve got some wicked news to tell you!”

“What?” Frankie, Lyndz and Rosie said at once, but Fliss just frowned. “I was actually in the middle of telling everyone what the twins did last night,” she said huffily. “So let me finish first!”

Frankie rolled her eyes at me, and Rosie bit her lip, trying not to giggle at the cross look on my face. Lyndz, who’s definitely the most patient one of us five, was the only one listening to Fliss’s boring story about what her baby sister and brother had been up to now.

“And you’ll never guess where I found Hannah’s rattle in the end,” Fliss said at long last, building up to a dramatic climax. “In the fridge!”

“Really? In the fridge?” Lyndz asked. “How had it got in there?”

“Well,” Fliss began – but Frankie was just a smidgen too quick for her.

“C’mon, Kenz – what’s your news? You look like you’re about to burst with it!” she said.

“Get a load of this,” I said importantly, “Mum told me last night that—”

PEEEEPPPP!

Curses! Now it was Mrs Poole our headteacher’s turn to interrupt me, blowing the whistle to get us to line up and go into school.

“What is it?” hissed Frankie as we lined up in front of Mrs Weaver.

“Tell you later,” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth. The Cuddington carnival wasn’t something I wanted to whisper to the others just before we went into class. I needed time to tell them about it properly.

But then, wouldn’t you know it? It just wasn’t going to be my day for breaking the news. As soon as we’d had the register, Mrs Weaver smiled a big smile at us and said she had something exciting to tell us about. Then she pulled down the blackboard to show one word: CARNIVAL.

Aaaaarggghhh! So all in all, I’d been scuppered by:

Emma – using the phone

Mum – who’d made me go to bed

Fliss – who wouldn’t let me interrupt her boring story

Mrs Poole – blowing the whistle just at the crucial moment

And Mrs Weaver – telling everyone about the carnival before I could. Gutted!