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

  Wystan said nothing, but tugged at his beard in a way that said, ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Okay,’ Fizz said and he looked at Alice. She smiled (her eyebrows met when she smiled, it was odd but oddly cute) and nodded.

  She took hold of Wystan’s left arm and Fizz took hold of his right and, without a word, they frogmarched him off in the direction of the Big Big Top. (Frogs, it should be said, are rubbish at marching, and so was Wystan. A more accurate description would be ‘frog-half-dragged-and-half-pulled’, and, to be honest, we could probably do without the frog bit entirely. And when I said ‘without a word’ that just meant Fizz and Alice were silent. Wystan, for his part, gave voice to a number of rude and rudeish words which were fortunately muffled by his beard so that you don’t have to hear them.)

  I realise we’ve got this far, by the way, with all these revelations and these new characters popping up all over the place without me even telling you where the circus had parked up for the book. I mean, anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of circus life would have been wondering why on earth there are all these other circuses hanging around. When a circus stops in a town to put on its show, it’s usually the only circus in town. Circuses don’t often meet other circuses, so this does all seem a bit weird.

  Trust me though, I’ll explain everything in the next chapter, along with giving you the first glimpse of Wystan’s parents (if that’s who they really are) and some further discoveries about this exciting new girl on the scene, Alice Crudge. Trust me, I’m not a doctor.

  ystan had quickly given in to the plan. He wasn’t happy about it, but the other two weren’t having to drag him any more, although he was still managing to drag his feet all by himself.

  And then there, in a little gaggle of circus folk, by the Big Big Top’s backstage flap they saw them: Wystan’s parents.

  Fizzlebert recognised them instantly. He didn’t need the bearded boy to point them out. There were only two people in that little crowd who looked like the people in Wystan’s photograph.

  The man was wearing plain blue overalls and had short brown hair and a big curling aviator’s moustache. Of course, he also had a nose and eyes and ears and all the usual bits as well, but it was the moustache Fizz recognised (even though he’d only seen the photo once, months before, it had stuck in his mind). The woman, on the same hand, was also wearing blue overalls and had short brown hair and a big curling aviator’s moustache. Like the man she had all the rest of the normal features, naturally, but Fizz’s eyes were drawn back, time and again, to her moustache. The way it matched the man’s, but pointed down where his pointed up, was quite uncanny. She definitely looked a bit like the woman in Wystan’s photo. (The bit being, mainly, the moustache.) If these were his parents then it was clear where he got his hairy genes from (and I don’t mean furry trousers, as you well knew, so it was silly to even think I might have been thinking about making a joke at a time like this).

  They were about to go into the tent. Mr Gomez, the farmer, had just gone in and they were following, but Fizz ran over and shouted for them to stop.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Barboozul,’ he said. ‘Have I got a surprise for you!’

  They stopped and looked at the excitable boy.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Look,’ Fizz said, as Alice pushed Wystan in front of her, ‘it’s Wystan!’

  ‘Wystan who?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Wystan Barboozul. Your son.’

  The woman looked at the man and then they both looked at Wystan.

  ‘I don’t remember having one of those,’ the man said.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Fizz said. ‘He was a baby when your balloon got blown off course. You went missing.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve not gone missing,’ said the woman. ‘We’re right here.’

  ‘But before,’ Fizz said. ‘You went missing before.’

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ the man said, stroking his moustache.

  There was a shout from inside the tent.

  ‘Where are you two?’ called Mr Gomez, sticking his head through the flap. ‘We’ve got judging to do.’

  ‘Oh hello,’ said the woman.

  ‘Come on,’ said Gomez. ‘Quickly. Chop chop.’

  Without looking back the pair who looked exactly like Wystan’s parents followed the farmer into the Big Top. The three kids were left tapping the grass with their feet out the back.

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ Fizz asked.

  ‘It wouldn’t do no good,’ Wystan said, gloomily. ‘You saw them. They don’t know who I am. They didn’t recognise me.’

