The Bare Bum Gang and the Holy Grail (7 page)

‘Where’s Noah?’

Noah. Drat. I looked back. And there he was, halfway between the wall and the dumper truck.

‘Looks like he’s stuck,’ said The Moan.

Noah was lying on the ground, waving at us. His face was crinkled up with pain and fear.

‘I’ll go back and check on him,’ I said. ‘You guys wait here.’

I ran back to Noah as fast as I could. There was a big patch of tangled-up barbed wire. Noah was caught in it like a fly in a spider’s web. It had snagged his jeans
and
torn a great rip in his T-shirt.

‘Don’t move,’ I said. ‘You’ll just make it worse and probably disembowel yourself.’

Disembowelling is one of the worst ways to go – worse, I reckon, than death by jellyfish, death by parachute-not-opening, or death by scorpions. What happens is that your bowels, which are all the pipes and tubes in your belly, slither out of you like giant worms. You then have roughly ten seconds to re-embowel yourself, which is when you push the pipes back in and sew up the hole, before you die.

Of course usually that’s impossible, because the thing that caused the disembowelling in the first place, say a Samurai warrior, a sabre-toothed tiger or great white shark, will still be attacking you, and might well have eaten your bowels in the meantime. Not the Samurai warrior, of course. Japanese people don’t eat bowels, but raw fish. They may eat raw fish bowels, but I’m not sure. I’ll check on the Internet.

But I didn’t mention any of the details of disembowelling to Noah, because then he’d panic and start thrashing around, which is exactly the right way to go about getting yourself disembowelled.

I had exactly what I needed to deal with this situation. I took out my multi-tool. As well as the knife, the scissors, the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves, the magnifying glass, the hammer, the pliers and the saw, it had some wire cutters.

‘I’m stuck fast,’ said Noah weakly. ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I replied as I got to work with the wire cutters. ‘I’ll have you free in a second.’

It was harder than I thought to cut through the thick wire, and I had to use both hands
and
squeeze with all my might.

But I did it.

First I snipped the wire tangling Noah’s legs, and then, more carefully, I cut through the wire caught up in his T-shirt. Each time it made a very satisfying
click
sound.

Click
.

Click
.

Click
.

I thought I’d have made a very good wire-cutting man in the trenches in the First World War, even though that was one of the worst wars ever, in terms of mud, rats, gangrene, death, etc., etc.

It took more than a second, but in the end Noah was free. I snapped my multi-tool together again and put it in my pack.

‘Thanks, Ludo,’ Noah said as we jogged back to join the others. ‘You could have left me there until Zoltan found me and savaged me all to bits, but you came back and saved me.’

‘Hey,’ I said proudly, ‘we’re the Bare Bum Gang and we never leave one of ours behind. Unless it is The Moan in one of his bad moods . . .’

Noah looked at me accusingly.

‘Only kidding,’ I said, and we both giggled.

Chapter Nine

LAND AND SEA OPERATIONS!

‘WHAT ARE YOU
two grinning about?’ The Moan asked as we reached the dumper truck.

‘Oh, nothing really,’ I said as Rude Word licked my face.

‘Right, next stage. We make for the entrance of the tower, over there.’ I pointed to the big glass doors at the bottom of the building. ‘And we have to be quick – the guard will be coming round the side any minute now. Everyone ready?’

Nods from the gang, and off we went
again
, running low to the ground. This time I made sure I was at the back so I could keep an eye on everyone.

That meant I was the last to see it.

The others were crouched in a line ahead of me, about ten metres from the safety of the tower.

‘What is it?’ I asked, but I didn’t need an answer.

We were at the edge of the biggest puddle in the world.

There’s probably a strict rule invented by scientists about when a puddle becomes a lake, and this one must have been pretty close. It looked brilliant for skimming stones, but this wasn’t the time for idle play. The water was thick and brown, and there was a rainbow pattern on it from spilled oil.

‘How deep do you think it is?’ asked Jenny.

‘Up to our necks, I reckon,’ I replied. ‘Maybe deeper.’

‘Can’t we just go round it?’ asked Jamie.

‘No, look – if we go round it the guard will be able to see us.’

