Fizzlebert Stump (9 page)

‘Come on,’ Mrs Stinkthrottle said when she’d finished the chocolate bar, ‘it’s time for lunch. Let’s get you in the kitchen and show you what’s what. What can you cook, little boy?’

Fizz couldn’t cook anything, but he kept quiet and just did as he was told.

He followed the filthy Mrs Stinkthrottle’s pointing finger to another door which led to the kitchen. After having seen the front room and the hall, he absolutely dreaded what the kitchen would be like.

And that’s where we’ll leave him for the moment. Let’s have a little pause to think about what’s happened. Go refresh your glass, have a sandwich or something. And then, whenever you’re ready (that’s the beauty of a book, it will wait for you for as long as you like), come back for Chapter Seven, which begins just over the page.

Chapter Seven

in which another boy is met and in which baked beans are cooked

When Fizz opened the kitchen door, the sight that bumped its way into his eyeballs was pretty much what he expected. The place was a mess and it smelt, though perhaps not quite as badly as the front room had, because one of the plates of glass on the back door was broken (a small square one, high up) and a tiny bit of fresh air made its way in (before promptly turning round again and going out when it met the much tougher, bullying, hard-to-get-on-with air inside).

Old Mrs Stinkthrottle gave him a sharp nasty shove from behind and he tumbled forward, landing face first on the linoleum. (Well, Fizz assumed there was lino there somewhere, underneath the food cartons, eggshells, chip grease, crushed crisps, fluff and dust, even though he couldn’t see it.)

‘Make us some lunch you two, we’re hungry,’ she snapped.

Then she shut the door leaving Fizz on his own.

Well, not quite on his own. As anyone who is paying attention to the details will have noticed, Mrs Stinkthrottle’s not-so-polite request for lunch had been addressed to two people, but Fizz wasn’t paying as much attention as you and me.

Once Fizz had picked himself up off the floor (wiping dried bits of vegetable and gravy and cat food, biscuit wrappers, egg and a mysterious sweet-smelling purple slime off of himself as best as he could) he tried the back door, but it was locked. It was only after he did this that he noticed another boy in the room. He was stood next to the sink.

This boy, who was about his own age, was looking at Fizz with big round eyes from underneath a slab of blond hair. He was dressed in a grubby school uniform and held a washing up brush in one hand and a clean plate in the other.

‘I was just doing the washing up,’ he said in a tiny voice.

‘Who are you?’ Fizz asked, in a matching whisper.

‘I’m Kevin,’ Kevin said.

‘I’m Fizz,’ said Fizz, holding his hand out. (He was too distracted right then to remember to be worried about telling this boy his real name.)

‘That’s cool,’ said Kevin taking Fizz’s hand and shaking it nervously. ‘I’ve never met anyone called Fizz before.’

‘Well,’ said Fizz, ‘I’ve never met anyone called Kevin.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. You’re my first ever Kevin. I like it. It sounds exotic.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Wow. At school I get picked on for being called Kevin. The other kids say it’s a rubbish name.’

‘Yeah, well, I like it,’ Fizz said, and went on, ‘But what are you doing here? How long have you been here? What happened? What are they going to do to us?’

Kevin explained that he’d been in the supermarket the day before, after school (he went past it on his way home and his mum had asked him to pick up some milk). Mrs Stinkthrottle had spotted him and asked him for help carrying her bags. He didn’t know she’d want them carried all the way home, or that she’d then ask him to take them into the kitchen and unpack them.

When he’d got there she’d locked the doors and told him to start cleaning the place.

‘Why did she do that?’ Fizz asked.

There was a banging from the next room and the roaring sound of the television dipped down for a second as Mrs Stinkthrottle shouted, ‘Are you two cooking? Get on with it! We’re hungry!’ Then the telly got loud again and Kevin began to tell Fizz what he’d found out.

‘Well, last night, after I’d made them beans on toast, because that’s all I can make . . . Well, they went up to bed after locking all the doors and windows. She told me to keep on cleaning. Look, I’ve done this whole corner over here.’ (He was right, there was one corner marginally cleaner and tidier than the rest, but only marginally.) ‘Well, I had a snoop around. I couldn’t escape and I couldn’t sleep. I was too scared, yeah?’

Fizz nodded. He didn’t imagine he’d be able to sleep either, but he was impressed that Kevin had had the guts to snoop around with the Stinkthrottles asleep just upstairs. He didn’t know if he would have done that.

‘Well, I found this letter in the old woman’s coat pocket. She left it lying on the sofa. I was looking for the keys, but she must’ve taken them to bed with her. But I found this. Look . . . I reckon it must have something to do with it.’

Kevin handed him a scrunched up bit of paper that he pulled from his pocket.

‘You read that while I heat up some beans. We’d best do as she says. I’m a runaway now, and you know what happens to runaways?’

Fizz shrugged and shook his head, as if to say ‘No’.

‘Well, the police, they lock you away. Running away from your mum and dad, even if you didn’t mean to, well, that’s against the law and you’ll be put in prison. And I don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want to. She said my mum’ll hate me for running off. She said Mum wouldn’t even want to visit . . . wouldn’t come to visit me in prison. Oh . . . If we don’t do what she says, she’ll phone the police and they’ll come and take me away . . .’

