Life, underwater
My seat on the crowded bus trembles with the echo of idling engines, the bass to a soundtrack of coughs and conversations and clammy air. There is a thigh touching mine, and no room to move away. Its owner hasn’t noticed. Human touch, warm and impersonal: it snags on my mind. I force my thoughts out the window into the clean cold rain. Outside, the pet shop window is dotted with drops. Inside, aquariums gaze back at the traffic. The angelfish eyes his reflections. From four glass walls, and the mercurial underbelly of the water’s surface, silver-shimmer beauty reflects back at him. But reflections aren’t company. He is trapped in solitary.
Angels are schooling fish. Through the glass, goldfish and tetras line up alongside him in their neighbouring cells. They can’t relieve his isolation. Loneliness seeps from him, filling up the tank water with sadness, a pheromonal signature as recognisable as a tang of fear. Because fish leak pheromones, chemical signals, like people leak facial expressions. Fear, excitement, love: their social communication takes place in the water around them. In the oceans and rivers of their birth, they never know the smell of being alone.
We have sealed ourselves apart from the oceans of our birth. Zipped inside thickened, watertight skins, we stepped into a different space, buffeted by quilts of cold, dry air. Inside the bus, we turn our eyes away, close our mouths, cut each other off from the turmoil of our social selves, but still our lives are swamped with the emotion of our social milieu. Though each person sits in their own anhydrous bubble, the air hangs soggy with our unspoken lives.
I lean my forehead on my window and stare at the angelfish through his. Hers? Nothing is perfect. Not beauty, not desire, not loneliness, not love. Even the angelfish ballasting down and up, down and up has a scale missing.
Loneliness: that, we both understand.
The bus window judders my thoughts, a mechanical lullaby, soothing away the press of the rest.
I‘d met her at the Crown and Anchor.
Its lights had called to me through the barrelling rain. A pub is where adults go, so I’d go, and soak in human presence for a moment, before locking myself in the cell of my apartment for the night, staring through the floor to ceiling window at the rain-smeared city lights.
From the bar, she sat quiet amid the waves of late-night drinkers. Her dress wrapped her in tight, sinuous membranes. Her crossed legs dangled high heels from her toes like fishhooks. She drank like a fish. I like fish.
My working day is immersed in the world of fish. The rains lift the sea closer every day: the underwater world beckons. Our work unlocked its secrets. First humbly from behind a mask, dribbling bubbles, neutrally buoyant before the vibrant kaleidoscope community of aquatic life that stretched back to the dawn of life and onwards in evermore complex swirls of ecological roles and partners and webs and biomes. Then, degree in hand, I streamed between wet-labs and offices, paid for my work. Here though, my passion seems somehow to be evaporating. The taste of canned air is heaven to me, and now I taste it less and less. The receptionist’s formalin smile, the glass-eyed security guard: despite the rain that poured outside the atmosphere inside was as desiccated as a museum. But this is what it is to be adult, isn’t it? We sit catalogued into our cubicles. We inserted ourselves into the study of the natural world from behind the shield of the microscope lens. The institute’s strategic plan was to satisfy us not just as scientists, but as people. Higher into the alpine lakes, faster through the genome, deeper into the oceans’ ravines: all variation neatly slotted into a solid wooden tree of discernible, finite species, of evolutionary dead ends and mankind atop an arrow of progress. Careers were spent arguing about who went in which box, and which boxes nested into each other. Difference classified, incising troubling, as-yet-to-be-explained variation, splicing it to variations that fit, branching from a central theme. The normal and the irregular.
The youngest face in a sea of greying heads and crumpled shirts, I knew all about irregular.
A pack of them gather around the centrifuge, laughing in defiantly injured tones — a ‘new kid on the block’, some larval research group had snagged the latest grant. Their latest grant. The impudence of it. When Perkins Institute was established. Its reputation set in stone.
Clunes glided towards me, her eyes as black as a shark’s. Her suit just as grey as the rest of them, shapeless with academic neglect. I drag my eyes from the 100x view of blue-banded goby eggs to meet hers.
“How’s the new paper coming?” she asks my comfy new sneakers. They, like me, are too bright, too new.
I cross my ankles beneath my chair. “It’s interesting actually, I–”
But Whittaker comes up beside her, joining us from the group at the centrifuge. His hip plants itself on the edge of my desk, damming my words.
