Uncle Gobb And The Green Heads

by Michael Rosen

  Ulla doesn’t always quite get it, Malcolm thought, but neither do I. Or anyone. And that’s the point, he thought.

  All of us don’t always quite get it, Malcolm thought. If Uncle Gobb got it that no one gets all of it, it wouldn’t be so horrible being with Uncle Gobb. And then, all of a sudden it was like the clouds opened and a great big face with a great big voice said in an American accent,

  ‘THAT’S THE BIT THAT

  UNCLE GOBB DOESN’T GET.

  HE DOESN’T GET IT THAT

  NO ONE GETS

  ALL OF IT.’

  Malcolm smiled.

  Mr Keenly said, ‘Malcolm, you’re smiling. What’s your GETTING GIGGLY thing?’

  Everyone went very quiet.

  The whole class looked at Malcolm. He started to say the first thing that came into his head which was the stuff about Uncle Gobb and this great big moment with the cloud opening … but then he quickly realised that that had nothing to do with GETTING GIGGLY.

  He looked at Janet.

  He remembered that what made him GIGGLY was Janet. Well, not just Janet. It was the fact that Janet and Mr Keenly liked each other.

  The class was still quiet.

  The whole class was still looking at Malcolm.

  Then he said, ‘You and Janet.’

  The whole class took in a big breath at the same time. It was a massive whole-class gasp.

  A gasp big enough to swallow the Niagara Falls, if you were in America, Malcolm thought.

  Usually, the gasps big enough to swallow the Niagara Falls only happened when someone was in Big Trouble. Like the time Humpty brought some sick to school. Humpty isn’t his real name.

  So Malcolm knew he was in Big Trouble.

  Crackersnacker whispered, ‘You did that Blurting-Out Thing there, Ponkyboy.’

  Crackersnacker had once told Malcolm that he did Blurting Out quite often, and that sometimes it would be better if he didn’t.

  That was Crackersnacker’s ‘HELPFUL ADVICE’ and, just like the Helpful Advice in this book, was free.

  Even the whole Ponkyboy thing came about because of Blurting Out. That was the time when Malcolm was thinking about ‘Inky Pinky Ponky,’ at the very moment he was on TV being asked ‘What is the capital of Italy’ and he said, ‘Ponky!’ That was such a Great Big Blurting Out, the whole world knew about it.

  And now he had done another Blurting Out and the whole class was looking at him.

  Mr Keenly started to speak.

  I know what’s coming, thought Malcolm. I’m going to have to go and see Mrs Office and she’ll ask me to say sorry and then she’ll ask me why I’m sorry and I won’t know why I’m sorry. I never know why I’m sorry. And that’s when things go fizzy.

  And when things go fizzy, I feel sad.

  ‘That’s very good, Malcolm,’ said Mr Keenly. ‘That’s exactly the kind of situation we’re talking about.’

  ‘We live in a flat,’ Ulla said.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Janet.

  Mrs Office walked in. With her were two men and two women in suits.

  ‘And that just about finishes that,’ said Mr Keenly smiling very nicely at everyone.

  Malcolm was puzzled. How did ‘that’ just about finish ‘that’? What finished what? They had hardly started to talk about GETTING GIGGLY. And this was supposed to be Talk Time when they talked about Important Things. That was their Learning Objective.

  But now it had all ended. Just because Mrs Office and the two men and the two women in suits walked in.

  ‘They’ve come to arrest us,’ Crackersnacker said.

  ‘No,’ said Malcolm, ‘I think they’ve come to do the leak.’

  ‘No,’ said Crackersnacker, ‘the people who come to do leaks wear blue overalls.’

  ‘Right, everybody,’ said Mrs Office. ‘I want to introduce you to some people who are going to have a lot to do with the school. They’ve come from the Gobb Education Force.’

  The four people did some big smiling. And nodding.

  Malcolm heard ‘Gobb Education Force’ like it was a baked bean in a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. Odd, brown and very, very surprising. How could these people be part of the Gobb Education Thing?

  One of them started speaking.

