The Bare Bum Gang Battles the Dogsnatchers Read online

  ‘Is he going to be our gang dog then?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘a lot of gangs have a gang dog. Like Timmy in the Famous Five.’

  I’d been reading quite a lot of the Famous Five adventures, because I was worried that I was going to grow out of them soon, so I wanted to use them up.

  ‘But that’s a completely different sort of a dog,’ said Noah, who was still in a huff. ‘Timmy doesn’t lick his bum and then lick your face. He finds treasure and rescues the others when they get locked into dungeons by the baddies.’

  ‘What do the rest of you think?’ I said to the gang.

  Although I was Gang Leader, I always liked to find out what everyone wanted to do because that was only fair. If you never ask the Ordinary People what they think, then you’re an Evil Dictator. I’m more of a Good King, like King Arthur or Queen Elizabeth I, even if she was a girl.

  ‘I think a big scary gang dog would be quite cool to have,’ said Jamie. ‘And we can train it to destroy our enemies.’

  ‘Yeah, I think it would be good too,’ said The Moan. ‘But if it eats our sweets, Ludo has to replace them.’

  ‘I think he’s quite nice,’ said Jenny. ‘But maybe instead of training him to attack our enemies, we should teach him not to sit on Noah, or lick his bum so much.’

  That made us laugh, because it sounded like she meant that Rudy licked Noah’s bum rather than his own.

  ‘I don’t think we can train him not to lick his bum,’ I said. ‘It’s how dogs keep clean. It’s instead of toilet paper for them. But every time he sits on Noah I’ll tell him off and he’ll soon learn. Is that OK, Noah?’

  Noah said that it was, but he still looked like someone who’d been sat on by a smelly dog’s bottom and wasn’t happy about it.

  ‘Shall we have an adventure then?’ asked Jamie, after we’d sat around for a while.

  We all agreed that having an adventure was a good idea, but then we got a bit stuck about exactly what kind of adventure. The Moan wanted us to use Rude Word to go hunting rabbits, but Noah said it was wrong to kill creatures for fun, and anyway we didn’t know where there were any rabbits. I pointed out that Rude Word was such a stumpy dog he’d never catch the rabbits even if we found any. There was some talk about attacking pirates, cannibals, aliens, etc., etc., but that was just silly.

  Then I had a brilliant idea.

  ‘SHALL WE SEE if Rude Word can find some treasure?’

  I admit it was Noah who first mentioned how Timmy used to find treasure all the time for the Famous Five, but it was my idea to copy it. Anyway, it got their attention. Treasure is good for getting people’s attention, because people like treasure more than almost anything.

  ‘Yeah!’ said everyone together.

  ‘But how?’ asked The Moan.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘everyone knows that dogs are great for sniffing things out. You should have seen Rudy last night, snuffling away like crazy. It doesn’t matter where you hide the biscuits, he’ll find them. OK, so my plan is we let Rudy sniff a little bit of treasure, and then he’ll be able to sniff out a whole lot of it. And we’ll be as rich as emperors.’

  ‘Which emperors?’ Jamie asked suspiciously, as if I was trying to scam him out of some treasure by picking a rubbish emperor.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. The emperors of China and Peru, probably.’

  ‘Added together or separate?’

  ‘Separate – there’s no need to get greedy. Anyway, emperors don’t like to be added together.’

  He seemed happy enough with that.

  ‘But what kind of treasure will we find?’ Jennifer enquired. ‘You don’t get treasure just lying around the place, do you? Because, if you did, it would already have been discovered.’

  ‘Well, it could be buried pirate treasure, or golden coins left by the Romans. Anything like that.’

  ‘There is one small problem,’ said Noah.

  That was bad news. Noah was usually on my side.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said Rudy would need to sniff a little bit of treasure before he could find the great big load of treasure.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, where are we going to get a little bit of treasure from? If we’d already found the big load of treasure, we could choose a little bit of it for Rudy to sniff, but then we wouldn’t need him, because we’d already have it.’

  Drat. He had a point. We were stuck.

