In a circus, as in much of showbusiness (a world of late nights and bright lights), six o’clock in the morning is a near-mythical time of day, heard about, whispered of, but rarely encountered. Certainly it wasn’t a time Fizz remembered ever meeting.
As he climbed out of the caravan, itching in his ill-fitting uniform, he looked around and saw that no one else was having a happy meeting with the time either. They were all looking about themselves, bleary-eyed, yawning, still in shock from their sudden change of circumstance.
Besides the three Stumps there was Dr Surprise, Percy Late (of Percy Late and his Spinning Plate fame), Emerald Sparkles (the knife thrower) and Mr Sparkles (her fifth husband), Captain Fox-Dingle, William Edgebottom (who, when made up and in costume was Bongo Bongoton, the mime) and Madame Plume de Matant (the ‘French’ fortune teller) and the Ringmaster himself.
They all looked stupid and unimpressive in their stripy supermarket uniforms. There wasn’t a single sequin, feather or bright colour to be seen. And even though they were in uniforms and uniforms are meant to make you look smart, these didn’t. They weren’t very well ironed and it seemed they’d all been given uniforms of more or less the same size, which meant that Fizz’s was too big (even with the sleeves and trouser legs rolled up) and his dad’s was too small.
‘All right, you horrible lot,’ Mr Pinkbottle shouted, as if he’d just woken up from a dream in which he’d been a sergeant major, and wanted to try it out in real life.
He was stood on the steps at the back of the supermarket and with him was the woman with the clipboard (whose name, they discovered at some point not interesting enough to have its own paragraph, was Mrs Leavings).
It seemed supermarket owners and their clipboard-wielding assistants didn’t have to wear uniforms. They both had on smart suits, crisply ironed and sort of, but not quite, expensive-looking.
‘This is your first day doing real work. But I believe you have the capabilities to do what you are told and to do it well. I believe in you. And so, as a display of my faith in your abilities, I want you to know that, because I’m kind and trusting, I shall be making no allowances at all. Any breakages, any delays, any complaints from the wretched scum who soil my floors with their dirty shoes to buy themselves little treats or to do the family shop …’ He paused to wipe a speckle of spittle from his spittle-speckled chin. ‘Anything goes wrong and your pay will be docked and you’ll be sent to work in the cold store, with no gloves.’
***Long and unnecessary digression warning! Feel free to skip ahead.***
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a real job. I mean, the sort of thing where you have to get up in the morning, every day, and go off somewhere and do what you’re told by someone who thinks they’re better than you, just because they’ve been there longer or have a fancy clipboard.
It’s been a very long time since I had a proper job, and I can hardly remember what it was like having to get up every morning, early. (Which isn’t to say I don’t get up every morning, because I do. This writing lark isn’t something you can just do in the afternoons. Oh no. I’m writing this paragraph at nine minutes past ten on a Tuesday morning, for example, which gives you an idea of how dedicated I am to making these books for you.)
The point is, I don’t have a foreman or a manager stood in the doorway of my study tapping their watch or looking over my shoudler, tutting and saying, ‘Well, Harrold, you’ve spelt “shoulder” wrong again, you flipping idiot. If you don’t concentrate I’ll flipping well get someone in here who can spell. You’re not the only one writing books, you know. Writers like you are ten a penny, they’re queuing up outside. You’d better buck your ideas up, mister.’
And, to be honest, I’m very glad I don’t have a manager like that. (I do have an editor, called Zöe, who looks at the words in the book when I send them to her and she’s very nice and appreciates me for the unique talent I am and feeds me tea and biscuits when I go to London to visit her. She wouldn’t mind if I spelt shoulder shoudler because she understands that the odd shoudler isn’t the end of the world and we can easily change it before we sell the book to you or your parents.)
Fizz and his circus chums, however, didn’t have the good fortune of being employed by someone as kind as Zöe. They had a right monster peering over their shoulders. Oh, it wasn’t good. As you’ll see.
