The Depths
By peakly
- 337 reads
So there's me, no more then twelve or thirteen years old. You
remember the age. The opposing forces of immaturity and angst, pulling
violently at your coat-tails. Still secretly fond of your transformer
toys, yet utterly convinced of your future as a world
leader/philosopher/hero . The early formation of believes you would
later label agonistic. The realization that girls are pretty, and the
eagerness to do something with your penis, though you're not sure what
exactly. You remember. Twelve or thirteen. Y'know, the best
years.
It was at that golden age, that I had my first experience with fish, or
at least the first I feel prepared to share with you all. Standard
class trip to an aquarium centre. Rained in the morning, brightened up
by lunch. Three hours on the bus. 300 sing-a-longs of Johnny had a
pigeon (complete with swearing), 200 shouts to 'sit down' from the
bus-driver, 13 incidents of GBH, 4 sweet-packets thrown, 2 pants wetted
and 1, single tear, rolling down the cheek of our teacher Mrs. Wilson,
which we all noted yet never mentioned ever again.
I was at the back of the group with Jackie Ping-Pong and Buttons
Scholfield, talking cynically about the size of the centres 'sharks',
in-between exaggerated brags about my pog collection. That's when we
reached the feeding room. A man with a red shirt and devastating
acne-scars informed of the house rules - no shouting, no throwing
anything in except the food-provided, and, most importantly, no leaning
over the edge or, more stupidly, jumping in the pool. Anyone who did
any of those things stood to be either severely scolded by our
teachers, or subjected to the dangers of the tank.
And so to my experience. I wish I could say that I did something
straight out of Denis The Menace, like disorientate the supervisors
with a homemade smoke-bomb before scuba-diving into the tank just to
cause mischief, but I didn't. I fell in. Don't ask me how, because I
don't know. All I know is that one minute I was trying to hit Jimmy
Murray with my expandable ruler, and the next I was feeling the icy
invasion of pool water in all my body cavities, coupled with the vague
(probably imagined) nipping of fish at my toes. The pool was deep, and
dark, and frightening. For at least 10 seconds, I was at the complete
mercy of my own fear. Jerking and revolting in an unholy spasm,
swallowing water, struggling hard to keep away from the fish. There
could have been eels in there, or piranhas. I could be eaten, or
attacked. In seconds I felt the drain of my energy, and, in the closest
thing to a clear thought possible at the time, I felt sure I would die.
Then, after opening my eyes for the briefest of moments, the panic
stopped. I found peace.
A few inches from my face, was a medium-sized fish. Her fins were
golden brown, and the light from outside cast rainbows across her face.
And the eyes. As huge as base-balls, in an honest shade of charcoal
black. She just floated there, right in front of me. Not afraid, not
intimidating, barely even curious. Just calm. It's hard to be sure of
course, with fish, but to me it seemed that she wore a smile. Just a
small one, rising slightly at the sides. It was as I peered at this
fish, the crowds of people above me, shouting and screaming in equal
part worry and excitement, that I realised I had nothing to fear.
Nothing. Not from fish, or from the world, or from anything else until
the day I died. She spoke to me, that fish. Not literally of course,
that would be horrific, but in another way. She spoke to my soul, in
just a whisper. "Sam", she said, "It doesn't mean a thing". Beneath
that water, with hair and clothes beyond repair, and people above ready
to shout at me perhaps forever, I looked that little fish in straight
in the eyes, and I gave a nod. With that she turned, with effortless
grace, and swam out of sight, waving me good-bye with her tail. The
people at the centre pulled me out of course, and the teachers began
asking me why I jumped in the pool. I had nothing to say though.
The next day I returned to the centre, this time alone, desperate to
meet once more with my old pal. I never jumped into the pool, it was
impossible - too many of the centres employees remembered me from the
day before and kept a close eye on my every move. I didn't want to be
banned from the tank altogether. However, I did find a spot by the
floor of the tank, with a solid glass window allowing visitors to peer
into the depths of the water. It was here that I would sit, waiting to
see her again. I sat there every day, of every week, for the remaining
year.
I never saw my brown fish again, until many weeks later. I arrived late
one day, and some of the attendants were scooping fish out of the tank
with a giant net, dropping them into bags. They let me take a look,
since I was a regular by now and knew my name. Inside their net, with
her eyes closed and her body scabbed and unclean, lay my fish. They
told me she had began to deteriorate with old age. They said the other
fish probably began picking at her body, before she died.
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