by Andy Stanton
Copyright
You’re a Bad Man, Mr Gum!
Text copyright © 2006 Andy Stanton
Illustration copyright © David Tazzyman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Egmont UK Ltd
239 Kensington High Street
London
W8 6SA
Visit our web site at www.egmont.co.uk
First e-book edition 2010
ISBN 978 1 4052 4939 3
In memory of Sam
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
1. The Garden of Mr Gum
2. A Massive Whopper of a Dog
3. Mr Gum Lays His Plans Like the Horror He Is
4. Mr Gum Has a Cup of Tea
5. Jammy Grammy Lammy…
6. Mr Gum Lays Down His Hearts
7. Friday O’Leary
8. Some Things Happen
9. Polly and Friday Ride into Town
10. Jake’s Darkest Hour
11. How It All Turned Out
About the Authors
Chapter 1
The Garden of Mr Gum
Mr Gum was a fierce old man with a red beard and two bloodshot eyes that stared out at you like an octopus curled up in a bad cave. He was a complete horror who hated children, animals, fun and corn on the cob. What he liked was snoozing in bed all day, being lonely and scowling at things.
He slept and scowled and picked his nose and ate it. Most of the townsfolk of Lamonic Bibber avoided him and the children were terrified of him. Their mothers would say, ‘Go to bed when I tell you to or Mr Gum will come and shout at your toys and leave slime on your books!’ That usually did the trick.
Mr Gum lived in a great big house in the middle of town. Actually it wasn’t that great, because he had turned it into a disgusting pigsty. The rooms were filled with junk and pizza boxes. Empty milk bottles lay around like wounded soldiers in a war against milk, and there were old newspapers from years and years ago with headlines like
VIKINGS INVADE BRITAIN
and
WORLD’S FIRST NEWSPAPER INVENTED
TODAY.
Insects lived in the kitchen cupboards, not just small insects but great big ones with faces and names and jobs.
Mr Gum’s bedroom was absolutely grimsters. The wardrobe contained so much mould and old cheese that there was hardly any room for his moth-eaten clothes, and the bed was never made. (I don’t mean that the duvet was never put back on the bed, I mean the bed had never even been MADE. Mr Gum hadn’t gone to the bother of assembling it. He had just chucked all the bits of wood on the floor and dumped a mattress on top.) There was broken glass in the windows and the ancient carpet was the colour of unhappiness and smelt like a toilet. Anyway, I could be here all day going on about Mr Gum’s house but I think you’ve got the idea. Mr Gum was an absolute lazer who couldn’t be bothered with niceness and tidying and brushing his teeth, or anyone else’s teeth for that matter.
(and as you can see, it’s a big but) he was always extremely careful to keep his garden tidy. In fact, Mr Gum kept his garden so tidy that it was the prettiest, greeniest, floweriest, gardeniest garden in the whole of Lamonic Bibber. Here’s how amazing it was:
Think of a number
between one and ten.
Multiply that number by five.
Add on three hundred and fifty.
Take away eleven.
Throw all those numbers away.
Now think of an amazing garden.
Whatever number you started with, you should now be thinking of an amazing garden. And that’s how amazing Mr Gum’s garden was. In spring it was bursting with crocuses and daffodils. In summer there were roses, sunflowers, and those little blue ones, what are they called again? You know, those blue ones, they look a bit like dinosaurs – anyway, there were tons of them. In autumn the leaves from the big oak tree covered the lawn, turning it gold like a gigantic leafy robot. In winter, it was winter.
No one in town could understand how Mr Gum’s garden could be so pretty, greeny, flowery and gardeny when his house was such a filthy tip.
‘Maybe he just likes gardening,’ said Jonathan Ripples, the fattest man in town.
‘Perhaps he’s trying to win a garden contest,’ said a little girl called Peter.
‘I reckon he just quite likes gardening,’ said Martin Launderette, who ran the launderette.
‘Oy, that was my idea!’ said Jonathan Ripples.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Martin Launderette. ‘You can’t prove it, fatso.’
