Quilt

Part Two

The reception is for her a treacherous experience of meeting many people for the first time, trying to keep one name or face apart from the next, as a stranger to the house and yet more affected by it now than anyone perhaps besides the son. She is the pristine remora, paradise-haunter, tip-haulage expert, bleacher and scrubber. She is also, this afternoon, chief tea-maker and sommelier of wine, at least until others offer to assist, while the son is still busied with taxiing folk up from the church and overseeing the arrangement of parking. Some people are too nervous to address a word to her, others dutifully say hello and ask where she comes from and what her plans are. She is staying a couple more days, she explains, then must return to her own country.

With so many strange friends and relations the event is at first, not surprisingly, muted. She pictures a specialist section in a music-store, a selection of soundtracks from funeral receptions from different countries, the English version impressive for the quietness of its opening. Bodies shuffle. Some file through to the kitchen, others contend with the dining room. No one can stand in the centre. Voices operate at little more than whispers, amid clinks of teacups and teaspoons, and a furtive crunching of biscuit. But as the scene progresses, it attains a kind of macabre raucousness, rising to crescendos absurdly at odds with the way it began.

And for him the only thing is to let all the visitors see the pool, hardly difficult as it engulfs almost the entire space of the first room you enter as you come into the house. The surprise on some people’s faces seems diplomatically slight. With others the intake of breath is audible. Of course he misses so much of this initial impact because he is busy with sorting out parking in the drive and taxiing people up the lane, but the sheer size and scale of the equipment alone is evidently a cause for amazement. The aquarium fits into the oak-beamed room with space for a comfortable walkway around, with access to kitchen and drawing room as well as into the stairwell to the upper floor. The table with drinks and food has been set up in the one doorless corner. It is possible to hold a cup and saucer of tea or coffee or a glass of wine close to you and someone else pass without too much inconvenience, but still for at least a handful of guests it must be difficult not to sense that the gangways around the pool are like the space in the earth around a coffin.

— Well I never, just look at the scale of the thing!

— Did you know he was interested in aquaculture?

It’s bigger than the sort of pond children might dream of having in their garden.

— What’s in it anyhow?

— Looks like a couple of big rocks and a load of white gravel.

— Is there something in it?

— He’s taking after his father, wouldn’t you say? His dad always was making things and installing them somewhere or other.

— Like something out of Heath Robinson, to be sure.

— Used to drive his dear old wife round the twist, with that filtering system he set up for the drinking water supply. You’ve seen that, haven’t you? Take a stroll into the kitchen and have a look, it’s still there. Lord knows how many filters and containers he used to purify the water come from a spring in the field above the house.

— Very father like son, wouldn’t you say?

— Only look at the size of it!

— Are there fish in it?

— What’s this all about?

Gradually his own voice takes up a place in the room and attention is more sharply focused on the remarkable tank.

— No, it’s not empty. They are rays, the son explains. There are four of them. They are Potamotrygon motoro freshwater stingrays, from South America.

His aunt is at him, his mother’s youngest sister, accusing him of being mad as a hatter. He is smiling, speaking quietly, but everyone is listening now.

— You used to have an aquarium yourself, he reminds his aunt. Though I admit this is something of a departure.

— Freaky if you ask me, says the aunt, not one to mince her words, and mildly guilty too at the recollection of her own late husband’s insistence on keeping aquarium fish and the palaver of feeding them and cleaning out the water, ensuring the light is kept on for specific periods to eliminate the growth of algae and so on.

— It’s a lot of work, young man (an irony this, since he is in truth no longer young, and every day since his father’s death has felt like a month and more). How are you going to manage it? I assumed you were going to be selling the house. You can’t sell it with a great tank like this kerplomp in the middle of it.

The rays, it seems, divide the company like goats and sheep. For some the sight of these creatures, especially when the son opens up a section of the lid and they come truly flap-slapping up to the surface, all too evidently eyeing the wine-sipping peanut-crunching crowd, is just too weird. A wave, or to be more exact, a cold current of strangeness passes through the audience, as if in collective registration of an extravagancy out of keeping with mourning, beyond any normality one might reasonably associate with a funeral reception, a kind of crazy ensnarement, yes, an unacceptable, improper spectacle best reacted to by the quickest practicable exit, but a wave that, the girl senses, once gone gives way to more diffuse and diverse predicaments of being stranded and uncertain. No one, in fact, leaves. And then there are others, it becomes clear, who are simply in awe, astonished at what the son has done.

— Not only me, he says to a murmur along the line of all those gathering around the pool: I could not have done it without her.

He gestures towards the pristine dark girl by the door off to the kitchen.

— It is necessary, he goes on, to confront a ghastly deception. Triumph is a terrible delusion that must nonetheless be reckoned with. To pretend that it is not there would be as nauseating as to accept that it is. I cannot speak for her (and here he gestures once again towards the beautiful stranger scarcely anyone present has previously met), but I am not going to deny a sense of achievement at having conceived and constructed this ray pool, with its spillway design and lipped feature, at having lined it with the correct quartz sand, after picking over and assessing it, stone by stone, day after day, at having carefully selected the, I think it’s thirteen, individual, perfectly sized rocks, and at having installed the highest-quality filters, pumps, lighting and heating. Everything has been done here that could have been done to ensure an appropriate supply of water and to establish the correct mechanisms for the upkeep and replacing of water, and for the weekly gravel-cleaning and hydrovac. But any feeling of triumph here is at once also its opposite. To achieve is to lose. To suppose that you are winning is to be undergoing absolute defeat.

He pauses, somewhat perplexed at where this speech has come from. Then he carries on with a view to relating as briefly as possible the acquisition of the rays themselves, the initial quandary he had been thrown into by the dealer who encouraged him to buy a number of so-called teacup rays.

At which point at least one local woman, a farmer’s wife, glances down in fuzzy consternation at the teacup and saucer in her hands.

— The teacup ray, the bereaved man adds, as if picking up the demur, is sometimes advertised as a sort of miniature version as of some pigmy species, but really it is just a baby. Don’t be fooled by the teacup talk. I wasn’t, for I had read and talked to plenty of people on these issues, and I wasn’t going to be fobbed off from my original desire to get motoro rays of fair proportions which, as you may be able to see, is what we did eventually manage to do. Not that they are as big as they might be: a stingray of this variety can, in appropriate conditions, grow to a diameter of three feet or more, but these I hope will be happy to stay closer to the size they are now.

— It’s been hard, he goes on, unexpectedly swallowing a word or two, more emotional now than he had been in presenting his speech at the church, not having anticipated that he would make any particular speech at all at this point, in this revolutionised dining room, in the presence of so many family and friends, as well as a handful of more or less complete strangers.

