The Grunts In a Jam Page 2

  Dr Tubb studied Mr Grunt’s nose quickly and efficiently.

  “You’re going to need stitches,” he announced. “And a very big injection.”

  “A what?” demanded Mr Grunt.

  “An injection,” said Dr Tubb.

  “Did you say a very big injection?” asked Mr Grunt.

  “A very big one,” nodded Dr Tubb.

  The doctor got Sunny and Mimi to act as his assistants. Alphonso Tubb’s nurse had Fridays off, so – it being a Friday – they had to stand in for her. Dr Tubbs soon realised that, despite his wonky-eared, sticky-up-haired, strangely dressed appearance, Sunny was a smart kid. And so was the sweet-smelling pink girl with the birds above her head. Once hands had been washed, it was down to business.

  When it was all over, Mr Grunt’s face had been cleaned and disinfected with something that left his skin looking yellow-tinged, highlighting the squirrel’s claw marks. His nose was held together with six neat stitches, and there was a thick, padded dressing with sticking plaster over the top, holding it in place. Mr Grunt was also left with a sore bottom from that very large injection.

  Dr Tubb peeled off his disposable latex gloves, opened the lid of the pedal bin with his foot on the pedal and dropped them in. He indicated Sunny and Mimi to do the same.

  “Nice work, Sunny,” he said. “You too, Mimi … though I’m not sure they’d let you work in a hospital with those two flitting around.” He pointed at Frizzle and Twist.

  “Thanks, Dr Tubb,” said Sunny and Mimi together.

  “Now, I’m not going to hold my breath—” began the doctor.

  “Then why tell us?” demanded Mr Grunt.

  “I beg your pardon, Mr Grunt?” said the doctor.

  “Why waste time telling us you’re not going to do something? If we all stood around all day telling each other what we’re not going to do, we’d never get ANYTHING done.”

  “Well—”

  “Hey, doc! I’m not going to the moon.”

  “If you’d let me finish—”

  “I’m not going to have a baby… Not even a baby grand piano!”

  “What I was going—”

  “Hey, doc! I’m not going to make shoes out of banana skins and slide from here to the North Pole!”

  “– to say was that I—”

  “Hey, doc! I’m not going to pay for this treatment because I don’t have any money!”

  “Precisely,” said Dr Tubb.

  “Huh?” said Mr Grunt.

  “What I was going to say was…” He paused and cleared his throat. Mr Grunt remained silent. “I’m not going to hold my breath, but are you able to pay? I expect the answer to be no, but there’s no harm in asking.”

  “Oh,” said Mr Grunt. He looked quite endearing with his “nose bandage”, if not exactly cute.

  Just then, Sunny caught sight of something moving out of the corner of his eye. He looked over to the window just in time to see the top of someone’s head duck out of view.

  Who’s that, he wondered. A gardener? Someone hoping to catch a glimpse of one of Dr Tubb’s celebrity patients? It certainly hadn’t been Mrs Grunt. He’d recognise the top of her head anywhere. Curious…

  “Dr Tubb is being nice, Mr Grunt,” said Mimi, bringing Sunny’s attention back into the room. “He just fixed up your nose and face and gave you an injection without asking whether we could afford it first.”

  Sunny turned to the doctor. “I’m sorry, Dr Tubb. But it was an emergency.”

  “No matter,” said the doctor, eager to get back to his poem. The poems were, you see, extremely important to Dr Tubb. He saw them as the greatest weapon in his armoury to win the heart and hand of Miss Prendergast. And he need “weapons” because he wasn’t the only man out there who wanted to make Jenny Prendergast his wife, remember. (There was his arch-rival, Jenny’s childhood sweetheart Norris Bootle.) But Norris couldn’t write poetry the way he could!

  Back in the driveway, with Dr Alphonso Tubb closing the front door behind them, Sunny looked across to the window of the surgery where he’d caught sight of the person looking in. He was fairly sure that it’d been a man. There was no sign of anyone now, though there were plenty of shrubs and trees he could be hiding in. The three of them made their way back towards the caravan.

  Mrs Grunt, meanwhile, hadn’t wasted her time. She’d let Clip and Clop out of their trailer to have a feed. (They were busy enjoying the flowers in one of Dr Tubb’s beautifully tended flowerbeds.) And she’d also cut seven or eight neat strips of turf out of the lawn. She was busy rolling up the last of these and putting it into the back of the caravan, when her husband arrived.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Mr Grunt.

