Fizzlebert Stump and the Girl Who Lifted Quite Heavy Things Read online

  For Claire, Dom and Freya

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  ow, I don’t know if you ever watch the television. Of course I don’t, how could I? This is only the first sentence of the book and I don’t even know your name. We’ve not been introduced properly. I’m the chap telling you this story, my name’s probably on the front cover somewhere (it escapes me right now), and you are . . . ?

  Sorry about that, but that’s what happens if you interrupt on the first page. I get distracted. Okay. Here we go. Let’s start again.

  Ahem.

  I don’t know if you ever watch the television, but if you do you might have noticed that sometimes programmes have a little sequence before the opening credits. Sometimes it’s all the usual characters you see week in and week out (maybe they’re sharing a joke or recapping what happened in the last episode), but occasionally it’s people you’ve never seen before. More than that, it’s people you don’t know doing stuff that makes you wonder if you’ve even tuned in to the right channel. What is all this? you think. But then the theme tune starts and the credits roll and you sit back and forget about it until much later on when it all becomes relevant. That is to say: if you’re patient, it’ll all make sense in the end.

  Well, the first chapter of this book is a bit like that. If you’ve read one of these books about Fizzlebert Stump before (the ones I spent ages writing, so you should read them, if only out of politeness) you’ll notice right away that he’s not in the first scene. In fact, no one you know is. None of his friends from the circus where he lives are in it. His mum (a clown) isn’t in it, his dad (a strongman) isn’t in it. Fish (a sea lion) isn’t in it. None of the people you’ve read about in all the other books are in it.

  And if you’ve never read any of the other books about Fizzlebert and his adventures (books that, as I said, I spent ages writing), then it’s probably just as important to let you know that this first chapter’s an odd thing, because I don’t want you sitting there reading it saying to yourself: ‘Well, I don’t think much of this writer, he’s completely forgotten his main character.’ Fizz will turn up, if you’re patient. Okay? Is that clear? No complaining about this beginning? Thank you.

  Now, I’ll get on with it.

  Scene one.

  The first scene.

  The beginning of the book. Finally, after all that apologetic preamble. (Preamble is an interesting word actually: amble means ‘walk around pointlessly’, and pre- means ‘before’, so it means: ‘a pointless wander round beforehand’, which is, if you think about it for a moment and stop interrupting with silly questions, more or less exactly what just happened.)

  As I said: now we begin.

  It was a dark and stormy night. Lightning flashed like jagged electric spears beneath great black clouds. The rain lashed in roaring gushing sheets from the sky. Windows rattled in their frames, trees rocked this way and that, and the noise of the pouring rain on the roofs of the buildings sounded like a machine gun spraying its bullets across a particularly soggy battlefield.

  (That’s very descriptive writing, isn’t it? Really setting the scene nicely. It was well worth waiting for, don’t you think? Sets a high standard for the rest of the book.)

  It wasn’t the sort of night to be out on. Anyone with any sense was at home, locked in behind waterproof doors, tucked up under a duvet reading a book by torchlight. Even owls were huddled together in their barns, keeping warm by hooting at each other, except they didn’t know they were being hooted at because the storm was roaring too loudly outside to hear a hoot. It wasn’t a good night to be an owl.

  It wasn’t a good night to be a balloonist either. (And by balloonist I don’t mean a children’s entertainer who folds long sausage-shaped balloons into the dim likenesses of animals or bicycles or historical figures, but the sort of person who flies a hot air balloon.)

  You must know what a hot air balloon looks like – a great big upside-down tear-drop thing, full of hot air, with a wicker basket dangling underneath where the pilot and his or her passengers sit turning the knobs on the burner which shoots out flames, keeping the hot air hot and the balloon in the sky.

  Just in case you still don’t know what I’m talking about, here comes a balloon now.

  Out of the storm a dark shape approaches. A flash of lightning explodes behind it, but all we see is the black silhouette of a hot air balloon and it’s getting bigger, it’s coming closer.

