Free Welcome to Silver Street Farm by Nicola Davies Page A

good news. This could be the year we start our farm!”
    From either side of her, Karl and Gemma both groaned.
    “Meera, we don’t have any animals,” said Karl.
    “And if we
did
have any animals, where would we keep them?” added Gemma. “My dad’s toolshed?”
    “Or the balcony of Auntie’s apartment?” added Karl.
    “But if we
did
have somewhere to keep them,” said Meera, sitting bolt upright, “that would be a start, wouldn’t it?”
    “But finding somewhere is the difficult part,” said Karl gloomily. “We’ve always known that.”
    “Well,” said Meera, her eyes starting to sparkle, “I think I
have
found somewhere! My Auntie Priya works in the city-council offices and she told me about it. There’s an old railway station down by the canal that’s been closed for years. There are buildings to keep animals in and grassy parts for grazing. It sounds perfect.”
    “But the city council would never let us have a place like that,” said Gemma.
    “It’s probably just ruins covered in brambles,” added Karl.
    Meera ignored their objections. “It can’t hurt to go and have a look though, can it?” she said.
    But Gemma and Karl still looked doubtful.
    “I know!” said Meera, leaping off the merry-go-round. “Let the jelly beans decide!” She snatched the bag from Gemma and struck a pose like an actor on a stage.
    “I veel close my eyes. I veel hold out zee magical bag of jelly beans. . . .” Meera paused dramatically. Peeking between her eyelashes, she could see that Karl and Gemma were now both watching her and starting to laugh — she’d
gotten
them! — “And if zee next jelly bean I pull from zee bag eez
green,
you veel be bound by jelly-bean magic to accompany me on my quest for our farm!”
    Meera pointed in Karl’s direction.
    “Drumroll please, Karl!”
    Karl drummed his fingers on the old merry-go-round, and Gemma provided a trumpet fanfare with a rolled-up newspaper she had found.
    Meera reached into the bag with her other hand, paused dramatically, and pulled out . . . a green jelly bean!
    “Ta-da!”
    Karl and Gemma clapped and got off the merry-go-round. Sometimes, you just had to do what Meera wanted, even if you knew that the jelly bean
had
to be green because none of them liked the lime-flavored ones.

Auntie Nat blinked. She looked at the screen again. It couldn’t be true, could it?
    “Adorable poodles. Two left. Bargain for quick sale.”
    The photo on the advertisement was terribly blurred, but then dogs moved around so much, didn’t they? They’d be hard to photograph. She wrote down the number on the screen and, her heart pounding with excitement, reached for the phone.
    Auntie Nat, or Natalia Konstantinovna Lebedeva, to give her her proper name, had always wanted a pair of white poodles with ribbons tied into their woolly fur.
    “I walk with them to shops,” she would tell Karl in her heavy Russian accent. “And I look elegant, like models in magazine.”
    Then she’d walk across the living room, pretending to be a tall, skinny model with two dogs on leashes. This always made Karl and Auntie Nat laugh, because she was short and very, very round.
    “When I’m rich and famous, Auntie,” Karl always said, “I’ll buy you two perfect little poodles.”
    “Ah, my Karl,” she’d sigh, “you will have to be very rich. Poodles
so
expensive.”
    Poodles
were
so expensive, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Every week, when she was reading her horoscope in the
Lonchester Herald
and on the Mythic Modes website, she’d check online in case someone, somewhere, was selling a poodle for a price she could afford. But the stars always told her that wasn’t going to happen. Until today.
    “A long-held dream is closer than you think!” said her horoscope on the back page of the
City Gazette
.
    The voice at the end of the phone line was gruff.
    “Yeah, I still got the dogs,” it said. “You got the money?”
    Hmmm,
Auntie Nat thought to herself.
Not a refined