ALSO BY PETER HELLIAR

  Frankie Fish and the Sonic Suitcase

  Frankie Fish and the Great Wall of Chaos

  Frankie Fish and the Viking Fiasco

  Frankie Fish and the Sister Shemozzle

  Frankie Fish and the Wild Wild Mess

  Frankie Fish and the Tomb of Tomfoolery

  Best Ever Pranks and More!

  (written by Frankie Fish & Drew Bird)

  FOR MY GRANDPARENTS:

  AILSA & BERT. VIN & KITTY.

  CONTENTS

  A SHORT BIT BEFORE WE FIND FRANKIE FISH

  CHAPTER 1: SHOW OFF AND TELL

  CHAPTER 2: FRANKIE HAS NOTHING TO SHOW AND NOTHING TO TELL

  CHAPTER 3: A VERY WEIRD TRIP

  CHAPTER 4: THE VILLAGE PEOPLE

  CHAPTER 5: ARTHUR THE NOT-QUITE-AS-GREAT-AS-WE-HOPED

  CHAPTER 6: BACON THE PIG

  CHAPTER 7: A CHALICE WITH NO FLAMES

  CHAPTER 8: A BAD DEAL

  CHAPTER 9: PIG VERSUS HORSE

  CHAPTER 10: A SPECTACULAR BACKFIRE

  CHAPTER 11: MEANWHILE, BACK HOME

  CHAPTER 12: SUFFER IN YOUR STOCKS

  CHAPTER 13: DREW BIRD LIVES AN UNDREAMABLE DREAM

  CHAPTER 14: THE CAVE WITH THE MIRROR

  CHAPTER 15: THERE ARE NO CROCODILES IN ENGLAND

  CHAPTER 16: NOT THE WORST IDEA IN THE WORLD … OR IS IT?

  CHAPTER 17: DREW BIRD: RELUCTANT FLYER

  CHAPTER 18: TO THE ROOFTOP!

  CHAPTER 19: A BIRD-BRAINED SCHEME

  CHAPTER 20: THERE IS ALWAYS A FINAL HURDLE

  CHAPTER 21: SEE YA LATER, ALLIGATOR! (WE HOPE!)

  CHAPTER 22: THE WORST DADAY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  CHAPTER 23: SHOW AND DON’T TELL

  CHAPTER 24: FINALLY! THE BEACH!

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  An old man with a hook for a hand turned and sighed in his bed, while his wife, an ex-nurse, patted his forehead with a damp cloth.

  ‘How are you feeling now, Grandad?’ asked his granddaughter warmly from a nearby chair.

  The old man smiled weakly back. ‘Much better, Louise. For a while there, I didn’t know if I was Arthur or Martha.’

  ‘Well, you’re Alfie now, thank goodness,’ his wife said as she took his temperature.

  ‘That’s right, my Mavis. I’m yer Alfie.’ He beamed.

  Alfie Fish had been in the hospital again, following another spell where he was very muddled and extremely fuddled. Fortunately he was home now, but unfortunately these spells were getting worse and more frequent, as Alfie was not only very old, but ‘struggling with memory problems’, as Nanna sometimes put it. The doctors called it Alzheimer’s disease.

  Frankie Fish – Alfie’s grandson – called it unfair. He was determined to find a cure. Frankie and his best friend, Drew Bird, and his sister, Lou, had even travelled back in time to seek help, using the Sonic Suitcase that Grandad had invented. Months had passed since they had returned from the Wild West via St Mary’s Hospital in Glasgow, and for a while the recommendations of eating more vegies and fruit and doing regular exercise had helped a little. But no-one lives forever, and it seemed that Alzheimer’s was finally getting the better of Alfie Fish.

  ‘Need anything before I go?’ asked Lou, getting up from her chair.

  ‘Actually, yes,’ Grandad said, with a rare look of clarity in his eye. He shuffled along the bed to sit up a little.

  Lou and Nanna shared a look before leaning in. ‘Let me guess, you want haggis for lunch again?’ Lou grinned. ‘I’m not sure we should after the smell last time …’

  But Grandad was distracted, and his fingers were fidgeting with the blanket. He clearly had something weighing on his mind.

  ‘What is it, love?’ asked Nanna Fish, suddenly worried.

