‘He’s right,’ Kevin added. ‘She locked us up. She’s bonkers! Don’t take us back!’
When Mrs Stinkthrottle saw the two men coming down the street with the boys, she clapped her hands and did a wrinkled little dance in delight.
‘Oh, thank you!’ she said. ‘Thank you, you two lovely young men.’
‘That’s alright, Mrs,’ Frank said. ‘Maybe you can tell us what’s going on. What have these lads taken? Do you know these boys? Do you want us to call the cops?’
(Frank was pulling his mobile phone out of his trouser pocket.)
‘They’re my grandsons!’ she lied, leaning back on the gate to look through her glasses at the builder. ‘My grandsons. And they’re rotten and lazy, but I don’t think we need involve the police, not yet.’
Kevin wriggled and shouted, ‘That’s not true. We don’t know this old woman. She’s mad.’
‘Now, now,’ said Tommy, who was holding him tight by the shoulder. ‘That’s no way to talk to your gran. There’s no need to be rude. Just be quiet for a bit.’
‘But she’s not – !’
‘They were cleaning for me,’ she interrupted. ‘Cleaning my house, and then they stole . . . things. And then they ran away. Selfish, ungrateful boys. Just give them back to me. I can deal with them from here.’
‘What did they steal?’ Frank asked her, then he turned to Fizz. ‘You’d better give her back whatever you took. Both of you.’
‘We didn’t take anything,’ Fizz said. ‘She’s been holding us prisoner. She made us into slaves. I had to scrub her bathroom. I’ve never met her before today. I don’t know her. You’ve got to believe me. You’ve got to let us go.’
‘What an imagination it has,’ Mrs Stinkthrottle said. ‘Just give it back to us. Poor little Johnnie. His brain must be addled. Put it back in our house and we’ll deal with it.’
By now the pungent smell that oozed out of the house had become impossible for even the politest builder (Frank was slightly more polite than Tommy) to ignore. The front door was wide open and a fishy, mouldy stink was beginning to fill the street.
‘That’s a bit of a pong, isn’t it?’ Tommy said, holding his nose.
‘A pong?’ Mrs Stinkthrottle repeated.
‘Yeah. Coming from your hall. Have you spilt something in there?’
‘Well, that’s what the boys, my grandsons, that’s what they were supposed to be doing, before they went snooping and meddling and thieving. They were supposed to be doing a tiny spot of cleaning for their poor old granny. I can’t reach the high bits anymore,’ she said, acting all weak and meek.
‘Well then,’ said Tommy, ‘you two had better get on with it.’
The boys looked at each other. They didn’t know what to do. All their protests had fallen on deaf ears and now they were going to be forced back into the house. If they tried to run they’d just get caught again. And neither wanted to think what Mrs Stinkthrottle would be like when that front door closed once more. She’d be livid, angry and extremely dangerous.
Frank let go of Fizz, and handed him over to the old woman.
She clutched onto his arm with her wizened claw of a hand and hissed into his ear, just loud enough so everyone heard, ‘Welcome back, my little Johnnie, my little grandson. I’ve missed you so.’
But just as she turned and pushed him up the path towards the house, a deep thundering roaring noise burst out of nowhere.
Well, I say it burst out of nowhere, but that’s only because nobody had been looking up the street: they’d all been focussed on the foul old lady and her house. But had they looked behind them they would have noticed, running down the road, a great golden shape, something like a giant dog, with a shaggy mane of hair round its shoulders.
It was, of course, Charles the circus lion, and he bounced through the little crowd of builders and boys and leapt on the old woman, pinning her to the ground.
Frank and Tommy screamed and clutched at each other and Kevin leapt out of the lion’s way, landing on the pavement with a bump.
When he got up he was horrified to see that the lion had Mrs Stinkthrottle’s head in his mouth. It was biting her and chewing her and tossing her about. There were disgusting wet slurping noises from the lion’s mouth and deep rumbles from inside its throat. Mrs Stinkthrottle’s muffled screams could hardly be heard at all. She was scratching at the beast with her dirty fingernails and kicking around with her spindly legs, but she really was an old woman and quite weak and so the lion hardly noticed.
