‘It was a honeytrap,’ said Queenie. ‘And you walked right into it, like the greedy, good-for-nothing criminal you are.’
‘YOU MARK MY WORDS!’ snapped Armitage. ‘I’ll get you back one of these days! You’ll pay for this! In money! Lots of it! You’re not nearly as lovely as you think you are, Queenie Bombazine!’
‘Oh, yes she is,’ said Hannah.
‘I think so, too,’ said Granny.
‘Lovely is the perfect word for it,’ said Old Bill.
‘Yup – she’s definitely lovely,’ said Ernesto.
‘REALLY lovely,’ chorused a hundred and thirty-five other voices.
‘Woofely!’ barked eleven dogs, which I think it is safe to assume was a canine vote of loveliness.
‘Squeak squeak squeak,’ squeaked the six synchronised otters (all at once, naturally). There’s no way of proving what this meant, since otter squeaks are notoriously difficult to translate, but it’s not hard to guess.
‘SO WHAT!’ yelped Armitage. ‘Even if everyone does think you’re lovely, I still don’t like you, and one of these days I’m going to get you back.’
‘For what?’ said Queenie. ‘For kippering you or for being lovelier than you?’
‘Both. I hate being kippered and – yes! – I admit it. I’m jealous and I’m not ashamed of it and one of these days I’m going to be better than you, then you’ll be jealous of me, so there!’
‘Better than me at what?’
‘Everything!’
‘Right,’ said Old Bill. ‘We’ve heard more than enough from you. You’re coming with me to the station.’
‘YOU’LL NEVER PROVE ANYTHING,’ ranted Armitage as he was dragged away. ‘IT WASN’T EVEN REAL MONEY! IT’S HER YOU SHOULD BE GOING AFTER – SHE’S A SELF-CONFESSED FORGER! IF I THOUGHT IT WAS REAL MONEY, I NEVER WOULD HAVE TAKEN IT! WE WERE ONLY PLAYING! I’M AN INNOCENT MAN! EVERYONE’S GOT IT IN FOR ME! MY MOTHER NEVER LOVED ME! I CAN’T WEAR PRISON CLOTHES, THEY’RE HIDEOUSLY UNFLATTERING! IF I GIVE YOU FREE TICKETS TO MY SHOW, WILL YOU LET ME GO? HOW ABOUT IF I LET YOU DRIVE MY ENORMOUS LORRY? TWICE? OK, I’LL LEND IT TO YOU FOR A WEEK. A MONTH? A YEAR? OK, HAVE IT! HAVE THE LORRY! PLEASE! LET ME GO! PLEASE!’
A happy ending! How wonderful!
(Says who?)
Says me. And who are you, anyway?
(I’m the voice of doom. And I hate happy endings.)
Well, go away!
(I don’t want to.)
Go! You’re not welcome here!
(Oh. OK. Bye then.)
Bye. That was weird.
SO OFF ARMITAGE WENT, in handcuffs towards the dismal fate he so richly deserved.
(Or did he?)
What’s happening here? Is this happy ending being derailed by devious, dastardly, doomy events? It can’t be.
(It can.)
It can’t.
(It can.)
You’re back!
(I am.)
Oh, my goodness! Something is afoot. And not those lumps at the end of my legs. This is something else.
One last twist, one final shocking scheme, may be uncoiling itself before our very eyes. For who is that in the road up ahead of the police car, standing in the middle of the B764, waving her arms and stopping the oncoming vehicle? It is a woman, dressed rather scantily for this cool autumn evening. Next to her is a man who looks exceptionally French. And behind them is a lorry. Not a small lorry. Not even a medium-sized lorry. An enormous lorry.
‘Help us! Help! We’re stranded! We’ve run out of petrol!’ said the woman, pressing her hands into the bonnet of the police car, which had now stopped in front of her.
Old Bill stepped out of his car and examined the curious scene in front of him. He sensed there was something fishy (and also vaguely circussy) going on here, but, before he had the chance to figure out what that might be, Fingers O’Boyle leapt out from behind the enormous lorry and tied him up. Jesse (who was just finishing one of his longest ever sulks) lifted the tied-up policeman, carried him into a nearby field and, with a this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you expression on his face, tipped him upside down into a bush, a thorny bush, which, as things turned out, hurt the policeman far more than it hurt Jesse.
