Read The Boy Who Cried Fish Online

Authors: A. F. Harrold

The Boy Who Cried Fish (8 page)

BOOK: The Boy Who Cried Fish
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I just wanted to say that, you know, get it out there. So, now, if anyone copies Fizz’s stupid antics and is eaten by crabs, I can at least point to this bit and say, ‘I did warn them,’ and no one can pin your accidents on me. Let’s make this clear: your stupid acts are
your
stupid acts. (And mine are mine, but let’s not talk about those.)

 

‘Hey, Fizz,’ said Wystan. ‘Look!’

‘What?’ said Fizz, trying to keep his balance as he turned the torch on his bearded companion. His heart was beating so hard in his chest he could hardly hear Wystan over the noise of it.

His bearded friend was pointing his torch at the Aquarium wall just above his head.

‘Someone’s left a window open,’ he said. ‘Shall we climb in here?’

Fizz looked down at the great, weedy, damp rock he was standing on, and the long fall either side of it, and then up at the open window, thought for a very short moment, and said, ‘Yeah, okay.’

 

 

Wystan reached out and helped Fizz back up onto the path.

Without talking, Wystan interlocked his fingers and lowered his entwined hands down to about the height of his knees. Fizz put one of his feet in them and in the age-old tradition of the bunk-up, Wystan bunked him up.

Fizz’s hands got a grip on the window frame and he pulled himself in. Once on the window sill, he lowered his legs into the darkness behind him. To his relief he found a platform which took his weight.

He leant out the window and caught the rucksack Wystan threw up to him.

‘Do you need me to lower the rope?’ Fizz asked.

‘Nah, don’t bother about that,’ said Wystan. ‘Just stick your hands out.’

Wystan crouched and sprang like a boy trained in acrobatics and with several years of circus experience under his belt. He caught hold of Fizz’s arms and, with a painful yank, swung himself up over Fizz’s head and through the window so that he landed with a professional acrobat’s crash somewhere on the floor.

Well, at last, they were in, and I think we’ve all earned a cup of tea and a break. Well done everybody, take five minutes to relax.

Chapter Seven

In which some purple fish are seen and in which a conversation about pink sharks is had

Fizzlebert pointed the torch at his feet.

He was standing on a toilet seat lid.

‘Wystan?’ he called in a whisper, waving the torch around the room. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, nothing broken,’ said his bearded accomplice.

Fizz found him with the torch. His beard was spilling out around his chin like a comet’s black furry tail. In the torchlight it threw weird shadows on the wall.

‘Well, we’re in. Now we’ve got to try to find Fish. Where’s the door?’

‘Here, look.’

Wystan pointed and his finger touched it. It really was quite a small room they’d climbed into. You might say, it was the smallest room. But then again, you might just call it the loo, and that would be fine too.

Fizz opened the door a crack. The corridor outside was lit by widely-spaced, dimly glowing lights in the ceiling. The walls along either side were filled, to no one’s great surprise, by tanks of water.

The boys turned their torches off.

‘Look at this,’ Wystan said, looking into a nearby tank.

‘Shark?’ asked Fizz, nervously.

‘Nah, just little purple things. And they’re all still swimming about.’

Indeed they were, fishy little purple shapes, like pipe-cleaners with nozzle-like snouts and tiny frilly fins halfway down their backs. They swished about in the water, rushing between waving fronds of weeds as if they were chasing one another in a miniature unending game of tag.

‘What did you expect?’ asked Fizz, looking in the tank himself.

‘I thought they’d be asleep,’ said Wystan. ‘It’s getting late.’

‘Oh Wystan, Wystan, Wystan,’ Fizz said, shaking his head like Dr Surprise. ‘If you read the label here,’ (he pointed at the label by the side of the tank that he’d just read), ‘you’ll see that these fish are from Australia.’

‘So?’

‘What time it is in Australia?’

‘Same time as anywhere else?’

‘Australia’s on the other side of the world. So, instead of being half past eight at night, it’s actually half past eight in the morning there.’

‘Really?

‘And that means that
these
fish have probably just woken up. They’re chasing each other because they’ve just had their breakfast and are full of energy. For them, it’s just the beginning of another day.’

Wystan muttered something into his beard that Fizz couldn’t make out.

‘Dad’s aunt Sycamore moved to Australia years ago. She sends us letters every now and then and they’ve
always
got the wrong time written at the top. And the wrong day, too. But it’s only the wrong time for
us
; for her and everyone else in Australia, and these fish, it’s right.’

Wystan gave Fizz another of his looks over the top of his beard. This one meant something like, ‘I’m not sure I believe anything you’ve just said, but I’m not going to argue with you right now because that would just take up precious time that could be used searching for our missing sea lion.’ (Wystan had very expressive eyes.)

‘So,’ Fizz said, taking Wystan’s hint, ‘which way?’

The bearded boy pointed to the left, down the corridor, further into the Aquarium.

 

They tiptoed past tank after tank after tank of purple fish. Some were small like the pipe-cleaner fish they’d already seen, and some were huge fat things that hung in the middle of their tanks, floating like lumpy balloons, staring at the boys with ugly pudgy eyes. They opened and closed their mouths as if they kept remembering something important to say and then forgetting it before they said it.

