Fizzlebert Stump (16 page)

‘Piltdown Truffle,' shouted Mrs Scrapie, catching sight of Fizz, ‘stop where you are. Do not approach the weird people on horses.'

Mr Carvery drove his little golf cart directly at Fizz, but Fizz brushed it aside, knocking it over and spilling the tracksuit-clad teacher to the ground.

He said, ‘Sorry,' but he didn't stop walking.

As he pushed his way through the other kids (which wasn't hard, since they saw him coming and backed away like the Red Sea had when Moses got near it in that old story), still carrying a groaning Mr Mann over his shoulder, Mrs Scrapie shouted again.

‘Children, stop her! And Truffle, put that truant officer down.'

For a moment the children in the playground were torn. On the one hand, they
knew they ought to do what Mrs Scrapie told them, because she was the headmistress and the corridor outside her office had plenty of chairs for them to sit on while waiting to hear her thoughts on the depth of her disappointment at their wrongdoing and the personal pain that their disobedience causes her. But on the other (and much bigger) hand, no one wanted to get in the way of Piltdown Truffle, a girl who had been a rotten bullying nuisance ever since she first turned up the week before and who was carrying a grown (and groaning) man over her shoulder. That was a good indication of whether you ought to get in someone's way or not.

And on the third hand, there were still funny-looking people riding beautiful white horses that they could touch and poke,
especially if they pretended not to have heard the headmistress over all the noise.

Fizz pushed on, unhindered.

Now his dad was wading forward from the other side.

‘Fizz!' he shouted. ‘There you are!'

Honk
,
honk
,
honk
, went Mrs Stump as she made her way through the sea of kids too.

(It is hard for a clown to wade through children. They like poking clowns even more than touching horses. At best a horse will be warm and furry, whereas a clown might give you custard.)

‘Mum! Dad!' shouted Fizz as he made his way towards them.

He waved the truant officer at them.

‘Young man,' said a policeman, stepping
into his way. ‘Would you be so good as to put the gentleman down?'

‘
Young man?
' crackled Mr Carvery scornfully through his megaphone. ‘Officer,
that
is a girl and a right devil of one too.'

The policeman looked Fizz up and down and apologised. ‘Nevertheless,' he went on, ‘I would be most obliged if you would gently lower the sleeping gentleman to the ground.'

‘I
am
a boy,' said Fizz as he gently dropped Mr Mann on the ground.

Fizz was glad to put him down as he'd started getting heavy and had started wriggling a bit too.

‘Of course he's a boy,' said Mr Stump, arriving next to the policeman.

The policeman had pulled his notebook
out of his pocket and was licking the end of a little pencil.

‘Name, sir?'

‘Mr Stump,' said Mr Stump.

‘And would you tell me why you're here in a school playground on this fine afternoon?'

As Mr Stump began to explain, and as the policeman began to write the story down (not as well or as thoroughly, it should be noted, as I've written it), Fizz knelt down and rummaged through Mr Mann's pockets, searching for the key to the handcuffs.

He'd just found it tucked inside a used handkerchief, stuck to a half-eaten boiled sweet, when Mr Mann's eyes flicked open and stared straight into his.

‘Truffle,' he hissed. ‘I've got you now.'

Fizz tried to jab the small key into the
tiny keyhole as Mr Mann reached down for the tranquilliser gun that was holstered on his hip.

Ting, ting,
went the key as it failed to find the hole.

Pop,
went the catch on the holster.

Blurp
, went the sleeping potion in the gun's glass vial as Mr Mann pulled it out.

Fizz looked up. His dad was deep in conversation with the policeman.

‘Dad,' he said. ‘Quick.'

‘Hang on a moment, Fizz,' said his dad. ‘PC Gurney here is just telling me about his uncle who was a juggler with
Wally's Wondershow
—'

Fizz was on his own.

He put his foot on Mr Mann's wrist, the one that he was chained to, and heaved. The metal chain holding the two locking
hoops of the handcuffs together began to stretch and screech and
POP!
just as Mr Mann fired a tranquilliser dart at him, Fizz flew fallingly and luckily backwards.

Fizz banged into the policeman and knocked him over.

Mr Stump caught his new friend before he hit the ground but Fizz fell flat on his back and watched as the feathered dart flew high up into the sky above him.

Mr Mann climbed to his feet, his face like thunder.

‘You trod on my hand! You broke my
personal patented anti-escape child container-restrainers
! And they were new. You're gonna pay for that, you evil little—'

Whatever it was Mr Mann was going to call Fizzlebert we'll never know, because it
was at that point that gravity finished working its magic on the recently fired tranquilliser dart.

What goes up, the saying has it, is bound to hit you in the back of the neck if you're not careful.

Mr Mann fell to the floor in a slumbering heap.

Fizz got up.

‘Officer,' Mr Carvery megaphoned from the other side of the pavement. ‘Please arrest that girl for whatever it is she just did to the truant officer.'

PC Gurney was too busy thanking Mr Stump for having caught him to hear.

