Blacky Blasts Back Read Free

joined at the hip. Plus, the other kids who were going weren’t exactly a barrel of laughs. For example, there was John, a specimen with the build of a basketball player and the personality of a serial killer. His speciality was torture. Other kids if he could get them, but failing that, any passing butterfly would do. Then there was Brodie. He made John look like a candidate for sainthood. And then there was Kyle . . .
    This would be like going on holiday with a pack of rabid dogs. Only more dangerous. I could do without it.
    But Blacky hadn’t given me a choice . . .

I hate to give the impression I’m telling this story backwards, but can we go back to the Thursday before my pointless interview with Miss Dowling? I promise I won’t do it again, otherwise we’ll be finishing this story with my birth. Although that’s a pretty spectacular event from my point of view, I doubt you’d find it fascinating.
    Thursday evening. It hadn’t been the greatest evening, mainly because Rose had spent dinner repeatedly kicking me under the table. It is Rose’s mission in life to make mine miserable and she pursues it with enormous energy and considerable success. You might wonder why I don’t simply dob her in to my parents, show them the bruises and gloat while they give her a sound thrashing with a length of lead piping.
    Okay. A grounding, at least.
    The thing is, they wouldn’t believe me. As far as they’re concerned, Rose can do no wrong. If they discovered my sister disembowelling me with a rusty tin opener, they’d assume she was performing emergency lifesaving surgery and double her pocket money.
    It’s not fair.
    So I limped into my bedroom and had a go at my Maths homework.
    A man is filling a tank with water at a rate of 30 litres a minute. The tank is 3.5 metres long, 4.5 metres wide and 6 metres deep. However, the tank has a leak exactly halfway up and when the water reaches this level it escapes at a rate of 5 litres a minute. Bearing in mind that 1 cubic metre contains 1000 litres, how long would it take for the tank to overflow?
    I thought about it.
    â€˜ Never ,’ I wrote, ‘ because only a complete moron with a criminal disregard for water conservation would carry on filling a tank when it was spewing out 5 litres a second through a leak .’
    Satisfied I’d aced that one, I had a shower, brushed my teeth and got into bed. I was going to do some reading, but I was tired out from dinner. It’s exhausting having your shins hammered with steel-capped boots. So I turned off the lamp and snuggled down into my doona.
    I don’t know if this has ever happened to you. You drift into that cosy state of pre-sleep, suspended in warmth. You fall deeper and deeper into a blissful void. Your breathing relaxes into a peaceful rhythm.
    And then a cold wet nose is thrust into your ear.
    Okay. It must be just me.
    I yelled and jumped out of bed in one movement, like one of those vertical take-off military jets. I nearly scraped the ceiling. Just as well I’d only recently been to the bathroom. Otherwise I’d have been leaking at the rate of 5 litres a minute.
    I pressed back against the wall, peered through the darkness towards my bed and prayed I was in the throes of a nightmare.
    â€˜Tickle my bum with a feather, tosh,’ came a voice in my head. ‘You scared the living daylights out of me, you twonk!’
    I took a step nearer the bed.
    â€˜Blacky?’ I breathed.
    â€˜Who were you expecting, bucko? Barack Obama?’
    I turned on the bedside light.
    A small, scruffy, dirty-white dog sat on my pillow. It looked at me through pink-rimmed eyes.
    â€˜Wotcha, mush,’ said the dog.
    Now this is the bit you’ll find hard to believe.
    Blacky is a talking dog.
    Well, he can’t actually talk . He’s not in demand as an after-dinner speaker, and he’d flunk an English oral outright. But he can communicate. Only with me,