“We’re going for lunch,” he says, dry lips peeling back to unearth mummified teeth, and I start to gather my things, taking a breath to finish my sentence.
“Oh no, honey,” Clunes touches my arm, embarrassed for my misunderstanding, “It’s more of a meeting.” I hesitate. “A staff meeting.”
I stare like an octopus from a bucket. I’m not an intern. I am staff. I’ve been here two years.
She notices my empty mug, and holds out hers. “Oh, you can make me one while you’re at it. For the road.”
Beside her, Whittaker’s yellowed teeth stare back at me. “Thatta girl.”
In a word, my probationary adult status is stripped from me. A girl, me? But then, an adult — a woman — would stand up for herself. I snatch her cup and slide away. Catch myself staring at teaspoons and soup spoons: I don’t even know how to make coffee.
They say groupers are all born female. When they mature, they turn into men. At Perkins I was reminded daily that I was a juvenile. At least schooling fish can be juvenile together: I was young and alone.
Floating through life in my bubble, I am part of a world I can’t quite touch. Until that bubble burst and life came flooding in — my bubble burst at a smile. Through the soupy haze inside the pub, from her table in the corner, she’d flashed a lure of a smile. Teeth the ivory of wedding dresses, of narwhal tusks; her lips anemone soft. A cuttlefish flush bloomed across my cheeks. Her smile was aimed at me.
This was no girl.
The bartender screwed a towel inside an already dry glass, watching me trickle over.
“So, what brings you here?” Her eyes were open oysters stolen from me with a turn of her head. She lifted a mug of beer and my gaze plunged down the length of her neck. Her skin mature, worn proudly for the world to see. The air grew muddy.
She’s everything I’m not. The thought catch me unawares. She’s everything I want to be. Clearing my throat, I looked away. “Just coming home from, work, actually. Thought I’d umm…”
The flared base of her dress swirled around her re-crossing legs, stingrays encircling her calves. My blood surged. Jealousy. Desire. Salty waves lapping at my heart.
“Oh? Where do you work?”
“Perkins Institute. Ichthyologist. Fish scientist,” I translated.
A grin flared in her eyes. “Have you ever seen a Plentimaw fish?”
I admitted I hadn’t.
She shifted a little, her neck angling, lining me up. “Well, Sal-mon Rushdie says there are Plentimaw fish in the sea.” She flashed her smile. My lips reflected hers. Despite, or maybe because of, the playful inanity of her line, I was caught. Hooked, lined and sunk.
You feel like you’re flying, but all the while you’re sinking deeper. It doesn’t matter that the walls of the well are narrow, that the water is cold and the surface far away, not when the air you breathe comes from someone else’s lungs. With her, I was happy to drown. Night after night, pint after pint, she was happy to drown with me. If I’d had a tail I’d have wrapped it round her seahorse-tight.
“Want to go dancing?” she’d ask.
“Dancing?” I’d drink in her everything. I’d follow her to the moon.
“Yes, dancing.” Her eyes are bathed in amusement, but it’s a warm amusement, not Whittaker’s stinging dry ice. “You can dance, can’t you?”
My skin crawled, but my body itched to move like liquid, to twist, to coil, to breathe to a beat. She grabbed my hand and ran down the street. Pearls of laughter drifted in her splashing wake.
“Blue-banded gobies,” I gasped, “sea bass,” she turned without pausing in her flight, “blue parrotfish.” I managed to flick a nervous, enraptured smile. I knew she’d understand. “Hermaphrodites, technically. No gender at birth. It’s not just sponges and sea slugs. It’s determined later, by, by behaviour, by-”
She laughed as if there is no such thing as arbitrary as gender. Her laughter chased away my words. We had no need for breath. Music pumped in, pouring around us, breathing for us with a swell and slam of pulses. Lights burst on walls of people, coral caviar filling a crystalline sea. In a flash she’s caught, smile wide, eyes alive. Fireworks sprayed in her eyes, reflected in mine.
Life flooded us. Just by sensing another, sharing that sight, that sound, that touch, we are joined into a larger social body. A flick of lips, a breaching eyebrow, a shout, a whisper, a finger’s graze. Like cells in a jellyfish we bathe in the soup of our messages to each other. Caught up in the flow or abandoned in an eddy, one thing remains inviolate: people can’t live without the lubrication of social ties. How to strike a balance between drowning and dying of thirst engulfs our waking moments.
