Welcome to Silver Street Farm (2 page)

Auntie Nat blinked. She looked at the screen again. It couldn’t be true, could it?

“Adorable poodles. Two left. Bargain for quick sale.”

The photo on the advertisement was terribly blurred, but then dogs moved around so much, didn’t they? They’d be hard to photograph. She wrote down the number on the screen and, her heart pounding with excitement, reached for the phone.

Auntie Nat, or Natalia Konstantinovna Lebedeva, to give her her proper name, had always wanted a pair of white poodles with ribbons tied into their woolly fur.

“I walk with them to shops,” she would tell Karl in her heavy Russian accent. “And I look elegant, like models in magazine.”

Then she’d walk across the living room, pretending to be a tall, skinny model with two dogs on leashes. This always made Karl and Auntie Nat laugh, because she was short and very, very round.

“When I’m rich and famous, Auntie,” Karl always said, “I’ll buy you two perfect little poodles.”

“Ah, my Karl,” she’d sigh, “you will have to be very rich. Poodles
so
expensive.”

Poodles
were
so expensive, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Every week, when she was reading her horoscope in the
Lonchester Herald
and on the Mythic Modes website, she’d check online in case someone, somewhere, was selling a poodle for a price she could afford. But the stars always told her that wasn’t going to happen. Until today.

“A long-held dream is closer than you think!” said her horoscope on the back page of the
City Gazette
.

The voice at the end of the phone line was gruff.

“Yeah, I still got the dogs,” it said. “You got the money?”

Hmmm,
Auntie Nat thought to herself.
Not a refined person. Not good enough to own fine poodles.

“Yes, yes,” she said carefully, “I have money. Cash.”

“Right. Then meet me at the corner of Milsom Street and Park Row in an hour.”

He didn’t even wait for her to reply. Perhaps the puppies were stolen. Auntie Nat pushed the worrying thought to the back of her mind and, thinking instead of what Karl would say when he got home and found two little poodle puppies in the apartment, almost skipped down the hall to the creaking, cranking old elevator.

The man was definitely not a refined person. In fact, he looked as if he could use a bath. What was more, he seemed to be in a great rush to get rid of the puppies. He shoved the box into Auntie Nat’s hands and told her that the puppies were sleeping and that it would be better not to open the box until she got home. This had made her suspicious, but when she’d poked a finger in through an airhole in the box, she’d felt the warm, woolly fur. She handed over the money and hurried home.

Back in the apartment, Auntie Nat brought the box into the kitchen and sat down gratefully on a chair. She looked at it, but she didn’t open it. Now that her long-held dream was about to come true, as the horoscope had predicted, she realized that she didn’t really know anything about poodles. They were cute and fluffy, but what did they eat? How did you train them? Where, she thought with sudden horror, did they “do their business”?

Inside the pet carrier, the pups were starting to wake up and move around. She would have to let them out. She opened the top of the box, and two sweet little white woolly faces looked up at her and opened their mouths.

“Baa!” said the puppies. “Baaaaaaaa!”

The old station was most definitely
not
open to visitors: the huge wrought-iron gates were closed with a giant chain and padlock and covered in signs that shouted fiercely,
NO ENTRY!
and
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED!
and, most worrying of all,
DANGER! GUARD DOGS PATROLLING AT ALL TIMES
.

“We can’t go in there!” said Karl.

“Yes, we can!” said Meera.

“What about the guard dogs?” asked Gemma.

“Oh, that’s just for show,” said Meera, waving her hands dismissively.

Karl, who was still small for his age, looked up at the gate.

“How will we get in?”

“Climb, of course. Duh!” said Meera.

Gemma laughed. “But you’re terrible at climbing, Meera!”

“That’s where you come in, Daddy Longlegs. Get up there, Gemma!”

Gemma
was
the best climber of the three of them, and she could never resist a challenge.

“OK. I’ll get on top of the gate, then I’ll help you guys up,” she said. “And if we get thrown in jail, at least I won’t have to spend all vacation with my brother.”

