The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off

by Anthony McGowan

  But we couldn’t really enjoy the success of our traps, because there was a good chance we were going to get bashed, and that’s never very cheerful.

  When Dockery saw me, he stopped looking mad and started laughing.

  ‘Ha, look what we found! It’s the Bare Bum Gang and their cosy little den. Oh, correction, I mean our cosy little den.’

  ‘It’s not your den,’ I said. ‘It’s our den. We built it. There’s plenty of room in these woods. Why don’t you go and make one of your own?’

  Dockery came stumping up towards me, sticking his jaw out. The cans rattled and clanked behind him, but he didn’t seem to notice them.

  ‘We want this one,’ he said.

  I was frightened of Dockery. He was older and bigger than me, and so were his friends. But I knew that bullies are usually cowards, so I made myself say, ‘Well, you can’t have it.’

  ‘Yeah, get lost, Dockery,’ said Jamie, backing me up.

  I was glad we had him as our General. And I felt Noah and The Moan close in behind us. I was a bit worried that they might just run away, but they hadn’t.

  I didn’t want to chicken out, but I also didn’t want to have to get into a scrap with Dockery, because fighting is stupid and, anyway, we’d probably lose and get mashed.

  Then I had one of my ideas.

  ‘We’ll play you for it,’ I said.

  I don’t know why I said that. It must have come from some bit of my brain I wasn’t paying attention to.

  ‘What at, tiddlywinks? Flower pressing? Or showing off your bare bum?’

  There was a burst of loud rough laughter from Dockery’s friends.

  ‘No, er, football.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Noah, and there was another mixture of moans and groans from the other two. Dockery wasn’t very good at football, but he made up for it by playing really really dirty. Nobody was allowed to get past him – if you tried, he just hacked you down. And his friends were the same, except some of them were also quite skilful. Plus they were all older and bigger than us. Which, taken all together, made it a bit stupid of me to say we’d play them at anything, especially football.

  ‘Football? Yeah, any time you want,’ said Dockery, sneering. ‘Tell you what, get a team of you new estate kids together, if you can, and we’ll massacre you all.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. It sounded a bit like I was saying ‘fine’ to being massacred, but that’s not what I meant. I certainly didn’t think it was fine. What I thought was the opposite of fine.

  ‘Great,’ said Dockery, and he looked like someone who’d just lost a penny and found a pound. ‘Let’s make it next Saturday, so you can practise. Not that it’ll do you much good. Seven a side. On the field by the park. At three o’clock. If you don’t turn up, we’ll just come straight here and move into our nice new den, thanks very much. Or, I don’t know, maybe we’ll burn it. I like to watch things burn.’

  Larkin chuckled, and a streak of drool came out of his mouth. It reached halfway to the ground before he sucked it back in. He was good at drooling, Larkin.

  ‘We’ll be there, don’t you worry,’ I said. I didn’t like the thought of our best ever den going up in flames. I’d rather they just played in it like we did.

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried. You should be.’

  ‘We ought to play in different colours,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll tell you what, we’ll wear blue and you wear white. White for surrender. White for cowards.’

  And then they all went off, laughing and mucking about. Except that Dockery forgot about the cans, and they tangled up in his legs and he fell over. That was the best thing that had happened since this whole story began. It took him about five minutes to get free, and he used some bad words I’d never even heard of.

  ‘Nice work,’ said The Moan quietly when they were finally out of range. ‘That’s the den gone, for sure. We might as well burn it ourselves. We’ve got the matches.’

  ‘Don’t be such a defeatist,’ said Noah (he knew lots of good words). ‘We should look on the bright side. The other kids from our estate aren’t all as rubbish at football as we are.’

  ‘We’re not even that bad,’ said Jamie. ‘Ludo once scored a goal at school.’

  He was right. The ball hit the back of my head by accident while I was daydreaming, and flew into the goal.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how good we are,’ said The Moan, ‘Dockery and his lot will never let us win.’

  ‘Well, we can try our best,’ I said. ‘And at least we can say that we didn’t just let them take our den without a fight.’

  And then we all went home, feeling about one per cent hopeful and ninety-nine per cent depressed.

  Chapter Eight

  RECRUITMENT

  We had four days to find and train a team of red-hot players, fit to take on and beat the bully boys of the Dockery Gang. There’s a film I saw once called The Dirty Dozen, where an army captain has to find a bunch of soldiers for a deadly mission, and because it’s so dangerous, he has to get them from the army jail, and they’re all smelly and dirty, and don’t do what they’re told. But then he makes them into really good soldiers, and they complete the mission, except for the ones who get blown to bits or shot with machine guns. I was able to watch it because Mum and Dad went out and we had a babysitter called Tracy, and I told her I was allowed to stay up until eleven o’clock and watch whatever I wanted.

  So, finding our team was a bit like that, except we weren’t really smelly and dirty, and there was less of a chance of getting blown to bits. The trouble was that the kids on the new estate were mostly younger and more wimpy than the old estate kids. That was because the old estate had been there for longer, so the kids had more time to grow.

