The Bare Bum Gang and the Holy Grail

by Anthony McGowan

  Rudy looked down the tunnel, then back at me, then down the tunnel again. Then, finally, it sank in.

  In his time Rude Word had eaten many things – lumps of our car, lots of furniture, Weetabix, snotty hankies, dead pigeons, small trees, Pot Noodles, cat poo and one pet python (or boa constrictor). Now he was about to add something else to his menu. Without another sound, he shot off along the sewer like an iron ball along the barrel of the cannon on a pirate ship.

  The rats didn’t know what hit them. One second the eyes were there, glinting evilly. The next second they went out, as if there’d been a power cut, and all we could hear were terrified squeaks.

  I shone the torch down the tunnel. Rude Word was gnashing and snapping and chomping and yomping.

  ‘Quick, everyone,’ I shouted, ‘let’s move before they regroup and attack us from the flanks or up the rear. And tuck your trousers inside your socks so the little monsters can’t run up your trouser legs and destroy your undercarriage.’

  The gang didn’t need to be told twice. We zipped along the rest of the tunnel double quick, following in the wake of the doggie tornado that was Rude Word.

  In a couple of minutes we were out, blinking in the sunlight.

  I didn’t look back down the tunnel. If I had . . . well, I might have seen something interesting. And unpleasant. Very unpleasant.

  Chapter Eight

  THE WASTELAND

  WELL, IT LOOKED like sunlight when we first emerged blinking into it. In fact it was still miserable and grey, but it dazzled us after the darkness of the sewer.

  We crouched down behind a pile of bricks that had once been a wall.

  ‘Well done, gang,’ I said. ‘Did we all make it?’

  I did a quick register to make sure. I didn’t want to leave anyone behind in the sewer to be eaten alive by rats.

  ‘Noah?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Moan.’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Jenny?’

  ‘Here, of course. Where else would I be?’

  ‘Rude Word?’

  ‘Woof.’

  ‘Jamie?’

  ‘GROOOUUURRRPPPPP.’

  ‘Please, Jamie, no burping. It might give away our position, plus it’s disgusting.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And you haven’t said if you’re here yet.’

  ‘What? Oh, here.’

  ‘Thank you. Now, gather round, everyone, and we’ll plan the next stage.’

  They all squatted in a half-circle round me. Their faces were full of excitement and fear. This was definitely the scariest adventure we’d ever had.

  ‘Well then?’ said Jenny.

  ‘Well then what?’

  ‘Well then, what next?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Er, we need to reconnoitre the situation.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Jamie.

  ‘It means we have to have a look around.’

  I got out my U-boat Captain’s binoculars, and peeped over the broken wall. After a few seconds trying to get the focus right, I could see all around the perimeter to the gate where the Group 9 guy was on guard with his hellhound. Ahead of us there was about five hundred metres of open ground. Beyond that the tower block loomed huge and grim. Between us there were a couple of bulldozers and a dumper truck, left idle for the weekend, plus some other piles of bricks, some wheelbarrows, some planks, and all the other cool stuff you find on building sites.

  I checked back to the Group 9 hut. As I watched I saw the guard come out, with Zoltan on a lead. He began to walk away from us, around the inside of the fence.

  ‘A bit of good luck,’ I whispered to the others. ‘The guard is doing his rounds. Looks like he’s going to go all the way round the fence. In a couple of minutes the tower will be in between him and us, so we can make it without being seen.’

  ‘What about sniffing,’ said Noah.

  ‘Sniffing is rude,’ I replied. ‘If you’ve got a runny nose you should wipe it on a hanky or a leaf or your sleeve.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean my sniffing, I meant Zoltan.’

  ‘Well, obviously dogs can’t use hankies . . . Oh, you mean he’ll sniff us out? Well, the tower should block off most of our smells. But we should make sure we don’t do any farts. It’s well known that a dog can smell a boy’s fart from fifty miles away.’

  ‘What about a girl’s?’ said Jennifer, with a funny look on her face.

  ‘What? Oh, I don’t think girls do them,’ I said.