  ‘But maybe if you’d just said “Hello!” even . . .’ Fizz began, wondering if that would have helped. It really had looked as if they didn’t know who Wystan was.

  ‘Are they them?’ Alice asked.

  Wystan nodded.

  ‘I’m sure of it. That’s them, and they don’t want me.’

  ‘No,’ Alice said. ‘It’s not that, I don’t reckon. I think they’ve got amnesia.’

  ‘Of course!’ Fizz shouted, ‘That’s it. Oh, Alice! You’re brilliant.’

  She took a bow.

  ‘What’s “amnesia”?’ Wystan asked, chewing the corner of his beard.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Fizz said, sounding slightly surprised because it was the sort of thing that was always happening to people in books he read.

  ‘I did know,’ Wystan said, slowly, ‘but I’ve forgotten.’

  Fizz laughed and slapped his friend on the beard, thinking he was making a joke.

  Alice coughed gently and Fizz looked at Wystan’s face. It wasn’t an I-just-made-a-joke sort of face.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, trying to sound as if he hadn’t just slapped his friend’s beard and laughed. ‘Amnesia is when you forget everything. They must’ve hit their heads or something, and have forgotten all about you.’

  Wystan gave a big sigh which rustled through his beard like a sorrowful autumn wind through a leafless (but furry) weeping willow.

  ‘Well, that’s that then,’ he said, definitely not tearfully (unless you looked really close, but that would be rude, so we won’t). ‘Nothing to be done.’

  Before Fizz could reach out to stop him, or say ‘No it isn’t, there’s loads we can do to make them remember you, Wystan Barboozul, the Bearded Boy and expert acrobat’, he had run off.

  ‘Come on,’ Fizz said. ‘Let’s go get him.’

  Alice caught hold of his arm and said, ‘Don’t be daft. He wants to have a blub. Look at him, he’s all upset, and so would you be too. You gotta give him some space. Give him some time.’

  Fizz saw the wisdom of her words. They just added to his growing feeling that this bent-nosed, red-haired girl was . . . well, what? He didn’t want to think exactly what it was she was, rather, he just believed it was probably good.

  ‘Let’s go see what’s on,’ Alice said, grabbing his hand and pulling him into the cool dark of the Big Big Top.

  Fizz looked around the stalls and saw a few people sat about the place waiting to watch that morning’s acts. There probably weren’t more than a dozen of them. Most of the other circus folk were busy rehearsing, practising or adding final, extra tricks to their already wonderful acts.

  The Big Big Top was the biggest Big Top he’d seen. It was much bigger than his circus’s one. Forgetting Wystan’s problems for the moment, Fizz felt his heart race. Oh, if only he could get to perform in there on Saturday night. Imagine the crowd! Thousands of them all watching him as he . . .

  Well? As he did what? Pretended to put his head in a pretend lion’s mouth? His heart sank. He’d been searching for days for a new act. Something he was good at, that would make him a star again. But so far, nothing. If only he could turn that nothing into a something. How hard could it be?

  His heart sank further, knocking his stomach to one side as it plunged towards the ground. He couldn’t help but remember the promise he’d made to Cedric, the challenge he’d thrown out, the words he’d said in the heat o
f the moment. Not only did he need to work up a new act for himself, for his own sake, but he also had to do it to stop that leather-jacketed bully, that smug show-off, that boy-who-said-he-had-a-lion from being such a smug, lion-owning, leather-jacketed bully.

  If Friday came and he had no act . . . well, he’d never be able to show his face again. He’d be crushed.

  He wasn’t much cheered when Alice said, ‘Look!’ She was pointing at the clowns who were warming up nearby. ‘There’s one of them kids that was teasing you.’

  It was Simon Pie, clown-in-training. He’d painted his face since we last saw him back in Chapter Two. It was now chalk white with big sad red lips. He wore the blue nose of a student clown.

  Fizz sniffed and looked away, only to see three figures settling themselves down behind a table at the edge of the sawdust ring.

