A Dream of Prairie Fishes

Peter Kettle 29 The Avenue, Lewes, Sussex, Bn7 1Qt.
Tel: 01273 472301 Fax: 01273 471685 Email: kettle@clara.co.uk

A Dream of Prairie Fishes

In the crowded hotel dining room, after the third course of a large but
lonely lunch, Bill Hooley's face went a clotted red. He silently
mouthed words as rapidly as an auctioneer. At which point Bill's heart
attacked him. The shock waves ruptured every arterial link Bill
possessed. The main veins that traversed his brain ballooned and
burst.
Bill spasmed upwards like a moon shot. For the first time in his
hugely corpulent life he achieved a position that was almost elegant, a
parody of the high diver's athletic grace. The sudden straightening of
his legs had sent the dining chair skittling across the room. A marble
obelisk, toppled by the chair, shattered on the tiled floor. By then,
Bill had reached the apogee of his climb and his hands clapped over his
head, as if summoning the attention of his fellow diners. Such a
summons was entirely unnecessary. All eyes were rooted by this
Falstaffian and shambolic body, exploding at an impossible height over
their heads.
The diners were so traumatized they thought time, gravity and motion
had become one big knot, which had then gone into suspension. Bill
Hooley, a shy and squidgy mass who none knew well, catapulted to a
horizontal plane, and - hovered! Intellectually everyone in the room
knew such an event was impossible. But there was very little
intellectual reasoning going on in the room. All were aware of one
thing for sure; they were witnessing an unexplainable phenomenon, a
first event in the world, beyond calm rational analysis. In its way it
was perfect. In the annals of medicine, it was unique. It's a pity
everyone in the room was too shocked to realize it.
Bill's dying brain took him back thirty years to his troubled, fatty,
frustrated adolescence:

