Fizzlebert Stump (5 page)

In an earlier age a boy faced with an automatic sliding door, a door that seemed to think for itself and which knew when someone was coming, would think it was witchcraft or black magic. They’d run and hide, rather than step through the doorway the devilish door was offering. Maybe they’d call the police or a priest to come and examine the door for demons and ghosts. But Fizz lived, more or less, now (or, at least, not so many years ago) and he understood about things like motors and electronics. He listened to the radio and had even been to the cinema a few times, and a door that could trundle out of the way when someone walked towards it didn’t seem an impossible thing.

It wasn’t the magic door that made him pause on the doorstep, but the responsibility he’d taken upon himself. He held the library book in his hand and he could hear Dr Surprise’s voice in his ear saying, ‘Just hand it in.’ But he didn’t know exactly what was going to happen in there. Would he have to explain where he’d got the book? Might the person behind the counter start asking him questions he didn’t know the answer to?

That’s what made him nervous.

As he hesitated the automatic door began to slide shut again. ‘Trundle, trundle,’ it went.

Fizzlebert stepped backwards and the doors stopped closing and began opening yet again, trundling in the opposite direction.

He grabbed the opportunity and scrunched up his courage and stepped through, saying, ‘Thank you,’ to the door that had done its job so well.

Inside it was nice and cool. It was spacious and brightly lit. Directly in front of Fizzlebert was a woman sat behind a wide desk. Her face was round and plump and red-cheeked and she looked a little out of breath. She wore a pair of glasses on the top of her head, rather than on her eyes, as if she had a secret pair of eyes under her hair that were watching the ceiling closely, and she was chewing the end of a biro. There were blue ink stains round her mouth.

A badge pinned to her grey-green cardigan (which seemed to be a size too small, as the buttons strained to keep it shut across her chest) said her name was ‘Miss Toad’. (Fizz was too polite to think to himself, ‘How appropriate,’ or if he did think it he was too polite to ever tell anyone he had thought it, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.)

Behind her, beyond the desk, filling up the rest of the tall building, were shelf after shelf of books. Fizz had only once or twice ever been in a bookshop, when he’d gone shopping with his dad. He’d been allowed to pick one book under five pounds on each shopping trip. He remembered what he’d bought. They’d been brilliant books. One was a collection of funny poems and one was a book about frogs. Fizz had read them both many times. ‘Did you know,’ Fizzlebert might ask you if you met him, ‘that some frogs have sticky pads on their feet so they can climb up trees? Or that frogs shed their skin from time to time? Or that when they shed their skin, they first loosen it by wriggling around and then pull it up over their heads as if taking off a jumper, and then eat it?’ Did you know that? Well if you didn’t, you do now, and that’s because that little frog book had been one of Fizz’s favourites when he was six years old.

‘Can I help you?’

(That was Miss Toad speaking. She had a grumbling rumbling raspy deep voice which almost sounded like she was burping the words she spoke. But Fizz knew that she wasn’t actually burping her words, because grownups don’t do things like that. Well, not very often, and
never
when children might hear.)

Fizzlebert walked over and gave her the book he’d found.

‘Someone said I should give this to you,’ he said, hoping that would be enough explanation.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

She turned the book round to face her, opened it up and waved a red light over the front page. There was a beep from her computer. She looked at her screen and said, ‘That’s fine.’

Fizz didn’t know what to do now. She hadn’t asked any complicated questions and the book had been given back. But . . .

He looked at the shelves and shelves of books and wondered.

‘Are these all yours?’ he asked quietly.

‘Well,’ Miss Toad smiled, inkily, ‘they’re not
mine
, are they? They belong to the library. Is that what you mean?’

‘Um, yes?’

‘Yes, those are all our books. Well, some of them. There are more upstairs,’ she rumbled.

She looked at Fizz’s face. It was like the sort of face that you sometimes see in books of old photographs pressed up against a sweet shop window. Except the boys in those sorts of pictures are normally in black and white and wearing little school caps. But the eagerness, the desire to be let in was the same.

‘The children’s section is through the arch over there,’ she said, pointing round the corner. (Pointing round corners is a really good trick and quite easy to do if you have long enough arms.)

‘Can I have a look?’

‘Of course,’ she burped. ‘Go on.’

Forgetting that he’d told himself he’d only be ten minutes taking the book back, and forgetting that he hadn’t told his parents where he was going, Fizzlebert thanked Miss Toad and, smiling, walked deeper into the library.

Bookcases loomed up into the air on either side and the smell of the room became more papery, slightly musty, ever so friendly. The carpet felt deep under his shoes and comfortable and quiet.

