Free The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off by Anthony McGowan Page A

you should. There
is
a test. You don’t know anything.’
    â€˜OK then, I’ll take your stupid test. What do I do?’
    I did some hard thinking, expecting a bright idea to pop into my brain. But nothing popped, so I decided to play for more time, which is something even famous geniuses need to do occasionally.
    â€˜First we have to go to the den.’
    We were at the park. The park has some broken swings, a broken roundabout, a broken seesaw and some grass, which would probably be broken as well, if you could break grass. Next to the park there is a football pitch. It has some proper goals but, like everything else, they are broken, because someone stole the crossbar from each one. What the thief wanted with twocrossbars is a bit of a mystery. Maybe they needed some replacements because someone stole
their
crossbars.
    Anyway Noah was there with us – I mean, me and Jennifer – but not Jamie or The Moan.
    â€˜Go and get the rest of the Gang,’ I said to Noah. ‘Meet us at the den.’

Chapter Two
THE DEN
    The den was in the tiny bit of a wood that’s left between the new estate and the old estate. We live in the new estate and most of our enemies live in the old estate.
    All the way there Jennifer kept nagging at me to tell her what the test was. And when I didn’t tell her, she started to guess.
    â€˜Do I have to walk in bare feet over broken bottles?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Do I have to eat worms?’
    Good idea that, but I didn’t want to doit after she’d said it, because that would be copying.
    â€˜Er, no.’
    â€˜Do I have to set fire to the school?’
    â€˜Don’t be stupid. Your mum would tell the police and the whole gang would be put in jail.’
    â€˜Do I have to eat mud?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Do I have to eat your bogies?’
    â€˜No. It doesn’t involve eating
anything
.’
    Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. It cut out an awful lot of tests, such as eating leaves, eating pepper, eating a raw sausage, etc., etc.
    â€˜Does it involve spiders?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Does it involve any creepy crawlies?’
    â€˜No, not really.’
    She leaped on that, like a lion attacking a zebra.
    â€˜What do you mean “not really”? Do you mean it does
a bit
involve creepy crawlies? Or don’t you even know?’
    She could be quite logical sometimes, which you don’t really expect from girls, or at least from girls with volcanoes coming out of the tops of their heads.
    â€˜I’m not answering any more questions until we reach HQ.’
    HQ stands for Head Quarters, which is another way of saying our den. We’d built about six dens in the woods, because the kids from the old estate kept smashing them up or burning them or doing wees in them so they smelled.

    Our latest den was quite well disguised with grass on its roof, and it was half dug into the side of a little hilly thing, and there was a weeping willow tree draped over it. The grass roof was over a sort of extension made of old planks sticking out from the side of the hill. I sometimes used to wish that our enemies were looking for us from a helicopter gunship, because from a helicopter gunship it would be impossible to see us.
    The door was a plastic sack that once contained cement powder, and it usually managed to sprinkle a bit of the grey stuff on your head when you pushed through on the way in.
    â€˜OK, we’re here now,’ announced Jennifer, as if she was already in the Gang and the den belonged to her.
    â€˜Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but it’s
my
job to say when we’re here.’
    Jennifer looked at me like I was mad for a while. Her looking-at-me-as-if-I-was-mad look was a lot like her normal grumpy look, except her eyes were wider, and her mouth made the shape of a chicken’s bottom.
    I think it might have been the chicken’s bottom that gave me the idea, although the idea itself