Fizzlebert Stump and the Bearded Boy Read online

  ‘See? She’s not well at all,’ the Doctor said, interrupting my lengthy complaint. ‘My poor Flopples. My poor baby. Her stomach’s all round and about, and she’s not touched her breakfast.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Fizz asked. ‘Is it something she ate?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve phoned for the vet, but he can’t get here until this afternoon. Until then all I can do is keep her warm. Keep her safe.’

  He started sobbing again, removed his moustache, blew his nose on a hanky Fizz gave him, and then replaced his moustache.

  ‘But you,’ he began between sniffs, ‘you didn’t come here to see a grown man cry. You’ve come for your history lesson, haven’t you?’

  Fizz nodded slowly.

  He didn’t much care for lessons. They were always about things that were less interesting than almost anything else in the circus or that he read in a book for himself. Who needed to know, for example, about wars that had been over for hundreds of years, when you could be learning about how to shoot a boy from a cannon and catch him in your beard without hurting anyone?

  ‘Dr Surprise,’ Fizz asked, trying to put off the history moment for as long as he could, ‘how long has Flopples been sick?’

  ‘When I got up this morning she was like that. Green. And mucky. I washed her and cleaned out the hat. And she . . . she’s just been sleeping ever since. The poor mite.’

  ‘What happened? I saw her during the show and she was fine then, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Oh yes, perky as a button. She got all the answers right. The crowd loved her, Fizzlebert. She was an absolute star.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Um. After that we watched that amazing new act . . . do you remember? The one with the beards in? Weren’t they good? And after that, we came back to the caravan for our cocoa. We’re working on a new trick and wanted to practise it a few times before bed.’

  He paused and scratched at his head, as if he were trying to remember.

  ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘I thought if I mixed a Larkin’s Luminous Larker with a Furious Finnegan’s Fanfare (that’s the one with the sparks and the noises like trumpets), then I might be able to get a sparking smoking glowing musical hat.’

  ‘That’s sounds brilliant. Did it work?’

  ‘Well, I got it glowing and I got it sparking, but the trumpets are proving harder to control. They refuse to stay in tune.’

  ‘Is that what’s made Flopples ill? A glowing hat?’

  ‘Of course not. I’ve been using my spare top hat for that.’

  Dr Surprise pointed at a slightly fizzing battered old hat that sat on the draining board.

  ‘Well, did anything else happen?’

  ‘We were trying the trick and then that woman came to say how much she’d liked the routine we’d done, and . . .’

  ‘Woman?’

  ‘You know Fizzlebert, the new woman. The one with the . . .’ He pointed at his chin.

  ‘Lady Barboozul?’

  ‘Is that her name? I don’t remember. Terrible head for names, me. Well, she told me how much she liked our act. She was ever so nice and very polite. Kind. She reminded me a little of Dr Surprise, except . . . for the beard.’ He tilted his head thoughtfully and his monocle glinted like a winking eye. (His wife, who Fizz had never met, had been a doctor too, just in case you thought he was being reminded of himself, which he wasn’t.) ‘She sat down and I let her hold Flopples for a bit as we chatted about this and that. All very civilised. After she’d gone I gave Flopples her supper and put her water bowl down and went to bed myself.’ Dr Surprise paused and looked into his top hat, where the poor rabbit was still snoring quietly. He sighed and spoke again. ‘And then . . .’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘. . . and then I got up and she . . . Flopples . . . she was . . . she was coughing and coughing, Fizz, and . . . and she sicked up this horrible claggy fur-ball, and just sat there panting and wheezing . . . and now . . . well, now she’s just sleeping . . .’

  ‘Oh, Dr Surprise! Don’t worry,’ Fizz said. ‘I’m sure she’ll be better soon.’

  ‘But Fizzlebert, you don’t understand. We’ve never missed a show before. If she’s not feeling better by tonight, we can’t go on. I can’t work without her, she’s my everything.’

  Fizz patted the Doctor on the shoulder and said that everyone needed an evening off now and then. Besides, come the morning, of course Flopples would be back to her old self.