  It was Jamie who saved us, which was amazing, as I don’t think he’d ever had an idea before, except for stuff like ‘Oh, I’m hungry’, or ‘Oh, let’s throw stones at that tree’.

  ‘Money,’ he said.

  ‘That’s clever!’ said Jennifer.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Money is a kind of treasure, so we let Rudy sniff some then he’ll find some more.’

  ‘So has anyone got any money then?’ asked Noah.

  For five minutes everyone patted their clothes and reached down into pockets. At the end of it we had three pennies and one two-pence.

  ‘This is terrible,’ said The Moan. ‘If all we’ve got is rubbishy coppers, then that’s what Rude Word will find. Even if he finds a whole chest full of pennies it won’t be enough to buy anything cool.’

  Then Jamie said: ‘What about this?’

  He held out something truly beautiful – a golden coin, exactly like the kind you’d find in a pirate’s treasure chest.

  ‘Is it real?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Real gold?’

  ‘Real gold? Don’t be stupid. Real chocolate. On the inside. It’s the last one left over from Christmas.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ I said. ‘The outside is made of gold, isn’t it, Jamie?’

  ‘Yes, well, I suppose so.’

  ‘That’s fine. We only need it for the smell. So, my plan is, we let Rudy have a good big sniff and snuffle of the outside and then off he goes. And either he finds a treasure chest full of actual gold coins, or if we’re really unlucky, he might just find a treasure chest full of gold chocolate coins, and everyone knows that the chocolate inside chocolate coins is the most delicious chocolate by a mile.’

  ‘That plan is not completely useless,’ said The Moan, which, for him, was like charging around and whooping and yelling and cheering and saying, ‘Well done, you’re a genius.’

  At that moment Rudy came back into the den, having got bored with the outside. You could tell he’d arrived both by the smell and by the noise. The smell was a bit like manky bananas and the sound was like someone with a bad cold snorting back their runny bogeys, while also drinking a thick milkshake with a partly blocked straw.

  So Jamie held out the coin for Rudy to sniff. He came over slowly on his fat legs. I mean Rudy, not Jamie. But Jamie also had quite fat legs. In fact in summer, when he wears shorts, his legs look like gigantic pink sausages.

  Rudy didn’t seem that interested to begin with, but then he went into hyper-snuffle mode.

  ‘Yuck, he’s licking it,’ shouted Jamie. ‘And he’s got slobber all over my hand.’

  ‘Well, that serves you right. You should have let me be in charge of the sniffing. I’d have done it properly.’

  ‘Go on then,’ he said, shoving the slimy coin into my hand.

  I wiped the coin on my trousers to get rid of the dog drool. Then I showed it to Rude Word. He tried to jump up to eat it, but I grabbed his collar and made him sit. It was like fighting a bag of cement.

  ‘Listen, boy,’ I said, in a commanding voice, ‘you have a very important mission.’ He wagged his tail and looked like he was paying attention. ‘OK, have another smell of this.’

  I let him stick his nose against the coin. Unfortunately after he’d had his snuffle, he swallowed the whole coin, including the golden outside.

  ‘Bad dog!’ I said, and pulled my angry, angry face at him. I think that did the trick, because he looked quite sorry then.

  ‘Now, boy,’ I continued. ‘Go find!’ I pointed out of the door an
d away into the woods, in the general direction, I hoped, of treasure.

  Rudy glanced back at me once and shot off. Well, I suppose ‘shot’ makes him sound a bit faster than he really was, which was probably about as fast as a heavy wheelbarrow being pushed by an old lady with one leg.

  ‘THAT DOG ACTUALLY looks like he might know what he’s doing,’ said The Moan, in an unusually un-moany way.

  ‘Of course he does,’ I said. ‘He’s a highly trained treasure dog.’

  ‘We should probably follow him, in that case,’ said Jenny.

  Rudy had already disappeared into the trees, so we spread out to find him, pretending to be in the SAS. Pretending to be in the SAS was quite good fun for a while, but halfway through the dog-hunting mission I got a bit distracted. I found a nice whippy stick and started slicing the heads off a patch of nettles, which is one of my favourite things to do.

  Then I heard a scream.

