The Phredde Collection (40 page)

Then we ate our berries, which were okay if you like flavoured cardboard, and Miss Richards had made us mistletoe cordial by soaking the sweet flowers in river water, while she had a good hot cup of river mint tea.

‘That was a great lunch!’ said Bruce at last. ‘Even better than mosquitoes!’

‘Almost as good as gryphon and blueberry pizza,’ agreed Phredde.

Miss Richards smiled. It was a really pretty smile and her fish-bone necklace looked really good too. (My school tracksuit felt like I’d worn it for two days and slept in it and got it stained with dinosaur doo and swamp mud and spotty leopard bl…, er, red stuff and brush turkey egg, which I had—I mean, I felt a real mess.)

‘Why don’t we heat up some water for baths now?’ she suggested. ‘And I’ll show you how to make bush
soap. You boil up ashes and water then pour the liquid into melted fat and stir it with a stick till it mixes together and you’ve got liquid soap! You can wash your hair too, Prudence,’ she added kindly.

I hadn’t thought what my hair looked like. I touched it gingerly. It felt all dusty and oily and probably had dinosaur doo in it too, despite my swims. Suddenly I was glad there weren’t mirrors back in prehistoric times—though if I said that to Miss Richards, I thought sourly, she’d probably knit me a mirror out of paperbark or something.

I was just going to agree that yeah, maybe a hair wash might be nice, when suddenly I noticed…

‘Hey!’ I said, ‘my egg!’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Phredde comfortingly. ‘We’ll eat it for dinner.’

‘Maybe I can use it to make a wattle-seed raspberry cake,’ suggested Miss Richards. ‘If we can just find a really big termite mound or ants’ nest we can hollow out a place for the fire in the bottom half and dig out an oven in the top half and then we can cook cakes and…’

‘No-one’s cooking my egg!’ I yelled. ‘Look!’

Phredde peered over my shoulder and Bruce hopped over and…

‘Wow!’ said Bruce.

‘It’s hatching!’ cried Phredde.

It was too. I suppose the warmth of the fire had done it. The giant egg was rocking from side to side, like whatever was in it had been dosed with itching powder, then suddenly the shell was ripped open by a tiny claw. A little head poked out, with a great strong beak and glaring beady eyes.

‘That doesn’t look like a brush turkey to me!’ decided Phredde, flying up above us all to get a good view.

I stepped over to it, just as the little bird’s long sharp toe ripped the rest of the shell to shreds. ‘It’s not a brush turkey at all!’ I yelled. ‘It’s a baby Demon Duck of Doom.’

The baby Demon Duck gazed up at me. ‘Quack?’ it boomed, stepping out of the shreds of its shell. ‘Quack? Quack?’ It jumped up onto my jogger and rubbed its fluffy head against my leg. It came up almost to my knee.

‘Oh, how cute!’ cried Phredde. ‘It thinks you’re its mum!’ She fluttered down to pat its downy head.

‘Quack!’ snarled the baby duck. It pecked at her finger viciously.

‘Ow!’ screamed Phredde, flapping quickly up out of range. ‘That hurt!’

‘Careful!’ I warned. ‘Demon Ducks of Doom are meat eaters, remember.’

Bruce hopped hurriedly away.

‘Well, you tell your duck that my finger isn’t a nice juicy kangaroo steak,’ said Phredde, angrily sucking her hand.

‘Quack!’ said the baby Demon Duck, gazing adoringly up at me. ‘Quack!’ It felt pretty good actually, as no-one else had been gazing adoringly at me lately. Not that I wanted them to, of course, because that would have been totally yuk and soppy, but just a
little
bit of adoring gaze would have been okay.

‘Quack!’ said the duck again.

‘This is fascinating! Let me have a look at it!’ said Miss Richards. She stepped over to the baby duck and reached towards it.

The baby duckling raised its long clawed foot. ‘Quack!’ it growled. Suddenly Miss Richards’s nice new leopard skin skirt was ripped right down the front.

‘Oops,’ I said. I picked the duckling up and let it cuddle into my neck. ‘Maybe you’d all better just let me handle it.’

‘Quack,’ agreed the duck, opening its mouth wide. ‘Quack, quack, quack!’

It sounded like it was trying to tell me something. All at once I realised. It was hungry!

‘Oh, you poor hungry little baby!’ I crooned. ‘Do you want something to eat then? Well, don’t worry, Prudence will find you something.’

I heard Bruce making pretend sick noises behind my back but I ignored him.

‘As long as it doesn’t think it’s having the rest of my finger for lunch,’ Phredde warned.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of stew left.’

I carried the baby duck over to the turtle-shell stew pot and sat back on my seat. The stew was cooling now, so it was easy to pick out lumps of meat. The baby duck gulped them all down. It really was cute, in a funny sort of way. Its legs were all long and bare and
leathery and its tongue was long and leathery too, and its wings were short and stumpy and covered in downy feathers just like its body—but its beak was really massive. I mean when you looked at this bird you thought mutated vulture, not budgerigar.

‘What are you going to call it?’ asked Phredde, landing carefully out of reach of the giant beak.