Threading his way through the tall stacks he found the arch the lady had pointed to and stepped through into a smaller, more colourful room. The shelves in this room were lower. He could reach the books on the top of the bookcases and he liked the look of them.

The room was empty. Empty of people, that is; obviously it was jam-packed full of books. There were also some chairs and tables and a whole corner had been given over to beanbags and a big wooden caterpillar which had shelves in it and provided a home, it seemed, for big flat picture books. But other than all that sort of stuff, the place was empty of people. It was a Tuesday and although it was the summer, term hadn’t quite wound up and was only thinking about ending, so normal kids were still in school. So, this morning, Fizzlebert was the only boy in the whole library.

The room was full of more books than he’d ever seen in his life. Brilliant! Amazing! Just looking along one shelf at random and reading the titles, it seemed that every single book was different. Where to begin?

He shut his eyes and pulled out the first book his hand fell on. The title was:
The Great Zargo of Ixl-Bolth and the Flying Death Robots of Mars
. He tried saying the unfamiliar words and after just two goes he thought he could pronounce them properly. Reading the back of the book it said it was about a big war between two alien races . . . and yes, it had robots (flying ones (from Mars)). Well, if that wasn’t right up his alley (which is a different way of saying ‘if that wasn’t his cup of tea’, which I didn’t say because Fizz didn’t drink tea, preferring hot chocolate or cold squash) then he didn’t know what was.

He looked at the price that was printed at the bottom of the back cover, just next to the barcode.

Looking in his purse, he had just enough money to buy the book.

They would only be in this town another couple of days before the circus moved on, and he might never find his way back to this library and he really wanted to find out what
The Great Zargo
was.

He quickly made a decision.

‘Excuse me,’ he said a minute later to the lady at the front desk, ‘I’d like to buy this book please.’

He handed her the book and started to empty his purse out onto the counter top.

‘
Buy
this book?’ Miss Toad asked, the words rolling out of her inky mouth like curious boulders.

‘Yes please,’ he said.

‘But you don’t need to
buy
the book. This is a
library
.’

Please, don’t laugh at Fizz. I know that you know and you know that I know that you know how a library works, because we’ve been to them and we’ve all borrowed books. Sometimes we borrowed them for fun, sometimes to do some homework. Sometimes we had to get a book out or take one back for our granny. The important thing to remember is that we’ve been there and done it. Fizzlebert, as I said in the last chapter, had
never
been to a library before. He wasn’t to know how they worked. Naturally, looking around at all those books, he thought the place was just a big bookshop.

Imagine how surprised he was when she told him he could borrow the book and didn’t have to pay anything. How brilliant is that?

‘What?’ he said. ‘You mean I can just have it?’

‘No,’ she rumbled, ‘but you can borrow it.’

‘Are you sure I can borrow
this
one?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘But are you sure about
this
one?’ He wondered if she was making it up, or if there was a special offer on certain selected books.

‘Yes, you can borrow them
all
. Well, only four at a time, but . . .’

‘I can borrow them all?’ he said, his mouth falling open. He looked around at the shelves, tall and dark and looming, but filled to the brim with books. More books than he could ever imagine reading in an entire lifetime, and he could just
borrow
them
all!

‘Yes, you can borrow
any
of them,’ Miss Toad went on. ‘All I need to do is scan your library card and stamp the book and it’s yours for the next four weeks. You can leave this one here for the moment and go and choose some others if you like. I’ll keep it safe for you.’

There was something in what she just said which had caught hold of Fizz’s ears, something that he’d heard but hadn’t quite understood. What was it?

‘Library card?’ he said, after a moment.

‘Yes, your library card,’ Miss Toad said. ‘The card that says you’re a member of the library.’

‘A member of the library?’

She leaned over the counter to look at him closer. Her big round face loomed like the bookcases had, and her glasses slid down from her hair, over her forehead to land, plop, on her nose. Her eyes became enormous. The lenses were very thick. The ink stains round her mouth moved weirdly as she talked.

‘Are you not a member of the library?’

She pointed at him with the grizzled end of her biro.

Fizzlebert quaked. Here came the hard questions. He had known something was going to go wrong, that there was going to be a catch, and here it came.

‘No?’ he said, making it sound a bit like a question just in case she knew better.

‘Well, you’ll want to join then, won’t you?’

She smiled in such a way that her cheeks wobbled like two blue-spotted jellies. It was her way of being friendly, he decided.

‘Yes, I think so. Is it complicated?’

‘No it’s very easy,’ she burped.

Fizz felt relieved.

She reached under her desk and brought out a folder with some forms in and tapped at the top one with her pen.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘are you over sixteen years old?’

If Fizz had been a less polite boy he’d have looked at her as if she was stupid.