 

 

To Fizz’s relief none of them looked remotely shark-like.

Every now and then they passed one of those empty tanks, looking lonely among all the slowly swimming sea-life on either side, with a pasted-on sign saying things like STOLEN FISH: REWARD OFFERED or HAVE YOU SEEN THIS FISH: MISSING SINCE SUNDAY NIGHT?

Hundreds of fishy eyes, small and large, black and yellow and red and orange, followed the boys as they walked. Occasionally the fish were extra interested and swam along in their tanks keeping pace with the boys until they swam head-first into the wall. Being fish of very little brain, they forgot Fizz and Wystan immediately and simply swam back the way they’d come, wondering where this headache had come from. (Had Unnecessary Sid, one of the more irritating clowns in the circus, been there, he would have made an awful ‘haddock’ joke, because ‘haddock’ sounds a bit like ‘headache’ and that’s his idea of fun. Luckily he wasn’t (he was at a different ‘plaice’), so we don’t have to listen to him ‘carp’ on.)

When they reached the end of the purple corridor, Fizz peered round the corner into another corridor of fish tanks.

This new corridor glimmered palely pink, like an underwater grotto a nine-year-old mermaid has been allowed to decorate all by herself. The sparse light from the ceiling reflected off the thousands of scales of the assembled pink fish swimming in their little glassy worlds lined along the walls.

‘At least there ain’t gonna be any sharks in here,’ Wystan whispered.

‘Why’s that?’ Fizz whispered back.

‘You’re not gonna find a pink shark, are you? Pink’s the most girly colour of all, and sharks ain’t
girly
fish, are they?’

‘Well,’ said Fizz, pondering the matter deeply, ‘I think
some
sharks must be girls.’

Fizz wished he’d read a book about sharks when he’d last been at the library. There were, he knew, some weird sharks out there. He couldn’t remember any pink sharks, though he’d seen a picture of a hammerhead shark, whose head is, as you probably know, shaped like a hammer. (They don’t often keep hammerhead sharks in aquariums because they’re always smashing the glass. Once they’ve broken out, they lie on the floor, flapping about with their great rough sandpapery tails and weird-shaped heads, until someone comes along and puts them in a new tank. It’s very annoying.)

‘Fizz,’ Wystan said, interrupting my almost entirely true anecdote about hammerhead sharks.

He pointed at a sign on the wall. It said TO THE ARENA.

The boys looked at each other and grinned. That was where they wanted to get. That was where they’d last seen Fish, during the afternoon’s show. They followed the sign’s pointing finger and hurried along the corridor. Everything was going to plan.

There were loads of pink fish swimming around on either side as they ran. If you want to skip back and read the description of the purple fish a few pages ago but change the word ‘purple’ to the word ‘pink’ then you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it looked like. I don’t want to upset any fish fans, any collectors of tropical beauties, or anyone with a pressed fish collection in their rainy-day drawer, but I really can’t think of anything else to say about them. They were pink, they swam, and they could breathe underwater. That’s it. I challenge you to make an Aquarium more interesting than that. In fact I’ve an idea. Put your e-reader device down and go find yourself a bit of blank paper. Get yourself some pens or crayons or paint. Draw some fish. Draw lots of fish. Draw hundreds of the things. Make them all different and interesting. Not so easy is it? Okay, stop now. Stop. Come back over here, pick the machine up again and read on.

 

Whether you just did as I suggested or not, by now the boys had stopped running.

They’d heard the sound of footsteps heading towards them. Clumping footsteps, and the jangle of a chain or a key ring. And the sound of someone whistling. To be precise, someone whistling, ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’.

Fizz’s first thought was the same as Wystan’s first thought:
Admiral Spratt-Haddock
!

Their matching second thoughts were:
Run the other way!

Putting the plan in action straight away, they ran back the way they’d come, as quietly as they could but also as quickly, down the pink corridor. They darted down the first opening they saw into yet another corridor, this time filled with the shimmering green light that reflected off shimmering green fish. And there they skidded to a halt for a second time. They weren’t alone. Ten feet in front of them was a man.

In that moment Fizz’s heart couldn’t decide whether to freeze solid or jump out of his chest and run off by itself. Instead it fluttered like a bird behind his ribs. They were caught!

But no, he saw, it wasn’t quite so bad. They’d not been seen. His heart breathed a sigh of relief. They weren’t safe yet, but it could be worse.

The figure had its back to them. It was crouched in the middle of the corridor, dressed all in black, with a long coat that hung to the ground, and seemed to be manhandling something into an inside pocket. There was a puddle of water around its feet and a long pole with a net by its side.

Behind them the footsteps were still slowly heading in their direction (whoever it was hadn’t heard them running, or they’d be hurrying faster), and the whistling was growing louder.

The mysterious stranger in front of them suddenly looked over his shoulder. Fizz couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a black balaclava (which is a bit like a badly knitted woolly hat), but the two peering red eyes that burned out from the woollen blank blackness made him gulp in fear.

BOOK: The Boy Who Cried Fish
4.4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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