Princess Phoebe

 

 

Swift Publishing Ltd,

145-157, St John Street,

London,

EC1V 4PW

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

© Copyright Scilla James. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by Swift Publishing in July 2013

ISBN: 978-0-9568148-4-5

ebook ISBN: 978-0-9568148-5-2

Finding a pair of socks without holes in the toes is impossible in our house. Sometimes I feel like phoning ChildLine. The school bus leaves at half past eight, there's no breakfast on the table, Mum's yelling at me to hurry up, and there are no socks. That's how it is every day, and it's no different the morning that our greyhound, Queenie, has her puppies.

‘Four of them!' shouts my brother, David, up the stairs. ‘And one's really scrawny.'

Only four. That'll cause trouble
, I think. Frank will be coming to see them later in the day and he will not be pleased.
I
want to see those puppies though; I'll be late for the bus but I don't care. I run out to the shed where Queenie's lying on the old sacking Dad has put out for her.

‘Clever girl!' I tell her. ‘Four beautiful puppies! But is that really all? You know Frank likes you to have at least six.'

Frank Skally's horrible. We've had Queenie for years, but Dad has this agreement with Frank, where he always gets her puppies. I can't remember how many she's had altogether, but Frank gets to come round and take them away as and when he wants. It's not fair, and I know it upsets poor old Queenie.

She looks at me mournfully and shivers a little. It's cold in the shed, but Dad says you can't make greyhounds too
comfortable, or they get soft. And Frank doesn't want soft dogs; he wants six tough ones every time.

‘I'll come and have a proper look after school,' I tell Queenie, and give her a kiss.

Mum's shouting, ‘Ellie,
come on
! You've missed the bus now, and I'll be late for work having to walk round by the school with you. I can do without this!'

Mum's always telling me the things she can do without.

She's got baby Jack in the pram and little Patrick with his coat on, ready to go. Patrick's only 2. My older brothers have gone already. David and Sam, the twins, are 13, and my half-brother Nick, my favourite person in the world, has gone early to his new job as a van driver.

There are too many of us in our family. Six kids in a three-bedroom house with my parents, Charlie and Pearl. As the only girl I get a room to myself, but it's so small it's more like a cupboard. I run up there quickly to get my bag for school. The twins have nicked my pens again, so I shoot into their room.

‘Yuck!' I kick my way through a pile of dirty clothes, looking for something to write with. I wish I could get those two to stay out of my bedroom. Dad won't put a lock on my door, though I'm always asking him to.
How would he like it
? They used to put spiders in my bed but now it's just general burglary. I've been meaning to invent a hand-trapping box to keep my stuff in. Trip wires, electrified door-knobs, some of that paint that never comes off your hands. Mum says they'll get bored if I ignore them, but so far she's been wrong. They stick together but they fight each other all the time too, not like most twins I've read about, and have no time for me unless it's to be irritating.

‘
Ellie
!' Mum's going mental as I come downstairs. I take Patrick's hand and we set off.

My best friend is called Jan. We go everywhere together and we look a bit alike, as it happens. Both skinny with brown hair, only she has pink cheeks and is a bit taller. Her clothes are cleaner than mine, too, which is simply due to her not having any brothers who put their smelly socks in with the white washing. And her dad's a great cook. He nearly got on
Masterchef
once.

What's more, Jan's got a gran with an allotment, and that's about as lucky as you can get, in my opinion. Her gran's called Margaret and she's always pleased to see us. She has a tall hedge round her allotment that makes it like a secret place, and an old stone outbuilding where she lights fires in winter when it's snowy outside. She makes us hot chocolate and we curl up on two big old sofas with stuffing hanging out, and listen to her stories about when she was small and the bombs were dropping on Liverpool. She never gets cross or threatens to tear her hair out like my mum, and she always asks how Queenie's getting along. I wish I had a gran, but mine both died before I could get to know them.

Today, Jan comes home with me after school. We're in the shed admiring the puppies when the door flies open and Frank Skally's standing there.

‘What's this?' he shouts, glaring down at us. He's got a long white scar down one side of his face where a dog scratched him, and it goes red when he gets in a temper.

‘I hear your greyhound's only had four puppies. Is that right?'

‘Yes, Uncle Frank,' I say. Though he's not my real uncle.

