Ros Asquith - Trixie and the Dream Pony of Doom

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Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

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Have you ever ridden a palomino stallion in the clouds? I have. I’m doing it right now.

Of course, I realise you might not know what a palomino stallion is, so I’ll tell you and then you’ll know what you’re missing. (On the other hand, if you’re always riding a palomino stallion in the clouds then I look forward to cantering into you any minute and we can compare notes.)

A palomino is a beautiful horse, and a stallion is a beautiful boy horse. Sigh. Mine is called Merlin. He doesn’t have wings, so I don’t know quite how he does it, but he can fly – we’ve just hurtled out of a cloud and you can see the rivers and mountains below, looking about a million miles away. His mane is flying out in the wind and I’m holding tight to it, my face close to his straining neck …

“HOW DARE YOU, PATRICIA TEMPEST?!!”

I realise pretty quickly that this is not the voice of a palomino stallion. Nor is it the Voice of God, rebuking us for playing in clouds usually reserved for Higher Spiritual Beings and all, whatever. It is the voice of Warty-Beak, the Teacher From Hell. I am dreaming my favourite dream again, the dream where I actually own a real live horse. Trouble is, I made the mistake of dreaming it in Warty-Beak’s classroom, in the middle of a lesson. And when Warty-Beak calls me Patricia instead of Trixie I know something is Very Extremely wrong.

“Sorry?”

“How DARE you?!!”

It was like those Itchy and Scratchy cartoons where they run straight out of a top-floor window and keep on running in the air until they realise – help! There’s nothing underneath! As soon as Warty’s yell broke the spell Merlin and me fell like stones, and the only sounds were a rushing wind and a long Warty cackle: the grisly sound of Warty-Beak’s laughter, like a rusty saw trying to cut through a tin can.

“Sorry, Warty … er, Mr Wartover, but what’s the matter?” I ask with a sigh that Warty takes to be annoyance but is actually me still half in my dream, seeing Merlin land neatly on his four shiny hooves and gallop off out of my life.

“THIS … THIS … is the matter!”

The class gets the joke long before I do, and of course Warty doesn’t get it at all. My two best friends, Dinah Dare-deVille and Chloe Caution, had been looking anxious when Warty started going on at me. (Well, Chloe always looks anxious. Dropping her pencil on the floor so other people can hear it is a major disaster as far as she’s concerned.) Now Dinah was stuffing a fist in her mouth to stop herself spifflicating with laughter and Chloe had gone red-as-a-postbox. Splutters and giggles were breaking out all over the room. Warty-Beak was droning on like an alligator gargling concrete, about how he couldn’t even bring himself to show it to the head teacher, Mrs Hedake. How it would upset her too much. What a disgrace it was. How a five-year-old would be ashamed of it, and on and on.

I tried to focus on the big piece of paper Warty had unfolded and was holding up in front of me. It looked like this:

I stared at the picture. I could feel a BAD giggle starting. It was one of those snuffly, snorty giggles that start in your toes and tickle your legs all the way up to your tummy until your tummy just has to let them explode up your chest and out of your mouth with the sound of a thousand squealing piglets, otherwise you will die.

It would have been a desperate moment, except that the whole class was laughing so much because by now they’d realised what I hadn’t at first – that this was a picture of Warty-Beak snogging Mrs Hedake, the head teacher! So I turned the monstrous giggle into a very convincing sounding fit of coughing. Dinah flung her arms around me and did her best to look concerned for my life as the coughing got louder. This look is difficult to manage when you’re helpless with laughter, but somehow Dinah managed it, just about.

“Maybe you’d better call an ambulance, sir,” Dinah said, hysterical tears streaming down her face. I nodded furiously, between coughs.

“I’m sure there’s no need for that,” Warty-Beak said, but rather anxiously now. “Take her to the toilets and get her a drink of water. We’ll discuss this … this ABOMINATION later …”

In the horrible toilets I leaned over the basin and splashed myself with freezing water.

“Why ever did you do it?” whispered Chloe when I finally came up for air.

“To stop myself dying laughing,” I said.

“No, I don’t mean the drowning yourself in the sink bit,” Chloe said. “I mean the drawing. Well, not just the drawing, the writing your name on it. Why did you do such a rude drawing and then leave it lying around where anyone could see it, and with your stupid name on it?”

“I didn’t do it,” I said. “And what do you mean, my stupid name?”

“I don’t mean your name’s stupid, I mean why did you sign it? It’s signed. In your writing,” she mumbled, looking at her feet.

“I know that, but I didn’t do it. Someone’s trying to get me in trouble.”

“Why didn’t you say?” Chloe’s eyes were wide with astonishment.

“I couldn’t say. I was laughing too much.”

“You have to go back in and tell him it wasn’t you!”

“He won’t believe me.”

“You’ve got to try.”

“Yes. But honestly, why did he show it to the whole class? Isn’t he embarrassed?”

“Well, it might seem strange, since it’s such a good likeness,” said Chloe, “but I don’t think he realised it’s a picture of him. He doesn’t know he’s called Warty-Beak, does he? He was going on about how unfair it was on Mrs Hedake. I think he thought it was just a rude picture of her with a man.”

“It wasn’t that rude,” I said. “Not compared to those magazines you see in the newsagents.”

I didn’t know there was a brighter red than a postbox, but Chloe has now proved there is.

Back in class I told Warty I didn’t do the drawing.

He turned to the class. “ Patricia …” (He said this with a disgustrous sneer as though I was something he was wiping off the sole of his shoe.) “ Patricia says this drawing, which is signed in her own hand, is not by her, so would the culprit please own up?”

Dinah’s hand shot up at once.

“There’s no point in pretending, Dinah,” he said, rather nicely for him, “unless you know who it really was.”

“It was me. It was just a joke,” said Dinah. “I can do Trixie’s handwriting with both hands tied behind my back.”

Warty was not convinced.

“She didn’t do it. I did,” piped up a voice from the back of the class. Everyone turned to look. It was Martha Marchant, the new girl who is Very Extremely keen to be Dinah’s Best Friend, so we have to keep including her in our games.

“That’s not true, is it, Martha?” said Warty, and poor old Martha went even pinker than Chloe does.