Fizzlebert Stump (15 page)

Charles lurched off ahead, eager to help his little friend out, and pounced on the person who looked most mean, the person who had Fizz in a tight arm grip. And that’s how it was that Mrs Stinkthrottle ended up underneath a lion, having her head chewed rubberly.

By the time the rest of them caught up the struggle was all over. Fizz had got Charles to let go of the old woman and Mr Stinkthrottle was helping her to her feet.

‘Fizzlebert!’

(That was his mum shouting, in case you didn’t recognise her voice.)

She snatched Fizz up in her arms and hugged him so tight that the rubber horn in her pocket honked.

There was more honking as Fish, who had led them all this way by following his nose, flippered up to Mr Stinkthrottle and gave him a big wet kiss. Well, that’s what it looked like, but Fish was actually slapping his black tongue over the old man’s face in order to get at all the leftover bits of tuna in his moustache.

He let the old man go and waddled up to the front door, sniffing the fishy air that was wafting out. (This was the smell that Fish had followed. He’d caught the scent of it almost as soon as Mrs Stinkthrottle had opened the front door, even from as far away as the library.) He stuck his head inside, snuffled around and pulled the stuffed halibut out of the dead typewriter that was sitting on the hall table. It wasn’t edible, being full of sawdust and sand, but he was able to balance it on his nose before flipping it upside down, honking, balancing it some more and finally throwing it over his shoulder into next door’s front garden when he realised no one was watching.

Frank and Tommy were so surprised by the sudden arrival of the circus that for a moment they just stood there with their mouths open.

Mr Stump looked at them suspiciously.

‘What have you done to Fizz?’ he said, flexing his huge muscles.

‘Fizz?’ they said. ‘Who’s Fizz?’

‘He is. Our son. Fizzlebert,’ he said, pointing to where the corner of Fizz poked out of his mum’s huge silky clown-suit-coloured embrace.

‘Him? But his name’s Johnnie. His granny said so.’

‘His granny? How on earth did you hear from her? She’s at the seaside.’

‘No she isn’t. She’s over there.’

Tommy pointed at Mrs Stinkthrottle who was now on her feet. Her husband was holding her hand and saying, ‘Hilda? Hilda? Can you hear me?’ She looked dazed, and lion dribble dripped off the end of her chin.

‘Gloria,’ Mr Stump said, calling his wife.

‘Yes dear,’ she said over the top of Fizz’s head, a big smile slapped across her face.

‘Is that your mother there?’ he said, pointing at Mrs Stinkthrottle.

‘My mother?’

‘Yes, this gentleman said she’s Fizz’s grandmother, and she’s definitely not
my
mother, so I wondered if she’s
yours
?’

Mrs Stump looked at the old woman.

‘No, she doesn’t
look
like my mother,’ she answered. ‘Mum’s been dead for ten years now.’

‘Mum, Mum,’ Fizz shouted, eagerly. ‘She’s a rotten old thing . . .’

And so he and Kevin, who had been carefully stroking Charles, began to explain what had been happening to them. There were gasps and tutting and much shaking of heads as the whole dreadful story unfolded.

Chapter Eleven

in which another boy puts his head in a lion’s mouth and in which loose ends are tied up

And so we reach the last chapter of the book (that’s this chapter). This is the one where things get tied up, loose ends are brushed under the carpet and I get to tell you what happened to everyone. So . . .

Once Fizz had told everyone about what the house was like inside, and about the letter from the council threatening the Stinkthrottles with being sent away to live in a home, Tommy and Frank spoke up.

‘We help my brother-in-law sometimes,’ Frank said. ‘He runs a cleaning company. There’s nothing he likes more than a big job.’

‘This is a
really
big job,’ Kevin said, pointing inside. ‘Have a look.’

Tommy stuck his head in the front door (covering his nose with a hankie) and had a very quick look around.

‘Wow!’ he said, coming out. ‘That’s gonna take some cleaning. Heavy duty, industrial vacuum cleaners, disinfectants, delousing . . . the works.’

‘That’s not gonna be cheap,’ added Frank.

‘They can afford it,’ Fizz said.

Mrs Stinkthrottle looked at him meanly. ‘No we can’t,’ she hissed. ‘We’re poor little old people. Look at us both. We’ve got no money and no one loves us. Everyone picks on us. It’s not our fault. We got confused.’

‘They’re not poor at all,’ Fizz said, and he told everyone about the drawer full of money in their bedroom.

‘See,’ Mrs Stinkthrottle snapped, waving a gnarled finger at the boy, ‘I told you he was a nosey little thief.’

Mr Stump tried his very hardest to not get angry with the old lady. Still, his muscles rippled and his moustache steamed.

