Fizzlebert Stump

by A. F. Harrold

  ‘It’s a place where books are kept,’ said the Doctor, explaining about the library. ‘You say you only met the boy whose book this was briefly? And you don’t know where he is now? Well, there’s only one thing to do, isn’t there?’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘Yes. This book is due back tomorrow and if it isn’t returned to the library your new friend will be in trouble.’

  ‘In trouble?’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s a serious thing having a book out too long.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Oh yes. Very serious indeed. What if someone else wants to read this? What would happen then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No. And neither do I. Very serious.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘We do nothing, Fizzlebert. I have a trick to practise. You, on the other hand, should take this book back.’

  ‘Back to the boy who . . .?’

  ‘No. You said you don’t know where he is. No, you’ll have to take it back to the library for him. Do a good deed.’

  Fizz didn’t like the idea of getting the boy into trouble, even if he had been mean. That wouldn’t really be fair and although he was unhappy, he didn’t want to be nasty. So, yes, he thought, he would take it back, but . . .

  ‘But, Dr Surprise, I don’t know where this library is either.’

  ‘Ah, that’s easy,’ the Doctor said. ‘Look, the address is written in the book and it’s not very far at all.’

  The two of them climbed down from the caravan and walked to the edge of the circus tents.

  Dr Surprise pointed to the other side of the park.

  ‘You see there, just round the duck pond and up that path?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, through those trees is a little road and the library is the building just on the right. It’s a five-minute walk from here.’

  ‘So, it’s past the duck pond, up the path through the trees and you say it’s just on the right?’ Fizz repeated. ‘How will I know which one’s the library?’

  ‘It will say “Library” over the door in big letters. Be full of books. You can’t miss it. Just go in and give the book back. That’s all you have to do.’

  ‘That’s all I have to do?’

  ‘That’s all. It won’t take you more than ten minutes all told. But first . . .’

  ‘First?’ asked Fizz.

  ‘You’d best tell your parents where you’re going. We don’t want you getting in trouble, do we?’

  Before Fizz could answer Dr Surprise spun on his rabbit-slippered heel and headed off back to his caravan where his new trick was waiting to be tried out.

  Fizzlebert began walking across the park, down past the duck pond and towards the trees on the far side behind which hid this library place. The tails of his frock-coat fluttered as he walked and the cool breeze of the late summer morning ruffled his red hair like the hand of an over-friendly aunt.

  He looked back at the circus once. All the tents and caravans and lorries looked so small next to the enormous Big Top with its orange and yellow stripes shining bright in the morning sun.

  For just a second he wondered whether he should do as Dr Surprise said, and go and tell his parents, but his mum was wearing her clown face now and she would just crack another stupid joke if he tried to tell her anything, and the last time he saw his dad he’d been trying to work out how a man could lift a horse.

  Fizz had tried telling his dad things before, but he usually became distracted and dropped whatever it was he was lifting. Fizz didn’t fancy being responsible for his dad dropping a horse. (The woman in charge of the horses (Miss Tremble) was the sort of person who cried when one of her horses had its hair cut. Who knew how she’d react if the strongman dropped one of her prize ponies. Fizz didn’t want to find out.)

  ‘Anyway,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll only be ten minutes. They won’t mind me popping out for that long.’

  Of course, Fizzlebert’s parents didn’t mind him popping out, but only because they didn’t know about it. By the time Dr Surprise had set fire to his hat a few times he’d almost completely forgotten the morning’s lessons, and besides he had told Fizz to tell his parents, so it wasn’t his fault, was it?

  Hang on, what wasn’t his fault? Fizzlebert is just taking a book to the library and coming straight back, isn’t he? We’ve all done that, haven’t we? It’s easy. What could possibly go wrong?

  Chapter Four

  in which a librarian is encountered and in which death robots from Mars make a brief appearance

  Fizzlebert was about to push open the door to the library when it opened all by itself. It trundled to one side and waited for him to step through. To Fizz this was unusual. Circus tents don’t have automatic doors and neither do caravans. He was startled, but he wasn’t scared.

  In an earlier age a boy faced with an automatic sliding door, a door that seemed to think for itself and which knew when someone was coming, would think it was witchcraft or black magic. They’d run and hide, rather than step through the doorway the devilish door was offering. Maybe they’d call the police or a priest to come and examine the door for demons and ghosts. But Fizz lived, more or less, now (or, at least, not so many years ago) and he understood about things like motors and electronics. He listened to the radio and had even been to the cinema a few times, and a door that could trundle out of the way when someone walked towards it didn’t seem an impossible thing.

  It wasn’t the magic door that made him pause on the doorstep, but the responsibility he’d taken upon himself. He held the library book in his hand and he could hear Dr Surprise’s voice in his ear saying, ‘Just hand it in.’ But he didn’t know exactly what was going to happen in there. Would he have to explain where he’d got the book? Might the person behind the counter start asking him questions he didn’t know the answer to?

  That’s what made him nervous.

  As he hesitated the automatic door began to slide shut again. ‘Trundle, trundle,’ it went.

