Fizz was shaken awake.
Mr Pinkbottle was in their caravan. It was still dark outside. His dad was snoring. His mum was snoring (even though she always assured Fizz that she didn’t).
‘Get up, Stump,’ the supermarket manager said, quietly but firmly but quietly.
Fizz sat up.
‘What time is it?’
‘Time for work,’ Mr Pinkbottle sneered. ‘Get your uniform on and be outside in three minutes.’
Fizz was dressed and outside in two and a half.
‘Here’s your brush,’ Mr Pinkbottle said. ‘There is cleaning to do.’
He led Fizz inside the building, through the storehouse at the back and into the shop itself.
He pointed at the floor.
There were marks on the tiles where the wheels of trolleys had got stuck and scraped along and where people had trodden mud and muck in from the street and where Mr Pinkbottle had just spilt a large tub of rice.
‘The store opens in two hours,’ Mr Pinkbottle said, ‘and it’d better look spotless. Or else.’
And with that he strode off to his office, leaving Fizz alone with a large scattering of rice, a dirty floor the size of a supermarket and a brush.
The brush, I didn’t mention before, was the size of the sort you use to clean your teeth, that is to say: it was a very small brush.
(He also had a tiny dustpan to go with it and a black bin bag.)
Fizz grumbled to himself but there was nothing he could do, not right now.
He lowered himself to his knees and began sweeping the rice up. He’d do that first and then he’d scrub at the mud and the marks, but he didn’t have any soapy water or anything, just elbow grease (which was available in tins on Aisle B, along with tartan paint and glass hammers).
He tipped the tiny dustpan full of rice into the black bin bag and then scooped up some more.
After a while the bin bag began to grow heavy, as Fizz shuffled forward on his knees across the floor.
After another while the bin bag was practically full.
It had taken ages, but all the rice was up off the floor.
So were the lentils, the barley and the dried kidney beans which had all also been accidentally knocked over just in front of Fizz.
Mr Pinkbottle walked up, his shoes clacking on the tiles.
‘That bag looks almost full,’ he said. (There was no, ‘Well done.’) He prodded it with his toe, and then he called, ‘Mr Stump, coo-ee!’
Fizz’s dad appeared from around the corner of some shelves. His supermarket uniform bulged across his muscles, the seams gaping and the buttons looking worryingly close to bursting off in all directions. He didn’t smile when he saw Fizz.
‘Move this sack.’
Mr Pinkbottle pointed and Mr Stump bent and lifted.
‘For the bin?’ he asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ Mr Pinkbottle said, and then, as Fizz’s dad turned and began lumbering towards the back doors, he said, ‘No, stop!’
Mr Stump stopped.
Fizz looked up.
‘This won’t do,’ Mr Pinkbottle said. ‘Look at this. This bag is damaged. You, boy, you must have damaged this bag.’
Fizz couldn’t see anything wrong with the black bag. It was keeping everything in, which is all it had to do.
The supermarketeer tapped on his clipboard with his pen and then, when Fizz said nothing, pointed at the bin bag.
‘Look here, there’s a hole.’
‘I don’t see –’ began Fizz, just as Mr Pinkbottle jabbed his pen through the plastic and suddenly a sackful of beans, rice and lentils spilt, like a very dry waterfall, across the floor.
Mr Pinkbottle snapped out a tiny mousetrap-like laugh, before leaning down and hissing, ‘You’d better get sweeping, boy. The shop opens in twenty minutes and this is a health and safety hazard. And it’s all your fault! What if an inspector came today? Hmm? HMMM?’
‘Now then,’ Mr Stump said, turning round with the deflated black bag flapping on his shoulder as if he were a particularly rubbish superhero. ‘It wasn’t Fizz’s fault and I won’t have you shouting at my son like that.’
He stepped towards the supermarket man, towering over him and casting a strongman’s shadow over his face.
At last! Fizz thought, Dad’s got some of his old self back. He’s woken up!
He was about to whoop with joy as the nasty manager was lifted up by his lapels and dangled in the air, but it never happened.
As Mr Stump loomed, Mr Pinkbottle flicked through the papers on his clipboard until he found the one he wanted and showed it to the strongman.
