Possum Soup

By fred dinkum

Stranded in a broken car next to a suburban park with his sick mother, the only good in SIMON's life is watching the possums dance along the overhead wires. When a small possum, GUMNUT, falls onto the car bonnet, Simon rescues it before it's snatched by BORIS SCRAM and WILBUR PUMMEL, the two manic local gardeners on their nightly possum hun

• Language: English
• Publisher: fred dinkum
• Release date: Mar 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645030631

fred dinkum

Hello, I'm fred dinkum. When I was naughty boy, my mum called me frederick. She still does sometimes. I like to write tales. Not the sort of tails you find on the end of tigers or unicorns or you pin to a donkey. But the tales you read on the pages of a book. If anyone is kind enough to buy a fred dinkum tale, I donate at least 10% of the next proceeds to important causes/charities related to the themes in that book. Stay kind & keep reading (it grows my brain & tickles my heart).

Book preview

Asleep in a Car

There was only one good thing about living in the car.

It wasn’t the struggle to get to sleep sitting up in the passenger seat.

It wasn’t the cold night air pinching Simon’s skin.

And it wasn’t even living next door to a park with a curvy green slide and a red plastic swing.

Each night when the traffic emptied from the street and the children had left the playground, and when his mother had fallen asleep, Simon sat in the front seat watching. 

A circus of possums ran along the overhead wires. Sometimes there was just one—a loner. But often there was a frenzy of four, five, six, up to twenty possums dancing back and forth. It was wonderfully exciting when Simon didn’t know which furry performer to watch. They were like acrobats flitting across a tightrope. At times he gasped and hoped something terrible didn’t happen—a freak gust of wind, a wire to snap, or a wrong step that would have them plummet to the ground. How the possums didn’t fall was a miracle.

Tonight, there was a possum with a stubby tail, that stopped and looked around. Perhaps it had seen a bat or a hungry owl.

Something else shuffled along the wire.

‘What could this be?’ Simon said, leaning forward and wiping the foggy windscreen.

This creature was much smaller. ‘Surely it’s not a rat,’ he mumbled.

Its tail was curled around the wire. The tip was bright white as though it had been dunked in paint. As it came into the streetlight, he could see the same grey fur coat as the other possums.

He smiled. A warm, excited, ticklish sensation filled his chest. ‘Wow. A baby one.’

Simon had never seen a baby possum before. He wanted to wake his sick mother but falling back to sleep wouldn’t be easy for her. So instead, he watched.

‘Hurry up little one,’ he said to himself. ‘Don’t let Scram and Pummel see you.’

Mr Boris Scram lived on the other side of the small suburban park. He was a gruff and unpleasant man with a bald, wrinkly head and floppy bulldog cheeks, whose main interest in life was defending his garden from the invasion of any sort of pest. 

Many local children feared visiting the park in case Mr Scram yelled at them for being too loud and upsetting his plants. ‘Shut up you punks! My roses won’t bud with that racket,’ he’d say, or, ‘Be quiet you grubs, you’re ruining my rhubarb.’ Some children had their prized footballs thrown back over his tall wall, flattened with six small holes, that matched the six sharp teeth on his rake. Mr Scram took his rake wherever he went. And that was mostly with his neighbour, Mr Wilbur Pummel.

Wilbur Pummel shared a back fence with Mr Scram, and a side fence with the park. He was a keen cactus grower who’d been convinced by Mr Scram that it was possums eating his prickly collection and not hungry caterpillars.

Simon had seen the local gardeners in action. Two nights ago from the car, Simon yelled ‘Run, Mummy Possum, run! Don’t let them catch you!’ As soon as the words left his mouth, both men turned sharply. Torchlight shone straight into the car. Simon shut his eyes and didn’t dare move. His almost blind mother, woken with panic, called out ‘Is everything okay?’

Simon wanted to shout, ‘No, Mum. The scary men are watching me,’ but he bit his lip, frozen with fright.

Simon now had a terrible feeling that tonight was going to be just as terrifying as the other night.

The Night Patrol

‘C’mon little fella, just a bit further,’ whispered Simon, as the possum crawled along the wire.

It was about now Scram and Pummel began their nightly patrol for the nocturnal possums.

Muffled voices came from somewhere in the park. In the distance Simon could see the red glow of the neon light on Scram’s wall that flashed Trespassers will be punished and possums will be killed. A light beam struck a nearby tree. It had to be the possum hunters. No one else would dare be outside in such a cold, wet, windy night.

The larger possum tried to pull the tiny possum along the wire.

Simon wanted to blast the car horn to give the small possum a hurry on. But like the engine and the heater, it didn’t work.

‘Someone should turn all possums into car seat covers,’ said Mr Scram, now right alongside the car, wearing a dented steel helmet from a past world war.

Simon sank in his seat until he could just see out the window.

‘Maybe that someone’ll be you, Scram,’ cackled Pummel. ‘Why, in this wretched weather I could do with a pair of possum mittens.’

‘Mittens?’ barked Mr Scram, rubbing his fingerless-gloved hands together. ‘There’s nothing manly about mittens…but I could do with a hot bowl of soup right now.’

‘Soup!’ shrieked Pummel. He was a stringy man with a long neck, a small head and large eyes that gave him the unpleasant appearance of a strangled chicken. ‘That’s a dastardly wicked idea.’

‘I’m full of those,’ snickered Scram. ‘I’ve eaten chicken soup and pea and pig soup, but never possum soup.’

Simon didn’t like the sound of this.

‘Hey, Scram. Shine your torch up there,’ Pummel said, pointing to the starless sky.

‘No don’t,’ said Simon, louder than he’d wanted.

But Boris Scram didn’t hear Simon’s cry. ‘Aha,’ he said, as the light hit the possum. ‘Bullseye. Take the torch.’

Pummel fumbled the torch. The light beam shone everywhere except on the possum.

Scram stopped. ‘Pummel, just for once, do as you’re told. Hold the torch steady.’ With such a large stomach, moving quickly didn’t come easily to Boris Scram. In contrast, Pummel with his long, gangly legs, easily stayed close behind his neighbour as they reached the middle of the street.

‘It’s our lucky night,’ said Pummel. ‘Perhaps I’ll have warm hands and you’ll have a warm belly after all.’

‘No, no…’ mumbled Simon, finding it hard to sit still.

Scram extended his adjustable homemade rake handle until the steel teeth reached high above his head. ‘Hoo Haa. We’ve got you now, you little bandits,’ he shouted up to the possums.

‘Yeah, we’ll have you in a hot soup for midnight supper,’ yelled Pummel, growing more excited.

‘Oh, slug-germs. Just keep the torch on them, would you!’ cried Scram.

‘Do you think it tastes like chicken?’ Pummel asked.

‘Huh?’ grunted Scram, busy waving his rake about.

Pummel shuffled closer to his friend. ‘Haven’t you heard how some animals taste like chicken?’

‘What are you talking about?’ barked Scram.

‘Well…’ Pummel swallowed. ‘They say crocodile, rabbit and kangaroo all taste like chicken, so I wonder if this possum’ll taste like…you know…nicely fried chicken nuggets.’

Scram stopped moving his rake and stared hard at Pummel. ‘They don’t have feathers or a beak, you twit.’

A loud squeak came from the wires. Stumpy Tail raced along the wire to the other side of the street. That left the tiny possum stranded. Alone in the middle of the wire ready to fall.

‘No, don’t leave him,’ Simon cried, digging his fingernails into the dashboard.

‘You haven’t got your mummy with you now, have you?’ said Scram.

The possum froze. It clung fearfully to the wire as