  We began looking for the three recruits we needed the next day at school. Some kids we asked said yes until they heard who we were going to play against. Then they changed their minds, because they knew that there was no way we could win, and the best thing we could hope for was only getting slightly bashed.

  But in the end we did manage to get a couple of the kids from Year Three, who didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. They were actually quite good. One was called Luke and the other was called Oliver, but I never got it quite fixed in my head which one was which, because these small kids all look the same. The downside of Luke and Oliver was that they only had tiny little legs and so couldn’t run very fast, and they were so weak they looked like they’d fall down if Dockery even coughed in their direction.

  But, like I said, they were actually quite skilful, which was more than you could say for some of the others we looked at. Most of them didn’t even know which way to run, and just sort of milled around, tripping over their feet or getting distracted by the lines on the pitch. And if the ball came near them, they ran away or flapped at it the way you would at a wasp attacking your ice cream.

  There was one Year Six boy called Vincent who said he would play for us if we let him be in charge of our gang. Vincent’s teeth were green and brown and his hair was so greasy he could squeeze it into whatever shape he wanted – say, a horn or a spiral – and it would stay like that, and he smelled of smoky-bacon-flavour crisps, which is good if you’re a crisp, but bad if you’re a person (the same goes for prawn cocktail and cheese and onion). Vincent was good at football, and not just because nobody wanted to get too close to him in case they got a noseful of smoky bacon, or hit with the wet slap of his greasy hair.

  We discussed letting him in.

  ‘I don’t think we should let him play,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because you don’t want him to be our leader,’ replied The Moan. ‘You want to stay Leader yourself.’

  ‘I don’t want Vincent to be our leader,’ said Jamie. ‘I couldn’t stay in the den at the same time as him. We’d all end up smelling of smoky bacon.’

  ‘I don’t want him as Leader either,’ said Noah. ‘I like having Ludo as Leader. He doesn’t even smell a bit of smoky bacon.’


  ‘Well,’ said The Moan, who was obviously looking for an argument, ‘he sometimes smells of something worse.’

  ‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘What could be worse than smoky bacon? For a person, I mean.’

  ‘Flowers,’ said The Moan, looking smug.

  He could really fight dirty sometimes.

  ‘That’s because of the soap my mum buys.’

  ‘It’s girl soap,’ he said.

  There was a pause while we thought about this. If it was agreed that I used girl soap, then that would be me finished as Gang Leader, and Vincent would take over and we’d all smell of smoky bacon, even if we managed to keep the den, which was not very likely.

  It was Jamie who came to my rescue, which I didn’t expect.

  ‘That’s stupid,’ he said. ‘Soap is just soap. It’s not like lipstick. You don’t wear lipstick, do you, Ludo?’

  ‘Only at weekends,’ I said.

  ‘He’s only joking,’ said Noah, which was true.

  We told Vincent that he couldn’t play because he didn’t live on the new estate. We didn’t mention the smoky-bacon thing.

  Chapter Nine

  PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

  The next evening, although we were still one player short, we practised really hard. I organized the training. We began by running round the field by the playground. We were helped in this by Trixie. Trixie was an extremely vicious Jack Russell terrier. She belonged to an old woman called Mrs Cake, who lived in a bungalow next to the pitch. Footballs were always getting blasted into her garden, so she hated all children. As soon as she heard the sound of laughter, she’d drag Trixie out of her bungalow and throw her over the fence, shouting out, ‘Get them, girl.’

  Trixie was quite an old dog, but she could still run at exactly the same speed as an average child, so she would chase us round and round the field, never getting any closer, never falling any further behind. After twenty minutes Trixie would have had enough, and she’d slink off through a gap in the fence. I often thought that it was a good job Trixie was the size of a large rat, because if she’d been any bigger, she would have eaten maybe three or four children every week.

  Normally, of course, being chased by Trixie was a bad thing, but when you’re trying to reach peak fitness for a big match, it’s exactly what you need. After the twenty minutes was up, we had a lie down, and then practised other football skills, like kicking (the football, I mean), shouting ‘Pass! Pass!’ and then more kicking.

  We ended up by practising taking penalties, in case there was a penalty shoot-out. We decided that Jamie should go in goal, because he had some gloves. They weren’t proper goalkeeping gloves just some woolly ones his granny had knitted for him. One of the gloves had six fingers and the other one had four, because his granny had something called dementia, which is a disease that makes you count up fingers all wrong. I suppose there might have been some logic to it because altogether there were the right number of fingers, just divided up wrong.

  Jamie complained about being the goalkeeper, but he didn’t want to lend his gloves to anyone else, so he was stuck with the job. During the penalty practice he didn’t let in a single goal, which sounds like he must have been a good choice for goalie until you find out it was really because every penalty missed the target completely, except for mine, which dribbled to a stop before it reached the line.

  ‘Let’s just hope it doesn’t go to penalties,’ said The Moan, and we all agreed.

