Read The Boy Who Cried Fish for Free Online

rascal,’ said the Admiral, waving a fish on the end of his hook.
    The sea lion waddled out from the curtain, nose up, eyes wide, following the scent of the dangling pilchard. He wore a spangly sequined waistcoat and honked excitedly.
     

     
    ‘Fish!’ Fizz shouted.
    He stood up in his seat. Wystan was standing beside him.
    ‘Fish?’ Dr Surprise said.
    ‘Look at the waistcoat!’ Fizz said.
    ‘Look at the whiskers!’ Wystan added.
    On the little poolside stage the sea lion had gobbled the fish and rolled over, gulped down another fish and done a handstand, and now, following the scent of yet more fish, had gone and got its head stuck in the bucket.
    ‘Oh dear,’ said the Admiral, in such a tone of voice as to make an audience aware that this was still part of the act.
    With the bucket on his head the sea lion was clattering about by the side of the stage. He banged into the wall and then stepped to the left. His flipper flapped on the first step of a flight of concrete stairs which led up and up to a platform thirty feet above the pool.
    ‘Pescado,’ the Admiral said like a bad actor, half-winking at the audience, ‘not that way. Don’t go up there.’
    But the sea lion was determined and, flipper by flipper, he pulled himself up the steps, galvanised bucket rattling, echoing metallic honks punctuating the climb.
    There was nothing the boys could do. Fizz wanted to run out and pull Fish’s tail, take the bucket off, save him from those stairs, but a large plastic screen blocked the pool from his reach (it had stopped them all from getting wet when the squids had amusingly misfired their squirts). Dr Surprise quietly suggested they sit down.
    ‘But it’s Fish!’ Fizz said to him.
    ‘Nonsense,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Do sit down, boys.’
    As they argued, the sea lion reached the top platform and, in a movement so simple as to prove it had all been an act, tossed the bucket into the air, balanced it on his nose, flapped his flippers in a damp clap and honked a triumphant honk that echoed for seconds round and about.
    Then in a swift startling move he flicked the bucket into the air, wriggled off the platform and plunged like a beautiful spinning brick nose-first into the water. So deft was the dive that hardly a ripple arose, hardly a splash sploshed, but a startled flurry of flying fish fanned out in a circle, leaping up into the air from the middle of the pool, fleeing like pigeons from a snapping dog.
    It was a spectacular dive and only after everything had settled down did Fizz realise he’d been holding his breath.
    With a splash the bucket landed in the water, upside down but floating. From underneath the sea lion nudged the bucket round, and rose up in the water balancing it on his nose, honking again. Only then did Fizz notice Philip the otter in the bucket, looking round in the air as if in surprise.
    As he watched open-mouthed at this finale, the showman in him overriding his suspicions, he heard a beeping.
    Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep.
    It sounded like an electric alarm clock at the beginning of another long day.
    As the audience looked around to see where the odd sound had come from Fizz noticed Admiral Spratt-Haddock drop his head into his hands, and then a roar of water splashed up out of the centre of the pool.
    The log that Philip the otter had been so calmly lying on throughout the show had reared up, split apart, and lunged at the sea lion with his balanced bucket.
     

     
    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