In fact, they were all wrong. The real reason was this: Mr Gum had to keep the garden tidy because otherwise an angry fairy would appear in his bathtub and start whacking him with a frying pan. (You see, there is always a simple explanation for things.) Mr Gum hated the fairy but he couldn’t work out how to get rid of it, so his only choice was to do the gardening or it was pan-whacks.
And so life went on in the peaceful town of Lamonic Bibber. Everyone got on with their business and Mr Gum snoozed the days away in his dirty house and did lots of gardening he didn’t want to do. And nothing much ever happened, and the sun went down over the mountains.
(Sorry, I nearly forgot. Something did happen once, that’s what this story’s about. I do apologise. Right, what was it?
Um…
Oh, of course! How could I be so stupid? It was that massive whopper of a dog. How on earth could I forget about him? Right, then.)
One day a massive whopper of a dog –
(Actually, I think we’d better have a new chapter. Sorry about all this, everyone.)
Chapter 2
A Massive Whopper
of a Dog
One day a massive whopper of a dog came to live on the outskirts of town. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. What strange things had he seen? Nobody knows. What was his name? Everybody knows. It was Jake the dog.
He was a furry wobbler and friendly as toast and he soon made himself very popular. He would often come into town to play with the children and give them rides on his enormous broad back. No matter how many children wanted a laugh on him he never grew tired. He was just that sort of dog. If he had been a person he probably would have been a king, or at the very least a racing car driver with a cool helmet.
Or perhaps he would have been a gardener because Jake the dog loved nothing more than playing in gardens. He enjoyed rolling his big doggy body around on a springy green lawn to see what it felt like (generally it felt like a lawn) and chomping up the flowers in his big doggy mouth to see what they tasted like (generally they tasted like flowers). He looked so happy that nobody really minded his messy visits.
In fact, a rumour began that if Jake the dog visited your garden it meant you were in for some good luck, and if he left a ‘little gift’ on the lawn you were in for double good luck and maybe even a telegram from the Queen.
So the townsfolk started to leave pies and bones out on their lawns, hoping to tempt Jake into their gardens. Sometimes it worked and sometimes not. Mostly he played where he liked and when he liked. He was a free spirit, like Robin Hood or The Man in the Moon or something, I dunno – he was just a dog, after all. All summer long Jake played, and everything was fine until the fateful day he discovered a garden he’d never played in before. It was the prettiest, greeniest, floweriest, gardeniest garden in the whole of Lamonic Bibber.
On that fateful day Mr Gum was snoozing away in his unmade bed. (I told you he was a lazer and that’s what lazers do.) He was dreaming his favourite dream, the one where he was a g
iant terrorising the townsfolk. His enormous bloodshot eyes flashed evilly like flying saucers high up in the clouds as he snatched the roofs off houses to steal the toys from the children’s bedrooms. Nobody could stop him. He was the biggest and the best, he was –
WHACK!!!
For a moment Mr Gum did not know what was happening. Where were the tiny houses? Where were the frightened people? Where were the – WHACK!!! ‘Ow!’ yelled Mr Gum, rubbing his head and looking around in terror. ‘Oh, no!’ he rasped. The angry fairy was hovering over him, frying pan at the ready.
‘Sort out the garden, you lazy snorer!’ yelled the fairy, and down came the frying pan.
Mr Gum was too fast this time and shot out of bed like a guilty onion. PFFF! went the frying pan as it hit the bedcovers, sending up a little cloud of dust and ants.
Mr Gum legged it out of the bedroom and went hurtling down the stairs. He stepped on an old slice of pizza lying in the hall and skidded into the kitchen, riding it like a cheese and tomato surfboard. He could hear the fairy right behind him, shrieking with fury.
‘I ’aven’t done nothin’ wrong! I kept the flippin’ garden TIDY!’ shouted Mr Gum as he flung open the back door and ran outside. He started to say something else but when he saw the garden the words got stuck in his throat. They tasted horrible.