  One of the figures was Mr Gomez, the farmer, a huge roundish shape, much like the vegetables he grew (I’ll tell you about those in a minute), with a fuzzy grey stubble over his chin and dark glasses over his eyes. And beside him, one sat either side, were the two moustachioed amnesiac-Wystan-parents. They must be his fellow judges, Fizz thought.

  It was only later on, after he’d spent a little more time with them, that Fizz wondered exactly how two such forgetful people could judge anything, but by then he had a good idea that Mr Gomez wasn’t big on taking advice and that they were in fact his ideal fellow judges.

  Actually now would probably be a good time, while Fizz and Alice watch Simon Pie and his fellow clowns go through their act, to explain exactly what’s going on with all these circuses and this farmer chap.

  To begin at the beginning, Mr Gomez’s farm wasn’t the biggest of farms. It had seven medium-sized fields in which he grew those odd-shaped things you sometimes see in the vegetable section of supermarkets but which you don’t know the name of and which you never see anyone buying. In the middle of the fields was his farmhouse, where he spent most of his time looking out the window and wondering what his vegetables were called.

  Come the autumn, when the last of his odd-shaped stock was sent off to the shops and before the next year’s crop had been sown, he opened his fields up to a different sort of farming. You might call it circus farming. (When he was a boy his father had known a man whose brother had married a woman whose uncle worked in a circus (he swept the sawdust), and this had planted in Mr Gomez’s heart a lifelong love of all things circussy.)

  For more years than he could count on a small abacus this Gathering (as they called it) had happened. The way it worked was this: in one of the seven fields he put up the Big Big Top, and in the others six specially invited circuses parked up. Then, over the course of a week, he saw all the acts from the six circuses, picked the very best ones and on Saturday night put on a show in the Big Top to which he sold tickets and invited the local press. It was usually filmed by a chap from Austrian television (or was it Australian television? Mr Gomez could never remember what the difference was, but they paid well for the privilege so he didn’t ask).

  He called it ‘The Circus Of Circuses’ and, even though he was just a farmer, the British Board of Circuses had smiled upon him and given him an ‘Official Honorary Member of the BBC’ certificate and a special badge he could wear during the Gathering. The BBC published a big glossy supplement with lots of photos of the Circus of Circuses show with a full list of acts in the Christmas edition of their official newsletter and anyone who was anyone, naturally, wanted to be in it (because they could send copies to their friends and family instead of having to write and photocopy those tedious letters saying things like ‘This year the Algebra family had a smashing time. Little Timmy went surfing in Cornwall with Mr Pickles who lives next door and Maisie caught cat flu from Mr Pickles who lives next door . . .’ that dreadful adults like to send to each other in their Christmas cards).

  What I’m saying is that, even though (as I’ve said several times) Mr Gomez was just a farmer, the Circus of Circuses show was a Big Deal in the circus world. For Fizz’s circus to be among the six that had been invited to compete this year had made their Ringmaster swell with pride. (Mrs Needlethrust, the circus’s nurse, had made him swallow a week’s worth of anti-inflammatory pills to counteract the swelling, even though he’d tried to explain to her that it was just a metaphor. ‘Nasty things, metaphors,’ she’d said, doubling the dose.)

  Now, back to Fizzlebert . . .

  Out in the ring half a dozen clowns were going through their routine, pouring custard in one another’s trousers, ‘accidentally’ knocking each other down with ladders they were carrying for no reason at all and pointing at other peoples’ misfortune. So far so normal. But then Simon Pie picked up a bucket from the side of the ring and threw it at the Chief Clown (he had the biggest bow tie, almost twice the size of his head, that’s how you knew he was the boss). Fizz expected yet more custard or whitewash or sparkly tinsel (which clowns use when they’ve got a volunteer from the audience (it gives them the experience of being attacked by a clown armed with a bucket of water or custard, but with none of the cleaning bills)), but what emerged was none of the usual things. It was fish.

  Oh, sure, there was some custard involved, but the custard was full of silvery fish-shaped things which Fizz, from a long familiarity, immediately recognised as being the silvery fish-shaped things that fish experts call ‘fish’.

