Fizzlebert Stump (14 page)

‘You OK, Fizz? You don't sound like yourself,' Mrs Stump asked.

‘Fizz' kicked ‘his' shoes in the sawdust, digging a little trench and not looking at either of the grown-ups. ‘He' said nothing,
but mumbled under ‘his' breath.

‘Did someone mention champagne?' Miss Tremble said, poking her head between Mr and Mrs Stump. ‘I do like a glass of fizz every now and then, just so long as T.S. Eliot doesn't know about it. He gets upset because he had some once and the bubbles went the wrong way and he sneezed in his nose bag and ever since then the others have taken the mickey.'

Mrs Stump heard a little bell ringing in the back of her mind as she listened to Miss Tremble's teary speech. (It wasn't a real bell, lodged there by an exploding alarm clock many years ago, in case you were thinking, ‘Aha! I bet this is probably the cue for a joke.' It's not. The doctors had safely removed that when she was seventeen.) She took her
nose off, leaned down and looked closely at ‘Fizz'.

‘Freckles!' she said, suddenly.

Mr Stump stroked his moustache and looked closely too.

‘Fizz' tried to turn away, tried to run off, but Mr Stump put a finger and thumb either side of ‘his' head and held ‘him' gently, but tightly, in place.

‘Hang on, son,' he said, and began counting freckles under his breath.

He got as far as zero and had to stop, because he'd counted the lot.

‘What's happened to your freckles?' he asked, quietly, not wanting to embarrass the ‘boy' in front of all those horses.

‘Fizzlebert' gulped and wriggled.

‘I ain't sayin' nuffink,' ‘he' said.

Mrs Stump honked her horn and replaced her nose.

‘Bongo!' she shouted.

‘You mean?' Mr Stump asked, looking at her.

‘Champagne,' she said excitedly, pointing at ‘Fizzlebert'. ‘Bubbly! Fizz!'

‘I think we've got some
rotten champagne
,' Mr Stump said, repeating (the words suggested by) Bongo Bongoton's mime.

‘This isn't
Fizz
,' Mrs Stump said.

With that ‘Fizzlebert' kicked Mr Stump on the shin and tried to run away.

‘But if this isn't Fizz,' he said, still holding on to not-Fizz's head, ‘then where is he?'

‘What did you say Bongo mimed?' Mrs Stump said, scratching under her wig with a rubber chicken, ‘That he's been kidnapped by a group of dolphins?'

‘But that doesn't make any sense,' Mr Stump said. ‘What would dolphins want with Fizz? And what were dolphins doing in the woods anyway?'

‘I don't know,' Mrs Stump said. ‘Maybe they were foraging for acorns? Autumn's coming after all. It'll soon be time to hibernate.'

‘But, Gloria …' began Mr Stump.

While the grown-ups were talking Piltdown was thinking of ways to escape.

She'd been rumbled, found out, discovered and there was no point in her hanging around any more. It had been
sort of
fun, being in the circus for a morning, although parts of it had been too much like being at school (the bits where people tried to
teach her things) to really be what you'd call ‘good', other bits, like the trapezing and having cheesecake for second breakfast, had been brilliant, even the scary dangling-by-one-hand bits. If only there'd been a crowd of people to see her and to applaud her and to tell her how brave and funny and clever and brilliant and clever and brave and funny and brave she had been. And maybe give her a prize or a medal or some new binoculars. But there hadn't been a crowd and even if there had been, they'd've probably all been idiots anyway.

If only this dummy would let go of her head, she'd run off, head back to the woods, give her gran a hug and tell her what a nice day she'd had at school. But he wasn't letting go.

She'd already tried kicking him, but that had just knocked her feet out from underneath herself and left her dangling by her head until she could regain her footing. (He wasn't squeezing her skull hard, just hard enough to keep a grip on her.)

Then she noticed the big tub of custard that had been brought in for the clown to dive into (but into which she hadn't dived, being a stupid old coward and preferring the safety net). It wasn't far away at all.

By wiggling sideways Piltdown was able to get one of her feet up and over the rim of the tub and, with a bit of effort and determination, managed to tip it up, sending a glugging slow wave of yellow towards her.

‘Custard spill!' shouted Mrs Stump, honking wildly, twanging her braces and
running in circles, her big shoes flapping the sawdust into the air and her bow tie spinning like a propellor.

It was a natural clown reflex.

Mr Stump, on the other hand, looked down to see his feet being slowly lapped at by the gloopy yellow mess, and immediately slipped over,
finally
letting go of Piltdown as he did so.

She sprang away, running ahead of the spreading yellow puddle, across the sawdust ring and towards the tent's exit flapway on the other side of the ring. Between her and the exit were Miss Tremble's horses, who'd huddled together for their pre-rehearsal pep talk, and fearlessly, knowing anyone who followed her would have to do the same, she ducked down and plunged between the horses' legs, and went running, running, running.

Meanwhile, it was lunchtime in the school.

Fizzlebert stood in the lunch queue, holding a tray in one hand. The other one was attached to Mr Mann's wrist by what you or I might call a pair of handcuffs (but which Mr Mann called
personal patented anti-escape child container-restrainers
). Apparently Fizz, or ‘Piltdown' as he was still being called, was a ‘flight risk', and Mr Mann was being paid to keep an eye on him. (Prevention, as they say, being better than chasing someone down the street shouting, ‘Come here, you've got to go back to school, you rascal, you!')

He'd managed to find out that after lunch there was only an hour and a half before it was hometime. But he'd also learnt that Mr Mann
was
going to take him straight back to Piltdown's gran's house. Everything was going wrong.

