Short fiction

The Pancake Fish

The pet shop man leant over the counter. His smile twitched, rooty hands tightening on the wood, his eyes flickering behind his spectacles like the fish behind the glass. I watched his throat as he told me the way, peering up a bit to catch the corner of his lips. The aquarium light gave them watery contours, liquored words swimming from stubble to the flash of a tongue. I nodded and nodded, staring away at tanks and dank brick and maps sellotaped in empty corners. I felt him watching my knuckles, blue upon the desk. He smiled, and dreamed them scuttling out of rock pools. Books stood in his mind like yellowed cliff tops, where he watched us all. I tugged myself out of the tide, clutching my bag to my chest, and had reached the door when he rang his bell from the back of the cave. He came towards me, slipping out of the shadows. He held a large plastic envelope, full to the brim with water, containing one, very large, fish. He presented it to me and stood back, appraising us, as I fumbled it into my rucksack. He was thinking about crabs again.

“You must go now. You have a lot to do. Remember everything I have told you.”

I tripped down the steps to the pavement, walking fast against the rain. Out on the street the road was waxy from the piss-pools of street lights, snail-brown rivulets of water racing down the hill and into the mist. The wind surged out of the darkness and I buried myself deeper in my coat, breaking into a run. The road vibrated with the thrum of an approaching lorry, and little hunched people slipped over the edge of the opposite pavement. I continued, hugging the line of terraces, and finally turned up a dark cul-de-sac. At the top of the street, the bay window shone like a lighthouse. There was shouting coming from inside.

I crept in through the bricks and sat on my bed. They hadn’t heard me in the next room. The heap was against the door, muffling their voices. An apple rolled off the top and came to rest at my feet. As I watched, a violent red and green worm slipped out of the skin and back under, as fast as a dolphin, emerging again as a plastic butterfly which flashed across the room and was lost in a dark corner. Starry pieces of a wooden jigsaw puzzle were scattered around the foot of the heap. It was an open prairie at sunset, with no silhouettes of animals – but one piece cut in the shape of a deer’s antlered head. I took out the envelope from my bag and looked the fish in the eye. It was a pancake fish; tall and flat and almost round, electric blue with streaks of yellow. Its circumference was barely smaller than the proportions of the envelope. It did not move but hovered very still, unable to turn or to move forward or backwards. Its eyes were lidless, set in its sides, blank circles of white. The eye that watched me was falterless, yet the body was moist, quivering flesh. Little palpitations of life shot down its sides, and tiny rubbery scum fish shot all about it. But before I could decide what to do with it, I heard the kitchen door bursting open – voices breaking through, scuttling up the walls, slapping against my door. Grabbing my bags, I sped to the floor, tossing aside heaps of paper until there was a hole big enough for me to fit through. With a thrill of revulsion, I saw the pancake fish was flopped across my lap. As the bangs at the door grew more vehement, I stuffed it back into my rucksack and dropped onto the bars below.

On the great stage, teenagers in shorts were covered in bits of deer-skin. The art department’s sunset sunk into a lowland audience. I saw them all from the top of the bars, carefully replacing the sheaves of paper to keep out the noise. A boy with a jaw that would once have been firm was clutching at the shoulders of an indeterminate girl. The watches of parents clicked like crickets. There was a wire basket of ping pong balls forgotten in the corner, the inexplicable orange one still there. I clung to the metal, hot from the yellow stage light. The boards were soft and made of lolly-sticks and straw and the yellow light was slumberous. There were deep shadows etched in the wings, where a hundred eyes had fluttered by, a hundred encouraging hands. But the children on stage were strangers, and the conifers that should have shook in the windows were rain-battered billboards, and there was a smell of takeaway and an ambulance howling. I had to run again, sideways and silent like a spider, until I reached the doors of the PE cupboard.

