Fizzlebert Stump Read Free Page B

and pretty mysterious): she taught Fizzlebert French. (Since Fizz didn’t know any French to begin with, it didn’t much matter that Madame Plume de Matant didn’t know more than half a dozen words herself. A fortune teller, she thought, should be exotic and mysterious, and so she had assumed what she called ‘a French aura’ years before, which involved eating croissants every morning, drinking too much coffee and saying ‘oui’ instead of ‘yes’ (which sounded like she said ‘wee’ a lot, which made Fizz laugh until she told him it actually meant ‘yes’ in French, and not ‘wee’. That much she had right). The rest she made up and Fizzlebert never knew any different, not until the day he met a Frenchman, but that’s another story entirely.)
    Fizz’s other teachers included: the Twitchery Sisters ( Mary and Maureen, the Human Trampolines ), a pair of acrobats, who took him for geography; Captain Fox-Dingle, the lion tamer, who gave him art classes; and Bongo Bongoton, one of the clowns, who gave him lessons in English, which was awkward (which is to say, a bit silly) because he was a mime (and if you don’t know what a mime is, I’d just keep quiet about it).
    This morning however, Fizz had to go over to Dr Surprise’s caravan for a history lesson.
    Dr Surprise was the circus’s Mysterious Magical Mind Reader, Horrendous Horripilating Hypnotist and Incredible Invisible Illusionist . (His job title was possibly the longest and most impressive in the whole circus but few people actually understood what it all meant.)
    When Fizzlebert knocked on Dr Surprise’s door Dr Surprise was surprised.
    ‘What, eh? Who is it?’ he shouted in his thin high voice through the open window.
    ‘It’s me, Fizz,’ Fizz shouted back.
    ‘Oh heck,’ shouted Dr Surprise. ‘Is it that time already?’
    ‘I think so,’ said Fizz, secretly hoping that maybe it somehow wasn’t. He liked Dr Surprise, but he didn’t like history.
    ‘Okay, hang on. I’m just getting up. Give me a minute,’ the man squeaked.
    Fizz waited, scuffing his shoes in the dust and twiddling his thumbs.
    In years gone by thumb twiddling was a popular way to pass the time, but these days it has rather fallen out of fashion. It just proves that Fizz hardly ever hung around with kids his own age. They’d have told him pretty sharpish that thumb twiddling was old hat and they’d have probably laughed at him like the kids the night before had when they learnt his name. But Fizz had grown up surrounded by grownups who were twenty, thirty, even forty years older than him and he’d picked up a few of their habits. They didn’t mind thumb twiddling at all, in fact they would talk proudly of the days when one of their riggers won a bronze medal for it in the 1976 All-Circus Olympic-ish Games. (Riggers are the men who build the Big Top and take it down again every time the circus moves to a new town, and as a rule they’re tough burly men covered with tattoos (tattoos are like drawings, but done by people who can’t find any paper).)
    Anyway, if you’ve never twiddled your thumbs then you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s a brilliant thing. I do it. I expect your parents probably do it too. Certainly your grandparents. Next time you see them you should ask for a quick lesson. It’ll only take a minute. It’s dead simple. You just join your hands together in front of you, leaving the thumbs untangled, and then you sort of let them chase each other round in circles. Easy, see?
    You can do it for hours and hours and it’s absolutely free and doesn’t use any electricity and so is good for the environment.
    Fizz, however, only had to do it for two minutes and forty-six seconds before Dr Surprise opened the door and invited him in.
     
    Dr Surprise was a tall thin man. He wore a very dark suit, sharp and tight and oily, which squeaked ever so slightly when he moved. The stiff white cuffs of his shirt poked out of the bottoms of his sleeves