The Bare Bum Gang and the Holy Grail

by Anthony McGowan

  The plank didn’t quite reach the dry land, but it would only be a small leap from the far end. That didn’t worry me much, but what did bother me was that we couldn’t get the plank to be completely wobble-free. And everyone knows that there is a big difference between a wobbly plank and an unwobbly plank. It’s the same as the difference between a jaguar with teeth, and a jaguar that’s had all its teeth and claws taken out by the vet, so all it can do is gum you.

  Jenny went first again, running over the plank and jumping the last bit like an antelope. Jamie went next, thumping over the bridge like the opposite of an antelope, say a baby rhino. But he made the leap too. Next went The Moan. He put his arms out to balance, and put his foot in the last bit of puddle when he jumped, but not long enough for a piranha to get him, lethally fast though those watery predators are.

  Then it was Noah’s turn. I could tell that he wasn’t happy. He didn’t have a very good sense of balance, and the wobbles really discombobulated him. About three quarters of the way across he stopped.

  Jenny and the others urged him on from the front, and I encouraged him from behind. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw what I’d been dreading – the guard and his dog were now so far round the perimeter that we were no longer covered by the building. Zoltan was sniffing away at the fence and the guard was looking outwards, but it wouldn’t be long before he turned our way, and then we were doomed.

  ‘Now!’ I hissed. ‘Noah, go now!’

  My friend looked back at me, his face full of fear.

  ‘I can’t,’ he whimpered.

  There was only one thing for it. I stepped onto the wobbly plank behind him.

  ‘No!’ he wailed. ‘We’ll both fall in!’

  But I kept on walking steadily towards him. No matter how carefully I went, with each step the plank bobbed and wobbled more, and with each wobble Noah became more unstable. He teetered and tottered. I wasn’t going to reach him in time if I walked the rest of the way.

  There was only one chance.

  I ran, bounding along the plank, trying to time each stride with an upward wobble to give me more momentum. I reached Noah just as he was overbalancing. I grabbed his collar, screamed, ‘JUMP!’ and we both took off.

  We were lucky. The plank acted like a springboard, and we sailed through the air. Well, not that lucky. We were going to land in the water. I gave Noah a final mid-air shove and he sprawled out in the mud at the edge of the puddle. I landed a metre short of the edge, splashing down on my feet, but then falling forward. By some miracle, the water at this part wasn’t that deep – just up to my shins, and I waded out, wiping my muddy hands on my trousers. My feet were completely brown, as if they’d been coated in melted chocolate.

  There was no time to wait for Noah to say thanks. The Quest was calling. We were close to the Grail now, and I felt its power.

  ‘Move, move, move,’ I said, and led the way to the entrance to the grim tower of Corbin, which loomed over us the way a giant sausage would loom over a tiny ant.

  Chapter Ten

  THE TOWER

  THERE WAS A set of concrete steps leading up to the glass doors. I ran up them just hoping that the door itself would not be locked.

  The door was locked. But it didn’t matter, because what had once been glass was now just fresh air. Yes, some naughty vandals had smashed all the glass. It meant that we could just walk in.

  We found ourselves in what had once been the clean and airy foyer of the tower, when it was new and the world was young and full of hope. Now it was a depressing place, with graffiti scribbled all over the walls, and piles of rubbish everywhere. Plus, it ponged.

  Rudy seemed to like it – he ran around sniffing out the rubbish and doing lots of little wees.

  I didn’t want to linger there. Looking at the faces of my friends, I knew they felt the same.

  ‘I don’t suppose the lift works,’ said The Moan.

  He went and pressed the button a few times.

  Nothing.

  ‘Probably a good thing,’ said Noah. ‘Lifts in tower blocks always get used as toilets.’

  ‘Let’s find the stairs,’ I said.

  It didn’t take long. There was a doorway near the lift. The stairs were even more smelly than the rest of the building. Obviously once the lift stopped working people decided to use the stairs as the toilet.

  ‘I think we should leave Rude Word here to protect our rear,’ I said. ‘He can bark if the guard comes up after us.’