By the time he was twelve Bill had grown so out of proportion he was
the size and shape of a grain silo. He dreamed of fishes every night.
Which was odd, because he lived a hundred miles from the sea and had
never seen a live fish. The only fish he knew about were stick shaped,
covered in bread crumbs, and accompanied by chips and ketchup. But in
his dreams he imagined the prairie around his home to be very like a
sea, populated with shoals of what he thought of as Hooleyfishes. These
strange creatures would flow through the grasslands towards him, their
fishy scales glittering in the moonlight. He believed they had special
powers. He believed they would render him weightless. Because of this
belief he loved his fishes.
But this summer Bill stared at the fishes and worried. He feared for
their survival. The summer days seared moisture from the land and the
Hooleyfishes would need shelter or they'd die. His chance to become
weightless would surely die with them. His flesh prickled and quivered
at the thought, but the same thought prompted an idea for a trade off.
If the fishes gave him the lightness he craved, he would find them safe
havens from the summer's scald.
Bill dropped another chocolate wrapper out the window, where it
fluttered down and joined a multi-coloured pile. He dipped his hand
absently into the plastic crate on the window seat, where he stored his
cookies and candies, and unzipped another without thinking much about
it. His attention was on a particular fish in the shoal. It was bigger
than the rest, which pleased him because he knew all there was to know
about being big. The fish stopped and looked at him. Bill scrabbled
around on the windowsill, without taking eyes off the fish, and picked
up his binoculars. Zooming in, he saw it was not only a big fish, it
was female. She was shapely, moving like a dancer, and heartbreakingly
beautiful.
As he watched, the fishgirl reached to her neck and slowly unzipped
her skin. Out stepped a perfect woman, with great legs, just like the
ideal movie star inside Bill's heart and head. Slender and light, she
stared at Bill with a look so forensic he felt embarrassed. Bill forgot
to chew and began to drool. Her eyes glittered, like phosphorus on the
sea, and her body shivered. Scales lifted from her perfect skin. The
wind skittered scales away in gossamer flakes, winking silver then
black, silver then black, against the night sky. Each scale seemed
bigger than any star - 'Twinkle, twinkle little scale, how I like the
way you sail,' hummed Bill inside his poetic soul. The scales merged
with the stars, and Bill knew something life changing was about to
happen. He would, on this special night, not only achieve lightness. He
would also find the love his size had always denied him. And both these
changes would come from the same wondrous source.
The beautiful woman looked at him, and moved her hands over her body.
More scales lifted from her, and each one said yes. She beckoned to
him, but he was already clambering awkwardly out the window to get to
her. This was no longer a trade off. This was love. He flopped down and
scattered the snack wrappers, and bumbled through the silky grasses to
his woman. He stood before her, heavy with yearning. Panting and
dishevelled, he wiped sticky chocolate from his mouth. She reached for
him with perfect manicured fingers, carmine nails shining at their
tips. He closed his eyes, unable to believe or comprehend the
transcendent beauty of this vision, unable to measure his good fortune.
This fishgirl saw him as a marvellous proper young man. To be so chosen
was new to Bill, and he felt sure his illness of fat would be
healed.
He engulfed her to him.
He held her with a strength he never knew he had. They fell to earth
and he comprehended nothing of the intense moment except her beauty,
captured forever in his still closed eyes. In his haste her perfect
body folded and broke beneath his mighty corpulence. Crying in his own
completion, he heard her cry, too. He was inexpressibly happy, and he
had made her happy, too. He could not know it, but as he crushed her to
him, fin and bone, her cry was in death. Bill surmounted and colonized
her before other people, other fishes, could take her from him. Unaware
of what he had done, his great head bowed gratefully down into the hot
prairie grasses. He scattered the seed from grassy pods, and gruffed up
herbs and fish meat. Snuffing up the whole earth and sky, thundering
and biting the land, embracing his strange universe, he exulted in the
Hooleyfish girl's unmatched beauty. It was all his, alone and forever.
Nobody could spoil it or take it away. All his weight dispersed into
the landscape around him.
Silence. The ruined gorgeous body lay beneath him. Her fine silvery
bones had driven into the disturbed soil. He bulked back awkwardly
upright and rocked on his huge flat feet. Seeing what he had done, he
watched as grass and earth leached moisture from his love, wicking his
lady into portals of earth and granite, reservoiring her wonders beyond
his reach forever into deep aquifers. As the vision disappeared he felt
the loss of love, and desolation at his continuing grossness. He looked
through tears and saw the stars still there, like diamonds in velvet,
but there were now no longer fish scales among them. The more he looked
the more the stars mocked him. They had taken all the scales from his
woman and hidden them. Bill would hate the stars for reminding him of
his own culpability. Murdering his love had sentenced him to an
everlasting grossness of body. Each star glittered as they always had
and always would. But each point of light was now, for Bill, a silent
rebuke.
He dropped to his big squidgy knees and scrabbled through the scarred
earth, searching for a trace of his love, wanting to resurrect her. A
glitter in the beaten down grass revealed itself as a silver locket.
Inside was a name, Venus. Nothing to do with his woman maybe, but he
would keep it, because Venus was a goddess of love and the sea. And
because the locket was at least tangible. He felt fragments of thin
fishy stuff in his hands. He peered in wonderment at their misty
filamental grace, cupped as much as he could into his awkward hands,
and stumbled back to the house. But when he reached home the stuff had
turned to powder. When he got inside his room, the powder had gone,
too. As he lay in his bed the only fragments of his fishy woman were
the ones netted inside his memory. He held the locket hotly in his
grasp and tasted salt tears.
Next morning, on the school bus, Bill did what he always did. He tried
to shrink himself small. But nature poured pounds into him every day
and he raged uselessly at his state. Why was he a whole head higher
than Joe, the school's top string bean athlete, the one the girls all
loved? And why the hell was he a whole seat wider than Ruby, the
miserable ordinary fatty, hated by everyone? Bill, sitting in his two
seats, squirmed in lone misery. His hands dandled whitely. Why were
they softer and shapelier than the girls hands? He hated his hands.
They had killed his Hooleyfish. They had destroyed his one chance of
reformation. His fat feet smelt of fish in their hard to clean folds.
Billy Big Boy they called him. Why, he couldn't even pee while standing
up like other boys. He had to sit like a girl and because he was so
heavy he broke toilet seats all the time. Bill's size provoked abuse.
Because of it he was taunted; because of it he was the butt of jokes,
the receiver of all rants, and the candidate for exclusion. Because of
it he could not retaliate because he was slow. Now, on this particular
day, he knew why all these miseries were his, and why he deserved them.
It was punishment for killing his goddess.
Fish came on other nights, but were never as beautiful or attainable.
He had offended them and lost them and they would never rescue him from
his state. He knew it, and they did too. Now they were careful to pose
out of reach, their only function to keep him awake. During school
days, after each sleepless night, he was besieged with narcoleptic
lusts. Collapsing into sleep mid sentence, or between bites of food, he
woke to find his zipper undone, laces tied together, lunchbox lid
superglued shut.
But he continued to hope for another fish goddess. He looked in
fields, in rooms, in corners and cupboards, in rivers, ponds and
ditches. But all he got his hands on was the mockery of fish sticks in
bread crumbs.
He tried to express his loss, his love, and his guilt in poetry,
hymning his own Dark Lady in finny form. He fell in love with words
instead of love itself. Seduced by metaphor, ambushed by sonnets and
clotted in unattainable fantasies, he found words could never catch the
way he felt. As the poetry failed, so did tarot cards, sortilege and
futurology. The great tragic boy was in love with something mythical,
and it took him apart forever. He would never know love like his
Hooleyfish woman and in his mind he hoarded all the books he once
burned so fiercely to write about her.

