Selby Screams
Authors: Duncan Ball
This one’s for Eliot
NOSE BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS
SEVEN WARNING SIGNS OF A TALKING DOG
“What a great camera!” Dr Trifle said as he whipped around and snapped a picture of the bewildered Selby. “It’s amazing! All you have to do is point it and press the button and it does everything else. It focuses itself and decides if it needs the flash and it even winds the film!”
“That was a close call,” Selby thought, as he looked up from the newspaper he’d been lying on. “He almost caught me secretly reading. I’ve got to be very careful with Dr Trifle snapping pictures with his new Inig-Matic camera or my secret won’t be a secret for much longer.”
“Look at all these exciting features!” Dr Trifle said, reading the camera brochure
about all the buttons that could be pressed and dials that could be turned. “It’s even got
Smile-Sensitivity!”
“Smile-Sensitivity?” Mrs Trifle asked as she wondered why men were so interested in pressing buttons and turning dials. “Does that mean you’ll hurt its feelings if you smile at it?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Dr Trifle said. “It’s something special that lets you press a button on the back of the camera and then run around to the front and it takes your picture — but not till you smile. Isn’t that great!”
“And what if you don’t feel like smiling?” Mrs Trifle, who was watching a movie on TV about an orphan who was lost in the snow, asked.
“Then it’ll refuse to take your picture.”
“Refuse to take your picture?” Mrs Trifle said. “How dare it? I may be old-fashioned but, the way I see it, cameras should do what you tell them to do.”
“That’s all well and good for your normal run-of-the-mill camera. But these new cameras have minds of their own. If it’s set for Smile-Sensitivity you’d jolly well better smile or it’ll just jack up and that’s that, no picture.”
“Perhaps I’m missing the point,” Mrs Trifle said.
“The point is that cameras don’t lie.”
“Is that so?” Mrs Trifle thought as she tried to remember if she’d ever been lied to by a camera.
“That just means that if someone is feeling sad or looking terrible or something it’ll come out in the photo. But if you click the Smile-Sensitivity button, this one will only take happy photos,” Dr Trifle said as he clipped his Super Bug-O-Rama magnifying lens on the front of the camera. “Now I’m going out to the garden to get some pictures of insects.”
“But we’ve got to go shopping now,” Mrs Trifle said. “Besides, how will you ever get a bug to smile?”
“That’s silly,” Dr Trifle laughed, and with this he spun around and took another snapshot of Selby, almost catching him reading again. “You don’t turn on the Smile-Sensitivity when you’re taking pictures of insects.”
“This thing’s driving me crazy,” Selby thought, picking up the camera when Dr and Mrs Trifle had gone shopping. “I can’t do anything for fear
of being photographed. Even if I’m lying innocently in front of the TV Dr Trifle might take a picture. When it was developed he might realise that I was actually watching the TV.”
Selby pushed some buttons and turned some dials on the camera and then picked up the brochure. It showed a picture of a camera sliced down the middle and lots of arrows pointing to things.
“This camera
does
have everything,” Selby thought, getting more interested by the minute. “It’s even got a shark alarm for when you’re taking pictures underwater.”
The thought of swimming underwater with the Inig-Matic dangling from his neck suddenly brought a smile to Selby’s lips and — just as suddenly — there was a blinding flash.
“What was that?” Selby said, dropping the brochure and hoping the flash was lightning striking or a light globe burning out. “Oh, no! I forgot about the
Smile-Sensitivity.
It’s taken a picture of me reading the brochure! When the Trifles see the photograph, they’ll know I can read! My secret will be out! Help! I’ve got to do something fast!”
Selby lunged for the camera to destroy the film but just then Dr Trifle burst in the door.
“My goodness!” the doctor exclaimed as he grabbed the camera from in front of the flying dog. “The film is finished. I’ll have to send it away to Celia’s to be processed straight away.”
That night Selby couldn’t sleep.
“I’m sitting on a time bomb,” he thought. “As soon as Dr Trifle gets his pictures back in the post, he’ll see the one of me reading and my days of freedom will be at an end. Oh, sure,
at first it’ll be all friendly. They’ll ask me what it’s like to be a dog and I’ll tell them how horrible Dry-Mouth Dog Biscuits are and they may even give me some of their own people-food to eat. Then, gradually, there will be things to be done. ‘Selby, would you mind doing this and would you mind doing that?’ Before I know it, I’ll be their servant! I want to be their pet, not their servant. Or worse still, they’ll send me off to a laboratory where I’ll have to talk to boring scientists all day. Oh woe, woe, woe. The only sensible thing is to snitch the photo and the negative before Dr Trifle sees them. But how?”
