Fortune Cookie

I thought we ought to use our real names, so as to sound more professional, like proper writers, but Cupcake said that would mean everybody would know who we were.

“They might even put our pictures in the local paper!”

Personally I would love to have my picture in the local paper. I would love everybody knowing who I am! But Cupcake’s not into fame the way I am, and in the end we spent so much time arguing that we never did send the book to a publisher. Which I think is a pity, as it was really good, and we will probably never have the time to write another one. I wish now that I had given in and agreed to use our nicknames, in spite of them not being very professional. I bet the papers would still have found out who we were. I could have been a local celeb!

It was my dad who gave us the nicknames. He is quite a funny man, always making jokes. He laughed and laughed at the idea of me being Fudge Cassidy, though I would like to say right here and now that Iam notcalled Fudge because I’m a pudge. And not because fudge does happen to be my all-time favourite treat. Well, practically my favourite food. I would live on fudge if I were allowed to! All kinds of fudge: chocolate fudge, vanilla fudge, cherry fudge. Even fudge with nuts in, though it is a bit of a drag having to pick the nuts out.

Dad was watching me do this one day, spitting out the nuts and gobbling up the fudge, and that is when he cried out “Fudge Cassidy!” like it was the best joke he had ever made. I suppose it’s what’s called a play on words. See, there’s this movie called Butch Cassidy &the Sundance Kid that my dad is kind of obsessed with. He’s got it on DVD and every year on his birthday he sits and watches it. (Like Mum with The Sound ofMusic.) I watched it with him one year, after he started calling me Fudge, but I couldn’t get what he saw in it. It’s about these two men who rob a bank and become outlaws and in the end they are shot, which is a bit sad I suppose, cos even though they are bank robbers they are not really bad people, and sometimes they are quite funny. I liked it when one of them rides round on a bicycle singing this song about raindrops. “Raindrops keep falling on my head.” That is my favourite part!

I told Cupcake about it and taught her the song, and every now and then she’d jump on Joey’s tricycle and ride round the garden singing it, except she used to change the words to “Cupcakes keep falling on my head”. I know it sounds a bit childish, but Joey thought it was really funny. He thought it was even funnier when I changed the words to fudge keeps falling on my head. He used to squeal and go, “Eeeurgh, bird poo!” He was only little, after all. Well, seven years old. That is quite little.

Oh, I nearly forgot about Cupcake and how she became the Cupcake Kid. It was cos once when she came to tea and Mum had bought all these different coloured cupcakes – pink and lemon and strawberry and chocolate, plus some with sprinkles and some with little silver balls – Cupcake greedily went and ate one of each, which made six altogether. Six cupcakes! I have never let her forget it. Cupcake rather boastfully says, “And I wasn’t even sick!” Dad was impressed. He said he had never seen anything like it, and that if I were Fudge Cassidy then she was obviously The Cupcake Kid. Which is what we have been ever since.

Mum says if we don’t stop calling each other by our silly nicknames we’ll live to regret it.

“Believe me,” she says, “you won’t want to be known as Fudge when you’re my age!”

I expect that may be true, but it is way too far ahead for me to worry about it. In any case, Mum can’t really say that our nicknames are silly; not now that we’ve lived up to them. Little did we know when Cupcake’s mum took that photograph of us in the back garden, showing off our new school uniforms, that we were about to embark on a life of crime. That movie that Dad loves so much, the Butch Cassidy movie? It nearly came true. Me and Cupcake didn’t exactly rob a bank, but for a short time we were handling stolen goods…

CHAPTER TWO (#u819dc1b9-d33e-5484-a848-a6514fad0c4a)

It was Cookie that gt us started on our life of crime. Not that he was called Cookie back then. Back then he was just “the puppy”. The puppy that lived in the garden over the wall.

See, at the back of our block of flats there’s this old, crumbly wall that me and Cupcake used to use for tennis practice. We’d be out there whatever the weather, walloping about with our tennis racquets. Cupcake was never as keen as I was, but I can always get round her! All I had to do was wail, “You know how important it is to me!”