— It was hard, especially at the end, a matter of such precarious hope — as any of you will know who may ever have bought and kept rays… I don’t know, is there anyone here?

And he looks up, surprised at his own question, to a tide of blank faces.

— Perhaps not. But the trickiest part is bringing a ray home in its transport basin. You have to give it time to acclimatise to the change in water, introducing the creature to its new environment with all the care in the world not only for its own wellbeing but also for your own, since these, after all, are dangerous creatures. It is usual to cover the ray’s sting with a piece of plastic piping during transport, but at the other end, I mean back here at the pool, it was then a matter of removing the plastic hose from each. Not to do so is to invite infection, but to do so is at least as hazardous to the handler as to the ray itself. It was, I confess, a slightly hair-raising operation and I couldn’t have done it alone. So far, at any rate, it would seem to have been effective, but naturally it should be stressed (as the speaker now notices one of his cousin’s youngest children, a boy of perhaps seven, wander up to the edge of the pool and try to peer in), I should have stressed at the very beginning that these beautiful creatures can also be very dangerous, and when you lift up a section of the lid, as I have just done, and they come to the surface like a club of old wraiths having been stirred by some unexpected knock at the door, don’t for one moment suppose that it would be safe to put your hand in and give them an affectionate stroke (the cousin now calling the boy away from the edge) as you might have considered doing if you’d encountered similar rays in a so-called touchpool at a sea-life centre. These rays have not had their stings removed and this is not, I repeat, not a touchpool.

It may be, after all, that to the bereaved speaker, as to a storyteller, a peculiar authority befalls. Yet he pauses once more, curious as to how long he can continue without someone, perhaps his aunt, breaking into ridicule, or at any rate passing some kind of comment.

— What do you feed them on? blushes the teenage daughter of another cousin.

— On shrimps, he replies, a little snappily. Fillets of whitefish, trout, river perch, with occasional live food such as earthworms and red mosquito larvae.

— What’s a touchpool? asks the small boy still lingering near the lip of the unroofed section.

— A good question, declares the grief-stricken man, in a voice louder and more trembling than he might have wished.

He realises in a flash how careful he must be in his choice of words now, already risen up inside all his hatred for the commercialisation of rays that has, in so many coastal resorts around the world, reduced the experience of seeing to one of touching, as if they were puppies to be stroked or rabbits to have placed in one’s lap, um likkel inkydinky strokey. No, he has to rein himself in here — otherwise he will frighten the young boy, not to mention appear quite crackers to this gathered group of friends and loved ones. He must, if only for the sake of a certain decorum, fight against the impulse to spit out the euphemistic and quietly nauseating compound phrase ‘touchpool’ and denounce in the most vituperative terms all those who have ever been responsible for participating in, or merely encouraging, a state of affairs whereby visitors to an aqua-life centre can feel at liberty, or feel even that it is their right, to touch these creatures, when all the research stresses that rays have extremely sensitive skin all too readily susceptible to trauma. Still the words rush out of him.

— The last thing in the world you should do to a ray, he says, is stroke it, not to mention exclaim aloud, as I have heard people do in marine-life centres around the world, Ooh, it doesn’t feel like anything I felt before, or It feels, ugh, like fondling a giant frog, or Just like wet rubber, and so on. The sooner the world is rid of touchpools the sooner people might start properly respecting these extraordinary creatures. I say the last thing in the world, but (and here his gaze wanders away beyond the church-goers, and beyond the cousin and wife who had been stuck in traffic on the road from London but have now appeared at the door and mutely joined the others) actually I have witnessed worse something even more disgraceful in the case of a sea-life centre on the eastern seaboard of the United States. An official was seated right beside the touchpool, with a cap pulled down over his eyes, while a group of boys not all that much older than you, I shouldn’t imagine (his raised right forefinger here directly trained on the cousin’s boy near the edge), played at pulling their tails as they went gliding past. The boys thought this was just such a hoot and the official, employed it should be said by a company purportedly committed to the preservation of our great marine world and all the inhabitants of our oceans, merely maintained a blind eye. They were trying to catch then tug along the rays by their tails, worse than swinging cats, and of course the only reason why these little horrors, these mindless shrimps who might have taken a different attitude to the whole thing if they had been warned in advance of having testosterone whipped out of them with piano-wire, the only reason why they were able to do what they did — besides the grotesque and wilful neglect of the fake-dozing official — was because the stings of these rays had been removed. I allude here to an act of barbarity regarding not just the spines but the bulk of the tails altogether, a barbarity most readily appreciated by visiting one of these marine concentration camps, I choose my words carefully, these commercialised marine torture chambers, and witness for yourselves the amputations and the torture chambers and for the ray, for the rays –

He loses his thread and breaks off what was in danger of becoming a rant. He calls to his cousin and the wife whose name, alas, escapes him, please to come in and have a glass of wine or a cup of tea, as he makes his way across the room to welcome them both.

Then his mischievous aunt, always one for keeping up a comical or embarrassing situation if she can, calls out in a high-pitched theatrical voice:

— And tell us, pray: what are the creatures’ names, my dear?

And a few of the mourners laugh and he, suddenly mindful of a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, also known to the aunt (but very far, in fact, from her mind), who were once just an ordinary sad bunch of people but became permanently radiant-faced after getting the glory, replies with all due gravity:

Taylor, Audrey, Hilary and Mallarmé, one male and three females.

Sometimes a house is bigger than a heart, an apparently crazy thought, scarcely stands to irreason: a house is always bigger. But the thinker of the heart knows that in its pull, voracity, embrace and engulfing power it is at least as colossal as the mouth: it sucks up an ocean, casts out decades, burns down at a quiver forest after forest, searing soaring seeking or holding onto its prey, its inseparable maker, in a valley of kings of its own making. But sometimes a house is bigger. You can huff and you can puff but the walls won’t give, making the heart collapse, taking it all in at its own pace, a matter of a minute or a year and the house has prised open the heart and built itself so big inside it sprawls out finally standing alone with the heart pulverised, faked within, beyond repair. She recognises this in you and fears you have no sense of it. You know nothing of this.

