Uncle Shawn and Bill and the Almost Entirely Unplanned Adventure

In which Badger Bill gets another nasty fright and makes a number of wishes. And where is Uncle Shawn when Bill needs him? And Friday is nearly all over and tomorrow it will be Saturday, when bad things are going to happen…

Bill’s lunch had not involved pies – which was just as well – but it hadn’t been nice. It was only some raw, stale eggs in a mug with something green and lumpy mixed in. “Good for a fighter, dearie, drink it down,” Ethel had said, and then she had made him lift weights and gave him a rope to skip with, when he was no good at skipping because badgers’ legs are very shapely and elegant in their way, but not long.

By the time Bill couldn’t step or skip or lift any more, it was beginning to get dark. Ethel picked him up by his feet and carried him through to a small, secret-feeling yard, where Maude was waiting. She clapped her big, bacony hands together when she saw him and pointed to the large wire-mesh cage that took up most of the available space. “Here’sss where you’ll be fighting, dearie!” Maude gurgled with laughter. “Won’t he, Sssissster?”

Ethel unlocked a door in the cage and tossed Bill inside as if he was very unimportant and alone – which was how he felt.

Inside the cage was a small plate of stale tripe sandwiches and next to that was a tin mug of water. That was all the dinner Bill was going to get, but he didn’t really mind, because he felt sick with worry and didn’t want to eat anything. He wanted to curl up into a little ball the way he had in bed when he was a baby badger. He wished very hard that everything would go back to normal and be all nice again, and he closed his eyes and crossed his fingers…

And when he opened his eyes again he was still in a cage and still nearly at the end of Friday and still really, really sad all over. He sighed.

This made the sisters laugh – there were few things they found more amusing than someone being unhappy and sighing. And then the sisters left him, their identical orange and lime-green tweed skirts and massive purple cardigans giving him a headache on top of everything else.

Bill sighed again and turned round and round, trying to see if there was any way out of the cage. Badgers are excellent at digging, but the floor was made of hard concrete. And the concrete had marks on it that looked like the footprints of other sad badgers’ feet. And there were the scrapes of the paws of something else, something with big claws…

He glanced up and there was a huge steel-grey dog, with his gigantic, bristly muzzle right against the wire of the cage.

This wasn’t a nice dog that you might play fetch with, or who would take you for a walk in the park, or show you how to cover every inch of yourself in mud just the way you should to prove that you’ve had lots of fun. This was the kind of dog who would only fetch you horrible things and try to bite you for fun and lie all the way along your furniture and not let you sit on even a tiny bit of it.

The dog growled and laughed. “Grrrrr … harrharrharrharr. I’ve never seen anyone so pathetic.” The dog licked his lips and his nose both at once, because they were very close together and some dogs do that kind of thing. “Hrrrhrrrgrrr. It won’t take me more than a minute to finish you off.” The dog shrugged his shoulders and wriggled his back so that Bill could see that he was made of muscles and then covered in more muscles with some extra muscles on top. The dog was all muscles – except for the parts of him that were teeth – and big claws. “Eatchya for breakfast. And they’ll make a pretty little pie out of what’s left. They do it most Saturdays.”

“Um…” Bill was a polite badger and also didn’t want to annoy the dog. “I’m Bill. Hello.” Then he thought it might be better if he sounded fierce, so he tried to make his voice low and growly. “That is… That is…” Only this just made him cough and sound very squeaky afterwards. “Kkcagh… Kkcagh… I’m Battling Bob Badger. I think.”

“You said you were called Bill.” The dog sniggered. “Don’t you even know your own name?”

“Bob is my fighting name.” Bill tried to say this as if he was really tough, but it just made the dog laugh so hard that it had to roll on to its back and wave its legs in the air. “Ah…” Bill tried to be friends, in case that might help. “Who are you, Mr Dog?”

“Hrrrhrrr. Mr Dog… Fighting name… Harrharrhurr…” The dog was crying, he was laughing so much.

In the end, the huge beast got its breath back, stood up and snarled, “I’m Ripper. And my brother is called Snapper. And my other brother is called Cracker.”

“What does that mean?” Ripper stared at Bill as if he wanted to eat clever badgers more than anything else in the world. “Are you making fun of me?”

“Not at all. Not a bit. No, no, no… Ah, do your brothers live here, too, Mr Ripper?”

The dog licked his own nose again. “Oh, we all live here and we all fight here. We’ll all be fighting you.”

“What?” Bill could feel the white stripes on his face fur getting much whiter and wider. “But that’s not fair. I mean… There’s only one of me…”

“I can count! I know there’s only one of you!” Ripper snapped his jaws together with delight. “Who cares about fair? We brothers just want a bite of warm badger. Like last week. Mmmmggrrrr. Nothing like a tasty bite of warm and tender badger.”

“Well, I’m all stringy and full of gristle. My whole family are lumpy,” lied Badger Bill.

“Oh, you’ll be tender once we’ve thumped you. And we chew bricks to keep our teeth hard, so we like lumps. Harrharrharrharr.” And Ripper leaned his muzzle against the wire mesh again and shouted, “Boo!”

This made Bill jump, even though he knew it made him look scared. Then Ripper trotted away, singing a little song: “Badger pies are made with eyes and knees and toes and whiskers – we love ’em so bisscause – we doooo…” Which didn’t rhyme properly, but Bill thought he shouldn’t say so in case it made Ripper even more cross and snarly and terrifying.

Badger Bill sat down, because he was feeling wobbly. He stared at his knees, which were shaking, and tried to think what he should do. He put one paw into the other, so that he could pretend he was holding someone else’s hand, someone who could help him.

By now, the night had crept in, very apologetically, because it knew that it would worry Bill. After the night would come the morning … and it would be Saturday … and that would be the scariest day of all.

Bill looked up at the clear, twinkling sky and wished he had learned the names of the stars properly, and knew that he really, really, really needed a friend.

SECTION NINE