Fizzlebert Stump and the Bearded Boy (2 page)

Stood beside the Ringmaster were three people Fizz had never seen before. Having never seen them before, it was impossible for him to say whether they were more highly polished than usual or not, or whether they had brushed their hair in a new and exciting manner, or if, for once in their lives, they’d decided to
not
smear their faces with jam. Those are things you can only say after having known someone for a while and got used to their habits.

That’s not to say Fizzlebert couldn’t say
anything
about these newcomers. In fact, with just one glance he noticed quite a lot and he could tell, because he wasn’t a stupid boy, that there was something not entirely normal about them.

(Fizz always said that he had a special sense for spotting things that were odd, that looked out of the ordinary, un(as you might say)-usual. He called it ‘sight’.)

Behind the Ringmaster stood a man of medium height and medium build. (Nothing particularly unusual so far, I’ll admit.) He was wearing a shabby brown suit, with wide untidy shoulders. (Lots of people have untidy shoulders.) The hair on the top of his head was thin, but that on his chin was not. (Here we begin to approach the meat and two veg of the matter.) His beard reached right down his chest and was thick and glinted oilily in the shaft of sunlight that hung around in the tent’s doorway. (Beards are often a
bit
odd.) It was also blue. Well, it looked blue now, but then, when the man moved his head, the colour changed in the light. The blue was so dark that at times it seemed a shade of black. And then he moved his head, and his beard shifted again, and, for a moment, it looked like it was a rich purple, then black, then blue again.

As beards went, Fizz thought, it was a pretty good one. If rather odd.

But even this wasn’t what made him scratch his head and declare the scene one of the three weirdest scenes he’d seen for a week and a half. I’ve yet to tell you about the
really
interesting bit.

Behind the bearded gentleman stood a lady. She was a head taller than the man, and a fair bit slimmer. She wore a pure white trouser suit, smart and sharp, and was wearing dark glasses. Covering her hair was one of those headscarves like a turban that old-fashioned movie stars used to wear to stop their hair getting all ruffled as they rode in open-top sports cars. And on her chin was a beard, almost identical to that of the bearded gentleman described above. (I’ll give you a moment to skip back a couple of paragraphs and reread the bit about the size and colour of his beard. Done it? Fine, let’s continue.) Her beard, it should be emphasised, was no shorter, no thinner, and no less impressive than the gentleman’s. If anything, Fizz thought, it was probably
more
impressive simply because of whose chin it dangled from.

As he watched she took her dark glasses off (the tent was, after all, much darker inside than the sunny field she’d just come in from) and instead of tucking them away in her handbag or putting them in a glasses case, she slipped them into her silky dark fur of her glorious beard.

Fizz laughed at this, not having seen a bearded lady use her beard as a handbag before (indeed, you could add, not having seen a bearded lady before), but quickly turned it into a cough and covered his mouth with his hand. Laughing at anyone other than a clown (unless they’ve made a joke or fallen over (without injuring themselves)) is usually rude.

She gave him a hard stare from behind the Ringmaster’s back.

(You’re probably sitting there thinking to yourself, ‘What a magnificent beard that sounds, luxurious and dashing, so beautiful and smooth and elegant,’ and of course you’d be right. But as it happens, it’s not entirely normal for a beard to find itself on a woman’s chin. On the whole, women don’t have beards. (I expect they wish they did, but they just can’t grow them, at least not until they’re really old and have had time to practise.) In previous centuries it was considered so unusual when a woman turned up who did have one that they’d put her in a freak-show and charge people a shilling a time to look at her and point and snigger and gawp. But this is a more understanding age in which you and I live, and we don’t have freak-shows any more because we’ve learnt that no one ought to be pointed at and ridiculed (except clowns), because it’s what’s inside a person that matters, even if the outside does look a bit . . . different.)

It was only when the bearded lady turned away that Fizz got a good look at the third member of the party.

It took him a few moments to work out exactly what he was looking at.

There was a boy with them, probably about his own age (he guessed from the lad’s height), and
his
beard was, perhaps, the biggest and bushiest of them all. It reached down to his knees and spilt out to the sides, even more than the adults’ beards did. This was an unruly beard, a beard that had clearly fought against the comb, that had obviously beaten the brush, that was definitely and defiantly doing its own thing. From where Fizz sat it looked a little like an electrocuted badger.

Fizz laughed again, finding this chuckle even harder to hold in.

A boy who meant to be cruel would’ve pointed and laughed, but Fizz didn’t do that. He’d had enough kids take the mickey out of him (once they found out his name) that he kept his pointing finger to himself. It was obvious, all the same, that he was laughing at the bearded boy.

The strange boy glared at him and tugged the woman’s sleeve, and she looked over in his direction again.

Fizz shut up. He tried to look serious (which is the worst thing to do when you have a giggle inside you, because it’s likely to tickle you while looking for an escape route). He knew he’d been rude, but the boy
did
look silly. Beards are for grown men, he reckoned, and even then they’re still slightly silly-looking things. (I disagree with Fizz on this point, as would anyone with any sense of style, dignity and refinement, but we’ll let that pass.) No one he could think of in the circus had one (one of the fire-eaters had tried to grow one once, but it hadn’t lasted very long). If beards were cool, then surely, he thought, there’d be more of them around?

The Ringmaster, noticing Fizz, brought the strangers over to his table. Fizz wondered if he was in trouble.