  Grandad took a breath. ‘I think it’s time,’ he said. ‘Time we destroy the Sonic Suitcase.’

  The announcement hung in the air for a few seconds as Nanna and Lou tried to work out if this was Grandad talking, or the Alzheimer’s spruiking another crazy idea. Like a week earlier, when Grandad had announced that he wanted to wear a ball gown to the shops, or the day before, when he believed that bananas were spying on him.

  ‘Oh, why’s that, love?’ asked Nanna softly.

  ‘Yeah, Grandad, I thought you loved learning about history and getting into the odd life-threatening adventure,’ offered Lou.

  Grandad finally looked up. ‘No doubt we’ve had a lot of fun with the Sonic Suitcase, and, yes, there have been plenty of scrapes. Oh, the scrapes!’ His eyes twinkled as he paused, recalling their many misadventures. ‘But the suitcase was never supposed to be used as long as it has been, and I’m not going to be around forever to keep fixing it after every bang and bungle. In fact, I barely have enough time to teach ye half of what I know, Lou …’

  Lou’s eyes were filling with tears, so Grandad cleared his throat and patted her hand. ‘The thing is, if the suitcase breaks down while one of us is using it, we might never be able to get home. That’d really mess about with our timelines,’ he said, in what was definitely the understatement of the century, ‘and it might also muck up the history of the entire world. And we can’t risk that.’ He paused to gather his thoughts. ‘I know we’ve been very lucky up until now, but sooner or later luck runs out for all of us. So it’s time to put the suitcase to rest. OK, my dears?’

  For a moment, Lou could only nod. She could see in Grandad’s eyes that this was him talking, not his ailment. And she knew he was right – luck was indeed a fickle thing.

  When she found her voice again, she had only one question. ‘Who’s going to tell Frankie?’

  Grandad looked at Nanna, who looked at Lou, who looked back at Grandad. Clearly nobody wanted to volunteer. It’d be like volunteering to tell a cat that mice had been completely eradicated, or a dog that there were no more bones in the world. In other words, it was probably going to go very badly.

  And indeed, how Frankie Fish would react to having his beloved Sonic Suitcase destroyed could change the history – and the future – of the world. How, you ask? Well, you’ll simply have to read on to find out …

  Lisa Chadwick’s face beamed like the headlights of a monster truck. Frankie didn’t know WHY he always had an almost allergic reaction to Lisa whenever she took centre stage, but he did. His chest would tighten, his palms would sweat, and his stomach would churn like it was preparing butter for a toast-obsessed army.

  ‘This clarinet has been in my family for over eighty years,’ Lisa proudly declared. She pulled on a pair of delicate white gloves before gently taking the old instrument out of its elegantly weathered case. ‘My great-grandmother would play it every night for months while she waited for my great-grandfather to return from the war.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why he took so long to return!’ Drew snickered, and then quickly went quiet when Miss Merryweather shot him an ominous look.

  Luckily, one of the Mosley triplets began armpit-farting a sad military tune, which drew the teacher’s attention away from Frankie Fish’s best friend.

  Waving her gloved hands in a very annoying fashion, Lisa announced that she was the only person permitted to handle the precious Chadwick heirloom. She held it aloft and walked around the room, smacking the hands of anyone who dared encroach on the clarinet’s personal space.

  It was the first annual Celebrate Family History month at St Monica’s, so during Show and Tell the students were taking it in turns to present their most impressive family heirlooms to the class. Kimmy Klute proudly read out the picture books her dad had written when he was a boy, while Harry Chen carried in his great-great-grandparents’ very large and very serious-looking wedding portrait, in which you could see his great-great-grandad’s extra left thumb quite clearly. Very cool.

  The Mosley triplets had brought in their extra-large, extra-thick jar containing ancient farts passed down by generations of stinky Mosleys. Way less cool.

  ‘Legend has it,’ said one triplet (who knows which one), ‘that if you open the jar without adding a fart, the ones inside will leap out and GRAB your –’

  ‘That’s QUITE enough, thank you, Mosleys,’ Miss Merryweather groaned, before calling on Lisa to present her boring clarinet.

  The only thing stopping Frankie from projectile vomiting during Lisa’s presentation was knowing that, as old as her family’s clarinet was, Drew had her beat.

  Well. And. Truly.

