Free The Great Rabbit Revenge Plan by Burkhard Spinnen Page A

Henri!’ calls Fridz again.
    But there’s no answer.
    â€˜Maybe your mum’s out.’
    â€˜Nah. She’s not out, she’s here.’ All at once, Fridz looks serious again. She even has a big frown in the middle of her forehead.
    â€˜Keep quiet!’ she says.
    Konrad would have to stop breathing to be any quieter. He does so, carefully.
    â€˜I can’t hear a thing.’
    â€˜Me neither.’ Konrad breathes again, and it’s not a moment too soon.
    â€˜Henri!’ Fridz shouts loudly.
    Silence.
    â€˜Hell!’ says Fridz. She throws the second shoe at the front door. With a bound she is up the stairs again.
    Konrad hears her calling ‘Mum! Mum! Where are you?’
    What’s going on? And what should Konrad do now? Stand here like the town clock? Or slither off home? Maybe something bad has happened. Or at least something that he shouldn’t be around for. But what?
    Very slowly, Konrad goes to the staircase and starts climbing. From there he can hear doors being slammed, and Fridz’s excited voice. And finally he sees what’s wrong. At least, he doesn’t exactly see what’s wrong. He only sees that Fridz’s mum is lying, fully dressed, on the bed in the master bedroom, and that Fridz is bending over her. Her mum appears to be asleep and Fridz is trying to wake her up. She’s screaming at her mum and she’s shaking her. And now, yes, now she’s even slapping her across the face. So hard that you can hear the smack.
    â€˜Mum!’ she keeps calling. ‘Wake up, Mum!’ But her mum seems to be sleeping so deeply that she is totally out of it.
    â€˜Quick, help me!’ Fridz calls out and runs past Konrad into the bathroom, where she chucks the toothbrushes out of the tooth glasses and fills one of them with water.
    â€˜You fill the other one,’ she says and she’s gone.
    â€˜Quick!’ she calls again.
    Konrad hurries. As he comes back into the bedroom with the full tooth glass, he sees Fridz pouring the water over her mother’s face. Without thinking, he passes her his glass, she takes it and does the same thing again.
    â€˜Hey,’ says her mother then, very softly. Her face and hair are wet and so is half the bed.
    â€˜Hey,’ she says again. ‘What are you doing?’
    Then she pushes her wet hair off her face.
    Fridz is standing by the bed. She says nothing.
    â€˜I was asleep,’ says her mother. At last she notices Konrad. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she says. ‘She does such nice things, Friederike, doesn’t she? You’d think she was nuts, the little one.’
    She’s sitting up now, and she tries to pull Fridz towards her but Fridz pulls herself free.
    â€˜We’re going to the canal,’ she says bluntly. ‘I just wanted to let you know.’ And then she takes Konrad by the arm and pulls him out of the room.
    â€˜Be careful of the water!’ her mother calls after them.
    Half an hour later, Fridz and Konrad are at the canal. They let their legs hang over the steep bank and Fridz is throwing stones, one after another, into the dark water. Neither of them has said anything yet. Not even when a long, flat boat went by lying so low in the water that you’d think it was going to go under.
    Konrad has been thinking hard. Maybe Fridz is slightly mad after all? Maybe her mum is sick? Or is it just that things between Fridz and her mum are very different from how things are at home? Hard to say.
    He takes a look at Fridz out of the corner of his eye, theway she’s throwing stones in the canal, her teeth tightly clamped together. If she keeps this up, it will soon be so full of stones that the water will be all dammed up and the next boat will run aground.
    One thing is sure, thinks Konrad at last: she’s not really crazy. At any rate, he doesn’t want her to be crazy. Because although she does such very odd things, he still thinks she’s