  A girly scream.

  That could only mean one thing – a girl was screaming. Or I suppose it could be a boy screaming like a girl. Either way, I had to help.

  It probably meant someone was being attacked. They might have fallen into some quicksand, which made me really wish I’d brought some rope with me. I had my belt, which would have to do, even if it meant my trousers fell down while I was performing the rescue.

  That was a chance I’d just have to take.

  I ran towards the girly screaming sound, and found Jennifer standing in front of Rudy. She wasn’t in the quicksand, which at first I was a bit disappointed about, but also quite relieved because I didn’t want Jennifer to see me in my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle underpants when my trousers fell down.

  Rudy was looking a bit strange, just sort of standing there in front of a weird kind of a puddle. A puddle with chunks in.

  ‘What are you screaming about?’ I asked Jennifer. ‘I thought something terrible was happening.’

  I didn’t mention the quicksand in case she thought I was silly.

  ‘Something terrible has happened,’ she said. ‘Rudy’s just been sick.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling a bit queasy myself. ‘Well, don’t worry. Dogs are sick quite a lot. It’s one of the key facts about them.’

  ‘But look at what’s come out of him.’

  ‘Isn’t it just dog sick?’

  ‘I SAID LOOK AT IT!’

  Jenny was screaming now. I’ve heard that you’re allowed to slap girls when they scream like that, as a way of calming them down. The trouble was that Jenny was really good at tae kwon do, and if I tried slapping her she’d probably slap me back really hard, and then push my face into the dog sick, which is no one’s idea of a picnic.

  I looked.

  ‘Is it a stick?’

  ‘A stick?’

  ‘A stick in the sick.’

  ‘No. It’s not a stick in the sick. It’s a leg. It came out of him when he was being sick. He sicked it up.’

  Then she made the noise of a dog being sick, in case I hadn’t got the point.

  ‘Don’t be silly. Why would Rudy be eating a leg?’

  ‘It’s definitely a leg. It’s covered in fluffy hair – look . . .’

  There did seem to be some bits of hair on the sticky leg thing.

  ‘And look at the colour of it,’ Jennifer continued, her voice full of horror. For a second I thought about putting my arm around her, because it’s what you’re supposed to do when a girl is crying and needs comforting, or if you’re afraid to slap her. But luckily I didn’t, because just then I noticed that the rest of the Gang were there. They’d obviously homed in on the girly scream.

  Jennifer quickly told them about the gruesome find, and they gathered round the doggy sick.

  ‘It’s a sort of browny colour,’ said The Moan.

  ‘Trixie’s got one brown leg like that,’ said Noah.

  We all looked at each other, except for Rude Word, who had wandered away from the sick and was staring into the distance with an embarrassed sort of look on his ugly mug.

  ‘OH HECK,’ SAID Jennifer, her eyes wide with horror. ‘Do you think Rude Word has really eaten Trixie, and that bit of leg is all that’s left?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d already had a silly, jokey thought about Rudy eating Trixie, and now it looked like it might have come true.

  ‘That is so gross,’ said Jamie.

  He was usually in favour of gross stuff, such as eating his bogeys, or scratching his bottom and then smelling his finger.

  ‘But at least we won’t get chased by Trixie any more when we play football,’ said Noah, looking on the bright side.

  ‘No, I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘He may be ugly and smelly and not very bright, but he wouldn’t eat another dog. He’s not a cannibal. He probably just wanted Trixie to be his girlfriend.’

  ‘Dogs don’t have girlfriends,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Yes they do,’ said Jennifer, ‘and they get married sometimes too. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Yuck,’ said The Moan. ‘That’s worse than eating her.’

  ‘We’re getting off the point,’ I said. ‘It probably isn’t even Trixie. I mean, Trixie’s leg. I think it might be a hairy stick of some kind.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said The Moan. ‘A stick from the famous hairy tree.’

  ‘No need to be sarcastic,’ said Noah.

  ‘And even if it is Trixie’s leg, how do we know that Rude Word has eaten the rest of her?’