Three days after the funeral you drive her to Heathrow. In the receding visibility of the security line winding towards the departure lounge, her green shoes and lower body already gone, she turns back and sees you in tears, but she is always weeping first. It is unclear when you will next see one another, if ever, this miraculous relationship that has been going on already for years; she is fearful for you to the trembling tips of her fingers for what will happen now as you head back down the long road west through the summer dusk anxious already for the creatures abandoned that morning. There is the calm of water-lights, the shade and cool of this other world restfully alert to the eye, buried in time, the placid underworld and prehistoric clarity of sitting beside the great tank and watching. You establish a routine in your solitude as keeper, maintaining the quality of the water with the pH value at seven, and the temperature thermostatically regulated to between 24 and 27ºC, ensuring a good supply of oxygen to the tank via the filter outlet, removing faeces and left-over food from the substrate using the vacuum siphon, making regular partial water changes to the tank to avoid the build-up of ammonia, nitrite and nitrate, and of course feeding these creatures, securing the appropriate supplies of shrimp, whitefish, perch, occasionally mussels and squid, as well as earthworms, along with a variety of plant foods such as cucumber and lettuce leaves.

In the doldrums of grief these blazing dog-days alone unflaggingly you patrol the extensive gardens on a small tractor, cutting the chaotic former lawns back to something resembling a controlled state, weeding the former flowerbeds, assaulting the high hedges toting an electric hedge-trimmer like a machine-gun, sweat pouring off you as you shift load after load of grass and weeds and hedge-cuttings dry as a tinderbox down to the bottom of the garden to stack it up on a fire along with the steady flow of combustible material from inside the house, the innumerable papers bills pieces of correspondence, bits of bereft wood from here or there. In the dazzling heat of these raw grief-days you work with mole-like speed and feverish determination to clear as much as you can of the jungle that was once garden, your father’s swards, your mother’s joy untended, the flowerbeds infuriated with brambles nettles thistles and other weeds, all orderliness choked up in the two and a half years since she died, and making sorties into the drawing room cupboards and bureau-drawers and edging your way furtively, unsteadily, eyes swimming, before setting foot in the end in your father’s study, ruinous reliquary of the all-in archive and bibliography of remains.

You encounter, but it is already too late, your father’s things: the sturdy, built-in, ceiling-high shelves of old books never read or read in youth fifty or sixty years ago, gathering dust more or less untouched ever since, the numerous boxes and cases and cabinets stuffed, the diffuse array of small wooden tables, some of them of your father’s own construction, and the great oak desk piled high with all the gubbins of the inveterate pipe-smoker and former proof-reader and graphic design artist, the papers, the pens, the rulers and magnifying glasses, the erasers, paper knives, inks, ashtrays, debris of stationery, calendars, jottings, newspaper clippings and other memoranda stretching back twenty-five years or more on the surface of the desk alone, untouched since his wife, some four or five years earlier, acted a madness of Miss Havisham in reverse, blundering into her husband’s sanctuary, careering maniacally tipping over tables, pushing over pictures, like the strangely unreal stylised portrait of her father-in-law taken in a photographer’s studio in Ealing in the 1930s, scattering papers and implements, tearing down books, since which time he stopped working in his study or stopped retreating there to sit in his melancholy old age, taking temporary respite from the otherwise more or less constant responsibility of looking after his beloved wife, mad as an attic as she was, and never again disturbing the disturbance she had created in that berserk interlude but letting the place be, archive of chaos, overrun by spiders and mice.

You encounter, too too late, not only his collected works already scattered but in the deep drawers of the great oak desk and boxes and cases and cabinets the remains of all else, every letter, document and photograph relating to the family, from birth to death certificate, from toddler holiday snaps to terminal correspondence, and of the lives of your father’s father and mother, the last deranging flotsam casting up as from a kaleidoscope of sepia a photograph from Bexhill-on-Sea in full beachwear circa 1920, another of your mother’s grandparents, labourers on the farm in Scotland never before or again to be pictured, circa 1890, another of your mother’s father’s father from the Highland Games even further back, caber-tossingly dark and in the vestiges now yours to keep or consign to the almost daily garden pyre or further trip to the tip. With folders containing heating bills and letters exchanged on the subject of the boiler from a quarter of a century ago, or documentation relating to the extension built and the purchase and sale of the house you had previously all lived in, the bundling up and dispatch is almost automatic, but in the case of more personal relics, however apparently trifling, you can linger and lose all sense of perspective before deciding no, not now, not yet, and returning the folder to its place in the drawer.

It is practically crushing you, this end of the end, the ends altogether, coming together, end upon end of the world of your father and mother and family, house and history to be from now on adrift in your body alone. The end presses your forehead as if it were necessary for material to retreat that can no longer do so, slide away when everything has already gone. You remember a book to which he was strangely attached, called The Hampdenshire Wonder, and find it with surprising speed. You blow the dust off and you laugh. You laugh with your father. You feel his laugh in you. You have never read this book and wonder why. He showed it to you perhaps thirty years ago and you vaguely recall immersing yourself in the opening pages but no further. You wonder what he so liked about it. You connect it with the word ‘hydrocephalic’, which you hear, as you have always done, in the precise humorous intonation of your father.

Watching is also to be watched, the singular oddity of bearing witness to these creatures sometimes buried and virtually out of sight in the substrate, eyes nonetheless kept free, pricked up like cats’ ears, at attention in the quartz sand, again and again picked out after the event the realisation of another creature realising you, and at other times as if electrically surging, a trained-up veritable school of four, unforeseeably together, one by one or in ones and twos, ghost birds flapping up through the water, plapping at the surface and looking, yes, from the wings, in alary formation, indisputably on the watch at you, at where you are if not at you, the body rising through the water seen in its pulsing forcing resurrecting swoop, showing its creamy white underside, the gill slits and mouth organised as a smile returning to the world dolphin-like yet phantasmic, this rearing up of a living white sheet of ventral alien face, then the superbly fickle jilting gesture, surfacing or retreating, the flip and show of the dorsal view, the waving through the water of backs dark and gorgeous spotted, another world of eyes, the ocellate gliding, neither peacock, leopard, butterfly nor chameleon, but motoro, the rays all four the same variant or morph, name unknown. Following the torrid automatism of war in the garden, traipsing your father’s hand-built chicken-wire wheelbarrow full of tinder-dry grass, weeds and hedge-trimmings, like a bier down to the site of the daily fire, and driving out to the municipal tip with yet more filled black bin-liners and objects you can no longer face, sweltering days ending always this pseudo-iterative somnambulism, this delirium between repetition and alteration, in the late afternoon you stop, fetch out a bottle of chilled Aspall cider from the refrigerator, and sit down in your father’s favourite armchair, immersed in the rhythms of coming

and going, rising and falling in the cool shadow-life of the great tank.

There is a new literature. It does something new with people. It has different slownesses and spectralities. It celebrates nanothinking.