  But he wasn’t nearly as sure as he sounded.

  Dr Surprise wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson that morning, and (not unusually) neither was Fizz, so he made his apologies and left the Doctor to wait for the vet.

  Fizz was sat on the steps outside Dr Surprise’s caravan, thinking about the poorly rabbit and his mum’s missing nose, when a sudden cry split the sunny morning and echoed round the circus. It was a horrible wail of pain and was accompanied by a quieter crunching sound and then by a crash and then by a whimper.

  He looked all around, trying to work out where it had come from. And then he ran off in search of the source, leaving us hanging around here at the end of the chapter waiting for someone to turn the page and read on.

  Chapter Seven

  In which a Strongman is weakened and in which a trick is revealed

  Fizz arrived at the scene of the scream just in time to find his dad being lowered onto a stretcher by a pair of first aid-giving clowns.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Mr Stump painfully as they laid him down on the canvas and put a blanket over his chest.

  The clowns took up positions at either end of the stricken strongman, bent down and lifted the poles that supported the stretcher.

  There was a ripping sound and they walked off in the direction of Mr Stump’s caravan with the poles, but without the stretcher and Mr Stump, who were still on the ground.

  When they were safely out of the way, Mr Stump said, ‘Fizz, help me up will you?’

  Fizz took his dad’s hand and helped him hobble to his feet.

  The strongman pressed one of his great big hands to the small of his back and tried stretching.

  ‘Aarggh.’

  ‘Have you done your back in, dad?’ asked Fizz. ‘Was that what the scream was?’

  ‘Scream?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard a scream.’

  By now a small crowd had gathered round the two Stumps.

  Two more clowns came forward with a big bag of first aid gear. One of them pulled a stethoscope out and tried to listen to the side of Fizz’s head. Fizz brushed him away. The other one was already tangled up in the bandages he’d begun unrolling and ten seconds later was lying on the floor looking like a muddy mummy with a quietly honking horn and a red nose poking out between the wrappings.

  ‘I don’t scream,’ Mr Stump said firmly. ‘That was Madame Plume de Matant. I was lifting her up.’

  Madame Plume de Matant was the circus’s fortune teller. She had a little tent of her own that visitors could visit before they went into the Big Top. She would tell them their futures, which mainly involved saying, ‘You are going to see a circus,’ in a French accent. (People sometimes complained that that wasn’t what they’d paid a pound to hear, but however much they argued, they couldn’t fault her predictions.)

  ‘You dropped her?’

  ‘I don’t drop things,’ Mr Stump said, sounding like he was either cross or in pain or both.

  ‘Why did she scream then?’

  ‘Because she fell,’ Mr Stump said quietly.

  ‘Because you dropped her, dad?’

  ‘Sort of. Ooh.’

  The strongman was tottering back to his caravan leaning on Fizz’s shoulder. He was a big man and Fizz was only a short lad, so they were moving quite slowly. His back was obviously badly twisted.

  ‘Why did you drop her?’ Fizz asked. ‘I mean, “sort of” drop her.’

  Mr Stump stopped walking and his son stopped with him.

  He looked down into the boy’s eyes
and said, ‘You mustn’t tell anyone, Fizz. They’ll laugh at me.’

  ‘Okay. I promise.’

  ‘I lifted her up, and was just getting ready to start juggling, when I was . . . tickled.’

  ‘Tickled? You told me you weren’t ticklish. You said grownups aren’t ticklish, that it’s something kids grow out of!’

  ‘Well, sometimes adults can be tickled, but only if they’re surprised. Not normally.’ He turned and gave Fizz a look as if to say that this was information not to be abused, but as he turned there was a popping sound and the look he gave included more pain than was intended. ‘I was tickled,’ he went on after a moment, ‘and I wriggled and my back went pop and then Madame Plume de Matant fell on top of me and we both fell down. She wasn’t hurt, but I couldn’t move at all. Ooh!’

  ‘Who tickled you?’ Fizz asked.

  ‘Well, that’s the thing, son. I never saw. While I was lying on the floor, I looked around, but there was no one there. But I swear I was tickled by something.’

