The Boy Who Grew Dragons

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. Battle of the Bongle

  Chapter 2. The Jam Roly-Poly of Doom

  Chapter 3. Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? – Is It Super-Maggot?

  Chapter 4. It’s a Dragon!

  Chapter 5. The Tomtom and Jerry Show

  Chapter 6. Banana Blobalob

  Chapter 7. Doughnuts and Dragon-Fruit Crumble

  Chapter 8. That’s Grim, That Is

  Chapter 9. Poo Patrol, Goldfish and Ninja Tortoises

  Chapter 10. Why You Should Never Keep a Dragon in Your Rucksack

  Chapter 11. Quiet, Please – No Screaming

  Chapter 12. A Present for Liam

  Chapter 13. Slugs and Superheroes

  Chapter 14. Crispy Cornflake Crumb-Fest

  Chapter 15. Bingo!

  Chapter 16. Bat Watch

  Chapter 17. Oi, Stinker!

  Chapter 18. Nosy Eyes!

  Chapter 19. Coffee Surprise

  Chapter 20. The Great Idea

  Chapter 21. The Long Wait

  Chapter 22. Operation Fruit Burst

  Chapter 23. Attack of the Killer Leaf

  Chapter 24. Here Be Dragons!

  Chapter 25. Grand High DragonMaster

  Chapter 26. Poor Guppie!

  Chapter 27. Flaming Cabbages

  Acknowledgements

  About Andy Shepherd

  About Sara Ogilvie

  Copyright

  For Ian, Ben and Jonas

  For always believing in dragons – and in me

  When people ask me what we grow in Grandad’s garden, I think they expect the answer to be cucumbers, tomatoes or runner beans. I don’t think they expect the answer to be dragons. But there it is. We grow dragons. And I can tell you this – they’re a lot more trouble than cucumbers.

  Things cucumbers do not do:

  Poo in your dad’s porridge

  Singe your eyebrows

  Make a really cosy nest by shredding all your mum’s alphabetically ordered recipes

  Leave your pants (the embarrassing ones covered in diggers) hanging from the TV aerial

  Chase your cat

  Drop cabbages on your cat

  Try and ride your cat like a rodeo bull

  Wake you up at 4 a.m. every morning by digging razor-sharp claws into your forehead

  Set light to your toothbrush WHILE IT’S STILL IN YOUR MOUTH.

  Of course, they also don’t have scales that ripple and shimmer like sunlight on the sea. Or have glittering eyes that can see right into the heart of you. Or settle on your shoulder, with their tail curled round, warming your neck, and their hot breath tickling your ear.

  Nope, none of these are things you can expect from a cucumber. Well, not any cucumbers I’ve ever come across. Maybe a mutant radioactive space cucumber, but not your average garden variety. But dragons? Well, they’re a whole other story.

  So, who wants to grow dragons? Daft question, yeah? I mean seriously, who in their right mind would say no? Not me, that’s for sure. And not you by the looks of it.

  But if you want to grow dragons, you need to know what you’re getting into. Sure they’re fiery, fantastical and dazzling, but dragons are not all fun and games. Not by a long shot. And it’s not just the fire and the flammable poo I’m talking about. Oh no!

  Which is why, my dragon-seeking desperados, I’m writing all this down, so at least you can go into it with your eyes open. Because, believe me, you’ll need them to stay wide, wide open.

  It started about a year ago. And it was all Grandad’s fault. Well, his and the jam tart’s. I was just licking the last of it off my fingers when he said:

  ‘We should grow our own, Chipstick.’

  ‘Jam tarts?’ I asked.

  ‘Raspberries.’ He grinned. ‘Then we could make our own jam for Nana’s tarts. We could mix them up too. Strawberry and blackberry, gooseberry and raspberry – just think of the possibilities. Deeeelicious!’

  It did make a pretty good picture in my head, a vast plate-sized jam tart with different-coloured sections like a multi-topping pizza.

  ‘And more too,’ Grandad went on, before I could dive further into the jammy dream. ‘Radishes, beans, onions, cauliflowers … You name it, we could grow it.’

