Tench

by Inge Schilperoord

  Jonathan pushed his fingers into his ears and put his head down between his knees because the racket, the threat, kept getting closer. Suddenly the terrifying horror of it all was closing in on him; the world was shutting off all escape routes. Someone had their hands around his neck and had started squeezing.

  “Shhh, my mother’s asleep,” he said, nodding at her conspiratorially. He saw that she had her exercise book clamped under her arm again. “Sit down.”

  He went into the bathroom to get the scales. There was no question of not weighing the fish; even if he knew that it would weigh the same as it had this morning, he still wanted to do it again. When he came back into his room, she was standing next to the aquarium. Why hadn’t she sat down? He started fiddling with the scales and felt her watching him as she hopped from one foot to the other, before following along behind him while he carried the fish, gleaming with little droplets of water, over to the scales, which turned to 975 grams. He quickly ran his fingers through his hair a couple of times in an attempt to stay calm. Idiot, he said to himself. What did you expect?

  What was wrong with the fish? Was it just the heat or was it sick? He took hold of it and carefully felt its scales with his thumb and index finger, searching for lumps or irregularities. He pulled its lip out to look into its mouth. But he only saw pink, moist flesh, nothing unusual. All the time he could see the girl out of the corner of his eye, standing next to him, following his every move. She was agitated today and he was finding her hard to take.

  After slipping the fish back into the water he noted its weight. The line of the weight graph had been going down for days and was approaching a level at which the fish was seriously underweight. On the opposite page he saw that it had been days since he had filled in his own graph, the tension graph. The last time, three days ago, it was at nine, the second-highest level. He didn’t want to look at it and couldn’t understand why the line just wouldn’t go down again.

  “What are we going to do now?” the girl asked, as curious as she was concerned.

  “I’m almost ready, sit down.” Again he looked at her. She was still jiggling from one foot to the other. She needed to calm down and do what he said. He tried to sound stricter. “I have to get something, just sit down.”

  He walked downstairs quietly—his mother was still asleep—filled a jug with ice water and carefully added it to the tank upstairs, one splash at a time, trying to cool it down. “Otherwise it’s way too hot for you, isn’t it, buddy?” he whispered. The fish swished its tail as if in answer, then sank back down into the mud.

  Constantly aware of the child’s presence, Jonathan leant over the tank, racking his brain about the fish and what to do. The girl had sat down for a moment but stood up again and came up close behind him, where she started talking. He felt rage building. Not now. Now he needed things quiet.

  “We have to get some of those snails tomorrow.”

  “Sit down,” he repeated and said, “give it some sweetcorn first.” And then, “I’ve got some crisps for you.”

  Finally she did what he’d asked. She gave a serious nod. He passed her the feed and the crisps and briefly felt her hand, small and dry. Then he spent a long time wiping his own hands off on the cleaning cloth and took a few steps away before turning back to look her.

  She was sitting cross-legged in front of the tank and frowning. Her eyes looked moist. Had she been crying? “Give Tinca a little more,” he said to encourage her, forcing his face into a half-hearted smile. She picked a few chunks up out of the box and sprinkled them over the water, whispering to the fish while she was at it.

  Together they watched in silence for a long time, waiting for the tench to start eating. But it stayed floating motionless a few centimetres above the bottom of the tank.

  “We’re leaving,” she said suddenly. “Tomorrow.”

  His fingers curled. He wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard, shutting it out, trying to raise a shield in his head that would deflect her words, but it was too late.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mum says he knows where we are. We have to go.”

  The pain was back and moved into his stomach. But this pain was different and spread to his chest and made his windpipe feel soft, as if the cartilage was dissolving. He swallowed and made a few attempts to shake the feeling, but now it was like a fish bone caught at the back of his throat. His tear ducts filled. He closed his eyes, coughed a couple of times and felt something in his throat start to tremble.

  “When?” His voice sounded teary, choked. Arsehole, he thought. Be a bloody man.

