Agatha Parrot and the Mushroom Boy Read online

  We love Bianca. Don’t always understand her but love her.

  The only door left to try was number 3. Ivy got Bianca to point her trombone at the letter box. I held the flap open and Bianca did a big BWARB-WABWARRRRB in through the hole ha ha wicked!

  We could hear Martha laughing even before she opened the door because she’s big and jolly and laughs at everything.

  ‘Agatha! Perfect timing,’ she said when she appeared. It was like she was expecting me. ‘Here’s that stuff your dad wanted to go on his cake.’

  Martha held up a huge carrier bag from the shop her mum works at. It’s called Spendless and everything they sell has funny wrappings and it’s made by people you’ve never heard of. Martha opened it up to show us. ‘There’s icing, jam, chocolate sauce, crisps . . .’

  ‘CRISPS? Honestly Martha you can’t put crisps on a cake!’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Martha holding up a packet with strange writing on. ‘They’re pink so we think they’re prawn cocktail flavour. They go with anything. Besides they’re well past their use-by date so Mum put them in for free.’

  ‘Free?’ said Dad who had just stuck his head out of our front door which is next door. ‘YUM! Do thank your mum for me.’

  He reached over the fence, took the bag and went back in. Martha was about to go back in her house too but I stopped her.

  ‘Did you see Sing, Wiggle and Shine?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely no way!’ said Martha. ‘We’re watching the football.’

  ‘But it’s Rovers playing,’ I said. ‘You hate Rovers.’

  ‘Too right I do,’ grinned Martha. ‘And they’re losing three-nil. It’s awesome!’

  Martha hurried back inside her house. Ellie had already shut her door and Bianca did another BWARB and went back in too. That just left me and Ivy who was swinging on our gate.

  ‘How come YOU didn’t see the programme anyway?’ asked Ivy. I told her all about the evilness of James. ‘You can’t let him get away with that!’ she said.

  I must have pulled a face or something because Ivy fell off the gate and banged her head on the fence in excitement. ‘Oh WOW!’ she blurted out. ‘You’ve already done something haven’t you? I know. I can tell.’

  ‘No I haven’t,’ I said.

  ‘Yes you have, yes you have, yes you have,’ said Ivy. ‘What what what?’

  Honestly! We were standing right outside our house with the door open and James could have been listening. There was no way I was going to tell Mrs Big Mouth Ivy anything.

  ‘Tell me the truth or I’ll HATE you,’ said Ivy.

  So Ivy just had to go back into her own house and hate me. I can be dead tough like that.

  The Famous Cake of Odd Street

  When I got back into the kitchen, the cake was out of the oven and cooling on the table. Dad was digging through Martha’s bag of stuff, but then he looked up and caught James almost sticking his face in the cake and prodding it with his finger.

  ‘James!’ said Dad. The Guilty Boy jumped backwards so hard that he crashed into the fridge. ‘Will you stop poking and wiping your nose on that cake? People are going to eat it.’

  Dad opened up the bag and lifted out a massive block of bright yellow icing that almost hurt your eyes to look at. ‘What do you think of this, then?’ he asked proudly. ‘It was on special offer.’

  I bet it was. I think I’d rather eat the bit of cake that James wiped his nose on, but Dad can never resist anything on special offer. He tipped all the other special offers out of the bag. There was about three tonnes of coloured sprinkles, squirty toppings, sweets, chocolate shapes and of course some dodgy pink crisps. Yahoo, good old Dad! If you’re making a cake for a Guess the Weight of the Cake competition, you don’t want it to look boring.

  Dad and me began rolling out the icing and slapping it on the cake, but James just stood in the corner having a bit of a panic.

  ‘Do you want to do a bit, James?’ I asked him nicely like the lovely sister I am.

  ‘I’d rather he found that remote,’ said Dad as he aimed a strawberry sauce squirter at the cake. ‘Because James isn’t going to get any pocket money till it turns up.’

  BLOSH!

  SPLUDGE!

  SQUIRTY PLOP!

  We’d been decorating the cake for about half an hour, and the yellow icing was completely covered with flowers, stars, hearts, rockets and a rather lovely skull. The whole soggy lump was dripping with so much strawberry and chocolate topping that it had run off all over the table. There were just a few tiny silver sugar balls left on a saucer.

