Fish Boy Page 5

  ‘You thought I was a loser,’ he says.

  ‘No!’ I am genuinely surprised at this, the word comes out louder than I mean it to. Why would he even think that? ‘I thought you’d told everyone,’ I say. ‘About IT.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looks sad.

  I feel bad. I make the sock into a hand puppet and wave it in front of his face saying, ‘Kezdodik Kezdodik,’ and bite him with it until he smiles again.

  ‘That sock actually stinks,’ he says and laughs.

  I make the sock puppet pick up a pair of boxers from under the bed and throw them at him. They land in his face. I laugh. He throws them back and they land in mine. He laughs. I throw a sweatshirt. We’re suddenly a little hysterical. There is a blur of throwing things and the room goes fuzzy as my eyes water from laughing. We stop when a pair of jeans with a belt hits me in the nose.

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ He puts my eagle sweatshirt down.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say and take my hand out of the sock and rub the back of it under my nose. No blood. He’s right though – it does stink. ‘Kisz kezdodik,’ I say.

  ‘Kesz kezdodik,’ he says.

  ‘How’d you work that one out anyway?’

  ‘The great Houdini.’ He rummages through the clothes, which are now everywhere and opens his bag. He takes out a blank DVD in a see-through case. ‘It’s Hungarian.’ He’s stuck a photo on the front. It’s of a man tied up in chains. It looks freaky. ‘He’s Hungarian.’

  I pull a face. ‘I wouldn’t want to be that guy.’

  ‘It means, ready, begin,’ he says and taps the plastic case. ‘He used to say it before his act. Before they lowered him into the Chinese Water Torture Cell.’

  ‘The water what?!’

  ‘You’ve got to say it back to them.’

  ‘The fish?’ I realise how crazy this sounds.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why would fish speak Hungarian?’

  ‘Fish travel.’ He shrugs. ‘A lot.’

  I stare at the picture. Houdini has chains around his hands. His feet. His wrists. His ankles. Everywhere. If it means ending up like that, if that’s what kesz kezdodik means, then I’d really rather not. ‘I’m not sure, Patrick.’ I keep staring at the picture.

  ‘He gets free,’ he says. ‘He’s an escapologist, that’s the point.’

  ‘I might give the sea a break for a while,’ I say.

  ‘Magic is out there,’ he says. I laugh but he doesn’t. Sometimes laughing happens like that when I’m scared or really upset. It just comes out and sounds all wrong. ‘Billy.’ He looks totally serious. ‘You’ve got to go back in.’

  Mush

  At 5.30 Patrick’s phone alarm beeps. He has to leave to watch his sister while his mum goes to pilates. We go downstairs.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Mum shouts, just as I’m opening the front door. She comes down too. I stand in front of Patrick so he doesn’t notice that she finds this difficult. That this take a while. She’s wearing her denim dress and wolf slippers. I am totally thrilled she is actually dressed. ‘Hi.’ She tucks her hair behind an ear and leans into the door space. ‘You must be Patrick.’ He reaches out, she ducks but then smiles when he makes a plastic rose appear from her hair.

  ‘Aw, thanks,’ she says and offers a hand. ‘It’s really nice to meet you.’

  ‘Patrick has to hurry,’ I say, ‘to look after his sister.’ I start closing the door so their hands don’t meet. I don’t want Patrick to know about Mum. I don’t want anyone to know.

  ‘Oh,’ Mum says.

  ‘Bye,’ Patrick says and nearly falls off the step as I shut the door.

  ‘See you later,’ I say through the letter box.

  ‘What was that about?’ Mum puts her hand on her hip.

  I walk past her into the kitchen. ‘Do you fancy meatballs?’ Meatballs are my speciality. Actually, it’s pretty much the only thing I cook.

  ‘Okay,’ she says and follows me with her eyes. ‘That’d be lovely.’ I go into the kitchen. She puts the Bombay Bicycle Club on the iPod and sits down on the sofa.

  I take the meatballs out of the fridge and put them on the fish plate ready for the microwave. I put the kettle on for the pasta. I pour crushed tomatoes out of the jar and into a pan and put the pan on the small ring. I put the pasta in the boiling water and crank the timer round to eight minutes.