‘Great work, people,’ cackled Armitage, climbing out of the police car, free at last. Well, not really at last, since he’d only been under arrest approximately twenty minutes, but this felt like a long time to him, since being under arrest was right at the very top of Armitage’s list of The Worst Things That Can Ever Happen.
‘It was me that thought of it,’ said Hank and Frank, at the same time.
‘No it wasn’t, it was me,’ said Frank and Hank, simultaneously.
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
‘Me!’
While Hank and Frank hanked and franked, Fingers appeared with a length of rubber tubing and siphoned the fuel out of the police car. Within a minute, the enormous lorry was back to its old self, roaring enormous, fume-belching roars, and carrying off Armitage Shank and his troupe, away from the policeman upside down in a thorn bush, away from the Oh, Wow! Centre, away from the middle of nowhere, towards further dastardly adventures, and no doubt towards a plan for some quite spectacular revenge.
Decision Time
AND THAT, MY PRETTIES, is more or less that. What more do you want? The shirt off my back? The shoes off my feet? The teeny tiny hairs in my ears?
So Armitage was on the run again (booooo!), while Billy was reunited with his father (hoorayyyy!), who had now realised that it might be a good idea to change out of his prison uniform. Granny was reunited with her grandson (yippeeeee!) and Hannah faced a big decision (hmmmmm). Did she want to stay with Queenie and join the circus? But if Queenie was going back into retirement, was there even a circus for her to join? Could she stay with Billy and Ernesto? But to go where and do what?
Before we get to her big decision, we have to tangle one last time with the puzzling puzzle that has puzzled her since the beginning of this tale. Who was her father? Armitage or Ernesto?
When she finally sat down with Ernesto, and he told her how he had come to marry Wendy, it ended up being a story that was full of answers, but not necessarily to the right questions. Hannah was horrified to hear that after the Cupcake Test, Wendy had in fact chosen Armitage. Ernesto thought this might have something to do with the fact that he had been sending her flowers every day for a month, not knowing that she hated flowers and was in fact allergic to them. He never found out why she at first rejected him, but he was heartbroken.
His heartbreak, however, only lasted until an extraordinary day a few months later when by a stroke of luck, the Espadrille and Shank circuses found themselves in Moscow at the same time. Wendy had burst into Ernesto’s dressing room shortly before his show, in floods of tears. She’d just spotted Armitage stealing, and in an instant had realised that he wasn’t a wonderful, charming, dashing, charismatic ringmaster, Svengali and entrepreneur, but was actually a stinky pig.
Wendy had looked up after relating her woeful story, with limpid, tear-filled eyes, and in that instant something amazing happened, something that felt a little bit like being lifted up by a tornado, zoomed around the entire planet, then dumped back down where you started, all in less time than it takes to blink. Yes, Ernesto and Wendy fell in love.
Ernesto had been pining for her since long before the cruel day of the Cupcake Test, but in a magical instant, their love suddenly bloomed into something mutual, deep, and unshakeable. He knew straight away that she would leave Armitage and join his circus. ‘The day after that, we got married,’ he explained to Hannah, ‘and we were so, so, so happy; and nine months later, you came along, which made us even happier, because you were simply the most exquisite, delicious, perfect little baby. But the trouble with being happy is that you tend to forget about the boring things in life, like money. I’d never been good at that stuff anyway, but I got worse than ever, and it wasn’t long before we went broke and Shank took us
over. So poor Wendy ran away from Armitage, only to find herself working for him again, and now he was meaner to her than to anyone else. It was Armitage that made us send you back to your granny. A year or so later, just after Billy was born, he forced us to take away the safety net. It was all my fault. If she’d never met me, she’d still be alive today.’
Ernesto burst into tears, and Hannah and Billy leapt towards him, holding him as tightly as their four arms could manage. He still seemed to be crying when they heard him say, ‘I’m so happy to have you both back again. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. This is just the best thing that has ever happened. Joint top with that day in Moscow.’