Once they were on top of the gates, it was easy to slide down the other side and start to explore. There were several old brick buildings, some with faded signs still hanging above them:
TICKET OFFICE
,
WAITING ROOM
, and
STATIONMASTER’S OFFICE
. The windows were broken and there was ivy growing up the walls, but the roofs still looked solid and weatherproof. The space around the buildings was big, about half the size of the school soccer field, Karl guessed. It was completely overgrown, but where brambles and nettles would grow, so would grass for animals to graze. As the children wandered around, the dreams they’d had since the first day of kindergarten finally seemed within their reach.

They pushed through the jungle of plants and at last reached the edge of the canal, where they sat down with their legs dangling over the wall.

“It’s brilliant!” said Gemma. “I think there could be enough grazing in summer for a couple of sheep.”

“The ticket office would make a great cowshed,” said Karl.

“We could have ducks on the canal,” said Gemma, “once we’ve gotten the shopping cart out, of course.”

That was when they heard the growl and turned around to see a huge black dog with a row of very big teeth showing in an extremely fierce snarl.

“Just for show, eh?” said Gemma.

“Nice doggy. Nice, nice,
nice
doggy,” breathed Meera.

The “doggy” wasn’t impressed; he snarled and growled some more and began to close in.

“We’ll have to jump into the canal if he gets any closer,” said Gemma.

“We’ll be stabbed by a rusty shopping cart!” squealed Meera.

“Meera, quick!” said Karl. “Give me the jelly beans!”

Two minutes later, the “fierce” guard dog was wagging his tail and begging for more candy. Karl scratched him behind the ears.

“There’s a good boy,” said Karl.

The dog whined and offered his paw.

“I think he’s lonely,” said Gemma.

“He won’t be lonely when he’s the Silver Street Farm Dog!” said Meera as she patted the dog’s huge head.

“The
what
farm dog?” Gemma and Karl said together.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you! I found this nailed to the back of an old bench. It’s the station name.” Meera reached into her backpack and pulled out an enamel sign that said
SILVER STREET
in black letters. “It’s perfect for our farm.”

“Silver Street Farm,” said Karl. “Yeah, I like it.”

“Silver Street sounds a bit like a shopping center to me,” Gemma said, grinning. “But it’s OK.”

They fought their way back through the bramble jungle and climbed out over the gate. The dog stuck his nose through the bars and they fed him one last green jelly bean. He wagged his tail at them as they walked away.

“I think he knows we’re coming back!” said Gemma.

As soon as Karl opened the door to the apartment, he knew something was wrong. There was a horrible smell, for a start, and he could hear his auntie speaking angrily in Russian in the living room. Then he noticed the newspapers spread all over the floor, decorated with little brown currants and round damp patches. He didn’t have to wonder what had been pooping and peeing all over his home for long though, because just as he closed the front door behind him, two fluffy little lambs ran into the hall.

“Baaa!” said the lambs. “
Baaaaaaaaaaa!
”

Auntie Nat was following close behind, bending over the lambs and offering them food from a bowl with
DOG
written on the side.

“Ah, Karl!” Auntie Nat looked at him with a big smile. “At last, I have poodles. Puppies. Bargain from Internet.”

“Baaaaaa!” said the “puppies” together, more loudly than ever.

“This one,” said Auntie Nat, pointing to the larger lamb, “is Bitzi, and the other one, little one, is Bobo.”

Karl nodded. He didn’t know what to say. Auntie Nat waved the dog bowl around.

“I get puppy food,” she said, “but they don’t like.” Auntie Nat’s beaming smile faded. “If they don’t eat, they die,” she said. Suddenly she looked almost as forlorn as the lambs.

“Don’t worry, Auntie,” said Karl, finding his voice at last, “I’ll figure it out.”

The baby bottles were the easy part. Mr. Khan’s corner shop had them hanging up behind the counter, next to the aspirin and Band-Aids. Karl chose two. But what to put
in
the bottles was much trickier.

He spent ages looking at the cartons of milk in the cooler. There was skim, low-fat, and organic — but none of them were sheep’s milk. He peered into the freezer, but saw nothing that seemed to have anything to do with sheep apart from a package of frozen lamb chops.

When he got to the checkout, one of Mr. Khan’s nephews was at the register.