The Boy Who Cried Fish by A. F. Harrold Read Free Book Online

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.’
    ‘Hmm,’ Wystan said, unconvinced.
    ‘No, really. They’re actually pretty good at it,’ Fizz went on, ‘it’s just most of them choose not to. It takes them ages to get their fur dry. It’s such good-quality fur, you see, and