Fizzlebert Stump

by A. F. Harrold

‘What book?’ Mrs Stump interrupted.

  ‘It was a library book,’ Dr Surprise continued. He was worried now. ‘I . . . I said he should ask you. You know I would tell him that, don’t you?’

  ‘Where would Fizz get a library book?’

  ‘He said a friend had given it to him. Something like that. Let me try to remember.’

  He banged the side of his head as if it might knock loose the memory, but other than freeing some sparks which flew out of the opposite ear, it had no effect.

  ‘A friend?’ asked Mr Stump, sounding a little surprised.

  ‘Ooh!’ said Mrs Stump. ‘Last night, after the show, he was talking to some local kids. They were having a laugh together. It must’ve belonged to one of them. They must’ve lent it to him.’

  ‘It was due back tomorrow,’ Dr Surprise added. ‘He was going to do a good deed.’

  ‘But he’s not come back,’ Mr Stump said, looking Dr Surprise in the eyes with a look that might have been angry if it wasn’t so worried.

  ‘It’s only five minutes away,’ the Doctor said quietly.

  In less than five minutes an expedition was organised. Mr and Mrs Stump, along with a couple of riggers who volunteered, Dr Surprise and Captain Fox-Dingle, who needed to take Charles, the lion, for a walk anyway, started out across the park to visit the library.

  Fish, the sea lion, followed along, keeping out of Charles’s way, but looking hopeful. If so many people were going in one direction, then that might be a place with fish, he thought.

  Captain Fox-Dingle had Charles on a lead and he was more obedient than a dog (he was old, lazy and tired), but he did attract some strange stares from people out jogging. And he wasn’t the only one. Although Mrs Stump had washed off her makeup, she (in a break with all the rules of clownery) was otherwise still in costume: a bright pink and yellow bulbous silk shape walking across the park. People stared at her too. And at Mr Stump in his strongman’s leopard skin, with his little neatly oiled moustache. And at Fish, who still had his spangly silver-sequined waistcoat on. (He’d left his top hat behind.)

  ‘It’s just over here, through the trees,’ Dr Surprise said, pointing the way. ‘I’m a member myself.’

  He got his wallet out as they walked, to show the Stumps his collection of library cards. The wallet was the sort that has little compartments for cards that fold up like a concertina and as he held it up they fluttered down to dangle in a leather strip four feet long.

  ‘Forty-seven different library cards,’ he said, proudly. ‘I join up everywhere we stop. I like to read, you see.’

  Mr and Mrs Stump weren’t really paying very much attention to the Doctor’s conversation. They were busy looking around, seeing if they could spot Fizz somewhere. There were families out enjoying late afternoon after-school picnics in the park. Every time a boy ran by Mrs Stump’s heart jumped in her chest like a giddy frog, but, of course, none of them were Fizzlebert.

  After a couple of minutes they reached the library. It really wasn’t very far away at all.

  But it was closed.

  The circus group read the times on the poster in the window. It had only been shut for ten minutes.

  ‘What do we do now?’ one of the riggers asked. ‘You sure this is where he came?’

  ‘At eleven o’clock this morning,’ Mrs Stump said, dejectedly.

  She didn’t know what to do, what her next move should be.

  She could send all her friends off in different directions, wandering the streets looking for Fizz, but would that help? Why would Fizz be on the streets? If he’d wanted to go into the town he would have asked someone to go with him. He wasn’t a stupid boy. She’d brought him up properly, hadn’t she? He knew not to wander off alone. But then . . .

  Just as she was thinking these thoughts, trying to puzzle out an idea, Fish made a loud sea lion noise (which sounded a bit like a cross between a dog’s bark and goose’s honk, but smelled more of pilchard) and banged the ground with his flippers. He was pointing towards the library doors with his nose.

  ‘Look,’ Mr Stump said, ‘there’s someone coming.’

  Mrs Stump looked through the door (the one that had opened automatically for Fizz that morning, but which hadn’t opened for his mum or dad or their friends) and she could see a figure, approaching them through the gloom of the darkened library.