The reason it was so important was because I had this dream that one day, if I practised hard enough, I might end up a big star, playing at Wimbledon. I have a different dream now: I am going to be a TV celeb. I sort of gave up on Wimbledon; I got sick of losing tennis balls. It was mainly me who lost them, I have to admit. I am quite an energetic sort of player. I’d take a good swipe, and instead of bouncing off the wall the thing would go flying right over the top and into the garden on the other side. Well! You can’t keep buying new tennis balls all the time, and you can’t keep trailing all the way round the block and knocking on someone’s door and asking “Please can we get our ball back?” Specially not when the person who answers the door is this crotchety old woman who complains that she is trying to watch television or trying to get a bit of rest. After the first few times Cupcake wouldn’t come with me any more; it didn’t matter how much I begged and pleaded. She said, “I can’t! She’s too horrible.”

“She’s only an old woman,” I said.

“So you go and ask,” said Cupcake.

I could have, I suppose; crotchety old women don’t frighten me. But quite honestly it was getting to be a bit of a drag, especially when you went to all that trouble and then she wasn’t there.

“Prob’ly be easiest if we just climbed over,” I said.

Cupcake is such a scaredy-cat! She wouldn’t do that, either. She whispered, “What if we got caught?”

I said, “We’re not doing anything wrong! We’re only getting our ball back.”

“I dunno.” Cupcake pressed the strings of her tennis racquet against her face, making her nose go all squashed. “It’s still trespassing.” Thing about Cupcake is she does have this tendency to dither. Me, I just go ahead and do things.

“Look, you stay here,” I said. “I’ll go. You keep a lookout.”

That was when I took my first step towards a life of crime… I didn’t realise it at the time, of course; I mean, what’s a little bit of trespassing? No one was going to put me in prison for just climbing over a wall and getting my own property back. But I guess that’s how it always is. You start off with small things like trespassing and before you know it you’re a full-blown criminal.

It was quite easy hoisting myself up. I used an old bucket to stand on, then shoved my toes into cracks in the brickwork. Cupcake stood jittering while I swung myself over the top and jumped down on the other side. Almost before I’d even landed, a thing had launched itself at me. A furry, wriggling thing that made little squeaking noises. I went “Yow!” and fell in a heap with the furry thing on top of me. Next thing I know, Cupcake’s peering over the top of the wall going, “Fudge? What’s happening?” And then she saw the furry thing and went, “Oh!” And then, “Oh!” And then, “It’s the puppy!”

We’d seen the puppy before; just quick glimpses when we’d knocked at the door. He’d be there, snuffling at the door crack, trying to say hello, and the old woman would always kick him back inside. She didn’t kick to hurt, I don’t think, cos she only wore slippers, but one time the puppy whimpered, like maybe he’d crashed into something. It didn’t seem to me a very kind way to treat a little friendly animal. But then of course she didn’t treat me and Cupcake very nicely, either, considering all we wanted was our ball back. It wasn’t like we went round there on purpose to annoy her.

Cupcake’s voice came squeaking anxiously over the wall at me. “Fudge? Are you OK?”

By this time I was flat on my back and the puppy was smothering me in a frenzy of wet kisses. I went, “Help! Ow! Ooch!” and promptly collapsed into giggles. Which is when Cupcake took her first step towards a life of crime. Before I knew it, she was over the wall and flying to my rescue. Maybe she is quite brave, after all! She said later that she thought I was being attacked.

Cupcake isn’t used to dogs; in fact she is a bit scared of them. But not even Cupcake could be scared of a tiny puppy. Once she understood that he was just being friendly, and that the strange noises I was making were giggles, and not death rattles, she went all gooey and melty and wanted to cuddle him. But the puppy had other ideas. He was so pleased to have us in his garden! I’m sure he thought we’d climbed over the wall just to play with him. He immediately ran off and fetched a tennis ball – one of our tennis balls! – and came scampering back with it in his mouth. Plain as can be he was saying, “Throw it for me! Throw it for me!” So of course we did.

Cupcake got quite carried away! She just wouldn’t stop. In the end I had to remind her that we were trampling about in someone else’s garden.

“She could come out any minute!”

That got her moving. She shot back over the wall like she was jet-propelled, with me scrabbling after. And then, guess what? I realised that I’d gone and left the tennis ball behind!