  After four minutes I realise I forgot to put salt and oil in the pasta water. I put it in and give it a stir. Some of the pieces have stuck to the bottom. I try to unstick them. The timer goes off.

  ‘I’ll get that,’ Mum shouts. She comes in and carries the pasta pan to the sink to drain. This is the part I don’t do. The bit she doesn’t let me.

  She puts the pasta back in the pan. I tip everything else in too and stir. The spoon goes round. The meatballs break up. Some pasta bits have red on, some don’t. The sauce is like a T-shirt that’s too small. It doesn’t quite fit.

  I think about the sand pattern of the puffer fish. It works and works and works to make this amazing spiral. Marking it out with its body. The sea keeps moving the sand all the time and it has to keep going. To keep it in shape. To make it perfect. Sir David says, ‘He must work for twenty-four hours a day or the current will destroy his creation.’ The camera pulls back and shows the massive spiral he’s working on. It’s so beautiful.

  I look into the pan. It looks like a big pile of mush.

  Mum gives me a hug. ‘Looks great!’ she says.

  I get the spiral bowls and spoon it out.

  ‘You okay?’ Mum says. She tries to look at me. ‘School okay?’ I keep spooning. ‘Patrick seems really nice,’ she says. Her eyebrows look hopeful. The mush does not.

  We carry our bowls to the table. I want to say yeah, he might seem nice but actually he wants me to talk to a fish that’ll probably chain me up at the bottom of the ocean. But I don’t. So I just grate a load of cheese on to cover up the mush and say, ‘He is. Kind of.’

  Hang On

  I want to swim. I want it so badly my head feels like it’s going to burst. But I’m not going back in the sea on my own. No way.

  I lie in bed and poke my ribs to see if it hurts. The bones hurt more than the flesh. I wonder if this is what it feels like to Mum. If she hurts. I wonder if it’s like bruises. People only know how much something hurts when the marks show up and by then it’s not actually hurting any more. People get what they see. If they see it, they get it. If they can’t, you’re on your own.

  I think of divers in the deep-sea submarine, the walls twelve centimetres thick, of the angler fish where the male bites the female and becomes permanently attached, fed by her bloodstream. I think about how the sea is the most undiscovered place in the world. Sir David says, ‘We know more about the surface of the moon, than the abyssal plains.’

  I get up and go down to the first floor. The light’s on in the spare room. I can hear Dad mumbling about something. I push the door open. He’s sitting at the desk looking through papers, a calculator in one hand, a pink highlighter behind his ear. He’s got his reading glasses on. He always looks dead different in those, like he becomes someone else.

  ‘Ay up,’ he says.

  ‘Ay down,’ I say. He smiles.

  ‘You all right, son?’ He rubs his head.

  ‘I want to live in a spiral galaxy.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ he says and takes the glasses off. ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say and shrug. He holds his arms out and pats his knee. I go and sit on it. He holds me tight. A bit too tight.

  ‘Ow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mind my ribs.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He puts his head on the back of my neck and we swing back and forth on the swivelly chair. ‘Want to go to Mars?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. We used to play this when I was little. I put my hands over his eyes and shut mine. He holds me on and we pretend we’re in a rocket. His legs spin us and we go round and round and round and it feels like we’re taking off to Mars.
Well, it used to. He stops.

  ‘I feel a bit sick,’ I say.

  ‘Me too,’ he says. I take my hands off his eyes. He doesn’t take his arms off me though. ‘Hang on in there, son,’ he says. I feel the words against my skin. He holds me tight again and squashes all of me but I don’t say anything cos I hardly feel it, I hardly feel it at all.

  Milwaukee’s 440th Airlift Wing, Plane 680, 1965

  In 1965, an experienced crew from the Air Force Reserve Command’s 440th Airlift Wing flew from Milwaukee to the Grand Turk Island in the Bahamas.

  The plane landed on schedule at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida at 5.04 p.m. They spent two hours and forty-three minutes on the ground.

  The plane took off again at 7.47 p.m. and headed south to the Bahamas.

  It never reached its destination.

