The Boy Who Cried Fish Read Online Free Page B

exploring wouldn’t go amiss.
     
    They walked along the path that led out of the park, the sea on one side and the town on the other. At the seaside any path or pavement that stretches between beach and buildings isn’t called a path or pavement. It’s a ‘prom’, or ‘promenade’ for long. The Victorians liked to walk up and down looking at the sea on one side and the urchins on the other (although sea urchins would be on the sea side, of course), and that’s (sort of) what ‘promenade’ means in French, which isn’t what the Victorians spoke (except the French ones), but is what they called it anyway. (That explanation got a little more complicated than I expected, but is still shorter and clearer than the explanation Dr Surprise gave Fizz and Wystan as they walked, and which happened while I just did all this describing and explaining. So be thankful for small mercies.)
     

     
    A hundred yards out of the park, the scene on the left changed from a grey shingle beach to a grey shingle beach with an old fishing boat hauled up on it. There were seagulls sat in a row on its bulwarks (which is another way of saying they were sat on its gunnels, which are the bits of a ship’s side that stick up like a tiny wall around the deck’s edge). They squawked and cawed as the little party went by. (Not ‘party’ like a birthday party, of course, just ‘party’ like a small group made up of a mind reader and his two short friends, which would be a very disappointing birthday party, unless you only have one friend and enjoy mind readers, in which case it’s pretty much perfect.)
    Ignoring my descriptive writing, Fizz and his friends continued towards the Aquarium, which they could see sat square at the other end of the prom. It was a large white-washed building, thick and squat and irregularly-shaped, like a jumble of building blocks. Its doors were wide open and over them large friendly letters spelt out the word ‘QUARIUM’, which would have looked better if the first ‘A’ of the word hadn’t fallen off when a particularly fat seagull had landed on it.
    Fizz had never been in an aquarium before and he wondered what it would be like. The only fish he knew anything about were the sort that lay on plates, unmoving and dribbling vinegar. The sort that went well with potatoes (another thing he’d never seen in their natural environment, or even in a potatoarium (or greengrocers, as they’re more usually known)). What would fish be like alive and in action?
    Well, only time would tell.
    It took a minute to walk to the doors. It took less than a minute for Dr Surprise to buy three tickets, and then two minutes to untangle Wystan, who’d got his beard caught in the turnstile.
    Then they were in.
    And all around Fizz, filling every wall, were tank after tank of water, filled with a hundred different examples of very dull fish.
    Looking into one tank he could see big grey fish that swam to the right, turned around and swam back to the left, and in another there were small grey fish that did the same, only the other way round. There were pebbles that sat at the bottom of the tanks looking only slightly less action-packed than the fish. One tank had a miniature statue of an old-fashioned diver leaning at a jaunty angle in it, but even that wasn’t enough to keep Fizz’s attention.
    Though the fish were incredibly dull, he couldn’t help but think of what Fish might’ve thought of the place. The silly sea lion would’ve loved it. Of course, it would have been dangerous to let him loose in there. Fizz could imagine the broken glass and the spilling water and the guzzled fish . . .
    It would at least have been more interesting than this.
    He sighed loudly. Wystan joined in.
    ‘Well, I expect the really exciting stuff is further on,’ said Dr Surprise, peering into an empty tank that almost certainly didn’t contain an octopus in disguise. (It contained a lot of air and a sign on the front saying UNDER RENOVATION,