The Boy Who Cried Fish (4 page)

‘I thought you might appreciate a change of scenery, boys. Take your minds off things. How do you fancy visiting the Aquarium?’

‘Aquarium?’ Fizz asked.

‘A big building full of fish,’ explained Dr Surprise.

‘I know that,’ Fizz replied. ‘I just meant “What Aquarium?”’

‘Oh, whichever one’s nearest,’ said Dr Surprise, reaching into his pocket for his pocket watch and glancing as if to check the time. At this point he noticed that his hand was empty.

‘Where’s your watch, Doctor?’ asked Wystan.

‘I keep forgetting,’ Dr Surprise replied, ‘it’s at the watch-mender’s in town, being mended. Flopples mistook it for a carrot last weekend, and, well . . .’

Fizz had been wondering why the Doctor’s act these last few days had involved lots of sparks, mind-reading and magic tricks, but none of his famous hypnotism. This explained it, since he always dangled his pocket watch when he put people into trances. Without it he was just a normal man with a top hat, monocle, dangerous rabbit, card tricks, unexpected fireworks and surprising bunches of flowers.

‘There’s an Aquarium I spotted just along the prom,’ Dr Surprise went on, putting the non-existent pocket watch back into his existent waistcoat pocket. ‘Won’t take us five minutes to walk there. It
could
be interesting. I’ve heard that they have a lesser green-footed coral octopus in there that can disguise itself so well that it completely vanishes. It changes colour and shape and the texture of its skin and all sorts, and, hey presto!, you simply can’t see it any more. Sounds like marvellous stuff. Or so someone said. I wouldn’t know anything about it.’

‘Yeah, okay,’ the boys said. ‘Why not?’

This would be a good time to tell you where the circus is. As you know, Fizz’s home is a travelling circus and this means every week or so they move from one place to another, parking up in a town park and setting up the Big Top to entertain the locals. So, where’s the circus today?

It’s by the seaside.

If you look into the sky you’ll see gulls circling. If you look closer you’ll see the gulls are seagulls. And they’re still circling.

The circus is set up in a park, one side of which faces the sea. There’s a row of trees, then the tarmac strip of a path and then a rather pebbly beach and then water. Lots of water, water as far as you can see. In the other direction the park opens out into the town, which is just like any other town, except with more fish and chip shops, seashell emporia and concrete sandcastles. (Since the beaches in these parts are singly shingly, a bright-eyed Mayor in the 1980s had half a dozen giant sandcastles built out of concrete around the town (in the parks, squares, shopping centres and so on). He claimed they reflected the cheery seaside nature of the town, without the impermanence, the mutability if you will, of a normal sandcastle (that is to say, the sea can’t sweep them away, because they’re great ugly things made out of concrete). He said they’d bring in tourists. Tourists disagreed.)

A more recent Mayor (the current one in fact) preferred to attract tourists with big posters advertising his ‘
Summer Season Festival of Fun!!!
’ The circus had been booked as the main entertainment and had been parked in the park for just over a week. They had one more night here before the festival ended and the tents got packed away and they trundled off to a new town.

Fizz had been busy with circus work and his lessons, and had hardly had time to stroll on the beach, let alone go exploring along the prom. But now he had nothing but time on his hands. A little exploring wouldn’t go amiss.

They walked along the path that led out of the park, the sea on one side and the town on the other. At the seaside any path or pavement that stretches between beach and buildings isn’t called a path or pavement. It’s a ‘prom’, or ‘promenade’ for long. The Victorians liked to walk up and down looking at the sea on one side and the urchins on the other (although sea urchins would be on the sea side, of course), and that’s (sort of) what ‘promenade’ means in French, which isn’t what the Victorians spoke (except the French ones), but is what they called it anyway. (That explanation got a little more complicated than I expected, but is still shorter and clearer than the explanation Dr Surprise gave Fizz and Wystan as they walked, and which happened while I just did all this describing and explaining. So be thankful for small mercies.)

A hundred yards out of the park, the scene on the left changed from a grey shingle beach to a grey shingle beach with an old fishing boat hauled up on it. There were seagulls sat in a row on its bulwarks (which is another way of saying they were sat on its gunnels, which are the bits of a ship’s side that stick up like a tiny wall around the deck’s edge). They squawked and cawed as the little party went by. (Not ‘party’ like a birthday party, of course, just ‘party’ like a small group made up of a mind reader and his two short friends, which would be a very disappointing birthday party, unless you only have one friend and enjoy mind readers, in which case it’s pretty much perfect.)

Ignoring my descriptive writing, Fizz and his friends continued towards the Aquarium, which they could see sat square at the other end of the prom. It was a large white-washed building, thick and squat and irregularly-shaped, like a jumble of building blocks. Its doors were wide open and over them large friendly letters spelt out the word ‘QUARIUM’, which would have looked better if the first ‘A’ of the word hadn’t fallen off when a particularly fat seagull had landed on it.

