Fizzlebert Stump (6 page)

Fizz pushed some coats aside and found a peg. He hung his dressing gown up and walked back to his table.

‘Very well,' Mr Carvery said, brushing non-existent locks of hair out of his face. ‘Maybe now, if you don't mind, we can begin?'

‘Yes,' Fizz said. ‘Go ahead.'

There were some laughs from behind Fizz which Mr Carvery hushed with a blazing red-eyed stare.

Technically it
had
been a question that he had asked Fizz, and Fizz had answered it extremely politely, but apparently, it turned out, this hadn't been what the man
in the tracksuit expected, wanted, desired or liked. Fizz had done wrong. (I only mentioned the tracksuit again there because I think it's important to remember that this is a grown man, who is, let us remember, at work, who is wearing such a horrible, casual, unpleasant set of clothes. It's Monday morning at this point in the story, so they're clean and fresh, but he was the sort of man who wore the same tracksuit right through to the end of the week, because ‘it's practical'. You didn't want to be close to him on a Friday afternoon. And it wasn't even as if he did a lot of sport. Like most teachers, he watched from the sidelines, blowing his whistle, riding his golf cart and hurling incoherent encouragement at the players, although whenever one of the lady teachers happened
by he would hop out and start running on the spot and doing stretches, but fortunately they remained unimpressed.)

‘Not another word from you,' he snarled at Fizz, before talking to the room in general. ‘OK, class. Get out your workbooks and pencils. I want one page of news. “What I did at the weekend.” You've got twenty minutes, then we'll read some out. Let's get going.' He clapped his hands to encourage action.

Next to Fizz the girl, presumably Charlotte, unzipped her pencil case and pulled out a glittery blue pencil with a wobbly dragon on the end. She then produced an exercise book, seemingly from nowhere, clumped a hand down between her and Fizz, leant over and began writing. The other kids at the table did the same.

Fizz didn't have a book or a pencil. All he
had in his satchel was an apple, a chocolate bar, some fluff and a set of tatty pyjamas. None of it sounded useful.

‘Excuse me,' he whispered, nudging presumably-Charlotte. ‘Can I borrow a pencil?'

‘No,' she hissed. ‘Not after last time.'

Fizz didn't know what he'd done last time, because he hadn't been there then. He guessed Piltdown hadn't been wholly respectful of presumably-Charlotte's property, and she'd not looked at him closely enough to know he wasn't her.

‘I'm not her,' he whispered into the curtain of hair that, along with the defensive wall of her arm, separated the two of them.

‘What?' hissed presumably-Charlotte.

‘Piltdown. I'm not her,' he whispered. ‘I'm an impostor.'

‘Mr Carvery,' presumably-Charlotte said, raising her hand.

Mr Carvery looked up from his desk where he was sipping from a mug.

‘What's she done now, Charlotte?'

‘She's being weird, Mr Carvery, and she won't stop talking, and she's copying me.'

Mr Carvery sighed and made Fizz stand up and move to a table by himself that faced the wall in the corner.

He slammed down some rough paper and a short, chewed pencil and said, ‘Just get on with it.'

And so Fizz, not knowing what else to do, no closer to finding his way home, did as he was told. He'd had a good weekend, so he had plenty to write, and maybe this would be his chance to tell the truth and to get it heard.

CHAPTER SIX

In which a teacher is upset and in which a girl has hay fever

‘The first thing that happened was I got up and I did that because Mum was already making breakfast and there were crumbs getting in my bed. Then she said, “Fizzlebert. This is the best toast in the world it's amazing toast,” because she was making toast and boast for breakfast because she likes rhyming food. Then I went outside with my dad
and we lifted things up. Not straight away. First we did warming up by doing stretching, and
then
we lifted things up. He lifted a motorbike and a horse and I lifted a sea lion called Fish. He's my friend and he likes fish. Then we had lunch in the Mess Tent with Bongo Bongoton and Dr Surprise and it was meatballs in a sort of red flavour sauce with custard for afters. There's always lots of spare custard in the circus because—'

‘Sit down!'

Fizz's hair riffled in the wind from Mr Carvery's mouth.

As he sat down he looked around the room.

Everyone was staring at him and a lot of them had their mouths hanging open.

Having just listened to John Jenkins talk about eating salad and to presumably-
Charlotte talking about thinking about going to a museum the class had been electrified by Fizz's story, or so he thought.

‘I won't have
lies
in my classroom,' Mr Carvery was shouting. ‘What's important is what
actually happens
, all this made up stuff is useless. It fills your brains and dribbles out into the rest of your work. I won't be having it.'

He snatched Fizz's sheets of paper out of
his hand and tore them up.

Fizz felt like picking the man up and holding him over his head, he was so angry. His muscles were rippling under the scratchy uniform, but he controlled himself. Doing something like that was a certain way to get into trouble. He had to be cool.

‘What do you say?' Mr Carvery said.

‘I don't know,' said Fizz.

‘ “Sorry”,' said Mr Carvery, who was turning from red back to pink.

‘Apology accepted,' said Fizz.

Oops.