There is the lull and leave off, the to you surprising compassion shown by many of the official bodies, not the coroner or registrar or undertaker certainly, but so many mostly unnamed others, representing the utility companies, your father’s bank, local authorities, the pensions company, the tax office, the solicitors entrusted with the original of the will. There is time given. It is a time that never existed before. It is as if your father’s phrase ‘from time to time’, apparently so casual, opens up like a cuckoo clock, intimating a time in between the one and the other, a mad gift. Even your employer proves unexpectedly benign, granting you compassionate leave (officially described as ‘sick’), for as long as, so long as, what does the voice say? You try to recall the manager’s exact words: three months, is it? What does it matter?

You will stay here now in this house with Taylor, Audrey, Hilary and Mallarmé, in need as they after all are of almost constant attention. Really, so much care must be taken: it is a far more onerous task than having children or looking after elderly loved ones. You will watch in this house for as long as it takes.

In the first days after the funeral there are occasional visits or calls from neighbours, further cards of sympathy and calls from family friends. The farmer down the lane offers to help with carting stuff off to the tip and tidying the garden, his wife to collect supplies of food for ‘the fish’, as she insists on calling them, from the city where, some twenty miles off, you have to get such supplies. Someone else, an old friend of your father, calls and tries to put you in touch with another local man who specialises in house-clearance, to move along the business of sorting out the house. You politely decline all these offers, but when the farmer’s wife asks for the second time within that first fortnight when are you going to put the house on the market you struggle to remain courteous. As in the story of the man who cannot go into the street because he is absolutely sure he will kill everyone he meets, you find yourself driven deeper into the solitude that is in any case never yours.

It is while you sit with your Aspall, eyes sunk in the cool shadow-life of the great tank, that you talk to the girl last seen in green shoes. In the calm of water-lights, in this placid lost world of motoro, you drift for hours, telling her what you have been doing and thinking, enabling her to follow your life by telephone. When the conversation ends it is always the same. It is time to feed the rays. You relish the almost dissociated pleasure of seeing them seeing food on offer and rising to the surface accordingly, or remaining oblivious, at a distance, like Auden’s reindeer, altogether elsewhere, picking up a morsel of whitefish, shrimp or piece of cucumber only after it has come to rest on the substrate. It is strangely compelling to observe them eat while being unable to see what it is they are eating, since their eyes are on the other side of their bodies, the sense suggested of a communication between dorsal and ventral not of the order of vision, and the faintly frightening plates of teeth, the closest resemblance the rays have to their cousins the sharks, as they inexorably imperviously grind up their prey living or dead.

One day the telephone rings and it is H, asking if you would read something from Shakespeare on French radio. You laugh because she always makes you laugh.

— In French?

— No, darling, in English.

She asks you how you are. You want to tell her that you fear you are going crazy. In fact you merely note your unease at what you call the disappearance of the house.

— You must film it, darling.

You want to say yes, but the word stops in your throat. Instead:

— What is the Shakespeare?

— It is Clarence’s dream. Will you do it?

And so a couple of days later, at an hour agreed, the radio station calls and they record you reading, over the telephone:

Methoughts I was embarked for Burgundy,

And in my company my brother Gloucester,

Who from my cabin tempted me to walk

Upon the hatches. Thence we looked toward England,

And cited up a thousand fearful times

During the wars of York and Lancaster

That had befall’n us. As we paced along

Upon the giddy footing of the hatches,

Methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in stumbling

Struck me, that sought to stay him, overboard

Into the tumbling billows of the main.

Lord, lord, methought what pain it was to drown:

What dreadful noise of waters in my ears,

What ugly sights of death within my eyes!

Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks,

Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,

Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,

Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels.

Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in those holes

Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept,

As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,

Which wooed the slimy bottom of the deep,

And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.

You hear methoughts in your father’s playful fashion, like ‘me wife’: someone is hearing me thoughts. The recording is not good. To disguise it they later layer a crashing of waves over you. You sound as if you are speaking from the deep, within the tumbling billows.

The next day you tell me:

— Shakespeare has been filming the house.

You had a terrible night and could hardly sleep. You had a nightmare of unimaginable length and intensity. You attribute it to your ‘marine correspondence’ with H.

— I dream of gravel. I’m going to miss the funeral because of it. Time’s recoiled and we are completely lost in the logistics of acquiring the gravel, the agitation about having the right kind. It’s as if I were dreaming intermittently aware that what’s happening is an allegory but I keep forgetting this. The surface of the body is such a strange kettle, I remind you, with no scales, and even the dermal denticles on the dorsal surface affording limited protection at best, the ventral surface another hopeless hazard of sensitivity. We are arguing about it. I tell you I know that gravel is already a perversion of the standard natural habitat of mud, sand or silt, and no amount of scientific research will bring a satisfactory resolution to the question of the right kind of gravel, granted that gravel it needs must be. I know that the very fineness of sand or mud creates an unsustainable havoc, filter-blocking and anaerobic in the artificially generated world of a home aquarium. You suggest that there are numerous other, equally important issues to be concerned about, such as the type and quality of water, filters, pumps and so on, but I’m not to be deterred. I accuse you of being no better than the so-called authorities who blandly note the abrasive character of gravel as a minor problem to be avoided, since it can lead to infections of a fungal or bacterial nature. Only as it were in passing do they note that such infections are ‘almost inevitably fatal’. The ray is but a trifle, easy picking, so many more in the sea. Like cookies churned out on a factory conveyor-belt: such is the tone. I can see I am upsetting you, comparing you quite unjustly with these scientifically trained specialists and collectors, but I’m on my high horse and haranguing like a crazy man:

— Then there are the online dealers. Replaceable ray, dish of the day, this one or that! Initially set you back a hundred dollars, my friend, but if it arrives damaged or dead, refund guaranteed, we’ll dispatch another within twenty-four hours! If, on the other hand, you get it home and it acclimatises and seems happy but after three weeks begins to develop fin curl or abrasions from that gravel you selected for the substrate, or if it turns out the creature never really developed an appetite and has succeeded in starving itself, such apparently suicidal behaviour not unknown, if it dies it dies: just think of it as one of those balloons that go flat, simply pick up the phone or get online and order another one!

— I notice that you have stopped listening and put in your earphones and are playing music, but this only makes me rail the more.

— Nothing sharp that might abrade the creature’s ventral surface. That’s the main thing. It’s hardly a question of driving down to your local gravel pit and filling up the car in a series of stealthy operations: so many black bags filled, like all our recent life in reverse. Obviously it is necessary to realise that there is no such thing as aquarium gravel in the plain and simple sense. Nothing is reliable. If you spend most of your adult life burying yourself in a mass of tiny rocks you perhaps should expect to get into a few scrapes. But don’t imagine the guys at the building supplies company are going to give us much useful information or assistance in a situation like this. We’re strictly on our own!

