The Amsterdam Adventure

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2021

  Published in this ebook edition in 2021

  HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road

  Dublin 4, Ireland

  Text copyright © Paul O’Grady 2021

  Illustrations copyright © Sue Hellard 2021

  Cover illustrations copyright © Sue Hellard 2021

  Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

  Paul O’Grady and Sue Hellard assert the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008446802

  Ebook Edition © September 2021 ISBN: 9780008446819

  Version: 2021-09-09

  Dedicated to everyone both young

  and old who talks to their animals

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Publisher

  Do you have a secret? Is there anything about you that you’d much rather keep to yourself? Maybe you’ve done something in the past that you’re ashamed of? You might have told a big fat lie, or invented wild stories about yourself and your family, when really you don’t live in a mansion or own a pony but actually live in a perfectly ordinary house or flat.

  You might have an unusual hobby or interest that you don’t talk about in case people who don’t understand these things think you’re weird. Then, of course, there’s that nasty habit you might have that you’d rather no one knew about, like nose-picking, eating belly-button fluff or not wiping your bum. Ugh.

  This story is about a young boy called Eddie Albert who had an amazing secret. If you sat next to him on a bus or walked past him in the street you’d be forgiven for thinking he was just an ordinary ten-year-old boy. A bit scruffy, perhaps, not very tall and with an unruly mop of blond hair, but nothing in the least bit remarkable about him.

  Well, you’d be wrong, for Eddie Albert possessed a truly extraordinary talent, a unique skill that he really should have been very proud of. Only he wasn’t. He was extremely secretive about his hidden talent, determined that nobody should ever find out about this awesome gift that he saw as more of a curse. It had got him into trouble at school several times, and today was one of those days. It all started because of a mouse …

  Eddie wasn’t really what you’d call naughty. He wasn’t a bad kid at all – in fact, he was quite the opposite. But trouble seemed to have a nasty habit of following him around, and it usually involved animals.

  Once, Mr Broad, the PE teacher, had gone ballistic when he found Eddie on the school roof. But Eddie hadn’t shinned up the drainpipe and on to the flat roof for a dare or to show off. In fact, he’d wanted to rescue a seagull that was trapped between two planks left there by the builders who were repairing the roof. Nevertheless, Eddie had been hauled off to the headmaster’s office and given a long lecture on health and safety and the stupidity of little boys who liked to impress their friends by climbing on roofs.

  He’d been late for school on a number of occasions as he was always stopping to help lost or injured animals when he took a short cut through the park. One winter’s morning he came across a grass snake that was half frozen from the cold, so he popped it into his rucksack to get warm. Once it was nice and toasty, the snake woke up and decided to go for a little slither around – which of course happened during English class. Eventually, it settled on Miss Pike’s foot. The English teacher fainted and once again Eddie found himself standing before the headmaster’s desk. The man couldn’t understand how it was possible for such a quiet little boy to get into so much trouble.

  Eddie loved all animals, and people thought he had a special way with them.

  ‘It’s as if he can understand them,’ Mr Ali, who ran the local shop, would say. ‘My cat likes to sit on the step and Eddie always stops to talk to her on his way to school. Now, my cat is very fussy and doesn’t take to strangers, but she loves Eddie. She meows and purrs and wriggles about and he answers her. Quite a conversation they have! As I said, it’s as if he can understand her …’

  The thing was: Eddie could understand animals.

  Highly improbable as it sounds, Eddie Albert could converse with mammals, birds, fish and even snails (although snails do tend to have a limited vocabulary that involves a lot of slurping and hissing) just as well as with humans. It was an incredible gift, but Eddie didn’t see it that way. He was the kind of boy who didn’t like to draw attention to himself, preferring to get on with his work rather than mess about, which made him a frequent target for bullies.

  Eddie was determined to keep his special talent firmly under wraps. He was scared that if it was discovered he’d be seen as an oddity, a freak. He’d be ridiculed by the tabloid newspapers and people would point at him in the street. He’d be all over social media and made to go on daytime television and have to prove his talents weren’t just a trick. He’d be world-famous, unable to go anywhere without people wanting selfies and demanding that he speak to their dogs.

  No, no, no! That wasn’t going to happen. A bit of fun with Mr Ali’s cat could be taken for a young boy play-acting, but apart from that he kept his amazing capabilities to himself and only used them when no one was around.

  Now, where was I? Oh yes, I
was telling you about a mouse, the one that caused all the trouble. It appeared from underneath the radiator in Eddie’s classroom during a maths lesson one afternoon and, for something so small, it caused a lot of problems.

  From the way the mouse was just sitting there, staring round the classroom, Eddie could see it was lost. He bent down as if he were looking for something in his bag so he could talk to it.

