Fizzlebert Stump and the Bearded Boy (7 page)

Fizz’s dad had had to come out and pick him up and carry him out of the ring. He got a nasty nip on the ear for his troubles. (If you look closely you can see the scar.)

Since then no one had suggested Fish try to become a star again.

But they still threw him fish and he still balanced anything he could get his nose under. They liked him. After all, there
was
that time he’d chased away the burglars who’d tried breaking into the Ringmaster’s safe, and there
was
the time he’d rescued Fizz from Mr and Mrs Stinkthrottle, and there
was
that time he’d rescued the whole salmon from Cook’s worktop. But those are different stories.

As Fizz explained all this, somewhere across the park a church bell rang ten times. Fizz was late for his class and ran off toward Dr Surprise’s caravan, leaving Wystan to carry the ball back to his parents’ caravan. They promised to meet up again later on.

‘Oh woe! Oh tragedy!’ moaned Dr Surprise, when Fizz knocked on his caravan door.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, as he climbed up the steps.

Dr Surprise was sat on the edge of his bed with his face in his hands, moaning loudly. The
Famous Performing Rabbits of the
World
duvet cover was all rumpled up and there were playing cards and plastic flowers spilt on the floor. The stuffed crocodile that hung from the ceiling was dusty, as if it hadn’t been cleaned for days. In short, the place was less tidy than normal.

‘Oh dear, oh dear! Oh, woe is me! No, no, no!’

The Doctor was almost entirely bald, expect for a few long strands that usually wound their way round the top of his head and flopped down pointily above his left eye, but this morning they were flapping uncombed in the air. His tight black suit, which squeaked ever so slightly when he moved, was covered in dust and straw, and his tie was undone. His moustache drooped down in a depressed dangle. (It was a plastic moustache. He had a collection of them, and wore whichever one best matched his mood.)

‘Oh, Fizzlebert,’ he said, looking up with a jump. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Dr Surprise,’ Fizz asked anxiously, ‘what’s the matter?’

The Doctor wiped his eyes and took a deep breath.

‘It’s Flopples,’ he said. ‘She’s not well. Not well at all.’

Flopples was his rabbit, the one he did the magic tricks with. She usually lived inside his top hat. If you watched carefully, sometimes, when he was sitting down for dinner in the Mess Tent, you’d catch him poking a carrot up inside. If there weren’t many people around he’d take his top hat off and put it on the table and she’d look out with her little paws on the rim and watch what was going on. Fizz had often slipped her a bit of lettuce (which she seemed to like, even when Chef had dipped them in a toffee sauce). It was a way of clearing the salad off his plate without having to eat it himself.

Dr Surprise lifted his hat up from the floor, where it had been sitting between his pink fluffy bunny rabbit slippers.

Flopples was curled up asleep at the bottom of it, and even Fizz, who was no expert on rabbits, could tell she wasn’t feeling well.

For a start, she was green.

‘Take a look at this,’ the Doctor said, passing Fizz a plastic box.

It seemed to be full of gravy. Fizz sloshed the brown soupy liquid around a bit. It had a few strands of grass in it and smelt unpleasant. He asked what it was.

‘Droppings,’ Dr Surprise said.

‘Droppings?’ Fizz asked. ‘You mean Flopples’ droppings?’

Anyone who knows anything about rabbits is well aware that a rabbit’s . . . ‘leavings’ are small and dry and round. They’re firm, usually neatly piled, and easily confused with chocolate chips when baking.

One thing rabbit droppings shouldn’t do is slosh, and another thing they should never do is splash.

A rabbit with diarrhoea is not good news. It’s a much messier animal, for a start, and not, Fizz thought, the sort of pet a man would want to keep in his caravan, let alone in his hat. And, for another thing, it’s almost impossible to spell. You’d think as the author of this book I’d be able to tell you that Flopples had a much simpler illness, say, a cold. A cold only has four letters, and almost everyone knows which ones they are, but diarrhoea has loads and they look like they’ve been dropped on the floor. I’d rather he had a rabbit with bureaucracy, even, but the fact of the matter is, as your author, I can only tell you the truth, and the truth is that Flopples had the illness I mentioned before. The one that has too many vowels. Begins with D. I wrote it down before. I won’t do it again.

‘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.