“I didn’t know your hobby was stamp collecting,” I said to Fliss.
She went a bit red. “It isn’t but I didn’t know what else to put. I don’t really have a hobby.”
“Course you do,” said Lyndz. “You go to Brownies, don’t you? You go to dancing classes and gymnastics. You’re interested in fashion.” She reeled off a few more.
“Oh, I didn’t realise they were hobbies,” said Fliss, grabbing her card back. She’s so dozy. She scribbled away and soon ran out of space.
For my hobbies I wrote: Reading, Brownies, Pop Music, Collecting Teddies and Acting. I just lurv being in plays. It’s the best.
Kenny had written: Football, Swimming, Gymnastics, Snooker, Brownies.
Rosie had put: Netball, (I’d forgotten that), Soaps (she’s mad about them), Pop Music and Brownies.
Next I read Lyndz’s. She’d written: Horses, Painting, Horses, Brownies, Horses, Cooking Horses.
“Cooking horses?” I said.
“Let me see that.” She grabbed it back from me. She’d just missed out the comma. “Oh, very funny, I don’t think.”
I thought it was very funny, actually, and so did Kenny. We creased up.
Later on, when we were sure Rosie’s mum wasn’t coming back, we got out the food, put it in a big bowl and passed it round. I’ll tell you what there was: sherbet dabs, Black Jacks, Love Hearts, a Snickers bar, six marshmallows and a packet of Original Pringles. We all tucked in straight away.
“D’you think we should give Gazza something?” said Fliss.
“It doesn’t seem fair leaving him out,” Rosie agreed.
But really there was nothing apart from Pringles we thought a hamster might eat and we weren’t really sure about those. We decided we’d try him just with a couple of crumbs to see. Fliss got out of her sleeping bag and went to get him.
That’s when we realised he’d gone.
“He’s not here,” she wailed. “Oh, help, where is he?”
I jumped up as well, just to check, because Fliss is always losing things, even when they’re staring her in the face, but this time she was right: he wasn’t there. And when we turned on the lights he wasn’t anywhere else we could see either.
We stripped everything off the bed and searched all five sleeping bags. We looked under the bed. We emptied all our sleepover kits out in a pile in the middle of the floor. There were leggings and T-shirts and socks and knickers and slippers and toilet bags and torches and hairbrushes and teddies and sweet packets from the midnight feast. And we still couldn’t find him.
Fliss was nearly wetting herself. She kept saying over and over, “I’m going to be in such trouble with Mrs Weaver. I’m going to be in doom forever.”
And just then Rosie’s mum came back in. “My goodness, what’s all this noise?” she said. “Whatever’s going on?”
So then we had to tell her, Gazza was gone.
She helped us search the room all over again. But in the end she said, “Well, there’s nothing else we can do tonight. We’ll just have to hope he comes back when he’s hungry. The door’s been closed, so he must still be in the room somewhere. We’d just better make sure Jenny doesn’t get in here tonight.”
“Oh, no,” said Fliss horrified. “Would she eat him?”
“Probably not, but the poor hamster might die of fright if he saw her.”
“But where can he have gone?” said Fliss, nearly in tears.
“We’ve looked everywhere, Mum,” said Rosie.
“He could be under the floorboards, who knows. Come on, now, let’s have this light off and you girls settle down.”
“I don’t want to sleep on the floor any more,” said Fliss.
“I’ll swap with you,” said Rosie.
So Fliss dragged her sleeping bag onto the bed and Rosie and I got into our sleeping bags on the floor. We cuddled our teddies and Rosie’s mum turned out the light.
“It’s very late,” she said, “I think you should try to go to sleep, now. Goodnight.”
For quite a long time, we all lay in the dark and no one spoke. Rosie kept turning over, Lyndz sucked her thumb, Fliss was sniffing a bit. It sounded as if she was crying. Then I heard Lyndz whisper, “Don’t worry. He’ll turn up.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” Fliss sniffed. “I’ll be left out again.”
I felt sorry for Fliss too but I didn’t know what to do. I turned over and tried to get to sleep. I’m always the last to drop off. My brain won’t seem to go to sleep for ages after I go to bed, so I was lying there, thinking everyone else was asleep by now, when I heard this noise. It was quite close. In fact it sounded as if it was right underneath my pillow, right under my ear.
Rosie whispered, “Frankie, are you awake?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Can you hear that noise?”
I could and I knew exactly what it was: Gazza was on the move.
I sat up and turned on my torch. We crawled out of our sleeping bags and pulled back the carpet. Rosie doesn’t have a fitted carpet, like the one in my bedroom. She just has this big square rug in the middle of the floor. We rolled up one side of it and followed the sound and shone our torches down the crack between the floorboards.
“I think I can see him,” Rosie hissed. We both got so excited we banged heads. “OW,” I yelled. Suddenly all the others were awake.
“What’s going on?” said Kenny, jumping out of bed.
“Is it morning?” said Lyndz, rubbing her eyes. She’d only been asleep ten minutes!
“I’m sure I can see him,” Rosie said again.
I wasn’t sure I could, but I could certainly hear him moving about. Soon the others were crowding round us, Fliss was shivering in her nightie.
“Move back,” I said. “You’re in the light.”
“Try and coax him out with some Pringles,” said Kenny, getting one and crumbling it between her fingers. “Look what we’ve got for you,” she said, poking the crumbs down between the floorboards. She posted as much through as she could and waited. But still nothing happened. So we tried some more, until we’d pushed a whole Pringle down.
“If you keep pushing food through to him he’ll never come out,” said Rosie. “In fact if he eats too much he might get so fat he can’t fit back through the hole.”
“Good thinking, Wonder Woman,” I said. Rosie’s pretty clever at times.
Next we tried tapping messages on the floorboards above his head and flashing our torches on and off. But we couldn’t get him to come out.
Then Kenny got silly and started shining her torch up Fliss’s nightdress.
Fliss shouted, “That’s not fair, just because I’m the only one in a nightdress.”
So then