‘I think you’ll find,’ he said, ‘that if you lay a finger on my lapel I’ll be forced to sell this contract of yours to a pal of mine who runs a florist’s shop in Australia. There you go, Mr Stump, flying off down under to cut flowers, with no family beside you, because they’ll still be mine. It’s a great opportunity. We can do it now, if you’d like to come to my office. Just a quick phone call and a simple signature, that’s all it will take. Hmm?’
Mr Stump cowered.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
Then he said, ‘Fizz, you’d best clear all this up.’
‘Well done, Mr Stump,’ said Mr Pinkbottle. ‘Back to stacking marshmallows with you. Go on, go.’
Fizz’s dad gave him an embarrassed nod, not looking in his eyes, and slinked away around the shelving unit, back to the marshmallow aisle.
Fizz, defeated and not knowing what else to do, knelt back down and started scooping up the rice and beans and lentils and a family-sized tubful of couscous that had also found itself accidentally spilt among the rest.
‘No, no, no!’ snapped Mr Pinkbottle. ‘Not like that. The doors will be opening soon and I can’t have an ugly little boy sweeping in the middle of the shop like this. ‘Let me think. Oh! I’ve got it.’
When the shop opened not a single customer looked at Fizz and thought, Oh what a poor boy, forced to do pointless tasks by a brutal shopkeeper. And they didn’t think this because they didn’t see Fizz, even though he was there, right in front of them.
And they didn’t see Fizz because they saw a small gorilla (or a small person in a gorilla suit, because most people can tell the difference between a real gorilla in a supermarket and someone in a suit hired from a fancy dress shop. They’re customers, not idiots, after all).
Beside the small gorilla-boy with the tiny dustpan and brush was a sign that said: Pay a Pound and Spill Some Rice! – Watch the Ape Tidy Up! – All Proceeds to Charity! And people were doing as the sign suggested. They paid their pound to Mrs Leavings and tipped a packet of rice on the floor and watched as the ‘ape’ scuttled forward and began sweeping up.
And that was how Fizz spent his day, hot and bothered, and unable to escape. Always that woman with her clipboard and her rattling charity bucket. Always more jolly customers laughing and smiling as they tipped rice and pasta, lentils and quinoa on the floor, thinking they were doing some good in the world through their charitable contributions. (I’ll let you imagine what sort of charity Mr Pinkbottle might support. Let’s just say, it wasn’t one that was kind to animals, children or classic cars of the 1930s.)
You might be thinking, ‘Shouldn’t Fizz’s punishment for having ‘run away’ (and come back again) have been funnier? This book is sort of a comedy, after all.’ But I’m afraid Mr Pinkbottle didn’t have much of a sense of humour. He wasn’t like Miss Trunchbull, for example, in Roald Dahl’s book Matilda, who mixed her nastiness with appropriate and brutally funny punishments. The difference, of course, is that Mr Dahl was telling you a story that he’d made up out of his head, whereas I’m stuck relating to you the truth of the matter. I could make it funnier, but as Fizz would tell you if you sat down and spoke to him, it just wasn’t very funny. And I’m not going to lie to you. I have never lied to you before and never will. You know that.
To give you an idea of how nasty Mr Pinkbottle was I’ll tell you what Dr Surprise has been doing all this
time, because, after all, he was out of the supermarket when he shouldn’t have been too.
Dr Surprise spent his day working on the butcher’s counter, but there’d been a mix up with the deliveries and the lorry that brought the meat in hadn’t had any beef or pork or buffalo or kangaroo or venison or bacon or veal or boar or ostrich or lamb. All they’d had was rabbit. Lots and lots of rabbit. Rabbit chops and rabbit sausages. Rabbit burgers and rabbit mince. Rabbit ears and rabbit feet. Rabbit steaks and rabbit offal. And if you don’t know what offal is, then you’ve probably got good, kind and loving parents.
Dr Surprise loved rabbits. Just not like this.
(See? Not a funny punishment, but one that only someone as cruel and nasty as Mr Pinkbottle would come up with for a man who had performed nightly (with matinees on Saturday and Sunday) for years with a rabbit called Flopples in his hat.)