  She turned away for a moment, then stood up and came over to him. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with you.”

  He took a step away from her, sat down on his chair and before he knew what was happening, she’d plonked down on the floor right in front of him, less than an arm’s length away. She pulled open the bag of crisps and poured them into the bowl he’d given her. He stared at her, so close. Tiny red flecks just under her hairline.

  Suddenly he felt an unfathomable sorrow. About her leaving, about him being unable to escape any of it. Just when he might have found a good way of being with her. He didn’t understand, and everything was spinning, as if someone had started to pull the rug out from under him with quick little tugs. He felt like he might topple forward at any moment.

  She was sitting on the floor and eating the crisps a few at a time. He watched her eat, following her every movement. She wet the tips of her first two fingers and dipped up some crumbs. Then she crawled even closer and sat down again with his legs as a backrest. He could hear her chewing, swallowing.

  Push her away, he thought, push her away, push her away. But he didn’t do it. After sitting in confusion for a while, he looked down at her and saw how straight and tidy her hairline was under her ponytail, with very light down below it. Rapt, he followed the movements of her breathing under her top. She had never been this close before. His heart pounded in his chest. Her ear was very close too. He only had to raise a hand and he could trace its curve with a finger. On the inside his whole body was quivering. His back was sopping. From the other side of the room came the weary creak of the fan.

  She sighed again. In that way she had. The way he found so beautiful. “Shall I read you a story I wrote?” Her voice was soft. Slowly she turned her head towards him.

  “I think you have to go home.”

  She ignored him.

  Without giving himself permission, he bent closer to her as she picked up the exercise book. The faintest trace of the smell of soap rose towards him. His body reacted immediately: a feeling that burned a path deep into his belly. His dick harder than ever. His throat constricted. With his eyes closed he listened to her every breath. Under his shirt his heart was going wild.

  You have to go, you have to go, pounded through his head. He pushed her away from him for a moment, very carefully, but she resisted. She stayed sitting there, motionless, without taking her eyes off the page. Mumbling to herself the words she was about to read out loud.

  “Once upon a time there was a girl,” she began, but the words that followed didn’t get through to him. He studied her bare foot in her flip-flop. If he lowered himself to the floor now and slid over a little, he would feel her against the side of his jeans, pressing lightly against him. Under the material his erection grew.

  “And the girl also had a club,” he heard her saying. “She wanted to stay in that club for ever. Everybody in the club was really nice.”

  His hands were trembling uncontrollably and he gripped the seat of his chair to keep them still. Under his shirt he was bathed in sweat. His mother would wake up any minute. She had to go. Everything was getting in a mess, his whole schedule. And while thinking that, he saw her get up. She walked over to his bed where the workbook was half hidden under his pillow. She reached for it. “Have you got a story too?”

  “Hey, don’t touch that.”

  She did anyway.

  “Don�
��t touch it!”

  He strode over. He felt that he wanted to hurt her.

  She held the book tight behind her back and looked at him with an expression he couldn’t quite place.

  “We have to go to the lakes early tomorrow morning.”

  “Give that back.”

  “My mother doesn’t need to know. She’s working in the cafe until late and then she’ll sleep in. We’re not leaving till afternoon.

  He reached around her to grab the book but she stepped away. She obviously wasn’t planning on going anywhere. In the same instant he saw himself pushing her over onto the floor with a shove of one arm and holding her down.

  “It’s so hot, maybe I can go for a paddle. You’ll have to stay close, though, ’cause I can’t swim.”

  He imagined holding her down on the ground with one hand, using the other to pull her shorts and knickers down over her thighs. It was unstoppable.

  Suddenly she tossed the book back onto the bed. Then she undid her ponytail. She was just gathering her hair up again with the hairband in her mouth when he grabbed her by the arm. “You have to go now.”

  “Hey, that hurts!”

