A little escapism

I haven’t written a blog post all year! I have a few excuses. You know, pandemics, school closures and the like. So anyway, here is a bit of fiction instead because we all need to get away from reality now and then. This one is set in my old hometown of Auckland and it goes out to that fair city. Hope the lockdown is swift and painless, like a BandAid.

The Fish Thing

By Camille Khouri ©

It was a typical Auckland day when I first met Jamie, one of those that starts with deceptive sunshine and progresses through wind, rain, back to watery sun, then throws in a full-blown thunderstorm in the afternoon. I had been in Auckland for just five days but I had found myself a flat, discovered a few bars and cafes that took my liking, and realised the predictable nature of the unpredictable weather. 

I was sitting under the awning outside a Persian cafe smoking strawberry flavoured tobacco from a hookah pipe, when hail began to pelt the road. For me, this was a true novelty because I had been living in Fiji for the past three months with nothing but sunshine and thick tropical rain. People squealed and cars slowed; I saw a small, smiling boy stick his hand out from under the awning before being jerked back to shelter by his mother. I enjoyed the hailstorm almost as much as I remember enjoying sudden changes in the weather when I was his age, running to the classroom windows to watch nature take over.  

“Flat white, please.” A girl ducked in to wait out the weather. She was wearing a thin hooded jumper that clung to her shoulders, sodden and dripping. There was a dry patch across her chest where she had been crossing her arms against the cold. I offered her a chair and a smoke from my pipe. She looked surprised but obliged.

“It feels wrong smoking this in the open, even though it’s just tobacco,” she said, after exhaling a lady-like lungs-full of scented smoke.

“It does a bit,” I said. There was a faint hint of mascara under her eyes. Her nose was small and pink-tipped. She was carrying a shoulder bag that I guessed contained University books. I liked her immediately. 

I walked her home. The sun was filtering through the clouds and causing the road to steam. She talked quietly, her voice barely carrying over the trucks that thundered down Great North Road. Her grey-blue eyes were tipped to the sky as she walked, and she barely looked at me, which gave me every opportunity to take her in. Her hair, although damp, was light and wild. Her pale jeans had patches of rain-soak, as did her small white canvas sneakers. She studied Anthropology at University. When she asked what I did, I told her I hadn’t decided yet. I didn’t tell her the real reason I could never finish a University degree. 

🐟

It started eight years earlier. I was living in Boston with my father, a political journalist. We left New Zealand when I was sixteen, after my mother died. Dad was born in America and his family lives all over the northern hemisphere, so when he landed a job at The Boston Globe, we packed up and moved there. We traveled a fair bit at first and we had been in Boston for about a year when he bought me a goldfish. It was supposed to make me feel at home but it had the opposite effect. I felt trapped. Now a small life was depending on me for existence. If I didn’t clean the tank, it would die. If I didn’t feed it, it would starve. If I didn’t want the fish, I didn’t have to let it continue in this world, with its miserable, back-and-forth, two-second-memory existence. 

I finished school and Dad wanted me to go to one of the Ivy League schools. I had the marks but I didn’t know what to study – much like the point in my life when I met Jamie. It was different then, though; I was less jaded. I thought the answer would come soon. Which of course it didn’t – or not in the way I expected. 

“What’s the fish called?” my girlfriend of the time asked.

“Goldie.”

“Bo-ring!” she laughed. I stared at her and thought: when this fish dies I am going to leave you and move away.

There was nothing wrong with that girl or that place. There has never been anything much wrong with the places or the girls. It’s just the fish keep dying is all. And I keep moving.

🐟

Jamie was different. She called one day and invited me to a party at her house. 

“It’s not going to be big.”

“What are we celebrating?”

“It’s the holidays!” 

The party turned out well, considering I got to sleep in her bed. She didn’t have any qualms about sex on the first night; she was a realist. She had framed family photographs on the walls. Her duvet was pink and smelled like soap. We talked into the early hours. It was easy to make her smile but difficult to make her laugh. And she didn’t seem impressed or even interested in my earlier life. It was refreshing; I’ve had girls sit up for hours crying over my childhood. She dismissed my mother’s death with a flick of her eyelashes.

“Hmm. Lucy’s mother died last year.”

Lucy was her best friend. Annoyingly, they were very close. I hesitated. What could I say to that? Death happens, even to mothers.

Back home at my flat, the sun was shining and I could hear the neighbours’ teenage son starting up his moped. I lay on my bed with one hand on my crotch and looked at the fish tank. Goldie blew some bubbles as he reached his puckered mouth to the surface.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“Dump the bitch,” he said.

🐟

I waited a couple of days before I asked her over. She arrived with her hair tied back in a high ponytail that swished over the shoulders of her denim jacket. She was wearing a grey, knee-length skirt and skate shoes. Over the waistband of her skirt, I glimpsed a ribbon bow from the elastic on her knickers.