  Now we’re inside the balloon’s basket. There are two figures looking harassed, panicked, worried and windswept. One is a man and one is a woman and both wear leather flying caps with rain-flecked goggles and have beautiful moustaches that flap about in the storm. Between them is the burner, the thing like a large camping stove that shoots flames into the mouth of the balloon. But tonight the flames are small, and they flicker as if they’re about to go out.

  ‘We need more height,’ the man shouts, his words barely reaching across the basket before being whipped away on the wind.

  ‘I’m trying. I’m trying,’ the woman shouts back, fiddling with the knobs on her side of the burner. ‘We need more gas.’

  The man rushes to the front of the basket, leans over and looks out into the storm. He lifts his goggles to see better but is forced to squint as the rain lashes his eyeballs.

  ‘A tree,’ he shouts suddenly, pointing. ‘A tree!’

  The basket smashes into the leafy, branchy, bushy head of the tree in question and bursts out the other side.

  ‘More height,’ he shouts again, before turning back to the burner to help the woman with one of the controls, which seems to be jammed.

  Now, suddenly, the scene changes. The noise quietens. We’re indoors. A perfectly normal farmer is walking across the landing in the early hours of the morning. He’s coming from the bathroom where he’s just had a wee, going back to his bedroom, where he’s been tucked under the duvet with a good book. He pulls the curtain to one side to have a quick look out the window to see if the storm’s ending yet. It isn’t.

  Rain is beating against the glass. Outside he can just about see the dark shapes of trees that separate the farmhouse from the fields, and then . . . Oh! He sees something else.

  His jaw drops, his eyes go wide: something’s coming!

  A dark shape in the sky, huge and getting bigger. It’s coming straight at him. He sees a flickering spurt of fire in the middle of it and then he thinks he can make out voices, but the wind is too strong, the rain too loud and the glass in the windows too thick for him to hear what they’re saying anyway, and then . . .

  CRASH!

  A hot air balloon has flown into his farmhouse.

  And then, if this really were a television programme, just as you were sitting up and paying attention going, ‘Oh golly gosh, a hot air balloon has just flown into a house, what a nuisance!’, suddenly the credits sequence would start up. That theme tune you know so well would burst into life, all jolly and upbeat, and you’d be tapping your toes, maybe even singing along . . .

  Hey! Guys! It’s the Fizzlebert Show!

  Grab your hat, it’s time to go.

  Pull on your coat and get in the tent,

  an hour with Fizz is an hour well spent.

  Thump, thump, thump, thumpity-thump.

  This is the show about Fizzlebert S
tump!

  (or something like that)

  . . . and, one after another, each of the characters would appear, turn to the camera and smile as their actor’s name is shown underneath, except, of course, in this book there are no actors (except Alexander Fakespeer, The Man What Does Shakespeare, an act from another different circus who appears briefly in the background in Chapter Seven).

  So, the music’s rolling, the song’s singing, and a short boy with an enormous beard tumbles across the sawdusty ground, springs to his feet, turns to face the camera and gives a big thumbs up: featuring Wystan Barboozul as Wystan Barboozul, The Bearded Boy.

  Then the camera focuses on a huge pair of shoes and slowly pans up, past voluminous silky trousers and a great wobbly silky tummy, until it rests on the sad face of a clown who blinks widely out of the telly before vanishing behind the surprise arrival (except it happens in the credits every week, so it’s no surprise to you) of a custard pie. As the custard drips: with Mrs Stump as Mrs Stump, The Fumbling Gloriosus.

  A picture of a caravan. A wobbly caravan. The camera pans down to the man underneath the caravan, holding it in the air with one hand. He’s looking at the fingernails of the other hand. He notices the camera, brushes his little moustache, grins and, just as he drops the caravan on top of himself, the caption reads: and Mr Stump as Mr Stump, The Strongman.

  Then the music reaches its peak and a bright-looking, scruffy-haired lad in a red Ringmaster’s frockcoat that’s an inch too big for him turns, faces you, grins and winks: starring Fizzlebert Stump as Fizzlebert Stump.