  She turned and stared at him. For a second her eyes were as big and bright as ever. The copper fleck floating in one of them was a glittering splinter of glass. The sunlight shining in through the window was falling even more beautifully than before on her face, cheeks and throat.

  A little later he was sitting at his table. He picked up his workbook and stared at the scratchy lines he’d drawn under the exercises, at the tension graph. Once he’d seen it as a system. How could he have believed that the exercises in the workbook could help him? That all those words, interconnections thought up by someone else, could have applied to him? All that effort had come to nothing.

  Furious, he started to tear out the pages one by one, the pages he’d filled with his pathetic handwriting, that sad graph; with all his strength he pulled on them until the glue let go and those useless, stupid balls of paper started piling up on the floor. With both hands, he swept them together, wondering what to do with them, if there was any way he could possibly undo it all. All that wasted energy, all those hours he’d sat at his table, racking his brains, searching his body for answers. He thought of burning it, curling flames consuming the paper. Or he could shred it and flush it down the toilet as well as he could. He imagined himself moving, becoming active, flushing the paper away. But in reality he stood there and stared down at the pile, and in the end he didn’t do a thing.

  He thought about her unexpected movements, her mouth. Almost immediately afterwards, his thoughts went back to the therapy room. The psychologist was always talking about responsibility. But he had been responsible; he’d looked after her to the best of his ability. But she had still sealed his fate. He had nowhere left to go.

  His gaze drifted over the room, lingering on the two packed boxes pushed up against the wall. It was his fault that they still hadn’t left this shabby, run-down house. And he was to blame for the half-dead fish too. The hard time Betsy had had of it according to the other side’s lawyer, his mother being alone again, and the new girl, everything that was going to happen to her—it was all his fault.

  He sat down in front of the aquarium. It was boiling hot.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to the empty room around him. “I’m sorry.” He kept his eyes on the fish. It had come up out of the mud and was close to the glass. Jonathan brought his face right up to the side of the tank and stared into its small, dull, orange eyes. A noise erupted from his throat. He wanted to bang the glass, but stayed motionless. He felt now as if even his thoughts weren’t coming from his own brain, but bubbling up from a spring that belonged to him and his life, but was still completely foreign to him.

  And the light was still there, leaden. He rubbed his eyes. He was so exhausted all he wanted to do was sleep for days. Fully dressed, he lay down on the bed on his stomach, his face hidden under his arms. He stayed like that for a while, dragging tired breaths in and out of his lungs, then turned onto his back and put his hands together on his chest. It was so light and so heavy at once inside his head that he felt like he only needed to close his eyes to sink into illuminating sleep. But he was wrong.

  He covered his face with his hands, half opened his eyes under his spread fingers and watched through his lashes as the patches of light moved slowly over the ceiling. He tried to see himself from a distance. As if he was suspended there, wedged between the rafters, with his legs stretched out and looking down at his own body, his face hidden under his hands.

  “Coward,” he said out loud, but a different voice, somewhere at the back of his mind, also said, “You can’t do anything about it.” He felt tears welling up, made a fist of his right hand, then moved it from his eye to his lips, opened his mouth and bit his knuckles hard. “No,” he said, “there’s no point.” Ignoring a thread of spit running down his chin, he stood up and leant on the wall. His neck muscles were so stiff the pain was radiating out to his shoulder blades and the base of his skull. From where he was sitting, he could see the light forcing its way into the room. The heat. Now he thought of that image of the girl here in his room, as he’d just seen her. He stared ahead, pressed his lips together, opened his eyes wider, let his gaze wander over the things in his room, then screwed his eyes back up and turned his gaze inward, but everything stayed far away.

  It was over. He knew he was going to do something terrible. He’d never get out again. His breath was coming out of his nostrils in short, irregular bursts.

  After pacing for a while, he went over to the window and waited till he saw her in the yard. His jaws clamped tightly together.