  The Moan laughed. ‘Course they do – she does them all the time.’

  Jennifer hit him in the ribs.

  ‘Well, you do,’ he said very quietly, rubbing his side.

  ‘Maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t,’ I said, ‘but if she does, it probably smells of flowers, so Zoltan won’t recognize it. He’ll just think, Oh, what a nice smell. A lovely patch of roses must have come into bloom. Something like that. But, you know, in doggie language, so it would be more like, Woof woof, growl woof, snuffle woof, but meaning what I said.’

  Jennifer gave me a little smile when I’d finished. I was being nice to her because we were on a kind of olden-days adventure, and we were sort of knights, so you have to do something called ‘being chivalrous’, which is all about looking after girls (whether or not they really need it) and saying their farts smell of flowers (whether or not they do).

  All this time I was watching the guard and his dog like a hawk. A hawk with high-powered binoculars. Zoltan was the sort of dog that did a wee on every bush to show that he owned the place. So that’s how they went.

  Walk.

  Wee.

  Walk.

  Wee.

  It wasn’t long before they’d gone walking and weeing behind the tower. This was our chance. We were out of sight.

  ‘See that dumper truck?’ I whispered. They nodded. ‘We sprint for that. Ready? Go!’

  We jumped over the wall and raced like rabbits for the truck. Jenny got there first, of course. She’s so fast she’d probably have got there first if she’d done it in cartwheels.

  Jamie made it next, then The Moan, then me, with Rude Word right on my heels, and Noah at the back. I was gasping when I reached the dumper truck.

  ‘Halfway there,’ I said, and was about to begin another encouraging speech, when Jenny interrupted:

  ‘Where’s Noah?’

  Noah. Drat. I looked back. And there he was, halfway between the wall and the dumper truck.

  ‘Looks like he’s stuck,’ said The Moan.

  Noah was lying on the ground, waving at us. His face was crinkled up with pain and fear.

  ‘I’ll go back and check on him,’ I said. ‘You guys wait here.’

  I ran back to Noah as fast as I could. There was a big patch of tangled-up barbed wire. Noah was caught in it like a fly in a spider’s web. It had snagged his jeans and torn a great rip in his T-shirt.

  ‘Don’t move,’ I said. ‘You’ll just make it worse and probably disembowel yourself.’

  Disembowelling is one of the worst ways to go – worse, I reckon, than death by jellyfish, death by parachute-not-opening, or death by scorpions. What happens is that your bowels, which are all the pipes and tubes in your belly, slither out of you like giant worms. You then have roughly ten seconds to re-embowel yourself, which is when you push the pipes back in and sew up the hole, before you die.

  Of course usually that’s impossible, because the thing that caused the disembowelling in the first place, say a Samurai warrior, a sabre-toothed tiger or great white shark, will still be attacking you, and might well have eaten your bowels in the meantime. Not the Samurai warrior, of course. Japanese people don’t eat bowels, but raw fish. They may eat raw fish bowels, but I’m not sure. I’ll check on the Internet.

  But I didn’t mention any of the details of disembowelling to Noah, because then he’d panic and start thrashing around, which is exactly the right way to go about getting yourself disembowelled.

  I had exactly what I needed to deal with this situati
on. I took out my multi-tool. As well as the knife, the scissors, the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves, the magnifying glass, the hammer, the pliers and the saw, it had some wire cutters.

  ‘I’m stuck fast,’ said Noah weakly. ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I replied as I got to work with the wire cutters. ‘I’ll have you free in a second.’

  It was harder than I thought to cut through the thick wire, and I had to use both hands and squeeze with all my might.

  But I did it.

  First I snipped the wire tangling Noah’s legs, and then, more carefully, I cut through the wire caught up in his T-shirt. Each time it made a very satisfying click sound.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  I thought I’d have made a very good wire-cutting man in the trenches in the First World War, even though that was one of the worst wars ever, in terms of mud, rats, gangrene, death, etc., etc.

  It took more than a second, but in the end Noah was free. I snapped my multi-tool together again and put it in my pack.