— So then I’m sitting on the dining room floor surrounded by bags of gravel, the sort known as quartz sand, with a grain thickness of 0.4 to 1mm. You’re nowhere to be seen. Nothing’s been done. There’s no sign of the frame or any of the other equipment. I’m working my way through, bag after bag. From one bag to the next I inspect every little pebble, taking it like snuff between the thumb, forefinger and middle-finger, feeling, turning and assessing its abrasiveness, accepting or rejecting accordingly. I’m distracted by the thought that among all the hundreds of thousands of tiny granules there may be a few, a child’s handful or just one, a solitary single serrated little bastard that will injure and quite possibly lead to death. And I’m going as fast as I can, but all the time I’m thinking to myself: I’m missing the funeral.

— Then I wake up. I’m covered in sweat and my heart is thumping like a nightclub. It’s pitch dark and I can hardly breathe.

I call you and begin by asking where you are, even though you are always in the same place. I depend on this routine. As you sit in your father’s armchair you can tell me about Mallarmé, Hilary, Taylor and Audrey. It’s calming to hear your voice and description of the movements in the pool. But then there’s no knowing which way the conversation might go. A couple of days after the gravel-dream (which you tell me comes back repeatedly over the nights that follow, and which you relate to a disquiet you have about ‘no substrate at all’), you declare:

— I am going blind.

— What do you mean?

— I mean blind. I catch myself staring, as if I’m simply failing to shut my eyes, and what I see is dissolving. It’s as if I couldn’t sleep, but I go out like a light. Things appear bright and blurred at the same time.

— That’s just what you’ve been going through, the burden and strain of everything. It will get better. Try to sleep longer tonight. Have a lie-in.

But the thing persists. A couple of days later you refer again to troubled vision and then, after a pause:

— I’m overlooking myself.

Sometimes I wonder if I hear you correctly, your accent foreign and still unfamiliar (doubtless in part that is why I love your voice), an impression accentuated by the telephone and hundreds of miles between us. One cannot endlessly ask, Could you say that again? or Did you say you’re overlooking? Signifying what? A surreal game of Whisper Down the Lane tracks our every syllable.

— In France they call it Arab Phone.

— Sounds offensive. What are you talking about?

— No more than calling it Chinese Whispers. I’m sorry, I was thinking out loud. It took a moment to realise you said ‘overworking’…

— I didn’t. I said I’m overlooking. But you’re right, as always, my love: I don’t actually know what I meant by it. We might have invented another game: Overlook.

— What is this? Shakespeare meets Stephen King?

— Sorry. It’s an odd word, I see that. I’m overlooked in my birth.

— I guess you’re overlooking the rays.

— Yes, I’m looking after them. But I only meant I have this strange feeling of looking too much, seeing too hard. Like I said, things are blurred and bright at the same time.

— So: go to a doctor or optometrist or whatever.

There follows soon afterwards a torturously lengthy examination process at the local optician’s, with the optometrist over-close, fitting the measuring cage to the face, quietly spoken, insinuatingly moralistic:

— And when did you last have an eye-test, sir?

The examination seems interminable.

— I’m now going to shine this light into your right eye, sir. Very bright is it, sir? We’re almost done here, if you can just bear with me for a few more minutes. Turn to the right, please: look straight ahead. That’s splendid. And to the left…

— Hmm, says the optometrist finally, his breath cloudy in your face: That’s not so good.

Yes, finally you are told, your eyes have grown markedly weaker, and new glasses are provided with unexpectedly promptness.

— Are they helping? I ask him in due course, as easy-going as I can.

— Let’s wait and see.

You are an increasing worry, more elusive, desultory. I miss you intensely and wish I could join you but work commitments prevent me for at least three months. In the past we have undergone longer periods of being apart, but now things seem more precarious and difficult.

There’s no substrate, you say.

Words appear to you in a dream: ‘In the grave you hear no sound / But all the things in the ground.’ And then another time: ‘The asseveration comes in the night.’

You keep dreaming that you are late for the funeral. You miss it altogether. You miss most of the reception as well, like the cousin who turns up only at the end. You haven’t organised anything properly. You still have to do the gravel. This recurrent nightmare proceeds, you believe, from a sense of outrage at the so-called specialists who have the gall to suggest that there is no need for a substrate. It may come as quite a surprise for the creatures on arrival and they will certainly experience discomfort, for they are accustomed to using their pelvic fins for shifting through the substrate and they’ll find themselves slipping horribly. But they can get used to it, these specialists imply, as if these creatures that so love to bury themselves, whether out of sudden fear or simply in order to express a deep behavioural instinct, the delight in covering themselves so that only the eyes protrude, and the joy in blowing water into the substrate, to spout up morsels of food, could readily adapt to the imposition of a completely different, nonspecific gravity, the carpet pulled out from under their ghost-white bellies.

I remember when you first mentioned these creatures, around the time of your mother’s death. You came to see me, not long after, and said in the car as I was driving us out of the airport that you’d like to visit a sea-life centre of some kind to see if they had any rays. What a strange man, I thought, how I love you. Who else would come out with a remark like that, more or less the first thing you say to someone having not seen them in several months?

And so the next day we located somewhere, in fact one of the oldest aquaria in the country, in a little seaside town a couple of hours’ drive away, and sure enough they had a ray pool or, as they called it, a touchpool. It was in that dead period, no longer winter, not yet spring, with a raw wind blowing off the ocean, and we were the only ones there, besides the girl who worked at the aquarium who was feeding them. It was the first of many trips to marine-life centres, but I’ll never forget the strangeness of that first time. I don’t think I had ever in my life really looked at a ray or given a moment’s reflection to the subject. I guess I fed off your fascination, and also caught something from the girl, since she seemed surprisingly well-informed about these creatures and at the same time obviously fond of them. It still feels odd to talk of being fond of rays, I guess, but standing there with you and the girl (despite the freezing cold and gray blank of the afternoon) I came to share something of what you called this ‘new imaginary’. I mean, when I looked at these fish, really looked at one, for the first time, up close, in detail: weird!

Of course we didn’t know at this time about the injurious effects of touchpools. The girl eventually asked would you like to touch one. I said, don’t they sting? She said they’ve had them removed. An image of strange pathos came into my mind: the art of archery, without arrows. It’s a constant discombobulation to reflect on what we overlook, for of course then it was plain as day the creatures at the base of their tails featured these pinkish stumps. Your distaste for the trade began right then: I could see it. Driving back to my apartment I saw that you were sobbing. I assumed it had to do with your mother, but all you said was:

— Those pointless stumps!