A splutter now came out of his mouth that was either sobbing or laughter or both. It was hard to tell.
Emotions are strange things. At this moment, Ernesto’s emotions seemed to be rather like an enormous lorry juggernauting at top speed down a motorway, while somehow also juggernauting in the opposite direction at the same time.
Hannah was still in Ernesto’s powerful arms, wet with his tears and engulfed by his sob-laugh at the moment she asked if he really, a hundred per cent definitely was her father; but for some reason the question now felt less important than it had done only a short while ago.
He held her close, and responded in a sombre, intense voice. ‘Like all the best trapeze artists, your mother was a quick thinker, and she changed her mind about things very fast. In Moscow, it took her about 0.03 seconds to fall in love with me. And this was only a day after she’d caught Armitage stealing and had fallen out of love with him.’
After hours of talking and crying and laughing and remembering and explaining and exploring and examining, at the end of it all, they decided, together, that the answer to this question didn’t really matter after all. Hannah was Hannah. She was herself, no more no less, and nothing that had happened before she was born made any difference to who she was. Granny and Hannah and Billy and Ernesto and Hannah’s other mother and father back home, they were family now. All of them. And exactly what kind of family they were, or how to explain it to other people, made no difference whatsoever. All that mattered was that they had found each other after a long and painful separation, and that they cared for one another, and that it was time for cake.
Since we have arrived at slices of cake all round, that can only mean one thing. This, quite clearly, is . . .
Except that . . .
a few questions . . .
. . . remain.
1. Where will Hannah go now?
2. Where will Ernesto and Billy go?
3. Will they all start a new circus together?
4. What will Armitage do next?
5. Revenge?
6. You betcha.
7. But betcha isn’t a word and that isn’t a question.
8. And neither is that.
9. And what is the longest river in Argentina?
Endnotes
1. Kevin’s story ends here. It wasn’t a very long story, and it was not a happy one, either. Poor Kevin. He was extremely rude to the branch that looked after him all summer, though, so perhaps he got what he deserved.
2. Actually, they weren’t his friends. Nobody liked Kevin. He was a brat.
3. This, as you will remember, is what circus folk call non-circus folk. It’s not an insult. Not to a civilian, anyway, because civilians don’t know any better. To a circus person, calling them a civilian is about as rude as tipping a wellie boot filled with tadpoles into their underpants (i.e. very).
4. Health and safety, you may remember, were her mother’s main concerns. In fact, they were her job.
5. And eggs really is eggs, most emphatically. You can look it up if you don’t believe me. The Complete History of Eggs by Daisy Scramble is the place to look. Another option, for a more light-hearted take on the subject, is Oh Lay, Oh Lay, Olé by Ringo Kissinger.
6. There were in fact 7,362 things Armitage didn’t like, but there isn’t time to go into that here. A few examples: puppies, rainbows, the flute, lifts, turkey, Turkey and trainers with flashing lights in them.
7. There were only four things Armitage did like: himself, his enormous lorry, gadgets and revenge.
8. Maybe we should add lists to the list of things Armitage liked, because he really was unusually keen on making lists, especially lists of things and people that he didn’t like. Once, he made a list of his favourite lists, but that’s another story. Look out for Circus of Thieves and the List of Lists, soon to be available in all good bookshops, mediocre bookshops, and stinky hovels which happen to have the odd book for sale. 12.3456789% of the royalties will be donated to the Royal Society for the Protection of Numerically Ordered Items (which was founded in 1234 by the fifth Lord Six-Seven of Eight-Nine Hall in Tenby).
9. Words in capital letters should be shouted aloud. © Did you just shout out ‘bottom’? Haha! Tricked you.
10. There’s no such thing as a frontstory, by the way. That’s just the story. The backstory is what happens before the story begins, then the story is simply the story, and what happens after the story doesn’t have a name, because nobody knows what it is, unless another book is written saying what happens after the story, in which case that’s a sequel. In fact, this is a sequel, so the last book, which was just a story, is now the backstory to this story, but not the backstory I’m about to tell you about, which happened before the story in the last story, so it might make more sense to call the next bit a backbackstory. Glad we cleared that up.