Fizz was the only one who had any common sense at all, and he walked up and started stroking the lion on his neck, behind the ear like he knew he liked, and he said, ‘Charlie, you’d best put her down now. She’s ever so old and you might break her.’
Charles stopped banging her on the path and looked up at Fizz with big, questioning eyes, as if to say, ‘Are you sure?’
Fizz looked back at the lion with a stern expression on his face and said, ‘Drop!’ in a firm sudden voice, like Captain Fox-Dingle used.
Grudgingly Charles lifted his head up, shut his eyes, sucked in his cheeks and spat the old woman out onto the pavement in one mighty expectoration. (Now, that’s a brilliantly big word that means ‘spitting something out’. I think it’s my favourite word in the whole book.) She collapsed to the ground with a wet slapping thunk, her arms still wiggling and her claw-tipped fingers twitching frantically.
She lay stunned and silent on the pavement with lion saliva dribbling off her face. Her makeup was smeared all round, making her look like a felt tip drawing that’s been held under a tap so all the colours run. The dye had been drained from her hair, so that instead of being blue it was now just a plain dull grey (and a ragged mess too). Her glasses were bent and crooked on the tip of her nose and she was muttering under her breath.
The two builders were amazed and shocked.
‘What? How?’ they said, watching Fizz talk to the lion. They’d expected Mrs Stinkthrottle to have been killed. (They’d never seen anyone eaten by a lion before, and thought that it should have been a more deadly experience. As indeed it usually is, when rubber teeth aren’t involved.) ‘She’s alright? How?’
‘It’s only Charles,’ Fizz said to them. ‘He’s got false teeth, but don’t tell anyone. He’s shy about it.’
‘Charles?’ said Frank, not quite understanding what was happening.
‘Hilda?’ said a voice from the doorway.
Mr Stinkthrottle had wandered slowly through the house (after pocketing his prized pocket-watch in the garden) until he’d reached the open front door. He had arrived just as Charles had let go of his wife.
‘Hilda? What are you doing down there?’ He looked at the lion. ‘Is that a cat? I didn’t think you liked cats, dear?’
As this was happening (the Stinkthrottles being reunited, the builders having the lion explained to them and so on) . . . As all this went on there was a commotion from further up the road.
‘It’s the circus,’ Kevin shouted, pointing towards the strange crowd of strange-looking people. ‘The circus is coming, the circus is coming!’
And indeed it was, the whole crowd of them: Mr and Mrs Stump, Dr Surprise, Captain Fox-Dingle and the pair of riggers. And there at the front, leading them all, was the flolloping shape of Fish, the sea lion.
When we left them outside the library, they were all trying to think of a plan. Mr Stump was all for finding the local police station to get assistance, but Mrs Stump was arguing that would take too long and that they should split up and start searching the nearby streets. Captain Fox-Dingle was explaining to Charles what was going on, hoping the lion might have an idea. But before anyone could decide who should begin looking where, Fish began sniffing the pavement, then sniffing the air, and then he wandered off snuffling along the street.
And after he had been wandering for a minute, he began flolloping, which is to a sea lion what galloping is to a horse: that is to say, top speed.
‘He’s got a scent,’ Mr Stum
p had shouted, running after him.
He meant that Fish had smelt something, and was following where it led, and Mr Stump hoped it was the smell of Fizzlebert.
The whole crowd, including Captain Fox-Dingle and Charles, chased along behind (top flolloping speed for a sea lion (out of water) is just about jogging pace for a human), and after only ten minutes they turned the corner into the Stinkthrottles’ road.
At that point Charles had heard Fizz’s voice, had heard all the commotion going on outside the house, and had recognised his friend. He’d begun to run (and running pace for a lion is a lot faster than you or I or a sea lion could run (or flollop)) and Captain Fox-Dingle was left holding the lead that Charles had broken free of.
Charles lurched off ahead, eager to help his little friend out, and pounced on the person who looked most mean, the person who had Fizz in a tight arm grip. And that’s how it was that Mrs Stinkthrottle ended up underneath a lion, having her head chewed rubberly.