  I explained this carefully to Rudy, and I think he understood. There were still plenty of things to sniff in the foyer, so he didn’t mind.

  ‘Up we go then,’ I said to the others.

  ‘But we don’t even know where in this dump the tramp lived,’ said The Moan.

  ‘King Arthur said he lived right at the top, so that’s where we go.’

  To begin with we ran up the stairs, taking three at a time, trying to leave the foul stink behind us. But soon we were puffing and panting and dragging our tired legs up like old people carrying heavy shopping bags.

  ‘How many floors are there?’ asked The Moan.

  ‘Thirteen,’ I said back, in between breaths. ‘Lucky, eh?’

  On and up we trudged. There were windows along one side, letting in a cold grey light. I kept a close look out for the guard, checking with the binoculars, but I didn’t see him or his rotten dog.

  As we climbed higher, the whole of my little town came into view. I could see the other, smaller blocks of flats, little redbrick houses of the old estate, and the paler brick of the new estate. There was our football field with the broken goalposts, and next to it the park with its broken swings, broken roundabout, broken everything. Then the wood, with the Valley of Doom in the middle of it. Even with the U-boat Captain’s binoculars I couldn’t see our den, because it was too well camouflaged, but I knew where it was.

  It was magical seeing our world from up here, but also weird and unsettling.

  ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ panted The Moan.

  For once I didn’t blame him for sounding so depressed. It felt like we’d been climbing for all of our lives, and we were only up to the seventh floor. There were six more to go.

  ‘Let’s have a rest,’ I said.

  As a leader, there comes a point when you have to cut your men (and ladies) a bit of slack. This was that time.

  ‘Anyone got anything to eat?’ The Moan asked.

  ‘Only this,’ said Jamie, getting out his sausage roll and the scotch egg. ‘You can share, if you like.’

  But none of us fancied any, so he put them away again.

  Jenny was sitting next to me on the highest step, then came Noah, Jamie and The Moan, each one on a step by himself. The rest had helped, but they still all looked pretty worn out. They were grimy and yucky from the sewer and splattered with mud from the huge puddle. Noah’s clothes were torn, and I’d never seen Jenny looking this scruffy. Normally her yellow hair was arranged like a volcano exploding on top of her head, but now it was all limp and it had streaks of brown in it from the mud.

  She looked at me. ‘I hope this is going to be worth it,’ she said.

  ‘It depends what you mean by “worth it”,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes you have to do things because they’re right and not because you are going to get anything out of it.’

  ‘And sometimes,’ said Jenny, her face completely expressionless, ‘you really are quite annoying.’

  And then she laughed, and I joined in, and so, one by one, not really knowing what they were laughing at, did the others.

  ‘Come on then,’ I said. ‘Let’s finish this mission.’

  Chapter Eleven

  THE APPROACH TO THE GRAIL

  ON WE PLODDED for what seemed like an hour, but which, according to my Spider-Man watch, was only ten minutes.

  And then there we were at floor thirteen.

  I opened the door from the stairway to the corridor. I counted ten more doors in front of us, five on each side, all paint
ed green.

  ‘Here at last,’ I panted. ‘We’re at the top now.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said The Moan. ‘It’s all downhill from here.’

  ‘How do we know which one is King Arthur’s flat?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Mmmmm . . . All he said was that it was on the top floor. I suppose we’ll just have to check them all.’

  ‘Won’t they be locked?’

  ‘Some might be, but not King Arthur’s.’

  How did I know that? I just did. Call it Leader’s Intuition. Or maybe it was just obvious that poor old tramps don’t usually have front door keys.

  The others left it to me to try the doors. The first one was number 131. I turned the handle but it was locked.

  ‘I could bash it down, if you want,’ said Jamie.

  I think all the tension had got to him, and he was desperate to do some bashing, and it didn’t really matter what got bashed.

  ‘Nah,’ I said, and moved on to flat 132.