The garden was not tidy. The garden was a total wreck. The lawn was tufted up and torn. The flowerbeds were trampled and chewed. Rose petals and sunflower heads lay scattered all over the place like rose petals and sunflower heads. There was something lying under the oak tree that Mr Gum did not even want to think about. And in the centre of the wreckage played the most monstrous dog Mr Gum had ever seen.
It was Jake, of course. The beast was rolling around for his own fun, his golden-brown fur matted with grass, his happy eyes squinting into the sunshine. Before Mr Gum’s disbelieving eyes, nine moles popped out of their holes and joined the party.
The two smallest ones began bouncing up and down on Jake’s furry belly and doing somersaults. The rest of them chased each other in circles or had races.
WHACK!! The pan came down on Mr Gum’s head faster than Superman. SPLAP!! The pan whipped him one on the bottom. BOING!! A fat one to the belly.
Mr Gum doubled up in pain and tripled up in fear as the fairy raged. ‘It ain’t my fault!’ he yelled. ‘I ain’t never seen that dog before!’
‘I don’t care whose’ BASH! ‘fault it is! It’s your’ SPLURK!! ‘job to’ WALLOP!! ‘do the gardening,’ VROINNNK!! ‘you stupid trouserface!’
Mr Gum flung himself down on the lawn and lay there whimpering, his eyes shut tight in unbraveness. Jake, on the other hand, was having a brilliant time. But just then a cloud shaped a bit like a bone drifted by.
With a hungry bark Jake ran off to chase it. Mr Gum watched as the dog bounced over the fence and disappeared off to who knows where. The moles raced back to their moleholes at the speed of moles. As suddenly as it had begun, the terror was over.
Mr Gum spent all afternoon repairing the damage. The fairy watched over him, scowling and brandishing the frying pan dangerously to hurry him on. Eventually the garden was back to normal, and with one last WHACK for good measure the fairy flew back to the bathtub and vanished. Mr Gum breathed a sigh of relief and went inside to find he’d missed his favourite TV show, ‘Bag of Sticks’, which was a picture of a bag of sticks for half an hour. (Mr Gum was the only person in the country who ever watched ‘Bag of Sticks’. Everyone else turned over to watch ‘Funtime with Crispy’.)
‘That dog ought to be given a meddling medal, he’s such a meddler,’ muttered Mr Gum. ‘I hope that’s the last of him.’
But it wasn’t the last of Jake, it was the beginning. Jake’s big doggy brain could not stop thinking about that amazing garden and the very next day he returned with much the same result as before. And the day after that. And the day after that. But not the day after that, because it was a Wednesday and everyone knows that dogs have the day off on Wednesdays.
But on Thursday you should have seen him! He was back with a vengeance. Every day (apart from Wednesdays) it was the same story. That massive whopper of a dog would come bouncing over the fence and start romping around like an uncontrollable doctor, sometimes leaving his ‘little gifts’ as was only natural. Mr Gum would run out into the garden shaking a fist on the end of a stick to frighten him off but he could never catch him. Jake would just bark like a cheeky schoolboy doing an impression of a dog barking. Then he’d bounce over the spiky fence and disappear off to who knows where.
Three weeks later Mr Gum was covered in frying-pan-shaped bruises and he had missed ten episodes of ‘Bag of Sticks’. It was time for action. Nasty action.
It’s time for action,’ said Mr Gum to nobody in particular. ‘Nasty action.’
Nobody in particular shrugged his shoulders and wandered off to eat his dinner. Mr Gum went to the shed and got out his thinking cap. He put it on his knee (it was a kneecap) and started thinking about how to get rid of that dog.
Chapter 3
Mr Gum Lays His Plans
Like the Horror He Is
T he next morning Mr Gum was in the butcher’s shop. The butcher was a scrawny old man called Billy William the Third, and no one knew what the ‘the Third’ bit meant.
‘I reckon he was in prison when he was younger and his number was Three,’ said Jonathan Ripples, the fattest man in town.
‘Maybe it’s because he’s the Third Nastiest Person in town,’ said the little girl called Peter.
‘Tell you what I think,’ said Martin Launderette, who ran the launderette. ‘When he was a young man, he was probably in prison and –’
‘HEY!’ said Jonathan Ripples. ‘Stop stealing my ideas!’
