Uncle Gobb and the Plot Plot Read online

  For Emma, Elsie and Emile

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 The Middle of the Night

  Chapter 2 The Something Else Thing

  Chapter 3 The Something Else Thing (Again.)

  Chapter 4 The Dread Shed

  Chapter 5 In a Car Park?

  Chapter 6 A Floor

  Chapter 7 English

  Chapter 8 The Very Big Amazing Thought

  Chapter 9 It Doesn’t Belong to Anyone!

  Chapter 10 Sha-Boom Flash, Sha-Boom Flash - Google!

  Chapter 11 A Whole Lot Worse

  Chapter 12 Hotting Up

  Chapter 13 Gasp! Pant!

  Chapter 14 This Is Not a Chapter

  Chapter 15 Wiry Little Creature with Long Fingers

  Chapter 16 Mud

  Chapter 17 Earwax

  Chapter 18 Now What? Or Not Now What?

  Chapter 19 Only If It’s Empty

  Chapter 20 Tents. Or Is It Tense?

  The Appendix To Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 Hopeless

  Chapter 22 The Big Day

  Appendix

  Profiles

  CHAPTER 1

  The Middle of the Night

  It was the middle of the night.

  If you have read what this chapter is called (‘The Middle of the Night’), you already know that it was the middle of the night. If you didn’t read what this chapter is called, you would have missed that it was called ‘The Middle of the Night’. No worries, because now you do know that it was the middle of the night.

  Malcolm was fast asleep.

  He was fast asleep. Then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t fast asleep. He was awake.

  And it was still the middle of the night. No one likes waking up in the middle of the night. Apart from owls.

  A NOTE ON OWLS:

  They wake up, fly about, catch mice, eat them, and then a few hours later, do a sicky thing where bits of the mice they’ve eaten come back up again.

  I’m not telling you this for any old reason.

  I’m telling you this because this is what Malcolm was lying awake thinking about. He was asking himself, WHY do owls sick up bits of mice?

  He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. And he remembered the words ‘owl pellets’ from a book he read called ‘Great Owl Pellets of the World’. Imagine, he thought, if instead of that time when I was on TV and the man asked me what was the capital of Italy and I said, ‘Ponky’... what if, instead of that, the man had asked me, ‘What is the proper name for owl sick?’ I could have said, ‘Owl pellets!’ and I would have been right.

  Ah, if only.

  Just then the dog barked.

  Wow, thought Malcolm, still lying on his back in bed, that IS strange. I told him not to bark. I remember quite clearly saying to him, ‘Don’t bark tonight.’ And there he is barking.

  Then Malcolm heard a dragging sound. Something was being dragged.

  The dog barked again, and following that, someone or something said, ‘Shh!’

  Then came the dragging sound again.

  All that interesting stuff about owl pellets just flew out of Malcolm’s mind.

  (You probably don’t want to think about owl pellets flying out of someone’s mind, so if you don’t want to, just stop thinking about it. If Malcolm had been thinking about weasels, they would have flown out of his mind too.)

  Weasel 1: Hello again.

  Weasel 2: Looks like we’re back again, with our weasel words.

  Weasel 1: No, we don’t say weasel words, remember?

  Weasel 2: Don’t we?

  Weasel 1: No, we’re weasels. It’s humans who say weasel words, not weasels. We don’t actually talk. Except when people like Neal Layton do drawings of us talking.

  Weasel 2: Oh yes, I remember: we don’t talk. By the way, what are weasel words?

  Weasel 1: That was explained in another Uncle Gobb book. If you really want to know, just look it up in there.

  Weasel 2: All right, all right. No need to get ratty about it.

  Weasel 1: I’m not being ratty. I’m not a rat. I’m a weasel.

  Weasel 2: Me too. I’m a weasel.

  Weasel 1: I know you’re a weasel. You don’t need to tell me you’re a weasel.

  Then came the dragging sound again.

  Malcolm waited for the dog to bark.

  The dog didn’t bark that time.

  Aha, thought Malcolm, me telling the dog not to bark has worked. The dog did after all listen carefully, has remembered what I said and is now doing what I told him to do. Which is not bark.

