The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off

by Anthony McGowan

  I heard Carl sniggering at this.

  ‘Fine, we’ll be playing one-three-two-one. It’s still sort of a Christmas tree, but now Jamie is the wooden bit at the bottom.’

  ‘The trunk,’ said Noah.

  ‘More like the pot,’ said Carl, and sniggered again underneath his floppy fringe.

  And that’s how our final practice – I mean training session ended. Not brilliant, but not a disaster yet, either.

  Oh, I forgot, it did end in disaster. Because Trixie finally discovered us then (she’d probably been having a nap), and came pelting out and chased us all off the pitch, except for Carl, whom she ignored. The Moan fell down, and Trixie started snapping all around him. She’d never actually caught anyone before, and she was very excited. She looked like a wolf suddenly shrunk down to miniature size.

  ‘Play dead,’ shouted Jamie.

  ‘No, that’s for when you get attacked by bears,’ said Noah. ‘Get up and run for it!’

  ‘No, play dead. They don’t eat dead things.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘They eat dog food, and that’s dead.’

  But then Trixie got bored with attacking The Moan and, after a final growl and a quick woof, she went back home. It was probably the best day of her little doggy life.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE STASH GETS SPLIT

  ‘You look very excited,’ said Mum.

  It was eight o’clock on Saturday morning. I was pacing up and down in the hallway, carrying my football. Normally at that time I’d be watching TV. Saturday mornings were one of the few times I could watch TV without being hassled by Mum about it.

  ‘Do I?’

  I probably wouldn’t have used the word excited. I might have said nervous, or maybe scared to death. I was carrying the football because part of me thought that if I could just touch it for long enough, then I might get slightly better at the game. Another part of me knew that was stupid.

  ‘Is something happening today?’

  We’d discussed telling our parents about the Big Match. Noah was in favour of it. He said that they would come to support us, and that would mean we wouldn’t get kicked around too much by the Dockery Gang, and we probably wouldn’t get bashed or squished or pushed around after the game at all. Those were definitely good things – I mean, not getting kicked, etc.

  But there was one big thing on the other side of the balance. If our parents came, then Dockery would say that we had to get our mummies and daddies to come and look after us, poor ickle wickle babies deedums deedums.

  I’d rather get thumped than have to listen to that, and Jamie and The Moan agreed with me. So we outvoted Noah.

  ‘Nah, nothing, Mum,’ I said, back in our hallway. ‘We’ll probably kick a ball around later on.’

  That was true, sort of. I didn’t like telling lies to Mum, which meant I spent a lot of time trying to put things the right way.

  About half an hour later Noah came round. Sometimes we didn’t need to ask to know what the other one was thinking. I could tell from his face that he was as worried as me. We had some toast together in the kitchen. Noah’s parents were quite nice but they sometimes forgot to give him meals, so he often ate at our house.

  After the toast we went and collected Jamie and The Moan and went to the den. Just then it seemed like the best den in the world, safe and dry and brilliant in every way. It made us all sad.

  ‘This might be the last time we ever get to hang out in here,’ said Jamie.

  Usually I’d have made a speech about how things weren’t so bad, but I didn’t have it in me today. I think me not saying anything was a bit of a shock to the Gang. Maybe that’s why Noah said what he said next, which was even more shocking.

  ‘We should eat our stash,’ he said.

  ‘Our stash’ meant our stash of sweets, kept in a black shoe box. We’d collected them over a few months. They were supposed to be for emergencies, like if there was a war or something. Eating our stash was very symbolic, which is when one thing stands for another thing and it means more than you think at first.

  The big box of sweets, hidden in a hole in the floor covered over with a piece of carpet, was sort of the soul of the Gang. As long as it was still there, the Gang was still alive. Without it the Gang was like a dead body. The stash of sweets was even more important than the den. We could always build another den, but when our sweets were gone, well, that was it, they were gone. Unless we bought some more, that is.