‘Right, well you can tell your dad that the bitch is finished. I can't keep giving your family money to raise greyhounds for me if I'm going to get a pathetic bunch like this every
time. Tell him I'll get him a new dog or, if he doesn't like the idea of that, can start getting more dogs from Big Lennie. You tell him that.' And he slams the shed door and goes off into the dark.

Jan and I look at poor Queenie lying flat amongst the sacks as if she's been trying to press herself down through the floor out of Frank's view. She's trembling.

I hate Frank, and swear that one day I'll pay him out for his bullying. Just because he lives in a flat with no garden he gets to order my dad around. Dad provides greyhounds for him and his mates to bet on and they go out chasing hares, even though it's illegal. It's called hare coursing and it's really cruel. And sometimes they get the dogs to race: anything that makes Frank Skally money.

Frank and Dad come from the same village but I wouldn't call them friends. Then they both moved to this same town, which Dad wasn't too pleased about. We got here first by a year or two and Dad says he could have done without Frank pitching up as well. But Frank's a ‘Big Noise' around the place. That's what my brother Nick calls him. It means that everyone's scared of him. He walks about the estate as if he owns it, and people say, ‘All right Frank?' when they meet him, and then cross to the other side of the street.

Jan and I kiss the puppies goodnight. There are two bitches and two dogs. One of the bitches is tiny, and I have to agree she does look a bit pathetic. But she's Jan's favourite. My favourite is her brown-and-white sister. She's a gorgeous wriggly pup with a beautiful face. I'm longing for her eyes to open so I can see whether they're a soft brown like her mum's. I name her Princess.

We go back to the house in search of food.

‘I think there's a tin of beans,' I say hopefully, rummaging in the kitchen cupboard. ‘Oh, but it looks like the top's gone wrong. There's no metal bit to pull off.'

‘Tin opener?' asks Jan. She's really practical and she learns a lot from her dad.

‘No chance,' I say. ‘Let's just have toast, shall we? And there's some milk. We could make a shake with Patrick's juice.'

I hear the twins come in so I shout that I'll make them a drink too. Remembering my stolen pens, I put some soap in theirs. It looks great; really frothy.

‘They'll love this,' I say to Jan, who's leaning against the fridge giggling her head off.

‘You're mad,' she says.

Later, I go back out to the shed to check the greyhounds. I stroke Queenie's head and whisper to her: ‘I'll see you're safe. I'm sure they won't take your babies till they've grown. I'll try and bring some food to you early in the morning before the others get up.'

Dad comes in just as I'm going up to bed.

‘Frank's been round,' I tell him, ‘he says four puppies are no good.'

‘Well, four's what we've got,' says Dad, ‘so he'll have to live with it. Dad looks tired as usual. I don't tell him what Frank said about Queenie being finished.

‘Did you catch anything tonight?' I ask him.

‘No,' he replies, and goes to hang up his gun in the cupboard. So it looks like he'll be staying home, if he hasn't got anything to sell to his mates in the pub. Dad shoots rabbits or pheasants, or whatever he can catch. He says he's a gamekeeper-turned-poacher, when it should be the other way round, whatever that means. He's been unemployed since the Country Park closed.

I can't bear to think of the poor animals being shot. I often say to Jan, ‘If only Dad would take me out with him I might be able to warn them then they could get away.'

‘And what would you do?' she always asks, ‘send the rabbits a text telling them to stay down their holes?'

‘Burrows,' I correct her, to show that I know what I'm talking about.

The puppies grow fast. Jan and I love to take them out in the garden after school to play as the nights get lighter. We throw sticks for them and chase them around, though there isn't much space.

‘This one's mine!' Jan always says. She snuggles the smallest one, her favourite. ‘I'd call her Jade if she belonged to me.'

‘And this is my Princess,' I say, catching hold of the brown-and-white bitch and giving her a kiss on the nose. She has a way of leaning on my legs as if she's trying to say
I'm cold and I would like more to eat
.

Queenie's puppies never look very good. They're always thin and their hair doesn't grow so well with just old sacking to lie on over the shed floor. Sometimes Mum saves better scraps for them, but mainly they live on cheap food specially made for greyhounds. It comes in a sack and they have the same thing every day.