  Then came the dragging sound again.

  Malcolm decided that the dragging sound was scary.

  Malcolm remembered a horror story he read once about a giant cucumber. It wasn’t a living cucumber. It was a dead cucumber that had become a ghost. And in the middle of the night, this ghost-cucumber couldn’t sleep.

  So it walked about the house dragging something. I think it was chains, Malcolm thought … but then why would a ghost-cucumber be dragging chains? If there was a ghost-cucumber dragging something, surely it would be something that cucumbers hang out with, like a bit of lettuce?

  The sound that Malcolm could hear downstairs was not the sound of a ghost-cucumber dragging a bit of lettuce. It sounded more like a chair being dragged – yes – his chair, the little, funny wood-and-metal chair he had had ever since he was little and funny.

  When Malcolm was three, he remembered, he went to a place every day called ‘Start’, but then it closed, and when it closed, they said people could take a chair home instead. Malcolm found his chair, took it home and he had kept it ever since. The dog liked sleeping on it. Or under it.

  Here is an important message

  If you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to hear things, sometimes you say things to yourself that are not totally sensible. That’s because you might be half asleep.

  End of important message

  The next thing that Malcolm thought was most definitely not a sensible thing to think. What he said to himself was, Oh, my chair is going out for a walk.

  Then there was a crash, and a voice said,

  Malcolm knew immediately who said, It was Uncle Gobb. Uncle Gobb was the only person he knew who said when something bad happened.

  But why was Uncle Gobb dragging his chair around in the middle of the night?

  Malcolm got up, went downstairs, switched on the light and looked at Uncle Gobb.

  Uncle Gobb was definitely dragging the chair.

  Aha! said Malcolm to himself.

  Uncle Gobb’s up to something again. He’s already tried to get rid of me and my bestest friend Crackersnacker by shoving us in the DREAD SHED. He’s already tried to get rid of me and my bestest friend Crackersnacker in America ... but we DEFEATED HIM!!!! I know I can defeat him again, so this time I’ll find out what his plan is straight away. No hanging about.

  Malcolm took a step forward, towards Uncle Gobb, and said, ‘Uncle Gobb, why are you moving my chair in the middle of the night?’

  Uncle Gobb – who at the very exact moment that Malcolm switched on the light was moving Malcolm’s chair in the middle of the night – said, ‘I’m not moving your chair in the middle of the night.’

  Malcolm’s teacher, Mr Keenly, once said something really interesting about things like this. He said that when someone says something that everyone knows is not true, it’s because there’s something else altogether that they don’t want you to know. So, Malcolm thought this through: If Mr Keenly is right, then Uncle Gobb isn’t really trying to tell me that he’s not moving my chair in the middle of the night; he knows he’s moving my chair in the middle of the night; he knows I know he’s moving my chair in th
e middle of the night; there’s something else altogether that he doesn’t want me to know about. This is what my greatest, bestest most brilliantest friend, Crackersnacker, would call ‘The Something Else Thing’.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Something Else Thing

  While we’re waiting for Malcolm to f ind out what The Something Else Thing could be, we could spend a few moments together trying to figure it out for ourselves.

  Here’s a list of possibles:

  1.Uncle Gobb is going to move Malcolm’s chair next to the cupboard, stand on it, and get some baked beans out of the cupboard.

  2.Uncle Gobb has a secret collection of chairs that he doesn’t want anyone to know about. In the middle of the night, he woke up and started to think about Malcolm’s chair downstairs. He got up and started to drag it away to put in Gobb’s Secret Chair Museum.

  3.Uncle Gobb is going to take it to China. Quite often Uncle Gobb says, ‘I’ve been to China.’ Now he’s going to go back to China and he’s going to take the chair.

  4.Uncle Gobb thinks that Malcolm – and his great friend Crackersnacker – are not doing enough homework and not learning anywhere near enough for the tests. This makes him really, really, really angry. Uncle Gobb is moving the chair to put in front of the door, so that when Malcolm gets up in the morning, he won’t be able to get out, and Uncle Gobb can start the day with some really good questions, like: ‘What is William Shakespeare’s name?’

