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scared you but you faced up to it anyway. He told me that when I didn’t want to swim the whole length of the pool in the swimming carnival and some kids at school called me a chicken. So maybe Mum was right and maybe Mister Mosely was brave when he saved Amelia from the Pink Panther, even though she wasn’t really being attacked in the first place.
    Anyway, Mum bought all this new stuffing for Pinkie and she sewed him back together, but every time we tried to put him back on the stool Mister Mosely went crazy. Even if we closed the screen door he just kept barking and scratching at it and banging his head against it trying to getinside. So that’s how come we had to put the Pink Panther back in the cupboard for good.
    I don’t really care that much about Pinkie being locked away – except it meant that Dad stopped telling the story of how he got him for Mum. But maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway because pretty soon Dad stopped telling all his other stories too.
    When he did talk, it was only about work and money and bills and stuff.

11 The Weirdest Mister Mosely Story
    That time Mister Mosely ripped up the Pink Panther was pretty weird, but it isn’t the weirdest story about Mister Mosely. That happened one morning when I found him next door in Mr Taylor’s yard.
    That was the first weird thing, because Mister Mosely never went next door even though there’s this big hole in the fence where a couple of palings are broken off. He was acting kind of weird too. He was just wandering around near the old shed in Mr Taylor’s backyard like he couldn’t make up his mind where to go.
    I was up on our back porch when I saw him, so I called out to him. That’s when it got even weirder. Moe started to come home, butsomething really strange happened when he got about halfway across Mr Taylor’s yard. All of a sudden he just sort of stopped dead and jerked back round and wouldn’t come any further. I thought maybe he heard a noise behind him or something, but he just stood there whining for a bit and then he went back to the shed.
    I knew something was wrong with him, because Moe always came when I called him. So I tried again, but the exact same thing happened. He got halfway across the yard and wouldn’t come any further. Even when I clapped my hands and shouted at him it didn’t make any difference. There was something in the middle of the yard that was stopping him, like an invisible wall or one of those force fields they have in
Star Trek
. I kept calling and calling him but he did the same thing every time.
    Then Dad came out to see what ‘all the racket’ was about. When I told him what was happening, he did his really loud whistle thing that I wish I could do and he shouted out to Mister Mosely in his serious, ‘I’m not mucking around’ voice.
    But the same thing happened for Dad that happened for me. Except this time when Moe startedto come home he was going a bit slower and his head was hanging way down near the grass. When he got to that same spot his head just twisted slowly around and he stayed there making that whiny kind of noise he makes when something is really upsetting him.
    â€˜What’s wrong with him?’
    That’s what my dad said. I just shook my head because I didn’t have a clue. Dad said we’d better go and ‘check him out’, and that’s what we did. Dad climbed over the fence first then he lifted me over. I knew something was definitely wrong when we got into Mr Taylor’s yard because I really thought Mister Mosely would come running over to meet us but he didn’t. All he did was wag his tail a bit and stay where he was. I just kept thinking, what’s going on?
    It was Dad who saw it first. I only saw it when I got right up close to where Moe was standing. There was something like string coming out of his mouth. Only it wasn’t string, it was fishing line, and it