Wigglesbottom Primary: The Shark in the Pool - preview

THERE’SLOADS MOREMAYHEM IN

MEGAN

MILES

IRFAN

EVIE

LAUREN

HANA

JAYDEN

MISS RILEY

WELCOME TO

SUNITA

THEO

JOEL

BOBBY

ANNE-MARIE

GAVIN

ROZ

MR HARRISSUSIE

First published in 2015 by Nosy Crow Ltd The Crow’s Nest, 10a Lant Street

London SE1 1QR

www.nosycrow.com

ISBN: 978 0 85763 481 8

Nosy Crow and associated logos are trademarks and/or registeredtrademarks of Nosy Crow Ltd

Text copyright © Pamela Butchart 2015Cover and inside illustrations © Becka Moor, 2015

The right of Pamela Butchart and Becka Moor to be identifiedas the author and illustrator respectively has been asserted.

All rights reserved

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, hired out or circulated in anyform of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. No

part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievalsystem, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission

of Nosy Crow Ltd.

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Printed by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

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CONTENTS

FOR LUCAS AND ABBY

P. B.

FOR ROBERTB. M.

1

2

3

Last week during our swimming lesson Joel Jack started splashing and screaming so much that Mr Hobart (that’s our swimming teacher) had to throw in the EMERGENCY RING and pull him to the side.

4

Once Joel Jack got out the pool he started rubbing his leg and shouting,

“I’VE BEEN BITTEN!THERE’S A SHARKIN THE POOL!!”

5

As soon as he said that EVERYONE started screaming and trying to get out of the pool and Mr Hobart had to blow his whistle REALLY LOUDLY to get us to stop.

6

Then Mr Hobart said, “Settle down! There are NO sharks in this pool. Now get back into your groups and follow the POOL RULES!”

7

So everyone settled down, except for Joel Jack, who was lying at the side of the pool with a towel over him.

8

When it was time for our Free Swim, we all swam over to where Joel was, and Sunita Ram said, “Joel. What do you think happened?”

Joel said that he didn’t THINK anything. And that he KNEW what had happened. And that he had been the victim of a SHARK ATTACK!

9

So we asked if we could see his leg, and Joel said, “OK. But prepare yourself. It’s not pretty.”

And then he took a deep breath and pulled the towel off his leg. And that’s when we all saw that Joel Jack DIDN’T have a bite mark and that his leg was just a bit red.

10

Once we got back to class, Sunita Ram told everyone at our table that Joel Jack HADN’T been bitten and that he was just being

DRAMATIC.And that there weren’t even any teeth

marks.

11

But Joel Jack sits at the table RIGHT behind us so he heard EVERYTHING. And that’s when he came over and pulled up his trouser leg and said, “Well, what do you call THAT?”

We all saw that the red mark looked a bit bigger than it had before, and also that there were lots of little dots inside it now.

12

Joel started pointing to all the little marks and counting them out loud. And that’s when Irfan Baxter said that he thought the teeth marks looked too small to have been made by a shark, and that maybe Joel had been bitten by

PIRANHAS!

Then Irfan told us all about

PIRANHAS

and about how they are little fish with TEETH that bite people. And then he looked REALLY CLOSELY at Joel’s leg, and said, “Yep. As I thought. Piranha bites.”

The next week NOBODY would get into the pool because of the PIRANHAS. We all just stood at the side in our costumes.

Except for Susie Keys who was in the Deputy Head’s office with Miss Riley because she’d given Miss Riley a note that said she was ALLERGIC to water, and also to piranhas, and said that her mum had written it.

But that was a LIE because everyone had seen her writing it herself in the changing rooms.

16

We all told Mr Hobart about the piranhas, but he didn’t believe us. Even when Joel Jack showed him his leg, which was still all red, and Irfan showed him a picture of a brown piranha with a red tummy.

17

Mr Hobart said that it looked like Joel Jack had a rash, not a bite, and sent him to the nurse. Then Mr Hobart told us all to

WATCHCLOSELY

while he got the Big Net out and dragged it through the water, all the way from the Deep End to the Shallow End.

But even when Mr Hobart showed us that the net was empty, not even ONE

person would go in the pool, in case the piranhas were hiding in the

vents or sleeping at the bottom.

18

That’s when Mr Hobart got so annoyed with us that he dived into the pool with his shorts and t-shirt on and swam underwater for AGES checking the Deep End, and all the corners, and the vents.

When he got out he said, “All clear! Now PLEASE get in!”

19

But we were still a bit unsure and I was worried because Mr Hobart hadn’t been wearing goggles to look under the water, so I didn’t think he would have been able to see properly.

20

But then Miss Riley came in with Susie Keys and she said, “If you don’t all stop being silly RIGHT NOW, afternoon break will be CANCELLED!”

So everyone jumped in.

The swimming lesson didn’t go very well because everyone was scared to swim too much in case we woke up the sleeping piranhas. And every time someone’s leg accidently touched someone else’s leg under the water people started screaming, so it was hard to concentrate on our Front Crawls.

Eventually Mr Hobart said there was no point trying to do the lesson any more, and that we all needed to learn to RELAX in the pool again. So he threw in all the fun stuff, like the floats and the tubes and the sinking weights.

After about a minute, EVERYONE had forgotten all about the piranhas and we were having the

BEST TIMEEVER.

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But when it was my turn to swim underwater and collect The Treasure, I thought I saw something brown floating near the Deep End. And then all of a sudden the floating thing got closer and

CLOSERand even though I didn’t have my goggles on I saw that it had a bit of red on its tummy and I BURST out of the water as fast as I could and screamed,

“PIRANHAAAAAAAAAA!”

26

Once Mr Hobart had finished telling us off for screaming and starting up all the “Piranha Nonsense” again, he showed us the Big Net and told us all to look inside.

27

I thought it might be a dead piranha. But it wasn’t. It was a brown sticky-plaster with a bit of blood on it. Then Jayden King said, “Hey, that’s mine! It must’ve fallen off in the pool.”

And I realised that I HADN’T seen a piranha, and that I’d just seen Jayden King’s knee plaster. But when

we were walking back to class, Joel Jack came out of the nurse’s room, and he ran up to me and Sunita and said, “Guess what?”

28

And we said, “What?”And that’s when he told us that the nurse

had said Joel didn’t have a bite on his leg and that it was just a nettle sting from playing Jungle Warriors in the grassy bit at break. And that the pool water must have made it hurt more and stopped it healing up properly. But then Joel stepped closer and looked around to make sure no one was spying on us. And then he said, “But I don’t believe her, because it really stings!”

And then Joel Jack’s eyes went WIDE and he said, “Can I tell you a secret?”

And we said yes.And he said, “It’s not a shark or a piranha

in the pool. It’s a JELLYFISH!”