Daisy and the Trouble with Life (10 page)

BOOK: Daisy and the Trouble with Life

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Trouble was, Mum couldn't find our pump so she had to do it with her mouth.

So while she was huffing and puffing and blowing, Gabby and me said we'd water the garden. Well we never actually said we'd water the garden, we just did it. While Mum wasn't looking.

First of all we watered the flowers because they looked really hot. Then we watered the grass, which was going a bit brown. Then we watered the shed, which was really brown.

Then we watered Tiptoes.

The
trouble with watering Tiptoes
is he's a cat.

Which means he doesn't like it. Which isn't our fault, because when we watered him, he looked like he really wanted to be watered. I mean, he was right in a really hot bit of sun, all stretched out, not moving even a little bit. Me and Gabby thought he was dying of thirst so we thought he really needed some water.

When the water went on him, he wasn't still any more. He jumped up and went higher than a kangaroo, right over the wall and back into Mrs Pike's garden.

Then Mrs Pike poked her head over the wall and looked at me and Gabby with a cross face and said, “WHO DID THAT TO TIPTOES? HE'S SOAKED!”

The
trouble with holding hosepipes
is people can always tell which one did the squirting.

So I let go.

The
trouble with letting go of hosepipes
is you can't tell which way they are going to squirt. Which isn't your fault.

Mum said it was my fault though. When it squirted her, and made her dress all wet, she said playing with the hosepipe was a very silly thing to do. So did Mrs Pike.

I think that's why Tiptoes stays on the wall a lot of the time now.

Anyway, Mum was so wet she nearly didn't keep on blowing, but then she said that at least if Gabby and I were in the paddling pool, she would know where we were and what we were up to.

We weren't allowed to put the water in the paddling pool after that. Only Mum was.

The
trouble with paddling pool water
is it always gets dead bees floating on it.

Gabby says dead bees can still sting you, so you have to splash them out.

The
trouble with splashing dead bees out of your paddling pool
is it makes all the water go on the grass.

After three bees we only had a centimetre left.

Mum filled the paddling pool up again for us but said there would be no more after that. She said that water is precious and that if we use too much in our paddling pool, all the oceans will go down, including Mrs Pike's pond, which will be bad news for Freddy.

So the next time we got a bee in our water Gabby tried to splish it out instead of splash it out. Splishes are smaller than splashes.

Trouble is, she splished the dead bee onto her arm. If a dead bee stings you on the arm, your whole body can fall off, so Gabby went a bit loopy.

Luckily it fell off her arm onto the grass. So we managed to trap it under the big red bucket.

Gabby said she was really lucky to be alive and if her whole body had fallen off, she would never have been able to ride her new bike again. Or do skipping. Mum brought the towels out after that.

Hang on. Where is Mum? I can't hear her in the kitchen and I can't hear her upstairs. Maybe she's in the garden â I'll just go and see.

Chapter 15

Thought so. Mum's in the garden, hanging up the washing. She always does the washing on Saturday afternoon. She says if she does the washing on Saturdays, we can start the week with clean towels.

The
trouble with clean towels
is they never stay clean for long. At least not in our house.

Mum says that the towels would stay clean a lot longer if I got all the dirt off BEFORE I dried myself. She says dirt doesn't wash itself off, it has to be rubbed or scrubbed off. One rub for normal dirt, three rubs for mud, five rubs for grass stains and about two hundred and seventy-three scrubs for snake poo.

I'm not joking. If you get snake poo on you, you are in BIG trouble. Believe me, I know!

The
trouble with snake poo
isn't so much the look of it, it's the STINK of it. It stinks like a hundred stink bombs.

And if it squirts on you, you'll never get it off. And that's just with a little snake, like Dylan Reeves's. Imagine if it was a massive python or something! Imagine the stink then!

Dylan Reeves lives three doors away at Number 38. He's two years older than me, but sometimes he asks me round to play.

It's really good at Dylan's. His mum and dad have got a hot tub in their back garden. And asparagus.

Dylan's bedroom is the best. He's got his own telly in it, and a PlayStation, and he used to have a snake called Shooter.

Shooter was a Colorado garter snake. He wasn't very long â about as long as from my fingers to my elbow â and he was sort of light brown with a stripy crisscrossy pattern.

He lived in Dylan's bedroom, in a tank with a really bright light and heat pads under the sawdust.

Most of the time I just looked at him through the glass, but one day Dylan let me hold him.

I wasn't scared or anything â Dylan thought I would be, but I wasn't. I've always wanted to hold a snake.

BOOK: Daisy and the Trouble with Life

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