The Bare Bum Gang and the Holy Grail (8 page)

‘Good work, Doc,’ I said.

Noah liked it when I called him Doc,
and
he smiled a modest little smile.

All better now, I tested the bridge with my foot. It was quite wobbly. And the water in the puddle looked exceedingly deep. And was it my imagination, or did I see a shape ripple under the surface? Croc? Anaconda? Piranha? Who could say?

I snorted at the danger, gritted my teeth and began to walk across. But then I felt a hand on my arm.

It was The Moan.

‘No, Ludo,’ he said. ‘Not you. You’ve already had a bad splinter. And we can’t afford to lose you if you fall in the puddle. I’ll go.’

‘No, I’ll go,’ said Jamie.

‘I’ll do it,’ chipped in Noah, even though he was still in a bad way after his barbed-wire ordeal.

I was about to make a speech about how proud I was of the gang and how brave they were and what a noble thing it is to sacrifice your life for your comrades, friends,
Leader
, etc., when Jennifer, with a quiet ‘tut’, skipped across the plank and reached the island. Luckily, none of the underwater predators leaped out to grab her.

‘Come on then, you lot,’ she said. ‘We haven’t got all day. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

The rest of us followed her. Except for Rude Word. He decided that he didn’t trust the bridge and would rather take his chance with the creatures lurking in the depths, and just splashed straight into the puddle and swam across. He shook himself on the far bank and sat down to wait.

Just because Rudy made it across unchomped didn’t, of course, mean it was safe for us. I’d seen a documentary once about wildebeest crossing a river, and the crocodiles always let the first one get across without any bother, and then they’d move in to gobble up the rest of the herd, easy as you or me picking blackberries off a bush.

When it came to bridge-crossing, we boys weren’t quite as nimble-footed as Jenny, so there were a few wobbles. But we made it. The island was just big enough for us all to stand on, if we breathed in and held hands. There was a minor kerfuffle because The Moan wouldn’t hold Jenny’s hand as she was his sister, and no one really wanted to hold Jamie’s because of where he was always sticking his fingers, but we got sorted in the end.

The really tricky part was picking up the plank, moving it carefully to the other side
of
the island, then laying it down across the second stretch of water. Jamie almost fell in, but The Moan grabbed the front of his sweatshirt and saved him, which was the first decent thing The Moan had done for about two years.

The plank didn’t quite reach the dry land, but it would only be a small leap from the far end. That didn’t worry me much, but what did bother me was that we couldn’t get the plank to be completely wobble-free. And everyone knows that there is a big difference between a wobbly plank and
an
unwobbly plank. It’s the same as the difference between a jaguar with teeth, and a jaguar that’s had all its teeth and claws taken out by the vet, so all it can do is gum you.

Jenny went first again, running over the plank and jumping the last bit like an antelope. Jamie went next, thumping over the bridge like the opposite of an antelope, say a baby rhino. But he made the leap too. Next went The Moan. He put his arms out to balance, and put his foot in the last bit of puddle when he jumped, but not long enough for a piranha to get him, lethally fast though those watery predators are.

Then it was Noah’s turn. I could tell that he wasn’t happy. He didn’t have a very good sense of balance, and the wobbles really discombobulated him. About three quarters of the way across he stopped.

Jenny and the others urged him on from the front, and I encouraged him from behind. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw
what
I’d been dreading – the guard and his dog were now so far round the perimeter that we were no longer covered by the building. Zoltan was sniffing away at the fence and the guard was looking outwards, but it wouldn’t be long before he turned our way, and then we were doomed.

‘Now!’ I hissed. ‘Noah, go
now
!’

My friend looked back at me, his face full of fear.

‘I can’t,’ he whimpered.

There was only one thing for it. I stepped onto the wobbly plank behind him.

‘No!’ he wailed. ‘We’ll both fall in!’

But I kept on walking steadily towards him. No matter how carefully I went, with each step the plank bobbed and wobbled more, and with each wobble Noah became more unstable. He teetered and tottered. I wasn’t going to reach him in time if I walked the rest of the way.

There was only one chance.

I ran, bounding along the plank, trying to
time
each stride with an upward wobble to give me more momentum. I reached Noah just as he was overbalancing. I grabbed his collar, screamed, ‘JUMP!’ and we both took off.