  “Out of where?” demanded Mrs Grunt.

  “I said here, didn’t I?” said Mr Grunt.

  “Where’s here?” demanded Mrs Grunt.

  “Here,” said Mr Grunt, pointing at the ground beneath his feet.

  “But I’m here,” said Mrs Grunt, pointing at her patch of ground a metre or so away.

  “Then let’s get out of both of heres,” said a triumphant Mr Grunt.

  “Smart thinking, husband,” said Mrs Grunt with a nod.

  Sunny was busy herding Clip and Clop back into their trailer, the donkeys still happily chewing on ripped-up flowers. This was no way to repay Alphonso Tubb’s act of kindness. But what could he do?

  Soon the Grunts were trundling back down the brick driveway.

  Back at his desk, Dr Tubb was yet to discover the damage done to one of the lawns of Green Lawns Villa and to a flowerbed. He was thinking of postcard poetry, and of the lovely Jenny Prendergast. He reread what he’d written on his latest postcard:

  Botheration! What with the unexpected interruption, he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d intended to write next. He sighed, tore the card in half and tossed it into the wastepaper basket.

  He’d have to start all over again.

  Just as the Grunts reached the top of the brick driveway, they were met by a woman driving a gleaming red motorbike and sidecar coming the other way. She screeched to a halt and lifted her goggles off her eyes. Instead of a normal crash helmet, she was wearing what looked like a Viking helmet with giant horns on it (not that Vikings really had horns on their helmets). In the sidecar was a boy wearing a similarly horned crash helmet.

  “Holy fremolly!” said the woman, eyeing up the oncoming elephant and the caravan. “Those ears are big!”

  The boy, who was probably about Sunny’s age, gave a snort a bit like a friendly pig might. “Zoweeee!” he said.

  “Sorry,” said Sunny, who was sitting astride Fingers, Mimi just behind him. “Can you drive round us?”

  “Not a problem,” said the woman.

  Sunny leaned forward and peered at her more closely from his high vantage point. “Er, excuse me,” he said, “but aren’t you Lara Farp, the famous opera singer?”

  “She most certainly is!” said the boy in the sidecar proudly.

  The woman smiled. “Indeed I am. And this,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of her travelling companion, “is Ace.”

  Ace snorted again. The noise really reminded Mimi of Lady “La-La” Bigg’s pig, Poppet.

  “I’m Sunny,” said Sunny.

  “And I’m Mimi,” said Mimi.

  “Circus performers?” asked Lara Farp.

  Sunny shook his head. He was used being thought of as part of a circus. “No,” he said. “And we’re not one of the stars treated by Dr Tubb. Not like you, Miss Farp. He was just kind enough to help us out in an accident.”

  “He’s a lovely man,” said Lara Farp. “Was that wet drip of a woman with him?”

  “His nurse?” asked Sunny hesitantly. “No. Fridays are her day off, apparently.”

  “No, no, not her,” said the opera singer, pulling the goggles back over her eyes. “I meant the doctor’s love-of-his-life, Jenny Prendergast.”

  Ace snorted from the sidecar at the mention of her
name.

  Sunny shook his head. “No, Dr Tubb was alone.”

  “A lucky escape for you then!” said Lara Farp, who was clearly not a Jenny Prendergast fan. “Oh, well, must get on! Bye now!” She raised a leather-gauntleted hand in farewell, revved the bike’s engine, then drove round them. Fingers raised his trunk and waved. Ace waved back from the sidecar, a big grin on his face.

  “What’s the hold-up?” shouted Mrs Grunt from inside the caravan.

  “Lara Farp!” shouted Mimi.

  “WHAT?”

  “Lara Farp!” shouted Sunny.

  “There’s no need to be rude to your mother!” shouted Mr Grunt angrily, and Sunny heard him kick something.

  “OUCH!”

  That something was Mrs Grunt.

  Sometimes the Grunts took the caravan out on the open road to go in search of food. Most of their diet was roadkill – those poor squashed animals you often see run over by vehicles. (Mrs Grunt was, for example, very proud of her hedgehog goulash with crows’ feet crispies.) They did, however, often send Sunny out on his own, on Mr Grunt’s rusty old bike or just with Fingers.