What would Piltdown's gran say when Fizz was dropped off on her doorstep? Would she recognise that he wasn't her granddaughter? How would Fizz explain it to her? He could picture the scene and it was muddled, confused and complicated. He'd had experience of old women before and he didn't think back to it with fond memories. This old lady had shouted very loudly in the middle of the night, and that was when she was in a
good mood
. Imagine how she'd shout when she was given a Fizzlebert instead of a Piltdown. She might get angry. And she had an axe. Fizz stopped thinking about it.

He shuffled forward with the queue, trying to think nice thoughts, until he was in front of a pretty young woman holding a ladle.

Fizz knew all about canteens because he had his dinner in the circus's Mess Tent every night (and often he had his lunch there too, at lunchtime (and occasionally his breakfast (and sometimes, now and then, a mid-morning snack or spot of afternoon tea))). Cook dished up delightful food (ever since Dr Surprise had hypnotised him into being a Good Chef in an earlier book): big bubbling pots of stew and vats of flavourful soup or trays of sumptuous roast things. (Except on the rare and far-between days when his ears sparked and his eyes flickered and he made something like the aforementioned ham and pee soup or the not-previously-mentioned pickled egg surprise (the surprise being it was a flavour of ice cream and the second surprise being ‘that's all there is!'). Mostly
Cook made the circus Mess Tent a place of treats.)

‘Chips?' the young woman said.

‘Yes please,' said Fizz.

He liked chips.

She dipped her ladle down into the bowl and scooped up five or six limp-looking pale drooping oblongs. She dropped them on to a plate. They went ‘splat', which wasn't the ‘chippest' sound Fizz had ever heard.

‘Broccoli?' she asked.

Even before Fizz had said, ‘Yes,' she'd scooped a ladleful of grey-green goop up and dolloped it on top of the ‘chips'.

‘Meat?' she said unspecifically, dribbling a steaming lumpy brown slime on top of the ‘vegetables'.

Fizz looked at the quivering, sloppy pile of
things he'd been given and heard his stomach get on the phone to the travel agent's to ask if there were any spaces left on the next flight to Anywhere Elseville, Farawayvia. It didn't look good.

‘What do you say, Truffle?' Mr Mann hissed, jangling the handcuff.

Fizz looked up at the pretty dinner lady and said, ‘Thank you,' in a small and queasy voice.

‘Rice pudding?' she said, dipping her ladle in yet another pot.

‘I haven't got a bowl,' Fizz said, but she wasn't listening and simply added the blobby grey paste to his plate.

‘Jam?'

‘No thank you,' Fizz muttered as a rocky lump of red thudded on top of his meal,
splattering his school uniform jumper with droplets of dripping ‘food'.

‘Yum, yum,' said Mr Mann, biting into a fresh, crisp, juicy, luscious green apple he'd pulled from his pocket.

Back in the Big Top things hadn't gone exactly to plan.

Piltdown had thought running between Miss Tremble's horses' legs while they were distracted having their pre-rehearsal team talk would have thrown any Stump-related pursuers off her scent, or at least given her a head start when it came to running for the exit, but …

Horses have long memories, and it had been less than half an hour since this not-Fizzlebert, now darting about between their
legs, had unexpectedly run across their backs. They were still miffed. Even though Miss Tremble had given them a quick brush, and got the worst of the footprints off, they hadn't forgotten and they hadn't forgiven.

Teeth snapped around Piltdown as she dodged left and right. Big flapping flappy horse lips wrinkled and flapped and dripped horse spit either side of her as
snorfing
horse-noses nudged her this way and that.

‘Now, now. Gentlemen, please,' Miss Tremble said, from somewhere near the middle of the crowd of horses. ‘Leave Fizzlebert alone. He's having a strange day.'

(After finding there'd been no champagne after all, she'd wandered off to prepare her horses instead of listening to the Stumps learn that ‘Fizz' wasn't Fizz after all, so she was still under the impression that ‘Fizz'
was
Fizz. If she'd known ‘Fizz'
wasn't
Fizz she might not have been so kind, since a member of one's (circus) family having an off day and upsetting a few people is one thing, but a stranger sneaking in and pretending to be a member of one's (circus) family and upsetting people is something else entirely.)

‘No, come on, W.B. Yeats, that's not fair, don't bite the coat. Let it go. Arkle, it's not
nice to sneeze on boys. Don't do it again. No, Basil Bunting, don't trip him up …'

As much as the horses loved Miss Tremble, they didn't actually understand English (because they were horses).

Piltdown was tripped by a horse (Basil Bunting, presumably) and found herself face down in the sawdust staring at a pair of highly polished thigh-high black boots. And a little pink hand.

‘Here, Fizz, let me help you up,' Miss Tremble said.

Piltdown took hold of the hand and pulled herself to her feet, but she'd had enough of this whole thing.

‘Flippin' 'eck,' she shouted. ‘'Ow many times? I ain't your flippin' Fizzledork. I just wanna go 'ome now.'

‘Oh,' said Miss Tremble, stroking T.S. Eliot's mane to soothe herself. She didn't like being shouted at.

Fizzlebert and Mr Mann sat side by side at a table all by themselves.

Fizz poked the pile of miscellaneous gloop on his plate with a fork while Mr Mann talked on his phone.

‘Yes,' he was saying to whoever was on the other end, ‘dreadful child. Keeps running away … That's right, that one … Yes, silly hair … That's right, stupid name … Terrible underpants.' And so on.