‘So, what is it, John?’ she said. ‘Does our grandson want to come home with his poor old grandma and grandpa? Or do we have to tell Miss Toad that you are a little liar and leave you to her and her dungeon?’
Fizzlebert felt his mouth fall open and his hair go limp as he looked from this menacing old lady, to her smiling husband, to the big sign that said ‘Library’ (which now looked more scary than it had seemed two minutes before) and tried to work out what he could or should do now.
And I’m afraid we’re going to leave poor Fizzlebert in this unpleasantly tight corner at the end of the chapter. I have to admit, if I say so myself, it’s a bit of a tense one. Crikey.
But first, I should mention (though I’m sure it goes without saying) that that old lady is telling huge lies about libraries. They’re nice places, full of books and CDs and the like, and full of nice, friendly, quiet people, and the only punishment for an overdue book is a small cash fine. Even making a loud noise now and then will only get you a gentle, ‘Shush please,’ from the librarians.
But, as you know and I know, Fizz doesn’t know any of that. He’s only just found out what a library is, he’s not to know they aren’t as strict as this strange old lady is saying.
Oh, another thing I ought to mention now. You might be wondering why I’ve not told you the old lady’s name (or that of her husband). Well there’s a reason for that. Her name is Mrs Hilda Stinkthrottle (and her husband’s name is more or less the same, except with a Mr Arthur at the front), and there’s just something about the sound of it which isn’t very nice. I didn’t tell you earlier because I didn’t want you to prejudge her. After all, she might’ve turned out to be alright. Some old people are.
So there we go, that’s that done, Chapter Five is now finished, all that remains for me to say is, roll on Chapter Six.
Chapter Six
in which horrible things happen and in which a remote control is waved in the air
Mr and Mrs Stinkthrottle walked away from the library with Fizzlebert in tow. (They weren’t actually towing him, they hadn’t tied a rope around his neck and led him away, but the threat she had dangled over him acted in pretty much the same way.) He was forlorn and troubled and hopeless. He didn’t know what else he could do.
It’s all very well you saying he should have run away, because, yes, of course he should have. They were old people and old people don’t run very fast, but Mrs Stinkthrottle had shown Fizz her mobile telephone (which was in her handbag). She had the library’s phone number on speed dial, she said, and if he dared to make a bolt for it, she would phone them up without hesitation and then he’d be in trouble for sure. Maybe the police would have to get involved.
Fizz didn’t fancy the gruesome punishments that awaited him in the library, but he also didn’t fancy the punishments that might be waiting back at the circus, if they ever found out he had got into trouble at the library. His mum and dad had taught him not to lie (well, his dad had; his mum had taught him to pour custard down people’s trousers), and they’d be hugely disappointed to find out how exactly he’d gone about joining the library.
He was so confused and worried that it didn’t occur to him that they’d probably be more upset to find out he’d been kidnapped by two nasty old people and taken off to who knows where in order to do who knows what.
When they eventually got to the Stinkthrottles’ house Mrs Stinkthrottle opened the front door and pushed Fizz in ahead of her.
What met his eyes was awful. (What met his nose was worse, but we’ll get to that shortly.)
He’d grown up in quite a small caravan in the circus and his parents had never collected a lot of stuff. Living in a little place you had to be extra careful about that, as it could very quickly become cluttered. All you had to do was leave a couple of plates out after dinner, put a magazine down on top of them, put a half drunk cup of tea on top of that, and the next thing you knew you couldn’t get through the passage to the front door (which was usually, in a caravan, the only door) without knocking it all over.
While you probably think it’s a big job tidying your room when your mum nags you, Fizz didn’t have that problem. He didn’t have a room of his own, just a bed that folded down in the front caravan’s living room, and so everyone did their bit to keep it tidy as they went along, which meant it never got out of hand.
The Stinkthrottles, however, lived in a much bigger house and they had no such compunction. (When I first wrote that I thought a ‘compunction’ was a sort of small antelope, but when I checked in the dictionary I saw that it actually means ‘feelings of guilt’, which, now I think about it, fits the sense of what I was saying better. I should add, though, that although their house was a mess, they didn’t have any small antelopes either. So my first guess was right too. A double win for me. (The author takes a bow.) Thank you very much.)