  Sometimes they took the caravan out simply because that was the life they were used to and they were feeling a bit cooped up in the grounds of Bigg Manor, which they shared with Lady “La-La” Bigg, her pig, Poppet, and a bunch of ex-servants, including Mimi (the ex-boot boy, remember?).

  Sometimes the Grunts took the caravan out because they had places to go, and this journey was one such trip. They were on their way to collect Mrs Grunt’s mother. Mrs Grunt called her mother “Ma” but her name was Mrs Lunge, rhyming with “sponge”.

  Mr Grunt wasn’t too pleased about the trip because he really didn’t like Mrs Lunge. He also suspected that she was one of those people who could be deaf when it suited them (in other words, not really deaf at all). And Mrs Lunge, in his opinion, was so depressingly gloomy about everyone and everything. In fact, Mr Grunt’s nickname for Mrs Grunt’s mother was Gloom Bag, said in an especially gloomy voice.

  There had only been four people at Mr and Mrs Grunt’s wedding, not counting Mr and Mrs Grunt themselves, or the man who married them. Everyone had a great time (even the policeman, to whom Mr Grunt was handcuffed at the time). Everyone, that is, except for Ma Lunge.

  “This church smells,” she sighed. (They didn’t get married in a church, it was a town hall.)

  “It’s cold in here.” (She was hugging someone else’s ice sculpture.)

  “Everyone’s mumbling.” (No one was mumbling. She had suet in her ears.)

  “Some idiot’s blocking my view.” (She was sitting behind a statue of the mayor.)

  “This wedding cake is all leathery.” (It wasn’t a wedding cake, it was a handbag.)

  “Your new husband has a face like a hippo’s bottom.” (She had a point there.)

  Mrs Lunge also had a thing about not liking people taller than her. She took it as a personal insult and, being only 4ft 7in tall – that’s about 1.397 metres – that meant that she didn’t like most adults.

  She also felt gloomy about the corns on her feet. “I never have enough!” she wailed.

  She bemoaned the number of languages she could speak. “If only I couldn’t speak any…”

  She was depressed about her eyesight. “If it wasn’t so good, I wouldn’t have to see ugly people so clearly.”

  All in all, she felt that life was like one big card game and she’d been dealt a poor hand. Or it was an “everyone-gets-a-free-doughnut” party, and she’d been given the only one without any jam in it.

  The one thing in Ma Lunge’s life that regularly made her the slightest bit happy was her yappy little dog, Squat.

  Squat was yapping now as, two hours after leaving the doctor’s, Sunny pulled up the caravan alongside the tiny row of cottages where Mrs Lunge’s house was to be found.

  She lived in No 3, Railway Cottages. The windows were so grimy they were hard to see through, and there was an impressive layer of dead insects on the windowsills, inside and out.

  Yap! Yap! Yap! went Squat.

  Fingers looked at the little dog with his intelligent elephant’s eyes.

  Yap! Yap! Yap! went Squat, jumping up at him now.

  Fingers patted her with his trunk. Squat stopped yapping.

  Although they didn’t meet that often, they were the best of friends.

  Ma Lunge shuffled out of No 3 in a pair of flip-flops so grimy that it was impossible to tell what their original colour might have been. Her toenails, however, were painted the brightest orange Sunny could remember having seen anywhere. Even on an orange.

  “Oh,” she sighed on seeing Sunny and the caravan. “You’re here.”

  “Hello, Grandma!” said Sunny, trying to sound far more enthusiastic than he felt.

  “Hello, Mrs Lunge,” said Mimi.

  Ma was eyeing Fingers. “I suppose that great grey hulk has been upsetting my poor little dog,” she sighed.

  “I think they’re as friendly as ever,” said Sunny.

  “And what happened to the donkeys that used to pull this thing?” demanded Mrs Lunge. “They’re dog food now, I suppose?”

  “They’re in their trailer at the back, as always,” said Mr Grunt. He jerked his head in the direction of Clip and Clop.

  “Where’s Bunny?” asked Mrs Lunge. “Did she bother to come?”

  “Of course Mum came,” said Sunny, Bunny being Ma Lunge’s name for her daughter, Mrs Grunt (who spent much of her life wearing bunny slippers).