  And just as you think that’s the end of it (except you know it’s not, because you’re a fan and this is the bit you wait for before going to make a cup of tea every week) the music dwindles down to its final chords, and, out of nowhere, a honking barking noise is heard and Fizz is knocked out of the picture by the flolloping shape of a sea lion: and introducing Fish as Fish.

  Fish honks enthusiastically, juggles a beautiful silvery sprat, winks at the camera and swallows the fish whole before letting out a burp of a remarkably smelly scent. (Luckily you can’t smell it through the telly.)

  The last cymbal tinkle fades away and the show (or in this case, ‘the book’) begins properly . . .

  . . . in Chapter Two.

  izzlebert Stump, a dashing, red-headed, heroic-looking boy with a long frockcoat that once belonged to the Ringmaster flapping around his knees, jumped grumpily down the caravan steps and kicked a pebble that was lying in the grass. (The pebble hadn’t done anything to deserve such a kick, but sometimes the world isn’t fair.)

  Let me explain quickly why he’s grumpy before we get on. It won’t take a moment. Fizz, the Boy Who Put His Head in the Lion’s Mouth, the boy audiences loved to watch do his brave and dangerous act, the boy who took long bows every night to riotous applause, no longer bravely put his head in a dangerous lion’s mouth. If you read Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Cried Fish (probably still available from most good bookshops, several mediocre ones and the newspaper kiosk down near that bit of beach where all those jellyfish washed up last summer), you’ll remember that Charles, the lion, was getting too old. He was packed away, kindly and with much love, at the end of that book to the Twilight Tops Retirement Home and was probably, at this very moment, sipping a tall cool glass of antelope juice on a sunlounger by the pool.

  Captain Fox-Dingle had replaced Charles with Kate, a friendly, if sharp-toothed crocodile, but the Boy Who Put His Head in a Crocodile’s Mouth act Fizz had hoped they’d do hadn’t worked out for various reasons, mostly because it was a stupid idea in the first place. So, now Fizz was without an act and, what with the Circus of Circuses show in four days’ time (I’ll explain that later), he was grumpy, grumbly and feeling ever so slightly sorry for himself.

  Now, read on.

  Fizz brushed his hair out of his eyes and began walking slowly towards some of the other caravans of his circus. He was looking for Wystan Barboozul, the bearded boy, his sort of friend. It wasn’t that they weren’t friends, but they weren’t the sort of friends who’d ever be best friends. They were too different for that. They had different interests. Fizz liked to talk about books he’d read, and Wystan liked to stick things in his beard. But they were the only two kids in the circus, and so they spent quite a lot of their time together.

  This morning, however, things weren’t as simple as that. Before Fizz even reached Wystan’s caravan (which was actually Miss Tremble’s caravan (she trained the horses)) he found his way blocked by a small crowd of people.

  It was a small crowd of short people, he noticed as he got closer. And then he realised they weren’t short people at all, they were other children. (Not that children aren’t people: some of them definitely are, and the others should probably be included out of kindness.)

  ‘Hey!’ shouted one of the boys, in a friendly way.

  ‘Hi,’ said Fizz unenthusiastically back.

  The others turned to look. There were six of them, five boys and a girl. They all looked round about Fizz’s age, give or take a few years in this or that direction.

  ‘Wotcha,’ said a second boy.

  Fizz stopped walking. There was no way round them except by going through them. There were caravans on either side.

  ‘Yeah, hi,’ he mumbled. He knew what was coming. It was what he’d been worried about for the whole of the last week. It was what had made him grumpy last night. It was what had spoilt his mood over breakfast. It was what had made him kick a defenceless, innocent pebble just now. (I mentioned this a couple of pages ago. Remember?)

  ‘Fizzlebert Stamp,’ said a third boy, a little taller than the rest.

  He had slick black hair that flopped down over one eye and a black leather jacket slung over one shoulder. He chewed his fingernails as he spoke, but not in a nervous way, just in a way that made everyone think it was cool to chew your fingernails when you spoke. He was a horrible boy, but most people didn’t notice that because he mumbled and winked and clicked his fingers and that was all very cool too.

