Healing Rex (A tale of two heroic fleas!) Chapter 1

Healing Rex

Written and Illustrated by Tom Radford

Chapter One

(Something’s not quite right)

Half way down Bartholomew Road stood a large detached house. It had a pretty front garden with roses wound around the cast iron fence. There was a rockery built beside the small round pond into which two badly painted plastic garden gnomes had cast their plastic fishing lines, presumably hoping to catch some plastic fish. Four leafless cherry trees stood on a patch of lawn which was in need of mowing, and the cold October wind had blown their fallen leaves across the path into the drain by the front door. The door itself was painted cornflower blue as were the five window frames which surrounded it. Had you been passing by on a bright autumn day this neat little house would probably have cheered you up. Some houses seem to smile when you look at them; number twenty-three Bartholomew Road was just such a house. The only thing you might have noticed, had you stopped to take a closer look, was that the curtains were drawn even though the sun had been up for hours. In fact the heavy drapes had not been open for two days.

Behind the front door a few unopened letters and bills lay upon the welcome mat. Lights were on in the hall and living room, but there was no sound, no talking, no laughter; the house seemed to be empty. But if you listened extremely carefully you might just have picked up the faintest hint of a whimper. Had you followed that sound it would have led you down the hall, through the kitchen and into the living room at the back of the house.

The living room was fairly large with a cream carpet, sofa and chairs, sideboards and a coffee table. An old TV stood in one corner, but the whimpering sound came from the opposite side of the room. There on the floor beside the book shelf lay an enormous shaggy black dog. So big was the dog that next to him was a food bowl large enough to bathe a newborn baby. The word REX had been painted in red letters upon the bowl and beneath that in permanent black marker was written My Best Friend.The bowl was empty, a few flies buzzed around the dried chunks of dog food on its rim. Chewed-up toys and bones lay scattered about, but the dog paid no attention to them. He lay in a heap, sad eyes staring into space; wet patches on the fur beneath them, soaked in dog tears. He hadn’t been for a walk today or yesterday; nobody had taken him outside to run and play in the fresh air. There had been no pats on the head and no treats at dinner time. He didn’t even muster a bark when the postman came. In fact he hadn’t moved at all for two days and it seemed as though he never would again. Rex was the saddest, loneliest dog in Bartholomew Road, and the worst part was that nobody even knew he was there. Nobody cared if he lived or died. Well, almost nobody.

If you had extremely sharp eyes, or perhaps a very large magnifying glass, you might have noticed the tiniest glimmer of a sparkle from deep within the thick tangled black hair on Rex’s back. There, tucked away in the hair forest, was a miniature house. The roof and walls of the tiny home were made from the dried-up remains of some unspeakable gooey substance. A round window (formed from an old contact lens which had stuck to the dog’s coat years ago) filled the house with light. And who lived in this undersized dwelling? Well, unlikely as it may sound, a pair of remarkably refined fleas (if indeed fleas can ever be described as refined). Their names were Hooper and Ping.

The house was built well outside the scratching zone to avoid it being demolished every time Rex got an itch. And, unlike other fleas (of which there was none on Rex, who was a very tidy dog most of the time), they were very careful not to cause any itches. Hooper and Ping were good tenants; they kept a clean house and never bit their own dog. Whenever Rex went near other dogs and cats they would leap across, have a quick lunch and return home, all in a matter of seconds.

It may not sound too pleasant, living on the back of a large and occasionally smelly dog, but to the fleas it was an idyllic existence. In fact, apart from eating, they had very little to do. Fleas are lazy creatures and because of their enormous legs they can’t really walk particularly fast so they like to sit out on the front porch and watch the world go by instead. Except that for some reason the world had stopped going by recently. In fact they had been staring at the same view for what seemed like hours. (Hours to a flea are like days to a human, in much the same way that days are like hours to a whale and minutes are like days to an amoeba. Nobody has actually measured how bacteria keep track of time, but we know that they don’t wear watches so presumably they don’t care.)

‘How come the sky doesn’t move any more, Pingey?’ asked Hooper, lazily rocking himself on a chair fashioned from two toenail clippings. Ping stared upwards at the huge expanse of ceiling for a moment. (A flea moment is much shorter than a human moment but it feels pretty much the same.)

‘I hadn’t noticed … maybe Rex has been having a long sleep,’ said Ping.

‘For two days?’ Hooper sounded doubtful. ‘Something must be wrong, we ought to check.’ This was one of those rare occasions when Hooper was right.

‘I’ll go and investigate; you stay here and keep an eye on things,’ said Ping.

‘Why can’t I come?’ Hooper moaned. Ping bit back the temptation to say that Hooper was clumsy, accident prone and more likely than not to get lost. Instead he suggested that Hooper stay and protect the house from invaders.

‘Have you forgotten what happened last time we left the house unguarded?’ Hooper thought for a moment, but before he could reply Ping continued. ‘Remember how that family of dust mites just sort of moved in and took over the place?’ (A family of dust mites could be anything up to ten thousand individuals. They were rude, messy, lazy and had a nasty habit of stuffing all the cupboards and wardrobes with dust for their mid-mite snacks.)

