Fizzlebert Stump

by A. F. Harrold

  ‘Oh, did you and Charles do your act tonight?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. Didn’t you see it?’

  ‘No, I was trying to put the collapsing clown car back together, ready for the finale. You know how much trouble I have with that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Fizz. He was a little upset that his mum hadn’t watched his death-defying stunt with the lion. Of course, he knew she’d seen it before and, of course, they both knew it wasn’t actually death-defying on account of the rubber false teeth, but all the same, he felt a little deflated. Any normal mum would watch her son put his head in a lion’s mouth and be proud, wouldn’t she? Any normal mum would have stuck up for her son when he was being teased.

  But he had the feeling that if she’d come out when she’d heard the noise and told the kids off for calling him names and taking the mickey, they would’ve laughed at her even more than they’d laughed at him. When a clown tries to be strict it always looks funny. People always laugh. And those kids would’ve been rolling on the ground clutching their sides, pointing at her and at him.

  And knowing her, she would’ve thought they were laughing because they thought she was funny. But there are two ways of being funny, of making people laugh: one is by doing funny things on purpose (telling a joke or being a part of a comedy routine), and the other is by having people think you look ridiculous.

  They were plain mean kids, it had turned out, and his mum would’ve just embarrassed him even more. If only he had a normal mum, who dressed in normal clothes that he could be seen in public with without everyone staring and pointing. But she loved being a clown, he knew. It meant a lot to her.

  ‘They liked the show?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ he said.

  ‘They thought you were good?’

  ‘They thought I was good, yeah.’

  ‘Did they mention the clowns?’

  ‘The clowns?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, did they mention us?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t really talk for very long.’

  ‘Oh well, I expect they liked the clowns,’ she decided, pleasing herself.

  ‘Probably,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Fizzlebert,’ his mother said, ‘I’m glad you’re making friends.’

  Then she was gone back inside.

  ‘Friends,’ Fizz said to himself, with a sort of grumbly sighing noise best spelled something like ‘harrumph’ but pronounced however you like.

  Not much later he went to bed himself, filled with the last little bits of excitement left over from the evening’s show but with much more of the disappointment he’d got from those kids. Meeting them had been more exciting than the audience roaring, and when they’d gone away . . . why, that was crushing. He actually felt crushed.

  And why had they gone? They’d gone, Fizz thought to himself as he lay in his bed, because he had a silly name. He just wished he was normal. Why did he have to live in a stupid circus?

  And those were the thoughts rattling round his head as sleep finally overtook him and almost brought this chapter to an end.

  But first there’s a tiny flashback. Just before he went in for the night he stood up and stretched and noticed something on the ground where the kids had all fallen over when that boy had done his silly dance. It was a book. Fizzlebert liked books and so, in case it rained and the book got ruined, he took it indoors with him.

  Now the chapter ends. There we go. That’s it. It’s stopped now.

  Chapter Three

  in which a mind reader is met and in which rabbits are discussed

  The next morning Fizzlebert woke up in bed. This was a good start. Sometimes he woke up on the floor, which wasn’t such a good start. It wasn’t that he fidgeted in his sleep, but if the circus was travelling through the night then sometimes the caravan would sway on a sharp corner and if he’d forgotten to do up the buckles then he’d be tipped out on the floor. Fortunately the floor wasn’t particularly hard and the fall wasn’t particularly far, but on the whole everyone would agree it’s nicer to wake up in bed than out of it. And that was exactly what Fizz thought too.

  While he was sat in the caravan’s tiny kitchen eating his breakfast (which was his usual candyfloss and cornflakes) he flicked through the book he’d found the night before. He could only assume that one of those horrible kids had dropped it. He didn’t want to be accused of stealing the book, but he didn’t know what to do with it. He had tried asking his mum, but she had already put her makeup on, ready to rehearse some new routines with the rest of the clowns, and she couldn’t give a sensible answer.

  ‘You could hide it in this bucket of custard,’ she’d said, ‘unless you’re afraid of the sharks.’

  That was typical of her. No help at all.

  He wondered who else he should ask.