   We had sex after a couple of glasses of wine, then lay on my shag rug by the bar heater, talking. 

“I think you’re quite wonderful,” I said. This was not something that would usually spring from my mouth. She smiled, her mouth tipped back and she laughed. A great sense of relief washed over my naked body. 

I shouldn’t have told her about the fish thing. I told it in a comical way, like I was some sort of misfit who placed life in the hands of fate. But she didn’t take it like that. She stared at the fish tank for a while. 

“And,” she smiled wryly, “ I suppose that makes you a bit of a nomad?”

I laughed. “I guess so!”, then proceeded to list off the countries I had visited, mostly with my father, mostly before I even invented the fish thing. While I spoke I could see that my worldliness was not getting the usual response. I loved her for that but I couldn’t stop speaking. 

Eventually, a t-shirt covered her fine shoulders and the underwear with the bow were pulled back into place.

“Where you going?” I asked. 

“I’m helping Lucy babysit tonight.”

I had expected we would spend the night together but I tried to pretend the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.

“Yeah, of course,” I said. She smiled and walked out the door.

🐟

A couple of weeks later, we were lying on her Queen size bed while rain tapped on the roof above. It was warm in her room and I was particularly taken by the pile of neatly folded laundry on her desk chair. A cone of frangipani incense burned on her windowsill. 

She was excited, the grey in her eyes pushed back to reveal a brighter blue, her hair loose and curly. She was wearing the bow underwear and a singlet. I listened as she talked about Uni. I have never met anyone who was so interested in her studies, to the point where she dreamed her lecture notes at night. When it came to exams, she didn’t need to study. She just became meditatively calm to allow the information to rush out onto the page. The way she described this knowledge flowing from her lovely head had me speechless.

The next day I tested the pH level in Goldie’s water. I had started him on new, vitamin-rich flakes but I was still giving him some of the old stuff to allow him to adjust. He was approaching a crucial age. At about three months, my Goldies become susceptible to fin rot, which can be a killer. I shone a torch over his tank and examined him. This Goldie was a googly eyed black moor. I decided to wander down to the pet centre, just for a look. 

Arriving there, I spotted a tank of black moors and called the assistant over.

“I’m not sure if we can do that,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Why don’t you want to take them home?”

“I don’t need them yet.” I shrugged and plunged my hands into my pockets.

“I’ll have to check with the manager.”

A girl was peering at me from over by the birds. She had two little boys with her, one attached to each hand. It was Lucy. She allowed the children to escape to the puppy pen and came over. I held my breath. 

“Hey. What are you doing here?” she asked. She glanced at the fish tanks. I wondered if Jamie had told her. Surely not.

“Oh, just…”

“Yes, it’s fine, but for three months, tops. If you come over to the counter, I can organise the paperwork. You’ll have to rent the tank.” It was the shop assistant. Lucy’s eyes narrowed. I looked from one woman to the other, saying nothing.

“Catch you later!” Lucy said, running to retrieve the kids who were poking at a kitten through the bars of its cage. I looked for her before I left but she had gone. I walked home slowly, uncertainty growing steadily in my chest.

🐟

Jamie was out of town for a week. When she got back, we went for pizza at Mission Bay. She was distracted, gazing at the cars rushing by on the black, wet road.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Nothing.” 

Which in girl language means everything. I began to talk too much again. I went on about Italy, making it sound as if I had been alone and self-funded, when really I had been living off a daddy allowance, staying mostly with my great-aunt. 

“How long did your fish live for in Italy?” Jamie interrupted.

“What?”

She just stared at me, one hand on her chin.

“I don’t…” I was having trouble, “I don’t think I had fish back then.” I had a girlfriend in Australia who cried at the airport. That was before I left for Fiji. She tried to stage one of those movie moments where the one being left intercepts the leaver and it all ends up happily ever after. Didn’t work, though. Goldie had developed a fungal infection. I had seen it coming.

“I think we should break up,” Jamie said. She was looking at me with her beautiful eyes. I swallowed and a sharp pain danced in my throat. “You’re just so…life is what you make it, you know? I mean, you’re really quite up yourself.” She sighed, picked up her jacket from the back of the chair and walked away.

🐟

Back at my flat, everyone was out and the fridge was whirring in the darkness. I poured myself a glass of wine and went to my room. The moon was shining through the open curtains, so I lay back on the bed in the cold light. Goldie was moving like stirred silt through the dark water. He nibbled on the glass and looked out at me, his mouth opening and closing. A bubble floated to the surface. 

“Gone, huh?” he said. 

He was very much alive.

By Camille Khouri ©