The Fish by Lloyd Jones

Author:Lloyd Jones [Lloyd Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2022-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

For weeks, months after, Mum will recall the happy glint of the sea and the bright sunshine, and to someone on the end of the phone muttering in disbelief, ‘Blue. It was perfectly blue. Not a cloud to be seen.’

We expected Carla to come home. Some thought was given to where she would sleep. It is decided she will take over the Fish’s room. The Fish can have mine. I would sleep on the couch—just for the time Carla is back for the funeral.

Carla rang a few nights later. It was late and we stood around in the hall in our pyjamas, the Fish’s covered in pictures of cowboys and Indians.

Carla sounded far away, a bit jagged, upset of course, but also apprehensive about what we would think and then say.

She spoke to Mum for a long while. Mum said, ‘I see,’ a great deal. And once, ‘No, Carla, I did not say that and I do not think that.’ A couple of times she closed her hand over the mouthpiece and turned her head away—a sign for me to lead the Fish up the end of the hall.

At last Mum held out the phone and the Fish ran towards it. His fish lips did that arguing with themselves thing, where one lip tries to climb over the top of the other.

Carla has to do all the talking. She has no idea who she is speaking to. Neither has the Fish—he looks back at us for help, for Mum to say in a whisper, ‘Tell your aunt about the bookends you made in woodwork.’

When Mum goes out to the kitchen to switch on the jug, I take over the Fish telephone-minding. The Fish doesn’t care about me eavesdropping. Carla is nattering on about when Dad used to make sandcastles with turrets, moats, shells for windows. I wonder if Dad would be surprised to hear himself remembered in that way. The Fish’s eyes bulge.

And now it is my turn. I haven’t spoken to Carla since last Christmas. I am very aware of how I sound, a bit closed, and resistant.

I must listen to her explain all over again what she just told Mum—she is in London on a job. There is no way she can get back in time for the funeral. The flights, the international dateline, and behind it all, unspoken, her fear of returning to a place she might not be able to escape from again.

As a pause at my end threatens to grow into a silence, she asks me why I have stopped writing to her.

I don’t know what to say, because I don’t know what the answer is. But it is true. Ever since Disneyland, well the night in San Diego, seeing those messages arriving to the outstretched hands, I haven’t had anything as urgent to say. I do now, however. Several times I have flattened out an aerogram to start, then given up. To explain what happened is to feel it all over again. It is a loss I never imagined would happen to me, and that surprise is my news.

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