The Grunts In Trouble (4 page)

Lord Bigg slept in a huge bed that looked more like a giant wooden sledge. He sat up, let out a great big yawn, leaned against his pile of plump pillows, and yanked a bell-rope.

Down in the dark, dank kitchens, a little bell tinkled. It was the signal for Agnes to cook and take up his breakfast. She was asleep at
the kitchen table (an old packing crate), her head slumped over a copy of
Dull
magazine.
Dull
magazine was a weekly magazine full of such boring articles that it was supposed to make you feel better about your own life. Agnes had been reading a piece about a woman who spent thirty-five years inside a hollow tree counting ants. Suddenly, working for the horrible Lord Bigg inside nasty Bigg Manor hadn’t seemed quite so bad.

The annoying tinkling of the bell woke her up. She had been having a lovely dream about having a pet frog that burped up gold coins. When she realised that it had been just that – a lovely dream – she felt very upset, and came out in a whole new set of blotches. She dragged herself out of her chair and banged a frying pan down on to the top of the great big iron range stove to cook His Lordship his
morning eggies.

Lord Bigg had finished his eggies and was sharing a piece of toast with Monty the parrot when there was yet
more
noise. This time it was the distant sound of the “thunk-
phwut-thwacks
” made by the Grunts’ rock-throwing, and it got the parrot into another flap. He squawked and ruffled his feathers, then flew over to the window, where he tapped the glass with his beak.

“What is it, Monty?” asked Lord Bigg. He lifted the tray off his lap, threw back his bedclothes and stepped out on to a threadbare rug. “What’s all the fuss about?” He slipped a blue silk dressing gown over his red-
and-white
striped pyjamas, and strode across to the window. Monty flapped up on to his shoulder.

With money in such short supply, Lord Bigg had bought the dressing gown
second-hand
from an Internet auction site. (A rather dodgy Internet site, where not everything on it was being sold by people who actually had the right to sell them, if you see what I mean. As in: they probably-weren’t-theirs-
to-sell
.) What
hadn’t
been stated in the ad was that the dressing gown must have been worn by a boxer into the boxing ring. So when it arrived and Lord Biggs unwrapped it, he was surprised to find that it had writing on the back. The big black letters said:

No wonder the photo on the website had only shown the dressing gown from the
front
.

At first, Lord Bigg had been very angry. Then he decided that, because he only ever saw himself from the
front
, it didn’t really matter. What’s more, Barney “The Bruiser” Brown had been quite a GOOD boxer in his day, before he had retired and got himself a new job with a smart blue uniform.

Standing at the window, Lord Bigg pulled a small pair of mother-of-pearl-coated binoculars from a dressing-gown pocket and held them up to his eyes. He surveyed the scene. Through the trees he could just make out the entrance to the grounds. What he spied was the Grunts and Larry Smalls. What he thought was:
trouble
.

Chapter Four

Bees a-Buzzin

B
y the time Lord Bigg had tramped all the way out of the house and down the drive to the entrance gates, Mr and Mrs Grunt, Sunny and the donkeys were long gone.

All His Lordship found was Larry Smalls hanging from the top of one of the gates, and tennis ball-sized rocks dotted all over the ground.

“What in blazes are you doing up there, man?” demanded Lord Bigg.

“Squawk!” added Monty the parrot for good
measure.

“Bigg ain’t best!” shouted Larry Smalls, who was very proud of his slogan and couldn’t think what else to say anyway.

“Oh, it’s
you
, is it?” said Lord Bigg with a sigh.

“Of course I’m me,” said Larry Smalls.

“You’re the man who threw the cauliflowers at me at the village fête, aren’t you?” said Lord Bigg.

Larry Smalls nodded proudly. “And who tried to drown you at the swimming gala!” he added.

“And posted me that very realistic rubber tarantula!” spluttered Lord Bigg.

“And smeared full-fat yoghurt on the saddle of your bike!” said Larry Smalls.

“And tried to push me into that vat of marmalade on the factory outing!” said His
Lordship.

“And forced your motor car into a ditch that wet Wednesday!” Smalls nodded with glee.

“And locked me in that cupboard at the art gallery that dry Thursday!” fumed Lord Bigg.

“And—” began Larry Smalls, only to be interrupted this time.

“And I think I’ll go and call the police,” said Lord Bigg. He looked down at his feet. There on the ground in front of him was a coal-black, short, crumpled top hat. “Yours, I take it?” he said, looking up at Smalls.

“Mine!” agreed Smalls.

Lord Bigg picked the hat up, crumpled it some more, and somehow managed to squodge it into a large outside pocket of his dressing gown.

“You can’t do that!” Larry Smalls protested.

Lord Bigg chose to ignore him.

Monty the parrot, on the other hand, took immediate action. Up until now he’d been perching on Lord Bigg’s left shoulder. He flapped up into the air and sank his beak into Larry Smalls’ nose.

screeched Mr Smalls, then added a few very rude words, which I’m FAR too polite to repeat here and now. (Maybe later, when no one else is around, if you ask me nicely.)

“I want you off my land – I mean, off my
gate
– within the hour,” said Lord Bigg, “or I really will call the police. One hour.”

“But I’m stuck!” protested Larry Smalls. He clutched his bleeding, swollen nose in both hands.

