Pick Your Poison. Lauren Child

but as the old saying went, beggars really can’t be so choosy and (if you wanted another one) any port in a storm.

      Or, as Ruby’s RULE 73 had it: SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO WORK WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT.

      Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a nice place to hang out, and Ruby was at that moment regretting her decision to leave the tranquility of her bedroom and venture out into the big bad world.

      They could hear Vapona talking to her gang.

      ‘Where did they go?’

      ‘Beats me.’

      ‘They just disappeared!’

      Thump.

      Vapona slammed her fist on the dumpster.

      ‘We lost em.’ She sounded pretty angry about it. ‘When I find Lasco, I’m gonna pulp her!’ To illustrate this intention, Vapona thumped the dumpster again, this time so hard that Ruby felt the thud vibrate through her.

      The two of them listened to Vapona’s gang’s footsteps as they receded back towards Amster, their dread threats becoming less and less audible until only the thrum of passing cars could be heard.

      Twenty minutes later – Ruby wasn’t taking any chances – they struggled out like earwigs emerging from debris.

      They brushed themselves down, Del picking a fish head out from Ruby’s hooded top, Ruby peeling chewing gum from Del’s jeans, then they shook hands.

      ‘Congratulations Lasco, you’re alive,’ said Ruby.

      ‘But I smell like I died,’ said Del, sniffing the air. She looked at Ruby. ‘Your glasses look wonky.’

      ‘That’s the least of my problems,’ said Ruby. ‘Listen, nice bumping into you and all but I think I gotta take a shower,’ she called as she strode off towards home. The garbage smell was making her nauseous and she needed to clean up before the stench knocked her out.

      ‘Thanks for your assistance anyway,’ called Del.

      ‘No problem,’ shouted Ruby, breaking into a run. She felt this day could surely only get better, that was until the wind blew her hair over her eyes and – vision impaired – she collided with a parking meter.

      Winded, she sat down for a moment on the sidewalk.

      A banana skin fell from her sleeve.

      It had to be said, this was not the kind of day she’d expected.

      

      AS RUBY STUMBLED IN THROUGH THE KITCHEN DOOR, Greg Whitney’s voice jingled out of the radio:

       ‘SO THOSE WINDS LOOK LIKE THEY REALLY MIGHT HIT HARD.’

      ‘YOU GOT THAT RIGHT,’ replied Shelly the weather girl. ‘THEY ARE REALLY BEGINNING TO WHIP UP AND IT WON’T BE LONG BEFORE TWINFORD CITY EXPERIENCES SOME VIOLENT STORMS.’

       ‘RAIN TOO, SHELLY?’

       ‘YOU CAN COUNT ON IT, GREG!’

      Mrs Digby put down her apple peeler and planted her hands on her hips. The dishevelled state of Ruby was one thing; the smell of her a whole lot worse.

      ‘Child, have you been crouching in a garbage can by any chance?’

      Ruby opened her mouth to explain but the housekeeper put up her hands.

      ‘Before you make up a whole bundle of untruths, I might as well tell you that Mr Chester saw you climbing out of a dumpster and he didn’t wait more than a minute before dialling up my number and spreading the good news.’

      Ruby rolled her eyes.

      ‘The man is a virtual loudhailer of other people’s business,’ said Mrs Digby, ‘if you can call crouching in a garbage can “business”.’ She tutted. ‘Not that it would have escaped my keen eye that you look like something the cat dragged in but, that said, whatever you have been up to, and for whatever reason you thought it necessary, one thing’s not up for discussion: you need to take a bath.’

      Ruby sniffed the air. ‘Yeah, it was sorta rancid in there.’

      ‘I thought you were lying low today?’ said the housekeeper.

      ‘I was trying to, and then I bumped into Del Lasco.’

      ‘Say no more,’ said Mrs Digby. ‘That child will have you banged up in the Big House before you can say, “call my lawyer”.’

      Ruby went upstairs to her room, set the shower running and scrubbed the dumpster dirt out of her pores. She sprayed herself with a large waft of Wild Rose scent and put on some clean clothes – a pair of jeans, striped socks and a T-shirt. Like most of her T-shirts, it said something, this one bearing the words: I’ve heard it all before. She put on her glasses and could immediately see that there was a problem. The fall into the dumpster had bent them out of shape and the left arm no longer made contact with her left ear, so the glasses now sat at a strange angle. Since right at that moment she had no idea where she had put her spares, she would have to resort to her contact lenses: without either option, life was a total blur.

      Once that was taken care of, she took a book from the bookcase and sat down to read.

      Ruby owned a lot of books, ranging across all subjects. She read for every reason: inspiration, information and escape. If she valued any of her books above the others, perhaps the ones she would single out would be her code books. After all, it was her interest in codes that had landed her a job at Spectrum, an organisation so secret it was hard to know who actually controlled it, and who it was actually working for. All Ruby really understood was that the agency was on the side of good, a fact she had taken at face value when LB, her boss and head of Spectrum 8, had told her so.

      Along with the job came her own personal minder and protector, a field agent who went by the name of Hitch and who disguised his true purpose by acting as the Redfort family household manager (or butler, as Ruby’s mother preferred it). He could have fooled anyone, and did fool everyone. To the outside world Hitch was one of those enviable assets – a manager who ensured one’s domestic life was pressed and ironed, and anything you forgot he was sure to remember.

      Yet he also possessed skills most domestic managers lacked. These included scaling buildings, leaping from rooftops and the odd karate chop when required. He wasn’t bad in a crisis either: should you need to board a plane when it was already taxiing down the runway, Hitch was your man. To Ruby’s mom he was the best darned butler this side of the hemisphere; to Ruby he was a mentor, bodyguard, loyal ally and at times royal pain in the derrière.

      The volume Ruby was engrossed in today, however, was neither codebook, textbook, nor true-life story. Today she was reading to relax her brain, a totally necessary pursuit if one wanted to find the answer to something one just couldn’t grasp.

      RULE 6: SOMETIMES NOT THINKING ABOUT A PROBLEM IS THE BEST WAY TO FIND THE SOLUTION.

      And there was a pretty big question that needed answering: what in tarnation was going on in Twinford? Ruby had worked four cases now for Spectrum, and all of them had been resolved, more or less.

      But there was something still nagging at her. A sense that those cases were connected somehow, in some way she couldn’t grasp.

      She hadn’t got a long way through Kung Fu Martians when one of her many phones began to ring. She had a good collection of telephones by now, having become interested in them when she was just five years old: every shape, every design, from a bar of soap to a squirrel