The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off (9 page)

I didn't aim for her, but it turned into a brilliant pass to Jennifer.

All of the Dockery team except for the goalkeeper had come up into our half for the corner. The ball bounced ahead of Jennifer, rolling slowly towards their goal. She leaped after it like a racehorse. Boy, but she looked fantastic, her white kit gleaming in the sun.

Their goalie, William Stanton, didn't
know whether to come out to meet her or stay in his goal. The ball rolled on and Jennifer chased it down. No, not like a racehorse or a gazelle or anything like that, but like a predator, a cheetah.

We held our breath. The Dockery Gang held their breath. The crowd held their breath. The tension hummed in the air like an electric storm.

She was almost there now, with the ball rolling slowly, almost coming to a stop about four metres from the goal. Jennifer slowed, steadied herself and drew back her foot for what was going to be an almighty shot, a real net-breaker, a rocket, a thunderbolt.

She swung.

You could hear it as well as see it. A
whoosh
as her foot cut through the air at the speed of sound.

And she completely missed the ball.

Missed the ball, flew into the air and landed smack on her bottom on a patch of bare mud.

I held my head in my hands.

The Moan moaned.

Jamie said, ‘That was rubbish.'

Even Noah let out a little gasp of despair.

The enemy laughed like a pack of hyenas. The crowd joined in with them. Trixie barked.

We'd made a terrible, terrible mistake. Jennifer might be sporty, but whatever sports she was sporty at, football wasn't one of them.

So now not only did we have a girl on the team, we had a useless girl.

Jennifer sat there, looking more annoyed than embarrassed, as if she blamed the ground or the ball for the fact that she'd missed it by a mile.

Stanton jogged up and booted the ball down the pitch. That's it, I thought, it's going to be carnage. And in a strange way, that turned out to be right.

Out of the corner of my eye I could still
see Jennifer sitting in the patch of mud. I thought she might stay there for the rest of the game, but she was so rubbish at football I didn't think it really mattered.

Dockery had the ball, thundering along on his massive legs, charging towards our goal. There was no way he was going to miss again. But then little Luke somehow managed to poke the ball out from under his feet. It rolled to The Moan. Dockery looked surprised as well as furious at being tackled. You could see that he thought about kicking Luke, but then decided he might as well kick The Moan, which meant he'd have
the ball again. In fact he didn't even bother kicking him – he just ran over, grabbed his shirt and threw him on the ground. You couldn't get a more obvious bit of nasty cheating.

And then I saw a blur. The blur moved from where Jennifer had been sitting in the mud. It flashed all the way down the pitch to where Dockery was standing. Then the blur became clearer, and I saw that it was Jennifer.

Her face had the look of a warrior princess: grim, determined, fatal.

She ran straight at Dockery, flew into the air and landed an amazing kick right in the middle of his chest, shouting out, ‘Hiiiiiiii-yahhhhh!'

Dockery staggered back, a look of amazement on his face. Then Jennifer followed it up with two more kung-fu-style kicks, and Dockery was on the floor.

‘Don't you dare touch my brother!' she screamed.

Carl lumbered up to help his chief, but Jennifer got him too, with a chop to the arm. And then she chased James Furbank, and tripped him up and pushed his face into the mud.

Then I realized what it was that Jennifer was sporty at. The Moan said she was always off at clubs in the evening. I looked at him (he was still sitting on the floor, where Dockery had pushed him). He was grinning.

‘Karate!' we said together, and laughed.

And now the whole crowd were laughing too. Jennifer, the little pocket warrior, was chasing all the Dockery Gang around the pitch. She kept landing kicks and punches, and they were squealing and yelling. Finally she chased them all off the pitch, and then Mrs Cake let Trixie off her lead, and she joined Jennifer in the attack, biting at heels and bottoms, and the whole Dockery Gang kept on running until they were out of sight.

The rest of our team were cheering like mad by now. Even The Moan, who hated to admit that Jennifer had ever done anything right.

Finally Jennifer came back and stood with us. She was smiling sheepishly – not that sheep really smile, but you know what I mean.

‘Well, Jennifer,' I said, trying to keep a straight face. ‘I can't say I approve of that sort of thing. We were supposed to be here to play football, and you turned it into a kung fu movie.'