‘This is young Mister Stump,’ the Ringmaster said to the bearded lady (and her men (but she stood in front of them and was quite clearly in charge)). ‘He’s the son of
The Mighty Stump
.’

‘Oh, the strongman?’ she said.

She spoke in a voice that sounded smooth and silky like her beard. It slithered into your ears like an expensive wine. Fizz felt it tickled a bit. Which was odd.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ the Ringmaster replied.

‘He had a moustache, I think,’ she said.

They’d clearly met Fizz’s father already, on their tour round the circus.

‘Only a very small one,’ the Ringmaster answered.

‘It was oiled, and pointy.’

‘That
is
the traditional style for a strongman’s moustache.’

She sniffed at this explanation and turned her attention to Fizz. She stood for a moment and looked him up and down. Her eyes flickered like sapphires and her blue-black beard moved softly in the breeze.

He was feeling sorry he’d laughed at her, and embarrassed. The giggle he’d felt wriggling inside him escaped through his ear, which made him shake his head, but didn’t make a noise.

‘Stump?’ she said finally. ‘What an abrupt name. But I suppose you are short.’ She gestured behind her. ‘This is my husband Gildas. This is Wystan.’ She rested her hand on her beard. Almost stroked it. ‘And I am Callisto, but you will call me Lady Barboozul. Yes?’

‘Bar-booze-all?’ Fizz repeated. He only meant to make sure he could say it right, but the Ringmaster seemed to think he was being silly with it.

‘That’s enough of that, Fizz. Shake hands and then we’ve got to get on. Got a whole circus to show the Bamboozles. New act, you see. Do all sorts of things, just wait until you see the show.’

‘I think it’s
Bar
boozul, Ringmaster,’ said Fizz, laughing at the mistake.

The bearded boy, thinking Fizz was laughing at his name, and having already seen him laugh at his beard, shot him the dirtiest of dirty looks. Fizz only caught the very end of it as the Ringmaster blustered, ‘Oh, yes! Of course. Slip of the, as we say in the business, tongue,’ but still it was enough to make him think the new boy was upset about something.

‘Lady Barboozul,’ Fizz said, ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’

He held his hand out to shake.

Lady Barboozul looked at it for a moment, before saying, ‘Gildas, shake the boy’s hand. Chop chop.’

Her husband, who had been silent up to now, stepped forward, took Fizz’s hand and said, ‘Good to meet you, Mr Stump.’

He had a soft voice that hardly seemed able to climb up out of his throat before it was whisked away on the wind. Soft and quiet and anonymous, quite unlike his wife’s.

‘Yes, yes,’ Lady Barboozul said, turning away from Fizz and looking over at where Cook was ladling food onto people’s plates. ‘I think we’re hungry now. We will take lunch in our caravan, Ringmaster. Have someone bring it over. We can finish the tour later, yes?’

Before the Ringmaster could say anything, she had pulled her sunglasses from out her beard, slipped them on and began walking back out into the sunshine.

‘Gildas, Wystan, come.’

Man and boy lingered for a moment before turning and following her, hurrying to catch her up.

The bearded boy turned back as they went and said, ‘I’ll see you later, yeah?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ Fizzlebert answered.

It was only after the boy had said his words and Fizz had answered that he thought about the tone of them. It had sounded a bit like a threat. He’d never had to deal with playground bullies, never having been in a playground, but even without training he could work out the meaning behind the words. It wasn’t so much, ‘I’ll
see
you later,’ as it was, ‘I’ll
get
you later.’

Fizz gulped down half his lunch with a sinking feeling in his stomach. The other half he found he couldn’t eat.

Oh dear. Laughing at beards isn’t the best way to go about making friends. That’s lesson one in this ever so useful book. What could we possibly learn in Chapter Three?

Chapter Three

In which a sea lion chases ducks and in which a clown makes sandwiches

Later on that afternoon Fizz was down by the duck pond (there’s always a duck pond in a town park (go look)). He ended up there most afternoons, because Fish liked to swim, but he didn’t like to get his spangly waistcoat wet. (Would you want to get duckweed over
your
silver waistcoat?)

Fizz was walking round the pond with the glittering piece of cloth draped over his arm like a waiter in an overly sequined restaurant. Fish was swimming rings round ducks and honking noisily at them from behind. The ducks were spinning round in the water and quacking back at him. (The moorhens had seen the sea lion coming and had rapidly migrated to a park on the other side of town.) It was somewhat cacophonous.

And then Fizz saw what he’d been dreading ever since lunch.

His stomach did a little flip and his knees wobbled as if they were thinking about running, but couldn’t agree on which direction to head off in. The duck pond noise fell away in his ears.

There, from the direction of the circus, came the shape of the bearded boy. And as it got closer it turned out to be not just the shape of him, but the rest of him too.

‘Oi, you!’ he shouted as he drew close.

‘Me?’ asked Fizz.

‘Yeah, you. I’ve been looking for you,’ the other boy said, getting right up in front of him.

‘Um,’ said Fizz, nervously.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Doing?’

‘Yeah, doing!’

The other boy was pushy and angry, and Fizz didn’t really know what to say.

‘Um, well. I’m holding the sea lion’s waistcoat,’ he tried, lifting up the spangly bit of cloth.

‘What?’

Fizz pointed into the middle of the pond where Fish was balancing a rusty tin can on his nose. ‘He likes a swim sometimes, and I . . . er . . . I hold his waistcoat for him.’