Fizzlebert Stump and the Bearded Boy by A. F. Harrold Page B

little door opened at the back of the platform and Wystan slid out. With the boom and the gush of smoke all the attention of everyone in the Big Top was focussed on the flying figure which burst out the cannon’s mouth, and Wystan nipped through the darkness and in behind the curtains to where Fizz was stood.
    ‘You’d best duck,’ he whispered to his friend.
    Fizz felt Wystan’s beard tickling his ear as he spoke.
    The two boys ducked down just in time.
    Wh-i-i-i-i-zzz!
    The bearded boy who’d just been shot from the cannon hurtled through the narrow gap in the curtains, straight over their heads.
    He crash-landed a few yards away, all mangled and higgledy-piggledy. Fizz’s stomach leapt into his mouth as he watched the figure sliding along in the dirt and spinning round. He’d seen lots of people fall off things in his time, but acrobats always knew how to land safely and they didn’t do it like that.
    But then he thought a second, even more obvious thought, which was that Wystan, the bearded boy, the lad who had climbed into the cannon, was actually stood next to him, hand on his shoulder, with a big smile on his face.
    ‘See,’ Wystan said, laughing. ‘I told you there was a trick to it.’
    Fizz looked at him and looked at the boy on the ground and then looked back at him.
    ‘Huh?’ he said.
    ‘You’ll see. I’ve got to go now. Fizz,’ he added before he went back through the curtains into the circus ring, ‘sorry to hear about the lion.’
    Suddenly Fizz was on his own.
    Wystan was back in the ring, taking his helmet off and waving to the crowd.
    Fizzlebert wandered over to where the other Wystan was lying in the dirt.
    It was a dummy.
    Well, of course it was. Fizz kicked himself that he hadn’t thought of it earlier, that he hadn’t spotted it the night before. Letting a dummy take the flight in Wystan’s place was much more sensible. But Fizz still couldn’t imagine how they did the other tricks.
    And then something waved at him from inside his brain. It was something someone had said that he hadn’t paid attention to at the time. What was it?
    Um.
    Something about . . .
    No. It was gone. But it sniggled in Fizz’s head, just out of reach, going, ‘Look at me, listen to me, remember me!’
    You know how sometimes you want to say something and can’t quite get the right word out? It’s a word you know, and probably one you’ve said hundreds of times before, but it just sits there like a bubble of forgetfulness in your mouth, and you say, ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue.’ Well, that was exactly what Fizz was feeling, except it wasn’t on the tip of his tongue, because he didn’t want to say it out loud, just remember it, so instead he was thinking, ‘Oh, it’s on the tip of my brain,’ which is similar to the tip of your tongue, just about four inches further back.
    He was interrupted by Captain Fox-Dingle.
    ‘Fizzlebert. No teeth,’ said the Captain, who always kept things brief.
    It was hard to hear him over the applause that was coming from the other side of the curtain.
    ‘Sorry?’ Fizz asked him. ‘What did you just say?’
    ‘No teeth, Fizz. No teeth, no show. Charles. Gummy. Teeth?’ He pointed at his mouth. ‘Missing.’
    Fizz added up the words and made them into something like a sentence. His heart sank. Charles’s rubber teeth were missing, and if the lion didn’t have his set of rubber dentures, then they couldn’t do the act.
     

     
    For a split second Fizz thought they could use Charles’s other false teeth. But then he remembered how Charles tore open great hunks of meat with them and thought better of it.
    Fizz was gutted. (Though not as gutted as he might’ve been, had he attempted the trick with a suddenly sharp-toothed lion.) He’d just listened to his friend get the biggest round of applause he’d heard for ages for not-actually-being-shot from a cannon, and now he couldn’t get any sort of round of applause, because some false teeth had gone