  ‘Maybe it was a feather blown by the wind.’

  ‘Maybe,’ his father agreed.

  However much sense it made, it was clear this solution pleased neither of them.

  The two Stumps got back to their caravan and Mrs Stump had her husband lie down on the hard floor and stretch, just in case it helped.

  ‘That’s your father out of action,’ she said to Fizz. ‘Last time his back went it took a month before he was able to lift a broom, let alone a car.’

  ‘But what about the Inspectors?’ he asked hurriedly. ‘Flopples is sick too and your nose . . .’

  ‘I know, Fizz. We turned the caravan upside down this morning looking for my nose. It’s not here. I’ve had to order a new one. The woman from the Clown-U-Factory is coming tomorrow to measure me up. But it’s still going to take a week to make. This family isn’t having the best of luck, Fizz. Your mum and dad aren’t exactly doing much for the circus, are we? It’s lucky we’ve still got you and Charles in the ring.’

  ‘But, will you get expelled? I mean, if you can’t perform?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Fizz’s dad said from the floor where he was lying. ‘I don’t think it works like that. They’ll judge the circus as a whole, probably. I doubt they’ll ask about us. I mean they can’t judge an act they can’t see, can they?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Fizz said, unsure whether that really made sense. ‘But . . .’

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Stump said, ‘if you’re worried, you’d best make sure you and Charles put on a blinder of a show tonight. Yes?’

  ‘Oh yeah, of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you proud.’

  He wished he’d meant what he’d said, but after all that had happened, the good effects of Wystan’s pep talk had evaporated. Fizz began to worry, not just about his act, but about the others too. If things carried on like this, Fizz thought, the circus might run out of acts altogether. And then the Circus Inspectors, with their clipboards and their red pens, couldn’t give a Good Mark, could they? Where would the circus be if that happened? On the scrapheap, or working in a supermarket putting price stickers on tins of beans, or doing photocopying in a local council planning department office. It didn’t bear thinking about, thought Fizz, as he thought about it.

  Fizz watched that evening’s show from the darkness behind the curtains backstage. He could see the acts just as well as you could from any seat in the audience, except everything was backwards. That is to say, he saw backs more than he saw fronts and bottoms more than he saw tops. But still, it was enough for him to know what was going on.

  He was still excited about the Barboozuls’ act, even while worrying about the rest of the stuff. He really wanted to know how they did all that beard stuff, not to mention Wystan’s trick with the cannon. This evening it was definitely a different girl that he plucked from the audience, and Lord Barboozul stole a notebook out of her pocket, not a camera, but Lady Barboozul still produced it from her beard.

  Eventually Wystan climbed up the ladder onto the platform near the rear of the ring. Fizz watched as he slid himself into the cannon’s barrel. He listened to the fizzing fuse and counted down the seconds before the explosion.

  As it went off, a little door opened at the back of the platform and Wystan slid out. With the boom and the gush of smoke all the attention of everyone in the Big Top was focussed on the flying figure which burst out the cannon’s mouth, and Wystan nipped through the darkness and in behind the curtains to where Fizz was stood.

  ‘You’d best duck,’ he whispered to his friend.

  Fizz felt Wystan’s beard tickling his ear as he spoke.

  The two boys ducked down just in time.

  Wh-i-i-i-i-zzz!

  The bearded boy who’d just been shot from the cannon hurtled through the narrow gap in the curtains, straight over their heads.

  He crash-landed a few yards away, all mangled and higgledy-piggledy. Fizz’s stomach leapt into his mouth as he watched the figure sliding along in the dirt and spinning round. He’d seen lots of people fall off things in his time, but acrobats always knew how to land safely and they didn’t do it like that.

  But then he thought a second, even more obvious thought, which was that Wystan, the bearded boy, the lad who had climbed into the cannon, was actually stood next to him, hand on his shoulder, with a big smile on his face.

  ‘See,’ Wystan said, laughing. ‘I told you there was a trick to it.’

  Fizz looked at him and looked at the boy on the ground and then looked back at him.

