Mouse Noses on Toast (3 page)

T
HE DOOR WAS MADE OF VERY OLD WOOD, AND HAD A
tiny crack in one corner.

Paul squeezed through first, followed by the Tinby and then Sandra, who removed her tinsel halo to prevent it from breaking. The tip of Rowley Barker Hobbs’s nose poked through too, to say hello.

“The mouses live out back,” Paul said, pointing toward the dusty storeroom.

“Forget the mouses,” Sandra said. “Let’s eat!”

The Mouse Restaurant was by the far wall of the human restaurant, under a charming antique dresser. To reach it, you had to cross an area of polished stone tiles and weave between the chair legs and table legs of
the dining table without getting squished.

They were lucky to get a table. The Mouse Restaurant had recently been awarded Five Golden Cheeses in
Mouse About Town
magazine, and was packed with fashionable rodents from all over the country. Fortunately, the mouse waiter mistook the Tinby for a famous film star, and offered them a table reserved for the Mouse Mayor.

“We should order a bottle of wine,” Sandra said. “It’s not a posh meal without wine.”

“A bottle of mouse red,” Paul told the mouse waiter.

“Certainly, sir,” the waiter said, and disappeared through a hole in the baseboard.

“I don’t know what to have,” Sandra said as they studied the menu.

They were still choosing when the waiter came back with the wine, so Paul straightened his acorn hat and asked the waiter to recommend something.

“The breadcrumbs are fresh today,” the waiter said, scratching his whiskers. “We also have a squashed sausage.”

“That doesn’t sound very posh. What do the humans
eat?”

“This is the food the humans don’t eat,” the waiter explained. “We serve whatever they drop on the floor.”

“I wonder what the Tinby would eat,” Sandra said. “If it had a mouth, I mean.”

But the Tinby was not at the table.

W
HILE
P
AUL AND
S
ANDRA WERE DECIDING WHAT TO
order, the Tinby had made a decision of its own. It would find out what humans ate for a posh meal and ensure its friends had the same.

Tinbys are skillful climbers, and this Tinby was one of the best. By the time Paul and Sandra stepped out from under the charming antique dresser, it was already halfway up the leg of the nearest table.

“There it is!” Sandra cried, pointing at the small checked shape. “We must do something.”

But they could only stand and watch.

At last, the Tinby flipped itself up onto the tabletop, where it leaped for safety behind the salt and pepper
shakers and stood very still, blinking its small black eyes.

“I think it wants us to follow,” Paul said.

The Tinby had had a change of plan. Rather than bring the food to its hungry friends, and have to carry a dinner plate down a table leg without spilling anything, it would lead its friends to the food.

But how would Paul and Sandra reach the tabletop? Not even a mouse can climb a varnished table leg, and Sandra’s hands were made of tinfoil.

As the man paid the bill, the Tinby looked at what was left of his meal. Where you or I would see a plate of half-eaten spaghetti, the Tinby saw an opportunity. Before the waiter had time to remove the plate, it tied together five spaghetti strands and dangled them over the edge of the table.

Paul and Sandra did not like this, not one bit. What if the spaghetti snapped? What if the knots became undone? What if they got tomato sauce on their fingers?

Paul sighed. “We’d better do what the Tinby wants, or it will sulk.”

So the mouse and the Christmas-tree decoration climbed the clever pasta rope, Sandra going last so that she could secretly laugh at Paul’s blue bottom.

When they reached the top, there was no Tinby.

They were about to give up and climb back down when the Tinby appeared from nowhere, like magic.

“It was here all along,” Sandra said. “We couldn’t see it, as it matches the tablecloth.”

Sandra was right. The Tinby and the tablecloth were patterned with the same yellow and lime-green check. All it had to do was close its small black eyes and itwas invisible.

A married couple was shown to the table. Paul and Sandra hid behind the camouflaged Tinby, and watched closely. The married couple was rich. The man wore a silk tie with a gold tie clip, and the diamond on the lady’s wedding ring was as big as Paul’s head.

But the real shock came when they ordered their meal.