  The book itself was a novel, and normally Fizz liked novels. He liked ones about adventures in outer space or in steamy jungles with dangerous animals, or with robots if at all possible. He’d read the first few pages and it was clear this novel had none of that. It was a story about life in a circus. Fizz thought a book ought to be an escape, ought to open a doorway into a different life for a few hours. This book didn’t seem to do that at all. It just looked plain boring.

  After breakfast Fizz had lessons. Even kids who live in circuses have to have some sort of schooling (it’s the law), but I dare say the classes Fizz attended weren’t quite like the ones kids like you get at school.

  All his different subjects were taught by different members of the circus. Each person taught Fizz the subject they felt they knew most about. For example, Madame Plume de Matant, the woman who told fortunes in a dimly lit and heavily perfumed tent by peering into a crystal ball (which was just an upside down goldfish bowl filled with purple smoke, but it looked all swirly and spooky and pretty mysterious): she taught Fizzlebert French. (Since Fizz didn’t know any French to begin with, it didn’t much matter that Madame Plume de Matant didn’t know more than half a dozen words herself. A fortune teller, she thought, should be exotic and mysterious, and so she had assumed what she called ‘a French aura’ years before, which involved eating croissants every morning, drinking too much coffee and saying ‘oui’ instead of ‘yes’ (which sounded like she said ‘wee’ a lot, which made Fizz laugh until she told him it actually meant ‘yes’ in French, and not ‘wee’. That much she had right). The rest she made up and Fizzlebert never knew any different, not until the day he met a Frenchman, but that’s another story entirely.)

  Fizz’s other teachers included: the Twitchery Sisters (Mary and Maureen, the Human Trampolines), a pair of acrobats, who took him for geography; Captain Fox-Dingle, the lion tamer, who gave him art classes; and Bongo Bongoton, one of the clowns, who gave him lessons in English, which was awkward (which is to say, a bit silly) because he was a mime (and if you don’t know what a mime is, I’d just keep quiet about it).

  This morning however, Fizz had to go over to Dr Surprise’s caravan for a history lesson.

  Dr Surprise was the circus’s Mysterious Magical Mind Reader, Horrendous Horripilating Hypnotist and Incredible Invisible Illusionist. (His job title was possibly the longest and most impressive in the whole circus but few people actually understood what it all meant.)

  When Fizzlebert knocked on Dr Surprise’s door Dr Surprise was surprised.

  ‘What, eh? Who is it?’ he shouted in his thin high voice through the open window.

  ‘It’s me, Fizz,’ Fizz shouted back.

  ‘Oh heck,’ shouted Dr Surprise. ‘Is it that time already?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Fizz, secretly hoping that maybe it somehow wasn’t. He liked Dr Surprise, but he didn’t like history.

  ‘Okay, hang on. I’m just getting up. Give me a minute,’ the man squeaked.

  Fizz waited, scuffing his shoes in the dust and twiddling his thumbs.

  In years gone by thumb twiddling was a popular way to pass the time, but these days it has rather fallen out of fashion. It just proves that Fizz hardly e
ver hung around with kids his own age. They’d have told him pretty sharpish that thumb twiddling was old hat and they’d have probably laughed at him like the kids the night before had when they learnt his name. But Fizz had grown up surrounded by grownups who were twenty, thirty, even forty years older than him and he’d picked up a few of their habits. They didn’t mind thumb twiddling at all, in fact they would talk proudly of the days when one of their riggers won a bronze medal for it in the 1976 All-Circus Olympic-ish Games. (Riggers are the men who build the Big Top and take it down again every time the circus moves to a new town, and as a rule they’re tough burly men covered with tattoos (tattoos are like drawings, but done by people who can’t find any paper).)

  Anyway, if you’ve never twiddled your thumbs then you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s a brilliant thing. I do it. I expect your parents probably do it too. Certainly your grandparents. Next time you see them you should ask for a quick lesson. It’ll only take a minute. It’s dead simple. You just join your hands together in front of you, leaving the thumbs untangled, and then you sort of let them chase each other round in circles. Easy, see?

  You can do it for hours and hours and it’s absolutely free and doesn’t use any electricity and so is good for the environment.

  Fizz, however, only had to do it for two minutes and forty-six seconds before Dr Surprise opened the door and invited him in.