  Chapter Ten

  A SURPRISING PROPOSAL

  Later that evening, after tea, there was a knock at the door. We have a bell, but about two years ago it got stuck while it was ringing and it rang for two days before the battery ran out, and it hasn’t worked since. I was watching a DVD called Great Footballing Bloopers, all about funny things that had gone wrong during football games. I had a notebook and a pencil and I was making notes about things not to do, like blasting the ball into your own net, jumping into the crowd to kick spectators who had said mean things about you, head-butting other players right in front of the ref, etc., etc.

  ‘It’s for you, Ludo,’ said Mum.

  I went to the back door. It was a boy I didn’t really know called Carl.

  ‘Can I be in your team for the big match on Saturday?’ he said.

  This was rather strange, because Carl, although he lived on the new estate, quite often hung around with Dockery. He was big and lanky and he was one of the best players in the school team. His hair was always hanging over the side of his face, so you could only ever see one eye. That made him look a bit shifty, but I always thought you shouldn’t judge people by how they look. You have to take into account other things, like whether or not they smell of smoky bacon, and also how nice they are.

  ‘What do you want to be in our team for?’ I asked back. ‘We’re probably going to get marmalized, you know.’

  ‘I can’t stand Dockery,’ he said. His one visible eye wasn’t looking at my face but at the middle of my chest. ‘He’s always boasting about things. He never shuts up about how great he is and how he’s got every single decent toy that’s ever been invented. Whatever you get for your birthday or Christmas, he always says, “Yeah, I’ve got that already.” And he never lets you play with them.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘OK then. We’re having our last practice session tomorrow.’

  ‘You should call it a training session, not a practice session,’ said Carl. ‘Calling it a practice session makes it sound stupid, like you’re practising the violin or something.’

  I didn’t really like the way he said that, sort of sneering. But he was probably right. ‘Training session’ did definitely sound a bit more sporty. And I didn’t want to put him off. With Carl on our side we actually had a small chance of not getting massacred.

  ‘OK, come tomorrow after school for the training session.’

  Chapter Eleven

  TACTICS

  I did my best to avoid Dockery the next day at school. At morning break I saw him and his gang playing football in the playground. They were kicking the ball around to each other. They weren’t that good, just big and strong, and they could kick the ball really hard. You could hear the ball hit the brick wall at the end of the playground with a WHHHAAAANNNG noise that made your head hum.

  The funny thing is that there were only six of them, including Dockery. I wondered who their seventh player was.

  At lunch time Dockery saw me in the dining hall (which was just the school gym at lunch time) and sort of smirked at me, which I didn’t like, although being smirked at is much better than being bashed. I don’t think he was very worried about losing the bet.

  The Bare Bum Gang thing still raised its ugly head now and then, but, as Noah pointed out, in a couple of years nobody would remember it, and in a hundred years we’d all be dead anyway, which was a funny way of cheering us up. I think he gets some of his ideas from his dad, who is quite often depressed, which means sad when you’re a grown-up.

  Jennifer didn’t even bother talking to us any more, which suited me. But I still noticed how good she was at cartwheels. I thought about trying one myself, but I was worried it might turn into a disaster, with me in a heap on the floor. That’s the thing about cartwheels – you don’t even have the faintest idea whether or not you can do them until you try. And when you try there’s a very good chance that you’re going to look stupid. It’s amazing they ever got invented, really.

  In the afternoon Miss Bridges asked me if anything was wrong. I said I had a lot on my mind, which made her smile. I wish Miss Bridges was going to be our teacher next year as well, and not that horrible old bulldog, Miss Parks.

  We met up before tea for the last practice – I mean training session before the big match. I thought it was better to meet before tea, because the last time we were all a bit full, and that slows you down.

  Carl was there waiting for us, and he had his own ball, the same kind they use in the Premiership. He was doing keepy-uppy. It looked like he could
go on doing it for as long as he liked. My record for keepy-uppy is three.

  Trixie wasn’t there to begin with, so we didn’t do as much running round the pitch as usual. Instead we did more skills-based training. We practised passing the ball and dribbling, and then we had a rest and drank some water while I had a think about tactics and positions and other important things.

  Carl didn’t really join in with any of this, because he was already brilliant at the things we were practising. He mainly watched us and sometimes made a suggestion. I felt a bit funny with him watching us like that. It made me more useless than ever, and Jamie and The Moan weren’t much better. Carl laughed at Jamie’s gloves, and I thought he was going to go home, but he didn’t.

  I was pleased with Oliver and Luke, who were really excellent at passing and dribbling. I decided to put them in midfield, where they could do most of the work. Carl would play up front, and the rest of us would be the defence, as all we were really good at was getting in the way, and that might be quite useful if we were getting in the way of their attackers.

  ‘We’re going to be playing three-two-one,’ I said when I’d worked it all out.

  ‘Eh?’ said Jamie.

  ‘The Christmas-tree formation. Three at the back – that’s me, The Moan and Noah – two in midfield that’s Luke and Oliver – and one up front – that’s Carl.’

  ‘What about me?’ said Jamie. ‘Why don’t I get mentioned?’

  ‘I don’t know why, but they never count the goalie when they talk about the formation.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care. Unless you include me I’m not playing.’