  It was a clear night. There was no indication of trouble and all radio communication was routine. When they didn’t land, radio traffic controllers called Plane 680. There was no response. There was an expert maintenance crew on board, so if there was a mechanical problem on the flight, there were plenty of people to take care of it.

  There was no explanation for the disappearance of Plane 680.

  Sometimes stuff just happens. I snap my laptop shut.

  Maybe she’ll be okay.

  Mum.

  Maybe the fish is okay.

  He seemed nice.

  Didn’t he?

  Did he?

  I wonder where the plane went. I wonder what the fish wants. I wonder about weirdness.

  Now?

  The letter comes on Saturday at breakfast.

  ‘How was the spiral galaxy?’ Dad says.

  ‘No chocolate spread.’ I put a thick layer on a crumpet. ‘So I came back.’

  ‘Understandable,’ he says. The toaster pops and the smoke alarm goes off. ‘I’m the fire starter!’ Dad does his Prodigy impression and whacks the reset button with a broom handle. He sings ‘exhale, exhale, exhale’, puts the broom back against the wall and passes me a blue envelope. ‘This came.’

  ‘That’s odd …’ Mum scrapes butter over the burnt toast. ‘No stamp.’ She points at the space where it should be. I look at the writing all neat and curled up.

  ‘Gonna open it then?’ Dad looks over my shoulder. ‘Must be special, no one sends nice letters these days. No one. It’s all emails and headaches. Or junk.’ He licks peanut butter off his fingers. ‘Junk and bills, bills and junk. It’s not fair on the trees. What they’ve had to go through to get to that and then they just get chucked.’

  ‘Or monkeys. The monkeys miss the trees,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah they can’t swing on an envelope, can they?’ He jumps around the kitchen doing a monkey dance.

  ‘And owls,’ I say. He flies his arms over the table.

  ‘Buzzards,’ Mum says.

  ‘Crows.’

  ‘Wood pigeons.’

  ‘Cuckoos.’

  ‘Jackdaws.’

  ‘They nest in holes actually, not trees,’ I say.

  ‘Righto,’ Mum shrugs.

  Dad does all the birds. Some are better than others. ‘You need to work on your buzzard,’ I say and he hits me on the head with his Flying Pig tea towel.

  ‘I thought it was all sustainable now anyway,’ Mum says. ‘They replant them, don’t they? They plant what they chop.’ Dad looks over at her uneaten toast. She’s left half of it. ‘Full,’ she says and pulls a face. ‘I’ll give it to the birds, the poor little treeless birds.’ She tears it into pieces.

  ‘Are you gonna open it or what?’ Dad nods at the envelope.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Right.’ I run my fingers over the edges. I don’t know which corner to start from. I tear it open slowly and look inside.

  Believe

  I pour the flakes out into my hand.

  ‘Is that it?’ says Dad. ‘No letter?’

  ‘No,’ I say and hide the note that’s inside.

  ‘What are they?’

  Fish flakes is what they are. ‘I don’t know,’ I say and go red. I put the envelope in my dressing gown pocket.

  Mum leans in and looks closer. ‘They really stink,’ she says and pulls back. ‘They could be poisonous.’

  ‘They’re not poisonous,’ I say. They are sticking to my hand though.

  ‘You should put them down.’ Mum prods one with a finger. ‘You might get a rash. People send things sometimes, not nice things.’ She looks at Dad with concerned eyebrows. He looks back with shrugging ones.

  ‘Yeah, it might be some nutter,’ he says.

  ‘Dan!’ Mum whacks him.

  ‘I’m just saying …’ He puts the tea towel over his head and hunches up like he’s an old lady. ‘Plant the magic seeds, Jack, plant the magic seeds.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a beanstalk,’ Mum says, ‘with golden eggs at the top.’

  ‘You’d climb that would yer?’ Dad says. ‘Tell that to Dr blummin’ Winsall.’ He shouts up at the ceiling. ‘She climbed the bleeding beanstalk, now leave her alone all right!’ He gets Mum and lifts her over his shoulder. ‘Any golden harps up there?’

  ‘Just three big fat cobwebs.’ She taps him on the back. ‘Now knock it off.’ He puts her down. I try to tip the flakes into the bin. They are totally stuck to my fingers. I try to scrape them off. ‘Just going to the bathroom,’ I say and go upstairs. I shut the door, put the toilet seat down and take the note out of the envelope.