Fizz's mum finally arrived (it is always a slow journey for a clown through a playground, as mentioned before). She swept Fizz up into a big silky embrace at the same time as Dr Surprise brought forward a girl who looked very similar to Fizz. A girl who, in fact, looked more like Fizz than Fizz did, since Fizz was wearing a school uniform
and she was wearing Fizz's ex-Ringmaster's coat.

‘What do you say, young lady?' Dr Surprise said, adjusting his moustache which had been joggled loose during all the horse riding.

Piltdown said nothing. She looked at the ground and huffed.

‘Apology accepted,' said Fizz, wriggling free from his mum's cuddle. ‘Can I have my coat back please?'

The crowd of kids gathered round looked at him and looked at Piltdown and looked at him and looked at Piltdown and looked at him and looked at Piltdown and then presumably-Charlotte said, ‘Hang on a minute!'

When Mr Mann eventually woke up, the circus folk had all vanished and he had a headache.

He was lying on a bench in the school hall. Mrs Scrapie was looming over him.

‘A right mess you made of that,' she said. ‘You brought us the wrong child. Twice. And we looked a proper laughing stock in front of the children. It's going to take an awfully long time before the little angels let us forget this. I dread to think what next parents' evening's going to be like. A nightmare, I dare say. I think next time one of our darlings goes missing I'm going to phone Stalky & Sons. I've heard good things about them.'

She took Mr Mann's business card from her pocket and ripped it up in front of him.

And then she tore up the invoice he'd left on her desk for the Piltdown Truffle job. Without paying it.

Mr Mann was not happy, but there was
nothing he could do. He just hoped that news of what had happened didn't reach the Guild of Independent Travelling Truant Officers (GITTO) and get published in the ‘And Now For The Funnies …' section of the newsletter.

(You'll be pleased to know: it did.)

Fizz was very happy to be back in the circus. Back with his family, his huge and extended family. The Ringmaster had him tell everybody the story of his day before dinner. Everyone laughed at him, but in a friendly way, and applauded when he first escaped the school and then cheered Bongo Bongoton when Fizz mentioned him and the conversation about the potatoes. Bongo took a proper clown's bow, fell over, climbed back to his
feet using an invisible ladder and fell over again.

Then Fish decided to take a bow, even though he hadn't really had anything to do in this book, but Cook had made a lovely seafood lasagne and there was always the possibility that a good bow might encourage someone to be generous with their leftovers.

That night the show went well. There were plenty of people in (the Ringmaster had handed out a lot of free tickets in the playground), and they did the things audiences do in all the right places (clap, laugh, cheer, go ‘ooh', fall off their chairs with excitement, leave at the end of the show). Fizz was glad he'd had the chance to prove he was who he said he was in front of his former one-time
classmates. Even if he was never going to see them again it was nice to know that they knew the truth and didn't think badly of him. But all the same there was something about the show that left him feeling a bit down. He'd scanned all the faces and one had been missing.

And so, after the audience had gone, he and his parents and a few others went on a door-to-door search of houses that backed on to the park to find which one was Dympna's.

When they found it, they got her out of bed and, in her hermetically-sealed, oxygen-rich front room, put on a sawdust-free show just for her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN AND A HALF

In which a loose end is discussed and in which mutiny is mentioned

Now, if this was a
story
and not just an accurate telling of real events, there'd be some sort of moral or lesson learnt.

For example, during Fizz's time as ‘Piltdown' he would have made friends with some of the kids in the class, after having done something special and funny and wonderful for them. They would all have thought that he actually
was
Piltdown and so when she was dragged back to school the next day they'd be much nicer to her and she'd be able to start afresh.

Or
while Piltdown was busy being ‘Fizz' at the circus she'd've learnt some important lesson about how being nice to people was better than being mean, and about how being at school and learning stuff is better than whatever the alternative is. And then when she was dragged back to school the next day, she'd turn over a new leaf, and after a rocky start, be able to become a better person all round.

Unfortunately this isn't a cleverly shaped story with a neat moral to be drawn from it. And do you know why that is? It's because I would never lie to you. I respect you, my readers, much too much to just go around making stuff up. Everything I've written is
just simply exactly what happened and sometimes real life isn't as well constructed as a novel. I'm sorry.

So, what actually happened was this:

That afternoon Piltdown ran back to her gran's house where she ate peanuts until her gran came home.

She got into trouble at school the next day and played truant again and again.

Eventually, when she turned sixteen, without a great deal of education behind her, she joined the Merchant Navy as a junior pot scrubber and was involved in a mutiny off the coast of Honduras.

The mutiny didn't go well and she was cast adrift in a lifeboat with two other mutineers and a small supply of biscuits and a bottle of
sparkling mineral water. (Which meant they didn't even get to play the, ‘Is that still mineral water?' ‘Yes, it's
still
mineral water,' game in the lifeboat, which would have passed the time quite amusingly.)

A year later she was found living wild on a desert island having eaten her companions.
Her hair had grown long and she'd trained a parrot to braid it while saying swear words.

Just before she was rescued and taken back to civilisation she was killed by a falling coconut.

If only she had tried harder to be nice to people at school and had paid more attention in class.

So, maybe there is a moral to the story after all:
Children, beware coconuts
.