I drowned.
Gritty city air eases into my lungs. The bus rumbles into gear with a miasma of diesel fumes and the view from the window dissolves. When the glass clears again, traffic flows in all directions. A red light chases a space on the road and crowds snatch across, a school channelled through a concrete reef. Head trembling on the window as the engines idle, I blink, I watch. Detached. Like everyone else inside this bus. Together but apart. You can be outnumbered ten thousand to one in the city and still be alone.
This is the lap pool of life. Cold. Long. Serious. Slow lane to the left. Far lane reserved for swim squad.
But here I swim. I’m here because it’s better than being in that last pool, alone. The dark one. There, I had sunk so deep in a well of passion I had almost fizzled out.
While she was with me, I didn’t see the darkness.
But then she was gone.
For months I’d breathed her smiles, drunk her stinging epithets with the disregard of a clownfish nestled in her host anemone. Polyp. Dearest Worm. Each slow blink brought a flash of euphoria: her hips pressed to mine, her fingers cradling my wrist, the spark of joy in her eyes. Then the rapid-fire shutter flutter of memory ended. Her last smile’s umbra burnt into my retina, but her body was spinning away, away. Away, she breathed from another’s lungs. Drag them down, deep, oblivious. Let them think they could breathe her love and be safe despite the depths, the pressures, the narcosis.
Without her, my chest deflated and sank. Without the balm of her love, her stings cut cruel into the tender coils of my mind. Small fry. Hatchling. Larva.
Catch and release. Never again would I think it a humane method of fishing. My hands caught at the shreds of my bubble-skin, trying to cover myself and rub her touch away, both at once.
I barely saw the suede skirt sidling up to me, the flop of dark, kelp-curly hair over red frames. “Ah,” she said, “One of Coral’s shipwrecks.” She glanced where my eyes would not leave, to a tangle of dancing limbs, of bodies pressed too close. A gentle, crooked smile, like a treasure chest opened in a surge of current, a glimmer of gold. “Would know one anywhere.”
When you are drowning in love and the love goes, all you are left with is drowning. My eyes glazed before the suede skirt.
“I’m Jenny,” said a voice somewhere near, slipping through the beat stinging my ears. A card pressed into my hand. I caught another flash of gold, wedding band gold. “Can I get you a glass?”
“I have one, actually,” I raise the empty shell, “Oh. Sorry.” She meant something else. One day I will master the social language in all its coraline labyrinth. One day I will grow up. Right now I just want to dissolve. But she is still talking, regardless.
“… in Lates calcarifer.”
Only this is a language I speak! “Really?” I try, I take a stab at the conversation direction. “Commercial work or…?”
Her smile is half and half, holding a secret she wants to tell. “Sort of. I’m researching the physiology of maturation-”
“Because barramundi are all born male, and only become female when mature, in the sea, or-”
“- when the environmental conditions are right.” Her smile holds. I appreciate her precision. The visibility lightens. But far above, she floated to the bar, serene as a sea cow, ever out of reach. Already setting out her lures for her next catch. Her laughter sent bubbles of my stolen breath to the surface. I freeze. The flash of lights that had seemed wondrous before now bruise my head; my ears ache anew from hours of beatings.
I had to get out of the water.
You get it, right? I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t breathe, and if she swam my way again, I’d have clung to her like a suckerfish. A parasite.
I had to go.
Lungs bursting, I swam for the surface though her siren call pulled me back. Though her hook tore in my flesh. I clawed until the cold hard slap of the surface hit my cheeks and the line joining us stretched and broke. The corridors of my apartment building were littered with splashes of humanity quagging my air with their questioning eyes, their trigger-happy mouths. I dodged them all and beached in my empty apartment.
Alone.
Gasping breaths stretched my lungs and my head grew dizzy from the unaccustomed oxygen.
Slowly, the fog clouding my mind cleared. Silence and calm filled my ears. Through the venetians, a rare sun wrinkled my eyes and beat at my head.
Slowly, my apartment came into focus around me. The phone rang, as it had done for a while, I realised, on and off. A pause, the dreaded buzz of a message. When I deemed it safe, I filled my lungs with a solid, taught breath and pressed the waiting triangle.