  The door handle turned, and Jenny gasped as I pushed the door open. We slowly entered. But I knew straight away that it wasn’t the one we were looking for. The rooms were completely empty, and looked almost as if nobody had ever lived there.

  ‘This is spooky,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Yeah,’ said The Moan, ‘let’s get out of here.’

  Flat 133 and flat 134 were locked.

  ‘I really don’t like it here,’ said Noah. ‘Can’t we just go home?’

  ‘Don’t lose it now,’ I replied. ‘We’re almost there, almost there. I can feel it.’

  ‘But what if there’s someone else up here? I mean, someone who isn’t harmless like King Arthur. My mum says there are bad people around, and I have to be careful.’

  I hadn’t thought about that. It was true. There were bad people in the world.

  But then I looked at the gang. Noah, who may always have been on the verge of tears, but who was clever and kind and my oldest, most loyal friend. There was Jamie, tough, brave, strong. He may have been about as sharp as a marble, but if there was trouble you wanted him on your side. There was Jenny, sporty, fast as a cheetah, the best cartwheeler in the universe, lethal at every martial art. All that more than made up for the fact that she was a girl and had silly hair. Then there was The Moan. Not very fast, not very brave, not very loyal, but my friend.

  Together, we were a match for whatever came our way. Apart from, maybe, a full-blown alien invasion fleet, armed with ionic disrupter beams and photon torpedoes. Or an army of robot velociraptors, made out of titanium by an insane scientific genius. But it would almost be worth getting defeated by titanium velociraptors just so I could see them.

  It was time for a speech.

  ‘You’ve all read about the three hundred Spartans who stood up to the millions of Persians at that battle in Greece, the one with the name I can’t pronounce. And you know about Captain Scott on his mission to conquer the South Pole. And remember in school when we did Geronimo, the brave Indian chief who fought the might of the American army for years. And then there’s the good old Charge of the Light Brigade. Well, that’s like us now. We stick together and we can do anything. Now let’s find this treasure.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Noah. ‘Didn’t all the Spartans end up, er, massacred?’

  ‘Well, yes, but—’

  ‘And Scott and his team froze to death in their tent, didn’t they?’ added The Moan.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re missing the—’

  ‘And Miss Bridges said Geronimo lost in the end,’ said Jenny. ‘And the Indians got sent to rubbish reservations where lots of them died of measles, mumps and rubella.’

  ‘Ah, but not before he’d—’

  ‘And I thought the Charge of the Light Brigade was a disaster. They all got blown to bits by cannonballs.’

  That was Jamie. Trust that to be the only fact he’d ever learned at school.

  ‘OK, so they all died. But they live on in memory, and so will we, probably.’

  And with that I turned the doorknob of flat 135.

  Chapter Twelve

  A SURPRISE

  I KNEW STRAIGHT away from the smell. This was where a tramp lived. A tramp like King Arthur.

  ‘This is the one, isn’t it?’ said Noah quietly.

  In fact the whole world seemed strangely silent. Up here there was no traffic noise, no sounds of children playing, no sounds of life at all.

  I nodded.

  ‘Smells of wee,’ said Jamie.

  Do you think King Arthur always lived here?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I think he moved in when everyone else moved out. Or maybe he lived here years ago before they built the tower, when they had proper houses. That’s probably it. I bet he wanted to end his days here, back where he began, just up a bit higher.’

  We moved slowly through the flat. From the hall I stuck my head into the kitchen. It was a wreck, with old pots and pans, and broken plates, and cups without handles. It was just the useless stuff that the people left behind when they moved out. I didn’t think King Arthur had done much cooking in there.

  The living room was bare except for a sofa with the foam padding bursting out, as if it had been blasted with a shotgun. There was a huge stain on the carpet in almost exactly the shape of Africa, which was interesting, as usually big stains on the carpet are in the shape of Australia.

  Then we went into the bedroom. This was obviously King Arthur’s Centre of Operations. In fact it looked as though he basically lived in this one room. The walls were plastered with newspapers. I tried to work out if there was something important in the stories, but they seemed to be completely random. Car crashes, foreign wars, petrol prices, silly stories about famous people I’d never heard of. There were more newspapers in stacks in all four corners. There was a bookcase made out of planks and bricks against one wall. It was full of old library books. I opened one. It was stamped to be returned on 9 June 1984.