  ‘Huh?’ he said.

  ‘You’ll see. I’ve got to go now. Fizz,’ he added before he went back through the curtains into the circus ring, ‘sorry to hear about the lion.’

  Suddenly Fizz was on his own.

  Wystan was back in the ring, taking his helmet off and waving to the crowd.

  Fizzlebert wandered over to where the other Wystan was lying in the dirt.

  It was a dummy.

  Well, of course it was. Fizz kicked himself that he hadn’t thought of it earlier, that he hadn’t spotted it the night before. Letting a dummy take the flight in Wystan’s place was much more sensible. But Fizz still couldn’t imagine how they did the other tricks.

  And then something waved at him from inside his brain. It was something someone had said that he hadn’t paid attention to at the time. What was it?

  Um.

  Something about . . .

  No. It was gone. But it sniggled in Fizz’s head, just out of reach, going, ‘Look at me, listen to me, remember me!’

  You know how sometimes you want to say something and can’t quite get the right word out? It’s a word you know, and probably one you’ve said hundreds of times before, but it just sits there like a bubble of forgetfulness in your mouth, and you say, ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue.’ Well, that was exactly what Fizz was feeling, except it wasn’t on the tip of his tongue, because he didn’t want to say it out loud, just remember it, so instead he was thinking, ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my brain,’ which is similar to the tip of your tongue, just about four inches further back.

  He was interrupted by Captain Fox-Dingle.

  ‘Fizzlebert. No teeth,’ said the Captain, who always kept things brief.

  It was hard to hear him over the applause that was coming from the other side of the curtain.

  ‘Sorry?’ Fizz asked him. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘No teeth, Fizz. No teeth, no show. Charles. Gummy. Teeth?’ He pointed at his mouth. ‘Missing.’

  Fizz added up the words and made them into something like a sentence. His heart sank. Charles’s rubber teeth were missing, and if the lion didn’t have his set of rubber dentures, then they couldn’t do the act.

  For a split second Fizz thought they could use Charles’s other false teeth. But then he remembered how Charles tore open great hunks of meat with them and thought better of it.

  Fizz was gutted. (Though not as gutted as he might’ve been, had he attempted the trick with a suddenly
sharp-toothed lion.) He’d just listened to his friend get the biggest round of applause he’d heard for ages for not-actually-being-shot from a cannon, and now he couldn’t get any sort of round of applause, because some false teeth had gone missing. It wasn’t fair.

  He was angry. He felt robbed.

  He kicked at the ground.

  ‘Sorry. Me too,’ said a glum Captain Fox-Dingle, touching the buttons that gleamed on his chest.

  He meant he was hurting as much as Fizz was, that he felt useless missing the show too.

  Fizz wondered how he’d break the news to his mum and dad. The Stump family were now entirely pointless as circus performers. If the Inspectors saw them all sitting around doing nothing, Fizz was sure they’d be demoted or expelled. How could they not be? He felt bad thinking how bad they’d feel when he told them and that made him feel even worse.

  And then he remembered what it was that he’d forgotten.

  ‘Sorry to hear about the lion.’

  Wystan had said that to him.

  It was a simple enough comment, of course. The sort of thing a friend would say to another friend. But how had his friend known about the missing teeth before Fizz did?

  The Barboozuls had come off stage now, and were being congratulated by various people on another fine show. The Ringmaster had a big grin on his face. He ruffled Wystan’s hair and slapped Lord Barboozul on the back, and went to slap Lady Barboozul on the back too, but stopped when she looked at him from over the top of her beard.

  Fizz gave Wystan a puzzled look, and Wystan waved back, smiling.

  And then Lord and Lady Barboozul whisked away back to their caravan and took their bearded boy with them.

  Fizz was left standing on his own in the middle of all the busy backstage bustle, putting things together in his mind. He promised himself to keep an eye on those beards. He had the feeling that something weird was going on. All this bad luck, and at this important time? It couldn’t be natural. A seed of suspicion had sprouted inside his head and was tickling him behind the eyes and between the ears.