‘Are you absolutely sure this is safe?’ my mum asked me again.
The four of us – Mum, Dad, Lucy and me – were sitting around the kitchen table, but it wasn’t teatime. It was show time.
Stinky was on the table, next to his little skateboard.
Mum and Dad wanted to see what Stinky could do, before deciding whether to enter him into the pet show. Because, when I’d told them that he could skate, they didn’t believe me.
I couldn’t blame them. I had a bit of a history of telling little fibs. Like the time I told them I’d seen a man-eating python in the garden, and it turned out to be a slightly-bigger-than-average worm.
My mum frowned at Stinky and the skateboard. ‘This might be animal cruelty,’ she said.
‘He’s wearing a crash helmet,’ I pointed out. It was the one I’d made him when he’d been an astronaut.
‘Crash helmet?’ scoffed my dad. ‘It’s just half a ping-pong ball. That won’t be much help when he plummets off the table and lands head first on the floor.’
‘Poor little thing,’ said Lucy. ‘It is cruel.’
‘You once dressed him up in a doll’s bikini,’ I said. ‘That’s what I call animal cruelty.’
Stinky must have got fed up hearing us argue, because he’d already stepped onto the board and had started skating.
We all went quiet as he zoomed towards the edge of the table.
But when it looked like he wasn’t going to stop, Lucy squealed, Mum gasped and Dad cupped his hands just below the table’s edge, like a cricketer waiting for a catch.
I was really calm though.
I’d watched Stinky do this hundreds of times on my desk.
Now, just as he reached the edge, he skidded spectacularly to a stop, flicked up the skateboard, spun around and skated back to where he started.
My mum sighed with relief.
My dad stared, wide-eyed, and said, ‘Wow!’
Lucy, for a change, was speechless.
‘Wait until you see this,’ I said, as I put a ramp on the table. Well, it was actually a doorstop, but Stinky used it like a ramp, and did a couple of amazing jumps.
When Stinky’s show finished, my whole family gave him a round of applause, and then Dad turned to me.
‘How on earth did you teach him to do that?’ he asked.
The truth was, I’d only shown Stinky how to skate once. After that he had improved all by himself. Every day when I went to school, I left the skateboard in his cage so he could practise. Every evening I put him on my desk so he had a lot more space to work in, and he practised some more.
‘That little hamster,’ my dad said, ‘has a brain the size of a pea. And yet you, Ben, taught him how to do tricks on a skateboard. Incredible!’
‘So he can enter the competition?’ I asked.
‘Of course he can!’ said Dad. ‘He might even win it!’