Hooper frowned. (It isn’t actually possible for insects to frown because of their hard exoskeleton, so instead they just sigh heavily and their antennae go floppy.)

‘Oh okay,’ he said in his most disappointed voice. ‘I just wanted to be a part of your important mission, but I guess I’m too clumsy and stupid for that.’ Although this was completely true, Ping felt very guilty all of sudden.

‘Come on then … but we’ll have to be quick in case the mites do come! Follow me closely and don’t get lost!’

‘Rock and roll!’ shouted Hooper and hopped off into the distance before Ping even had a chance to decide which direction they were going to take. Launching himself into the air he set off in pursuit of his haphazard friend, already regretting the decision to let Hooper come along.

Rex looked sad. They had bounced off the dog, across the carpet and up onto the table and were now looking down at the huge miserable shaggy face.

‘Do you think he’s ill?’ asked Ping.

‘Nah,’ said Hooper, ‘I expect the floor would be covered in sicked-up bits of dog food if he was, all sticky and stinky.’

‘You have such a way with words, Hoop,’ said Ping. ‘But there are lots of ways to get ill without being sick. Let’s see if we can wake him up.’

Hopping over to Rex they landed themselves on the edge of one enormous eye. It was almost closed; just a faint semicircle of eye could be seen beneath the immense hairy eyelid which dwarfed the two fleas. Standing right on the rim they danced and shouted trying to get a response but nothing happened; except another faint whimper followed by a huge tear falling from the corner of Rex’s eye, which they only just managed to dodge.

‘What’s wrong, dog?’ shouted Hooper. Again there was no response.

‘It doesn’t look good, Hoop. I’m not an expert but in my expert opinion: silence is not the sound made by a dog with a full bill of health!’ said Ping.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he’s probably ill!’ Ping strode around purposefully like an eminent flea surgeon. ‘We’re going to have to make Rex well again,’ he announced.

‘How?’ asked Hooper.

Ping didn’t know. He’d never had to help someone get well before. The first thing to do would be to find out what was wrong with Rex. But how? They decided to begin with an external inspection.

‘Hooper!’ Ping commanded, ‘I shall require you to take notes.’ And with that he hopped off across the hair forest with his assistant in pursuit. Shortly they arrived at Rex’s tail.

‘We shall begin,’ began Ping, ‘at this end…and work our way around to the other end making careful observations.’ Hooper scribbled furiously on his worm-skin notepad with a pencil made of beeswax.

‘You will notice that the tail,’ he pointed to Rex’s large bushy tail, ‘is motionless.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Hooper. (Hooper said this a lot because in truth he didn’t really know what most things meant.)

‘It means …’ he paused in thought, ‘… it means that it is not wagging!’ beamed the flea triumphantly. ‘A happy dog wags its tail … therefore this is not a happy dog!’ Hooper stood with his mouth open, amazed at Ping’s detailed knowledge of dog anatomy and behaviour. The tour of inspection moved on. When they arrived at the front Ping pointed to Rex’s nose.

‘The nose, you will notice, is not shiny,’ he said.

‘Er … should it be?’ Hooper had no idea.

‘A shiny nose is a wet nose, Hoop! And a wet nose is a happy nose!’ explained the Head of Inspection. ‘And so, in conclusion … I can categorically confirm without a shadow of a doubt …’ He waited for the tension to build. Hooper leant forward in anticipation of the imminent diagnosis. ‘This dog is unhappy, and is therefore … ill,’ he smiled (insomuch as a flea can smile). Hooper clapped his claws together in appreciation of this highly intelligent conclusion.

‘How can we make him better?’ said Hooper. ‘I mean it’s all very well saying he’s ill but we don’t know what he’s got. And you’ve got to know what someone’s got so you know how to get it … er …out,’ he continued. They pondered this obstacle for a few minutes.

‘Well,’ Ping ventured, ‘what do we do when we’re ill?’

‘We lie down and say “Urgh!”’ said Hooper, remembering his last bout of infleaenza. ‘Then we moan a lot because we’re too hurty to go jumping and then we get better I guess.’

‘No … well, yes, but that’s not what I mean.’ Ping looked sympathetically at Hooper. ‘The thing you missed out is medicine. We tend to take medicine when we’re ill.’ He tried to think of an example. ‘Like wasp tears for a cough. Or woodlice wine for a headache. The problem is that you really need to know what’s wrong with someone in order to know what medicine to give them.’

‘What medicine do we take for sadness, Ping?’ asked Hooper.

‘Good question. The only cure for sadness is happiness … but I’ve no idea where you get it,’ he pondered. ‘You’re sad because something is wrong. In order to be happy you must make it right. So what we need to do is find out what Rex is so sad about … then we can bring it back and make him his old self again.’

‘How we gonna do that, Ping?’

‘Well we’ve tried asking him and that didn’t work … so there’s only one thing for it. We’re gonna have to go inside and find out what’s wrong!’

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For other stories by this author, please check out;

Gonzales the Tortoise (By Tom and Hugh Radford)

Gonzales the Tortoise and Senor Pinafore (By Tom and Hugh Radford)