  Malcolm looked at Crackersnacker. It was amazing. The man was almost certainly speaking English but the only words that Malcolm and Crackersnacker could understand were ‘the’ and ‘and’. One more word that Malcolm heard was the word ‘inspection’ though he wasn’t sure he understood it.

  Malcolm looked at Crackersnacker.

  ‘They’re not coming to arrest us, Crackersnacker. I think they’ve come to do some inspection.’

  When Malcolm said ‘inspection’, he did the Mr Keenly thing where he opened his eyes wide, said a word with big lips, and made a little wiggly finger sign as if he was underlining the word.

  What happened next was an Awkward Silence.

  This is where things are pretty silent and everyone feels awkward.

  Like when you’re on a bus and you say, ‘Mum, someone’s done one,’ and everyone hears and they think you mean that someone did a fart, but you didn’t mean that, you meant, ‘Someone at school has done a picture of the school summer fete’ because your mum just asked you if it was you who was supposed to be doing the picture of the school summer fete, so you say, ‘Mum, someone’s done one.’

  And there was an Awkward Silence in the class right now because no one knew what to do next.

  So the whole class was breathing quietly. Even Singalong and Freddy, who hardly ever did anything quietly.

  Malcolm was also breathing quietly in the awkward silence but the words ‘Gobb Education’ were going round and round in his head like the words at the top of a roundabout at the fair.

  A roundabout? he thought … and as he thought that, he heard that same voice, in an American accent, saying, ‘Hey buddy, over here it’s a carousel. Not roundabout. Carousel. Now let’s go get some of that cotton candy I promised you …’

  CHAPTER 4

  Sorry about the name of Chapter Three. Malcolm didn’t get to America. Sometimes things don’t work out in the way you say they will.

  This chapter hasn’t got a name in case things don’t work out in the right way again. Bad luck can sometimes come in twos.

  Or threes. Or ones.

  No, not weasels.

  You’ll remember that the last chapter ended with an Awkward Silence. This chapter begins just as the Awkward Silence comes to an end with:

  ‘The Timeline,’ said Mr Keenly.

  The Timeline was pinned up round the room. At the beginning of The Timeline it said 3000BC. At the end of The Timeline it said NOW.

  In between there were all sorts of dates and next to the dates it said things like ‘War’, or ‘King’.

  (Uncle Gobb loved The Timeline. When Malcolm said at tea-time that Mr Keenly had put up The Timeline round the Malcolm’s classroom, he ran round the kitchen, jumping up and down, shouting, ‘At last, at last, at last!’

  ‘The point is, Tessa,’ he said, ‘there are millions of people who don’t know which comes first, and which comes second, and which comes third. What comes after first? Second! What comes after second? Third! Everyone needs to know this. They know it in China.’

  ‘A lot of things happen where the third thing comes before the first thing,’ Malcolm said. ‘Like getting up, having things to eat and going to bed.’

  ‘What?!!!’ said Uncle Gobb very crossly.

  ‘Well,’ said Malcolm, ‘we say that first we get up, then we have things to eat, then later, we go to bed. But if you look at it another way, you could say, first we go to bed, then we get up and then we have things to eat.’

  ‘WHAT???!!!’ said Uncle Gobb even more crossly.

  Malcolm noticed that a lot of conversations he had with Uncle Gobb ended with Uncle Gobb saying, ‘WHAT???!!!’

  It was at moments like this that Malcolm loved to imagine a different kind of conver
sation at home; one that could just end with a ‘Mmmm’ or a ‘Hah!’ That would be nice.)

  ‘I want you all to write down in your Timeline Books,’ Mr Keenly said, ‘the time and place you would most like to have been alive.’

  The Gobb Education people wrote something on their clipboards.

  There was some hubbub while people couldn’t find their Timeline Books but Janet moved round the class like a red-hot arrow finding Timeline Books. The Timeline Books were quite easy to find because they had the words ‘Timeline Book, provided by the Timeline Corporation’ on them.

  Malcolm wrote down, ‘I would like to be in America around about the time when my dad went there.’

