The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off Read online

Then I sort of trailed off, because something even weirder was happening to Jennifer. Weirder, I mean, than the changing-colour thing she was doing. She was beginning to shake. At first I thought this was part of the crying, which meant it was going to be a massive sobbing fit, and I felt like a really bad person for causing so much misery.

  But then I realized that she wasn’t crying at all.

  She was laughing.

  To begin with she laughed so hard she couldn’t speak, but then she calmed down a bit, so she could get it out.

  ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! To be in your gang you have to show your bare bum! You’re the Bare Bum Gang, that’s who you are. The Bare Bum Gang. And nobody knows. Well, they’ll all know now, because I’m going to tell them! Bare Bum Gang, Bare Bum Gang, Bare Bum Gang.’

  And with that she turned herself round yet again, and crawled out through the door.

  But that wasn’t quite the end of it. Before we’d even had time to take it all in, we heard a muffled banging sound, and then the extension part of the den fell in, and we saw Jennifer outside, still laughing, but not so hard that it had stopped her from kicking the living daylights out of our HQ.

  Chapter Four

  THE BAD NEWS SINKS IN

  ‘That was rubbish,’ said The Moan. ‘I can’t believe we let you be Gang Leader. If it was up to me you’d be Gang Toilet Cleaner. In fact I wouldn’t even let you do that because you’d be rubbish at it.’

  Luckily my best friend, Noah, came to the rescue.

  ‘That’s not true. He’d be a really good Gang Toilet Cleaner, if we had a toilet. It’s not Ludo’s fault that Jennifer wanted to be in the Gang. It’s your fault for having such an annoying sister.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ The Moan replied. ‘It’s not like you get to choose. No one ever said to me, “What would you like, a really cool older brother, who can teach you how to make a brilliant bow and arrow and lend you his pen knife, or a stupid sister, who’ll ruin your gang and kick your den in?”’

  ‘OK, everyone calm down,’ I said. I knew it was now that we needed a true leader, and it had to be me. It was my great chance to shine. ‘Let’s take a good look at the problem.’

  ‘We all know what the problem is,’ said Jamie. ‘The problem is that when we go to school on Monday, every single kid is going to know that we are in a gang called the Bare Bum Gang, and that you have to show your bare bum to be in it. They’re all going to laugh so much they’ll puke up their Turkey Twizzlers.’

  ‘We don’t have those any more,’ said Noah.

  ‘Well, their vegetable pasta bake then.’

  ‘But that’s only if Jennifer tells them,’ I said.

  ‘And how are we going to stop her?’ Noah asked reasonably.

  ‘Yeah,’ said The Moan, ‘she’s already told us she’s going to blab. And I don’t blame her. Why did you have to say all that bare bum stuff?’

  ‘I just thought she’d say no, and that would be it. But that’s all in the past now. I have an idea.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said The Moan. ‘Any more of your ideas and the Gang will be finished.’

  I ignored him. ‘I think there’s a way we can stop her from talking.’

  ‘How?’ asked Noah.

  ‘We let her into the Gang.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ said Jamie. ‘She’ll never join us, not now we’re the Bare Bum Gang. Who would? Only some loony who liked showing his bare bum.’

  ‘Or her bare bum,’ added Noah.

  ‘Don’t call us the Bare Bum Gang!’ I said sharply. I really didn’t want the name to take hold, even in our heads. ‘I think she’ll jump at the chance. It’s what she’s always wanted.’

  ‘No way!’ said Phillip, shaking his head. ‘If she’s in, I’m out. It’s bad enough having to see her at home. And anyway, what would she be? It was hard enough thinking up a decent job for me to do.’

  ‘I thought, perhaps, she could become Gang Doctor,’ I said quietly.

  There was a stunned silence. I sneaked a quick glance at Noah. He looked like he’d been stabbed in the back, which was true, sort of. But being a Great Leader means you have to make tough decisions.

  ‘B-b-but I’m Gang Doctor,’ he said, and I thought he might blub, which would have been embarrassing for all of us.

  ‘Look,’ I said, in a kind sort of way, ‘there are lots of lady doctors, but there aren’t any lady admirals or generals. We’ll think of a new job for you.’

  ‘I like being Doctor,’ said Noah, getting angry. No one had ever heard him shout before. ‘And you can’t have a girl as Gang Doctor. Everyone knows that girls can’t wee in a straight line. They wee all over the place. Jennifer would be useless at fixing grass cuts. We’d all die of gangrene before she managed to wee on the right spot.’