We were lucky. The plank acted like a springboard, and we sailed through the air. Well, not that lucky. We were going to land in the water. I gave Noah a final mid-air shove and he sprawled out in the mud at the edge of the puddle. I landed a metre short of the edge, splashing down on my feet, but then falling forward. By some miracle, the water at this part wasn’t that deep – just up to my shins, and I waded out, wiping my muddy hands on my trousers. My feet were completely brown, as if they’d been coated in melted chocolate.

There was no time to wait for Noah to say thanks. The Quest was calling. We were close to the Grail now, and I felt its power.

‘Move, move, move,’ I said, and led the
way
to the entrance to the grim tower of Corbin, which loomed over us the way a giant sausage would loom over a tiny ant.

Chapter Ten

THE TOWER

THERE WAS A
set of concrete steps leading up to the glass doors. I ran up them just hoping that the door itself would not be locked.

The door
was
locked. But it didn’t matter, because what had once been glass was now just fresh air. Yes, some naughty vandals had smashed all the glass. It meant that we could just walk in.

We found ourselves in what had once been the clean and airy foyer of the tower, when it was new and the world was young and full of hope. Now it was a depressing
place
, with graffiti scribbled all over the walls, and piles of rubbish everywhere. Plus, it ponged.

Rudy seemed to like it – he ran around sniffing out the rubbish and doing lots of little wees.

I didn’t want to linger there. Looking at the faces of my friends, I knew they felt the same.

‘I don’t suppose the lift works,’ said The Moan.

He went and pressed the button a few times.

Nothing.

‘Probably a good thing,’ said Noah. ‘Lifts in tower blocks always get used as toilets.’

‘Let’s find the stairs,’ I said.

It didn’t take long. There was a doorway near the lift. The stairs were even more smelly than the rest of the building. Obviously once the lift stopped working people decided to use the stairs as the toilet.

‘I think we should leave Rude Word here
to
protect our rear,’ I said. ‘He can bark if the guard comes up after us.’

I explained this carefully to Rudy, and I think he understood. There were still plenty of things to sniff in the foyer, so he didn’t mind.

‘Up we go then,’ I said to the others.

‘But we don’t even know where in this dump the tramp lived,’ said The Moan.

‘King Arthur said he lived right at the top, so that’s where we go.’

To begin with we ran up the stairs, taking three at a time, trying to leave the foul stink behind us. But soon we were puffing and panting and dragging our tired legs up like old people carrying heavy shopping bags.

‘How many floors are there?’ asked The Moan.

‘Thirteen,’ I said back, in between breaths. ‘Lucky, eh?’

On and up we trudged. There were windows along one side, letting in a cold
grey
light. I kept a close look out for the guard, checking with the binoculars, but I didn’t see him or his rotten dog.

As we climbed higher, the whole of my little town came into view. I could see the other, smaller blocks of flats, little redbrick houses of the old estate, and the paler brick of the new estate. There was our football field with the broken goalposts, and next to it the park with its broken swings, broken roundabout,
broken
everything. Then the wood, with the Valley of Doom in the middle of it. Even with the U-boat Captain’s binoculars I couldn’t see our den, because it was too well camouflaged, but I knew where it was.

It was magical seeing our world from up here, but also weird and unsettling.

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ panted The Moan.

For once I didn’t blame him for sounding so depressed. It felt like we’d been climbing for all of our lives, and we were only up to the seventh floor. There were six more to go.

‘Let’s have a rest,’ I said.

As a leader, there comes a point when you
have
to cut your men (and ladies) a bit of slack. This was that time.

‘Anyone got anything to eat?’ The Moan asked.

‘Only this,’ said Jamie, getting out his sausage roll and the scotch egg. ‘You can share, if you like.’

But none of us fancied any, so he put them away again.

Jenny was sitting next to me on the highest step, then came Noah, Jamie and The Moan, each one on a step by himself. The rest had helped, but they still all looked pretty worn out. They were grimy and yucky from the sewer and splattered with mud from the huge puddle. Noah’s clothes were torn, and I’d never seen Jenny looking this scruffy. Normally her yellow hair was arranged like a volcano exploding on top of her head, but now it was all limp and it had streaks of brown in it from the mud.

She looked at me. ‘I hope this is going to be worth it,’ she said.

‘It depends what you mean by “worth it”,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes you have to do things because they’re right and not because you are going to get anything out of it.’

‘And sometimes,’ said Jenny, her face completely expressionless, ‘you really are quite annoying.’

And then she laughed, and I joined in, and so, one by one, not really knowing what they were laughing at, did the others.