Sticky Beak by Morris Gleitzman Page A

shoulder and a big grin on her face.
    â€˜I’ve got it,’ she yelled.
    Darryn Peck looked up from Trent Webster’s video camera which he was trying to focus on a pimple on Doug Walsh’s bottom.
    â€˜Hope it’s not catching,’ he smirked.
    He and his mates fell about.
    Me and Amanda just smiled quietly to each other.
    We resisted the temptation to tell him that soon he won’t have much to laugh about because we didn’t want him running off to South America and hiding.
    As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered, because for the whole day we didn’t even get to take the lens cap off the camera.
    For a bloke who wears fish shirts, Mr Segal’s a real stickler for paperwork.
    First he insisted on seeing written permission from the parents of everyone who’d brought a camera in.
    Then he wasted hours ringing up Trent Webster’s parents. He thought Trent’s note was forged just because ‘camera’ was spelt without an ‘e’ If he’d asked us we could have explained that Trent’s mum had to leave school when she was eleven to look after the goats.
    Then Raylene Shapiro put her hand up and said that her dad was wondering if the school insurance would cover damage to his camera.
    Mr Segal called Mr Fowler in and asked him.
    He said he’d check.
    I was adjusting Amanda’s camera strap at the time, and when Mr Fowler saw me with a camera in my hand he went visibly pale.
    Then, just when me and Amanda thought we could start shooting our in-depth report, Mr Segal announced that first we all had to write scripts.
    We did that for the rest of the day.
    It was a bit tricky because we didn’t want Darryn Peck to know we were writing about him, so we used a code name.
    Poodle.
    Mr Segal thinks we’re doing an in-depth report about dogs who are mean to cockatoos.
    At least writing the script gave me something to show Sticky when I got home. I don’t think he’d ever seen a current affairs script before because he tried to eat it.
    â€˜Sticky,’ I said, ‘stop that. Don’t you want to be a star and an object of pity who’s allowed to sleep in my room again?’
    I don’t think he understood the hand movements because he just looked at me with his beak open.
    I wished I had Amanda there to explain it to him by mouth.
    Then I remembered what Mr Segal had said about pictures being more important than words. I pulled out my notepad and drew Sticky a picture of me playing the in-depth report to Dad and Ms Dunning on our video and them tearfully inviting Sticky to live with us in the house.
    He stared at it for ages and I could see his eyes getting moister.
    I drew him another picture, of Darryn Peck being arrested by RSPCA officers and sentenced to ten years hard labour cleaning out the dog pound.
    Sticky put his head under his wing and seemed a bit upset, so I reduced Darryn’s sentence to five years.
    It was the third picture that got Sticky really excited. I did it on two pages, and it showed our report being broadcast on telly, and people all over Australia who were about to abandon or neglect cockatoos thinking again.
    I put in a few people who were about to abandon or neglect other things as well.
    Dogs and cats.
    Hampsters.
    Kids.
    Those people were all thinking again too.
    Dad was one of them.
    â€˜Bottom plops,’ said Sticky.
    Poor old Sticky, he finds it really hard to express his emotions.
    I know that inside he was just as excited and moved as I was.

 
    I never realised making in-depth current affairs programmes was so hard.
    For starters there’s focusing the camera properly and waiting for planes to fly over so they don’t mess up the sound.
    Then there’s asking the reporter if she’d mind changing her orange and purple striped T-shirt for a blue one and taking off the green eye shadow.
    And on top of all that there’s waiting for Ms Dunning to go into town for her check-up