On later trips to marine-life centres you would often become visibly enraged at seeing the spines had been snipped off, if that’s the right phrase. Doubtless an understatement. ‘Sawn off’ is more apt, more in accord with the brutality of the act, even if it is done with an anaesthetic like Finquel.

The first we witnessed were a cow-nose variety, not the loveliest on the eye, but still they were eerily engrossing. Even then, on that first encounter, when the girl invited you, you wouldn’t touch. Already there was a certain reserve in relation to these creatures who were to acquire such centrality in our life. I couldn’t simply say they were beautiful, because there is also something uncomfortably negative about them. They’re never exactly a happy-go-lucky sight. They always remain wayward. Irreproachably creatures of elsewhere is how I think of them. Even if you are close, as we were that afternoon, to this fellow with a sad stump rendering him completely harmless, and he comes bobbing up through the surface and looks up at you like a blind pet spaniel. You can feel you’re infinitely far away from him, but still there’s this singular unease he generates. Gazing in a quite detached way, just as you might find yourself other creatures in an aquarium such as sharks, still you get caught up short somehow. You are unable to have a clear impression of what perspective or dimension to look at them from. Are they upside down or back to front, fat or thin, facing you or away? How can this creature be looking at me? Fish don’t look at you. Makes no sense.

Neither fish nor fowl, they move like moles in the gravel of the substrate, burrowing and blowing up air, like animated pancakes, or stay at rest on the bottom, half-hidden dark moons. Or they glide through the water like ghosts on a shopping spree in an empty mall. But the otherworldliness is constantly undercut by a kind of normality. They gently bump into one another and shift accordingly, like courteous commuters. They eat with their little plates of teeth, grinding up whatever it is they select as the plat du jour. They shit into the watery depths, like muting birds in flight. They indulge in sexual congress, though it was a fair number of visits to sea-life centres before finding ourselves one day, in Portugal, peculiarly a party to that voyeurism.

How to talk about them? They are eerie machines for creating and overturning words. Every time you think you have come up with an appropriate way of describing them, a submarine bird or robotic frittata or psychodelic beret, you are undone. You’re mere bystanders. They’re Teflon: nothing sticks because in reality they are the cooks, the makers, somnifluent agents of provocation and alterity in a maddening game with invisible rules in operation before you set eyes on them and being perpetually revised. But nothing sparks talking like the constraints of doing so. Our telephone conversations thus find respite of sorts, from the more or less constant anxieties over which we range, regarding nightmares and eye problems, the apparently never-ending business of clearing the house and gardens, and how rawly we experience each other’s absence.

One morning (for it is morning in my time-zone) you sip from your glass of ice-cold Aspall and describe how Mallarmé is nudging up the side of the tank to within a foot of your face. From the patina of ocellation you have learnt to distinguish easily between the rays and, picturing these differences, I have memorised them so that I can follow. Of course the single male is the most immediately identifiable, having claspers.

— It’s a completely different world, you say.

I assume you’re referring to the pool. But you go on:

— The totter has gone.

I have to cast my mind back.

— The beautiful lionish man: vanished! He hasn’t been there since we saw him there together, just before the funeral. I meant to tell you. It’s a completely different world.

— At the tip?

— Everything is being stripped away. I can’t express it. I’m experiencing new, incredible possibilities. It’s a kind of magical sharpness, as if shadows have light, and the totter’s disappearance belongs to a time that is coming back but for the first time. It has to do with that mimosa thing I told you about. It’s a kind of upside-down space of coincidence, a portal. I can’t stay…

Your voice is strained and I’m having real difficulty following what you are saying.

— What is happening there? Are you missing me?

— I can’t wait to see you again. But the weirdest thing has just happened. I wonder if I’m not going completely off my head.

A long pause ensues. An expanse of hundreds of miles of deep cold sea dangling the frailty of a telephone is not a reassuring medium for a long-term relationship.

— What do you mean?

— I’ll write. I love you.

Then you hang up. I call back but there’s no answer.

There is no internet at the house, but you must have gone, as you sometimes do, to the café in town to write: the Tea Party, as it’s quaintly called. For a couple of hours later an email arrives, in which you explain that yesterday afternoon, having just overseen the day’s final fire of ripped-up nettles, clipped brambles, hedge trimmings and scythed grasses, eyes a-blur stinging and watery from acrid smoke, a slight breeze at the fireside an almost pleasurable twisting of a knife swirling smoke one way then another, walking up the steep back lawn towards the house bulking up with almost manorial proportions above you, it occurs to you, a decision precisely contrary to all your desires and hopes. You’re going to sell the house. You phone the estate agent and a meeting is arranged. And so this morning the gentleman duly appears and enthuses and proposes an asking price and takes photos, starting with the gardens from this and that boundary or angle, standing on a woodworm-eaten ladder (a big man, perspiring in a suit and tie, trying to get the best photogenic perspective) which snaps clean through under his weight and he tumbles vaudeville roly-poly down the slope of yellowing grass. And inside he clicks and slicks away at this and that room, deterred only here or there. Naturally, unphotographably, your father’s study remains the last stronghold of chaos. The biggest obstacle, of course, is the first thing inside the front door (but Shakespeare, you want to say, is working on it). The agent’s lack of surprise suggests he has been tipped off (down in the town things get about). Encountering what was once a dining room now a major aquatic display he blandly enquires what you plan to do with it.

— Not, he queries chuckling, presumably to be part of the fixtures and fittings?

— I’d be taking that with me, you say, struck momentarily by the enormity of doing so.

— What are they in there anyway? asks the man, stooping a little and peering in.

And then one of them, Taylor, flaps into vision, and it occurs to you that you haven’t in fact shared the secret of the rays with anyone since the funeral.

— Curious, exclaims the visitor. Like an underwater kite.

There is now a delayed version, you suggest, a shadow-replay of his falling through the ladder five minutes earlier and almost breaking his legs when, his curiosity getting the better of him, the agent goes to put his hand near the surface of the water as Taylor edges up close and you, rallying to the defence of both parties, pull the arm back, exclaiming at the danger of the spine lashing his hand. Stung at any rate mentally, the estate agent remarks that it is not going to be easy transporting a contraption of dangerous creatures that size and you have to agree. Surveying the upstairs rooms he more than once poses the question of the fate of other furnishings and items obviously capturing his business eye.

— Some nice furniture, he remarks. Will you be instructing the auctioneers in town?

