Fizzlebert Stump (11 page)

‘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 string 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.