  Drew and his dad had recently become interested in their ancestry, and had managed to trace their roots all the way back to Indian merchants in the spice trade centuries earlier. So when Miss Merryweather had excitedly announced that everyone needed to present a special object from their family’s history, Drew knew exactly where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do when he got there. Yep, he wanted to go back in time to collect an extra-special object from his ancestors – no surprises there. The surprising thing was that Drew wanted to do this on his own. Without Frankie, his very best friend. And so, with a nervous frog in his nervous throat, Drew had asked Frankie for an extra-special favour.

  ‘Can I take the Sonic Suitcase for a spin … by myself?’

  At first, Frankie thought Drew was joking and responded with an immediate and thunderous guffaw. But when he saw his best friend’s face staring back at him, a little hurt, he knew he was serious.

Deadly serious.

  Frankie didn’t know what to say. They had always time-travelled together, which meant they always had fun together. It also meant they could get each other out of trouble. And let’s face it, Frankie thought to himself, it’s often Drew who gets us into trouble in the first place. What would happen if Drew got into a spot of bother without Frankie there to help him out? And, more importantly, why didn’t Drew want Frankie to come along on this adventure? Didn’t he like Frankie anymore?

  ‘I need to do this, Frankie,’ Drew had pleaded. ‘It’s not because I need to beat Lisa Chadwick, although that would be pretty cool. I need to do this for me. To prove something to myself.’ He swallowed. ‘I need to prove I can have an adventure … without you there to lead the way.’

  In the silence that followed, Frankie thought about a lot of things. He thought about how he did often lead them on their trips through time – and how he’d never considered how that made Drew feel. Once, Frankie had dragged Drew to clash with Vikings in Norway, en route to getting a genuine Viking outfit, just so he, Frankie, could beat Lisa Chadwick at the St Monica’s Halloween costume competition. And he’d taken Drew to the Wild West to help find a cure for Grandad’s memory problems – but they’d never done anything to help Drew or his family. Frankie hadn’t thought about that before, but now that he did, he felt AWFUL. Drew had always gone along with Frankie’s plans. Now he had been brave enough to ask Frankie for this favour – so it was Frankie’s turn to go along with Drew’s plans, even though that meant not actually going along with Drew on this particular adventure.

  Frankie swallowed hard, doing his best not to look upset, and said yes.

  Drew, naturally, was over the moon. ‘I’ll be super careful,’ he promised, grinning. ‘I’ll wear the earpiece Saint Lou made so I can communicate with you while I’m away, and I’ll be back before you know it!’

  And that was how Drew time-travelled by himself with the Sonic Suitcase to the spice trade in the fifteenth century. Frankie tried not to think of all the fun Drew was having without him – and he definitely did not think it might mean Drew didn’t want to be his best friend anymore. Not much, anyway.

  Drew returned with a minimum of fuss. He came back with stories told to him (with the help of the suitcase’s translating padlock, of course) by the merchants in his family: stories of travelling across the seas to bring strange and exotic spices to foreigners far and wide, and sleeping under the stars. It all sounded very exciting.

  For the next few days Frankie kept a close eye on Drew, trying to work out if his best friend no longer liked him. But, since Drew didn’t ask to use the suitcase on his own again, and seemed to be acting normal – well, normal for Drew Bird – Frankie told himself he just had to believe everything was OK, and that he and Drew would go on many more adventures with the Sonic Suitcase – together – for many more years to come.

  Unfortunately, Frankie had no idea how wrong he was. But he didn’t know that just yet.

  Finally, it was Drew’s turn to present his family heirloom, although Lisa Chadwick insisted snootily on continuing to take her clarinet around the room so that everyone could see it close up.

  Drew didn’t seem to mind, though. He got up with a cheeky smile and placed a large, very old-looking wooden case on Miss Merryweather’s desk. ‘Today I’m showing you some of the ancient spices that my great-great-great-great-great – look, just trust me, they were really great – grandparents used to sell along the Silk Road,’ he said proudly. ‘I have ancient jars of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, turmeric, pepper –’

  Lisa snorted rudely. ‘I have all of those spices at home too. That doesn’t seem very special.’

  Frankie groaned, but Drew insisted, ‘No, no, these are the original spices! Come and have a smell, you’ve never smelt ANYTHING like them.’