Cupcake said, “Well, but we couldn’t have taken it off him. It’s his toy!”

I agreed; it would have been too heartless. We perched on the upturned bucket and peered over, watching as he went scampering off up the garden, throwing the ball in the air with his mouth and chasing after it.

“So cute,” sighed Cupcake.

All puppies are cute. Much cuter than babies, I think, though of course that is only my opinion. But it was the first time Cupcake had ever properly met one, so naturally she thought he was special. She asked me what sort of breed he was. “Is he a pedigree?”

I said I didn’t know. “He could just be a mongrel.” I added that some people reckon mongrels are best. Cupcake shook her head.

“I think he’s a pedigree,” she said. She didn’t know any more than I did! She didn’t even know as much as I did. But it was obviously what she wanted to believe, so I didn’t argue with her.

Now that we knew the puppy was there, we started taking quick peeps over the wall before getting on with our tennis practice. My tennis practice. Cupcake seemed to have got more interested in watching the puppy than helping me prepare for Wimbledon.

If he was in the garden by himself, without the old woman, we’d call to him and he’d come rushing up, all happy, tail wagging and ready for a game. Even I wasn’t quite brave enough to climb over again, but we broke bits of stick off a nearby tree and threw them for him, and once we found an old burst football and lobbed that over, and he carried it off as proud as could be, shaking it from side to side.

Sometimes the old lady was out there, hanging washing on a clothes whizzy thing, or prodding about in the flower beds with a trowel. She never played with the puppy like we did. He tried so hard to make her! He used to run and fetch a toy and push it at her, or drop it by her side then back away with his bum in the air and his tail whirring in circles. I knew what he was saying. “Go on, missus! Throw it for us!”

But the old woman just ignored him. Either that or she shoved him out of the way. She really didn’t seem to like him very much. Quite often she’d shout at him.

“Just stop bothering me!”

One time she whacked him for digging up one of her flowers. Poor little boy! He didn’t know it was wrong. He was just trying to have fun. Another time we saw him in the garden by himself, tossing something small and bright into the air and catching it as it came down. Me and Cupcake were clapping and going “Yay!” and “Well done!” I suppose you could say we were encouraging him. Maybe we shouldn’t have, cos all of a sudden the old woman came bursting out of the back door and started screeching.

“You bad dog! Bad! Drop that! Stop it! Drop it this instant!”

At first the puppy thought it was a game, he thought she was playing with him at last, but then he started to cower, and his ears went back and his tail crept between his legs, and the old lady grabbed the small, bright thing he’d been playing with and gave him a sharp crack across his nose. Oh, he did yelp! We felt so sorry for him. In a doubtful voice, afterwards, Cupcake said, “I suppose he has to learn.” But you don’t teach children by hitting them, so why teach puppies that way? We hated the old woman for that.

“I told you she was horrible,” said Cupcake.

We still didn’t know what the puppy’s name was. The old woman never seemed to call him anything except “Bad dog”. We just called him Boy. I was the one who came up with the name Cookie. We were perched on our bucket, dangling a pair of old woollen tights over the wall for the puppy to play with. I’d tied a big knot in one of the legs, and the puppy was tugging and making little growly noises.

“Thinks he’s sooo clever,” crooned Cupcake. “Such a big grown-up boy!”

She was getting to be like one of those yucky, show-off mums who are for ever going on about how wonderful their kids are. I tried teasing her about it, but instead of laughing – cos it was funny, well, I thought it was – she just hunched a shoulder and went “Humph.” It wasn’t like Cupcake; she usually has a good sense of humour. I can almost always make her laugh. But she’d been a bit down just lately. The puppy was the only thing that seemed to bring a smile to her face.

I said, “Here! You play with him.” I thought it might cheer her up. She took one leg of the tights and obediently hung on to it, but not with very much enthusiasm. She’d suddenly gone all miserable and quiet. I did my best to make a game out of it. I said, “Grr!” and “Go for it!” and shook my head madly from side to side making growly noises, but the puppy could obviously sense there’d been a change of mood cos he dropped his knotted end and sat down instead to have a scratch.