  ‘What’s gangrene?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘It’s when you get a grass cut, or even some other kind of cut, and first your finger turns green, and then your hand, and then your whole arm. Then, if they don’t amputate your arm, which means chopping it off, the rest of you turns green and you die in terrible pain.’

  There was a hushed silence as the awful reality of having a girl Gang Doctor sank in. This wasn’t going well.

  ‘But she could carry the dock leaves OK, that’s not so hard,’ I said. I was clutching at straws, or rather dock leaves.

  ‘That’s only half the job,’ said Noah, growing in confidence. ‘And you have to know where to find them, and even if you do find some, they quite often grow right next to nettles, so you have to be brave to pick them. If you ask me, it would make more sense to have Jennifer as Gang Leader than Gang Doctor.’

  The Moan moaned, and Jamie said: ‘Now you’ve gone too far. We don’t want her in at any price and that’s that.’

  So that was the decision. We’d just wait to see what happened on Monday. We weren’t little kids any more. We’d tough it out, we’d see it through.

  Chapter Five

  THE HORROR. THE HORROR

  ‘So, you’ve got a stomach ache and a headache?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you feel sick?’

  ‘Mmmmm.’

  ‘And you think you’ve got a temperature?’

  This time I was too ill to do anything except 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.

  ‘And your arm hurts?’

  ‘And my leg too.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Both of them.’

  I opened my eyes again and saw that Mum was smiling, which was bad news.

  ‘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.

  ‘Maybe it’ll be OK,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘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 appea
red, they all pointed at us, their fingers jabbing like daggers, and they started singing a stupid song. It went like this:

  ‘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 found them. 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 really hurt. I saw Jennifer out of the corner of my eye, and she had stopped leading the other kids in the song, and she wasn’t looking crazed any more. In fact she looked a bit sad, probably because she wanted to do all the teasing herself and didn’t like anyone else getting in on the act. She ran off, and the rest of the choir scattered, but Dockery was still sitting on my chest. Luckily, before they managed to pull my trousers down Miss Bridges appeared.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ she said in a strict voice.

  ‘Nothing, miss,’ said Dockery. ‘We’re just playing, aren’t we, Ludo?’

  ‘Yes,’ I mumbled. I didn’t have much of a choice. Then Dockery got off me.

  ‘See you later,’ he said as he and his gang walked off.

  ‘Are you OK?’ asked Miss Bridges.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, looking at my feet.

  ‘There’s nothing you want to tell me?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  I should have told her that Dockery was a big bully, but he’d have got me for it later.

  No one really bothered us for the rest of the break, except that every now and then one of Jennifer’s class would come up and say ‘Bare Bum Gang’ and then run off.

  Jennifer didn’t say anything. But at lunch break I saw her doing cartwheels. She could do one after the other, and the only thing that stopped her was reaching the wall at the end of the playground. Even though I thought that was quite cool, it still seemed like she was only doing cartwheels because she was so happy about getting her revenge on us.

  Chapter Six

  SMARTIES-TUBE FART BOMBS, ETC.

  We all met up in the den that evening after tea to talk things over. We had to fix up the extension bit first, but that didn’t take us long. The damage looked worse than it was. The Dockery Gang would have made a much better job of wrecking the den, not to mention the weeing-on-it part.

  The earth inside the den was always nice and dry, even when it was raining outside, and we also had an old dog blanket and some newspapers on the floor, so compared to most dens it was a palace. Noah had some fizzy fish and Phillip had some crisps. Mum had given me some raisins but I was too embarrassed to get them out. Raisins are OK if you’re on an expedition and there’s nothing else to eat for miles around, so you’d starve without them, but apart from that they aren’t much use. Noah shared out the fizzy fish, but he kept the red and black ones for himself, which we agreed was probably fair.

  ‘That could have been much worse,’ I said when we were all settled. I meant the day of teasing and being sat on by Dockery, not the destroyed extension.

  ‘Yeah,’ said The Moan, ‘we might have been squashed by a steamroller and then chopped up into bits and then flushed down the toilet. That might have been worse. A bit.’

  ‘No need to be sarcastic,’ said Noah, loyal as ever.

  ‘I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life about it,’ said Jamie. ‘All I’ll hear is “Bare Bum Gang, Bare Bum Gang” for ever.’

  I said, ‘Well, it was pretty embarrassing, but it should die down now, don’t you reckon, Phillip? She won’t go on for ever, will she, your sister?’