  “Mum!” Sunny called. “We’re here and so’s Grandma!”

  Mrs Grunt opened the door of the caravan and stomped down the steps. She looked so BIG next to her tiny mother, standing in front of the tiny cottage. It was hard for Sunny to imagine them both living there, along with Mrs Grunt’s dad before he’d been killed by a unicorn.

  What do you mean, “there are no such things as unicorns”? Do you think I’m as stupid as I look? Of course there are no such things as living, breathing unicorns. The one that killed Mrs Grunt’s dad was stuffed. Well, it was a stuffed horse. Some Victorian taxidermist – which is what professional stuffers of animals are called – had added a narwhal’s tusk to the front of its head to make it look like a unicorn, the sneaky old thing. Anyway, that’s what had killed Mr Lunge years and years ago. It was being wheeled on a trolley down the steep ramp at the back of a delivery truck when … when… Let’s just say that it was a pointy, messy, tragic business.

  “Hello, Ma,” said Mrs Grunt. She leaned forward and kissed her tiny mother on top of her head. “We brought you some lawn.”

  “Hello, Bunny,” said Mrs Lunge. “What would I want with lawn?”

  “Well, we don’t want it,” said Mrs Grunt.

  Mrs Lunge sighed.

  The mention of lawns – well, the turf stolen from Green Lawns Villa – made Sunny find himself thinking of the person at the window again. The man had already been ducking from view as Sunny’d turned to look. If only he’d got a look at his face and not just a quick glimpse of the top part of his head.

  What was he up to? he wondered.

  When Sunny had mentioned the man to Mimi earlier, she’d thought it was most likely he was a fan hoping for an autograph from a star, or a journalist or photographer hoping for a news story or a photo.

  “And instead he got Dad with a squirrel bite on his nose!” said Sunny.

  “And an elephant pulling a caravan!” Mimi laughed.

  Speaking of the caravan, of all the new arrivals at No 3, Railway Cottages, Mrs Lunge was most pleased to see Clip and Clop. Despite what she’d said about dog food, she loved those donkeys and went over to their trailer and fussed over them.

  “What happened to you?” she asked Mr Grunt as she passed him. She reached up – a long, long way for her – and jabbed his bandaged nose with a bony finger.

  “OUCH!” said Mr Grunt. “A good-for-nothing squirrel,” he said.

  “A good-for-stuffing what?” said Mrs Lunge, patting Cl
ip – or was it Clop? – on the muzzle.

  “I didn’t say anything about stuffing!” said Mr Grunt. “I said, ‘good-for-nothing’. A good-for-nothing squirrel.”

  Mrs Lunge turned and GLARED at him. “What did you just call me?” she demanded.

  Mr Grunt sighed. “I’ll be inside if anyone wants me,” he announced, clambering back into the caravan.

  Squat was now jumping up and barking at Frizzle and Twist, who were treating the whole thing as a game. They were swooping up and down, tantalisingly just out of the little dog’s reach.

  Sunny handed Mrs Lunge a carrot to feed to the donkeys. She took it, snapping it in two and giving each donkey a piece. They chewed it thoughtfully and appreciatively.

  “Staying long, Bunny?” she asked Mrs Grunt.

  “You know we’re just here for the night, Ma––” Mrs Grunt began.

  “Then why come?” demanded Ma Lunge. “You’re not here to steal my rare plate collection, are you? I knew it! You ARE, aren’t you?”

  In truth, Mrs Lunge only owned two – very ordinary – plates but she loved them. She had even named them. The chipped blue one was called Blue Plate, and the unchipped (but slightly cracked) red one she called Red Plate. Mrs Grunt’s mother scrabbled up the wooden steps to the caravan to get nearer to her daughter’s height, then GLARED at her.

  Mrs Grunt sighed. The only person she found more annoying than her beloved Mr Grunt was her mother. “No, Ma. We’re not after your plates. We’re here to take you to the country fair nice and early in the morning, remember?”

  “Course I remember,” said Ma Lunge, who’d completely forgotten. “What do you take me for?”

  “An idiot!” shouted Mr Grunt from inside the caravan.

  The walls did little to muffle the sound of his guffaws but Mrs Grunt’s tiny mother seemed not to hear a thing. “This year I’m going to beat that Edna Tuppenny fair and square!” she said.