Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

I stopped walking and pretended to brush her hair out of her face, looking deep into her eyes to get past the bubbly manner. She was in there, looking out at me, uncertain, excited, on the edge of being happy. I pulled her to me and kissed her there, among the hurly burly, and she stilled for the duration of the kiss, but when it ended she ran over to a table of fresh herbs.

At the far end of the hall a line-up had formed. I asked a woman standing with her young daughter, who was dressed in some kind of ratty ballet dress, what the line-up was for. Ice cream! I couldn’t believe it. It was like hearing Ruby’s high heels. Years had gone by without ice cream. I told Ruby, You keep exploring and I’ll buy us ice cream cones. If they have flavours, what would you like?

She looked around her and suddenly shrank into herself. It’s too much, she said. Let’s leave. She pulled at my wrist. I scanned the room for anything that might have set her off.

You’re sure you don’t want an ice cream cone? After all these years? The line’s moving pretty fast. We might never get another one.

She stared straight ahead at my shirt button. I put my arm around her and we left.

She knocked on my apartment door around nine the next night, complaining about the dark stairwell. She was still wearing the blue silk dress. We went straight to the bedroom. We undressed and she pulled me down on the bed. The sight of one another was like rocket fuel. Neither of us were the sort to delay satisfaction.

Afterward she lay in my arms, where I’d gathered her, my chin on her head. She raised her head off the pillow and sniffed.

It stinks in here. Like fish, and not fresh fish either.

Instant shame. You can’t smell your own smell. Should I have taken the sheets to the laundry? With Leo here, and the suddenness of this love affair, I hadn’t had time to plan out domestic details. My nose was in her hair, and all I could smell was the cedar perfume of her shampoo. I raised my head and sniffed. The odour was like tide pools after a day in the baking sun or two-day dead crab. It was clinging to the paint on the walls, circulating through the air pockets in the mattress, permeating the curtains. I got up and investigated. It wasn’t coming from the kitchen, outside, or from the apartments above or below.

Then I remembered. I crouched down beside the bed and fished out the bowl. The goldfish’s belly was very swollen now and its eyes filmy and sunken. I strapped on my leg, pulled on my pants, my shoe, a shirt, winked at her — Let me handle this, little lady — and exited with the bowl.

I carried it downstairs and outside. Every year, when the new buds are about to unfurl into leaves, the city drapes the trees with fine netting to protect them from burning in the sun. In the moonlight the street looked like a ghostly sculpture garden. I walked over to the base of one of the trees. The square of earth in the sidewalk was covered with dead leaves and bits of twig. The goldfish’s body, lacerated at the gills and whitened around the mouth and tail, flashed out of the bowl, like a thought that slipped someone’s mind, and nose-dived into the leaves. It should have slipped from sight and rotted under the leaves except that it seemed to meet some sort of obstacle, so the tail stuck out, creating the surreal impression that the dead fish was burrowing into a hole or trying to reach a morsel of food under the leaves.

Even outside the smell was strong. I worried a raccoon or stray cat that had survived the crises against all odds would eat it and become sick. Surely evolution had taught everything but true scavengers to stay away from rotten fish, but instincts can be massively imperfect in their ability to protect a species. As we know.

Allen, I said to myself, the universe must take responsibility for itself. In the narrow light of my Callebaut I saw a black beetle tentatively approach the fish’s diving cadaver. It reached out and caressed the bright scales with its antennae and thread-like feet. And it was the caressing which was the problem, which sucked me down a funnel. That dead goldfish seemed to have become a focal point for a reawakening tenderness in me. Ruby had softened me up. A suppressed memory, thin like the beetle’s leg, tested my edges to see if I was defended or inert, to see if I was vulnerable or ready to turn with savage jaw and bite back. It was the quality of the goldfish flesh, its not-too-springy plumpness, like the turkeys my mother pressed with her forefinger to see if they were fresh, that dulled golden flesh being caressed by the ever-so-thin tip of a beetle’s leg. An image streaked across my mind of flesh, cold and blue in death, streaked by a thin line of blood dissolving in rain.

My diaphragm plummeted, creating a vacuum that forced me to suck in air with such intensity that I barked. Several violent involuntary inhalations followed.

I turned and made my way slowly, stiff and brittle now, no more the thirty-year-old lover, back to my apartment. Ruby was in the armchair wearing an old sweater of mine and her dancing tights. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and a grin.

Jeez, you sure know how to make a girl feel self-conscious.

A laugh escaped me. I washed the bowl and scrubbed the sink. Scrubbed my hands. I asked if she wanted tea or something to eat. She said she’d make tea, and I sat on the arm of the chair and watched her move around the kitchen. I walked up behind her, pressed my erection into her hip and … even the cannibal goldfish began to blush.

Later, when we were sipping our tea, she in the armchair and me on a kitchen chair, our legs touching on the ottoman, I felt relieved enough to ask, You met my brother the other day?

I did.

He mentioned you asked about me. What did he tell you?

He said you used to be different. Confident. Self-righteous. Adventurous. You were a colonel or major something. He barely recognized you now, he said.

That goes both ways. Was he, I paused, a gentleman?

What do you mean? Did he offer me his chair? A glass of water? Did he make a pass? He was charming, as I imagine you’d expect your brother to be. He was curious. He grilled me about us.

Unavoidably. I’m curious too.

He mentioned a cabin up north. A family cabin that he wants you to go to with him. He wanted me to convince you.

I don’t know why he wants to go so much.

He said your mother’s ashes. And he thinks he could survive up there. He said he’s not doing so well down here. Is he your older brother?

Younger.

He seemed like the older one. The way he sat in your chair and opened your coolbox.

I haven’t seen him in eighteen years.

You don’t look like brothers.

We both have our mother’s blue eyes and our father’s big hands.

One short, one tall, one thick, one thin, one hairy, one hairless …

Clearly there was no way of finding out if anything happened between them without asking directly. I didn’t think that would go over well so instead I continued the list of contrasts she’d started.

One devastatingly handsome, smart, and good, the other …

I got up and made two sandwiches with the cheese and solar greenhouse lettuce and tomato we’d got at the market. I had a small jar of mustard and I splurged. Ruby clapped her hands she was so happy.

I haven’t eaten this well — I can’t even remember.

I wanted to tell you about the goldfish.

She nodded and kept eating.

I’m not normally a rule breaker. I fully support OneWorld. I don’t even want to go back to the old world, unlike my brother.

She nodded vigorously, her mouth full of sandwich.

I made the decision to keep my fish a long time ago, and then I stopped thinking about the rule. You know how things can become invisible until someone else sees them? I wouldn’t keep a cat or a dog.