  With a heavy heart I moved the carpet and got the box out of the hole. Everyone gathered round as I opened the lid. We all looked at the pile of goodies. Whenever we bought some sweets, we were meant to save something to put in the box. I suppose we all cheated a bit, because it’s quite hard not to just eat all your sweets when you buy them, but the box was still pretty full. With the shiny wrappers and gold paper, it looked like a box of pirate treasure.

  I shared them out. It had looked like a pretty good stash when you saw them all together in the box, but when it was split between the four of us, it didn’t seem that much. Just a couple of handfuls of chews and fruit pastilles and broken-up blocks of chocolate and not even a whole packet of crisps each.

  That was symbolic too. The Gang was like the stash of sweets. Quite impressive all together, but a bit rubbish when you looked at the separate parts.

  Still, eating sweets always cheers you up a bit, and we even began to think that, with Luke and Oliver and Carl on our side, we might have a chance of beating the old estate kids.

  It was then that we heard the rapping of a stick on the outside of the den. Bad news, we all thought. And we were right.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE TRAITOR IN OUR MIDST

  ‘Who is it?’ I shouted.

  ‘Me,’ said a voice we knew all too well.

  ‘Oh no,’ groaned The Moan. ‘What does she want?’

  ‘Probably to rub salt in our wounds,’ said Noah.

  We all crawled outside to see.

  Jennifer was there, holding a big stick. I thought for a second that her plan was to whack us with it, probably as a way of making us weak for the Big Match, like when Delilah cut off Samson’s hair so he became rubbish at fighting, which is a story we did in RE. Up until then Samson was really cool, and slayed – which means killed – about a million Philistines, who were the baddies, with various weapons, including his bare hands and the jaw bone of an ass, which is a donkey and not your bum.

  I walked forward to talk to her, as I was still the Leader for the time being. I kept an eye on her stick, in case she made a sudden swipe.

  ‘What do you want, Jennifer?’

  Her hair wasn’t in its usual volcano shape today, and it actually looked quite normal. It went down instead of up, which, if you ask me, is the right way for hair to go.

  She threw her stick into the bushes. At first, when I saw her hand move, I thought she was going to whip me with it, so I stepped back, which wasn’t very cool. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned in life it’s that you can’t be cool all the time.

  ‘You know Carl?’ she said.

  ‘Of course we know Carl. He’s playing in our team today, so we should know him.’

  ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘Isn’t what?’

  ‘Playing in your team today. Or ever, probably.’

  I found it hard to understand her face. I didn’t know if she was enjoying this, or was actually trying to help us.

  There were cries of surprise and alarm from the boys behind me.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘He is playing for us. He came to our practice – I mean training session – yesterday. He’s our best player.’

  ‘It’s all a trick,’ said Jennifer.

  ‘What?’ I replied, but I was beginning to have a rotten feeling inside me even before Jennifer answered.

  ‘He’s only pretending to be on your team. It’s all so Dockery can find out what your plans are, and when you all turn up at three o’clock, Carl’s going to go
and play for Dockery’s team. And it means you’ll only have six players, and they’ll have seven.’

  ‘The evil sneaky swine,’ said Jamie. ‘I knew it was too good to be true.’

  ‘They’ll know all about our Christmas tree,’ said The Moan.

  ‘You’re not lying, are you, Jennifer?’ I asked, but I knew it was true. Everything started to fall into place.

  ‘I do not tell lies,’ she answered, sounding very high and mighty.

  ‘That’s true, she doesn’t,’ said The Moan, but he didn’t mean it as a compliment. ‘She never covers for me when I’m in trouble.’

  I glanced around at the boys. They looked really, really depressed about this news.

  ‘Let’s say it’s true then. But how do you know about it?’

  ‘My friend Sarah is friends with his sister’s friend, Fiona.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I just heard, OK?’

  ‘Why are you telling us this? Is it because you want to gloat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ha!’ said The Moan. ‘She doesn’t even know what gloat means.’