***Long and unnecessary digression ends here! Feel free to continue reading.***
On that first day Madame Plume de Matant was set to work on the cheese counter. Perhaps it was because she was (sort of) French and a lot of very fine cheese is French too (such as le Cheddar and le Double Gloucester).
Had Mr Pinkbottle known Madame Plume de Matant longer he would have known that not only was she fraudulently French and lactose intolerant, but that she was also very fond of cheese. The last two facts didn’t make for the most comfortable of mornings.
Every time a customer came by and said, ‘Could I have two hundred grams of le Edam, please?’ Madame Plume de Matant couldn’t resist cutting a little sliver for herself, and gobbling it while wrapping the customer’s portion. By the time she said, ‘Is that all?’ she could already feel the gurgling and bubbling beginning inside her stomach.
By mid-morning tea breaktime she knew she shouldn’t eat any more cheese. In fact she knew she shouldn’t have eaten any cheese at all, but sometimes … what can you do?
When she came back from her break she found a few more little chunks and offcuts of cheese accidentally making their way past her lips.
‘Ooh la la,’ she murmured as the ripe taste of some creamy mature mouldy gooey le Stilton danced around her mouth.
A moment later it was, ‘Oh dearie me,’ as her stomach began rebelling, bubbling acidly and turning itself over and over like a pillow in the night, unable to find the comfortable cool side.
Food intolerances manifest themselves in different ways in different people. For some it’s repeated urgent visits to the loo, for others it’s sickly acidic burping. For Madame Plume de Matant it was wind, or as she would say, if she had known the French term: ‘le vent’.
By lunchtime she had, shall we say, ventilated the whole of the cheese counter with a perfume created by the combination of the lactose in the cheese and the army of bacteria that inhabited her insides (they’re inside you too). It wasn’t exactly Chanel No. 5. It was cheesy, but cheesy with a faint undertone of compost. Cheesy with a hint of onion at the edge. Cheesy with a sledgehammer of Keep Away! behind the cheesiness.
People kept away.
A dog fainted.
Mr Pinkbottle was as good as his word (or ‘as bad as his word’, perhaps) and after lunch (and after all the windows had been opened and Dr Surprise had been instructed to wander around wafting some newspapers as improvised fans) he sent Madame Plume de Matant to stack boxes of frozen fish fingers in the cold store.
Just because it was cold it didn’t make the smell, which continued to leak squeakily all afternoon, any better. It just made it colder.
* * *
And it wasn’t just Madame Plume de Matant who had a bad first day at the supermarket. (What about Fizz? I can hear you wondering. It’s his name on the front of the book, shouldn’t you be talking about him a bit more? Hmm? Well, to you impatient people I say: patience.) William Edgebottom, the off-duty Bongo Bongoton, was finding adjusting to the new job difficult too.
He had had the misfortune of being placed in the fresh fruit and veg section. Unlike Madame Plume de Matant, he wasn’t in any danger of eating too much of the produce, and even if he had, he didn’t have any vegetable intolerances, and so it wouldn’t have been a tragedy of the cheese sort.
No, his problem was quite different.
He liked potatoes.
He liked potatoes very much.
(But not in a way that made him want to eat them raw. That would have been weird.)
He spent all morning stacking the potatoes under his care in neat pyramids, turning them this way and that until they
showed off their most handsome faces. The way he piled them they became like works of art.
As customers wandered in the fruit and veg section, they noticed that the potatoes’ eyes followed them round the room. That’s how much of a work of art those spuds were.
Some people found it a bit unnerving. They hurried past, thinking, Well, we had veg yesterday …
But something worse than a few lost sales happened when one brave customer walked up to the potato pyramid and lifted a nice fat King Edward from off the top.
He put it in his basket and was about to stroll off to examine the carrots and broccoli when he was knocked to the ground.
‘Arthur!’ a voice muttered in his ear.
The customer’s name wasn’t Arthur.
But the potato’s was.
Arthur the King Edward.