  ‘Psssst!’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing here? Go home.’

  ‘You couldn’t tell me how to get to the boiler room, could you?’ the mouse asked politely, giving his whiskers a quick wipe with his paws. ‘I seem to have taken a wrong turn.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back the way you came? Only head downwards as the boiler room is in the basement,’ Eddie whispered.

  Unfortunately, he was overheard.

  ‘Miss!’ Quentin Harris, the class snitch and a grade-A bully, shouted out so loudly that the entire class turned round.

  Quentin sat at the opposite end of the same table as Eddie and he loved nothing more than to suck up to the teachers by ratting out his classmates.

  ‘Miss!’ he shouted again, even louder this time.

  ‘What is it, Quentin?’ Miss Taylor asked. She stopped writing on the whiteboard and looked round in irritation.

  ‘Eddie Albert’s talking to himself, miss,’ Quentin replied, beaming with smarmy self-importance and sheer delight at the thought of getting Eddie into trouble.

  ‘I was not, miss,’ a red-faced Eddie protested, sitting up quickly in his chair.

  ‘Then you were talking to the radiator. I heard him, miss,’ the smug Quentin whined on, determined not to let the matter drop. ‘He told it to go home to the boiler room. He’s a nutter, miss. Fancy talking to a radiator!’

  The entire class thought this hilarious and started laughing and sniggering until Miss Taylor told them to be quiet and reminded Quentin that the word ‘nutter’ was offensive.

  ‘Eddie,’ Miss Taylor said, leaving her desk and walking over to him, ‘you wouldn’t have a phone in your bag, would you? Because you know I don’t allow phones in my classroom.’

  ‘No, miss,’ Quentin assured her. ‘He hasn’t got a phone because his dad works in a supermarket and can’t afford to buy him one. I’ve got a phone, a tablet and a brand-new computer, miss.’

  ‘Then you’re a very lucky boy, aren’t you?’ Miss Taylor told him with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice. ‘When you get home, why don’t you look up the words bragging and boasting on this brand-new computer of yours. Now, be quiet.’

  Turning to Eddie, she asked him what all this fuss was about. Had he been talking to anyone and, if so, who?

  Eddie liked Miss Taylor. He wasn’t very good at maths but she was very patient and kind, taking time to explain the really hard things to him. Today he thought she looked tired and, as he didn’t want to lie to her, he told the truth.

  ‘I was talking to a mouse,’ he said to her calmly.

  Eddie might just as well have announced that he’d been talking to a six-metre-long man-eating snake, as the word mouse caused immediate mass panic.

  Miss Taylor quickly glanced at the floor, wrapped her skirt round her knees and moved away. If speed-walking backwards, knock-kneed because you’re holding your skirt tightly round your legs, had been an Olympic sport, then Miss Taylor would’ve won the gold medal.

  ‘Calm down, children!’ she shouted as pandemonium broke out. A lot of the girls were screaming and climbing on to their chairs, as were a few of the boys. Some of the children were adding to the mayhem as they ran round the classroom, shouting, ‘There it is!’ and ‘I’ll catch him!’ One of the boys picked up a girl’s cardigan from the floor where it had fallen from the back of a chair and gave it a good shake. In doing so, he sent a chunk of chocolate that had been in the pocket flying across the room in the direction of Miss Taylor.

  At the sight of this little brown thing coming towards her, Miss Taylor let out a scream that could have shattered glass and leapt on to her desk with the speed of a kangaroo.

  Just then Mr Pickard, the headmaster, walked in.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded, clapping his hands loudly in an attempt to silence the class.

  ‘There’s a mouse!’ Miss Taylor gibbered from her perch on top of the furniture. ‘It’s underneath my desk right now … a big brown mouse! Oh, dear me.’

  Mr Pickard – known to quite a few of his students as Mr Pick-on because that’s what he did to you if your work wasn’t up to scratch – bent down slowly and looked under Miss Taylor’s desk. The class fell silent as everyone held their breath.

  ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ he said, standing up after a while. He held something in his clenched fist.

  A girl started screaming again as Mr Pick-on held out his arm, slowly opening his hand. ‘Voilà!’ he shouted, like a magician who’d just sawn a lady in half.

  Miss Taylor, who’d been just about to let out another bloodcurdling scream, saw that the ‘mouse’ the headmaster was holding was actually just a piece of chocolate.

  ‘I feel such a fool,’ Miss Taylor stammered, blushing a deep red as she climbed down from her desk. ‘You see, Eddie Albert saw a mouse over there by the radiator and I went—’ But before she could finish her sentence Mr Pick-on stopped her.