  ‘I do so, stupid boy! It means being happy that someone else is sad, and then you make fun of them. And no, that isn’t why I’m telling you.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘They were going to cheat. I didn’t think it was fair. Especially as they’re all bigger than you anyway. I hate things that aren’t fair.’

  ‘That’s really nice of you, Jennifer,’ I said. And I meant it. ‘I’m really sorry about . . . you know.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yeah. I should never have made you show us your bare bum. I should just have said there were no girls allowed.’

  ‘But why are there no girls allowed?’

  ‘Why? But . . . but . . . I don’t know, really.’

  I was going to say that stuff about girls tidying up your den and making your action figures wear frilly dresses, but I realized that Jennifer wasn’t that kind of girl. In fact, for all I knew for sure, there weren’t any girls who would do all that.

  I looked round for support from my gang, but they were all hanging their heads. I could understand why.

  ‘What are you going to do about the game?’ Jennifer asked after a while. She’d probably got bored with waiting for me to say something.

  ‘Well, we can either not turn up, or play anyway, with six men.’

  Jennifer started laughing. ‘Six men! Ha, you mean six boys.’

  ‘You always say “men” in teams. You’d probably say men even if you had girls.’

  ‘And you can’t get anyone else to play?’

  ‘Too late now.’

  Jennifer was looking at me in a funny way.

  Then I had one of my ideas. It was probably the craziest idea I’d ever had, and that was saying something.

  I turned to the Gang. ‘We need to have a talk in the den,’ I said to them. Then I turned again to Jennifer.

  ‘Wait here a minute, will you?’ I said it in my nicest voice.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE KISS

  ‘What’s all this about?’ asked Noah when we were inside.

  ‘I’m going to ask her.’

  ‘Ask who?’ said Jamie.

  ‘Jennifer.’

  ‘Ask her what?’ said The Moan.

  ‘If she wants to play.’

  ‘WHAAAAAAT!’ The shout came from all of them together.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we haven’t got anyone else. And she looks quite sporty. Have you seen her doing cartwheels?’

  ‘But cartwheels aren’t allowed in football,’ said The Moan.

  ‘It’s just an example. She might be one of those girls who are really good at football. I saw a film about them once.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jamie thoughtfully. ‘I saw that. She runs fast too. And running is allowed in football. In fact it’s, erm, the opposite of not allowed . . .’

  ‘Compulsory,’ said Noah.

  ‘Yeah, that,’ said Jamie.

  ‘She’s your sister, Phillip,’ said Noah. ‘Is she good at sport?’

  ‘Well,’ said The Moan reluctantly, ‘she’s in lots of sports clubs. She goes off to do stuff almost every evening. I don’t pay much attention to it. But yes, actually, I think she is sporty. When she throws things at me, she usually hits the target.’

  ‘There’s another thing,’ I said. ‘I feel really rotten about what we did to her . . .’

  ‘What we did?’ said Noah.

  ‘OK, what I did. And this way we get a player who might actually be quite good, and I can sort of say sorry to her.’

  ‘But do we really want a girl in our team?’ said Phillip. ‘Especially if she’s my sister?’

  ‘In life you don’t always get exactly what you want,’ I said. ‘Sometimes you have to do something because it’s right, even when you don’t really want to.’

  There was nothing much more to be said, and, anyway, just then Jennifer shouted from outside, ‘I’m going home.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I shouted back, and we all crawled out again.

  Jennifer was waiting for us. ‘What were you talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, er, you, basically.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘We’d like to ask you something.’

  ‘What? It better not be to do with showing my bum.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing to do with that. If you want to, you can play in our football team.’

  ‘That’s not really a question.’

  I sighed. Jennifer wasn’t making this easy.

  ‘OK then, will you play in our football team?’

  ‘Say please.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Not unless you say how sorry you are.’

  ‘I’ve already said sorry.’

  ‘Say it again.’

  ‘I’m really sorry for what I did.’