For the next few days when Postie Paterson put the mail in the Trifle’s letterbox, Selby was watching from the garage through Dr Trifle’s binoculars.
“That’s it!” Selby said at last when he saw the unmistakable yellow envelope from Celia’s No-Scratch Photo Service. “Now if I can only get to the envelope …”
Selby crept out to the letterbox and nudged the lid up with his nose as he often did when he brought in the mail. But just as he was about
to grab the envelope, a hand shot in front of his face and beat him to it.
“Never mind, Selby,” said Dr Trifle, who’d also been anxiously waiting for Postie’s delivery, “I’ll get it. Yooohooo!” he called over to Mrs Trifle. “Come and have a look at the photos!”
The sweat dripped from Selby’s forehead as Dr and Mrs Trifle looked through the stack of photographs.
“Isn’t that a good one of you?” Mrs Trifle said to Dr Trifle.
“What do you mean?” Dr Trifle said. “It makes me look terrible.”
“Well they say the camera doesn’t lie, dear,” Mrs Trifle chuckled as her husband flipped through the pack.
“My goodness! What’s this?” Dr Trifle suddenly exclaimed as he looked at the last picture.
“I do believe it’s Selby!” Mrs Trifle said, looking over at Selby who was lying innocently on the ground.
“I can’t stand it,” Selby thought as he cleared his throat. “I’ll have to tell them. They’ve caught me. I’ll have to confess. Gulp.”
“But how could he have taken it?” Mrs Trifle asked.
“Well I don’t know,” Dr Trifle said, frowning at Selby. “Maybe he just bumped against it and
flash!
it went off.”
For a minute, Dr and Mrs Trifle’s heads went back and forth from the photo to Selby like two people watching a tennis match.
“It’s really quite extraordinary,” Mrs Trifle said."I can’t imagine how it happened.”
“I must have left the Super Bug-O-Rama magnifying lens on the camera,” Dr Trifle said. “It just looks like a close-up of fur with a tiny piece of his collar showing. What a laugh.”
“Thank goodness,” Selby thought as he breathed a great sigh of relief. “Cameras may not lie but luckily for me they don’t always tell the whole truth either.”
“Remember when the council chose the town of Twin Castles in Tallstoria to be our sister town?” Mrs Trifle, who was the mayor of Bogusville, asked Dr Trifle.
“Yes,” Dr Trifle said. “As I recall, the mayor of Twin Castles was planning to come here for a visit sometime.”
“Not just sometime,” Mrs Trifle said. “Count Karnht and his wife, the countess, will be staying here for the night tonight. They’re due at five o’clock.”
“How exciting! I do hope he speaks English. I don’t speak a word of Tallstorian.”
“Count Karnht speaks perfect English but he has trouble with his numbers. He has a way of saying two when he means one and three when he means four and so on.”
“You mean, Count Karnht can’t count?” “Yes. He grew up very rich and always had other people to count for him so he never learned. But Countess Karnht can count and she’s written to tell us to ignore anything that her husband says that has numbers in it.”
“My goodness,” Dr Trifle said, as a huge black car with flags on it pulled into the driveway.“I think it’s them!”
“The count that can’t count can’t tell time either,” thought Selby as he noticed the royal couple were two hours early.
“Let’s not be formal,” Count Karnht said, kissing Dr and Mrs Trifle on both cheeks. “We’re not here as the royal single —”
“He means the royal
couple
,” the countess whispered to the Trifles.
“— but as the mayor of Triple Castles.” “He means,
Twin
Castles,” the countess said. “And I
do
apologise if we’re early or late. My husband said we were due at fifteen
o’clock and I took a blind guess that he meant three.”
“It’s six dozen of one or half of another,” the count said, suddenly seeing Selby and screaming: “Help! Get that three-legged creature out of here! I was attacked by two packs of them when I was a boy of thirty.”
“But Selby wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Mrs Trifle said.
“I don’t care how many flies he wouldn’t hurt,” Count Karnht said, jumping up on the table. “I can’t cope with dogs. My wife used to keep canines but we had to get rid of them. They frighten me out of my wit!”