  ‘Shall I put these on Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘Hmmm . . .’ he said having a deep artistic contemplation to himself. ‘Nah, better not. We don’t want to overdo it.’

  Just then we heard the front door open. ‘We’re home!’ shouted Mum and then little sister Tilly ran in wearing her ballet skirt.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Tilly when she saw the cake.

  ‘It’s for the school fete on Monday,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tilly wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Do you like it?’ asked Dad proudly.

  That was a mistake. You should never ask Tilly if she likes anything, because you always get the same answer.

  ‘Hmmm . . . bit boring,’ said Tilly, then she ran upstairs to get changed.

  ‘She’s wrong,’ said Dad sounding hurt. ‘This cake is a legend. In years to come there’ll be coach tours going down Odd Street showing people where it was made. It’s one of the all-time greats.’ He took some photos of the cake on his phone then wrapped a big sheet of cling film round it. Finally he took one more photo and then went upstairs for a bath because he was covered in yellow icing, flour, cream and squirty toppings. James was still staring at the cake like it was about to bite him.

  ‘What is your problem?’ I asked.

  ‘The TV remote’s in there,’ whispered James. ‘It has to be!’ He went to the kitchen drawer and got a long metal meat spike out. ‘I’ll see if I can feel it.’ James was just about to stick the spike into the top of the cake.

  ‘Are you mad?’ I warned him. ‘Dad will go nuts if you burst the cling film.’

  ‘Then how can I find out? I have to know!’

  BBC2 is a Chocolate Flower

  A few minutes later I was keeping watch by the living room door. James was standing in front of the telly which was quietly showing a cooking programme. He was clutching the wrapped cake and was gently prodding the top with his finger. Suddenly the door opened and James spun round, almost dropping the cake.

  ‘Relax,’ I told him. ‘It’s only Tilly.’

  ‘What’s James doing?’ asked Tilly.

  ‘He’s trying to see if he can change the telly channel using the cake,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a bit boring,’ said Tilly. ‘Why doesn’t he use the remote?’

  ‘Don’t tell her I lost it!’ James snapped bossily. He kept prodding the cake, trying to push as hard as he dared without messing up the fancy patterns. He was just about to give up when the telly suddenly boomed out:

  ‘. . . AND THE PUDDING IS CALLED CHOCOLATE SURPRISE BECAUSE . . .’

  ‘Argh!’ cried James, stabbing at the cake even harder. ‘I must have hit the volume button. Shhh! Please shhh . . . !’

  ‘. . . WHEN YOU DIG YOUR SPOON IN, YOU FIND . . . TWO PAIRS OF TROUSERS AND AN OLD WELLINGTON BOOT AND . . . NOTTINGHAM RAILWAY STATION.’

  ‘Now it’s changing channels,’ said James. ‘The chocolate flower is BBC2 and the green star is Channel 5. The remote is definitely in here!’

  ‘What did James say?’ shouted Tilly, trying to make herself heard over the telly. Before she got an answer, we heard Mum shouting from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Why is that telly on so loud?’

  ‘James, she’s coming!’ I warned him. ‘Try pressing the red Smartie.’ So James pressed the red Smartie and to his relief the telly got quieter.* (*You’ll find out how I knew the telly would get quieter later on. I
t’s a bit of excitement I’m saving up for you. And anyway it’s unfair if I tell you now when I didn’t tell Ivy.)

  By the time Mum came into the room, the cake was back on the kitchen table and we were all sitting watching an old man with a big nose talking about train timetables.

  ‘What programme’s this?’ asked Mum suspiciously.

  ‘It’s something James wanted to watch,’ I told her. ‘Isn’t it James?’

  ‘It’s a bit boring,’ said Tilly.

  Mum knew something was going on, but as the house didn’t seem to be falling down, she hadn’t the energy to care.

  ‘Tilly, you get a quick drink and then up to bed,’ she said. ‘And you two, keep that telly quiet.’

  A few minutes later James was in the kitchen having a panic. Tilly had gone upstairs to do her teeth, and we could hear Mum walking around the main bedroom telling Dad off for getting chocolate on the carpet.

  ‘Maybe we could make a list of what sweets to press on the cake to change the telly,’ said James. ‘Then Dad could use it and stop worrying about the remote. We’ll just say the cake is magic or something.’

