Fizzlebert Stump (12 page)

‘Urgh,' she said as she climbed to her feet, smelt the fishy waft that Fish left behind him and watched the sleek black watery beast waddle away.

‘Ooh la la,' shouted a round woman with a voice like a croissant (flaky and buttery). ‘Are you all right?'

(It sounded like she was a German person attempting a Welsh accent.)

‘Yeah, I'm OK,' Piltdown said. ‘Just a bit squashed.'

‘Is time for you to see me,
non
?'

‘I dunno. Who are ya?'

‘But Fizzlebert, I 'ave known you since you were a babby. Why do you say such things?'

She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and blew her nose.

‘Amnesia,' Piltdown said suddenly, feeling mischievous, while tapping the side of her head. ‘I fell down in the woods.' (It was a good excuse, she should have thought of using it earlier.)

‘Ooh la la,' said Madame Plume De Matant. ‘Zat is a bad thing,
non
? You poor boy. I will make you a little thin tisane and we can go dip the madeleine,
oui
?'

Piltdown didn't know what she was talking about, but followed along because … well, why not?

It turned out a tisane was a herbal tea and a madeleine was a little sponge cake (named after the nineteenth-century French chef Madeleine Paulmier).

Piltdown ate a whole tray of them, with Madame Plume de Matant's encouragement. After each one the French teacher (and circus fortune teller) asked, ‘Do you remember anything now?' and Piltdown said, ‘Nah, not really,' and Madame Plume de Matant said, ‘Well, maybe just one more will do the trick.'

After all the cakes were gone and ‘Fizzlebert' hadn't got any more of his memory back, she decided they'd best do the lesson anyway.

Madame Plume de Matant was relieved because the amnesia meant they could start back at the very beginning, with the French words she actually knew. (She wasn't as good at French as everyone thought, but she got by just as long as she never went to France or met any French people. (Once a French family on holiday in England had come to the show and the Ringmaster had asked Madame Plume de Matant to translate for him. After a few minutes and some not-understanding she'd had to explain to him that they spoke a rare and difficult dialect that she didn't know very well. ‘But we come from Paris,' the mother of the family had explained (in English), ‘how rare can it be?' Madame Plume de Matant had said, ‘I must just go and powder my nose,' and went and hid in the toilet until they went away.))

‘
Oui
,' she said to Piltdown. ‘Say after me: “
Oui
”.'

Piltdown said a different word which meant the same thing as the English word ‘wee' (which sounds like the French word
oui
).

‘Fizzlebert!' Madame Plume de Matant said, sounding shocked.

‘Amnesia,' Piltdown said, smiling innocently and tapping her head. ‘Sorry.'

The lesson went downhill from there.

Ten minutes later Madame Plume de Matant was weeping on the steps of her caravan as Piltdown ran off whistling through the circus.

This time she got to where she'd wanted to be all along: the Big Top.

Not seeing an easy way between the maze of caravans, she had climbed some crates
and run across Eric Burnes (the fire-eater)'s roof. She'd then hopped across the backs of Miss Tremble's horses who were grazing on the grass on the other side, using them like stepping stones, before jumping down and, ignoring Miss Tremble's shouting and the horse's noisy neigh-saying, running the last few metres to the great striped tent.

Now, as she pushed her way through the heavy canvas tent flaps the scent of sawdust hit her in the nose. It wasn't an unfamiliar scent, her gran often smelt of it, but here in the big tent it was different. The lights were dim in the backstage area, focused as they were on the ring itself, and there was a hush in the air. After the chaos she'd caused and the people she'd upset (it wasn't her fault if they were stupid enough to get upset by her
jokes, and few things are funnier than a flying rabbit) she felt a wave of peace and calm and happiness swell up in her.

This was the Big Top. This was the ring. This was
The Circus
.

Here magic happened. Here chaos and madness and danger breathed easy, held hands and danced. She hadn't
really
known that this was what she had been looking for, but she knew it now. People showed off in that ring and everyone loved them for it. People who were different, who were unusual, who didn't fit neatly into rows and boxes, who didn't have to write essays or do sums or homework when some old bloke or some old woman told you to. The circus
wasn't school
.

Piltdown felt that she had come home. At last.

Except she wasn't home really and she knew, sooner or later, she was going to be asked to leave.

But before that happened she would have some real fun.

She stepped into the ring and began climbing the metal ladder that led to the high platform where the trapeze was waiting.

Below her, half a dozen colourfully suited and dripping-with-custard clowns were traipsing out of the ring. Obviously they'd just finished rehearsing. None of them looked up as they passed beneath. (Which was (sort of) lucky for Piltdown, since one of them was the Fumbling Gloriosus, who would've most certainly had something to say if she'd seen Fizz, or even ‘Fizz', climbing the tallest ladder in the circus.)

Piltdown kept climbing hand over hand, foot over foot. After a while she stopped and looked down. She would never admit it, but she had become nervous. She was higher than she'd ever been before and until you actually get that high you don't know whether being that high is going to make you feel ill or not and, although she didn't exactly feel ill, she didn't exactly feel well either, not now she was up here.

She reached the tiny platform at the top of the ladder and hauled herself up.

The ground was so far below her it wobbled.

In front of her, tied to a pole at the front of the platform was the long bar of the trapeze.

With one eye she looked behind her at the top rungs of the ladder. They seemed so
narrow and so fragile that she didn't think she'd be going down them again. The only option was to go on.

She'd swing, high above the sawdust ring. Swing and glitter and twirl in the air, like a beautiful woman in sequins. Everyone would love her for it. She'd amaze and dazzle them with her bravery and her skill. That was all she wanted. They'd pay her attention and love her.

