The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off Read Free Page B

close my eyes, the way you would probably do if you were about to die from malaria or the plague, or when gangrene spreads to your whole body.
    â€˜And your arm hurts?’
    â€˜And my leg too.’
    â€˜Which one?’
    â€˜Both of them.’
    I opened my eyes again and saw that Mum was smiling, which was bad news.
    â€˜Up you get.’
    I got to school late and so did Noah, Jamie and The Moan. They’d all tried pretending they had terrible diseases too. The Moan still had some faint red marks where he’d used his mum’s lipstick to draw measles on his face. Jennifer wasn’t with him. She must have come to school early.
    We met up just outside the school gates.
    â€˜Maybe it’ll be OK,’ I said hopefully.
    â€˜We’re all doomed,’ said Jamie.
    I looked at The Moan, who should have known best, as he had to live with Jennifer. He didn’t say anything. Just shook his head sadly. That was enough to tell us what would be waiting for us later on.
    The morning turned out to be fine.No one mentioned anything about bare bums, although I did think some of the girls looked at us in a funny way. The worst moment came when Miss Bridges asked me a question and I made a silly reply and then she told me off for being cheeky. Delilah Jones giggled behind her hand, and I thought it might be because, you know, bums have cheeks. But then Delilah just went back to her work, so I thought I was probably imagining it. It looked like the full story hadn’t got out yet.
    But then came morning break. As soon as we left our classroom and walked into the playground, we knew our lives were going to get much worse. The whole of Jennifer’s Year Four class were lined up in a row. Their faces were shining with a nasty sort of joy. As soon as we appeared, they all pointed at us, their fingers jabbing like daggers, and they started singing a stupid song. It went like this:

    â€˜
Watch out, people, here they come,
    They are the gang with the big bare bum.
    Ring that bell, clang clang clang,
    That’s why we call them the Bare Bum Gang.
    They’re like something off the telly,
    They’re all bare and they’re all smelly.
’
    The words weren’t very clever, and the tune was rubbish, just a sort of a droning noise, but that didn’t matter to the crowd that gathered. Jennifer was in charge, and she danced around in front of the others, conducting the choir and sometimes leaning forward with a nasty expression to sing the words extra loud.
    As if things weren’t bad enough, that’s when Dockery arrived. Dockery is massive. His neck is thicker than my waist and when he makes a fist, his hand is as big as a cannonball. He looks about three years older than anyone else in the school. One funny thing about him is that although he has a gigantic head, his face – I mean, his eyes, nose and mouth – are all tiny and squished up together in the middle of it.
    I wish I could say that he was a gentle giant who liked to pick wild flowers and look after sick puppies but he was just a big bully. He was also spoiled rotten, and had a PlayStation 3, an Xbox, a Game Boy Advance, a Nintendo DS and a PSP. He has a load of friends who hope one day he’ll let them play with all his stuff, but he never does.
    So there was Dockery, with his gang. Oh, I should say, they were also the gang from the old estate who used to burn down or wee on our dens whenever they foundthem. So from now on I’ll just call them the Dockery Gang. As well as Dockery; there was William Stanton, James Furbank, Paul Larkin and some others whose names I could never remember. They were mainly in Year Six.
    To begin with they joined in with the song, but they soon got bored with that. So then Dockery came over and pushed me down and then sat on me, and then he shouted to his friends, ‘Right, if this is the Bare Bum Gang, let’s see their bare bums!’
    He was sitting on my chest and it