William Edgebottom had rugby tackled the man (a rather impressive tackle for an elderly off-duty clown) and, rescuing the spud from the basket, he climbed to his feet.
‘Arthur,’ he murmured as he hugged the potato, dusted it down and placed it back perfectly positioned at the peak of the pinnacle of the pile. ‘There you are, my precious, back with your friends. Don’t worry, dears,’ William went on, ‘I shan’t let anyone touch you. I shan’t let them spoil your loveliness. My darling poes, my darling tays, my darling toes.’
Shortly before lunch he was sent, not to the cold store, but to work on the crisp aisle, among the packets filled with fried sliver after fried sliver of his beloved vegetable friends.
He wept silently as he refilled the shelves.
Pinkbottle was proving (a) that he was the boss and wouldn’t stand for any nonsense in his shop and (b) that he had an evil and unpleasant and nasty and rotten sense of justice in his punishments.
(Not everyone was having as bad a time of it as those two, however, even if no one was exactly overjoyed with their new roles. For example, Captain Fox Dingle was buttering scones in the supermarket’s cafe, while Miss Tremble was making sure the broccoli faced the same way (the Captain liked a nice scone, and broccoli was Miss Tremble’s seventh favourite vegetable). Emerald Sparkles was arranging soup cans in rows, while Mr Sparkles, her husband, was doing the same with cans of baked beans (it was easy enough, if not exactly thrilling). Mr Stump was in the stockroom moving boxes from here to there and then from there to here, and Mrs Stump was checking boxes of teabags to make sure they all weighed the same (dull but doable). Percy Late was in the crockery and household department dropping plates (at least it was something he’d had a lot of practice at; he was almost, you might say, an expert).
And the Ringmaster … well, he was out in the car park locked away inside his caravan, staring out of the drawn curtains and drinking too much lemon squash. (Pinkbottle hadn’t bought his contract and technically he could have left at any time, but he was feeling guilty and sorry for himself and wanted to stay with his friends. However, he refused to come out of his caravan, so his moral support went somewhat unnoticed.))
All this while Fizz was carrying shopping for customers. (Both to their cars (aided by Dr Surprise’s rainy day customer umbrella service), but also round the shop for little old ladies who didn’t want to push a trolley, but who also didn’t want to carry their own basket.) Fizz was good at his job, having the bulging muscles of a nascent strongman, and Mr Pinkbottle didn’t need to punish him, although he sneered when he spoke to him.
Why, Fizz wondered, had the man bought the circus, only to let so many of them go? (Why had the Ringmaster agreed to sell up?) Why had Pinkbottle made them work in his supermarket if he didn’t like circus folk? (And he clearly didn’t.) Surely it would make more sense, he thought, to just give jobs to normal people? It was all a mystery to Fizz, but he was working so hard in the shop, going to bed early and getting up just as early, that he was too tired to try to untangle the puzzle.
Talking to his mum and dad about it just led to a bad case of the grumbles and the ‘Time for bed’s. They were miserable like everyone else, and there was nothing they could do about it, not so long as Mr Pinkbottle owned their contracts.
I can, however, just to cheer you up among all this doom and gloom, let you know that we have now reached the bit in the story where the book began, way back in Chapter Four. (Although, technically, that was three weeks later than where we are, but what happened in those weeks in between now and then was just more of the same dreary, grumbly supermarket business. It was only after that scene in Chapter Four that the story really begins and things start to happen.)
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, as we plunge into … the future!
CHAPTER FIVE
In which some people do work in a supermarket and in which a boy meets a boy he’s met before
It was Thursday now. Thursday was half-day closing. The shop shut at two and the customers got the afternoon off.
Not so the staff.
They still had shelves to restock and floors to sweep, conveyor belts to oil and windows to clean, special offer labels to replace and dented tin cans to undent, sales targets to discuss and money to polish (Mr Pinkbottle liked the money he paid into the bank to be so spotless and shiny you wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen in public with it).
But this Thursday was slightly different.