“That’s not my problem,” said His Lordship. He turned and walked away. Monty the parrot swooped low and landed back on his shoulder. From the top of the gate, his belt looped over a railing spike, Mr Smalls read the back of Lord Bigg’s dressing gown with a puzzled frown.

Barney “The Bruiser” Brown?

Lord Bigg was Barney “The Bruiser” Brown?

Blimey.

Smalls hadn’t even known that Lord Bigg was a boxer, let alone a fairly well-known one, recently retired from the ring. That would
help explain why Bigg was covered in little crosses of sticky plasters. Boxing injuries!

Larry Smalls would never admit it, but he was impressed that Lord Bigg was Barney “The Bruiser” Brown. Only a
tiny
bit impressed, but impressed none the less.

A mile or so away, meanwhile, Mr Grunt was climbing up on to the roof of the moving caravan for a better view of the road ahead. He often sat up there and often fell off, which was usually Mrs Grunt’s fault, Sunny’s fault or Clip and Clop’s fault, but never HIS fault. (According to Mr Grunt, that is. Funny that.)

Today was no exception; as the caravan went over a small bump, Mr Grunt found himself sliding off the roof with a “Woooooaaaaah!”, which was swiftly followed by an “Ahhh! Ahh! Argh! Ouch!” as he landed in a roadside
gorse bush.

A gorse bush is a very prickly bush. It has a few pretty yellow flowers, but apart from that it’s just about all thorns. If he’d been a sack full of jelly, Mr Grunt would have sprung some serious leaks.

Sunny sighed and told Clip and Clop to stop. They were happy to, which surprised Sunny a little until he saw what they’d seen: an especially fine patch of roadside thistles. So while he did his best to help free Mr Grunt without getting too prickled himself, the two donkeys enjoyed a mid-morning snack.

Once freed, Mr Grunt felt a need to kick something solid. Sunny remembered the time Mr Grunt had kicked a statue in the middle of a town square. It wasn’t in the middle of a town square any more. It was now in pieces in the town’s rubbish dump. Not that Mr Grunt’s
foot hadn’t suffered too. For the following three days, Mrs Grunt’d had to give him a piggyback up and down stairs, and the rest of the time he’d shuffled around on his bottom like a toddler who couldn’t quite toddle (so wasn’t
really
a toddler yet, I suppose).

Today, however, Mr Grunt decided to kick an electricity pylon because, apart from a couple of spindly-looking trees, it was the nearest solid thing. Electricity pylons – metal towers supporting electric cables high above ground – can be dangerous things, as Mr Grunt was about to find out. He gave the pylon a mighty kick, and guess what happened …

Oh, go on. Guess.

Just for me.

Mr Grunt gave the pylon such a big kick that it vibrated, making the ground vibrate, causing a swarm of bees to leave their hive in
a nearby tree to find out what was going on.

Did you guess right? Of course you didn’t. (And if you
did
think “bees” you’re either one of those people who can see into the future, or you’ve read this before. And that’s not proper guessing, so it doesn’t count.)

So the bees swarmed out of their hive to find out what was going on and, because Mr Grunt was what was going on, they decided to take a closer look. They landed on his face, creating what looked like A GIANT BEARD OF LIVING BEES.

What Mr Grunt wanted to do was to SCREAM, but even Mr Grunt wasn’t stupid enough to do that because screaming would have meant having to open his mouth. And one of the last things he wanted was a mouthful of stingy bees. It was annoying enough that a few of the bees were thinking about exploring his nostrils. So he
imagined
himself screaming and simply went beetroot red instead.

In fact, his face went
so
red that it was enough to make Clip and Clop stop chewing their thistles and stare at him with a gleam of casual interest in their donkey eyes. Or perhaps it was the enormous buzzy beard he’d suddenly grown that attracted their attention.

Mrs Grunt, meanwhile, burst out laughing. You may have heard the phrase “to laugh like a
drain”, which has always confused me because drains don’t laugh. I can’t really describe
what
Mrs Grunt’s laugh sounded like but I can say that with her mouth that wide open it
smelled
like a drain.

“Shave that thing off, mister!” she said between the guffaws. “It makes you look stupid!”

Saying that Mr Grunt looked stupid is like saying that France is “a bit French”. For Mrs Grunt to have said that Mr Grunt looked stupid, then, must have meant that he looked really,
REALLY
stupid.

Sunny, meanwhile, was taking matters more seriously. He imagined that if a lot of the bees decided to sting Mr Grunt, this would be very bad – as well as very painful – for him. So how could he help?

Sunny ran back inside the caravan and
grabbed a big jar of honey off the breakfast table. The Grunts had discovered long ago that a smear of honey could make even the toughest squashed magpie even tastier, so they’d bought the biggest jar they could find. And bees like honey, don’t they? (Or is that bears?)

“Here, bee, bee,
bees
!” said Sunny, waving the open honey pot in front of Mr Grunt’s buzzing face, trying to attract the stripy insects’ attention. “Here, bees! Lovely honey, honey,
honey
!”

And this was the scene that met a certain young lady as she rounded the bend in the road: the strangest, most worrying-looking caravan she’d ever clapped eyes on; a cackling
yellow-and
-green-toothed woman; a bright-red man with an enormous beard of BUZZING BEES; and an extraordinary-looking boy, wearing
an extraordinary blue dress, leaping about with a big pot of honey.