Click here to buy this book!
Lulu
Replay
Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: Sally Odgers
Type: Fiction
Pages: 231
Copyright: 2007
This time round, I am a human girl and Harry is a dog. This is inconvenient, because my parents didn't really want a dog with a jutting eyebrow fringe and a shaggy, untrimmed beard. Nor did they want a dog that cost five hundred dollars. "A pedigreed Schnauzer!" I said in despair when I recognised him that morning at the agricultural show. "Why did you have to be a pedigreed Schnauzer, Harry? I mean - why did you have to be a dog?" So begins the tale of Harry and Aelfthryth, who were born in the 11th Century...
TRACK 1. AUSTRALIAN OVERTURE. (2007.)
This time round, I am a human girl and Harry is a dog. This is inconvenient, because my parents didn't really want a dog with a jutting eyebrow fringe and a shaggy, untrimmed beard. Nor did they want a dog that cost five hundred dollars.
A pedigreed Schnauzer! I said in despair when I recognised him that morning at the agricultural show. Why did you have to be a pedigreed Schnauzer, Harry? I mean - why did you have to be a dog?
Harry looked sheepish. His beady little eyes peered out from underneath that peculiar fringe. Sorry, Aelfthryth...
Ellie, I corrected. I'm called 'Ellie' now.
I was speaking to Harry mind-to-mind, of course. Australian English is the language I use in this Replay, but it isn't something a dog can ever learn.
Harry's little pink tongue polished his button nose. Sorry, Aelfthryth... I really couldn't help it.
Oh, never mind, I said. Of course you couldn't, any more than I could help the popinjay affair. (He was looking mournful. I never can stand it when Harry looks mournful.) It could have been worse. You might have been an elephant. Or a flea.
Or a bank manager, said Harry. I wish.
He was joking, of course. We both knew there was no way he could ever have made it as a bank manager.
I knelt down and gave him a hug, because I was so pleased to see him again. A computer nerd is about as high as you could have aimed in this time and place, I told him gently. A bank manager isn't one of the options, love. You can't be a postman, either. Not this time.
Harry sighed. Schnauzers never do look particularly happy, but poor Harry looked as if his last chunk of beef had turned out to be plastic.
I'm just so tired of being sixteen, he grumbled. It seems to get younger all the time. Except this time, when it's older.
You're not wrong, I said.
I thought back, carefully, more than ninety years. I was a kitchen maid that time, working for a man called Dr Large. He was a good enough doctor, I suppose, but his wife was very strange. Long red nose (I know she drank), stupid hobble skirts. And half the time she was off in a daze of laudanum. As for the housekeeper, Mrs Gurney! She was an evil old bat, unnaturally fond of Morals (with a Capital M) and caustic soda. Cruel stuff on the hands, that was, but not so cruel as her tongue.
Excerpt
A love song, a mystery, a waltz through history.
|