After the last customer had been shooed out and the front doors had been locked, Mr Pinkbottle let himself out of the back door and climbed into his car and drove off. Apparently, Fizz heard from Percy Late (who was now manning the fish counter), who’d heard from Miss Tremble, who’d overheard Mrs Leavings saying to Bertha Lotts (one of the dozen non-ex-circus supermarket employees) on the checkout, that Mr Pinkbottle was off on business in a neighbouring town, looking into a new supplier for tinned anchovies, pilchards and sardines, and she (Mrs Leavings) had been left in charge.
She loved being in charge. That much was clear. She waved her clipboard around and squinted at people as they worked. Sometimes she would tap her pen on a bit of paper and tut.
But she also loved her afternoon nap.
At three o’clock she retired to the little manager’s office beside the staffroom to lie down on the sofa with an eye mask over her eyes and snore gently for an hour. (She did this every afternoon and signs were hung around the store informing customers of the need to keep the noise down.)
At two minutes past three Dr Surprise surprised Fizz by tapping him on the shoulder.
‘Fizzlebert,’ he said.
‘Yes, Doctor,’ Fizz answered.
‘Shall we go out?’
‘Out?’
‘Yes, out.’
‘Out where?’
‘Just out.’
‘Out?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’
To you or I ‘going out’ might not be that much of a big deal. I ‘go out’ most days. Sometimes I go to the shops and sometimes I have a walk up the park and sometimes I go into town. All sorts of things, because I like to keep life interesting. But Fizz hasn’t been out for weeks. Life has been a dreary, repetitive, boring, repetitive, tiring, repetitive drudge of menial labour. It’s been the same thing every day. Yawn.
But today looked to be different and Fizz’s heart sang like a bird. (Not just any bird, but one of those ones that sings quite nicely, and that isn’t in a cage.)
‘Where will we go?’ Fizz asked.
‘Ah,’ said the doctor. ‘The world is our oyster. Just so long as we don’t take too long and are back before Mrs Leavings wakes up. And just so long as my shellfish allergy doesn’t flare up.’
‘The library?’ asked Fizz.
Dr Surprise nodded.
‘We could,’ he said. ‘We could.’
‘I’ll have to get my card from the caravan,’ Fizz said, ‘but that won’t take a minute.’
Ever since Fizz’s first recorded adventure, many books ago, way back in Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away From the Circus (And Joined the Library), he’d been collecting library cards. Most towns that the
circus visited had a library and either Dr Surprise or one of his parents would go with him to the library and sign up for a library card and then Fizz would borrow a couple of books. He had a special wallet in which he kept the library cards. He had seventeen of them and loved the sound as the wallet un-concertina-ed itself towards the floor, flapping and flipping and flopping (but not flupping or flepping, because they’re not real words) as it unrolled.
‘The library,’ Dr Surprise said, ‘is over by the park. You remember that, don’t you?’
‘What town are we in?’ Fizz asked.
(He’d been here for weeks now but hadn’t thought to ask. It hadn’t been important when he only saw the inside of a supermarket.)
Dr Surprise told him the name of the town.
Fizz tapped at the library card in the very top slot of his unfolded card wallet.
He felt a little lump in his throat.
He was remembering the start of the summer. This was where he had got his first library card. It was the first library he had ever been in. Now in the autumn of the year they were back where they’d been six months before. (It had been a rather action-packed six months.)
He smiled sadly as he remembered how he’d stumbled into the library not knowing what it was for. He’d always liked reading books, but he’d never known where they came from. (He’d thought they came from shops! What an idiot!)
(By the way if you’ve not read that first Fizz book – Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away from the Circus (And Joined the Library) – you ought to go and read it now (your local library might have a copy), because it’s quite good. (Even if I say so myself. (Which I just did.)))
A lesson Fizz had learnt back then was to always tell at least one of your parents (preferably whichever one wasn’t wearing clown make-up at the time) that you were going to the library so that, just in case you got kidnapped, they’d at least know where to start the search from.
Fizzlebert Stump and the Great Supermarket Showdown Page 3