  ‘Right, all eyes to the front,’ said Mr Keenly. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘50p’ said Ulla.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Janet.

  The children read out their answers.

  ‘I would like to be in Victorian times because I would say to Oliver Twist that he could have more cornflakes,’ said Oliver.

  ‘I would like to be in the Stone Age because I like the Rolling Stones,’ said Singalong.

  ‘I would like to be in the Great Plague because I would like to have a great plague,’ said Freddy.

  Malcolm read out his:

  ‘I would like to be in America when …’

  … and he stopped.

  He didn’t want to say the thing about his dad.

  He looked at Crackersnacker. Crackersnacker had that don’t-do-a-Blurting-Out-Thing look on his face.

  Crackersnacker tried to think of something that he could say to Malcolm to help him. He had seen what Malcolm had written in his Timeline Book, and he could see that Malcolm didn’t want to say that.

  Then Crackersnacker got it.

  He whispered to Malcolm, ‘When Clint Eastwood got out of Alcatraz.’

  ‘… when Clint Eastwood got out of Alcatraz,’ said Malcolm, ‘the only prison in the United States that no one ever got out of … apart from Clint Eastwood … and Alcatraz is an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay,’ Malcolm added.

  The inspecting people from Gobb Education Force were still writing on their clipboards.

  Mr Keenly said, ‘What you need to be telling me are the times you would like to be in, taken from OUR Timeline … Oliver – Victorians, very good; Freddy – Great Plague, very good; Singalong, I think you’ve got your Stones a bit muddled; Malcolm, no Alcatraz in America on our Timeline, I’m afraid.’

  (Quite a lot of big eyes, and wiggly underlining fingers went on there.)

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Keenly,’ Crackersnacker said, ‘the thing is, Malcolm’s got to get to America.’

  Malcolm had stopped listening. He was staring at some tiny writing on the bottom of the back page of the Timeline Book. It said:

  Of course it does, he thought. It’s just like at home, when Uncle Gobb starts firing off questions and facts about spiders and stuff. Now it’s Timeline questions. Uncle Gobb was coming at him from all directions. It felt like Uncle Gobb had got hold of his head and was squeezing it harder and harder and harder.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Keenly in one big rush … (Note: That means you have to say what Mr Keenly says next, really, really quickly. On your marks, get set, go!)

  ‘I’m sure we all want to go to America, but Malcolm, you wouldn’t be able to go to Alcatraz when Clint Eastwood was there … that was a film … it wasn’t real … No. Yes. I mean Alcatraz is real. It was real. But Clint Eastwood wasn’t in Alcatraz. That was a story. About the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz. If that’s true. And Alcatraz is still there. People go. You can go in a boat. I’ve been there. Ha! Imagine? Someone on the boat fell off. It was awful. Look, let’s hear some of the other answers …’

  Malcolm thought that Mr Keenly was getting fizzy. Everyone else could see that the people in suits from the Gobb Education Force were making Mr Keenly VERY, VERY nervous, so they tried to help. They all said that they wanted to know about the boat, Mr Keenly’s trip to Alcatraz and the awful thing that happened. This just made Mr Keenly even more nervous because he thought that going to Alcatraz wasn’t what they were supposed to be doing. It wasn’t THE TIMELINE and it wasn’t the Learning Objective.

  ‘All eyes to the front,’ said Mr Keenly. ‘The bit of The Timeline that we’re going to focus on this term is the Stone Age.’

  He pointed at the bit of The Timeline on the wall that said, ‘Stone Age’, and he did more eyebrows, wiggly fingers, underlining words thing.

  Singalong said, ‘My granddad used to do electricity for the Rolling Stones.’

  Mr Keenly switched on the whiteboard and there was a picture of a pile of stones.

  Malcolm felt prickly – that feeling you get when things aren’t going quite right. They’re nearly right and if you could do something to get them more right, you wouldn’t feel prickly. Like there are little tiny pins sticking into the back of your neck. Not painful pins. Just prickly pins.