  It was large and it waddled. And very slowly it came closer. It was Miss Toad. She had turned all the lights off and was about to go home. She opened the door, came through, and locked it up behind her. She seemed surprisingly unsurprised to find a bunch of circus folk on her doorstep.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said in her voice like a burp, as she started to walk past them.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mr Stump said, putting his enormous arm out to block her path, ‘do you work here?’ His arm was like the branch of a tree and she ducked to go under it. Being so short, ducking was very easy for her.

  Mr Stump said, ‘Excuse me,’ again, and when she ignored him and walked by, he grabbed her (gently) by the collar and lifted her up. Her fat ankles paddled the air, as if they were still walking. He lifted her higher, with one arm, which was a remarkable feat since she was not the slimmest or slightest of creatures, and turned her so they faced each other.

  She was, as you can imagine, a little startled by this, but as a trained librarian she did not let it show. All sorts come into libraries, especially in the winter when it’s snowing outside and the library is the only free and warm building nearby. A woman like Miss Toad has to be able to deal with them, and to kick them all out at closing time. She was unflappable.

  But she did stop waggling her feet.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mr Stump said again, as politely as he could, given that he was lifting the woman in the air by the scruff of her neck. ‘I just wondered if you, by any chance, work here?’

  Miss Toad looked up at him through her thick glasses. Her cheeks puffed out as she chewed what was either a wad of chewing gum or the remains of her last biro.

  ‘Yes,’ she rumbled. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Our son. We’re looking for him.’

  ‘We think he came here this morning,’ Mrs Stump added. ‘Before lunch.’

  Miss Toad thought about it for a moment and while she thought she continued chewing. Her fat round face bulged and moved as she did so and the blue ink marks round her mouth wiggled around like very weird cartoons on an even weirder television made out of skin. She blinked from behind the jam-jar-thick glasses.

  ‘A boy?’ she said eventually.

  ‘Yes, his name is Fizzlebert. He’s almost nine. He doesn’t wear glasses.’

  ‘No,’ she burped. ‘Not seen a boy called Filbert. Sorry.’

  ‘Fizzlebert,’ corrected Mrs Stump from behind her husband.

  ‘Only one boy in this morning. Before lunch.’

  ‘Well, that must have been him. Did you see where he went? Did he say anything?’

  Miss Toad waited for Mr Stump to stop talking. She was still dangling at the end of his arm, but the collar of her coat had begun to stretch and her feet were almost touching the pavement.

  ‘But,’ she grumbled, ‘his name wasn’t Fizzlewart. It was Smith. Just plain John Smith. He told me himself, when he signed up for his library card.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence,’ one of the riggers chipped in.

  Mr Stump looked at him.

  ‘Well, John,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but your name’s hardly unusual, is it?’

  ‘That’s why,’ Mrs Stump added, ‘we called Fizzlebert Fizzlebert.’

  ‘Fizzlebert?’ said Miss Toad, finally pronouncing it right.

  ‘I mean, because it’s not the same as everyone else. We wanted him to be his own person. To be unique. But now he’s missing. Oh, I hope he’s alright.’

  She began to cry big quiet tears.

  Dr Surprise produced a handkerchief from his top pocket. And another one. And another one. After a minute he had produced a st
ring of twenty-four hankies, all different colours, and he handed her the one on the end to wipe her eyes with.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be fine,’ her husband said. ‘We’ll just have to keep looking.’

  He put Miss Toad down (and apologised for having picked her up) and let go of her coat. Like her namesake (that is to say, a real toad let go by a boy who’d been holding it in his hand) she just waddled by, carrying on her way as if nothing had happened, off home to have her tea and watch telly.

  ‘Sorry about your boy, your Fizzlebert,’ she belched over her shoulder as she left them. ‘I hope you find him soon.’

  The crowd of circus folk stood at a loose end outside the now totally shut library.

  ‘What do we do next?’ someone asked.

  ‘Just what I said,’ Mr Stump said, ‘we keep on looking.’

  ‘It’s curtain up in two hours,’ Dr Surprise commented.

  ‘The show can go on without a strongman tonight. I’ll keep looking until I find my boy.’

  ‘Me too,’ his wife added. ‘As long as it takes.’