  ‘And you have to give me a kiss.’

  ‘WHAT!’

  ‘A kiss.’

  ‘That’s definitely not fair.’

  Then I heard Noah behind me say, ‘Go on, Ludo. You’ve gone this far. It won’t kill you.’

  I think the boys might have been enjoying this.

  ‘All right then,’ I said miserably, ‘but not on the lips.’

  ‘Yuck, no. On the cheek.’

  ‘You don’t mean your bum cheek, do you? Because if you do, you can just forget it and the whole deal is off.’

  ‘You are so immature. No, not on my bottom, although that would be what I believe is called poetic justice. I mean here, on my face.’

  She pointed to her left cheek. Someone pushed me from behind. I walked slowly forwards, aiming my lips exactly where she had pointed. I didn’t want her to say I’d done it in the wrong place so she could make me kiss her again. But as I stepped forward I put my foot in a Smarties-tube fart-bomb trap, so a horrible smell came out at the same time as the kiss, which actually landed on her arm, because I’d half fallen into the hole, and that all led to quite a lot of commotion, with Jennifer pulling away, going ‘Pooooooooohhhh,’ and the boys all rolling about laughing, and me collapsing on the floor.

  But then Jennifer came back and helped me up, saying, ‘Good trap,’ and we all sort of laughed together, not anyone laughing at anyone else, but all of us laughing at everything.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE TRAITOR UNMASKED

  At five to three we all met at the pitch. Only Phillip had a real football kit; the rest of us were wearing ordinary white T-shirts and shorts, but I still think we all looked pretty good. I was surprised to see that there were quite a lot of spectators, maybe thirty kids.

  Amazingly, Mrs Cake was there as well, with Trixie. Trixie was on a lead, but she still kept leaping up trying to bite the nearest child. I don’t suppose there was a lot of excitement in Mrs Cake’s life, so watching some little kids get kicked around by some slightly bigger kids probably counted as entertainment to her.


  Anyway, having a big crowd there to watch piled even more pressure on me. I’d never played in front of a crowd before. None of us had.

  Jennifer was standing there with some of her friends. She was wearing a pink tracksuit, which was pretty bad, but I suppose it was the only one she owned.

  The Dockery team were kicking the ball around. Just as I suspected, there were six of them. There was Dockery, Stanton, Furbank, Larkin (dribbling and drooling at the same time), and the two others whose names I could never remember. They all had proper kit. They even had shin pads. That seemed a bit strange to me – we were going to get kicked, but they had the shin pads! I suppose there’s always a chance that when you try to kick someone, you might get it a bit wrong and hit them with your shin instead, so they were probably guarding against that. I imagined their mums sending them off to play, saying, ‘Do be careful, dear, when you kick those little children. Make sure you don’t hurt yourselves.’ They were laughing a lot (the Dockery Gang, I mean, not their mums), and generally looking smug.

  Carl was standing by himself near the halfway line, wearing a white T-shirt. But there was something odd about it. It was too chunky and wrinkled. He looked smug as well, or rather like someone trying not to look smug, but failing. I think they were waiting till the last minute to take maximum advantage of the trick, trying to make us look as stupid as possible.

  Well, this time the trick was going to be turned back on them.

  I marched straight up to Carl. He started to say something, but I spoke over him in a loud voice so that everyone could hear – the rest of the Dockery Gang plus all the kids watching.

  ‘You’re sacked,’ I said.

  ‘B-b-but . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve decided you’re not good enough to play in our team. In fact you’re completely rubbish. And your hair looks stupid. We’ve got someone good to play instead of you.’

  ‘You can’t sack me, because I’m . . . I mean, I was . . . I mean . . .’

  But I’d already turned my back on him and gone to rejoin my team. We all looked towards the sideline, knowing that the eyes of the Dockery Gang as well as the crowd would follow us. Then I waved to Jennifer, who, grinning from ear to ear, took off her track suit and ran out to join us.