the fish lately

The life of the fish has been caught up in a strange and turbulent tide.

 Here are some fragments of it, the bits that I can navigate quite well, 

for there are other parts that I cannot.

the fish at nine

For Isabelle, and her flowers

                                                      What was I like when I was nine?

I lived in the beachside suburb of Merewether, in Newcastle. In a white timber house with a bay window and a typical coastal backyard with tough saltproof grass, and terrifying prickly pear over the fence. Lined up along the silvered wood of the paling fence were the white skeletons of coral and shells, collected over decades. When it was hot, the saltbush smelt like blackberry, and shells peered up from the sandy soil, no matter where you looked, there would always be one or two, even in the grass along the flat pathways to school. My mother used to pull snails off the daisies and drop them into a jar of salt to kill them: I remember having hysterics, and her laughing. I still think it is cruel and nasty.

    My brother was younger, and I played with him when I emerged from my reading, but he was pliable and a bit too complicit. I bored with him easily, even though he was sweet enough. Sometimes we fought. One time we fought like the two cats of Kilkenny in public and my mother never recovered. Lots of hair pulling and slapping: she was so mortified I thought she would abandon us, but no, she was stuck with us.

My best friend was Lisa, who was pretty with green eyes and gleaming blond hair. She was very popular, and I was always amazed at her loyalty to me, so quiet and easily bewildered. Once I ran to the teacher to tell on someone who had dropped a paper at lunch, just so I could be rid of her and have Lisa to myself. My other favourite was Alice, who had large, pale blue dreamy eyes and long white plaits with ribbons, like a fairy person. She still looks like that.
Lisa married a very rich Italian lawyer. He was my landlord when I was at art school. Even later, her daughters turned up in my class at the posh school I worked at as an art teacher.


But me, at nine.
I was given a watch for my birthday, but I really think I could not tell the time, even then, because time was an abstract concept of which I had no grasp. Time meant nothing.

I loved Classical Mythology with a passion.
I preferred the Greek to the Roman, and my favourite was Persephone. Thanks to Volume 4 of Richards' Topical Encyclopedia, which I stole from my Grandma and still have, I actually believed the illustrations were photographs. They were, in fact black, and white reproductions of paintings by the likes of Ingres and Bougereau, and convinced me utterly of the truth behind these stories.

I loved my Derwent Pencils, their scent, their rich colours with names like Imperial Purple, Prussian Blue, Spring Green, Crimson Lake. I used them incessantly, going into raptures at the experience of using one freshly sharpened, or shading two colours together.


After school, I was only allowed to go to the beach if I was with with Lisa. Never alone. We used to go to the secret beach and find huge abalone shells, the likes of which I never see today. They looked so ugly from the outside, but their inner secret rainbows were so beautiful. I coveted the colossal shell that Lisa spied first one day, it would have covered my whole face. The biggest abalone I have found in recent times on my morning walk on the beach was almost the size of my ear, and usually they are much smaller.


Lisa and I used to swim in the ocean pool, silently, with only our eyes and nose above water level. We would noiselessly swim to the green net bags tied to the side by the fishermen and unpick the knots with our nimble fingers.
Out would swim whiting, bream and blackfish, freed from their bonds, and away we would all swim, fish and children, the silent liberators. We would and slip up and over into the surf, unseen, the fish would head for the safety of the dark shadows until the tide came up. The Merewether Baths are the largest ocean baths in the whole wide world.


At school they were strict with uniform and one day I wore pink underpants instead of regulation Navy Blue. I was ordered off the monkey bars, and had to play alone. At home I was always occupied with drawing, or books. I read endlessly, setting the stories in the coves along the beach with their towering darkness and sandy inlets: Ivan Southall, for example.
I went years later to that beach and was stupefied to note how small and low it seemed.


So, Isabelle, myself at nine?
Living in my imagination, swimming in the sea, collecting shells, setting free the fish, making up stories, drawing coloured pictures...
Sounds very much like...me!

in which the sky is sea, and the sea is a basket of sticks.

Solidity:

There is no such thing.

Even our bones are merely clever things that seem to hold us up through sheer belief. Fluted columns as light as bird breath. Things which seemed solid become inevitably swept away, washed away by time. Even time itself seems completely abstract.
Nothing is forever.
When I was small I had such faith in things, in objects, in structures, in the slow and steady march of time. Now I just marvel at my own tenacity in hanging on to beliefs at all. Babies disappear and become complete other persons. Persons disappear altogether. A place evolves into somewhere unknown. Concrete things just melt away. Lose their meaning.






The sky is low today, and it showers at regular intervals in long wet breaths. The sea has pushed the sand into a hump, so that the beach stretches out a long way, rising in a long low incline then falling away steeply at the waters' edge. When the tide recedes, small lakes are left in the hollow of the sand. Here,  small children sit and dig and play. I watch a father carefully construct a dam, his backside in the air, his small daughter, in four shades of pink, throws her spadeful of wet sand at the very moment he raises his head.




My daughter is on patrol. She watches the edge of the water with pale eyes, her hair in long wet strands from the wet air and the salt.  The sea lifts itself up, and she narrows her eyes, watching and waiting. New lifeguards chatter excitedly around her; they have just passed their exam. There are so many of them, all eager to be watching, waiting, prowling at the edge of the ocean in brand-new yellow and red. They stand about with their hair in sheets, sand spattered on the backs of their legs. My daughter has removed her emergency toned lifeguard clothes, and hovers, pale skinned, in blue, silent and barely visible. Yet the small children follow in her shadow when she swims, then they follow her out again, like little doctor-fish. They sit nearby, cross legged. She moves, and they move with her. Looking at her in her blue club costume, I can almost glimpse her as a tiny girl, in the smaller version. Same colours, new girl.