  Fizzlebert stepped backwards and the doors stopped closing and began opening yet again, trundling in the opposite direction.

  He grabbed the opportunity and scrunched up his courage and stepped through, saying, ‘Thank you,’ to the door that had done its job so well.

  Inside it was nice and cool. It was spacious and brightly lit. Directly in front of Fizzlebert was a woman sat behind a wide desk. Her face was round and plump and red-cheeked and she looked a little out of breath. She wore a pair of glasses on the top of her head, rather than on her eyes, as if she had a secret pair of eyes under her hair that were watching the ceiling closely, and she was chewing the end of a biro. There were blue ink stains round her mouth.

  A badge pinned to her grey-green cardigan (which seemed to be a size too small, as the buttons strained to keep it shut across her chest) said her name was ‘Miss Toad’. (Fizz was too polite to think to himself, ‘How appropriate,’ or if he did think it he was too polite to ever tell anyone he had thought it, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.)

  Behind her, beyond the desk, filling up the rest of the tall building, were shelf after shelf of books. Fizz had only once or twice ever been in a bookshop, when he’d gone shopping with his dad. He’d been allowed to pick one book under five pounds on each shopping trip. He remembered what he’d bought. They’d been brilliant books. One was a collection of funny poems and one was a book about frogs. Fizz had read them both many times. ‘Did you know,’ Fizzlebert might ask you if you met him, ‘that some frogs have sticky pads on their feet so they can climb up trees? Or that frogs shed their skin from time to time? Or that when they shed their skin, they first loosen it by wriggling around and then pull it up over their heads as if taking off a jumper, and then eat it?’ Did you know that? Well if you didn’t, you do now, and that’s because that little frog book had been one of Fizz’s favourites when he was six years old.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  (That was Miss Toad speaking. She had a
grumbling rumbling raspy deep voice which almost sounded like she was burping the words she spoke. But Fizz knew that she wasn’t actually burping her words, because grownups don’t do things like that. Well, not very often, and never when children might hear.)

  Fizzlebert walked over and gave her the book he’d found.

  ‘Someone said I should give this to you,’ he said, hoping that would be enough explanation.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  She turned the book round to face her, opened it up and waved a red light over the front page. There was a beep from her computer. She looked at her screen and said, ‘That’s fine.’

  Fizz didn’t know what to do now. She hadn’t asked any complicated questions and the book had been given back. But . . .

  He looked at the shelves and shelves of books and wondered.

  ‘Are these all yours?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Well,’ Miss Toad smiled, inkily, ‘they’re not mine, are they? They belong to the library. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Um, yes?’

  ‘Yes, those are all our books. Well, some of them. There are more upstairs,’ she rumbled.

  She looked at Fizz’s face. It was like the sort of face that you sometimes see in books of old photographs pressed up against a sweet shop window. Except the boys in those sorts of pictures are normally in black and white and wearing little school caps. But the eagerness, the desire to be let in was the same.

  ‘The children’s section is through the arch over there,’ she said, pointing round the corner. (Pointing round corners is a really good trick and quite easy to do if you have long enough arms.)

  ‘Can I have a look?’

  ‘Of course,’ she burped. ‘Go on.’

  Forgetting that he’d told himself he’d only be ten minutes taking the book back, and forgetting that he hadn’t told his parents where he was going, Fizzlebert thanked Miss Toad and, smiling, walked deeper into the library.

  Bookcases loomed up into the air on either side and the smell of the room became more papery, slightly musty, ever so friendly. The carpet felt deep under his shoes and comfortable and quiet.

  Threading his way through the tall stacks he found the arch the lady had pointed to and stepped through into a smaller, more colourful room. The shelves in this room were lower. He could reach the books on the top of the bookcases and he liked the look of them.

  The room was empty. Empty of people, that is; obviously it was jam-packed full of books. There were also some chairs and tables and a whole corner had been given over to beanbags and a big wooden caterpillar which had shelves in it and provided a home, it seemed, for big flat picture books. But other than all that sort of stuff, the place was empty of people. It was a Tuesday and although it was the summer, term hadn’t quite wound up and was only thinking about ending, so normal kids were still in school. So, this morning, Fizzlebert was the only boy in the whole library.

  The room was full of more books than he’d ever seen in his life. Brilliant! Amazing! Just looking along one shelf at random and reading the titles, it seemed that every single book was different. Where to begin?

  He shut his eyes and pulled out the first book his hand fell on. The title was: The Great Zargo of Ixl-Bolth and the Flying Death Robots of Mars. He tried saying the unfamiliar words and after just two goes he thought he could pronounce them properly. Reading the back of the book it said it was about a big war between two alien races . . . and yes, it had robots (flying ones (from Mars)). Well, if that wasn’t right up his alley (which is a different way of saying ‘if that wasn’t his cup of tea’, which I didn’t say because Fizz didn’t drink tea, preferring hot chocolate or cold squash) then he didn’t know what was.

  He looked at the price that was printed at the bottom of the back cover, just next to the barcode.