A query too far for you at this moment, you merely note you have not yet decided what to do with it, and the agent with newfound gusto and boldness avers that while the condition of the house, so obviously in need of modernisation, is not going to put off a prospective purchaser, given that the price would be tailored to that fact, and while such a person would be attracted as much as anything else by the size of the plot of land coming with the property, nonetheless a bit of tidying up and clearing space in the bedrooms and the drawing room downstairs might be advantageous for the purpose of viewings.

— Your father’s study in particular, he sighs with but a thin veneer of professional decency.

He leaves you with the promise of papers to sign, coming with luck in the post next day, and an unnecessarily impactive handshake.

Five minutes later you too drive out, seeking replenishments of your favourite bottled cider.

It happens, or has already begun, on your return. There is a sound coming from the kitchen. You can hear it above the noise made by the water-pump in the pool as you come through the front door. There is, you write, a resting place in every mental archive, a discrete space of effects walled up without a listener’s awareness. Most remain unnoticed in the dull daily roar. Then there are the others, those isolated, unmistakable sounds which, once heard again, transport more directly and more frighteningly than any odoriferous power of reminiscence or snapshot visual recall. Of course there is a kind of common stock, shared files of archetypal distinction, the sound of rock falling, a footstep where none is expected, the thrown vocable of a diabolical chuckle, the autumnal rustling of trees, a snatch of distant seas shrugged off in the dozy instant. But there are also sounds peculiarly your own, received and buried, as it were, in your heart of heart. It is what you mean, you remind me, when you tell me I am your pristine.

The sound you hear on coming back through the front door, carrying over the peaceful bubbling of the pumps in the ray pool, is a screech. You recognise it immediately: it is the shriek, initially a scrawny cry but rising, made by your mother locked in the bathroom upstairs one night twenty years ago, shortly after the local GP downstairs administers a final dose of morphine, on the occasion of the first death, the deciding death. And now coming into the house the hallucination, for you tell yourself it could only be such, is that unmistakable but faint cry, started up from you can’t think where. It is a savage gutturality, a fugal scree. After a moment of absolute disorientation you think of the upstairs bathroom, where you recall she would not respond to your murmured entreaty but kept up this speechless screech intolerably, forcing you in due course to let her be and return downstairs. Climbing the stairs again now the sound, you note, has outstripped you. The upstairs landing is silent and still. Coming face to face with a bathroom door that is closed, however, re-establishes your disquiet with a sharp, unpleasant flutter. Always in the time of your parents the door of the bathroom, if unoccupied, would be ajar. With trepidation you open it. There is nothing: a once pleasing up-to-date emerald-green bathroom now unequivocally in need of what the estate agent called modernisation, the chrome covers to the taps long since broken off, the cracked cover to the cistern leaning against the wall below the window, the bath and bidet stained bone-gray and cobwebbed. Then you realise it must have been the estate agent, closing the door behind him as he was making his tour of the house.

Your mother is in the kitchen, sitting at the table.

— Is your father out?

She is sitting with a cup of coffee, with her daily crossword, shopping list and pen on the table, along with her cigarettes, a lighter and ashtray.

— He has died, you say.

— Typical. Is there anything you’d like me to get while I’m down in town?

She has put out her cigarette and picked up her ballpoint to write.

Yes, you think, before or beyond any religious belief, the dead speak. You don’t choose them any more than they choose you. Masters and mistresses of restraint, they hardly ever raise their voices. They try, if anything, to keep their commentary in wraps, their interventions airy nothings, their refrains mere janglery. Yet life is mostly a matter of how you listen to them.

— You’re smoking again.

— People who don’t smoke don’t exist.

— But you gave up.

— Once a smoker always a smoker. When did he die, did you say?

— Three weeks, no, nearly four weeks ago.

She then fills in a crossword clue, precisely as if she is in a world of her own and has neither spoken nor listened.

— Are you well?

She scrutinises you over her spectacles as you continue to stand, as if paralysed, at the kitchen door.

It is, without a shred of doubt, your mother, restored like the work of an old master, but alive, here in the kitchen, smoking, drinking coffee, doing the crossword, talking to you, apparently capable of driving down to town and getting shopping.

— What of the Alzheimer’s?

The moment you utter the word you realise you had never in her hearing done so. You begin now to advance into the kitchen, walking like an invalid, supporting your slow progress by keeping a hand on the counter as you take one step forward, then another. You wonder what has happened to your body.

— Alzheimer’s? she says, quizzically. That’s an invention, dear boy, not my bag at all. Of course it has currency, as you call it. Don’t get me onto currents. I lost my marbles. To each her own. I’m losing my marbles I said to you, I’m sure you remember (at which you nod).

And now you are standing in front of her at the table and trying to take her hands and bring her to her feet and gather her in your arms. And as you do so your strength seems to return. No longer seeing her, you hold, buried in the warren of this embrace, alternately closing your eyes as if to protect them and gazing out through the window at the forsaken ghost of a garden, you regale her with details of everything that has happened up to this moment, since your father died, every nuanced little thing. And you want to tell her what happened to her in turn, what it was to lose face, both of you, your mother no longer recognising you, speaking to the dead mother of a mother living but no longer capable of being addressed.

— The last time I saw you, you whisper at her ear, a weightless wisp of her dead gray hair caressing your cheek, was two and a half years ago and you didn’t recognise me. You were in a care home, past caring or home. For months already you were powerless of speech, incontinent, reduced to liquid foods, unable to follow even fragments of conversation. Before that, still here at home, for months and months already you’d lost the plot. You’d sit in your armchair in the drawing room, in wandering glassy-eyed silence for minutes or hours on end, then rise, walk on autopilot through the dining room into the kitchen, stare out through the window, trying to fool an observer into perhaps thinking you were looking at the bird-table where your once-beloved blue-tits, nuthatches and woodpecker might be pecking at the peanuts, perhaps actually looking at the bird-table, perhaps neither looking nor feigning to do so, then walk back to the drawing room and sit again, glassy-eyed again, or else again here, in the kitchen, try to do one of the things you used to be able to do, such as make a cup of coffee or get yourself a cigarette or help yourself to a biscuit from the cupboard. But those days were past. You had to be followed everywhere, in case you fell over or set the house on fire. And you were still his beloved wife. He would come to see you at the care home every day after breakfast, bringing a packet of digestive biscuits and a pocketful of paper kitchen-towels for when you dribbled. He would feed you, just as if you were your birds, and afterwards wipe the dribbling, trembling, futile mouth, over and over, whether or not that morning you were willing or able to munch and crumble. You would scarcely recognise him, giving out, in the early weeks, some sigh or stammer in the semblance of acknowledgement, then not even that. It must have been around then he had his silent heart attack. He claimed you recognised him, right up to the end (and here you draw back and stare into the shifting whorls of your mother’s eyes). But I couldn’t see it.