  Dr Surprise was a tall thin man. He wore a very dark suit, sharp and tight and oily, which squeaked ever so slightly when he moved. The stiff white cuffs of his shirt poked out of the bottoms of his sleeves and almost hid his hands from sight. What you could see of his hands was covered by thin black silk gloves. He was bald except for a few long strands of hair that grew from somewhere near the back and looped around the dome of his head several times before drooping pointily downwards just above his left eye. His moustache was impressively curly, a deep midnight black, and from a particularly expensive Christmas cracker. In his right eye he clutched a monocle (that’s like half a pair of glasses, in case you didn’t know) that glinted whenever he moved his head, which he didn’t do very often at all.

  On his feet were a pair of large pink fluffy slippers shaped like rabbits. (When he went on stage he changed into smarter shoes, but right now he was off duty.)

  He smelt ever so slightly of wax.

  ‘So,’ he said when they had sat down at the little table they used for lessons, ‘what are we to study today?’

  ‘I think,’ said Fizz, ‘that we’d just got up to the Wars of the Roses.’

  ‘Aha!’ shouted the Doctor in his high warble. ‘I knew that!’

  (Well, he was a mind reader after all, so it wasn’t all that surprising that he knew.)

  ‘So what happens next?’ asked Fizz.

  ‘I think there was another war. Didn’t you read the next chapter in the history book?’

  ‘Well, no, because you set fire to it last week. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Set fire to it?’

  ‘Yes, you were showing me how to do the trick where you make sparks come out of your fingers.’

  (Fizz always tried to get the Doctor to teach him tricks. It was better than learning history, and probably more useful too.)

  ‘Ah, Brilliant Brewster’s Bright Bedazzler?’

  ‘That’s it,’ Fizz said.

  ‘And that set fire to the book?’

  (Fizz didn’t mention that he’d ‘accidentally’ left the book out just where they were doing the trick. He liked books, as I’ve already said, but not all books.)

  ‘Yes,’ Fizz said. ‘And then you said not to panic, because you’d get another one.’

  ‘I did?’ asked Dr Surprise, cautiously.

  ‘Yes, you were going to go shopping.’

  ‘Ah. Well. I never quite got round to it. I’ve been busy, you see.’

  ‘Busy?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about setting fire to my hat. A tall blaze of flames winding up from within. What do you think?’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ Fizz asked.

  ‘Oh no. Not at all. I’ve mostly worked it out. I lift my hat, turn it over, hold it away from me, run my hand over it and woosh! A pillar of flame bursts ten feet into the air. Spectacular! It’s basically the same as the Brewster’s Backfiring Blaster-Bomb, but on a larger scale. Only,’ he added, ‘I must remember to do the fire trick after I’ve pulled the rabbit out. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘It’s cooked rabbit for dinner?’ Fizz asked mischievously.

  ‘No, no!’ Dr Surprise squeaked in a pretend frenzy. ‘You nasty boy. How dare you suggest such a thing? I couldn’t eat Flopples. She’s been a friend to me for more years than I can count on one hand.’

  ‘Six years?’ Fizz suggested, knowing that Dr Surprise always counted with his fingers.

  ‘No, more years than I can count on my left hand.’

  ‘Ah, five years then?’

  ‘Yes. For five years Flopples and I have been best friends, comrades in magic, associates in otherworldliness. She has helped my shows soar to their great heights and no one can take that away from her.’

  Flopples, as you’ll have realised, was the rabbit that Dr Surprise pulled from his hat halfway through the show. You might also be wondering what happened to the missing finger on his left hand, but all I’ll say about that is: be very careful if ever you try training a rabbit with a carrot that’s too short.

  They discussed this new trick for a while before Fizz started asking Dr Surprise about hypnotism. (He always asked Dr Surprise about hypnotism because it was Fizz’s favourite bit of the Doctor’s show.) It seemed the Wars of the Roses had been completely forgotten.

  Hypnotism is the art of putting someone into a ‘state of suggestion’. That means that they’ll do whatever you ask them to, even if it’s something quite silly, like hopping on one leg or pretending to be a cat or even pretending to be a cat that’s hopping on one leg. That’s exactly the sort of thing that makes an audience laugh nervously (it’s very funny, just so long as it’s not you that’s been hypnotised).