  That the fish weren’t part of the act became apparent from what happened next.

  The Chief Clown, picking mackerel out of his clothes, started shouting at little Simon Pie (not using usual clown words either, but a whole different set of non-clown words that you won’t find in the dictionaries they keep in school but which you might hear on a late-night television programme about Hell’s Angels).

  Simon stood stock still in shock and gingerly looked inside the bucket (which was now empty) as if he might find a note written on the bottom of it explaining what had just happened. Finding nothing, he began to cry.

  There are few things sadder than seeing a clown-in-training cry, his tears leaving pink streaks down his cheeks where the face paint was stripped away.

  Few things are sadder, but I think some things are funnier.

  For example, six sea lions attacking a custard-and-fish-covered Chief Clown from six different directions at once. That would be pretty funny, yes? Well, I’m sorry to say most circuses don’t have a resident sea lion (they’re capricious animals (technically, ‘capricious’ means ‘having a head like a hedgehog’ (go look it up: as unlikely as it sounds I speak the truth) but here it just means moody or unpredictable (‘prickly’, if you like))), and so the Chief Clown was only attacked by one, Fish. (Not, as you might think if someone’s reading this out loud, by one fish but by one sea lion called Fish. Obviously.)

  This is how it happened: first Mr Gomez looked at the glass of water beside his notes on the table. He looked around the ring to see if anyone else had noticed it. He looked back. There were circular ripples appearing in the water. Regular, like a heartbeat. Something was coming this way. Then he felt a rumbling in the ground. Clowns began to look this way and that. Then the sawdust in the ring began to shake in the air. The Chief Clown stopped shouting at poor Simon and looked towards the main flapway where a slim shaft of sunlight could be seen. There was a noise from out there, from outside, a noise like distant thunder, coming closer. And then, through the flaps, burst a flolloping shape, dark, streamlined, toothy, smelly (both in the sense of ponging a bit of fish and also sniffing loudly at the air) and ever so hungry.

  Fish, Fizz knew, could smell fish from a mile and a half away and when he’d not eaten in the last seven minutes (or so) was drawn to a new fishy scent like a magnet to a bar of chocolate (a metal bar of chocolate, obviously).

  The Chief Clown was knocked to the ground as Fish landed on top of him, gobbling mackerel and sardines from where they’d fallen. Then, when all the loose fish were gone, the sea lion began rummaging inside the clown’s clothes for any strays.

&
nbsp; If a sea lion attacking a clown is funnier than a crying clown-in-training, then a Chief Clown screaming with fear at the snapping jaws of a rogue sea lion inside his voluminous silken custardy trousers is simply troubling. I’d look the other way if I were you.

  ‘Fish!’ Fizz shouted, climbing over the railing in between the seating and the ring. There was no one else from his circus there and he felt, somewhat, somehow, sort of, responsible for Fish’s actions. (Or at the very least he thought someone was going to make a fuss about this (probably the Chief Clown) and if they knew Fizz had been there and had done nothing they’d include him in the fuss.)

  Fish wasn’t finished yet and the Chief Clown was still wriggling and writhing in the sawdust.

  Mr Gomez and the two moustachioed judges were watching with interest and taking notes. Every now and then they whispered to one another. A crowd of fearful clowns had formed around their Chief and were gently, vaguely considering thinking about possibly one day poking at the sea lion with their long shoes, but they were too scared.

  Fizz was pushing at his nautical friend. ‘Come on,’ he was saying. ‘Get off him.’ But it wasn’t working. Fish was too heavy for him to move. Even Fizz (who had a Strongman for a father) couldn’t shift a hungry sea lion who didn’t want to move.

  And then Alice appeared at his side.

  ‘He with you?’ she said, nodding at Fish.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fizz. ‘I’m afraid so. He’s a bit of a nuisance . . .’

  But before he could say anything else Alice had reached over and lifted Fish up and off the Chief Clown, who immediately stopped screaming and began honking his emergency horn and shouting something about ‘the sea, the sea’.