Then she looks you over, her eyes foam-flowers, with all the clarity of yore:

— Done rabbiting? Who’s this girl you’re with? How ever did the garden get into that state? What happened to the raspberry patch, the greenhouse, my flowerbeds, the roses, the orchids, the irises, the tiger lilies, the montbretia? And what, since I could hardly fail to notice it coming through the door, is that enormous tank-thing in the dining room? What have you done with my dining room table and chairs?

In consternation I call, but you don’t pick up. Perhaps you are still at the Tea Party, waiting for me to write back. I realise anew the appalling isolation in which I have left you: I have no contact numbers for neighbours or anyone else in the vicinity. In any case it is impossible to judge the gravity of what you have written or to interpret the abrupt manner in which your message concludes. There is no signing off, no closure or explanation. You just stop, as if mid-stream. I email you asking to call me back. I try to call you repeatedly, to no avail. In the end I resort to a text message, hazarding: ‘Sometimes a house is bigger than a heart, my love.’

Early next morning you call. I am angry and worried in ways I think it best not to voice. I let you do the talking. You apologise. You tell me you had to stop writing, because the café was closing. And when you got back to the house you were suddenly overwhelmed with an incredible tiredness, as if you hadn’t slept for weeks. Omitting even to feed the rays you fell into a sleep as deep as a coma and have only just come to. You say you thought it was in your head, or the estate agent stolen back into the house and playing a trick on you, improbably hiding in your parents’ bathroom and producing a top-class imitation of your mother’s screech. But how did he know how to imitate her? No: there was no one in the bathroom. The door was closed and you couldn’t open it. Not locked, just a window you’d left open had blown the door shut and now the wind was blowing a gale through, keeping the door as if stuck fast and whistling up a sound like a mad fugue, you say, a horrible frenzied feeling subsiding as you heard the screech fade and found the door could, after all, be opened quite easily and the bathroom empty, a site of harmless ruin and cobwebs enlivened by breezes. But then in a state, you say, of high but bleary relief you went downstairs and your mother was sitting at the kitchen table, fresh as reality, puffing on a cigarette, sipping at her coffee, fiddling with the Times crossword, quizzing you about your father and asking did you want any shopping as she was planning to drive down to the town. You asked about her Alzheimer’s, you say, and suddenly realised you’d never used the word to her face. It was mortifying. You say you were frozen rigid at first but then went closer. You thought you were in Madame Tussaud’s. When you first saw her, you admit, it was unpleasant to say the least, like a huge wave of something staggeringly malodorous washing in from the sea. Not this, you thought. You couldn’t move. You were stranded at the open kitchen door in a trance, rigid, and would have called me, an ambulance, a neighbour, but so many things seemed to be happening at once. It wasn’t just your mother sitting calm as the moon, it was like curtains pulled back very sharply, to expose another veil, one giving way to the next. It was when I said the word ‘Alzheimer’s’, you say.

You were seeing things, you see that. You frame a reconstruction: you’re hallucinating, had a funny turn coming back into the house, big day, big decision to sell the place, things perhaps all too quick, calling in the estate agent straight away and his speed taking the pictures, falling through the ladder, getting the sale rolling, as he said, with luck find you a buyer before we even have the brochure printed.

— It’s the word ‘Alzheimer’s’. Its very anachronicity produces the future it traces. Do you think I’m crazy? The moment I say it my mother looks at me, her soul collaborator, innocent little girl’s blue eyes she had even when she had completely lost the plot, but looking at me now in complete possession of her senses, entirely derailed by my use of this word, as if I have made a mortally serious mistake and something is being ripped, carefully but very fast, from the top of my brain. I say Yes, I see, Mother, it’s not your word, and I’m in tears now and scarcely conscious but we’re standing embracing one another, and then I’m lying on the floor. I have wet myself and my mouth is full of the taste of blood. I’ve bitten my tongue, I realise, coming round, and I see no sign of her or of the paper, the coffee mug, cigarettes or ashtray, not even a whiff of tobacco smoke remaining. I take a shower and feel cold, as if I’m dead myself, like Clarence: as if I were drowned.

Sometimes in a pool you can see one ray has sort of sidled up along the substrate and come down on another, sort of half-covering her. There’s nothing sexual about it per se. It’s like you can’t tell if they’re even aware of it. I remember when you suggested they are curiously insensitive in this haptic dimension: they can flop down on a heater, not realise, and get burned. But then they also seem to sense more or in other ways than we do: they are always a turn or more ahead of the game. I guess it’s not so incredible. They have massive brains proportionate to the rest of their body-size. They’re a great deal more intelligent, whatever that word is supposed to signify, than sharks, and sharks are supposed to be pretty smart after all.

It’s so difficult not to project onto them what you are thinking and feeling. You see this motoro, Mallarmé for instance, lying down as in a bid for amatory adventure, spreading out over Hilary, and Hilary doesn’t seem to care an iota, being apparently quite fulfilled in the serenity of the substrate, vaguely nosing perhaps for a morsel of what you dropped into the pool half an hour earlier and Mallarmé, having settled like a spaceship, then does absolutely nothing. You think: why do that? Is it chance that Hilary’s at rest just where Mallarmé came down? Is there some surreptitious motive, is it just being friendly or is there nothing in it at all, you can’t help but picture with a smile asking yourself, when someone sidles up to you and lays most of their body area on top of you?

And there’s something about these creatures that really makes me flip, like a kind of stratifying of the universe which is, after all, in the language of astrophysics, remarkably flat. Watching rays you get to feel this in a truly spooky way. We have shared this, I think, from the beginning. It has to do with the realisation that people have such a ludicrously anthropomorphic ego-projective perception of everything. They can’t so much as glance at a fishtank without thinking of being them, inhabiting a watery world of swimming, floating, shimmying through the depths. What must it be like, you think to yourself, to have the constant noise of that water-pump and filter system, the endless inanity of nosing up and down and burrowing in the substrate, and eating whatever is provided when it is provided, and flopping on a fellow-creature if that’s how the mood takes you, or burying yourself in gravel: what sort of a life is that? And then at the same time you come to experience this quite different thing, the murky registration that, in terms of deep time, in terms of the actual timeframe of life on the planet, half a hiccup ago you were a lungfish yourself. You were decidedly less imposing-looking, but you were a not dissimilar sort of creature yourself. At which point you dimly sense a sort of vast retelling, a turning shadow cast out over the waters in the flickering light of which the projection actually goes the other way, and the refractively aleatory antics of Mallarmé with Hilary, no different now from how they would have been a couple of hundred million years ago, show us frankly what or who we are.