  No one had noticed that Captain Fox-Dingle and Charles had nipped off while they were talking to Miss Toad, but just after she’d left they came back from out of the trees.

  ‘Sorry,’ the Captain said in his brisk military tone (he’d never actually been in the army, but he’d learnt a brisk officer’s tone from watching war films). ‘Miss anything? Charles in bushes. Bit of . . . ahem . . . call of nature. Back now. Fizz not returned? Search goes on? Yes?’

  Charles roared quietly and tossed his mane about, as if agreeing.

  ‘Yes,’ the weary parents said, ‘we’re going to keep looking.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ the Captain said. ‘Count us in. Charles likes Fizz. Head perfect size. Good show. Very good. Let’s go.’

  Fish eyed the lion warily and, sniffing the air, honked once as if he had an idea, but no one paid him any attention. They were too busy trying to work out a plan for the search. Who should go where? Where to look first? Should they get the police involved?

  If only Fish could speak English he could have told them what it was his nose had picked up. But he couldn’t speak English and no one noticed his twitching whiskers.

  And so the adults began their search, and Chapter Eight comes to a close. Chapter Nine will be a good one, because we’ll be back with Fizz, and I for one am quite eager to find out what’s been going on in the Stinkthrottles’ house.

  See you there.

  Chapter Nine

  in which a bathroom is described and in which an escape plan is formulated

  You’ll remember when we last saw Fizz he had just been told by Mrs Stinkthrottle to clean her bathroom, and it was a bathroom that needed cleaning.

  For five minutes he just stood and looked around and wondered where to begin. He thought that he ought to make a start while he tried to come up with a plan of escape, but it wasn’t until he’d emptied the sink that he thought of even the beginning of one. This (I mean emptying the sink, not the beginning of the plan) involved removing the gramophone horn (you’ll have seen these, big curling cones on really old record players), the three socks (none matching), the peacock feathers, the empty mouse nest, some coal and the hairy soap.

  The only way Fizz could empty the sink was to dump the stuff he took out of it into the bathtub, which was already full of all sorts of other rubbish (some of the key ingredients were mentioned at the end of Chapter Seven and I won’t repeat them here). Once he had moved the junk he could see the white enamel of the sink. Well, it had once been white. Now it was stained with brown water streaks (one of the taps dripped) and had multicoloured patches of caked-on toothpaste and toadstools.

  If Mrs Stinkthrottle really wanted him to clean the place you’d think she would have given him some cloths and some detergent, but all he had was a crumbly old bath sponge that he found in the medicine cabinet and a kitchen spatula that had been stuck to the windowsill.

  He spent more than an hour emptying the sink and chipping away at the gunk and muck, before he had his idea.

  It wasn’t much of an idea, but it was a moment of courage. The thoughts had slowly bubbled up to the surface of his mind that he had been left alone for a whole hour, that he was alone upstairs and that the bathroom wasn’t the only room. He could, if he was really careful, sneak around a bit. Have a snoop. Have a nose about to see what he could find. It wasn’t a plan of escape, but it meant he was doing something and not just giving in to the mad old woman downstairs.

  At home, in the caravan, when they all went to bed his dad would lock the door. It was better safe than burgled, he used to say. He kept the key in his strongman’s suit’s pocket, but in case there was a fire or other emergency in the night, Fizz knew there was a spare key tucked in a sock at the back of the sock drawer.

  Fizz didn’t expect that the Stinkthrottles would keep a spare key in their sock drawer, he was sure that different people kept their spare keys in different places, but maybe he’d find something. Whatever happened, it was definitely much better to be doing something for himself than just scrubbing a sink for her. He felt good about it, and being active even took his mind off poor Kevin stuck in the kitchen.

  He pushed all thoughts of Kevin, and of his mum and dad, who he really missed, to the back of his mind. It was like having your head in the lion’s mouth: you took a deep breath and tried not to think about what you were doing. Sometimes bravery is just getting on with things.

  He crept across the landing on tiptoe and pushed open the first door he came to.

  The room was really dark. He assumed the curtains were drawn. Either that or the rubbish was piled up so high that it had blocked the windows up. Or he’d been here much longer than he’d thought.