Their house looked like the set of a disaster film, just after all the big action has happened. To call it untidy would be an understatement of monstrous proportions. In fact, to call it untidy would be a bigger lie than the fib Mrs Stinkthrottle had told Fizz about the library. If there is a word that describes quite how much like a tip their house was I don’t know it (I looked), but I imagine it would be spelt with a lot more letters than just six that make up the unsatisfactory word ‘untidy’.
Fizz was stood in a hallway which seemed to be made out of piles of newspapers, not just stacked up at either side (where the walls probably were), but slumped and drifting like blown snow all across the room. There was unopened post covering the carpet and when he moved his feet it all slipped and slid about. Something crunched and squeaked underfoot but even though he looked down he couldn’t see what had made the noise.
There was a dead typewriter (all its keys were bent up and out of place like the legs of a dried-up woodlouse) on what he guessed was the hall table and in it was stuffed, headfirst, a stuffed fish. It might have been a halibut, but Fizz was no expert. (If Fish was here, he’d know, Fizz thought.)
The stairs were directly in front of him and in the dim light of the hall he could see a narrow passage heading up. The once wide stairs were crowded on both sides by stacks of books and boxes and old lamps and apple cores and teddy bears and coat-hangers and wicker donkeys and crisp packets and old tomato ketchup bottles that hadn’t been washed out and were now growing blue-green moulds. It was as if these old people had just dumped all their rubbish on the stairs, instead of putting it out for the dustmen.
The old couple followed him in, crowding round him in the tiny hallway, and Fizz watched as Mrs Stinkthrottle locked the front door (three locks with three different keys, because you never can be too careful) and put the keys back into pockets hidden in the layers underneath her coat.
‘Get your stupid coat off,’ she said, tugging at his old red Ringmaster’s jacket. ‘You’d best make yourself at home, eh?’
She practically pulled him out of it and hung it on a hook on the wall, which promptly collapsed under its weight, dumping coat, hook and a shower of plaster onto the piles of rubbish on the hall floor.
‘In there,’ she said, indicating a door on his right with a bony pointy finger.
Fizz turned the door handle (which was sticky to the touch) and went into what must have been the lounge.
It didn’t look much like a lounge. Where the sofa would normally be was a sofa-shaped mound of screwed-up bits of paper, scrunched-up magazines, flattened cardboard boxes (for various things, such as board games, hairdryers, Cup-a-Soups and shoelaces), ragged shreds of carrier bags, plastic bags and paper bags. In the middle of this heap were two indentations, two dips which looked to be just the right size for a pair of old people’s bottoms.
Along the back of the mound-which-was-roughly-shaped-like-a-sofa was a window box (a sort of long rectangular flowerpot) out of which stuck, not flowers as you might expect, but bits of old broken crockery (all gummed up with dried or dripping food), empty bottles, a broken guitar, the type of hat a Scotsman might wea
r, and plenty more bits of newspaper: in short, all sorts of rubbish. At one end a little plastic purple flower drooped drearily over the side.
Two bent bicycle wheels leant against a wall, and on a sideboard two stuffed foxes fought with a coffee percolator, a half-empty plastic milk bottle and a set of miniature suits of armour.
The rest of the front room was much the same. Plastic bags full of unidentifiable stuff piled up in the corners and the floor squelched and crunched under his feet, hidden under layers of discarded paper and who knew what. Armchairs and a coffee table sat in the usual places, but were only recognisable by their vague outlines.
And the place smelt even worse than the inside of a lion’s mouth, which Fizz had thought was the worst smell he’d ever get to know. It was a dreadful stench.
If you want an idea of the smell of the Stinkthrottles’ house, here’s an easy way of experiencing it via an experiment. First, ask your parents to let you take your Sunday dinner up to your room one day and instead of eating it stick it under your bed. Then, when they ask you for the plate, tell them you’ll wash it up yourself and go into the kitchen and run the taps and make washing up noises and then clatter the plates in the cupboard and tell them you’ve put it away. And then wait. Don’t wait a week, that’s not nearly long enough. Don’t wait a month, that’s not quite long enough either. Wait for the whole of the summer holidays and then the first few weeks of the autumn term. That should be long enough.