  ‘What do you mean? Are you saying that Trixie might have just dropped one of her legs, and gone off hobbling about on three instead of four? And then Rude Word just happened to find the one that Trixie dropped and said, “Oh look, a spare leg, that’s lucky, I think I’ll eat that”?’

  That was The Moan, of course, continuing to be sarcastic, which is the lowest form of humour apart from farting in church.

  ‘No,’ I replied, keeping my voice nice and even, ‘I mean, maybe something else killed Trixie, and ate most of her, except for one leg.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Noah.

  ‘Maybe an eagle?’

  ‘There aren’t any eagles around here. And anyway, why would it leave one leg?’ said Jennifer.

  ‘Maybe it was full. Quite often I can’t finish all my shepherds’ pie,’ said Noah, backing me up, although I could tell his heart wasn’t really in it.

  ‘It could have been a fox,’ I said, because I was never really convinced by the eagle idea. ‘Or there might be an escaped black panther. I read somewhere that leopards like to eat dogs, and a black panther isn’t a separate species at all, just a kind of leopard, which people don’t realize. Yeah, that’s probably it.’

  We all thought about that for a minute. About being eaten by an escaped black panther, I mean. And nothing being left of us except for one leg. Or four legs, if you counted us all together. I suddenly regretted having brought up panthers. I knew that, as Leader, it was my job to cheer everyone up.

  ‘Look, let’s stop thinking about whatever it is that used to own the leg that Rudy’s eating, and whatever it is that ate the rest of it.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Jamie. And I suppose you could understand why.

  ‘I think we should have a funeral for Trixie,’ said Noah.

  ‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘We definitely ought to bury her. I mean, bury what’s left of her.’

  ‘You mean bury her leg?’ said Jennifer.

  ‘Yes, it’s what she would have wanted.’

  So we gathered around the leg, even Rudy, who was being quite well behaved, except for a small amount of bottom-licking. None of us wanted to look at the remains too closely. I tried to imagine the rest of Trixie still attached to it, and I looked at the imaginary parts and not the chewed and sicked-up bit.

  I found a stick and scraped a hole in the ground. Not a very deep hole, because it’s quite hard digging a hole with a stick. When the hole was finished, I used the stick to poke the leg into the hole. Then I used the stick to scrape the soil back over the leg.

&n
bsp; Sticks are brilliant. You can use them for all kinds of things – for example, throwing, poking, stabbing, sharpening, slashing, etc., etc.

  ‘Do you think we should say something?’ said Noah, once I’d stopped poking about with the stick. ‘I mean, some nice words about Trixie.’

  I nodded. Everyone bowed their heads and I began.

  ‘Oh Lord, Trixie was quite a good doggie, even if she used to chase us around the football pitch all the time and bite us whenever she could. Please look after her in heaven, and take her for walks. If you are busy, then one of the angels can take her. Maybe as a special treat you could let Trixie chase some of the bad people down in you-know-where as part of their punishment – for example, Hitler, Attila the Hun, and that horried one from Pop Idol who tells girls that they can’t sing and are too fat. And please forgive whoever it was that ate the rest of Trixie apart from this leg which we are burying now, because they probably didn’t mean any harm and it was just an accident. Amen.’

  ‘Amen,’ said everyone else.

  Except for Rude Word, who said, ‘Ashtray.’

  After that we all went home, forgetting about treasure.

  WHEN WE GOT home, Mum said she’d decided that Rude Word had to sleep in the garage where there was nothing for him to chew up except the lawnmower and some bricks. Dad had made a sort of bed for him out of the baby bath, which my little sister Ivy didn’t need any more because now she gets her stinky bum washed in the ordinary bath, like the rest of us.

  Rudy had to wait in the garage until we’d finished our tea. Mum said that the best thing for him to have for dinner was our left-overs. I was pleased because his dinner didn’t have to come out of my pocket money. You shouldn’t feel sorry for him because there were always plenty of leftovers in our house: Ivy didn’t eat anything green or orange, and I didn’t eat anything that’s sloppy or has sauce on it, or that’s been on the same plate as anything with sauce on it. Sauce includes gravy, but not vinegar, because I like that.