Читать книгу Sleepover Girls Go Treasure Hunting - Sue Mongredien - Страница 6

You know what it’s like when you’re dead excited about something and then you show your parents and they’re like, “Oh yeah, whatever,” as if they’ve just seen the most boring thing on earth? Well, that was kind of what I was expecting to happen with the ring as well – for Mum and Dad to crush our excitement with lots of boring, practical reasons why we couldn’t possibly have found some real treasure.

Which just goes to show that parents are totally unpredictable creatures because – miracle of the year – they didn’t say anything of the sort.

“Mum, look what Buster found in the garden,” I shouted as we went into the kitchen. Mum and Dad were both there reading the newspaper and trying to stop my baby brother Spike ripping up the TV guide.

Fliss wiggled the ring off her finger and dropped it into my mum’s hand. “Treasure!” she beamed.

“Is it yours, Mrs Collins?” Sherlock Kenny wanted to know at once. “Did you lose it when you were gardening?”

Mum shook her head. “No, it’s not one of mine,” she said, peering at it. “I’ve never seen it before. It’s very pretty. I wonder whose it is.”

“We were wondering if there could be some buried treasure in the garden,” I burst out excitedly. “What do you think? You might have dug this up the other day when we were out in the garden – and there might be loads more where it came from, too!”

Fliss sat down at the kitchen table suddenly, looking really pale and scared. “I’ve just had a horrible thought,” she said faintly. “What if there’s a dead body down there? A dead body that was WEARING THE RING!”

“Eeeeuughh, do you have to, Fliss?” Rosie said. “Thanks for that lovely idea – not!”

“Darling, I’m sure if I’d raked over the hand of a dead woman, I’d have noticed,” Mum said calmly. She is not the tiniest bit squeamish – as you probably guessed.

“Raked over the… ugh,” Fliss echoed, her face changing from white to green in seconds. She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked sick as anything. “I wish you hadn’t said that, Mrs Collins.”

Dad took the ring out of Mum’s hand and examined it. “It feels heavy enough to be real gold,” he said, sounding interested. “Whereabouts did you find it?”

“Near the ash tree,” I said. “Can we go and do some digging there to see what else we can find, please, please, PLEASE?”

“Definitely not,” Mum said at once. “I can just see it now – my rose bushes all destroyed by you five, hacking away at their roots. No, thank you very much!”

“Oh, per-leeeeze, Mum,” I wheedled. “We’d be dead careful.”

“I mean, if it really is buried treasure, there’s bound to be more down there, isn’t there?” Kenny reasoned. “After all, no one would bury a single ring, would they?”

“It’ll be just like Time Team!” Frankie piped up. “I saw it the other week, right, and they’d found this whole Roman campground that they were digging up. It was soooo cool. They found bits of old Roman wine goblets and parts of old spears and all sorts of cool stuff!”

“Awesome,” Kenny said. “Hey – what if Romans used to live here in your village, Lyndz?”

“What if they lived in your HOUSE?” Fliss breathed excitedly.

My dad burst out laughing. “As this is a Victorian house, I doubt it,” he chuckled. “Fliss, remind me – what century is this again?”

Fliss frowned at him. “Is this a trick question?” she asked suspiciously. “It’s the 21st century of course!”

“Right,” Dad said. “And the Romans were around… when?”

Fliss shrugged. “Erm… about a hundred years ago?” she guessed, looking uncomfortable.

“The Romans were around in the FIRST century,” Dad told her. “Nearly two THOUSAND years ago. Now, I know our house might look two thousand years old, but… ” he joked.

“Dad, do you think this ring could be two thousand years old?” I asked excitedly. “How old might it be?”

Dad peered at it again. “It’s hard to say with gold,” he said, shaking his head. “It ages very well. I very much doubt it’s Roman though, but… ”

“Just think, if we DID find a whole hoard of Roman treasure, we’d be famous,” Rosie said dreamily, completely ignoring my dad. “We’d be on the news and everything.”

“And rich,” I said pointedly. “Weren’t you saying the other night, Mum, that you didn’t know how you were going to pay for the loft extension?”

“Lyndsey, I don’t think your friends need to hear about our money problems,” Mum said with an edge in her voice. She gave me a sharp look over the top of her glasses which said, clear as day, Shut up, Lyndz.

I closed my mouth and looked down. When my mum gives you THAT look, you know it’s best not to argue. But why is it that parents go all weird when you start talking about money? When I’m grown up, I won’t care about how much people earn or how much someone’s house is worth – who’s interested, anyway? I’ve noticed that grown-ups get dead twitchy and secretive about it though. Odd, isn’t it? You’d think they could find something more interesting to get their knickers in a twist over.

I was just starting to think that was going to be the end of any treasure hunting, there and then, when my dad cleared his throat. “Well, maybe it would be worth having another quick look around the ash tree,” he said slowly. “A SUPERVISED quick look under the tree so that no one does any damage to the rose bushes. Or their roots,” he added quickly before my mum could say it.

“YEAHHHH!” I yelled.

“Yay!”, “Result!”, “Nice one, Mr C!” the others cheered.

Mum still didn’t look too thrilled at the idea of us digging up the garden. “Keith, I mean it – if anybody digs up anything they shouldn’t, I really will not be happy… ” she said to my dad warningly, as she started tidying up the newspapers and Spike’s toys.

