Toad Rage - Morris Gleitzman [20]
“Yuk,” said Goliath, “toothpaste.”
Limpy sighed.
He took a deep breath and tried to explain to Goliath that when a young athlete has paid a lot of money to a shopping center security guard for your freedom and then smuggled you back to the Games village in her bag and hidden you under her bed so an angry bloke with a clipboard can't get his hands on you, it's pretty ungrateful to eat her antiseptic foot cream.
Goliath spat out a Band-Aid and thought about this.
“Why should we be grateful?” he said. “She was meant to be taking us to meet the Games Mascot Committee and all we ended up with was sore backs.”
“It wasn't all bad,” said Limpy. “That shop the toddler dragged me into was full of tellies. I was there for ages before the security guard found me. You can learn a lot of useful stuff about humans from telly, even if you don't speak their language. Did you know there's a very famous person on telly named after one of our dead uncles?”
“Who?” said Goliath. “Roly?”
“No,” said Limpy. “Bart.”
Goliath looked impressed. He stopped eating the stuff in the bag. Limpy took the foot cream away from him in case he got hungry again.
“But she still didn't take us to the committee,” said Goliath, “did she?”
Limpy sighed again.
Goliath was right.
Why hadn't she?
Limpy was still puzzling it over when the bag was pulled out from under the bed. The girl lifted him and Goliath out and offered them dinner.
“Here,” she said. “I got you these from the parking lot.”
Limpy wasn't hungry, not even for the radiator-grilled grasshoppers she held out to him.
Then he noticed the telly was on and saw what was on the screen. The girl and the clipboard bloke fighting over Goliath at the shopping center.
“That's me,” yelled Goliath through a mouthful of grasshopper.
Limpy stared.
Not at his cousin being stretched on the screen. At the expression on the girl's face in the room now as she watched. Everyone on the screen looked angry or shocked or upset, including Goliath. But the girl's expression now, as she watched the chaos, was delighted, gleeful, ecstatic.
Suddenly Limpy understood.
She'd planned the whole thing. She'd taken him and Goliath to the shopping center on purpose to upset the bloke with the clipboard. To pay him back, probably for making her do something she didn't want to do.
She hadn't been doing them a favor; they'd been doing her one.
Boy, thought Limpy, perhaps Uncle Preston was right about not trusting humans.
The shopping center bit finished on the telly and Limpy saw the girl smiling down at him fondly. She didn't look selfish or dishonest. She just looked like a friendly human who'd rescued him twice.
Then Limpy realized what must have happened.
Of course, he thought. She didn't trick us. She just hasn't understood. She hasn't got it. She hasn't grasped that I want to be a mascot.
On a shelf above the telly, Limpy saw, was a set of the fluffy mascot toys.
He decided it was worth one more try.
He hopped up onto the shelf and sat between the platypus and the echidna, trying to look as much as possible like a mascot.
The girl laughed, lifted him back down, and offered him another grasshopper.
“Give up,” mumbled Goliath with his mouth full.
Limpy ignored him, hopped back up, and took his position again with the other mascots.
This time the girl didn't laugh.
She stared at him and the other mascots for a long time, frowning.
I think she's getting it, thought Limpy. I think she understands.
He decided she was.
What was it Uncle Roly had been saying just before he was flattened by that caravan?
“Life's a long, hard journey, young Limpy,” he'd said. “But you'll get more out of it if you look on the bright side.”
Limpy looked on the bright side for the rest of that evening, and all night in front of the telly, and most of the next morning, right up until the girl put him and Goliath back into her bag, put the bag back under the bed, and left without them.
Limpy managed to open the bag zip from the inside and scramble out from under the bed just in time to hear a vehicle driving off.