  ‘Eddie Albert again,’ he sighed, shaking his head slowly. ‘I might have known you’d be responsible for this chaos. My office, please. Now.’

  Just as I was telling you, trouble seemed to follow poor Eddie around, and it usually involved animals.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ Eddie said aloud to no one in particular as he walked home from school. He hadn’t had a good day. It had started badly when he got up and discovered an empty fridge with no milk for his breakfast Weetabix because his dad had forgotten to buy any again. He poured water on them instead, which wasn’t that nice but, as he told himself, was better than nothing.

  His dad had left the house already for an early shift at Wise Prices, the budget supermarket where he worked, but Eddie was used to that and quite capable of getting himself ready for school. Even if it did mean wearing the same shirt for three days on the trot, which he was having to do today as he didn’t have any clean ones.

  Then he’d had a rotten day at school, culminating in that trip to the headmaster’s office for a telling-off for something that wasn’t his fault.

  ‘I hate that school,’ he said aloud, kicking a bottle top into the gutter. ‘I’ll be glad when the summer holidays start so I can get away from the whole stinking lot of them.’

  ‘Talking to yourself again, Albert?’ Quentin Harris shouted as he came out of the fried-chicken shop, carrying a bucket of wings. ‘Or have you got that mouse in your pocket?’

  Just ignore him, Eddie thought to himself and carried on walking.

  ‘You’re crazy, you are, a loony lunatic. You should be locked up for talking to yourself all the time. Are you listening to me, mouse boy?’ Quentin goaded, poking Eddie in the back as he walked closely behind him.

  Determined not to give in, Eddie simply pretended that he hadn’t heard. He very rarely lost his temper but Quentin was certainly pushing his buttons at the moment.

  ‘Are you deaf as well as daft?’ Quentin went on relentlessly, trying to trip Eddie up now. ‘You should go to a school for freaks. It’s not safe having someone like you around. That’s what I think and I’m going to tell everyone to keep away from you because you’re dangerous.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Eddie muttered as he kept on walking.

  ‘You won’t even eat chicken,’ Quentin continued, waving a greasy wing about. ‘You’re weird.’

  ‘Why?’ Eddie replied calmly as he carried on walking. ‘Because I don’t believe in eating animals?’

  ‘A sausage isn’t an animal,’ Quentin scoffed. ‘You’re a nutter, that’s what you are. I love eating meat – we have it every night for dinner in our house,’ he bragged. ‘You only eat rabbit food because that’s all your da
d can afford.’

  ‘Why don’t you keep your stupid opinions to yourself?’ Eddie snapped. He spun round to face his tormentor. ‘You’re always creeping around the teachers and telling tales. You’re a snitch, and it’s no wonder you’ve got spots all over your face, and your bum is bursting out of your trousers with the amount of junk food you eat,’ he added for good measure.

  Quentin’s face turned scarlet with rage and he started to shake. ‘I have not got spots … it’s a heat rash. And I have not got a big bum!’ he spluttered.

  ‘Yes, you have,’ Eddie teased. ‘There’re two things you can see from the moon – the Great Wall of China and your bum.’

  ‘You can’t talk to me like that,’ Quentin whined. ‘You’re not allowed to because I’m special,’ he said proudly. ‘I’ve got anger issues and get very upset if anyone’s nasty to me because I’m sensitive. The school psychologist said so – she told Mum and Dad. So there, mouse boy – stuff that up your jumper.’

  Eddie looked him up and down slowly. He was feeling very brave right now and all the anger and pent-up frustration from his rotten day gushed out like air from a burst balloon.

  ‘Call it what you want,’ he replied, ‘but really you’re just a spoilt mummy’s boy with a spiteful temper that you can’t control. Where is Mumsy today? Isn’t she picking you up in the car?’ he teased, really going for it now. ‘Don’t tell me she’s letting her lickle baby walk all the way home by himself?’

  Quentin looked as if he were about to explode, but, as his rage had temporarily robbed him of the power of speech, all he could manage was a gurgling noise that sounded like an ostrich having a drink.

  ‘And another thing! Stop texting Sandra Ellison – she doesn’t fancy you and wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last boy on earth. I heard her telling Devorshka,’ Eddie went on, oblivious to the steam coming out of Quentin’s ears and nostrils, ‘that she thinks you’re a great big pig-faced—’

  But, before Eddie could continue, Quentin completely lost his rag and punched him as hard as he could.

  ‘Honestly, Eddie,’ his dad said, frowning and tutting as he dabbed antiseptic on Eddie’s cut lip. ‘First I get a phone call from your headmaster to say you’ve been disruptive in class and then you come home with blood all down your shirt and a cut lip because you’ve been fighting. What’s the matter with you?’