First e-book edition 2013
First published in paperback in Great Britain 2013
by Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Text copyright © 2013 Kjartan Poskitt
Illustrations copyright © 2013 David Tazzyman
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted
ISBN 978 1 4052 6271 2
eISBN 978 1 7803 1303 0
www.egmont.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Cover
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
The Heart of . . . What?
The Return of the Mud Creature
The Best of Enemies
Nice and Friendly and Boring
Welcome to the Club
What???
Zogs and Debras
Inside Information
Ivy Malting and Her Secret-Message-Sending Leg
Too Many Xs!
The Lesson
Martha’s Funny Mood
Ellie Makes Me Jealous
Miss Pingle to the Rescue
Who?
Don’t Talk About the Nappy
The Battle of Odd Green
The Ending
Bianca’s Facts About Zebras
Hiya! I’m Agatha Jane Parrot and THANKS for reading this book. It’s very nice of you because the title is a bit strange! If you want to know why this book is called The Heart of Mud, it’s something that somebody says later on in the story. If you like, you can flick through the pages and see if you can spot who says it. Remember you’re on page 2 now, so I’ll wait here and you can come back when you’ve found it.
I’ll just hum some waiting music . . . Tum-tee-tiddly-tum!
If you think the title is a bit silly, it could have been a LOT worse. There’s one bit in the story where my friend Ivy sends secret messages with her leg! It’s true, she really does, so Ivy wanted this book to be called Ivy Malting and Her Secret-Message-Sending Leg ha ha! But it was a bit long to fit on the front, so we used that name for one of the chapters instead.
Before we start, I should warn you that this book does have a bit of LOVE in it. (That’s why it has Heart in the title.)
Don’t worry. There’s no long kissing or holding hands or anything gross like that. YUK! We don’t do that sort of thing on Odd Street – apart from once. It was Dad’s birthday so Mum had to give him a kiss, but they didn’t like it much because he’s bald and she’s got hairy legs. What a pity Mum couldn’t take the hairs off her legs and plant them on Dad’s head eh? That would have been a brilliant birthday present for him. How very thoughtful.
Anyway, Ivy’s leg is waiting for you so we better get on with the story. WAHOO!
In our house, Wednesday teatime is the BEST teatime of the week.
What makes Wednesday so good is that Mum cooks up ‘A Real Taste of Italy’. It’s made with fresh pasta and hand-picked tomatoes with an exciting blend of herbs and covered with a rich cheese sauce. Each serving also contains 377 calories, 13 grams of fat and 832 mg of sodium (whatever that means).
How do I know all this? Because that’s what it says on the box. YUM!
We love teatime out of boxes. Even Dad can’t cook it wrong, apart from the time when he forgot to poke holes in the top with a fork and it went BADDOOF in the microwave. The smell lasted for weeks! Mum went mental with him, but secretly she was dead pleased because when her friends came round they thought she’d been cooking some posh stuff like they do on telly.
‘What IS that lovely smell?’ said the friends.
‘It’s my new secret recipe,’ said Mum the Big Fibber.
Gosh if I told whoppers like that, I’d be straight up to bed with no arguing.
The bad thing is that we can only have box tea on Wednesdays, because Wednesday is the only day when there are four of us for tea. The box says serves four and WE MUST OBEY the box.
So anyway, one Wednesday we were all sitting round the table waiting for our exciting herbs and 13 grams of fat. The four of us were Mum, Dad, me and little sister Tilly. As usual, Tilly was dressed as a fairy and she was watching the numbers on the microwave count down so she could do her magic spell at the end.
‘Five, four, three, two, one . . .’ said the fairy then she waved her wand.
PING! went the microwave oven.
Dad got the plastic box thing out and peeled the top back. Oh wow, smell that smell, love it love it. He was just dolloping it out on to four plates when we heard an evil scraping sound coming from outside.
The front gate squeaked and the scraping sound got closer, and then the front door burst open. A hideous creature covered in mud staggered into the hallway leaving a slimy trail all over the mat.
‘UM OME!’ wailed the creature.
‘Oh no!’ said me and Tilly. The last thing we had wanted to see was the Mud Creature from Planet Smelly, but there it was.
The Mud Creature had been playing football. Usually he had tea at his friend Matty’s house on Wednesdays but obviously something had gone wrong.
‘UM OME!’ he said again.
‘What’s he saying?’ asked Dad.
‘He says “I’m home”,’ said Mum, then she shouted into the hallway. ‘Don’t come in the kitchen like that.’
‘Like what?’ said the creature.
‘Like THAT!’ snapped Mum. ‘You’ll have to get undressed in the hall.’
By now you’ve probably guessed that the Mud Creature from Planet Smelly is actually my big brother James. This was not good news for me and Tilly. We started shovelling the pasta inside us as fast as we could because we knew what was coming next.
‘Did you get tea at Matty’s?’ asked Dad.
‘No,’ said the Creature. ‘He wasn’t playing today.’
Dad went to the cupboard to get another plate out.
Shovel shovel shovel went me and Tilly.
‘Wait, you two,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll need to save a bit for James.’
And sure enough Dad spooned a HUGE bit off both our plates and plonked it on a plate for the Mud Creature. UNFAIR. I just hope James got all my 13 grams of fat in his bit. It would have served him right.
After we had eaten our SMALL HELPINGS of box tea, Dad stood up and pulled an important face.
‘I’ll leave you people to clear up. I’ve got a bit of work to do in my office.’
Office? That sounds grand doesn’t it? I bet you’re thinking that Dad’s office has a big desk with lots of telephones and a giant window with helicopters outside.
Actually it’s not quite like that surprise surprise gosh faint in shock.
There’’’’boo hoo hoo