“Don’t worry,” Dad said. “You won’t even know we’ve been there. Apart from the huge heap of gold coins and goodies we’re going to bring back with us, of course… ”

“WHOOOPEEEE!” Kenny yelled, bouncing around the kitchen like a mad jack-in-a-box. “Come on – let’s go and dig up that booty – like, NOW!”

“Clever, clever Buster,” I said, stooping down to pat him proudly. “We’re going to be rich and famous – all because of you. You’ll get the biggest, juiciest steak there ever was for being such a good little treasure hunter.”

Mum rolled her eyes. “Now, don’t go making promises you can’t afford to keep, Lyndz,” she said, as we went out the back door.

Luckily, Dad was a bit keener on the idea of treasure than Mum was. He once told me his favourite book when he was a boy was Treasure Island, so he was getting well into the idea. “Right, girls, let’s sort out some digging tools,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Follow me to the shed and we’ll see what we can find.”

Minutes later, we were “all tooled up” as Dad put it. He had Mum’s garden spade, I had my brother Stu’s smaller spade, Kenny and Frankie had trowels and Rosie and Fliss drew the short straw and had to make do with plastic beach spades. “I’ve never seen the Time Team people using bright pink and yellow spades before!” Rosie joked as we went over to the tree.

“That’s ‘cos we’re the cool new version of Time Team,” Frankie said. “Treasure Team!”

Dad chuckled. “Right then, Treasure Team – where did Buster dig up this ’ere ’ighly valuable piece of gold?” he asked.

“Just there,” I said, crouching down and pointing. “See his scratch marks?”

“You know what, if we really ARE going to be like Time Team, we’re going to have to be very careful,” Fliss said solemnly. “They just scrape away at the soil dead gently, don’t they, so they don’t damage or scratch any of the buried treasure in the ground.”

“Oh, let’s just get on with it and get stuck into the digging,” Kenny said impatiently, and then remembered my mum’s warning. “Er… Very carefully, of course… ”

“Fliss, if by any remote chance there does happen to be Roman treasure down there, we’ll be scraping away at the soil for weeks before we get to it,” Dad pointed out. “It won’t be lying just under the surface, will it?”

“And remember, Mum’s just dug up loads of this flowerbed and she wasn’t scraping gently at all,” I added. “So it might be a bit late to start all that now.”

“All right, all right,” Fliss said huffily, her cheeks going a bit pink. “I just think, if we’re going to do this, we may as well do it properly, that’s all, but if you all think you know better, then… ”

“Let’s get going, then,” Frankie said, before Fliss could get too carried away. “And anything we find gets split equally, yeah?”

“After we’ve bought Buster’s steak, yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s get to work!”

So the great garden dig-up began. At first, we were all dead excited about what we might find, and started talking about what we’d spend our riches on. Fliss was going to have a wild shopping weekend in London with her mum (of course). Kenny fancied an adventure holiday bungee jumping and snowboarding in New Zealand. I was going to set up an animal welfare centre. Rosie wanted to buy a posh new house for her mum and Frankie was going to take her family on holiday to Florida so she could go to the Epcot Centre and the NASA space station. Dad said he was going to take Mum away on a romantic holiday and leave us kids to fend for ourselves for a few weeks. I think he was joking…

Then a scream came from Fliss. “Oh, oh, ugh, GROSS!!” she squealed, dropping her spade as if it was burning hot, and leaping away.

“What’s up? Is it the dead woman’s hand?” Kenny asked eagerly, coming to have a look at what Fliss had found.

Fliss shuddered and closed her eyes. “A worm! A worm!” she moaned dramatically. “It was wriggling on my spade and everything!”

“Oh, FLISS,” I said, going over to pick it up. “You’ve probably scared it by screaming like that, poor little thing.”

“Do you reckon?” Rosie asked, sounding interested. “Do worms have ears, then?”

The others looked at me, expecting me to know but I had no idea. “Well, I can’t see any,” I said, peering doubtfully at the pink wriggler in my hand.

“That reminds me,” Kenny giggled. “What did the earwig say as he crawled into Fliss’s ear?”

“Kenny!” Fliss groaned, shaking her head and looking sick again. “Please just… shut up!”

“Earwig-o, earwig-o, earwig-o,” Kenny sang. “Geddit? ‘Ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go… ’”

“You’re lucky I’m too scared to touch that worm,” Fliss said, sounding fierce. “Else I might just have dropped it down your neck for that, Kenny McKenzie. I’m going to have nightmares about earwigs crawling into my brain now, thank you very much.”

“How about this one?” Frankie said, with a mischievous glint in her eye. “There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden and his name is Wiggly-Woo… ”

The rest of us immediately joined in the song.

“There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden

And all that he can do

Is wiggle all night and wiggle all day… ”

“Stop it!” wailed Fliss.

“Come on, Fliss,” my dad said, seeing her bottom lip sticking out about ten centimetres. “Ignore them. Think about all those clothes you’re going to buy, eh?”

We were all in a silly mood by then. “I’ve just dug up a pop group,” Rosie giggled. “Look – it’s the beetles!”

Even Fliss laughed at that. “Hey, I’ve got one – what’s a gardener’s favourite Christmas carol?” she said, joining in. “Soil-ent night!”

Soon we were all coming out with them.

“What smells most in the garden?” Dad asked. “Your nose!”

“Where do insects live?” Frankie said. “Crawley!”

We were having such a laugh, I couldn’t believe it was lunch time already when I heard Mum calling us. Treasure hunting was turning out to be the best fun we’d had in aaaaages!