  Everyone bounded out of their chairs and crowded around while Drew delicately opened each jar. Finally the oohing and ahhing seemed to bother Lisa, and she huffily wedged her way to the front of the crowd, hissing, ‘Shove over and let me have a smell!’

  Gingerly holding her family’s clarinet with one gloved hand, Lisa leant in to smell the jar of pepper at exactly the same time that a Mosley triplet leant in on her other side. Before anyone could stop him, the Mosley triplet took a huge sniff and quickly turned an alarming shade of purple. ‘Ahhhh,’ he huffed. ‘Ah, ah …!’

  And before Lisa could move her precious clarinet even an INCH out of the line of fire, the Mosley triplet exploded in the world’s hugest, wettest, most peppery sneeze of all time – all over the clarinet, and all over Lisa.

  ‘… AH-CHOOOO!’

  Drew turned to Frankie and winked. ‘I told you my trip would be worth it,’ he said.

  As Frankie walked home from St Monica’s Primary that day, with Lisa’s hysterical, pepper-laced screams echoing in his ears, he couldn’t stop thinking about his own presentation, which was due the following week – right before the end of term. All month he’d been ‘forgetting’ to bring his family heirloom, but Miss Merryweather had finally laid down the law.

  ‘Next week, Frankie!’ she said, exasperated. ‘Everyone in class has to do it, including you. And NOTHING in a jar, OK? I’ve had more than enough of jars this week.’

  At this point, all Frankie had was a video of Grandad’s favourite movie, Braveheart, and he knew that wouldn’t be good enough. He couldn’t take Grandad’s old car-racing trophies to school – the last time he’d borrowed one for a school project, Grandad had called the cops every day for a week, convinced it had been stolen. Think, Frankie! he told himself. You’ve got to have SOMETHING good.

  Of course, Frankie did have something rather special up his sleeve. Just as it had helped Drew, a certain time-travelling suitcase could be the answer to all of Frankie’s problems, too.

  When Frankie arrived at Grandad and Nanna Fish’s house, he was greeted by his nanna, her arms reaching out like a friendly zombie to wrap him in a cuddle.

  ‘Hi Nanna, is everything OK with Grandad?’ he asked, squeezing her back.

  ‘He’s good, love! He’s looking forward to seeing you, actually,’ Nanna said lightly, cupping Frankie’s cheeks in her hands before planting a big smooch on his forehead.

  Frankie gently creaked Grandad’s bedroom door open and popped his head in, hoping he wasn’t about to wake Alfie up or spy him doing nude aerobics.

  Luckily, Alfie Fish was doing neither of those things. He was sitting up in bed writing in a card that had a picture of forget-me-nots on it. Probably writing to the local council to complain about noisy garbage trucks, Frankie thought. Grandad did like to get rather cranky in letter form.

  ‘Hi Grandad, had a good day?’ Frankie enquired playfully.

  ‘Kiddo,’ his grandad smiled back, ‘when ye get to my age, if there is breath in yer lungs, it’s a good day.’

  As Grandad patted the bed, inviting his grandson to take a seat, something caught Frankie’s eye: the Sonic Suitcase was resting on the doona. This was strange – usually, when it wasn’t in use, the suitcase lived in the Forbidden Shed with the door firmly closed and locked. This was partly to stop anyone using it without permission, and partly so it didn’t get damaged – although, Frankie noted as he sat down, the suitcase had seen better days. Who’d have thought that being speared by Olympic javelins, tossed in Viking mud and prised open by greedy town sheriffs was not good for luggage upholstery? Even with Lou’s ongoing improvements – adding a rainbow lightshow here, or the translating padlock there – the Sonic Suitcase was certainly battle-weary, and the buckles didn’t look as sturdy as they once had. Grandad was the one who really kept the suitcase in working order.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ Frankie asked as an uneasy feeling settled over him.

  Grandad wasn’t one to beat around the bush. ‘We’ve had a good run, lad,’ he said bluntly but not unkindly. ‘It’s been the most glorious roller-coaster of all time. But all roller-coasters have to come to an end.’ He patted the bruised shell of their time-travelling suitcase and gave Frankie a firm look. ‘I’m putting the suitcase out of action.’

  ‘Already?’ Frankie said, the blood draining out of his face. ‘But – but – I’m not ready for this roller-coaster to end!’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9