Except she hadn't really thought this through properly (her gran said this about her a lot: ‘Piltie dear,' she'd shout warmly, ‘you've not thought it through properly, have you?'). There was no audience, not yet. The circus wasn't putting on a mid-morning show. The ranks of empty seats around the ring were just that: empty. But still, she was here now, and
Piltdown Truffle was not the sort of girl to turn back from an adventure.

She grabbed the bar of the trapeze and jumped into the air.

Whoosh
, she went, onomatopoeically.

Her stomach plunged as she swung down and down and along and along and up and up. She yelled with pleasure into the rushing air, but couldn't hear herself for the roaring wind in her ears.

This was amazing, like being on the biggest, longest park swing in the world.

Fizzlebert's stupid coat streamed out behind her as she zoomed. Her hair ruffled. Her eyes streamed.

This was amazing.

And then the trapeze slowed, as it reached the highest part of the upswing on the far side,
and she saw a second little platform there, waiting for her to jump off. But she didn't dare: the platform looked so small and by the time she thought maybe she
would
get off, she was already plunging backwards through the air.

This was also amazing.

If only everyone could see her now. They'd forgive her for not being the best pupil there was, for being an awkward and unusual daughter. They'd simply think she was brilliant.

She didn't know it, but down below she was being watched.

The Fumbling Gloriosus had come back into the ring to look for a not-lifesize model of the Statue of Liberty she'd dropped.

She heard the yell of pleasure from above and looked up.

Imagine what she saw. (Unless we've been able to afford to get Sarah to do a drawing of it, in which case don't bother imagining it, just look at the brilliant picture. (Otherwise, imagine away, dear reader.))

There, way above her head, far up in the heights of the Big Top, her son, her little Fizz, was hurtling through the air on the rickety old trapeze, his red ex-Ringmaster's coat flapping out behind him.

‘Gosh,' she said, honking her horn at the same time.

She was torn in two. Normally when she was dressed in clown gear, with her clown make-up on and her red nose resting like a huge cherry on a cake in the middle of her face, she was inclined to be silly, to make jokes and fart noises, to drop things and fall
over a lot. However, seeing her son, who is afraid of heights and is rubbish at walking the high wire even when it's a low wire, swinging vertiginously above the circus ring made her want to be quite serious, because
something was wrong
.

She honked her horn and looked around for help.

‘Miss Tremble,' she said, ‘look!'

Miss Tremble was just leading her horses into the ring to rehearse their running around in circles act.

‘Oh, Mrs Stump,' she said. ‘I want to have a word with you about Fizzlebert. He trod on my horses and they're very upset with him.'

She dabbed at the corner of her eye with a handkerchief and pointed at the dirty footprint on Emily Brontë's back.

‘What? No! Look!' Mrs Stump said, pointing up.

‘Is that Fizzlebert?' Miss Tremble asked. (She didn't like heights either, which is why she refused to work with very tall horses.)

‘Fizz' screamed from above as the trapeze began a third pendulous swing. The two women watched.

(Piltdown had failed to step back on to the original platform and had plunged forward again. She was beginning to think this might not have been the best thought-through plan she'd ever not thought through.)

‘Quickly,' Mrs Stump said, honking her horn again, ‘you go get help. Find the Twitchery Sisters. I'm going to go get him.'

(Mary and Maureen Twitchery were the artistes who trapezed. If anyone could get
a rogue trapeze under control it would be them.)

‘Mrs Stump,' Miss Tremble said, laying a hand on the clown's silky shoulder. ‘They're not here. They've gone to Australia for the week on an exchange trip, remember? That's why Alberto McGough the Singing Echidna-Wrestler is wrestling singing echidnas.'

She pointed to the side of the ring where a large man in a leotard was wriggling underneath something that looked a bit like a hedgehog, saying, ‘I submit! I give in! Help me!'

‘Well, go get
someone
,' Mrs Stump said, honking urgently.

‘Mrs Stump,' Miss Tremble said, quietly, pointing upwards. ‘There's no safety net.'

A safety net, for anyone who doesn't know, is the big bouncy net that's strung somewhere between the ground and the trapeze so that you can fall off without injuring yourself (or worse).

Mrs Stump didn't hesitate, but began climbing.

Her big shoes didn't help.

Her wig kept fluffing against the step above and getting in her eyes.

Her nose itched. (It hadn't done that for weeks.)

Her horn (which was tucked in her trousers) honked every time she lifted her leg to climb to the next rung.

She went as quickly as she could.

Step after step.

Rung after rung.

Meanwhile, William Edgebottom was sat in front of his mirror, looking himself in the eye.

He'd packed away his shopping.

He'd had a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit, and had rearranged his potatoes on the windowsill in order of beautifulness.

He sighed, looked himself in the other eye and began to put on his make-up.

Back in the Big Top young Ms Truffle was slowing down. Each swing brought her not as close to the platform as the one before had. The platforms (at either side) were getting further away.

She tried swinging her legs up, like you might do on an ordinary swing in a park, but it didn't seem to help.

And her arms were getting tired. Her hands were getting sore.

‘Oh dear,' she muttered.

She didn't look down, until she did look down, and then she didn't look down again. (That didn't help much though, since what she'd seen when she'd looked down after not looking down remained imprinted in her mind's eye even when she was no longer looking down.)

Outside, Miss Tremble was running round trying to find someone to help.

‘Dr Surprise!' she shouted, catching sight of the Doctor polishing his caravan.

‘Miss Tremble!' he squeaked loudly, jumping with shock and turning round. ‘I wasn't expecting—'