  There she was, in her running shorts. The moment he saw her, he undid his jeans. He’d wanted to cry, but he wouldn’t manage that now either. He stared at the child, the girl, the beautiful girl, who had her back turned to him and was bending over to unroll her skipping rope, whose cut and frayed ends he could now see better than ever. Slowly, with her back slightly curved, she walked from one side of the yard to the other. Five steps for him, seven for her. She put the doll down near the middle of the skipping rope and squatted next to that lifeless thing, her face close to its rigid plastic head.

  The buckle of his belt started banging furiously against the radiator. He imagined her mouth moving, her lips forming words he, like always, could not make out. The tip of her flaxen ponytail was shaking very lightly back and forth. “There you are,” he panted to the rhythm of his movements. “There you are…” His heart was pounding, fast and furious, but far away as well.

  My life is over, ran through his mind at the same time. Over, he thought. His life was over before it had really begun and he didn’t know for sure that that was such a bad thing. Or what it was that he would lose. It was all beyond him and he upped the pace.

  The fish was dead. It was already slightly swollen, he now saw. This was what he had been scared of, what he had been worrying about all this time. Now that it had happened, he could only stare. It was floating on its back on the surface, pale belly up as if praying for help from on high, help that would never come. Scales hard and pointy, dorsal fins lit by the dim lights. He’d left the pump on all evening and listened to its quiet bubbling.

  He closed his eyes to let the sound absorb him. This was something he was good at, disappearing. He began fiddling with the knobs, turning the pump up. Its drone still sounded quiet and constant, but the disappearance he’d hoped for didn’t materialize. He rubbed his eyes and pressed his nose against the tank. He was so close to the glass the reflection of his face was strangely distorted.

  “Look,” he told himself. “That’s you.” But he couldn’t manage to see through it, to get past his shadow: he was too scared and looked away. Then he sat there silently for a while, not moving at all, eyes shut and listening to the soft bubbling gurgle of air bubbles being blown through water. In his head the sounds were swaying dots of light, shooting through his mind togeth
er with the images.

  When he opened his eyes he felt the tears. He knew that, however crazy it sounded, this was the end of him. Now that the fish was dead, he was done for too.

  Before forcing himself to get up, Jonathan stayed lying on his back for a moment on the sweat-soaked mattress, eyes closed. He’d only slept in snatches, a few hours altogether, and was more exhausted than ever. His bones, sinews, muscles—everything hurt, everything was raw and strained. He tried to get up, but it hurt too much and almost immediately he lay down again, not even opening his eyes. It was already so hot that his whole body was covered with a clammy, itchy layer of moisture. The heat had penetrated into every part of his body, pushing him down on the bed, but in his head thoughts were in motion. With excitement as much as disgust, he watched them appearing like moving images of her being projected on a screen. Even after he’d opened his eyes and looked around the room, the images still imposed themselves on him.

  She was sitting here in his bedroom, radiating warmth, almost shamelessly giving off her childish girl smells. He pressed his front teeth into his lip, slid over the mattress to the narrow dusty gap between the wall and the side of his bed and felt like tipping his body into it as if rolling it into a ravine, but there was no salvation. He slid back. Turned his head left and right on the pillow.

  The soapy sweetness of her skin, the vague perspiration, even the slightly sour smell of her clothes. It all excited him. He thought of her belly moving softly with each breath. Her bum, here on the mat, the way she sat there with her legs spread while he, while he just worked, and kept on doing his best, and now he wished he could come up with a way of explaining it that made it her fault too, some way, any way. If only he could make her partly to blame. He thought of her towelling shorts, how they crumpled around her crotch, the folds they formed, how underneath her bits must have those same folds. He was still biting his lip. He pressed his right incisor down hard but kept seeing flashes of her through the pain. And nowhere could he discover any blame in any of it, for all he wanted to. But he still couldn’t see her the same way as before, as if some strange bond had been established between them. An agreement that had come into being without their involvement, as if a network of meaning stretched between him, her and everything around them, so that he felt it but couldn’t push through to reach it.