Underneath the horrible pink tracksuit she was wearing a proper white football kit that used to belong to Phillip, and she looked really good. I’d warned her against doing any cartwheels, but I think she probably knew that already. She ran so fast her feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.
I looked at the opposition. They didn’t know what to think about Jennifer. You could see from their faces that they wanted to laugh, but there was also something a bit like fear in their eyes. They could see that Jennifer was fast and sporty, and I reckon they were imagining what everyone would say if they got beat by a team with a girl in it.
Then Dockery stepped forward. ‘No girls allowed!’ he shouted.
‘Says who?’ I shouted back. ‘We never said anything about girls playing or not playing, so that means they can. If you’re afraid to play us, then fine. We win.’
There was a sort of murmur from the crowd then. I think they saw that we were being fair and Dockery wasn’t.
Dockery clamped his mouth shut after that. Carl was still hovering about, unsure what to do or where to go. ‘Come on then,’ Dockery shouted at him. ‘Sort your kit out.’
Then Carl took off his white shirt and underneath it he was wearing a blue one.
The crowd laughed at that, and someone shouted out, ‘Cheats’, but when Dockery went over towards them, most of the kids went quiet. They were still scared of him. And so was I.
Chapter Sixteen
THE BIG MATCH
Noah, Oliver, Luke, Jamie, The Moan and Jennifer gathered round while I gave them a last quick team talk.
‘Let’s try to pass the ball. And if we can, we should probably try to score. Oh, and we should try to stop them from scoring. If we can score more goals than them, then I think we’ve got a good chance of winning. Any questions?’
There weren’t any. I then got them all to stand in their positions. Jennifer was going to be our lone striker, taking Carl’s place.
The opposition lined up in their half. My heart was racing. They all looked so big and strong, and we looked so weak and feeble, especially little Luke and Oliver, who were three years younger than most of the kids in Dockery’s team. It felt like we were up against a gang of giants and ogres and trolls.
Someone shouted out, ‘OK, let’s go,’ and the next thing we knew they were all charging towards us. They hadn’t bothered with a proper kick-off. We weren’t even ready. Carl passed the ball to Dockery, who ran down the middle of the pitch towards our goal. Luke tried to tackle him, but Dockery just shoved him aside. I shouted ‘Foul’ and ‘Free kick’ but they didn’t stop. Noah tried to get to him, but he wasn’t fast enough. Then Dockery was right in front of our goal, with just Jamie in the way. Jamie’s legs were shaking, and he held his hands and the gloves with the wrong fingers out in front of him. Dockery could have easily slid the ball past him into the net, but he decided to blast it.
And blast it he did, right into Jamie’s face. It bounced away and went out for a corner.
It must have hurt like mad, but Jamie didn’t cry, which made me really proud.
There were complaints from some of Dockery’s team, but he silenced them with a glare. Larkin took the corner. I managed to get to it first and blindly whacked up the pitch, just trying to get it out of the danger zone.
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 tur
ned 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.
‘Watch out, people, here we come,
We are the Gang with the big bare bum.
Ring that bell, clang clang clang,
That’s why we’re called the Bare Bum Gang.
We’re like something off the telly,
We’re all bare and we’re all smelly!’
Supplementary material, chiefly concerning the manufacture of fart bombs, and the making of traps. And also dens.
Making a Smarties-tube Fart Bomb
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
Get some Smarties tubes
Get some farts
Put the farts in the smarties tubes
Put the loaded bomb in a hole
Wait for somebody to step in the hole
As you’ll see, I’ve also included a picture of a dog-poo trap, which is an even nastier version of the Smarties-tube fart-bomb trap. Usually people don’t fall in headfirst, but they might and it would serve them right if they did, for trying to sneak up on our den.
Making a den
The den is the most important thing about having a gang. You can make a den out of almost anything. However dens made out of newspaper, cardboard, tissue paper or cotton wool will be rubbish, especially when it rains.
Much will depend on where and when you are building your den. In the North Pole, your den will probably be an igloo made out of snow. In the Wild West your den will usually be a wigwam or possibly a tepee. In the Olden Days, your den would probably have been a small castle, made out of stone. In the future there will be dens in outer space and at the bottom of the ocean.
But whatever kind of den you have, your enemies will definitely want to destroy it. They can do this either by kicking it in, or by weeing in it. Some people think the best form of defence is attack. In fact the best form of defence is running away. However, dens cannot run away. The best form of defence for a den is hiding. You should therefore hide your den by covering it in leaves, wood, soil, newspaper, plastic bags or army camouflage netting. Our den is hidden under a weeping willow tree, and half of it is a sort of cave dug into the side of a hill.
Unfortunately sometimes your enemies will find your den. That is when the traps come in handy.
Every good den will have a secret stash of sweets hidden in it. If there is a siege lasting months or years, you can eat your special stash of sweets to stay alive.
The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-off
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 407 04933 5
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
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This ebook edition published 2013
Copyright © Anthony McGowan, 2008
Illustrations copyright © Frances Castle, 2008
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox 9781862303867 2008
The right of Anthony McGowan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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