It is warm and inky. Eveyone sits on the rain-pocked sand happily, playing in the tidal puddles, in the strange light. I can smell the base note of salt and the wetness of the sand in the warm air.


The sea beats itself on the steep incline of sand at low tide, snarling in a froth of flung sand like a serpent flicking its tail in its sleep. Beyond this, it is smooth between the sets of waves.  Knots of people negotiate the wild rhythms at the edge, reluctant to step into the deep.


I wonder about the things I hang onto, I wonder about the things that disappear and I dont even notice.
I count the things which remain as a constant, forming a rhythm to my life and thoughts.  Something that bundles me together, me,  creature of salt and blood and bones and hair, all too ready to wash away. Dissolve.


The hard sloping bank of sand is pleasant to walk on and the low sky like dark watercolour seeping into the air just above my head. I enter the water, bracing myself for the onslaught, trying to look nonchalant, my goggles around my neck.


I have to drop quickly to the sandy floor as a nasty cracking wave curls swiftly out of nowhere, and I am immediately blasted with sand. Before I have time to so much as brush it from my face, I am forced to commando-roll beneath another two before I escape along the bottom and dart out across the deep.
Still the waves dance their vigorous waltz.


It is so dark beneath the blanket of wet inky sky that  the ocean floor is rendered a dark green. It is cloudy from the rains, and shapes shift beneath me, yet the water feels like soft warm silk: so seductive, so beautiful, achingly alluring. Out here I am washed clean of sand, am nervously eyeing the shadows far below where indistinct swarms of fish move about in the swirl. The summer sea is filled with small animalcules, little lively swimming things, blue sea lizards. Transparent, spent carapace, small, soft and shaped like clawed hands drift and float, wave like tiny fingers. Tiny unseen creatures hover and dance. Nestle near to my skin, preparing to leave their constellation of pink marks on my body. My own body, without a carapace, without a bunch of claws, without a cloudy bag of ink to expel.




All are netted into my swimming costume, a harvest of sorts. I move through this lively soup like a whale shark on Ningaloo, sifting the water. Only a thin skin separates my inner body from my outer, the sea as warm as my blood, too warm to seize my head by the temples and knock sense in to my brain. Too warm to enliven my slow and bedevilled dreams. I feel as if I move slowly and fill myelf with a mad bevy of microscopic monsters.


It has rained so much that the lagoon has burst its banks, and leaves swirl past me. Casuarina needles poke at me, needle my arms. Large brown eucalyptus leaves flap past like huge moths in the dark green waters.  The sea is laughing quietly to itself, like some demented thing, toying with folks at the edge and flinging them about. I keep silent and as still as possible, gliding through the depths, trying not to stare, pop-eyed at every thing that moves, trying not to shudder at the sensation of the clouds of casuarina needles, the flapping moth leaves. The dark indigo shadows


When the lagoon bursts into the ocean it carves a huge river into the sand. Out of the dark the water rushes, pale blue in the blackness of a rainy night, and empties into the sea. In the morning there are just the mudflats, inspected by a team of concerned pelican, walking seriously from puddle to puddle, inspecting the flat chocolatey silt with their beaks. All the lagoon dwellers have been expelled into the sea: tortoises, mullet, plovers, flushed from the rushes and the reeds at the foot of the casuarinas. Sometimes ducks and their ducklings, their striped fluff spiked by a sea-dunking, scooped up in cupped hands quickly and saved from the waves.
Along the shore lie reeds in bundles, a handful facing one way, the next another, all along. Tennis balls, odd shoes. Strange things knitted along the edge of the sea.

Now the sea has gathered everything, the lagoon contents, and fashioned a kind of floating raft of rushes, pointing this way and that, woven in between with small pieces of bark, pine needles, branches, and has placed me in the middle like some archetypal foundling. Jostled among the flotsam and the creepy jabbing reeds.


Enough, I say,
I cant stand you today. 


And  I make some mutter about summer water, how the soft silkiness of it is so beguiling, but just so unrewarding. And so populous. How I am bedecked with a tiny bestiary and a collection of lagoon items. How nasty the prickling of casuarina needles, the prickling of tiny things.
And I am unashamed to say it, and rush to the edge, prepared for by sandblasting, prepared to be knocked this way and that, to drop to my belly and let the nasty flapping curl of snad filled water pass above me.


I can't bear you today.


I look up from my raft of rushes, poked this way and that incessantly by pieces of rush and reed, and the world has changed again, like the magic faraway tree.  Folks have shifted, children have grown, the sky has fallen and there are trees in the sea.




There is only one constant in this world of flux, there is only one thing. Endless. Constantly changing, but always there.  I shall enter its summer self, among the frenzy of seaweed bits and mad swarms of fish, its raft of needling rushes and the red sand which tosses in plumes beneath the sudden violet storms. I shall spread my arms and lie on my back, watch the cumulus clouds pile up on the horizon, and the sea will say


shh shh shh!


such utter nonsense you always speak:


shh shh shh!


and as it throw one last spray of sand on to the backs of my sorry legs it shouts again:


Nonsense!