  Suddenly I wasn’t so sure it was a great idea. Strawberry and cauliflower jam? Ew! Anyway I had enough fruit and vegetables to deal with, what with Mum shovelling in my five a day. I mean she even sneaked dried fruit into perfectly good flapjacks – as if I wouldn’t notice!

  But Grandad wasn’t one to let go of an idea once it had fluttered down and settled. So on Saturday morning there we were at the end of his garden, up to our ears in mud, digging away at what looked to me like a monster jungle. In fact, I was beginning to realise why Mum had offered me provisions for my ‘trip to the Amazon’. Without the nettles and brambles, my grandparents’ garden was probably half as big again and ran all the way down to the fields beyond.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to get stuck into this since we moved in,’ Grandad told me, pausing to catch his breath, ‘but what with one thing and another, I just don’t seem to have found the time.’

  I stopped digging and scraped my spade across a clod of mud. I know you have no idea what he was talking about, but I did. I knew exactly what he meant by ‘one thing and another’.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered. Because I really was.

  He rested his arms on his spade and leaned towards me. Now, there’s something you should know about my grandad – he twinkles. That might sound weird, but he does. There’s a phrase ‘to have a twinkle in your eye’, which means to be bright or sparkling with delight. Well, my grandad has the biggest twinkle of anyone I’ve ever known. And right then he was shining that twinkle down on me, till I felt its warmth flooding every bit of my body. It was like I’d sat down in front of the toastiest marshmallow-toasting fire.

  ‘Now then, Chipstick, how many times have I told you? What’s the deal with families?’

  I smiled. ‘They stick together.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he grinned. ‘Not unlike jam tarts. Now get digging!’

  So I did. The worst thing to dig up was this stuff Grandad called bongleweed – it wound itself around everything, clinging to roots, shoots and shrubs for dear life.

  Soon enough I was in an almighty tug of war: boy against plant. And for a moment there it really looked as if the evil Bongle-Plant Overlord might win.

  But I dug. And scraped. And pulled. And heaved. Until all that was left was a patch of earth … and the strangest-looking plant I’d ever seen.

  It was taller than me, and my blistered hands would have only made it halfway around the trunk. Except it was hard to see the trunk, because of all these long green cactus arms that draped down.

  ‘It looks like a giant upturned mophead,’ declared Grandad. ‘But you know – green and spiky and knobbly too.’

  Bizarrely, he wasn’t far wrong.

  Sprouting from some of the cactus arms were vivid yellow and orange tendrils, like bursts of flames. And on each one of those nestled a fruit. Some were large and red and looked fit to burst, others were small and green and looked new. But all of them had weird spiky pineapple-like leaves. They were so unlike anything I’d ever seen in our fruit bowl at home I found myself reaching up to touch them.

  I noticed one of the smaller fruits had already turned red, but the tendril it was attached to was being pushed down by the weight of a few larger fruits hanging above. I gently lifted it and moved it to one side to give it some space. And as I did, I saw something even weirder. ‘Hey, Grandad,’ I called, ‘it’s glowing. Like those fireflies, do you remember? Dad said it was bioloonynon
sense or something. He said some jellyfish do it too.’

  ‘Bioluminescence,’ Grandad corrected. He peered at the red fruit and rubbed a finger across it. ‘Reckon it’s just mould,’ he said. ‘Come on, Chipstick. I’m famished.’

  ‘But what is it?’ I asked.

  Grandad wrinkled his nose. ‘No idea, but we can pull it out tomorrow.’

  I looked at the red spiky fruit that was glowing in my hands. And whether I pulled it a little too hard, or it just chose that moment to fully ripen, one way or another, the fruit dropped from the vivid tendril. Looking at it in my palm, somehow I didn’t feel like throwing it into the bonfire pile. So I tucked it under my arm before following Grandad inside.

  Later, when I got home, I put the pineapple-y sprouting fruit on my desk and typed ‘strange spiky fruit’ into the search box on my computer. Pictures popped up and there it was, right next to ‘durian’ – which smell like poo apparently, so it was dead lucky we didn’t find those! No, here it was: size of a mango, red, spiky pineapple-like leaves. Definitely what I had sitting in front of me. I clicked on the picture and read the caption.

  Pitaya – ‘Dragon Fruit’

  Yup!