‘Ah…you’re not going to keep it, are you?!’ Miss Richards sounded a bit worried.

‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘Look at the poor little baby! It’s all alone!’

‘Quack,’ said the duck, gulping down another kilo chunk of stewed wallaby. It looked around for more.

‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘That’s the end of the stew.’

‘Quack!’ said the duck threateningly. It peered hungrily at Phredde and Bruce.

Bruce hopped back even further.

‘See, there isn’t any more!’ I said, tilting up the turtle shell to show the duck it was empty.

‘Quack,’ said the duck. It sounded pretty determined.

‘Maybe it’d like a fish,’ suggested Phredde briskly.

I held a long slippery fish out to the duck. ‘Do duckie wuckies like fishy wishies?’ I asked.

‘Quack,’ said the duck decidedly. I hauled my hand away just in time, as the fish disappeared down the duck’s throat. It seemed like Demon Ducks of Doom liked fish as well.

‘Maybe you could call it Garbage Guts,’ suggested Bruce.

‘Huh!’ I said.

‘How about Yuka,’ offered Miss Richards. ‘My cat back home is called Yuka.’ For a moment she looked
really wistful. ‘She’s a really lovely cat. I hope someone tells my mum I’m missing so she goes over to my place to feed her,’ she added. ‘Yuka’s very intelligent but she hasn’t learnt to use a can opener yet.’

‘I think you should call him Fang,’ said Phredde, with a dirty look at the duck. The duck shot her an even dirtier look back. ‘Quack,’ it snorted.

‘I think I’ll call him Cuddles,’ I decided.

‘Cuddles!’ exclaimed Bruce.

‘Yes, because he’s all soft and cuddly. Aren’t you, Cuddles, precious?’

‘Quack,’ agreed Cuddles, snuggling into my neck and looking at Bruce as though crunching frogs for lunch was an even better idea than fish.

Well, six fish later Cuddles went to sleep on my lap. I didn’t want to disturb him—I mean, he was only a baby—so I sat there stroking him while Phredde and Bruce helped Miss Richards build a sort of verandah onto the hut to keep us dry if it rained when we wanted to eat dinner.

After that Miss Richards dug a toilet pit
and
put up a bark screen around it for necessary privacy (which was a really good thing because I was running out of bushes) while Phredde and Bruce took the carpet to look for lots of soft dry leaves for toilet paper. And then Miss Richards showed them how to make bush soap, while she heated water for a bath.

It was quite interesting watching them.

Cuddles was still asleep, so I put him down carefully on my stringybark cushion while I had a bath
with
soap
and
washed my hair. What with Cuddles
and
being clean I was feeling much better, and I felt even more fantastic when Miss Richards darted into the hut
and came out with this really cool leather-type skirt and narrow top.

‘Is that for me?’ I asked.

Miss Richards nodded. She really was pretty nice. ‘To wear while your tracksuit is drying,’ she said.

I stared at them. ‘What are they made of?’ I asked. I’d never seen leather like that before. It looked almost like it was transparent, but it wasn’t, and sort of scaly, and it glistened a little in the sun.

‘I
think
it’s a giant python skin,’ said Miss Richards. ‘That’s a really massive sort of snake. I found it lying over a tree branch. Snakes get rid of their old skins as they grow, but this is so thick and enormous it must come from a really big snake.’

‘It’s not poisonous, is it?’ I asked suspiciously.

Miss Richards smiled. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Only poison glands are poisonous and, anyway, pythons swallow their prey whole. They don’t poison them.’

I made a mental note to keep clear of any giant pythons. ‘Well, er, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll just go and try them on.’

It was dark and a bit dusty inside the hut (Miss Richards had said we’d try to make some paint tomorrow to brighten it up). Mrs Olsen was still snoring softly on her bracken bed. Somehow in the darkness her skin looked whiter than ever and her lips redder, and the fangs gleamed sharp and white as they protruded over her bottom lip.

I tiptoed in so as not to disturb her, and slipped off my grotty tracksuit, and tried on the skirt. It was a bit tight and itched a bit, but otherwise it was a perfect fit and so was the top. I stroked it. I’d always wanted a leather skirt
and
a leather jacket, but when I’d asked
Mum if I could have one for my birthday she’d just yelled ‘NO! NO! NO! NO!’ and Dad had said he didn’t think I was quite old enough yet.

Now it looked like I’d got one after all.

To be honest, I’d rather have been back home in our castle with Mum and Dad and poor old Mark even if I had to wear a frilly dress with lace and ruffles and die of embarrassment when anyone looked at me (well, almost, anyway). But if I had to be stranded in the distant past these were pretty great clothes to be stranded in, and I wished more than ever that I had a mirror.

I pushed the ’roo-skin door aside and stepped out into the sunlight again. ‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked.

‘Wow!’ said Phredde enviously. ‘Hey, can I have a leather outfit too, Miss Richards?’

‘Sure,’ said Miss Richards cheerfully. ‘I made Prudence’s first because her tracksuit gets dirty faster than phaery clothes. But I’m sure I can finish yours tonight.’