‘Shut up,’ said Martin Launderette. ‘Why don’t you go on a diet?’
Of course, Billy William the Third had his own theory.
‘It’s cos I’m actually royalty,’ he would tell anyone foolish enough to listen. ‘I’m third in line for the throne of Engerland after them other geezers.’ (He always pronounced ‘England’ in this way. Other words he said funny were ‘hospital’, ‘fountain’ and ‘funny’.) Nobody believed Billy William the Third’s story about being royalty except for Billy William himself, and even he didn’t believe it most of the time. But he enjoyed lying. It made him laugh. Not a nice laugh like you and I would do, but a sneaky old laugh on the inside where nobody else could see.
Anyway, forget it, the important thing is that Mr Gum had gone to old BW III’s butcher shop (which was called ‘Billy William the Third’s Right Royal Meats’) to buy the biggest load of meat he could get his angry hands on. He had a plan.
‘I’ve got a plan,’ he told Billy William. ‘Next time that whopper dog comes a-playin’ on my lawn, well, he better watch out, that’s all! My plan is the best!’
‘Are you gonna be layin’ down all that meat, and poisoning it so when that barking fatty eats it he’ll fall down dead?’ guessed Billy William.
‘Maybe I am,’ said Mr Gum, a little annoyed that the butcher had guessed his plan so quickly, He had been looking forward to explaining it in detail and impressing Billy William with his cleverness and bad heart.
‘Talking of bad heart,’ said the butcher, ‘here’s three pounds of it. It’s been sitting out in the sun since last Tuesday. That ought to poison him and no mistake, Mr Gum me old slipper!’
‘Why did you leave it sitting out in the sun?’ said Mr Gum, taking the horrible sloppy bag from the disgusting butcher.
‘I like watching the flies go mad over it!’ laughed Billy William. ‘They’re funty!’ (You see, that was how he pronounced the word ‘funny’.) ‘It’s the funtyiest sight in all of Engerland! I laughed so hard I nearly had to go to the hoppital!’
‘Well, thank you, me old gobbler,’ said Mr Gum, handing over some money that Billy William would later discover to be made out of lies and broken promises. And with that, he left the shop.
Out in
the high street Mr Gum remembered he hadn’t been nasty to anyone for over ten minutes. He looked around for any children who might be playing or just walking or anything, it didn’t really matter what they were doing, even reading a book would be fine. Just some children he could be nasty to. But there were none to be seen so he went and bought a newspaper. He opened it up at a photo of a ten-year-old boy who’d just won the World Record Cup Reward for Secret Burping.
‘This’ll do nicely,’ said Mr Gum, and he scowled at the photograph all the way home, hardly even looking where he was going. At one point he tripped over a stone, which made him feel like the Burper was somehow beating him, but that only made him scowl harder than ever. ‘So you see, I’ve won again,’ he said with a proud smile which he quickly turned back into a scowl.
Back home Mr Gum locked all the doors and windows, even the broken ones. Then he sat down to think on the old sailors’ chest which stood in the front hall. It was a beautiful old thing made of mahogany, which is a type of wood called mahogany, and it was carved all over with amazing scenes of life at sea with waves and whales and tall ships. Mr Gum had owned the sailors’ chest for over forty years but he had never once taken the time to appreciate its beauty.
What’s more, Mr Gum had never once thought to open that beautiful chest and see what was inside. Had he done so, it might have been a very different story indeed. It might have been Mr Gum’s Chocolatey Adventure because I’ll tell you something.
That old chest had once belonged to a sailor called Nathaniel Surname, the hero of the High Seas. One Tuesday long ago, he had saved a Spanish village from being destroyed by a terrible pirate called Kevin. As a prize, the village presented Nathaniel with the chest, which was absolutely stuffed full of chocolate. Not just any old chocolate, mind you, but special chocolate made by the dolphins of the region. And it might just be legend, but some said it was MAGIC CHOCOLATE WITH FANTASTIC POWERS, and they always whispered when they said it, which is why it is written so small.