  No, there are no such things as weaselly pins.

  The thing is, Malcolm thought, we were nearly going to talk about America. America was in the air all round them. You could almost touch America. But something in the room meant that suddenly we couldn’t talk about America. It looked like Mr Keenly wanted to talk about America. Crackersnacker had been really helpful. But then it just … slipped away.

  I know, he thought, I’ll have to have another big conversation with Crackersnacker about my Dreamy Stuff, and how to get to America and how we’re going to get rid of Uncle Gobb in America, because it’s not going to happen here in school.

  ‘Now these stones …’ Mr Keenly was saying … and Malcolm was imagining going home that night and Uncle Gobb saying, ‘You did the Stone Age in school today? Right, how many rocks where there in the Stone Age? What were the names of the rocks? How heavy were the rocks?’

  Mr Keenly carried on: ‘… these stones may not look like the most interesting stones in the world, but …’

  … but let’s interrupt Mr Keenly there. Let’s not carry on with the stones, eh?

  Let’s leave the stones alone.

  Mr Keenly was going to say something that he hoped would make the Inspection People very pleased. He was going to say that these stones are fascinating stones and really, really, really amazing.

  (Note: Some fascinating stones turn up in a book called ‘Fascinating and Really, Really, Really Amazing Piles of Stones in the Stone Age’ written by a very, very close friend of Uncle Gobb called Jack Rock, but that book is not this book.

  Sorry.)

  CHAPTER 5

  The Green Room (Which Is Not Green)

  (This Chapter Contains Some Secret Information About Genies That Has Never Been Revealed Before. Use It Sensibly.)

  If you have read a book called Uncle Gobb and the DREAD SHED you will know that if Malcolm rubs his nose, a Genie will appear. If you know this, you may be wondering why he doesn’t rub his nose to find out how to get to America. Please don’t be impatient. Malcolm does things in his own way and in his own time. He doesn’t like being rushed.

  If you have read that book, you will also know that if Uncle Gobb polishes his face and says some special words, Uncle Gobb’s Genie, Doctor Roop the Doop, doop dee doop, will appear. If so, you may be wondering, hey – if the Genies haven’t been summoned by Malcolm and Uncle Gobb so far in this book, what are the Genies doing?

  Here now is the secret information about Genies that has never been revealed before: what Genies do when they are in between the times they appear is sit about in a Green Room waiting to be called. You sometimes see a Green Room on chat shows. It’s where the guests wait before they come on.

  Malcolm’s Genie was sitting in the Genies’ Green Room.

  Uncle Gobb’s Genie, Doctor Roop the Doop is NOT in the Genies’ Green Room.

  So where is he? What is he doing? And why?

  We’re not the only ones to wonder about all this.

  Malcolm’s Genie wants to know. He want
s to know so that next time he’s summoned, any information he’s collected about Doctor Roop will help Malcolm. That’s what a good Genie does: gets the info on his master’s enemies.

  But how will Malcolm’s Genie get this info?

  He will have to stop staring at himself in the Green Room mirror, saying to himself, ‘I like the haircut, Mr Nice Guy,’ right now.

  He will have to stop making his biceps bulge while saying, ‘Grrrrrrrrrrrr!’ right now.

  He will have to focus on helping Malcolm.

  Now, there’s one other thing I didn’t say about Green Rooms. They’re great places for gossip. Genies chat.

  Even as Malcolm’s Genie was waving his scimitar in the air, and shouting, ‘I’m so accurate with this, in one swipe I could cut the wings off a passing fly …’ he heard someone say, ‘… Doctor Roop the Doop …’

  ‘Aha!’ he said to himself. ‘Info in the air, eh?’

  Cunningly, he pretended not to have heard and went on swiping and swooshing with his scimitar while he listened to the gossip.

  Old Tom, a Genie who was not very fit, was always a bit out of breath and had to send excuse notes to his master when he was summoned, was talking to Sandy the Demon Giggler. She was known as the Demon Giggler because her giggling was so dangerous it could make Presidents and Prime Ministers feel a bit silly.