Fortune Cookie - Jean Ure

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with The Sound of Music.) I watched it with him one year, after he started calling me Fudge, but I couldn’t get what he saw in it. It’s about these two men who rob a bank and become outlaws and in the end they are shot, which is a bit sad I suppose, cos even though they are bank robbers they are not really bad people, and sometimes they are quite funny. I liked it when one of them rides round on a bicycle singing this song about raindrops. “Raindrops keep falling on my head.” That is my favourite part!

      I told Cupcake about it and taught her the song, and every now and then she’d jump on Joey’s tricycle and ride round the garden singing it, except she used to change the words to “Cupcakes keep falling on my head”. I know it sounds a bit childish, but Joey thought it was really funny. He thought it was even funnier when I changed the words to fudge keeps falling on my head. He used to squeal and go, “Eeeurgh, bird poo!” He was only little, after all. Well, seven years old. That is quite little.

      Oh, I nearly forgot about Cupcake and how she became the Cupcake Kid. It was cos once when she came to tea and Mum had bought all these different coloured cupcakes – pink and lemon and strawberry and chocolate, plus some with sprinkles and some with little silver balls – Cupcake greedily went and ate one of each, which made six altogether. Six cupcakes! I have never let her forget it. Cupcake rather boastfully says, “And I wasn’t even sick!” Dad was impressed. He said he had never seen anything like it, and that if I were Fudge Cassidy then she was obviously The Cupcake Kid. Which is what we have been ever since.

      Mum says if we don’t stop calling each other by our silly nicknames we’ll live to regret it.

      “Believe me,” she says, “you won’t want to be known as Fudge when you’re my age!”

      I expect that may be true, but it is way too far ahead for me to worry about it. In any case, Mum can’t really say that our nicknames are silly; not now that we’ve lived up to them. Little did we know when Cupcake’s mum took that photograph of us in the back garden, showing off our new school uniforms, that we were about to embark on a life of crime. That movie that Dad loves so much, the Butch Cassidy movie? It nearly came true. Me and Cupcake didn’t exactly rob a bank, but for a short time we were handling stolen goods…

       CHAPTER TWO

      It was Cookie that gt us started on our life of crime. Not that he was called Cookie back then. Back then he was just “the puppy”. The puppy that lived in the garden over the wall.

      See, at the back of our block of flats there’s this old, crumbly wall that me and Cupcake used to use for tennis practice. We’d be out there whatever the weather, walloping about with our tennis racquets. Cupcake was never as keen as I was, but I can always get round her! All I had to do was wail, “You know how important it is to me!”

      The reason it was so important was because I had this dream that one day, if I practised hard enough, I might end up a big star, playing at Wimbledon. I have a different dream now: I am going to be a TV celeb. I sort of gave up on Wimbledon; I got sick of losing tennis balls. It was mainly me who lost them, I have to admit. I am quite an energetic sort of player. I’d take a good swipe, and instead of bouncing off the wall the thing would go flying right over the top and into the garden on the other side. Well! You can’t keep buying new tennis balls all the time, and you can’t keep trailing all the way round the block and knocking on someone’s door and asking “Please can we get our ball back?” Specially not when the person who answers the door is this crotchety old woman who complains that she is trying to watch television or trying to get a bit of rest. After the first few times Cupcake wouldn’t come with me any more; it didn’t matter how much I begged and pleaded. She said, “I can’t! She’s too horrible.”

      “She’s only an old woman,” I said.

      “So you go and ask,” said Cupcake.

      I could have, I suppose; crotchety old women don’t frighten me. But quite honestly it was getting to be a bit of a drag, especially when you went to all that trouble and then she wasn’t there.

      “Prob’ly be easiest if we just climbed over,” I said.

      Cupcake is such a scaredy-cat! She wouldn’t do that, either. She whispered, “What if we got caught?”

      I said, “We’re not doing anything wrong! We’re only getting our ball back.”

      “I dunno.” Cupcake pressed the strings of her tennis racquet against her face, making her nose go all squashed. “It’s still trespassing.” Thing about Cupcake is she does have this tendency to dither. Me, I just go ahead and do things.

      “Look, you stay here,” I said. “I’ll go. You keep a lookout.”

      That was when I took my first step towards a life of crime… I didn’t realise it at the time, of course; I mean, what’s a little bit of trespassing? No one was going to put me in prison for just climbing over a wall and getting my own property back. But I guess that’s how it always is. You start off with small things like trespassing and before you know it you’re a full-blown criminal.

      It was quite easy hoisting myself up. I used an old bucket to stand on, then shoved my toes into cracks in the brickwork. Cupcake stood jittering while I swung myself over the top and jumped down on the other side. Almost before I’d even landed, a thing had launched itself at me. A furry, wriggling thing that made little squeaking noises. I went “Yow!” and fell in a heap with the furry thing on top of me. Next thing I know, Cupcake’s peering over the top of the wall going, “Fudge? What’s happening?” And then she saw the furry thing and went, “Oh!” And then, “Oh!” And then, “It’s the puppy!”

      We’d seen the puppy before; just quick glimpses when we’d knocked at the door. He’d be there, snuffling at the door crack, trying to say hello, and the old woman would always kick him back inside. She didn’t kick to hurt, I don’t think, cos she only wore slippers, but one time the puppy whimpered, like maybe he’d crashed into something. It didn’t seem to me a very kind way to treat a little friendly animal. But then of course she didn’t treat me and Cupcake very nicely, either, considering all we wanted was our ball back. It wasn’t like we went round there on purpose to annoy her.

      Cupcake’s voice came squeaking anxiously over the wall at me. “Fudge? Are you OK?”

      By this time I was flat on my back and the puppy was smothering me in a frenzy of wet kisses. I went, “Help! Ow! Ooch!” and promptly collapsed into giggles. Which is when Cupcake took her first step towards a life of crime. Before I knew it, she was over the wall and flying to my rescue. Maybe she is quite brave, after all! She said later that she thought I was being attacked.

      Cupcake isn’t used to dogs; in fact she is a bit scared of them. But not even Cupcake could be scared of a tiny puppy. Once she understood that he was just being friendly, and that the strange noises I was making were giggles, and not death rattles, she went all gooey and melty and wanted to cuddle him. But the puppy had other ideas. He was so pleased to have us in his garden! I’m sure he thought we’d climbed over the wall just to play with him. He immediately ran off and fetched a tennis ball – one of our tennis balls! – and came scampering back with it in his mouth. Plain as can be he was saying, “Throw it for me! Throw it for me!” So of course we did.

      Cupcake got quite carried away! She just wouldn’t stop. In the end I had to remind her that we were trampling about in someone else’s garden.

      “She could come out any minute!”

      That got her moving. She shot back over the wall like she was jet-propelled, with me scrabbling after. And then, guess what? I realised that I’d gone and left the tennis ball behind!

      Cupcake said, “Well, but we couldn’t have taken it off him. It’s his toy!”

      I

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