The Boy Who Cried Fish

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

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

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