The Boy Who Cried Fish (6 page)

And Fizz saw, with a start, that it wasn’t a log after all, it was a crocodile, and it was chasing the sea lion out of the pool. A loud snap of its jaws and a flick of its long tail saw stillness return to the arena. Once again it looked like a large green-brown log was drifting in the middle of the water, and the Admiral and his prize sea lion (who was also Fizz and Wystan’s prize sea lion) were stood on the concrete beside the pool looking out at the rippling water.

Spratt-Haddock leant down and said something into Fish’s ear the boys couldn’t make out, but Fizz got the feeling it was an apology.

And then the show was over.

The Admiral, the sea lion and Philip the otter stood in front of the little curtain and took a bow, and then they all left, and the only sound was the gentle slurp and splash of water on the poolside tiles.

‘That
was
Fish,’ Fizz said confidently.

‘Definitely,’ said Wystan. ‘I’d know his nose anywhere.’

‘That was his waistcoat.’

‘Boys,’ said the Doctor. ‘There is more than one sparkly waistcoat in the world.’

‘Not
sparkly
,’ corrected Fizz. ‘
Spangly
.’

The Doctor slapped his knees as if it were some sort of answer. ‘I think,’ he warbled, raising a finger in the air, ‘it’s time to go back to the circus. We’ve been away long enough. A good afternoon’s work will take your minds off things.’

With the two grumbling boys in tow the Doctor led his way back through the Aquarium and to the park where the gaily coloured Big Top welcomed them all back home.

Despite what the Doctor said, Fizz and Wystan were decided. They knew their sea lion friend better than anyone. If they couldn’t recognise him then who would? He was missing and that Admiral character had been lurking round the circus with his pet crocodile. Everything made perfect sense. His fish had been stolen and so he’d had to steal a Fish of his own.

As they sat with the Doctor in his caravan, they tried to convince him one last time.

‘But Fish hasn’t been stolen,’ Dr Surprise said, stroking Flopples, his white rabbit, who lay in his arms gently snoring. ‘He’s just wandered off somewhere. He’ll be back. He’s probably back already. Before you start accusing people,’ he went on, ‘you must be sure of all the facts. You know that, Fizz. You have to trust me, I looked closely at the Aquarium and that sea lion
wasn’t
Fish. I’ve known him for years, ever since he first arrived at the circus, long before either of you got here. He was a young sea lion then, of course, sneaking fish from behind Cook’s back. Oh, it was a big mystery at the time. No one knew where all these fish were going, you see. And Cook was getting angrier and angrier.’

‘Like last night?’

‘Yes, but this was a different Cook. It was after he left that the chap you know as Cook took over. Before our Cook was Cook, he was just Terry Trapp the escapologist’s son. Terry’s shuffled off to the great old circus in the sky now, but it’s good to have a Trapp still in the circus, as it were.’

‘Dr Surprise, what about Fish?’

‘Oh, yes, these fish kept going missing. It went on for days. At first Cook blamed the clowns and he banned them from the Mess Tent. They were angry about that, and there are few things worse than angry clowns. They filled his caravan with custard. Got on the roof and poured it through the air vents until it was full. He had to eat his way out. It was definitely not funny at all. But the fish still kept vanishing.
Then
he blamed young Miss Tremble. He thought he’d overheard her ask Unnecessary Sid to get her “some kippers for breakfast”. Oh, you should have seen the tears when he accused her. She was mortified. That night the clowns filled Cook’s caravan with horse manure. His tastebuds were never the same after that. The funny thing was it turned out she’d actually asked Unnecessary Sid to buy her some
slippers
in
Belfast
, because he was about to go on holiday you see. To Belfast. And then—’

‘Dr Surprise,’ Fizz said quietly, adding a cough and lifting his hand as if he were a schoolboy asking a question (which in a way he was).

‘Yes?’ said Dr Surprise.

‘We don’t
care
about all that stuff. We only care about Fish
today
,’ Wystan snapped. ‘We need to rescue him!’

‘Rescue him?’

‘Yeah, from the Aquarium. Remember?’

‘He’s been kidnapped, Doctor,’ prompted Fizz, in a more friendly tone than Wystan. (Fizz knew it wasn’t a good idea to shout at Dr Surprise. Not only was he sensitive, but Flopples was very protective. Fizz had lost his temper with the Doctor once, when he was much smaller, and he still heard the rabbit’s fearsome growl in his nightmares. He didn’t want a repeat of that experience.)

‘What nonsense, boys,’ the Doctor said. ‘There’s a very special way Fish’s whiskers wrinkle when he sniffs. No other sea lion does it quite the same. The Aquarium’s Pescado was
not
Fish. Not even close.’

‘But it’s obvious what’s happened,’ Wystan said when the boys had left the Doctor’s caravan. ‘When Cook threw a ladle at Fish last night and shouted at him and ran him out of the Mess Tent, then he must’ve been so upset that Admiral Spratt-Haddock could easily come along and lure him away.’

‘You’re right,’ Fizz said. ‘He looked so upset about being shouted at. All the Admiral had to do was wave a bit of mackerel and smile nicely and he would’ve followed him anywhere.’

‘How did he know, though?’ Wystan wondered. ‘I mean that Fish was feeling miserable?’

‘Well, maybe he just got lucky, maybe he was over here looking for something else, but ran into Fish, or maybe . . . maybe Cook’s in cahoots with him?’