In the hotel dining room, Bill's two seconds of being twelve again
sputtered out. Half way through his body's trajectory, Bill had just
one more flourish that would grant him a permanent place in the memory
of his fellow diners. Normally the size of a pressurised haggis, Bill's
stomach expanded to the size of a supermarket trolley. Unable to cope
the much abused organ exploded. Exiting through flesh and fabrics,
freighted with a couple of buttons, a paper clip and a coin or two, the
stomach distributed its cargo over the hotel's elegant dining room. And
all over the hotel's elegant diners.
The mash of clotted cream, scrambled eggs, curry, pasta sauce, black
pudding, crispy bacon, pizza, pastries, pretzels, a whole crispy duck,
some ginger, garlic, chili, porcini mushrooms, a porterhouse steak, a
spicy lentil bake, brownies, beans, cookies and a strudel of monumental
richness from the German deli, basted every surface. There might have
been a custard danish in there, too. But nobody was checking.
The body, held together by a shred of gristle, a sliver of bone and a
stoutly plaited leather belt, plummeted full length upon the buffet
table. Bill's head landed where it most wanted to be; in the centre of
that day's lunchtime special. Blood formed a circlet around Bill's
head, mixing with a yellow pumpkin sauce. Bill, worshipper of all
things edible, lay in foodie heaven, peacefully incorporated with his
chiefest lusts, and fondest appetites. The pity was his achievement was
unappreciated by those present, most of whom were busily removing
sticky particles from faces, hair and clothes. Some were noisily sick.
Others were quietly sick. The rest was silence.
Edith Brewster had lived in the hotel for twenty spinster years.
Deeply moneyed, agoraphobic, sexually inexperienced, untravelled, she
was a narrow minded recluse. Her world was proscribed by fear. She was
limited, geographically, by those streets nearest the hotel. Part of
Edith knew she inhabited a tiny part of a wider world; knew her wealth
insulated her from strife and whatever she perceived to be the
commercial stresses of modern life. But right now her face, as pale as
can be this side of death, was staring dead ahead. Fastidious and
refined, her life had conditioned her to deal with nothing so
excrementally horrible as this. The coating of still warm, mostly
burgered, Hooley particles, measled her face and her newly done hair.
Sitting in her usual seat, she wished liberation from this gagging
humiliation. Unsure what to do, she closed her eyes. And Edith
experienced a moment of clear inner vision.
Which changed her life.
Her dull eyes opened and revealed a new sparkle. She considered the
choice before her. She could either succumb to the horror and decline
into a gibbering world of night sweats and denial; or get real. She
stood up, more decisively than any time in her life, crunched over the
shattered obelisk and walked to the buffet table. She flicked bits from
her face and coolly looked down at Hooley's exploded body. The flaps of
flesh and fragments of bone were difficult to recognize as human, but
the face was still perfect. It looked surprisingly close to rapture.
Edith started to chuckle. The chuckle became a damn good, perfectly
genuine, truly liberated laugh, without neurosis.
Edith Brewster would date her triumphant emergence into the world of
stand up comedy from this moment. She packed her bags, checked out of
the hotel, and flew to Las Vegas. Doubling her fortune in one
afternoon, she doubled it again doing internet trading. Growing wings
of savage satire, she became the funniest comic of her time, from
Palladium to Comedy Store, and triumphed in her own tv series. While
touring South Africa she became the twelfth wife of a young Zulu
chieftain. She lived in a hut and bore many children.
There was one more consequence of Bill Hooley's spectacular departure.
A caraway seed stayed vital throughout the manufacturing process to
pretzelhood. It remained vital during mastication in Bill's mouth. It
survived the best efforts of Bill's stomach acids. This virile seed
left Bill's stomach whole. It hit the ceiling, ricocheted back to earth
and found landfall inside the rich loam of a tropical palm. The seed,
determined to go forth and multiply, sent up a tender shoot. This
optimistic sproglet of hope and greenery spent a happy hour peering
over the brass edge of the palm's pot. But a passing waiter plucked it
out and flicked it in the trash. The plant expired next to a perfect
set of female fish bones, and formed the last earthly link with Big
Bill Hooley and his dream of prairie fishes.