Fizz had never been in an aquarium before and he wondered what it would be like. The only fish he knew anything about were the sort that lay on plates, unmoving and dribbling vinegar. The sort that went well with potatoes (another thing he’d never seen in their natural environment, or even in a potatoarium (or greengrocers, as they’re more usually known)). What would fish be like alive and in action?

Well, only time would tell.

It took a minute to walk to the doors. It took less than a minute for Dr Surprise to buy three tickets, and then two minutes to untangle Wystan, who’d got his beard caught in the turnstile.

Then they were in.

And all around Fizz, filling every wall, were tank after tank of water, filled with a hundred different examples of very dull fish.

Looking into one tank he could see big grey fish that swam to the right, turned around and swam back to the left, and in another there were small grey fish that did the same, only the other way round. There were pebbles that sat at the bottom of the tanks looking only slightly less action-packed than the fish. One tank had a miniature statue of an old-fashioned diver leaning at a jaunty angle in it, but even that wasn’t enough to keep Fizz’s attention.

Though the fish were incredibly dull, he couldn’t help but think of what Fish might’ve thought of the place. The silly sea lion would’ve loved it. Of course, it would have been dangerous to let him loose in there. Fizz could imagine the broken glass and the spilling water and the guzzled fish . . .

It would at least have been more interesting than this.

He sighed loudly. Wystan joined in.

‘Well, I expect the
really
exciting stuff is further on,’ said Dr Surprise, peering into an empty tank that almost certainly didn’t contain an octopus in disguise. (It contained a lot of air and a sign on the front saying UNDER RENOVATION, and a sign under that saying UNDER ‘UNDER RENOVATION’.)

Next to it was another empty tank.

‘That’s odd,’ Wystan said, pointing at it.

Although it was filled with water and there were weeds in it moving slowly in the current from a little pump, there were no fish in there, just a sign pasted on the glass, which read: THESE FISH HAVE BEEN STOLEN. BY THIEVES. WE APOLOGISE FOR THE DISAPPOINTMENT. Then there was a phone number for anyone with any information about the theft to ring.

‘Who’d steal a fish?’ Fizz asked.

‘Well, Fish would,’ Wystan said.

‘Yeah, but he can’t work door handles and he wouldn’t have stopped at just the one fish, would he?’

They turned around to show the sign to the Doctor, but he’d already wandered off. There was only one way he could’ve gone, so the boys trotted along after him.

Turning a corner Fizz saw Dr Surprise peering into tanks in a corridor filled with blue fish. Through the doorway at the end he caught a glimpse of a room that flashed with yellow light, which he reckoned was a yellow fish room. So, the aquarium was colour-coded. Fizz had worried it was just going to be grey fish all the way through.

The blue fish were slightly more interesting than the grey ones. A few of them had weird huge mouths with spindly teeth, some had fins frail as lace doilies, and some were such a bright blue it hurt your eyes to look at, which made Wystan and Fizz look at them even more.

They stumbled past a couple more tanks with ‘Stolen Fish’ signs on them and wobbled dizzily into the yellow room, and from there followed the Doctor into a room of green fish.

‘Oh!’ said Dr Surprise.

‘What is it?’ asked Fizz, wondering if something interesting had happened.

The Doctor was staring intently into an empty tank. Like the other tanks it was filled with water and a few gently waving fronds of seaweed. But apart from that, as far as Fizz could see, it was devoid of contents. Oddly, it had no sticker stuck on the glass.

‘It’s just another empty tank,’ Wystan said, tapping the glass with his knuckle.

‘Ah, Mr Barboozul,’ Dr Surprise said, ‘there you are wrong.
This
is the wonderful lesser green-footed coral octopus. Look at the way she hides. Absolutely beautiful. So clever. So perfect! So exquisite! How much I admire her talents.’

The boys squinted and peered and looked really hard, but saw nothing.

‘There’s nothing in there, Doctor,’ Fizz said. ‘You’re pulling our legs.’

‘This is a fine octopus, Fizzlebert, and you’re very lucky to have seen it.’

‘You mean “to have
not
seen
it”,’ Wystan grumbled as he turned away from the glass.

(There’s a theory that says every zoo has at least one cage or area filled with trees and bushes and
no animals
, and that next to this area they all have a sign with the name of a really interesting animal on; say, a tiger. Crowds of people spend hours looking into the empty cage saying things like, ‘Oh, I think he’s up the back there,’ and ‘Do you see, just in that shadow, under the big tree?’ or ‘They must be off sleeping somewhere.’ And even though no one sees the tiger they’re never annoyed by the empty cage with the interesting label, because humans have a deeply held belief that wild animals
should
be hard to spot, and so the empty cage experience in some way feels more
worthwhile
than the enclosure where the polar bear lies in full sight, in the open, sulking on a concrete beach next to a pond of stagnant water.

In fact, there’s a second theory that says a zoo
could
be constructed entirely of empty enclosures, empty cages and interesting labels, and that this would be a deeply satisfying experience for the visitors, who would enjoy the challenge of spotting the rare and elusive animals, and much more fun for the animals, who wouldn’t have to live in cages any more.

As far as I know, such a zoo hasn’t yet been built, or if it has, no one has noticed.)