If after all that, you’re still able to go into your bedroom without being sick, I dare you to look under the bed and see what’s become of that uneaten dinner.
That’s almost what the Stinkthrottles’ house smelt like. Even though from time to time they squirted a lemon-flavoured air freshener into the air, it didn’t really help: the lemony freshness simply wove itself into the sickly sweet smell of rotting food and growing mould and ended up smelling slightly fishy and entirely horrible.
Fizz felt sick, and he was also scared, which made him feel even worse.
Mr Stinkthrottle took his hat and coat off and hung them up on a pile of rubbish by the door (they immediately slumped onto the floor, causing a small avalanche of rubbish to fall down with them) and then he sat down in one of the old-person-shaped holes on the sofa.
He let out a big sigh (I won’t write it out, you can probably do your own sound effects by now) and began rummaging around, as if he was looking for something.
‘Go on,’ Mrs Stinkthrottle said, prodding Fizz in the side with her finger, ‘help him find it.’
‘Find what?’ Fizz asked.
‘Find the remote control, for the telly,’ she said, pushing him towards the sofa. ‘He’s only gone and lost it again, the stupid old man.’
Normally if you wanted to find a remote control you would just reach down in between the cushions of the sofa, because that’s where it’s usually fallen, but Fizz couldn’t see any cushions, just lots of gaps in between lots of rubbish. He’d have to reach in there and he didn’t like the thought of what he might find.
He pushed his hand, as carefully as he could, into a crack in the sofa-shaped pile and felt around. There was something damp down there. It was a bit like squeezing a warm sponge, only it felt lumpy as well. (Fizz remembered his mum’s custard. She’d almost been kicked out of clown college when she was younger for her lumpy custard, but her other skills (falling over without hurting herself, taking a pie in the face without flinching, walking in ridiculous shoes and so on) had been superb so she’d completed the course with pretty good grades by the end, but her custard consistency remained inconsistent. (The flavour, on the other hand, was what her Desserts Professor described as ‘spot on’. (Fizz missed it awfully.)))
He pulled his hand out empty and, without looking at it, plunged it into the sofa in another spot.
This time it seemed to be a dry crevice, full of fluff and crumbs. Since his hand was sticky and wet from whatever it was he’d found on his first search, all this stuff stuck to his fingers and when he pulled them out it looked as if he had grown fur. Colourful, crumby, crumbly fur, but fur all the same.
‘Hurry up,’ Mrs Stinkthrottle said, ‘reach deeper. Stick your arm all the way in, go on, up to your shoulder. Have a proper rummage, sometimes it gets right to the back.’
Fizzlebert did as he was told and, with his eyes shut and his arm stretched out as far as it could go, his fingers closed around something hard and rectangular. He could feel a set of buttons on the top. This must be the remote control, he thought, and he pulled it out.
‘Here it is,’ he said, holding his prize aloft. (I already said in Chapter Two what ‘aloft’ meant, but we were in a tent at the time. This time Fizz was in a house that actually did have a loft (although, unknown to him, the Stinkthrottles always called it an attic), and this time his hand, clutching the remote control, actually pointed towards it, so well done Fizz.)
‘How dare you lie to me, your own grandmother!’ Mrs Stinkthrottle snapped, snatching the object from Fizz’s hand and looking at it.
When he looked round, he saw that it wasn’t the remote control after all, just a mouldy chocolate bar. The squares on the top were what had felt like buttons, but now Fizz could see it, it was obvious he’d made a mistake. It was also obvious that the bar of chocolate was probably older than he was.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Trying to make a fool of your grandma,’ the old woman said, almost talking to herself. ‘What a rotten child it is.’
She looked at the chocolate bar (which was covered by a layer of lightly swaying greenish-pink furry mould), picked a piece of feathery fluff off one end, and took a big bite.
At that moment the room filled with noise and Fizz jumped with fright. It took him a moment to realise it was just the television turning on.
Mr Stinkthrottle sat on the sofa with a big grin on his face and the remote control in his hand. He’d obviously found it down the other side of the sofa, where Fizz hadn’t been looking. Because of his poor hearing the volume on the telly was up to maximum.
‘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 pay
ing 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.
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