By the time the rest of them caught up the struggle was all over. Fizz had got Charles to let go of the old woman and Mr Stinkthrottle was helping her to her feet.
‘Fizzlebert!’
(That was his mum shouting, in case you didn’t recognise her voice.)
She snatched Fizz up in her arms and hugged him so tight that the rubber horn in her pocket honked.
There was more honking as Fish, who had led them all this way by following his nose, flippered up to Mr Stinkthrottle and gave him a big wet kiss. Well, that’s what it looked like, but Fish was actually slapping his black tongue over the old man’s face in order to get at all the leftover bits of tuna in his moustache.
He let the old man go and waddled up to the front door, sniffing the fishy air that was wafting out. (This was the smell that Fish had followed. He’d caught the scent of it almost as soon as Mrs Stinkthrottle had opened the front door, even from as far away as the library.) He stuck his head inside, snuffled around and pulled the stuffed halibut out of the dead typewriter that was sitting on the hall table. It wasn’t edible, being full of sawdust and sand, but he was able to balance it on his nose before flipping it upside down, honking, balancing it some more and finally throwing it over his shoulder into next door’s front garden when he realised no one was watching.
Frank and Tommy were so surprised by the sudden arrival of the circus that for a moment they just stood there with their mouths open.
Mr Stump looked at them suspiciously.
‘What have you done to Fizz?’ he said, flexing his huge muscles.
‘Fizz?’ they said. ‘Who’s Fizz?’
‘He is. Our son. Fizzlebert,’ he said, pointing to where the corner of Fizz poked out of his mum’s huge silky clown-suit-coloured embrace.
‘Him? But his name’s Johnnie. His granny said so.’
‘His granny? How on earth did you hear from her? She’s at the seaside.’
‘No she isn’t. She’s over there.’
Tommy pointed at Mrs Stinkthrottle who was now on her feet. Her husband was holding her hand and saying, ‘Hilda? Hilda? Can you hear me?’ She looked dazed, and lion dribble dripped off the end of her chin.
‘Gloria,’ Mr Stump said, calling his wife.
‘Yes dear,’ she said over the top of Fizz’s head, a big smile slapped across her face.
‘Is that your mother there?’ he said, pointing at Mrs Stinkthrottle.
‘My mother?’
‘Yes, this gentleman said she’s Fizz’s grandmother, and she’s definitely not my mother, so I wondered if she’s yours?’
Mrs Stump looked at the old woman.
‘No, she doesn’t look like my mother,’ she answered. ‘Mum’s been dead for ten years now.’
‘Mum, Mum,’ Fizz shouted, eagerly. ‘She’s a rotten old thing . . .’
And so he and Kevin, who had been carefully stroking Charles, began to explain what had been happening to them. There were gasps and tutting and much shaking of heads as the whole dreadful story unfolded.
Chapter Eleven
in which another boy puts his head in a lion’s mouth and in which loose ends are tied up
And so we reach the last chapter of the book (that’s this chapter). This is the one where things get tied up, loose ends are brushed under the carpet and I get to tell you what happened to everyone. So . . .
Once Fizz had told everyone about what the house was like inside, and about the letter from the council threatening the Stinkthrottles with being sent away to live in a home, Tommy and Frank spoke up.
‘We help my brother-in-law sometimes,’ Frank said. ‘He runs a cleaning company. There’s nothing he likes more than a big job.’
‘This is a really big job,’ Kevin said, pointing inside. ‘Have a look.’
Tommy stuck his head in the front door (covering his nose with a hankie) and had a very quick look around.
‘Wow!’ he said, coming out. ‘That’s gonna take some cleaning. Heavy duty, industrial vacuum cleaners, disinfectants, delousing . . . the works.’
‘That’s not gonna be cheap,’ added Frank.
‘They can afford it,’ Fizz said.
Mrs Stinkthrottle looked at him meanly. ‘No we can’t,’ she hissed. ‘We’re poor little old people. Look at us both. We’ve got no money and no one loves us. Everyone picks on us. It’s not our fault. We got confused.’