‘It was tae kwon do, actually,' she said. ‘I'm a red belt. They don't let you go any higher until you're fifteen.'

‘Well, whatever, but it's not really the sort of thing we do in our gang,' I said, still trying not to grin. But I couldn't keep it up. A smile sneaked onto my face, and then completely took over, and soon I was laughing again with the rest as we went over what Jennifer had done, and I
pretended to be Dockery, blubbing like a big fat baby.

Finally I said, ‘I don't suppose we'll be bothered much by that lot for a while.'

Then Jamie said, ‘But we haven't won the game yet. It's still nil–nil.'

‘You're right,' I replied. ‘Do you want to go and blast one in, Jenny? You've earned it.'

‘Um, no, maybe I should let someone else do it. I don't know where it might end up. I'm much better at kicking people than balls.'

Well, that was certainly true. So I decided that I should be the one. I dribbled the ball up the pitch by myself, until I was a couple of metres from the goal, and then I kicked it with all my might. It whistled in, and the few people still there cheered loudly. One of them was Mrs Cake, who'd put Trixie back on her lead. She walked over to us.

‘I've got something for you boys.'

We didn't know what it was going to be.
Perhaps she was going to set Trixie on us, now she'd got her breath back from chasing Dockery halfway to London.

‘I was going to share them with your friends, but as they've run away, you might as well have them all to yourselves.'

And then she gave us a huge bag of mixed sweets, with chocolates, chews, fruit pastilles, jelly sweets,
everything
. It was almost as much as we'd had in our stash.

I made everyone say thank you properly, and then she went back to her bungalow, dragging Trixie with her. It turned out that Mrs Cake wasn't such an old witch after all, unless she'd poisoned the sweets or sucked all the goodness out of them, but that was a chance I was prepared to take.

‘OK, you lot, back to the den,' I said. ‘We can eat half of these, and put the rest in the shoe box ready for the next emergency. The Gang is saved.'

‘What about me?' said Jennifer as we began the walk to the woods.

‘You, Jenny? Well, you're one of us now. One of the Bare Bum Gang. It began as an insult, but now I think we should sing it out loud.'

And we all did.

The hardest part of making a Smarties-tube fart bomb is getting the farts in the first place. There are two main ways of doing this. The first is just to wait around until one comes along. Although this can be boring, you have to remain alert at all times in case you miss it. While you are waiting for one to come, you could do something else as well.

I suggest the following:

Make a model aeroplane.
Although the Spitfire is the best ever fighter aircraft, you might decide that a Hurricane is better when waiting for a fart, as a Hurricane is also a kind of mighty wind.

Throw stones
– but not at other children, or animals, except for ones that are attacking you – for example, bears, leopards, giant eagles or octopuses. Aim instead at things that don't have feelings, like trees, puddles and girls. Only joking. DO NOT THROW STONES AT GIRLS – they'll tell on you and you won't be allowed to watch
Dr Who
If you don't want to just wait for a fart to arrive, you can force it to come by eating special food. As is known by everyone, beans are best for this. Any type of bean will do, except for Mexican jumping beans, which aren't technically a bean at all, but a type of worm. Don't waste your money on fart sweets from joke shops because I've tried them and they don't work.

The next most difficult thing is getting the fart into the Smarties tube. Some people think this is best done in the bath, where you simply put the tube over the bubbles. However, a more scientific answer is to use some proper equipment. I have designed a fart-catching apparatus, which I can now reveal.

Once you have loaded the tube, you next make the trap. Dig a hole in the ground. You can use sharp sticks for that, or borrow a spade. Not a toy spade like you use on the beach, because that will probably break, and then you'll have to hide it and pretend you didn't know what happened to it when you next go to the seaside. Put the tubes in the hole. Put some twigs over the hole and then some grass over the twigs. It is now invisible, and all you have to do is wait for someone to set it off.

This is what happens then:

To Make a Smarties–tube Fart bomb trap

1. Get some Smarties tubes
   
2. Get some farts
   
3. Put the farts in the smarties tubes
   
4. Put the loaded bomb in a hole
   
5. Wait for somebody to step in the hole