Free Kiss by Jacqueline Wilson

perfume! I was just trying out a tiny drop of Jake’s aftershave, that’s all,’ said Carl.
    I stared at his smooth skin. ‘You don’t shave!’
    ‘That doesn’t mean I don’t want to smell OK,’ Carl said. ‘
You
wear perfume sometimes.’
    I’d once snaffled some of my mum’s French perfume but it was old and stale, a long-ago birthday present from my dad. The bottle had been gathering dust on her dressing table ever since. I was simply trying to use up the perfume so that Carl could have the pretty cut-glass bottle for his collection, but Mum got cross and Carl moaned about the smell, saying it made his nose prickle and his eyes sting.
    He seemed totally unaffected by his own aftershave. I wondered if he had put it on for my benefit. My heart started thudding.
    ‘I love that smell,’ I said hurriedly. ‘It’s much nicer on you than it is on Jake.’
    Carl smiled at me, still flicking through the Glassworld Chronicles. ‘Do you think King Carlo and Queen Sylviana wear perfume?’ he said. ‘Aha, they’re forced to wear pungent oils and bury their regal noses in silken handkerchiefs during the Great Summer Stench when the Victorian Glassworld sewers collapse …’
    ‘Oh
yes
, because an enemy spy slipped down a manhole and blew up the brick sewer, so that not only is half of Glassworld mired in filthy mud, the entire royal family having to be carried by sedan chair so that the royal feet aren’t sullied, but also giant rats have now escaped from the depths of the stinky sewers and now there is a plague of them, over-running Glassworld, biting babies, getting in all the food cupboards, running over people’s faces in bed at night.
So
, Queen Sylviana gives her splendid Siamese cats the task of killing all the rats—’
    ‘But they are totally useless little lap-cats. They cower away from the rats and hide behind Queen Sylviana’s velvet sofa, mewing piteously. No, no, we need a Pied Piper, fresh from Hamelin. King Carlo spots him strolling nonchalantly through the palace grounds. His pied cloak trails on the filthy floor but none of the mud sticks to it, and his feet in their natty mismatch boots stay surprisingly mud-free too. His red and yellow garb looks curiously like a football strip. Indeed, as he nears the palace he starts kicking one of the prize pumpkins in the royal vegetable gardens. He breaks into a run, dribbling it nimbly down the ruby gravel driveway, all the while piping away. Queen Sylviana peers round the royal velvet curtains at the Piper. She catches her breath at the sight of his sweet face, his broad shoulders, his well-muscled long legs in their pied tights—’ ‘No she doesn’t! She wonders who this madfool is, dressed so bizarrely. Red and yellow look ridiculous worn together. How dare he pick any of the pumpkins! Queen Sylviana wants this impertinent interloper punished. He is banished to the dungeons—’
    ‘OK, he shrugs his shoulders and does not struggle because he sees that Queen Sylviana is quite mad. Maybe she’s so aware of his physical charm that she’s temporarily unbalanced. Whatever. So the Piper lurks in his little dungeon. He’s been put on bread-and-water rations but he’s still got his pumpkin, so he passes his time gouging out the flesh with the end of his pipe, munching his monotonous vegetable meal. The rats gather in force, their yellow teeth glinting by the light of his one flickering candle, but if he plays just eight bars of his haunting melody they are hypnotized, utterly catatonic. Ha,
rat
atonic! They stay motionless, in aural ecstasy. King Carlo visits this strange new prisoner and sees for himself the extent of his powers. He sets him free and commands him to walk around the town playing his pipe, similarly enchanting every single rat. He succeeds in just one quick circuit, and then he leads them up up up to Mount Eruption, the terrifying Glassworld volcano, and all the rats scamper madly because the mount is red-hot and burning their