He hadn't meant to say it. It just slipped out. As soon as it had gone past his lips he'd seen it and knew it was going to cause him trouble. If he'd had a magic lamp he would have rubbed it straight away, and taking those
words back would have been his third wish (after ‘Seventeen more wishes' and ‘A bigger caravan for Mum and Dad'), or maybe his fourth (after ‘Please take me home' (although if he had had that wish he wouldn't need to take his words back, except perhaps for just being polite)).

Steam puffed from under Mr Carvery's tracksuit and, without thinking, Fizz rolled out of his seat and under the table.

In some of the school books he'd read teachers had canes or slippers or metre-long rulers and weren't afraid of whacking kids who misbehaved with them. And although Fizz's brain had a feeling that that didn't happen any more, his body had decided it wasn't taking any chances. It had rolled to safety without him even having to ask it. (It's this
sort of split-second survival instinct that separates the kids who survive a circus upbringing from those who get squashed, eaten or custarded at an early age.)

The class was laughing now, little giggles and chuckles, growing into small guffaws and medium-sized snorks.

Fizz didn't know if they were laughing at him or at their teacher.

He watched Mr Carvery's legs turn away from the table he was under and the room fell silent.

Whoever they had been laughing at, they weren't laughing any more.

‘Truffle,' the man's voice said, quietly and coldly, from above. ‘You think you're so funny, don't you? Well, you can stay in at break time and write your news properly.
No lies, no messing about, otherwise we'll have to call your grandmother in here and explain to her why you're in detention for
the rest of your life
.'

They listened to a few more kids.

Trevor Bacon had gone shopping with his mum and dad and they had bought some new underpants, and Romana Avalanche had listened to a CD about learning to play the violin on her headphones because her neighbours were violin intolerant.

From under his table Fizz found it oddly fascinating. He'd never spent much time listening to other kids, at least not ones without beards, and certainly not ones who didn't live in a circus. He felt like a bold adventurer paddling upriver to study some lost tribe deep in the jungle. He
wondered if he ought to be taking notes.

After hearing about how Alfie Bacon (Trevor's younger brother (younger by three minutes, but Trevor never let him forget)) had also gone shopping with his mum and dad (and Trevor) and how he had also bought new underpants, a bell rang somewhere in the corridor.

Legs rushed past him on their way to break.

He crept out from under the table to find Mr Carvery handing him a new sheet of paper.

‘Do it properly this time.'

Fizz sat down at the desk and wondered what he could write that would make the teacher happy. It was obvious the man wanted something normal and un-circussy, but Fizz found it difficult to think of what would be good. He could copy something one of the
other kids had said, but Fizz hadn't ever been shopping for new underpants, not as far as he could remember. (He was right. Five years ago the circus bought a brand new Big Top (it had been a successful summer and the Ringmaster was feeling flush) and his mum had paid Unnecessary Sid to sew Fizz lots of underpants out of the old material (which, when soaked for six weeks, was
almost
soft).

As he sat there tapping the pencil against his teeth Mr Carvery said, ‘I'm popping out for a second. I have to talk to Mrs Wimple. Not a word from you two, OK?'

Fizz was confused. He counted himself: one. He hadn't thought there were two of him. He counted again: one.

Then someone sat down next to him.

He wondered who it was and quickly
came up with the perfect plan to find out. He looked. (If only all plans, he thought, were as simple and as successful as this one.)

There was a girl sitting there with big brown hair, a little nose, two eyes, a mouth, eyebrows, a chin and a hearing aid in and behind one ear.

‘Hello,' Fizz said, immediately breaking the one rule Mr Carvery had set.

‘Hello,' said the girl.

She was already
much
friendlier than anyone else he'd met at school.

‘I'm Dympna. Are you really from the circus?' she asked.

‘Yes,' said Fizz. ‘You believe me?'

‘I do,' she said, simply. ‘What's your name?'

‘I'm Fizz,' Fizz said, holding his hand out
to shake. ‘Fizzlebert Stump.'

She laughed a sweet little giggle and shook his hand.

‘You look like her,' she went on. ‘A
bit
like her, but you're not her. She wasn't very nice. She put chewing gum on Mr Carvery's seat and she threw Charlotte's pencil case across the room and broke the leads in all her pencils and she kept shouting at me. I didn't
like her.'

‘Well, I'm not her,' Fizz said.

‘I've got hay fever,' Dympna said, changing the subject, ‘that's why I'm here.'

‘At school? They send you to school for hay fever?'

‘No, silly,' she giggled again. ‘That's why I'm in at break. I'll start sneezing and sneezing and sneezing if I go outside. Mr Carvery lets me stay in and read.'

‘I like books too,' said Fizz.

‘Is that why
you
came to school?' Dympna asked. ‘To read books? 'Cause I have to warn you, we don't do a lot of that.'

‘No,' said Fizz. ‘I was tricked.'

He tried to explain, as quickly as he could, what had happened to him and had just reached the point where he'd left Piltdown's
house in the borrowed school uniform with the satchel with his lunch in, when they heard footsteps in the corridor outside.

‘Quick,' she said. ‘Work!'

She pointed at his empty piece of paper and ran off to her own side of the classroom.

Just before the door opened she said, ‘I know where the circus is.'

What?!
Fizz thought.