“I will have the colorful parrot soup,” the lady said, “with extra beaky bits.”

“And I,” said her husband, “will have mouse noses on toast.”

The waiter flipped open his notebook and wrote this down. “Would that be with whiskers, sir, or without?”

The man thought about this.

From his hiding place behind the Tinby, Paul thought about it too. He thought about his mouse friends under the floorboards in the storeroom. Were they running around without noses?

Surely humans didn’t eat mouse noses on toast? Perhaps Paul’s nose was poking out from behind the Tinby, and the rich man could see it, and had invented the meal as a joke?

But no.

A minute later, the waiter returned with a silver tray and placed two plates on the table. And there, on one of the plates, was a slice of toast, and on the slice of toast were half a dozen little brown noses.

T
HE
T
INBY WAS COOL, SO COOL THAT IT SOMETIMES SMELLED
of mint. It took a lot for the Tinby to lose its cool, but something about the plate of mouse noses on toast pushed it over the edge.

Before Paul and Sandra could stop it, the Tinby was on the toast, rolling in the butter and kicking the noses with its little square legs.

The lady cried out in horror. Her husband tried to grab the Tinby, but it ran up the silk tie and onto his head. The man leaped up from his chair and began waving his arms madly, trying to knock the Tinby from his hair, but the Tinby was nimble and would step out of the way with split-second timing.

Some customers carried on eating as though nothing had
happened. Others decided that the man was under attack from a swarm of bees, and ran to the toilet to hide.

The waiter tried to help by hitting the man on the head with a French loaf, but this made him even more frantic, and gave the Tinby a chance to escape. It ran up the side of the French loaf and somersaulted onto the top of the charming antique dresser, where it disappeared into the dust.

Bertrand Violin, the restaurant manager, came out of the kitchen to see what the fuss was about. Bertrand was an old man with a bad back. His back was so bad he was bent almost double, and could only look at tabletops and shoes.

With no Tinby to hide them, Paul and Sandra had crouched behind a small silver bowl. As Bertrand made his way through the restaurant, Paul and Sandra began to fear for their lives.

“Quick! In here!” Sandra cried. They lifted the lid from the silver bowl and climbed inside.

The sides of the bowl were decorated with a pattern of tiny holes. Paul put his eye to one of the holes and peered out.

Bertrand Violin was studying the rich man’s tie. He knew a lot about ties, and could tell that this tie ought to be plain, not covered in buttery footprints. “What has happened?” he said, holding the tie to his tongue.

“Mr. Violin,” the waiter said, “we did have a minor incident with an overgrown bug, but it has been dealt with, I assure you.”

The rich man was so timid that this would have been the end of it, buttery tie or no buttery tie, but his wife had other ideas. “Demand an apology,” she said, jabbing him in the ribs with the diamond wedding ring.

“My wife demands an apology!”

“Demand compensation,” yelled the rich woman, unscrewing the ring from her finger, “or this ring goes in the soup!”

“Sir, madam,” Bertrand Violin said gently, “please return to your chairs. This matter will be dealt with, you have my word.”

“We don’t want your word,” the rich lady said. “We want dinner free of charge. And a double helping of pudding.”

“Certainly,” Bertrand said, leading them back to their chairs. “Waiter! A bottle of champagne, on the house.”

Inside the silver bowl, Paul and Sandra began to wonder what they were lying on. It was dry and powdery, and smelled of unwashed socks.

“It’s cheese,” Sandra whispered. “We’re inside a bowl of Parmesan cheese!”

“My bottom will be purple,” Paul whispered back. “If we don’t get out of here soon, it will fall off, and I won’t have anything to sit on.”

Outside the bowl, the rich married couple was discussing what had happened. “It looked like an insect,” the man said. “A huge yellow beetle, with exotic lime-green markings.”

“We should call the health inspector, have the place closed down,” his wife said. “It’s unhygienic. And look at that!”

“What, dear wife?”

“A rat’s tail, poking out of the silver bowl.”

“How odd,” the man said. “It’s in the shape of a question mark.”

“Stab it with a fork.”

The man picked up a fork and lifted the lid.