  Fizz had seen the show many times. He’d watched Dr Surprise slowly and steadily swing his pocket watch to and fro and laughed at how the perfectly ordinary normal boring people out of the audience would do what he said. It looked so simple. ‘Just concentrate on my watch,’ he would say, ‘you are getting sleepy,’ and they’d answer and say, ‘I am getting sleepy.’ And then he’d say, ‘When I count to ten you will obey only my voice.’ And then he would count up to ten and the person would say, ‘Yes, Master,’ (he always asked them to call him ‘Master’ because it was scary and scary is good for business). Then he would say, ‘When I snap my fingers you will wake up and remember nothing of what has happened.’ And after he’d had them pretend to be dogs and jump through hoops or pretend to be chickens and scratch at the sawdust looking for grain, he’d snap his fingers and they’d say, ‘Have you started yet?’ not realising that he had not only started but also finished, and they’d go and sit back down thinking nothing had happened, until their friends told them all about it later on.

  Fizz thought it was brilliant and funny and also a bit scary, and he’d been badgering Dr Surprise to teach him the trick for months, but the Doctor was very careful about not revealing all of his secrets.

  ‘Go on,’ Fizz said today.

  ‘No, I cannot reveal my powers to you, Fizzlebert Stump. They bring me a great responsibility and I must keep them hidden, for fear they might fall into the wrong hands of some evildoer.’

  ‘Oh, go on, it’s only me.’

  ‘No. I cannot. Now, I think, this lesson is over. Look, it is almost eleven o’clock. I must begin rehearsing the new trick.’

  ‘Setting fire to your hat?’

  ‘Yes. So, you’d best run along.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fizz said. ‘Bye then.’

  But Fizz lingered in the Doctor’s doorway, one foot on the steps and fresh air already in his lungs. And there he paused, just for a moment.
He had wanted to ask Dr Surprise for some advice, but had forgotten until now. It was only when leaving the caravan that he’d picked up the book he’d found the night before and had remembered. But Dr Surprise wanted to be getting on with his new trick, and Fizz didn’t want to delay him any longer.

  As he hesitated, the Doctor raised a finger in the air with a mysterious flourish, and said, ‘Wait! I sense that there is something you wish to ask me, yes?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Fizz said.

  But before he could ask his question Dr Surprise spoke again.

  ‘You want to know about that book? Yes? Am I right?’

  ‘Wow,’ said Fizz, quite amazed. ‘How on earth did you know that?’

  ‘Well . . .’ said the Doctor, smiling widely under his tiny moustache.

  (Of course, Fizz shouldn’t have been surprised at all. I mean, he knew that Dr Surprise was a mind reader. But also, he might have noticed that he had been clutching the book and lingering as if to say, ‘I want to say something about this, but I’m not sure I should’. (I’m just saying, it’s worth remembering that it doesn’t always take a mind reader to read a mind.))

  Fizzlebert told him the story of how he’d found the book, though he didn’t mention about how the kids had taken the mickey out of him before running away laughing.

  ‘Well, let me see,’ Dr Surprise said, taking the book from him. ‘Ah, look. Do you know what this is?’

  He had opened the front cover and there pasted inside the book was a flap of paper with two columns of dates stamped in blue ink. Fizz had wondered about that earlier, but didn’t know quite what to make of it.

  ‘This is a library book. You see these dates? They tell you when the book has to be taken back.’

  ‘Taken back where?’

  ‘Back to the library.’

  ‘What’s a library?’ asked Fizz.

  (Now, of course you know what a library is, and you’re probably thinking that everyone knows what a library is, but you have to remember that Fizzlebert had grown up in a travelling circus. He had never lived anywhere long enough to learn about a library, let alone to join one and borrow books. So please don’t think him stupid for not knowing. I mean, I bet you don’t know what a corde pareille is, but Fizz did. (It’s a circus act in which the performer does spectacular graceful astonishing acrobatic things on a rope that hangs straight down from the highest point of the Big Top.) So now you know, and now Fizz is learning about libraries. Everyone’s learnt something. What a very useful book this is.)