11. This was a few years before he upgraded to an enormous lorry.
12. If you haven’t read the last book, Narcissus is a camel. If you have read the last book, but have a poor memory, he is also a camel. If you’ve read the last book and have a good memory, he’s still a camel.
13. Or perhaps that should be circus-father. Or stolen-from-your-real-father-father. There isn’t really a suitable term for Armitage’s relationship to Billy. Perhaps father-out-law does the best job. If you’re confused, read the last book. If, after that, you’re still confused, read it again. Then, if you’re still confused, give up and go to bed.
14. That’s Billy’s father. His real father. Keep up.
15. ‘Oi!’ I hear you shout. Unfortunately, I don’t respond to rudeness.
16. ‘Excuse me, sir?’ I hear you ask. Too much. Sycophantic.
17. ‘Ahem,’ you cough. ‘I have a question.’ That’s more like it. ‘At the end of the last book it seemed like Hannah was going to follow Narcissus’s footprints and find Billy straight away. What about that? Eh?’ OK. Good point. Very clever. Very astute. Very alert. You see . . . the thing is . . . er . . . what happened was . . . um . . . the fact is . . . it rained that night. Really hard. And washed away the footprints. OK? Satisfied? Smartypants.
18. You can fill in the blank yourself. There are many options. For example: vanity, waste, political insanity, the delusions of power, brainfreezes, tents.
19. He had written a book of card tricks which literally nobody understood, but which all the newspapers said was a masterpiece, because nobody wanted to be the first to admit they couldn’t understand it.
20. The Kremlin is Russia’s HQ – kind of like Parliament, 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace all rolled up together, hidden behind a massive wall, with a few domes plonked on top and Very Serious Men outside practising silly walks.
21. I said that thing about a museum just to be polite. Actually, it all belonged in the bin. This is just between us, OK?
22. See the books mentioned earlier if you still require proof of the egginess of eggs. Alternatively, make an egg sandwich, leave it in your sock drawer for a week, then shove your face in and take a good whiff. This is one of the eggiest proofs of egginess that can be conducted safely outside a laboratory. Do not attempt this if you are prone to fainting or share a bedroom.
23. Middle-class parents reading this aloud have my formal permission to replace the word ‘biscuit’ with the words ‘oatcake and slices of organic apple’.<
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24. This leaf, by a strange coincidence, was Kevin’s cousin, and it was not happy to end up as a swimming costume. Kevin was from a very unlucky family.
25. The second ‘p’ is very important in this word. Without it, a very different scene is conjured up.
26. Most books have a boring bit somewhere that you can skip. Teachers never admit to this, but it’s true. This paragraph is a good example of a Very Boring Bit. I recommend that you jump immediately to the next paragraph, because what remains of this one is pure, undiluted, top-of-the-range tedium.
27. On the international markets, questions are always priced in dollars. It’s a financial tradition. At today’s prices, this query is a £621,920 question.
28. Before all performances of any kind, sound is always checked. This involves a man in a black T-shirt that is too large and black jeans that are too small muttering ‘1-2-3 testing 1-2-3,’ into each microphone while a man at the back of the hall in similar clothes shouts back something along the lines of, ‘Yes, that sounds like sound.’ These people live according to mysterious rules known only to them and are rarely seen in daylight.
29. That list in full: 1. Being honest. 2. Smiling. 3. Being polite. 4. Playing badminton.
30. A box office, contrary to logic, is not an office filled with boxes. It is a place from which tickets are sold and, more importantly for the purposes of our story, a place in which the money raised by ticket sales is kept. Yes, Armitage was a-plotting. Dastardly deeds were afoot.
31. I like the word auditorium. It comes from the Latin words audit, meaning ‘very expensive’, and orium, meaning ‘a place where ice cream is’.
32.
33. What do you mean, ‘that’s not in the dictionary’? Pah! Dictionaries are overrated. Or should that be over-rated? I’ll have to look it up.
Circus of Thieves on the Rampage Page 11