‘If you hadn’t locked my boy in your filthy house,’ he said, slowly and calmly, ‘he wouldn’t have
had
to snoop around at all.’

Mrs Stinkthrottle muttered something under her breath and turned away.

It was just then that the police arrived.

There had been reports of a lion loose in the area and that’s just the sort of thing that attracts attention. Fortunately the Captain had put Charles’s lead back on and was able to produce his lion tamer’s licence. Once he showed the coppers the rubber false teeth they were quite satisfied that there was no danger.

One of the first things Fizz had nervously asked his mum, when she first swept him up in her huge clown-coloured cuddle, was whether she was going to call the police. ‘Why?’ she’d asked, and he’d told her what Mrs Stinkthrottle had said about runaways being sent to prison. Of course, she told him it was nonsense and Fizz told Kevin and so now, when the police had actually arrived, Kevin gathered his courage and tugged one of the copper’s sleeves and told him that he was ‘a lost boy’.

The policemen had heard a report just that morning back in the police station about Kevin’s disappearance. He radioed immediately to say that they had found the boy. Within minutes his mum was being whisked over to where they were in a police car, with sirens blaring and blue lights spinning.

While Kevin was talking to the policeman, Mr and Mrs Stump, the Stinkthrottles and the two builder-cum-cleaners continued their conversation.

‘It seems to me, Mrs Stinkthrottle,’ Fizz’s dad said, ‘that you’ve got two options. Either we tell one of those policemen over there that you’ve abducted my son and his friend, and then you’ll spend the rest of your lives in prison. Or you can pay Tommy and Frank here, and Frank’s brother-in-law, however much they need to get your house back in order, and we’ll have no more funny business.’ He flexed his muscles, quietly, but noticeably. ‘What’s it to be?’

Mrs Stinkthrottle hissed and whistled and rattled like a kettle, before she finally said, ‘That’s all our savings, that’s all we’ve got! How dare you! How dare you!’

But in the end she had no choice and so she agreed to pay, and no one mentioned what had happened to the policemen. Kevin told his mum he’d got lost on the way home from school, and she was so happy to have him back that she chose to believe him.

Captain Fox-Dingle pointed out that, with the rescue done, the old people dealt with and the police waved goodbye to, they still had half an hour to get back to the circus before the show was due to begin. Fizz asked if Kevin and his mum could have a free pair of tickets, and, of course, his parents said yes.

So, that night Kevin had the honour of walking down into the circus ring in the dazzling bright spotlight right in the middle of the show. Then, with Fizz by his side, he put his head in the lion’s mouth, which made him something of a star at school the next day.

As for Fizzlebert Stump, he went back to his old circus life. He knew, however, that he’d made a friend in Kevin and every time the circus came back to that town the two of them would meet up and they’d get together and eat toffee apples and popcorn for lunch, drink cola and sit in the lion cage telling each other about their totally different lives and their more recent adventures. And, because of the way his adventure had begun, Fizz’s parents signed Fizz up to every library in each new town the circus visited (if only to stop him trying to do it himself again). He and Dr Surprise would go together and borrow books, and it wasn’t long before Fizz had almost as many library cards as the mind reader had. It was a good end to the adventure, having the freedom to read any book you could think of. It had turned out alright in the end.

But Fizz always wondered about
The Great Zargo of Ixl-Bolth and the Flying Death Robots of Mars
. In all the fear and excitement he’d left it in Mrs Stinkthrottle’s house, and it had probably been thrown out in the big clean. But because he’d taken it out under the name of ‘John Smith’ he never got fined when it wasn’t returned. (Though John Smith, the rigger, did get a stern letter about it, but one of the great things about living in a travelling circus is that it’s very easy to pretend certain items of post never made it to you.)

It took more than a month for Frank and Tommy and Frank’s brother-in-law to clean the Stinkthrottles’ house. Frank made trip after trip to the tip, throwing out sack after sack of rubbish and junk (you can look at the descriptions in Chapters Six, Seven and Nine to get an idea of what they had throw out).

Everything had to be destroyed, all the furniture, all the curtains, the lot: it was all too rotten to keep. (Tommy tried shampooing the curtains, for example, but they just turned to rags as he touched them: too rotten and mouldy.)

Frank’s brother-in-law scrubbed the walls down with industrial bleach and Tommy killed the fleas and bedbugs that infested the place. Fortunately he had a mate who worked in the nearby city zoo, and they kindly gave a new home (with plenty of fresh air and room to stretch the old wings) to the two mangy parrots that had been shut away in the upstairs room. After a fortnight they even stopped swearing (except when they caught a glimpse of an old lady through the zoo’s crowds).

The big clean was a big job indeed, but eventually it was done and the house was spotless and smelled fresh and clean once more.