  ‘So you’re expecting dad to sit there every night with that cake on his knee, poking it with his finger?’ I asked. James nodded. Honestly, he’s such a loser! ‘Forget it. We have to take that cake to the school fete tomorrow.’

  ‘But I have to get the remote out,’ said James. ‘And if I cut the cake up Dad will kill me.’

  ‘He couldn’t kill you if it was yours,’ I said. James looked puzzled so I had to explain it a bit more. ‘Suppose you actually won the cake tomorrow and brought it home, you could do what you liked with it.’

  ‘Oh very funny,’ said James. ‘How am I supposed to guess the weight?’

  Well DURRR! There’s only a set of weighing scales in the kitchen cupboard isn’t there? He could have put the cake on them . . . but as James didn’t think of that, I suggested something really stupid instead.

  ‘All you need to do is get the cake recipe and then add up all the different bits,’ I said.

  I was only joking, but before I knew it, James had pulled the tatty old cookbook off the shelf and found the right page. Ha ha!

  ‘170 grams of flour, 170 grams of butter, 170 grams of sugar, three eggs . . .’ he read.

  ‘Dad used six eggs,’ I told him. ‘So he must have used more than it says of everything.’

  ‘So instead of three eggs it was six, so how much flour would that be . . .’ James got out a pencil and paper. ‘And how much does an egg weigh anyway?’

  ‘Don’t forget the icing,’ I said helpfully. ‘And the toppings.’

  And then James did something that made me a bit jealous. He made a really loud sad little sighing noise and he didn’t sound like a hippopotamus one bit. So it IS possible after all!

  I left him in the kitchen scribbling away like mad. To be honest I was wondering if I was being too mean to him, but then again, my head still hurt where it got bashed by the remote, and thanks to him I still didn’t know who’d won Sing, Wiggle and Shine. So no, Agatha, you were not being too mean. The boy James had asked for trouble, and he was getting it. Good.

  The Lucky Guess

  It was after school on Monday and the playground was full of wobbly old tables with wobbly old teachers standing behind them. Me and Tilly and James had just met up with Mum and Dad by the school gates when . . .

  ‘AGATHA AGATHA AGATHA!’

  Ivy came charging over and grabbed my arm and spun me round a few times. She was a bit hyper because she’d had a biscuit from Martha’s mum’s tea stall, and it had got some of that same yellow icing on it that we’d put on the cake. There’s something in those bright colours that makes Ivy turn into . . . well, Ivy really.

  ‘COME ON!’ she shouted and then went running off round the tables and shouting out what she thought of each one.

  The first table Ivy looked at had Mrs Twelvetrees selling her raffle tickets (‘WOW!’ shouted Ivy). Next to her Miss Barking was selling organic cardigans that she’d knitted from some weird stuff she grows on her allotment (‘WOW!’).

  Then there was a chair where you could sit and have your toenails painted by Motley the caretaker (WOW WOW WOW TOTALLY AWESOME WOW!’), and just along from that, the school receptionist Miss Wizzit was selling ‘nearly new’ books which had been rescued when the library had got flooded, and they were still a bit squidgy (‘WOW!’).

  As you can see, the person who most impressed Judge Ivy was Motley, so he needs a big round of applause clap clap clap WOW.

  ‘But that’s silly,’ said Mum. ‘Who’s going to be daft enough to get their toenails painted?’

  Motley looked a bit hurt. ‘I’ll do you a special offer. How about six toes for the price of five?’

  ‘Special offer?’ said Dad. ‘Ooooh . . .’

  In the middle of everything was a table with a small stool standing on it. The legs of the stool were wrapped in silver tin foil to make it look posh and groovy, and sitting proudly on top was Dad’s cake. (‘WOW! EH? WHAT? OH. WOW!’ Thank you Ivy for that intelligent contribution.)

  Pinned on the front of the stool was a smart little sign:

  Guess the weight of the cake 20p

  On the table beside it were some old weighing scales out of the school kitchen, and standing next to them was our class teacher Miss Pingle looking very serious. She’s the one who keeps dyeing her hair different colours, and on Monday it was a rather fetching shade of police-trousers blue to make herself look more official.