CHAPTER SEVEN
In which a boy runs away to the cicrus and in which an act of subterfuge is uncovered
It’s now somewhere between five and five thirty in the evening on that same Friday.
Fizzlebert is running through dark streets, retracing his way to the library.
Fizz is hurrying, his heart is beating as if someone’s chasing him, though he doesn’t think anyone is. Not yet, anyway.
He slips and slides round one final corner and the lights of the library are there before him, glowing out into the dark autumnal street, warm and inviting and safe.
But that’s not where he’s going. He runs past the library, past Miss Toad (who he sees crunching a biro between her teeth behind her desk), past the hundred thousand books, the hundred thousand other stories and on, on further into this new chapter all of his own.
He’s in the park now, running on wet grass.
Before him are the lights of a circus.
He can see the Big Top, he can see the lights on in people’s caravan windows and the dull yellow glow of buzzing lightbulbs strung between them.
The one thought in his head is: I must get help. I must find their Ringmaster.
He slows down. He stops running.
He looks at the Big Top again.
When you’ve worked in the circus your whole life you can recognise a Big Top immediately: it’s where all your most exciting moments happen; it’s where you come together as a big family and make the world a better and brighter place; it’s where you show off. It’s the signpost that means you never get lost. Wherever you go the Big Top towers over everything, like the Eiffel Tower in Paris: it’s a landmark that will always let you find your way home.
And in the same way that an expert can tell the difference between the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa just by looking at them, so too can a circus expert tell which circus’s Big Top they’re looking at just by looking at it too.
Fizz looked, trying to work out whose Big Top it was. As he looked the thought came that there was something odd about this one.
It wasn’t, he realised, as Big as the Big Top he was used to.
In fact it looked, now he really looked at it, more like a Medium Top.
Then it hit him: he knew whose circus this was.
There was only one circus on the circuit that had a Medium Top and that was Neil Coward’s Famous Cicrus. (A long time ago the misspelling had been painted on the side of Neil Coward’s wagon, and it had proved cheaper to keep than to change. Nowadays he explained to people that it was the ‘continental’ spelling. (It isn’t.))
Fizz’s heart sank and then bobbed up again.
It sank because Coward’s was (to be quite blunt) the most rubbish circus he knew of. Its performers were either so new they’d not had time to practise, or so old and tired they’d long since passed their peak. Coward’s was the place you ended up when you’d run out of talent, luck or custard.
The Ringmaster, Neil Coward himself, was (Fizz remembered from the one time he’d met him) a bit of a monster. Not a scary monster, but one of those ones made out of jelly that sit in the corner of a dungeon wobbling and waiting for an adventurer to trip up and fall into them. He was wet and weak and giggled at things no one else ever found funny.
More importantly he was poor. His cicrus was so rubbish it didn’t draw big crowds and didn’t make big bucks.
Fizz had hoped, secretly, that he might find a Ringmaster who’d go to Mr Pinkbottle and make such a good offer to buy the contracts that the horrid little supermarketeer would be unable to refuse. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Not a chance. Not in a million years. (Not that it would matter in a million years, since Fizz and his mum and dad would be long dead by then, and, also, the contracts only had eleven years to run before they were free of them anyway.)
But, I said Fizz’s heart also bobbed up when he realised which circus the cicrus in front of him was, didn’t I? That was because he knew someone who worked for Ringmaster Coward who wasn’t rubbish.
At the end of the summer Fizz’s circus and Neil Coward’s Famous Cicrus had parked up in the same field for a while and Fizz had met a girl called Alice Crudge. This is all recorded in a book called Fizzlebert Stump and the Girl Who Lifted Quite Heavy Things.
Like Fizz she was a junior strongperson, although her dad had had her doing a Flower Arranging act for reasons of his own. Needless to say, by the end of that book she had proved herself to be a brilliant young strongwoman and he’d grudgingly allowed her to begin lifting quite heavy things as her act.