I drew a picture in the mud with a stick, explaining the angles. It looked like this:

‘So what do we do then?’ asked The Moan. ‘Go home?’

‘Of course not. When you are confronted with a body of water too big to jump, you have three choices. You can build a raft to float over it, you can build a submarine to go under it, or you can build an aeroplane to fly above it. Well, they would all be quite cool – especially the submarine, you know,
Dive! Dive! Dive!
Switching to silent running, firing torpedoes, getting blasted with depth charges, so we have to release oil and bits of rubbish out of the tubes so our enemies think we’ve been destroyed – all that stuff.
Sadly
, we haven’t got quite enough time to build a decent submarine, raft or aeroplane. But there is a fourth way.’

‘Make your mind up,’ moaned The Moan. ‘Is it three or is it four?’

I ignored him.

‘We can build a bridge.’

I had another good look at the puddle, focusing all my powers on the problem. There was a sort of island about halfway across, made from an upturned wheelbarrow.

‘Right then, we need some planks,’ I said. ‘One to reach the island, another to go from the island to the far shore. Let’s get searching. Rendezvous back here in four minutes.’ And then I added quietly to Jamie, ‘“Rendezvous” means meet.’

I was sure we’d be successful. We were in a building site. If ever you need a plank or two, then a building site is the best place in the world to find them. Four minutes later we were back beside the giant puddle.

Jenny had found some sticks, which would
have
been handy if we’d been building a bonfire, but they were useless for bridge building.

Noah had some dandelions.

‘They’re to make the bridge look nice,’ he explained.

I found some wire that would be really useful for tying the bridge together.

The Moan came back empty-handed.

Only Jamie found a decent plank, just long enough to reach the wheelbarrow island. Evil plank thieves must have already raided this building site.

I scratched my head and did some more thinking, but this time it was Noah who had the good idea.

‘We could use the plank to get to the island, then pick it up and move it on to the other side.’

‘You mean we all have to stand on the island together?’ gulped Jennifer.

‘Standing together is exactly what the Bare Bum Gang is all about,’ I replied.

‘You’re crazy!’ said The Moan. ‘We’ll never all fit on the wheelbarrow. We’ll fall in and that’ll be the end of us. It’ll be like a tragedy on the news:
FIVE CHILDREN FOUND FLOATING FACE DOWN IN GIANT PUDDLE
.’

‘Not while I’m in charge,’ I said. ‘We can do this.’

I picked up the plank that Jamie had found and bridged the puddle as far as the wheelbarrow island.

Unfortunately, I got a deadly splinter from the plank as I let it drop. I made a small yelp, but didn’t cry even a bit, despite the fact that splinters are the most painful injuries you can get (except for disembowellings).

‘Let me have a look,’ said Noah.

Noah may have been best at rubbing dock leaves on your nettle stings or weeing on grass cuts, but he was also good with splinters. He held my hand and looked at the jagged splinter. It was a very nasty one, right under my fingernail.

‘Lucky I’ve got my medical kit,’ he said, and opened his bum bag. It was packed full of dock leaves, but he also had a thermometer he’d borrowed from his mum, and, as he now revealed, a pair of tweezers.

‘Be brave,’ he said soothingly.

And I
was
brave, not making a sound as he pulled out the splinter. It was at least two centimetres long. Well, maybe one centimetre, but that’s still big for a splinter. Actually, with splinters, it’s a bit like dog years. So, like, when a dog is four, he’s really twenty-eight, and, with a splinter, if it’s one centimetre, it’s really two. The real menace with a
splinter
isn’t actually the agony you feel, or even the gangrene that dissolves your flesh if germs sneak in. No, the real danger is if the splinter gets sucked into your vein. If that happens, then the splinter will either go straight to your heart, leading to instantaneous death, or get sucked to your brain, resulting in you becoming a mental case and setting fire to your pyjamas, shouting at people in the street, going to the toilet in your pants, etc., etc.

But none of that happened to me, which was a relief, as I don’t like going to the toilet anywhere except in a toilet, and certainly not in my trousers. After he got the splinter out, Noah put some special cream on it. He promised it wasn’t stinging cream, which turned out to be a small lie, because it did sting, but not very much. At the end he put a plaster around the injured finger.