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“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.
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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.
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“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.