  ‘He’s going to have a very big fine to pay when he gets out of hospital,’ I said, more to myself than anyone else.

  In the middle of the room there was a kind of nest, made out of blankets, sheets and duvets all piled up together.

  ‘I don’t see any treasure here,’ said The Moan. ‘Let’s get out of here before we catch the plague or leprosy or something.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Jenny. ‘What’s this?’

  Next to King Arthur’s nest there was what looked like a small table with an old tea towel draped over it. The tea towel had a picture of the Queen on it from the olden days when she didn’t look like a granny. Jenny lifted up the tea towel. Underneath it there was not a table but a box. The box was made from a dark wood, worn smooth and shiny with time. The lid of the box had a swirly pattern on it made out of the shiny white stuff you find on the inside of seashells.

  ‘Pretty,’ said Jenny.

  We were all crowded round now, fascinated by the box and what it might contain.

  ‘Open it up, then,’ said The Moan.

  ‘Not me,’ Jenny said. ‘This is your adventure, Ludo, and you should be the one to do it.’

  I leaned over and held the lid. It fitted tightly over the bottom part of the box, and the wood was heavy. But despite that it came away smoothly. I put it down gently on the floor and looked inside. The box was lined with thick red velvet. I touched it with my finger. It was soft and somehow sad.

  There were two things inside the box.

  One was a book and the other was a big glass pickle jar. I picked up the jar. It was as heavy as a bowling ball. It was heavy because it was full of coins.

  ‘TREASURE!’ yelled The Moan, taking it from my hands.

  But the smile soon fell from his face as he shook the jar and looked closely at its contents.

  ‘It’s all one and two pees,’ he said. ‘There’s probably only a few quid in here altogether.’

  ‘It must be his life savings,’ said Noah. ‘That’s why he wanted it so badly. Poor guy.’

  Before I had a chance to
say anything, something very strange happened. Rude Word appeared at the door. He had one of those dog biscuits shaped like a bone in his mouth, and his tail was wagging as if he was in a tail-wagging contest.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, puzzled. I stroked his nose. ‘You’re supposed to be keeping guard, you naughty boy. And where did you get that biscuit?’

  ‘Oh, he’s not naughty. He’s a good boy. Led us straight to you.’

  I looked up into the eyes of my mortal enemy.

  Dockery.

  He filled the doorway, big as an ogre. Then he stepped forward, and the rest of his gang followed him into the room, all of them big and ugly. We were so shocked it was as if we’d been zapped by a paralysing ray, and Dockery reached down and took the money jar from The Moan’s hands.

  ‘We’ll have that, thanks very much,’ he said, passing it back to Larkin.

  Then he leaned forward again and yanked my U-boat Captain’s binoculars from around my neck.

  ‘And I’ll take these as well, as a bit of insurance. You wait here until we’re gone, or I’ll smash ’em up, OK?’

  He said this looking at Jenny. They were all afraid of her because of her tae kwon do expertise. Jenny’s hands curled into fists, her knuckles white with rage.

  ‘You’re a nasty stupid swine,’ she said.

  Dockery laughed. ‘Stupid? Nah! Reckon you’re the stupid ones, leading us straight to the treasure. Good old Larks here heard some of what that loony tramp told you about it, and we thought it was a bit selfish of you to want to keep all that loot for yourselves. We’ve been spying on you lot ever since.’

  ‘Filthy sneaks,’ I said.

  ‘Filthy rich sneaks!’ he smirked. ‘Come on, guys,’ he said to his gang. ‘Let’s go and buy some sweets, and leave these losers to stew.’ Then he turned to me again. ‘And remember, you wait till we’re out of this place before you move, or I’ll smash your precious binoculars into a thousand pieces. If you’re a good boy you can come and collect them from our den tomorrow.’