  Now, it’s easy for you. Because you know there’s about to be a dragon. But I was clueless back then. I mean if someone gives you a fairy cake, you don’t expect Tinker Bell to pop out, do you?

  So I didn’t jump up and down screaming, ‘Whoopee I’m getting a dragon!’ I just left it on the desk and went downstairs for tea.

  And that probably wasn’t the best idea. You know, because of what happened next.

  ‘Is Grandad planning on growing potatoes on your head?’ Mum asked when I walked into the kitchen.

  She pointed to my hair.

  ‘You’ve got half the garden in there. Shower, now. And be quick – tea’s nearly done.’

  I groaned. But there was no point arguing. Not when Mum had her ‘I will not be moved even by a runaway rhinoceros’ look.

  But I didn’t make it to the shower. And not just because I spotted the latest Spider-Man comic I’d left at the top of the stairs – and stopped to check I hadn’t missed anything the six times I’d already read it – but because when I went into my room to grab my dressing gown, I noticed something very odd.

  The dragon fruit was glowing. Properly glowing! I went over and peered down at it. Reaching out, I prodded the spiky skin. It started pulsing orange, red and blazing yellow. And then I remembered what Grandad had said about mould. Maybe it was toxic? I yanked my hand back and stared at it, half expecting my fingers to shrivel up and drop off in some fatal reaction. They didn’t. And the relief was slightly sprinkled with disappointment. Not because I wanted my fingers to fall off, but because when you’ve read as many comics as me, you can’t help but hope that you might just absorb some superpowers when this kind of thing happens. Not that this kind of thing had happened to me – ever.

  The fruit had stopped pulsing and now looked pretty normal, apart from the glow. Before I could prod it again, I heard Mum shouting from downstairs that tea was ready and if no one was there to eat it in exactly thirty seconds she was giving it all to next door’s dog and we could have cereal for all she cared. I might have taken more notice of this if the neighbours actually had a dog – which they don’t. Just a ferret. And a fussy one at that. So I doubt it’d eat Mum’s lasagne anyway.

  Dad stuck his head around my door and shouted, ‘Tea up, Tomas.’ Then headed off down the hall.

  I waved. ‘Just coming, Dad.’ I didn’t bother telling him he didn’t need to shout. He wouldn’t hear me. He wears a pair of massive headphones pretty much permanently. Music is Dad’s job, and his hobby, and what he does in every second between those times too. He writes music for commercials on TV (and one very-low-budget film that no one’s heard of, let alone seen), but I think secretly he still wants to be a rock star and imagines being discovered by some TV talent show or something. Anyway I’ve got used to communicating with him mainly through mime.

  Aware that I hadn’t made it anywhere near the shower, I swapped hoodies then ducked into the bathroom and quickly stuck my head under the tap. Looking at the state of the sink after I’d finished we’d probably be growing potatoes in there too!

  Mealtimes are interesting in our house. Not because we talk about interesting things or anything like that, but because of my not-yet-three-year-old sister, Lolli. In particular, watching my parents trying to field the flying food and make sure some of it at least goes into Lolli’s mouth.

  Plus, since it’s the only time Dad doesn’t wear headphones or isn’t plugged into his keyboards, Mum seems to feel she has to make the most of it by talking non-stop at about a hundred miles an hour. No one could possibly process the amount of information she churns out in between mouthfuls. In fact, I’m pretty sure Dad is actually composing tunes in his head while she’s talking, and the nodding Mum takes for his agreement is just him keeping time.

  After Mum wiped up the lasagne that Lolli had generously shared with the floor, she brought out dessert. She’s working her way through a cookbook Nana gave her last Christmas, called Great British Puddings. That night it was jam roly-poly and custard. Well, lumps of custard.

  ‘The roly-poly’s a bit flat,’ she noted, as she offered it up to us apologetically. ‘It’s meant to be a nice spiral of dough and jam. You know, rather than a splodge.’

  She was right. It looked as if someone had sat on it. And that wasn’t unusual.

  Mum is a vet, you see, and although she can wrestle an uncooperative Doberman into a head cone, she can’t seem to wrestle pudding ingredients into anything that resembles cake. Despite all the shows she watches on TV.