  5.It’s not a very long list, is it? And yet it is the end of the list.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Something Else Thing (Again.)

  Malcolm looked very hard at Uncle Gobb as he was moving his chair. The dog looked very hard at Uncle Gobb as he was moving Malcolm’s chair.

  Malcolm, who you’ll remember is not going to put up with any more of Uncle Gobb’s secret plans to get rid of him and Crackersnacker, again said, ‘Uncle Gobb, why are you moving my chair?’

  Uncle Gobb raised his hand in the air, breathed in and said, ‘Ah, yes, that’s one of your questions, isn’t it, Malcolm? Yes, it is. It’s a question. It’s the kind of question that’s very like a question. In fact, it’s not only like a question, it is a question. Well done, Malcolm.’

  ‘Uncle Gobb,’ Malcolm said sternly, ‘why are you moving my chair?’

  Just then, Mum walked in. Her eyes were almost shut.

  Uncle Gobb looked as if Mum walking in was something he really didn’t want to happen.

  ‘Derek,’ said Mum, ‘why are you moving Malcolm’s chair in the middle of the night?’

  Uncle Gobb looked to and fro, started to go red, suddenly found that he had got a wedgie, tried to get the wedgie out, scratched his head, cleared his throat, cleared his throat again and said, ‘I need it, Tessa.’

  Malcolm thought of Uncle Gobb trying to sit down, and squeezing into his little chair.

  ‘But your bum will get stuck,’ Malcolm said.

  Mum took a different line. Malcolm knew that Mum tried to look after Uncle Gobb. She was Uncle Gobb’s sister after all. Malcolm knew that no matter how horrible Uncle Gobb was, he needed Mum to look after him and Mum was kind enough to do so.

  ‘Well, Derek,’ she said as kindly as she could, ‘Malcolm likes that chair. The dog likes that chair. You can’t just take it.’

  Uncle Gobb went on standing in the middle of the room clearing his throat and removing wedgies, or imaginary wedgies.

  INTERESTING NOTE

  In the book ‘Imagine the Imaginary’, under the letter ‘I’, it has ‘Imaginary Wedgies: an imaginary wedgie is the wedgie you think you have when you are feeling awkward. No matter how hard you try to get rid of the imaginary wedgie, it goes on being an imaginary wedgie. Famous people who have had imaginary wedgies include Jeremiah Worksheet, who invented the worksheet ‘Henry VIII; Reggie Wedgie’.

  ‘Well, Derek,’ Mum said, ‘the best thing for all of us, I think, is if you head off back to bed, hmmm?’

  Just then, a voice outside said, in an ‘I’m-trying-to-be-quiet’ voice, ‘Ready when you are, Derek.’

  Mum looked at Uncle Gobb, then went over to the back door, opened it, and looked out.

  A man with a very thick neck and wearing gloves was standing there. Straight away, he stepped forward and made a move to take Malcolm’s little chair. Uncle Gobb shook his head very hard, as if to say, ‘Don’t do it!’

  The man stopped in his tracks. He could see that something wasn’t right. Mum – whose eyes were now a little bit more open – looked from one to the other. Malcolm looked past the man to something outside.

  Outside was the DREAD SHED!!!!!

  If you know what the DREAD SHED is, you can miss out the next chapter. If you don’t know what the DREAD SHED is, you too can miss out the next chapter, but then you won’t know what the DREAD SHED is. You might think it’s a kind of ghost-cucumber. Or a shed with dreadlocks. Or a shed that was supposed to be the Red Shed but someone called it the DREAD SHED by mistake. It’s up to you.

  CHAPTER 4

  The DREAD SHED

  There is only one DREAD SHED in the world and it belongs to Uncle Gobb. Once, he put Malcolm and his great friend Crackersnacker in the DREAD SHED, but they found the way out of the DREAD SHED by walking through the door.

  Oh, yes we did! thought Malcolm.

  You wouldn’t want to go in the DREAD SHED. It’s very dark inside. It has cobwebs and smells of wee.