  Miss Pingle was in charge of taking the money and writing down everybody’s guesses. She was desperate to do a good job because she’s a new teacher and normally she only gets to pour out the orange squash. (By the way, it had taken her eighteen goes just to print the sign out on the computer. Of course she didn’t actually tell anybody that, but earlier on me and Martha had found numbers one to seventeen scrunched up in the recycling bin. You can’t fool us ha ha!)

  By now Ivy was starting to calm down a bit and had reached the stage where she had to hug somebody and the nearest somebody was me. It’s quite nice for a short time, but you don’t need too much of it. Luckily Bianca saw us and came over.

  ‘Don’t worry Agatha,’ said Bianca. ‘Ivy can bug me for a hit.’

  Eh? But then Bianca took Ivy off me. She must have meant to say ‘hug me for a bit’. YO! Good one Bianca. Top girl.

  Meanwhile James had been standing over by the railings and watching a few people have a guess.

  ‘675 grams,’ said Ivy’s mum.

  James had a big grin on his face so I went to ask him why. ‘That’s way too small!’ he told me.

  Thank goodness for that. We didn’t need Ivy’s mum winning the cake. You’ve just seen what one little biscuit’s worth of icing does for Ivy, so imagine what a whole cake would do. We’d be pulling her off the moon. Wahoo – GO IVY! We love Ivy.

  ‘3,762 grams,’ said Bianca’s mum.

  ‘Miles too big!’ muttered James happily.

  Then we saw Martha pulling an old gentlemen over to see Miss Pingle. ‘This is my grandad,’ said Martha. ‘He used to be a baker so he’ll know.’

  ‘That cake will be about 43 ounces,’ said Martha’s grandad, handing over his 20p.

  ‘We don’t measure in ounces these days,’ said Miss Pingle who wasn’t really sure what an ounce was. ‘We use grams.’

  ‘Oh, righto,’ smiled the jolly old gentleman who was admiring Miss Pingle’s blue hair. ‘Can you convert 43 ounces to grams for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Miss Pingle and she carefully wrote down 43 grams.*

  (*Warning! The old bloke who is typing this book out says that ounces used to be the old-fashioned way of weighing things. What’s more 43 ounces is not even close to being 43 grams, so if you say it is then you’ll sound like a bit of a weirdo. Mind you, the old bloke says that the real answer is that 43 ounces = 1,219·03 grams. Gosh, anybody who knows that would have to be a COMPLETE weirdo – just li
ke he is! Ha ha ha . . . oh ok, I’m only kidding. Keep typing please.)

  James was starting to feel confident. Nobody had come close to the number he’d worked out yet, but then Gwendoline Tutt marched over to the table. She’s the one who lives at the top end of Odd Street in the big house with the tree in front and a space to park two cars. She hates school fetes, but her mum told her that she had to have one go on everything before she could leave.

  ‘One two three four,’ said Gwendoline Tutt slapping down her 20p coin. Her best friend Olivia Livid was with her and they both sniggered rudely.

  ‘Do you mean one thousand, two hundred and thirty-four grams?’ asked Miss Pingle.

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Gwendoline. ‘I don’t want to win the stupid thing anyway.’

  ‘It looks gross,’ agreed Olivia and then the two of them walked off to make rude remarks about something else.

  Next to me James slumped back against the railings like he’d been thumped by a ghost.

  ‘Aren’t you going to have your go?’ I asked him.

  ‘No point!’ he groaned. ‘I spent all night working out the exact weight of that cake, and then Gwendoline Tutt just guessed it. She’ll win and she doesn’t even want to.’

  ‘Oh dear oh dear what a big pity,’ I said being a lovely sister. ‘But maybe you didn’t get it exactly right? You could try guessing one gram more than Gwendoline, and then just to be sure, guess one gram less?’

  ‘But that’s two goes!’ wailed James. ‘That’ll cost 40p.’

  ‘It’s either that or you’ll get no more pocket money ever,’ I reminded him. ‘So quick, do it now before somebody else guesses those same numbers.’

  James thought about it for a moment, then hurried over to pay his 40p. Miss Pingle carefully wrote down 1233g – J Parrot and also 1235g – J Parrot.

  ‘You seem very sure, James,’ said Miss Pingle suspiciously. ‘I hope you didn’t weigh the cake at home before it got here?’