Kevin looked as if he were about to cry, but Fizz put his arm round his shoulder and tried to cheer him up.

‘Look, it’s going to be alright,’ he said, not knowing if that was true or not. ‘We’ll escape somehow.’

‘But I’ll go to prison,’ Kevin sniffed, still not quite crying.

‘I don’t know,’ Fizz said by way of an answer. ‘I don’t know.
That can’t be true, can it? If we could just find your mum and dad, maybe . . .’

‘But
she
said . . .’

‘I know, but . . .’ Fizz didn’t know what to say. The thought crossed his mind that he’d run away from the circus, from
his
mum and dad too. If what Mrs Stinkthrottle had said to Kevin
was
true, then it would apply to him too. He just didn’t know.

(Of course, the whole thing about runaways being sent to prison was just another of Mrs Stinkthrottle’s wicked lies, like the ones she’d told Fizz about the library. And besides, even if it was true, little Kevin hadn’t
run away
, he’d been
kidnapped
by the old lady, and there’s a big difference. Right now, somewhere out there, in actual fact, his mum and dad would be very worried, they’d be looking for him high and low. They might even have gone to the police, not to have him punished, but to get help in the search.)

‘Do
your
mum and dad know where you are?’ Kevin asked, between sniffs.

‘No. They’re still at the circus,’ Fizz said. ‘They probably don’t even know I’ve gone.’

‘At the circus? What are they doing at the circus?’

‘Well, they live there, don’t they?’

‘At the circus?’

‘Yeah, my mum’s a clown.’

‘A clown?’ Kevin looked disbelieving. ‘With the face and everything?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘No, I’m not. That’s
her
job.’

‘Wow. That’s brilliant. Are you a clown too?’

‘No, I’m just a boy,’ Fizz said.

The look on Kevin’s face had changed. He no longer looked quite so scared. Now that he was distracted by thinking about Fizz’s strange life, he was actually smiling.

‘Does she ever let you join in?’ he asked. ‘I once had a clown for my birthday, but he wasn’t a real clown, he was just a friend of my dad’s who dressed up and did some tricks. He tried making animals out of those long balloons.’

‘Oh, my mum can do that too, except she’s not very good and they all come out looking like snakes.’

Kevin laughed. ‘Well, this clown could only make balloon worms. He wasn’t any good either.’

Fizz laughed too.

‘She doesn’t let me join in with the clowns very often, but last night I did the lion act with Captain Fox-Dingle.’

‘Lion act?’

‘Yeah, I had to put my head in Charles’s mouth. Charles is Captain Fox-Dingle’s lion.’

‘You never!’

Kevin stared wide-eyed at him.

‘I did. And I’ve done it before,’ Fizz said proudly.

‘That’s amazing. Really? You stuck your head in? Weren’t you scared?’

‘No, not really. Charles is an old softie really. He has rubber teeth. But even if he didn’t, I wouldn’t worry, he’d never bite me.’

Kevin just shook his head, stunned by his new friend.

‘But I’ll tell you what,’ Fizz added, ‘his breath doesn’t half stink!’

Right then there was another loud banging on the wall and Mrs Stinkthrottle shouted, ‘You boys! Less chatter, more dinner! Come on, come on!’

Kevin suddenly looked serious again. The laughter had stopped and they both remembered where they were. How they were all alone, locked in this strange house with these horrible old people.

Kevin sniffed again but quickly pulled himself together, wiped his nose on the silvery part of his school jumper’s sleeve and emptied a can of baked beans into a saucepan. He popped a couple of slices of stiff stale bread in the toaster and switched it on.

Fizz looked at the letter Kevin had found in the night.

It was from the local council and, as far as Fizz could understand (a lot of it was written in long words and jargon), it said that they had received complaints from some of the Stinkthrottles’ neighbours about the horrible smells coming from their house. An inspector had been dispatched and a report had been filed which said that if the Stinkthrottles didn’t sanitise (which just means clean, but
really
thoroughly) their house, the council would have to do it for them (which sounded like a good thing until . . .) and put the two old people in an old people’s home while they did so. If they could get the house cleaned up themselves then that would prove to the council that they were still quite capable, thank you very much.

But it was clear to Fizz that, instead of doing it themselves, they had begun recruiting (or kidnapping) a workforce of kids to do it for them.

As the beans cooked Fizz told Kevin what he thought was going on.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought too,’ Kevin agreed. ‘It was me yesterday, you today and who knows how many more kids she’s gonna get?’

The idea was terrifying. Fizz thought of the fairytales his dad had used to tell him (his mum, not surprisingly, preferred reading nonsense poems). Kids like Hansel and Gretel got stolen away by witches, but the kids always won in the end, didn’t they? But how? Fizz couldn’t remember. And what he could remember wasn’t much use: if he was going to stick Mrs Stinkthrottle in her own oven, he’d have to empty out the snooker balls, telephone directory, porcelain figurines and month-old remains of a roast chicken that were currently filling it up. But he didn’t want to kill her (she wasn’t planning on eating him, like a witch might do), he just wanted to escape.