  Looking in his purse, he had just enough money to buy the book.

  They would only be in this town another couple of days before the circus moved on, and he might never find his way back to this library and he really wanted to find out what The Great Zargo was.

  He quickly made a decision.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said a minute later to the lady at the front desk, ‘I’d like to buy this book please.’

  He handed her the book and started to empty his purse out onto the counter top.

  ‘Buy this book?’ Miss Toad asked, the words rolling out of her inky mouth like curious boulders.

  ‘Yes please,’ he said.

  ‘But you don’t need to buy the book. This is a library.’

  Please, don’t laugh at Fizz. I know that you know and you know that I know that you know how a library works, because we’ve been to them and we’ve all borrowed books. Sometimes we borrowed them for fun, sometimes to do some homework. Sometimes we had to get a book out or take one back for our granny. The important thing to remember is that we’ve been there and done it. Fizzlebert, as I said in the last chapter, had never been to a library before. He wasn’t to know how they worked. Naturally, looking around at all those books, he thought the place was just a big bookshop.

  Imagine how surprised he was when she told him he could borrow the book and didn’t have to pay anything. How brilliant is that?

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘You mean I can just have it?’

  ‘No,’ she rumbled, ‘but you can borrow it.’

  ‘Are you sure I can borrow this one?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘But are you sure about this one?’ He wondered if she was making it up, or if there was a special offer on certain selected books.

  ‘Yes, you can borrow them all. Well, only four at a time, but . . .’

  ‘I can borrow them all?’ he said, his mouth falling open. He looked around at the shelves, tall and dark and looming, but filled to the brim with books. More books than he could ever imagine reading in an entire lifetime, and he could just borrow them all!

  ‘Yes, you can borrow any of them,’ Miss Toad went on. ‘All I need to do is scan your library card and stamp the book and it’s yours for the next four weeks. You can leave this one here for the moment and go and choose some others if you like. I’ll keep it safe for you.’

  There was something in what she just said which had caught hold of Fizz’s ears, something that he’d heard but hadn’t quite understood. What was it?

  ‘Library card?’ he said, after a moment.

  ‘Yes, your library card,’ Miss Toad said. ‘The card that says you’re a member of the library.’

  ‘A member of the library?’

  She leaned over the counter to look at him closer. Her big round face loomed like the bookcases had, and her glasses slid down from her hair, over her forehead to land, plop, on her nose. Her eyes became enormous. The lenses were very thick. The ink stains round her mouth moved weirdly as she talked.

  ‘Are you not a member of the library?’

  She pointed at him with the grizzled end of her biro.

  Fizzlebert quaked. Here came the hard questions. He had known something was going to go wrong, that there was going to be a catch, and here it came.

  ‘No?’ he said, making it sound a bit like a question just in case she knew better.

  ‘Well, you’ll want to join then, won’t you?’

  She smiled in such a way that her cheeks wobbled like two blue-spotted jellies. It was her way of being friendly, he decided.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Is it complicated?’

  ‘No it’s very easy,’ she burped.

  Fizz felt relieved.

  She reached under her desk and brought out a folder with some forms in and tapped at the top one with her pen.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘are you over sixteen years old?’

  If Fizz had been a less polite boy he’d have looked at her as if she was stupid.

  ‘No,’ he said, surprised that she hadn’t been able to tell.

  She put her pen down and laid her plump ink-stained hands either side of the sheet of paper.

  ‘In that case
,’ she said, ‘your parents will need to fill in the form. Are they around?’

  Fizz mumbled something that might’ve been a ‘no’ but which also might’ve been a ‘yes’. He knew they weren’t around, but he didn’t want to admit it to her.

  He’d had his heart set on this book, and now he couldn’t have it. He wanted to bang it down on the desk and stomp out, but he stopped himself from making a scene. His eyes began to fill with tears and he felt angry with himself for almost beginning to sort of cry. It was only a book after all.

  (I’m sure you know what it’s like when you’ve been really looking forward to something that, at the last minute, doesn’t happen. Even if it’s no one’s fault you can still feel rotten about it inside. You feel like you want to cry or shout or throw a hissy fit, even though you know no one’s to blame and no one’s been mean to you. Well, Fizz felt something like that.)

  He left the book on the desk and walked out the library door.

  It opened for him with a grumbling trundle, and with his head down and his mind full of unfair thoughts he forgot to say ‘thank you’.

  He would have to go back to the circus now.

  His parents were awfully busy rehearsing and practising their shows, and when they weren’t doing that they were usually helping someone else with their rehearsals, or they were doing odd jobs round the circus. Everyone mucked in on cleaning up, for example, and the Big Top had to look good before the show.

  Even if he did ask them they probably wouldn’t have time to come all the way here to sign the forms. And if he asked them to, he’d have to confess that he’d come to the library without their permission in the first place, and he’d definitely get in trouble for that. But he wouldn’t get in trouble if they didn’t know he’d gone and the only way they wouldn’t know was if he didn’t tell them. But if he didn’t tell them, then he’d never get to join the library.