(And if you’ve read that book you’ll be thinking right now, ‘But at the end of the story she was offered a place in La Spectacular De La Spectacular De La Rodriguez’ Silent Circus Of Dreams, a far bigger and better circus than Neil Coward’s Famous Cicrus.’ ‘Surely,’ a friend of yours who’s been reading your mind over your shoulder, might think, ‘Fizz isn’t stupid enough to have forgotten that?’
Well, you can tell your friend, that what he or she doesn’t know is that Fizz had had a letter from Alice only a month before this book began, saying that her dad had had an argument with Ringmaster Rodriguez over the appropriate number of ruffles on a dancing dog’s tutu (he’d been working in the costume department) and they’d had to leave and had gone back and joined Coward’s once again because no one else had room for a brilliant stronggirl and her cantankerous and hard-to-get-on-with father.
So there.)
Fizz thought that even though this circus was no good for actually rescuing his friends from the supermarket, it would still have been nice to see Alice again. (That’s one of the annoying things about travelling circuses: you can make friends with people in them, but you’ll very rarely end up in the same place at the same time. It can be lonely, with or without the occasional letter.)
There was only one thing to do, wasn’t there?
Fizz went among the caravans and knocked on the first door he came to.
‘Hello?’ said a person dressed as a cloud.
‘Hello,’ said Fizz (he was never surprised by people dressed as clouds). ‘I was wondering if Alice was around. Alice Crudge? Do you know which caravan is hers?’
‘The Crudges are just over there,’ said the cloud, pointing at a caravan just over there.
Fizz said, ‘Thank you,’ and went just over there and knocked again.
‘Hello?’ said another person dressed as a cloud.
‘Hello,’ Fizz answered. ‘I wondered if Alice was home?’
‘Hmmph,’ said the cloud.
‘Fizzlebert?’ said Alice from behind him.
‘Alice,’ said Fizz, turning round to face her.
The caravan door was slammed shut.
‘Don’t mind Dad,’ Alice said. ‘He’s just grumpy because the Ringmaster’s got him playing a cloud in tonight’s Zeppelin Race.’
‘I thought he was a plate spinner?’ Fizz said.
‘Oh, he is, but we’ve run out of plates, so he’s got to pull his weight elsewhere tonight.’
Fizz said nothing. His heart was thumping in his chest because he’d found another of his friend
s. The fact that he was no closer to freeing his family from Pinkbottle’s grip was forgotten for the moment as Alice smiled at him.
When he still said nothing she filled the silence by saying, ‘What are you doing here?’
Meanwhile, back in the supermarket, at exactly the same time, Fizzlebert-in-a-gorilla-suit was scooping up yogurt with his dustpan and slopping it into a black plastic bin bag.
Mr Pinkbottle watched and tipped a packet of Nicey Ricey breakfast cereal on to the tiled floor.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said to the gathered crowd, ‘look at how quickly the little monkey works, eager to raise money for charity.’
He nudged Mrs Stump who stood by his side and she rattled a bucket.
People dropped change in and the bucket rattled some more.
Mrs Stump looked sad.
Maybe the bucket reminded her of happier times, with custard and trousers and laughter. Or maybe she felt powerless watching her son being humiliated in a gorilla costume in the name of fundraising.
Back to the cicrus!
During that ‘meanwhile’ Fizz had explained to Alice everything that had happened so far. And he’d told her his plan, how he wanted to find someone to buy the contracts off Pinkbottle and take them all back to where they ought to be.
‘But,’ said Alice, sitting on the steps of her caravan, ‘you’re looking at it all wrong. You’ve not asked yourself the obvious questions, Fizz! You won’t get anywhere unless you ask the right questions.’
Fizz knew that she was right. She had a funny nose that bent slightly to the left and he had liked her almost from the moment they’d met. Of course she was right! She’d helped make the ending of that other book turn out all right, using her brain and her brawn. He knew he should listen to her.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘You’re all about this, “Find someone to buy the contracts”, when you should be asking, “Why did the Ringmaster sell the contracts in the first place?”. I mean, that’s not a normal thing to do, is it? When have you ever heard of a Ringmaster selling up his whole circus?’
Fizzlebert Stump and the Great Supermarket Showdown Page 5