“Perkins here.” The gravel tones of the institute’s director pierced my haze.
He cleared his throat. A shiver crabbed down my back.
“You’ve been absent from your desk for the maximum allowable limit.”
Familiar posters of fish families displayed, categorised, ordered, plastered the walls. Powdered neglect lay over everything; the dust smelt of stale sunlight. Perkins’ sigh whispered like a breath over a salt lake. My mouth ached as dry as sand.
“Frankly, I never expected a woman to stick around.”
Now, now I’m a woman. A tiny smile cracked my lips.
“I’d dared to hope: your work was… promising. But you’ve proved me wrong. Congratulations.”
A poster peeled off the wall and curled up on the tiles.
I saw a mass of shimmering grey backs, suits so carefully the same, ties, shoes: all a slight variation on the theme. I’d never swim in that school. Nor would I have ever had the courage to leave it by myself. There’s a certain kind of safety in being the same. A desperate, dying safety, where one doesn’t live, but doesn’t quite die.
But the thing with the surface is, it’s a wasteland. A true desert of loneliness, where no one’s mouth snatches at your breath. Empty of danger, but empty of promise too. As much as it frightens and hurts us, people need to bathe in a sea of relationships, soak in vicarious emotions. Without them, we are fish out of water.
So, fingers aching from holding me back, I let myself slide slowly back in. I got work filling cylinders at the local dive shop. Just me and the air compressor in the back room, damp with brine, tasting of rubber, crowded with mute cylinders and the deaf Victorian clatter and pop and hiss of our work. On a slow day I’d emerge into the daylight and wait for the divers to de-rig, my ears still ringing, listening as the divers gassed about that blue fish, the spotty one, and the funny one with the thing, enjoying the freshness of the wonder on their faces. Once I ventured to pour some drops of my own into their conversation.
“The blue fish are called groupers.” I hauled a newly-shed cylinder onto my shoulder, reached for another. “Achoerodus viridis. The green ones are the juveniles. When a blue dies, a green changes sex as needed by the group. So there’s always a mix. Some blue, some green, some in-between.” The sliding spectrum of grouperdom brings a smile to my lips.
The divers return vague, uncertain smiles and brush past, peeling off their wetsuits like they’re everting squids for tea.
Every day immersed me midstream, mid city, mid-life. Heads down, noses to heels, we crawled free-style between our lane markers. Work, commute, home, sleep. A perfect medley, surrounded and alone.
The pub slides into view, a breaker spraying its windows as the bus slows.
My eyes are caught.
The bus settles with a sigh.
The tickle of thirst squirms in my throat.
Chewing my lip, I pull myself out of my seat.
The bus drags itself away.
Taking a diving breath, I plunge in. The drinkers surge, the music swallows me, the door slaps shut.
She isn’t here.
She isn’t here, and my body melts in relief. I’m alone. Alone and alive. Warm, beer-laden air embraces my lungs. With a few celebratory LLBs to liquefy my tongue, my tale pours out to the enduring bartender.
“Well, love, you know what they say.” The bartender sends me a kinked smile. “There’s Plentimaw fish in the sea.”
“No there aren’t, actually,” I say, though he’s already turned away. “Salman Rushdie just made that up.”
Outside, a bus as big as a whale cruises past, a belly full of sad-eyed city folk, staring through the glass. Framed as I am by the aquarium of the pub windows, no one has eyes for me. Gills wet to saturation, I crawl home. You have to keep swimming, you see. You have to keep swimming, or you drown.
My apartment quiet around me, I open my handbag, unshell its contents. Clearing out my life as I’d cleared out my heart. Start afresh.
A card falls out. New, an oblong of tropical sea-green. The modern impudence of such a colour, on a business card. The confident expense. The fresh warmth of it.
Jenny Plentimaw
Marine ecologist
NEPHTHYS
Underwater Science Research Group
Exploration ~ Innovation~ Communication
I see a flash of red-framed glasses. I see now, the eyes behind. Cool. Calm. Green. Sea-green. Suddenly the temperature and salinity are perfect. My hand floats to the phone as smoothly, as steadily, as a jellyfish in the Gulf Stream, borne through their existence just as it was meant to be. No walls. No glass ceilings. No boxes or jars.
Just the open ocean, teeming with life.