  ‘Thanks, Ludo,’ Noah said as we jogged back to join the others. ‘You could have left me there until Zoltan found me and savaged me all to bits, but you came back and saved me.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said proudly, ‘we’re the Bare Bum Gang and we never leave one of ours behind. Unless it is The Moan in one of his bad moods . . .’

  Noah looked at me accusingly.

  ‘Only kidding,’ I said, and we both giggled.

  Chapter Nine

  LAND AND SEA OPERATIONS!

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU two grinning about?’ The Moan asked as we reached the dumper truck.

  ‘Oh, nothing really,’ I said as Rude Word licked my face.

  ‘Right, next stage. We make for the entrance of the tower, over there.’ I pointed to the big glass doors at the bottom of the building. ‘And we have to be quick – the guard will be coming round the side any minute now. Everyone ready?’

  Nods from the gang, and off we went again, running low to the ground. This time I made sure I was at the back so I could keep an eye on everyone.

  That meant I was the last to see it.

  The others were crouched in a line ahead of me, about ten metres from the safety of the tower.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, but I didn’t need an answer.

  We were at the edge of the biggest puddle in the world.

  There’s probably a strict rule invented by scientists about when a puddle becomes a lake, and this one must have been pretty close. It looked brilliant for skimming stones, but this wasn’t the time for idle play. The water was thick and brown, and there was a rainbow pattern on it from spilled oil.

  ‘How deep do you think it is?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘Up to our necks, I reckon,’ I replied. ‘Maybe deeper.’

  ‘Can’t we just go round it?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘No, look – if we go round it the guard will be able to see us.’

  I drew a picture in the mud with a stick, explaining the angles. It looked like this:

  ‘So what do we do then?’ asked The Moan. ‘Go home?’

  ‘Of course not. When you are confronted with a body of water too big to jump, you have three choices. You can build a raft to float over it, you can build a submarine to go under it, or you can build an aeroplane to fly above it. Well, they would all be quite cool – especially the submarine, you know, Dive! Dive! Dive! Switching to silent running, firing torpedoes, getting blasted with depth charges, so we have to release oil and bits of rubbish out of the tubes so our enemies think we’ve been destroyed – all that stuff. Sadly, we haven’t got quite enough time to build a decent submarine, raft or aeroplane. But there is a fourth way.’

  ‘Make your mind up,’ moaned The Moan. ‘Is it three or is it four?’

  I ignored him.

  ‘We can build a bridge.’

  I had another good look at the puddle, focusing all my powers on the problem. There was a sort of island about halfway across, made from an upturned wheelbarrow.

  ‘Right then, we need some planks,’ I said. ‘One to reach the island, another to go from the island to the far shore. Let’s get searching. Rendezvous back here in four minutes.’ And then I added quietly to Jamie, ‘“Rendezvous” means meet.’

  I was sure we’d be successful. We were in a building site. If ever you need a plank or two, then a building site is the best place in the world to find them. Four minutes later we were back beside the giant puddle.

  Jenny had found some sticks, which would have been handy if we’d been building a bonfire, but they were useless for bridge building.

  Noah had some dandelions.

  ‘They’re to make the bridge look nice,’ he explained.

  I found some wire that would be really useful for tying the bridge together.

  The Moan came back empty-handed.

  Only Jamie found a decent plank, just long enough to reach the wheelbarrow island. Evil plank thieves must have already raided this building site.

  I scratched my head and did some more thinking, but this time it was Noah who had the good idea.

  ‘We could use the plank to get to the island, then pick it up and move it on to the other side.’

  ‘You mean we all have to stand on the island together?’ gulped Jennifer.

  ‘Standing together is exactly what the Bare Bum Gang is all about,’ I replied.

  ‘You’re crazy!’ said The Moan. ‘We’ll never all fit on the wheelbarrow. We’ll fall in and that’ll be the end of us. It’ll be like a tragedy on the news: FIVE CHILDREN FOUND FLOATING FACE DOWN IN GIANT PUDDLE.’

  ‘Not while I’m in charge,’ I said. ‘We can do this.’