‘Blimey,’ said Wystan, running his fingers through his beard, which was a sign that he was thinking. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Cook would love to get rid of Fish, wouldn’t he? So he upset him on purpose, with the Admiral ready and waiting to be nice to him . . .’

‘It was all a plot,’ Fizz concluded, and Wystan agreed.

And so the boys had dug their way down to the truth of the matter, unearthed the villains, found their friend and worked out the ‘why’ of the crime. Now all they needed to do was bring the dastardly deed to light, rescue their sea lion and set everything to rights.

Easy.

In fact they’ll probably do it all in the next chapter. I expect.

Chapter Five

In which a plan is set in action and in which an Aquarium is visited, again

I don’t know you. We’ve not met. I don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, a sea lion or a shellfish. I can’t possibly know what your life’s like, can I? You might spend lazy sun-filled days on a deckchair sitting on the beach sipping fresh mango juice, humming light-hearted tunes you heard once in a dream, or you might have people looking over your shoulder and breathing down your neck, saying, ‘Do this. Do that. No, not like this. Do it like that. No, not like that. Over here, not there.’

The life of a boy in a circus isn’t a bad life, but it has few deckchairs in it. It is one where people expect you to
do things
and to
be places
at certain times and they get upset if you just go off missing in the middle of the day (unless you’re accompanied by a Doctor). So Fizz had to sit through a whole French lesson with Madame Plume de Matant and then his dad lifted him up (with one hand, naturally) so he could clean the windows of their caravan and then he had to sit in the Mess Tent and eat his tea (cod and chips and crispy seaweed, which was a little annoying, since Tuesdays were normally Fizz’s favourite, caravan pie (which is like cottage pie, but moves about more), but while they were at the seaside it was fish every day).

While he was eating he saw Captain Fox-Dingle across the tent. He was just as smart as normal, but the pink of his uniform looked a little dimmer. He was moving his dinner round his plate with his fork but without picking any of it up. It looked like Charles hadn’t improved during the day. This wasn’t the way a happy lion-tamer went about eating his dinner.

Fizz definitely wouldn’t be called upon to do the act tonight.

On any other day he would’ve been heartbroken to miss out, but his head was still buzzing with Fish and the plan he’d come up with. The job before him, the one he had to do, was to find his friend and free him and return to the circus a hero, wreathed in glory and crowned with triumph.

At the end of it, at least Wystan would have an act again. Maybe he’d let Fizz join in:
Two Boys
&
A Sea Lion
. It still wouldn’t be quite the same as sticking his head in a lion’s mouth, though. Nothing could thrill a crowd quite like that.

He’d only done the act the night before, less than twenty-four hours ago, but already he missed Charles and his warm meaty breath. He missed the softness of his fur, and the applause.

He pushed the magnificent land lion out of his mind and filled it up with everything he knew about the sea lion and the Aquarium.
Okay
, he thought,
time to get on with this rescue
.

He met Wystan outside Miss Tremble’s caravan. She’d gone off to give her pre-show pep talk to her horses and the boys could talk without being overheard.

‘Got everything?’ Fizz whispered.

‘Why are you whispering, Fizz?’ asked Wystan. ‘Tremble’s gone to talk to the horses. there’s no one here.’

‘Sorry,’ said Fizz. ‘It’s just that going on a secret rescue mission like this, well, it seems right to whisper.’

Wystan gave him a look over the top of his beard.

‘Have you got everything?’ Fizz asked again, not loudly, but not so quiet as to be accused of whispering.

Wystan held up a rucksack. ‘I got torches, some rope, Fish’s spare waistcoat and three tins of tuna.’

‘Brilliant. Let’s go.’

It was almost seven o’clock. Everyone was busily bustling round, preparing themselves or tending to the crowds, and no one noticed two small shapes sneaking off into the half-dark of the dusk, through the line of trees and out onto the prom.

‘That was easy,’ Wystan said.

‘Well, it
was
the easy part,’ Fizz replied.

It was true. Walking away from a busy circus is simple, straightforward, plain sailing. Breaking into a locked Aquarium and finding and freeing and rescuing a sea lion and escaping without getting caught by a dangerous and quite probably mad hook-handed Admiral was going to be a tiny bit harder.

But still, Fizz thought, it
is
going well so far.

They walked along the prom between the park and the Aquarium, past the shingle beach with its one old beached up-tilted fishing boat. They didn’t feel the need to tiptoe or to sneak. There was nothing odd-looking about two boys out for an early evening stroll. Nothing at all. They were just doing the perfectly normal sort of thing any perfectly normal sort of person might do.

Except for the beard and the long red ex-Ringmaster’s coat, perhaps.

But since there was no one else about (they were probably all at the circus, judging from the crowds the boys had seen queuing before they left) they weren’t noticed.

The plan continued to go well, even if ‘walking along the prom’ was another one of the parts Fizz identified as being easy.

They listened to the crashing waves as they walked along. It sounded like the sea was getting closer and closer. The shingle roared as it was sucked back down the beach with each retreating wave. It sounded, to Fizz’s ears, like Charles when he was having his first roar of the morning. It was deep and long and rumbled in your belly just as much as in your ears, and if you didn’t know it was a friendly lion in the cage you would have probably run in fright or been frozen to the spot in terror.

Charles hadn’t roared that morning when they’d gone to see him. Fizz wondered if he would ever roar like that again: joyfully, full-throatedly.

He tried to push the thought out of his mind. He looked at the sea. Heard it roar again. ‘I read a book once,’ he said, hoping making conversation might stop him thinking sad thoughts, ‘in the library, that said that
all
cats can swim.’