‘They’re not poor at all,’ Fizz said, and he told everyone about the drawer full of money in their bedroom.
‘See,’ Mrs Stinkthrottle snapped, waving a gnarled finger at the boy, ‘I told you he was a nosey little thief.’
Mr Stump tried his very hardest to not get angry with the old lady. Still, his muscles rippled and his moustache steamed.
‘If you hadn’t locked my boy in your filthy house,’ he said, slowly and calmly, ‘he wouldn’t have had to snoop around at all.’
Mrs Stinkthrottle muttered something under her breath and turned away.
It was just then that the police arrived.
There had been reports of a lion loose in the area and that’s just the sort of thing that attracts attention. Fortunately the Captain had put Charles’s lead back on and was able to produce his lion tamer’s licence. Once he showed the coppers the rubber false teeth they were quite satisfied that there was no danger.
One of the first things Fizz had nervously asked his mum, when she first swept him up in her huge clown-coloured cuddle, was whether she was going to call the police. ‘Why?’ she’d asked, and he’d told her what Mrs Stinkthrottle had said about runaways being sent to prison. Of course, she told him it was nonsense and Fizz told Kevin and so now, when the police had actually arrived, Kevin gathered his courage and tugged one of the copper’s sleeves and told him that he was ‘a lost boy’.
The policemen had heard a report just that morning back in the police station about Kevin’s disappearance. He radioed immediately to say that they had found the boy. Within minutes his mum was being whisked over to where they were in a police car, with sirens blaring and blue lights spinning.
While Kevin was talking to the policeman, Mr and Mrs Stump, the Stinkthrottles and the two builder-cum-cleaners continued their conversation.
‘It seems to me, Mrs Stinkthrottle,’ Fizz’s dad said, ‘that you’ve got two options. Either we tell one of those policemen over there that you’ve abducted my son and his friend, and then you’ll spend the rest of your lives in prison. Or you can pay Tommy and Frank here, and Frank’s brother-in-law, however much they need to get your house back in order, and we’ll have no more funny business.’ He flexed his muscles, quietly, but noticeably. ‘What’s it to be?’
Mrs Stinkthrottle hissed and whistled and rattled like a kettle, before she finally said, ‘That’s all our savings, that’s all we’ve got! How dare you! How dare you!’
But in the end she had no choice and so she agreed to pay, and no one mentioned what had happened to the policemen. Kevin told his mum he’d got lost on the way home from school, and she was so ha
ppy to have him back that she chose to believe him.
Captain Fox-Dingle pointed out that, with the rescue done, the old people dealt with and the police waved goodbye to, they still had half an hour to get back to the circus before the show was due to begin. Fizz asked if Kevin and his mum could have a free pair of tickets, and, of course, his parents said yes.
So, that night Kevin had the honour of walking down into the circus ring in the dazzling bright spotlight right in the middle of the show. Then, with Fizz by his side, he put his head in the lion’s mouth, which made him something of a star at school the next day.
As for Fizzlebert Stump, he went back to his old circus life. He knew, however, that he’d made a friend in Kevin and every time the circus came back to that town the two of them would meet up and they’d get together and eat toffee apples and popcorn for lunch, drink cola and sit in the lion cage telling each other about their totally different lives and their more recent adventures. And, because of the way his adventure had begun, Fizz’s parents signed Fizz up to every library in each new town the circus visited (if only to stop him trying to do it himself again). He and Dr Surprise would go together and borrow books, and it wasn’t long before Fizz had almost as many library cards as the mind reader had. It was a good end to the adventure, having the freedom to read any book you could think of. It had turned out alright in the end.
But Fizz always wondered about The Great Zargo of Ixl-Bolth and the Flying Death Robots of Mars. In all the fear and excitement he’d left it in Mrs Stinkthrottle’s house, and it had probably been thrown out in the big clean. But because he’d taken it out under the name of ‘John Smith’ he never got fined when it wasn’t returned. (Though John Smith, the rigger, did get a stern letter about it, but one of the great things about living in a travelling circus is that it’s very easy to pretend certain items of post never made it to you.)
Fizzlebert Stump Page 9