They went as carefully as they could, the only light coming from the now vanished sun (which obviously didn’t give them much light at all), and from the pale glow which shone from some windows high above them.
The path grew wetter and more slippery in the dark.
The concrete on their right seemed rougher, harder and colder. It spiked their hands with tiny sharp edges, but they had to touch it to make sure they weren’t straying. They didn’t want to slip and fall. It was a long drop to the beach, and the idea of crashing onto those hundreds of hard pebbles wasn’t a happy one.
The spray from a big wave surrounded them like mist. The noise was deafening.
‘Stop, stop, stop, stop,’ whispered Fizz hurriedly.
Wystan bumped into his back.
Fizz wobbled, but didn’t fall, gripping onto the rough concrete with one hand.
He felt in front of him with his foot. He had been right to stop. The path stopped too.
‘Torch,’ he said.
Wystan scrabbled around in his rucksack and handed the torch to Fizz.
In the circle of white light they saw where the path stopped. Just under Fizz’s toes.
Shining the torch downwards, they could see the beach was further below them than they’d imagined. Ahead of them on their right the grey wall of the aquarium continued, rising up high above them like a castle wall. Some way in front, maybe twenty metres, maybe a bit more, the building got shorter, the wall lower.
‘There,’ said Fizz pointing into the distance. ‘That’s where we need to go, the wall comes right down. That’s our way in.’
Wystan squinted. At that distance the beam of light from the torch was lost in the general murk of the night, but Fizz was right, the wall was definitely getting lower. That must be the way to the pool.
‘The path runs out,’ he muttered through his beard. ‘How we gonna get there?’
Fizz shone the light around his feet again. He pointed the torch just beyond the end of the path. There were big rocks piled up along the bottom of the wall. The tops of them were level with the path.
‘Along there,’ Fizz said. ‘It’ll be easy.’
‘Easy?’
‘Well, easier than clinging to the wall or learning to fly.’
Wystan couldn’t argue with that. So he didn’t.
Fizz lived in a circus. The circus is a place full of special skills and admirable bravery. He hadn’t spent his whole life putting his head in a lion’s mouth every night. Sometimes he had had to help out with other acts too. He’d had a go at all sorts of things over the years.
He could juggle badly, he could ride a horse badly, he could make half- (but only half-) decent clown custard. He’d even done a bit of tightrope walking, though not on the high wire strung forty feet above the sawdust with no safety net. He’d learnt on the low wire, the one that wobbled a foot off the ground over an old mattress, that the acrobats used for practice.
He reckoned walking across the tops of those big boulders, piled up against the seawall of the Aquarium, would be a bit like that. Not so narrow of course, and with less sway underfoot and without anything to soften the fall, but still, a little bit like walking the tightrope. A wet, lumpy, rock-hard tightrope.
If only, he thought, he had been any good at tightrope-walking. It had been another one of those things he’d done badly.
Why didn’t the way into the Aquarium involve pouring custard into someone’s trousers? He could do that. He could do that pretty well. He knew just the right way to tip the bucket, so it flowed smoothly, didn’t just clump out in one great splurge, but took its time and luxuriated its way slowly down the trouser legs. He knew just where to pour it in so that both legs got filled evenly (there’s nothing worse than one custardy leg). He even had a good idea of just how to run away after you’d poured it: ideally at exactly the moment before the one whose trousers are full of custard notices.
But, try as he might, he couldn’t think how custard pouring could be of any use in this situation. Tricky tiptoe tightrope-like walking across the great dark wet sea boulders it was.
Fizz waited a few moments, listening to the constant repetitive surge and crash of the waves somewhere below him. The roar of them no longer reminded him of Charles, but of tigers and sharks (even though he knew they (sharks, I mean) don’t roar), and his mind’s eyes filled in the darkness with pictures of hungry beasts swimming round the foot of the rocks. Oh, thank you, mind’s eye, he thought sarcastically.
Gathering his courage up in one super-sized bundle, he sat down on the edge of the path and lowered himself towards the first of the huge rocks. He touched it with his toe, gingerly (which considering the colour of his hair (red) was the way he touched most things), and then pushed himself upright.
He was standing on the stone. It curved under his feet and, although this may have been his imagination, it felt cold through the soles of his shoes.
Beneath him the vast dark sea crashed up the beach and round the rocks. It seemed even louder now. A mist of spray whooshed up at him, and then the crunching shuckling sound roared to itself as the waves dragged the shingle backwards, back towards the deep water.
Nevertheless, Fizz stood firm. He stood strong. He stood brave. He was coming to find his friend, he had goodness on his side, how could he fail?
He waved the torch in front of him, trying to work out his next move, how to get to the next rock, how to pick his way, boulder by boulder, along to the Aquarium’s arena and their only way in.
The top of the next rock looked miles away. He gathered himself up to make the jump . . .
Now, I feel I must interject here, just briefly. Normally, as you know, I sit quiet in the corner over there (imagine me pointing into a corner), typing the words out, telling Fizz’s story as best I can and keeping all my opinions to myself. You know I don’t like to get involved or get in the way of the story; that’s not my job. My job is just to share Fizzlebert’s adventures with you as straightforwardly as I can. I don’t meddle. I don’t fiddle. I don’t make stuff up. I don’t tell you what I think or ramble on about biscuits and suchlike; I simply recount what happened. Just the facts, ma’am. That’s all.
However, I can’t keep quiet any more.
I must speak up.
I have to say this.
If I don’t, then I won’t be able to sleep at night, worrying what might happen.
Here goes.
What Fizz and Wystan are doing is utterly stupid. It’s crazy. It’s ridiculous. But more than that, it’s dangerous.
Climbing over giant sea rocks is bad enough under normal circumstances. They’re damp, they’re covered in slime, they’re hard and slippery. You could fall and break your leg, your arm, your neck even. You could drown in a poorly placed rockpool with a faceful of angry sea anemones. You will almost certainly be attacked by crabs.
It’s dangerous even when you’ve got people nearby looking out for you. At least they can ring for the coastguard and the air ambulance when you slip. But nobody knows where Fizz and Wystan are, they’re on a secret mission. If they fall, they’ll be stuck, alone, damp, and nipped by crabs. Possibly nipped to death.
Not only that, but what if they fell and got swept out to sea by the surging incoming tide with its treacherous undertows and ensnaring weeds? There are still crabs under the water, you know.
I can only ask, ‘What on earth is he thinking?’
Add to all that the fact that they’re doing this mountaineering nonsense in the dark, and this really is not a Good Thing.
It’s an adventure, for sure. And this book wouldn’t be very interesting if there wasn’t some sort of adventure in it. But it’s a stupid adventure.
I’m not saying Fizz is stupid, because he’s not. He’s a good kid and his heart’s in the right place. He’s doing this all to save his best friend, Fish, and that’s a Good Thing, it shows he’s listening to the commands of his heart, and that’s important. But what I am saying is that sometimes the heart disagrees w
ith the head, and at those times it’s important to remember that your head is the more sensible of the two, being the one that has a brain in it. Your heart is just a squishy pump that moves blood around your body, and it only works if you keep the blood on the inside. So, please, please, please: listen to your head.
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 could
n’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.
The Boy Who Cried Fish Page 5