  Dear Fish Boy

  A little something for your friend!

  Ha ha.

  The World of Magic says that the secret to magic is belief.

  People believe because they want to. I believe in you. I think your fish has something to say. Meet me on the beach tonight at 5.30.

  P

  I think of how Patrick must have got here to deliver this. I think of him doing his Superman in the air, coming to the rescue, over the houses, one arm out.

  I think of the mackerel braving it across the ocean. Alone.

  I fold the letter and put it back into my pocket.

  I feel bold. I feel brave.

  I will be there.

  Going Solo

  At 5.10 p.m. I take the bean tin out and put it on the worktop. I pull my blue hoody over my head, tuck the exploding volcano towel under my arm and walk to the beach. I am a giant kelp string about to break the surface.

  I see Zadie through her feature window, past the coral, in the lounge, watching MI High. She turns round. David says, ‘Signals from a male wolf spider have to be very carefully delivered because if his female doesn’t understand why he’s approaching her, she’ll eat him.’ I duck down and squat along under the rest of the window, hoping she hasn’t noticed.

  I walk to the steps and look down at the bay.

  It’s pretty empty. It’s always pretty empty. People usually stick to the cliff paths or walk over to the long sands, the main beach. I like this one. It’s always been my favourite. It’s always been me and Mum’s.

  On the right there’s boulders with gaps big enough to climb through and hide in and flies and old plastic bags and bottles filled with thunder bugs blown into the cracks. The rocks are big and wonky. I think they’re like icebergs. They have things going on underneath in places you can’t see.

  On the left is the crocodile and bone rocks. People call them that because the ledge looks like a crocodile and the rocks stick out of the sea, like it’s chewed someone up and spat out the bones into the water.

  And all around everything is the cliff. Like a giant pair of arms. Like it’s got its back to the wind so you don’t have to take it for a while. When you’re in the bay the wind stops.

  I look for Sir David. He’s hanging up hummingbird feeders in Arizona. ‘Meals like these must surely make the difference between life and death,’ he says, ‘especially for the rufous who still have to tackle the last stage of their two-thousand-mile migration across the bay of Mexico in one single six-hundred-mile flight.�
�� I look at the rufous. They’re like eight centimetres long.

  I look out at our beach. A sandpiper hops in with a wave, and legs it when it comes back out. A Jack Russell runs to the edge of the cliff, sniffs the air and runs back.

  I see Patrick sitting where the wet sand meets the dry, on the dry side. Sitting on the edge.

  I run down the steps and leap on him from behind. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey.’ He leans backwards and I fall off. He’s stuffing Doritos into his mouth. I stare at the crumbs falling on to the beach. ‘Want one?’ He offers me the bag. ‘They’re cheesy.’ He rattles them under my nose.

  I shake my head and pull back. I don’t feel hungry at all. ‘Where are your trunks?’

  ‘I’m not coming in.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I can’t swim,’ he says.

  ‘Oh!’ I didn’t think anyone in our year couldn’t swim.

  ‘We never stay in one place long enough.’ He looks away. ‘And besides, how many people with talking fish do you know?’ I shake my head. ‘Exactly, Fish Boy. The mackerel has come for you. Just you.’

  I turn the words over and over in my head. The mackerel has come for you. I wonder if that sentence has been said to anyone else in the world. Ever. ‘What’s that?’ I point to the big white bag next to him.

  ‘Provisions,’ he says and takes out a green padlockable notebook and pencil. I look in the bag and see a rope, a chain and a yellow rubber parcel tied with a red belt. He pulls the drawstring on the bag. ‘MEGALLAS,’ he says, writing the word down in the notebook in capitals and holding it up for me to read. ‘It’s the code for stop.’

  ‘What’s wrong with just stop?’

  ‘Stop isn’t Hungarian.’

  I want to Megallas right now. ‘Maybe we should come back tomorrow,’ I say and look out at the water. ‘It looks like it might get choppy.’ The sea is dead calm.

  ‘You can do this, Billy,’ Patrick says. ‘If you don’t you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened. What you missed. You’ve just got to go for it.’