  Of course that could’ve had something to do with her leaving out half the ingredients to make it healthier. Sugar-free cake is not cake in my book. But being bombarded with shows about producing the perfect pudding, while at the same time being programmed to make sure everyone eats their five a day of fruit and veg, makes desserts more difficult for Mum than for the rest of us.

  I wanted to say something nice to make her feel better, but I’m really not great at lying. Dad was staring out the window humming under his breath. I needed him to step in quick before I blurted out something that’d probably end up making Mum hurl the whole dish at the wall. Which was not necessarily a bad idea.

  Just then Lolli grabbed a piece and stuffed it into her mouth. And then spat it out. Mum looked horrified. We watched as Lolli picked up another piece, unravelled the dough and happily started licking the jam out of the middle.

  ‘See? Lolli likes it,’ I spluttered.

  Mum didn’t look convinced, so I dived for a piece and started making what I hoped were believable yummy noises.

  Mum sighed and just said, ‘Can’t you call her Charlotte for once?’

  ‘But she likes being called Lollibob – don’t you, Lollibob Bobalob?’ I replied, still chewing a tasteless lump of dough.

  Lolli giggled and stuck out two jammy hands to me.

  ‘See?’ I said, finally managing to swallow the leaden ball of dessert. It lodged in my throat and I had to take an enormous gulp of water to get it down.

  Mum turned and, while she was wiping Lolli clean, I grabbed the rest of the roly-poly pudding from my bowl and stuffed it in my hoodie pocket. Thanks to my sister, I was going to be saved from eating any more. We stick together, me and Lolli. Even without jam.

  Suddenly there was a loud THUMP from upstairs.

  Mum stared at the ceiling. ‘Whatever’s that?’

  ‘It’s probably just Tomtom messing with my stuff,’ I said.

  ‘That cat is like a furry wrecking ball,’ Mum moaned. ‘Go and sort out your pet, Tomas.’

  I didn’t need telling twice, not with half a roly-poly still sitting on the table staring at me menacingly. I raced upstairs.

  ‘Tomtom, come out,’ I said crossly as I stepped into my room.

  I looked around for the ginger cat, ready to give him his ma
rching orders, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  Then I noticed the dragon fruit wasn’t where I’d left it on the desk. It was on the floor by my bed. And what’s more, it had grown.

  So now the dragon fruit was glowing and growing.

  I decided it was best to keep it out of sight of Mum and Dad and away from Tomtom, so I pulled out one of the storage drawers from the wooden unit that was crammed with all my toys. Shoving a heap of little plastic play figures to either side, I placed the fruit inside. My hands came away covered in sticky goo, like it was oozing juice – or slime.

  Remembering the possibility of toxic meltdown, I quickly wiped my hands. Then I crawled into bed, eyes fixed on the drawer and the glow coming from inside. To be honest, it wasn’t the behaviour I’d come to expect from fruit. I mean bananas and mangoes never did this sort of thing. Even with kiwi fruit you knew where you were. But this? Frankly it was weird.

  I had every intention of keeping a close watch on the fruit but, after all the digging and wrestling with the bongleweed, I was so tired my night-time vigil probably lasted about three and a half minutes.

  I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when my eyes suddenly snapped open. The room was dark, but there was still a glow from the drawer. Suddenly the whole wooden unit began to rattle and shake – that must have been what woke me – and then just as quickly it stopped.

  I peeled back the covers and crept out of bed. I switched on my rocket lamp and crouched down next to the drawer. Slowly, I opened it and peered in. The fruit sat there, glowing but unmoving. Had I been imagining things? I rolled my eyes at my own crazy imagination. And then checked the room for the unicycling gorilla who usually turns up in my dreams. But there was no gorilla. Which meant this was no dream.

  I turned back to the fruit and then jumped in alarm as it began to move, shaking the drawer again – and this time I clearly saw one side of it bulge. It was as if something inside was trying to burst out! The skin stretched and the spiky leaves stuck out as the bulge moved under the surface. I thought of the worm I’d once found in a pear from Grandad’s garden. What if some kind of monstrous maggot was squirming its way out of the dragon fruit? The thing twisted and writhed and pushed. I started to back away. There was no way I wanted a mutant maggot launching at my face.