  ‘Stump,’ corrected Fizz.

  ‘Fizzlebert Stamp,’ repeated the lad.

  Fizz sighed and said, with mock politeness, ‘Good morning, Cedric Greene.’

  Fizz had seen him once before when they were younger. Cedric was with a different circus. He did an act . . . oh, what did he do? Fizz had never seen it, but he’d heard about it. It was something to do with fire, he thought. Anyway, what Fizz did know was that Cedric’s surname was actually Blue, and he was waiting for the flicker of annoyance that getting his name wrong (on purpose) would send across the older boy’s face. (Just as the Stamp/Stump ‘mistake’ had annoyed Fizz.)

  Except the older boy just said, ‘Oh, you remember me? I thought you might. Good on you, Slump.’

  He’d done it again. Look at that. And Fizz suddenly had the very real sinking feeling that the lad’s name was Greene after all, and he’d just thought it was Blue because he’d been so busy trying to remember the right name but then say it wrongly that he’d probably got it muddled and had thought of the wrong name but said it rightly. Blast it.

  ‘What do you want?’ Fizz snapped, not having time for all this. (Which wasn’t true, he had plenty of time.)

  ‘What do I want?’ Cedric nibbled a fingernail as he looked thoughtful. ‘I want to see this famous act of yours. You and this lion.’

  Fizz didn’t answer, not because he couldn’t think of anything to say, but because the other kids were laughing too loudly.

  He hadn’t met them all before, but he read the British Board of Circuses’ Newsletter often enough to be able to put names to most of them (the circus world wasn’t huge and every month the BBC Newsletter ran a column called ‘Stars of Tomorrow’ (Fizz had featured in it twice)). They all came from the other circuses Fizz’s circus was parked up next to.

  Besides Cedric there were four boys, none of whom looked as cool as he did, but all of whom seemed to be hanging on the leather-jacketed lad’s every word, snee
r and wink. Fizz could name them all (Norman Dance, acrobat; Vincent Franklin, juggler; Abercrombie Slapdash, magician’s stooge; Simon Pie, clown-in-training).

  But the girl, though . . . Fizz didn’t recognise her. He couldn’t think of any girls he’d read about in the Newsletter who looked like her (Jemima Nail, The Nimble Nightingale, for instance, had long black hair (quite the opposite of this girl), and Samantha Crinkle, The Child of Mystery, had a nose shaped like a rabbit’s drawing of a nose). Maybe she was new, or maybe she (imagine that!) didn’t do an act. Whatever the case, she was listening intently to Cedric’s words, just like the rest of them.

  ‘I, um. . .’ Fizz said. ‘We, um. . . don’t do the lion act any more.’

  ‘No?’ said Cedric, teasing the word out to silly length (sort of: ‘Noo-ooo-o-o-o-ooo?’).

  Fizz knew that they all knew Charles had retired. Word travelled fast in the circus world (and there’d been a small article on page 2 (the back page) of the most recent BBC Newsletter), but they had to go through this game all the same.

  ‘The way I heard it,’ Cedric said, ‘is that you got your head stuck and pulled all his teeth out in the middle of the show. Big-Headed Stump, that’s what I hear they call you.’

  ‘No,’ Fizz said angrily, his hair bristling. ‘That’s not what happened.’

  (It wasn’t what happened. Not in a show. It had happened once in a rehearsal, but that was different; the shows had gone flawlessly right until the end.)

  ‘Well then, the other thing I heard,’ Cedric said, chewing a fingernail, the other kids hanging on his every word, ‘was that it was bad breath that ended the show. I mean, there’s always a spot of halitosis in a lion act, but when it gets so bad that . . .’

  ‘Charles didn’t—’ Fizz tried to interject.

  ‘. . . that even the lion complains, you know, about the boy breathing out in his mouth, about Fizzlebert Stunk, well, that’s the end of the show.’