  He ran his hand along the wall by his head until he found the light switch and flicked it.

  Light filled the room, which, at a very quick glance, looked to be full of furniture, suitcases and accordions.

  There was a burst of flustered flapping feathers and a loud squawking and a great clatter as two startled parrots banged their wings against their cages’ walls.

  Fizz’s heart almost leapt out of his chest. (Which would’ve been a horrible sight if it wasn’t just a metaphor.) He quickly switched the light off and the room was plunged back into darkness. Slowly the birds subsided. Just before he pulled the door to, one of them called him a name. The sort of name I can’t repeat in a book like this (I’m far too polite, even if parrots aren’t). He was glad his mother hadn’t heard.

  Fizz stood leant in the doorway, clutching his booming chest and listening really hard. He was afraid they’d heard the parrots’ noise downstairs. But the noise of the television was still rumbling up through the floorboards and the door to the hallway hadn’t opened. It seemed he’d got away with it, for now.

  He decided to leave the parrots’ room to the parrots, and tiptoed along the landing to the next door.

  This was obviously the Stinkthrottles’ bedroom. There was a thread of light from between the curtains which lit enough of the room for him to be pretty sure there wasn’t any wildlife lying in wait for him.

  He switched on the light.

  This room, he had to admit, wasn’t quite as bad as the rest of the house. It still smelt. (Of course.) It still looked worse than even your bedroom looks. (Naturally.) But compared to everything else he had seen recently, it was almost tidy.

  Stepping into the room he knocked against a pile of plates, and for a terrible moment he thought they were going to crash to the floor. (The bedroom was directly above the front room, where the Stinkthrottles were watching telly. They were bound to hear a bang on the ceiling.) But instead of falling they just wobbled. The plate on top was glued to the one underneath with leftover supper, and that one was stuck to the one under it, and so on down, so instead of a pile of plates, it was a column, a tower of them, and it just tilted, rocked and settled back down where it was.

  The bed was unmade, and the sheets l
ooked grey and greasy and gritty and crumby. The pillows had indentations where the heads would lie, and one of them was stained the same blue as Mrs Stinkthrottle’s hair. (She slept on the right-hand side, nearest the window, in case you wanted to know.)

  Fizz left the bed well alone.

  There was a dressing table, with a mirror, on one side and he had a look at what was lying about on top. There was jewellery and bottles of perfume, all of them empty. There were pots of makeup and lotions, powder-puffs and tubes of ointment. Some peppermints and humbugs. A book called Forty Beauty Secrets For The Busy Woman. (Mrs Stinkthrottle had clearly been too busy to read it.) There was nothing here that would help him and he wasn’t learning anything new.

  In frustration he began pulling out drawers and rummaging. They certainly wouldn’t notice any extra mess he made, so he didn’t have to worry (he hoped) about putting everything back the way he’d found it. That made searching easier.

  The first drawer he opened was filled with old paperback books, furry boiled sweets and a stuffed eel. The next few were mainly filled with clothes that were more made of hole than cloth. All the usual rubbish, but nothing that added up to an escape plan. And then he made an amazing discovery.

  The bottom drawer was full of money.

  Pardon?

  The whole drawer was stuffed full of bank notes.

  There was no way in the world that Fizz could count it all. It was certainly more money than he’d ever seen. It looked like it had just been stuck in the drawer and forgotten about, except that on the top was a neat little book. When Fizz opened it he saw it was full of columns of numbers. At the bottom of each page was a figure, which he guessed was all the other numbers added up. As he flicked towards the back of the book the numbers at the bottom got bigger and bigger.

  He realised that this must be the Stinkthrottles’ savings. They didn’t use a bank, but a bottom drawer instead.

  Fizz knew about this, it was an old circus trick (and one of the reasons his dad kept the caravan locked). Because a circus is always on the move, it’s hard for performers to open bank accounts, so lots of them use their bottom drawers. Fizz knew that his mum and dad’s bottom drawer was nothing like the Stinkthrottles’. In fact, his mum and dad’s bottom drawer was so empty most of the time you could hear an echo when you dropped a 50p in.