  Once, long ago, there used to be many DREAD SHEDS – all created in order to lock away poor, bad children – but people thought the DREAD SHEDS weren’t nice, so they got rid of them. Except for little Derek Gobb, who saved one DREAD SHED. And the DREAD SHED standing outside the back door at this very moment was the one that little Derek Gobb had saved, long before he became Uncle Gobb, long before his marriage with Tammy went and they broke up, and long before he came to stay with Mum and Malcolm.

  Dog: And me. He came to stay with me too.

  Weasel 2: And us.

  Weasel 1: We don’t actually live with Malcolm, Mum, Uncle Gobb and the dog. We live in this book.

  Weasel 2: Isn’t that the same thing as living with Malcolm, Mum, Uncle Gobb and the dog?

  Weasel 1: No.

  The DREAD SHED has little wheels on the bottom, so it can be moved about. The wheels don’t make it nice. They’re just wheely sort of wheels that do wheely things.

  Malcolm and Crackersnacker made up a song about the wheels. They said that it wasn’t meant to be a cool song sung by people who wear sunglasses indoors. They said that they made it up for very small children to clap along to.

  ‘We’re the little wheels doing really wheely things,

  We wheel along wheelily singing wheely sings,

  We’re really wheely wheels going round and

  round and round

  but people in shops calls us “castors”.

  Boooooooo!’

  CHAPTER 5

  In a Car Park?

  (But still in the room in the middle of the night with Uncle Gobb and his imaginary wedgies and the man with the thick neck wearing gloves. (It’s not his neck that’s wearing gloves. It’s the man with the thick neck. He’s wearing gloves on his hands.))

  Mum stopped being nice.

  She didn’t stop being a nice person. She stopped being nice to Uncle Gobb. She could see that something very, very dodgy was going on. Malcolm could see it too.

  ‘Who are you?’ Mum asked the man with gloves on.

  ‘Roald Dahl,’ said the man.

  Malcolm stared.

  ‘You wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’ Malcolm blurted out.

  ‘No, not me,’ said the man. ‘That was the other Roald Dahl. I’m Roald Dahl Removals.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve seen you before. You’re one of Derek’s little friends from that he belongs to.’

  (At moments like this, Malcolm felt so proud of Mum he wanted to squeeze her.)

  ‘Am I?’ said the man.

  ‘Who
are you?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Fred Shed,’ he said.

  ‘Well, Fred,’ said Mum, ‘for starters, I don’t believe you’re Fred Shed, but it’s too late for me to care either way. Could you just step away from Malcolm’s chair? And you, Derek, step away too. The chair is not going anywhere.’

  Malcolm said, ‘The chair is not going anywhere.’

  He knew that Mum had already said, ‘The chair is not going anywhere,’ but it sounded like such a great thing to say, he just felt he had to say it himself.

  Mum went on. ‘I can see that you’ve moved your little dready sheddy thing up to the door. You, Fred, on your way out, can move it back to where it was before. Meanwhile, we can all go to bed.’

  ‘So we’re not putting the chair in the school, then?’ Fred Shed said.

  Uncle Gobb’s eyes were making huge Don’t Say Anything signs at Fred Shed.

  The dog looked at the Don’t Say Anything sign and thought about biting Fred Shed’s leg.

  Mum put her hands on her hips.

  Malcolm looked at his lovely little chair that reminded him of happy times at his ‘Start’ nursery when they ate orange segments and sang ‘Wind the Bobbin Up’.

  ‘Were you going to take my chair to a school somewhere?’ Malcolm asked.

  ‘No, no,’ said Fred Shed smilingly, and pointed at the DREAD SHED. ‘This is the school.’

  Malcolm looked at everyone round the room. He suddenly saw what was going on here. This was Uncle Gobb’s big, new plan. He couldn’t wait to tell Crackersnacker about it in the morning. Unbelievable. And Crackersnacker would say … What would he say? ... He would say, ‘The DREAD SHED is going to be an Uncle Gobb school???? The Uncle Gobb School!!! This is huge, Ponkyboy! This is massive!’