‘Wow,’ breathed Phredde again.

Bruce didn’t say anything. He just stared at me and somehow I didn’t think he was so keen on older women any more, even if they could dig wallaby traps and build mud huts and bake wattle-seed cakes and catalogue a library full of books and manage the school’s computer system.

‘Quack!’

‘Cuddles! You’re awake!’ I ran over to him just as he started to make a beeline for Miss Richards. After all, she had just made me the coolest outfit I’d seen in 144 million years and it seemed a bit ungrateful to let my baby duck eat her.

And then it was time for dinner.

It was a pretty good dinner. Not as good as sausage and pineapple pizza of course, but I was getting used to prehistoric cooking.

First of all we had freshwater mussels—they’re a bit like oysters—cooked in a broth with what Miss Richards said were lemon-scented backhousia leaves. (They looked like ordinary old gum leaves to me but they did smell lemony.)

Then Miss Richards did a stir-fry in the turtle shell with waterlily pods and tree-fern fronds and more bush tomatoes and witchetty grubs. (Miss Richards said witchetty grubs taste like chicken, but they’re
much
squishier. At least they looked a bit like stir-fried chicken so it wasn’t too yuk at all.) And then we had bullrush-pollen cakes sweetened with wild raspberry juice baked on the hot rocks by the fire, but Miss Richards said they’d be much nicer once we found an
ants’ nest tomorrow and got our oven dug out so she could do some proper baking. Maybe we might even manage pizza with a ground wattle-seed base and bush tomatoes and sundried wallaby instead of salami. Then she got all thoughtful and said if she could just work out how to catch a giant echidna
¹⁸
she could milk it and maybe make some cheese, because pizza without cheese isn’t really pizza at all.

And Cuddles sat on my lap and ate more witchetty grubs than any of us
and
some freshwater mussels
and
all the fish that happened to have swum into the fish trap by mistake. I think some of them maybe were the ones we had let go at lunchtime too. Fish don’t have many brains. (I know because I looked.)

Then Mrs Olsen woke up. The first thing I knew about it was Cuddles suddenly trying to hide under my snakeskin top, but there wasn’t enough room so he hid his head under my armpit instead.

I looked round to see what he was scared of. So far Cuddles hadn’t been scared of
anything
!

There was Mrs Olsen, standing in the doorway. But she didn’t look much like the Mrs Olsen we’d had as our teacher all year.

This Mrs Olsen looked taller somehow, and her cheeks looked thinner and her skin whiter and her eyes really dark and shining like the night, except they didn’t have stars or a moon in them or anything like that. And her lips were red as bl…, er, red stuff and her teeth were long and white, especially when she smiled at us.

‘Hello, everyone!’ she cooed.

It didn’t sound like Mrs Olsen either. It sounded more like something you’d hear on one of the late-night horror movies Mum won’t let me watch so we have to sneak out of bed and peer round the door while Mum cuddles into Dad and hides her eyes at the gory bits.

‘Er, are you hungry?’ I asked.

I realised at once that this was the wrong thing to say. The new-style Mrs Olsen smiled her bl…, er, red smile at me.

‘Why, yes, Prudence, how kind of you to ask. I am hungry,’ she said, all soft and creepy-like.

‘There’s some stir-fry left,’ offered Phredde.

Mrs Olsen’s smile grew wider and even weirder. ‘You know, I don’t really feel like stir-fry, Ethereal. You know what I do feel like?’ She sort of glided towards me as though her pants suit had turned into a long black velvet cloak. ‘I feel like…’

Suddenly she lunged and grabbed Cuddles from my lap.

‘Hey! You leave Cuddles alone!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t you dare vampirise him!’

Mrs Olsen opened her mouth. Her fangs glinted in the firelight. She lifted Cuddles higher and…

Cuddles bit her nose.

‘Ow!’ yelled Mrs Olsen. She dropped Cuddles and held her nose. Suddenly she didn’t look vampire-like at all.

‘Quack,’ said Cuddles. He sounded annoyed. He climbed back up onto my lap and glared at Mrs Olsen. ‘Quack!’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Mrs Olsen, and now she sounded like her old self again. ‘What was I thinking
of? I’m so ashamed! It’s the fresh blood you see. It…it does something to me.’

Yeah, turns you into a horror movie leftover, I thought, but I didn’t say anything, because she
did
look embarrassed.

‘I’ll just go and have a quick snack of kangaroo,’ said Mrs Olsen. ‘Or maybe a few wombat necks.’

‘There’s a giant echidna out there too,’ said Bruce helpfully. ‘Maybe you could vampirise that.’

‘Yes, yes, anything,’ said Mrs Olsen. She was really upset. ‘Oh, I do hope you’ll forgive me, and forget all about this…this unpleasantness.’ She bounded off into the night.

I looked at Phredde and Bruce and Miss Richards, and they all looked at me. Then Miss Richards cleared her throat. ‘Would anyone like another bullrush-pollen cake?’ she asked.

‘Quack,’ said Cuddles. And we never referred to it again.