  ‘You don’t know my sister. Once, when I annoyed her, she threw all my Airfix models out of my bedroom window. I was watching the telly downstairs, and at first I didn’t realize what it was. Just saw these streaks out of the corner of my eye. Then I looked properly, just as my last Spitfire bit the dust.’

  We all quietly absorbed what The Moan had said. There were obviously no depths to which the evil Jennifer would not stoop. But then something happened that, for the time being, put all thoughts of the Jennifer problem out of our minds.

  The first thing we heard was a loud rattling noise, the second was a yelp and the third was a voice crying out, ‘Poooooooooooooooh!’

  The traps!

  I should explain about our traps. Because our dens kept getting discovered and smashed in or weed on, we invented some traps to catch anyone who came near. There were two sorts of trap. The first sort was a hole dug in the ground and then covered over with sticks and bits of other stuff to hide it. The Moan wanted to put broken glass in the bottom, or nails pointing up, or sharpened wooden stakes, but Noah said that was barbaric, which means bad, so we didn’t. Instead we put either nettles, dog poo or Smarties-tube fart bombs in them.

  You make a Smarties-tube fart bomb by farting into a Smarties tube, which takes quite a lot of skill. Then you quickly put the top back on the Smarties tube to keep it in. The idea of the Smarties-tube fart bombs is that the fart gas becomes really strong and horrible by being stored for a long time in the Smarties tube. Then, when one of our enemies steps on the trap, they burst open the Smarties tubes, and the fart gas, by now really, really poisonous, floats up and suffocates them, but not to death – just enough to make them sick, so they run away home.

  In case you are wondering what a Smarties tube is: well, back in the olden days, Smarties used to come in a special round tube, with a cool lid that you could pop off and on. When I was little, I used to eat quite a lot of Smarties, and I always saved the tubes, because I knew they’d come in handy one day, either for farting into or for keeping other sweets in, like Jelly Tots or wine gums. The new kind of Smarties tube has eight sides and a cardboard lid. They don’t really work very well for keeping farts in, because they aren’t airtight or, rather, fart-tight, as they have too many holes and the fart gas leaks out. I suppose you could use them in an emergency, but they wouldn’t be very potent. If you haven’t got a load of old, proper Smarties tubes, you could use Pringles tubes. Obviously, they take a lot more filling up, as each one can hold up to four big farts, eight medium-sized ones, or twelve tiny little tummy squeaks.

  Anyway, altogether there were six of these pit traps around the den – three nettles (because they were the easiest), two dog poo and one Smarties-tube fart bomb, because they were the hardest to make, and my supply of Sm
arties tubes was getting low.

  The other kind of trap was what is called a snare, which is a piece of string or wire made into a loop. When one of your enemies puts his foot in the loop, it tightens and they are trapped. Jamie wanted to tie the other end of the string or wire to some bricks high up in a tree, but yet again Noah said we couldn’t, because it was barbaric and you might bash someone’s brains out, and then you’d go to jail. Also, it would be hard to get the bricks up into the tree, because we were all rubbish at climbing trees, except Noah, who wouldn’t do it because of what he said about it being barbaric.

  So I had the brilliant idea of attaching the other end of the noose to a load of old tin cans that we took out of the recycling bin. That was a bit of an adventure in itself, because during the expedition The Moan fell into the bin and cut his hand on a sharp edge and, what was worse, got covered in manky old baked-bean juice. He didn’t need any stitches, but his mum had to put the biggest plaster in the whole packet on it – the giant oblong one.

  Once we had the cans we made holes in them, using a hammer and a nail, and then tied the snares to them, using about six cans for each snare, and then we hid them really carefully around the den.

  I knew at once that the rattling noise was the sound of someone stuck in a tin-can snare.

  The Gang all looked at me, waiting for a decision. Should we stay in the den to see what happened next? Or should we go out and face whatever was there?

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’d better find out what we’ve caught.’

  Chapter Seven

  THE CHALLENGE

  We crawled out through the cement-bag door and came face to face with our worst fears. Dockery was there with three of his gang. Dockery had got stuck in a tin-can snare and was shaking his leg about, trying to get it free, and that was rattling the cans like mad. His gigantic head and tiny face were glowing bright red. One of his gang, the one called Larkin, who was tall and skinny as a lamppost, had put his foot in one of the pit traps and was waving his hand in front of his face, which had gone a pale green colour, a bit like mint ice cream. That could have been a Smarties-tube fart-bomb trap or just the dog-poo trap, because they were both quite smelly.