  I picked up the plank that Jamie had found and bridged the puddle as far as the wheelbarrow island.

  Unfortunately, I got a deadly splinter from the plank as I let it drop. I made a small yelp, but didn’t cry even a bit, despite the fact that splinters are the most painful injuries you can get (except for disembowellings).

  ‘Let me have a look,’ said Noah.

  Noah may have been best at rubbing dock leaves on your nettle stings or weeing on grass cuts, but he was also good with splinters. He held my hand and looked at the jagged splinter. It was a very nasty one, right under my fingernail.

  ‘Lucky I’ve got my medical kit,’ he said, and opened his bum bag. It was packed full of dock leaves, but he also had a thermometer he’d borrowed from his mum, and, as he now revealed, a pair of tweezers.

  ‘Be brave,’ he said soothingly.

  And I was brave, not making a sound as he pulled out the splinter. It was at least two centimetres long. Well, maybe one centimetre, but that’s still big for a splinter. Actually, with splinters, it’s a bit like dog years. So, like, when a dog is four, he’s really twenty-eight, and, with a splinter, if it’s one centimetre, it’s really two. The real menace with a splinter isn’t actually the agony you feel, or even the gangrene that dissolves your flesh if germs sneak in. No, the real danger is if the splinter gets sucked into your vein. If that happens, then the splinter will either go straight to your heart, leading to instantaneous death, or get sucked to your brain, resulting in you becoming a mental case and setting fire to your pyjamas, shouting at people in the street, going to the toilet in your pants, etc., etc.

  But none of that happened to me, which was a relief, as I don’t like going to the toilet anywhere except in a toilet, and certainly not in my trousers. After he got the splinter out, Noah put some special cream on it. He promised it wasn’t stinging cream, which turned out to be a small lie, because it did sting, but not very much. At the end he put a plaster around the injured finger.

  ‘Good work, Doc,’ I said.

  Noah liked it when I called him Doc, and he smiled a modest little smile.

  All better now, I tested the bridge with my foot. It was quite wobbly. And the water in the puddle looked exceedingly deep. And was it my imagination, o
r did I see a shape ripple under the surface? Croc? Anaconda? Piranha? Who could say?

  I snorted at the danger, gritted my teeth and began to walk across. But then I felt a hand on my arm.

  It was The Moan.

  ‘No, Ludo,’ he said. ‘Not you. You’ve already had a bad splinter. And we can’t afford to lose you if you fall in the puddle. I’ll go.’

  ‘No, I’ll go,’ said Jamie.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ chipped in Noah, even though he was still in a bad way after his barbed-wire ordeal.

  I was about to make a speech about how proud I was of the gang and how brave they were and what a noble thing it is to sacrifice your life for your comrades, friends, Leader, etc., when Jennifer, with a quiet ‘tut’, skipped across the plank and reached the island. Luckily, none of the underwater predators leaped out to grab her.

  ‘Come on then, you lot,’ she said. ‘We haven’t got all day. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  The rest of us followed her. Except for Rude Word. He decided that he didn’t trust the bridge and would rather take his chance with the creatures lurking in the depths, and just splashed straight into the puddle and swam across. He shook himself on the far bank and sat down to wait.

  Just because Rudy made it across unchomped didn’t, of course, mean it was safe for us. I’d seen a documentary once about wildebeest crossing a river, and the crocodiles always let the first one get across without any bother, and then they’d move in to gobble up the rest of the herd, easy as you or me picking blackberries off a bush.

  When it came to bridge-crossing, we boys weren’t quite as nimble-footed as Jenny, so there were a few wobbles. But we made it. The island was just big enough for us all to stand on, if we breathed in and held hands. There was a minor kerfuffle because The Moan wouldn’t hold Jenny’s hand as she was his sister, and no one really wanted to hold Jamie’s because of where he was always sticking his fingers, but we got sorted in the end.

  The really tricky part was picking up the plank, moving it carefully to the other side of the island, then laying it down across the second stretch of water. Jamie almost fell in, but The Moan grabbed the front of his sweatshirt and saved him, which was the first decent thing The Moan had done for about two years.