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This afternoon, my cat-flap flapped. When I went downstairs to look, it wasn’t my cat. Gunk had come in.
She came to tell me about her day, and to have some tea. She wasn’t dressed up nice, so I didn’t have to call her “mylady”. She did insist on having an extra cookie (or three). After the water had boiled, we sat down at my kitchen table to drink tea and have a chocolate cookie. Or five, in the case of Gunk.
As always, she would talk and I would write. Gunk would like you to know that she can write just fine. She says she could let me talk so she could write. But she thinks my stories are boring. And not very up-grown. Besides, she doesn’t like the way the letters look at her after she has written them. That is why she is always frowning when she reads them. Reading is a very up-grown thing and she can read just fine too.
As you know, Gunk isn’t very large. In fact, she is rather small. She doesn’t live in a house. She has a burrow, at the bottom of the garden, in the corner against the shed, underneath a pile of rubbish.
Gunk is always making things. Sometimes its clothes or something to decorate her burrow with. Sometimes it’s tools or things to help her when she is out and about. But sometimes she makes something especially to play a prank on someone. Apparently, today was one of those days.
That morning, she was in a very nasty mood. You see, Gunk was bored. She’d had breakfast and done all of her chores. She’d swept the burrow, re-organised the pile of rubbish, bitten the cat, cleaned up the yard, emptied the trash, had a nice neighbourly chat with the birds that visited the garden, cleaned out her wardrobe, scrubbed the stove.
But then, there was nothing left to do. She didn’t like that. Like a hurricane or an erupting volcano, Gunk was most happy when she could keep busy. She thought about imitating a doorbell or a telephone, to annoy the neighbours or maybe track down the mailman and shuffle around all the mail when he wasn’t looking. But somehow that didn’t appeal to her. She wanted to do something that grown-ups would do so she could have some real up-grown fun. The best place for this would be where all the grown-up go to do their up-grown things.
So she went into the village, heading for the shops.
Although she had no idea what she would do when she got there, she was already in a better mood. She ran all the way there, only briefly stopping to bite into the front-tire of the mailman’s bicycle. Just enough to make air hisssssss out.
Because it was still early, there weren’t many people about. Some of the shops were still closed. But the supermarket was open, so she headed there. The manager of the supermarket, Mr. Wallace always took great care of all the details in his shop. The cash-registers always had enough change, all the products were neatly placed on the shelves and none of his shopping-cart wheels squeaked, thank you very much. He oiled all of the wheels personally, every Monday.
So, first, Gunk had some fun playing with the shopping-carts. She would hop on to someone’s shopping-cart and make squeeky noises. Then, when the customer would look at the wheels of the cart whilst moving it forward and backward in an attempt to figure out which wheel was squeaking, she would be silent. But as soon as the customer shrugged and walked on, she would make squeeky noises again.
After that, she would run from shopping-cart to shopping-cart, blocking one of the wheels. When the customer was pushing (or pulling) the cart almost sideways to get it to move, Gunk would quickly run to another wheel and block that instead. The customers didn’t like that at all. Some got very cross at their shopping-carts. Twice, Mr. Wallace had to run out of the store to fetch a customer a new cart from outside. Naturally, when he wheeled away the offending cart, he could not find anything wrong with it. The more puzzled he looked, the more fun Gunk had.
Now, for some reason, I was running low on chocolade cookies. So that morning I had also gone to the supermarket. Although I did have a shopping-cart, my cart behaved itself and I didn’t see Gunk anywhere. Of course, it could just be because you can’t see Gunk if she doesn’t want to be seen.
After she was done playing with the shopping-carts, she ran around for a while pretending to be a mouse. After that, she thought it would be fun to swap around the salt and the sugar. Swapping things out by hand would be a lot of boring work. The up-grown thing to do would be using a tool. At this point in her story, sitting on my kitchen table, Gunk got rather excited. She had finished about half her tea (and almost half of my chocolade cookies). She explained that, using part of the supermarket’s freezers, bits from the cash-register, half a cookie and some string, she had made a swapping-things-around machine.
After having busied herself with swapping out the contents of the bags of salt with the bags of sugar, she moved on to swapping the paprika powder with the chilli powder. After that she swapped the salt and vinegar crisps with the plain flavoured ones.
Next she decided she would like to swap the contents of people’s pockets. She felt that would give people a bit of a surprise, and who doesn’t like a nice surprise?
This did mean that she needed to work on her swapping-things-around machine a bit. Obviously you can’t use the same parts to swap out paper and metal as you do when swapping out powder and potatoes. It must have been obvious because when I asked her about it, she just gave me a looked that clearly stated I had, once again, said something stupid.
After all her hard work and swapping things about, she had become tired and a bit peckish, so she had come straight to my house to tell me about her adventure. She looked up at me and smiled a big smile. She had finished her story, most of her tea and all of my chocolade cookies.
I was a bit grumpy about that last bit, especially as I had only had one cookie. (I was too busy writing to have any more cookies). When I told her this, she wrinkled up her nose and told me she was just being up-grown.
“You have grown-ups visit you all the time and they always eat all of the cookies too. Besides”, Gunk continued, ”You can always get more cookies at the supermarket. You can swap them with those girls that can’t remember their names.” I raised an eyebrow but Gunk threw me another look that told me I was being stupid again. “You know. They have a little plank pinned to their clothes with their name on it. So they can check when they forget! You can swap with them at their special swapping machines.”
“They seem to like the little paper drawings a lot more than those weird metal buttons you give them. I can quite imagine” Gunk said, rather aloof, ”they don’t even have holes in them. Just think of those poor girls, having to bite holes in all those little metal buttons before they can use them. Anyway, I made sure to swap those stupid coins in your pocket with some of those paper things.”
I was about to ask her what she was talking about but as I took my wallet from my pocket, I could see that it held more banknotes that it had that morning. I casually asked her if, perhaps, she had her swapping-things-around machine with her.
She looked at me as though I had said something shocking. She told me she had left her machine at the supermarket. All the parts came from the store, so taking them out of the store would be stealing. And stealing wasn’t a very up-grown thing to do! So this was definitely not stealing as everything was still in the supermarket.
I nodded and said I understood. She acknowledged my remark very solemnly and, approving, said that I would be a real grown-up soon, if I kept it up. All I needed now, Gunk said, was to stop asking stupid questions and make sure to get her some more cookies.
Preferably of the chocolate kind.