Here the sounds of the play were muffled by mattresses. I felt for rows of crash mats, yielding bodies with insistent springs, between two of which lay the door. As I pushed each couple apart, becoming more frantic, I was frozen by a scurry of water. With the mat heavy on my chest, I tried not to breathe. And then the pause was interrupted by a deeper sloshing. I bent to the ground and crouched around the corner. In the square of window moonlight I stood, soaking, feet in a bucket of water. A man stood behind, fully-dressed with his shirt sleeves buttoned at the elbows, plaiting my damp hair. The nativity mumbled in the hall. His hands were making white stripes on my scalp. A lorry ground by and the walls were suddenly flame-coloured. They vanished in the sweep of light, water still dripping onto the ground, and with the persecution of fiery eyes behind me I tore through the mattresses, tearing and tumbling, falling with a squashy flump onto the cold spiral staircase.

The knight looked up from the tower bed. Plaintively he called my name. I stepped into the chamber. By a burning torch above the scarlet floor-bed, I couldn’t meet his eyes. I rushed in and knelt beside him, shrugging off the rucksack and rummaging inside. His hand, thin and wasted, was open on the bed spread.

“Are you feeling better?” I asked.

He chuckled faintly, his head back against the stone. The light spattered his neck with a rash of pores and bloody stubble. He clutched a hot water bottle under the blanket, which was spotted with blood from the wound. He laughed again, with tremorous ribs, as I put aside the fish on the end of the bed.

“What’s that for?”

I looked at it, still motionless, breathing imperceptibly. Its eye was still expressionless, following me. Some of the little fish had died.

“I don’t know,” I said, turning back to my bag. Under the remaining flakes of books and papers I pulled out the cloth, and came towards him. His eyes followed my face as I turned my back on the fish and carefully tucked back the locks of undergrowth around his face. He shook like a hare as the first cold drops of water rubbed across his forehead. His eye flickered open, like an insect, and I splashed it away. As I worked, pressing the sweat out of deep furrows, his breathing grew heavier and deeper, finally catching on something in his throat and exploding into a noisy fit of coughing. I jerked up and flung the cloth onto a chair, striding about the room. He got gradually quieter whilst I stood at the window, watching the night billowing in smoky artificial clouds.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

I smiled shortly and marched about the room collecting my books.

“You’re not leaving?”

I picked up the envelope, the fish flumping against my side.

“I’ve got to. I’ve got such a lot to do.”

The chamber was very quiet. There was the faintest of honkings from the distant street.

“All right then,” he said easily, lying back and smiling and shutting his eyes. Now they were shut I felt frustrated. He was a log-thing, uprooted and snug in a tufty little nest. He looked very soft and warm.

From the front pocket of the bag I took out an orange plastic dinosaur and very gently placed it on the pile of books beside the bed. I left quickly, before he opened his eyes.

The lift slid down, like a bubble in a glass tube, out of the darkness and into the library, striped with fluorescent light. It hummed and flickered quite contentedly. People were passing – prospectus people, in twos and threes and colours and shiny hair. Some of them stopped me, smiled, took my hand and enquired. I did my best to reply, shrugging my rucksack down low as I could, keeping myself between it and them. There was a sour smell faint in the air, like metal and decay, but I wasn’t sure if it was the fish or the library. The aisles fanned into the distance, chrome with orange, green, blue and yellow, bright and foreboding like the shelves of a fridge. Each ended with a glass rectangle of night, swirled with yellow mist, where the rows met the windows.

I had to take some books from the furthest column. The voices of the people walking past lagged behind them, getting lost in echoes. I stared ahead, avoiding them, slipping away at last to find these shelves deserted. There were the books, laid out on a pedestal with surgical lighting. I opened my bag again, fumbling with the zip, dodging the voices which always seemed to be approaching my corner. I couldn’t look at the pancake fish as I forced the books beside it. The street hadn’t noticed. It was still churning in a mass of dank traffic and pollution – people, violent slashes of colour, still staggering against the wind, bags twisting out of their grip and into the air. The soft clicking of the library seemed to mute it all, recording the chaos and eliminating it under microscopes and halogen beams. It shot back and forth, silently, in a glass valve among a million glass valves, alphabetically arranged in obscure cellars. The ticking continued, complacently rhythmic, swaying, slipping, repeating and repeating as I passed shelf upon shelf, geometrically unravelling at impossible angles, mirrored and doubled in every direction, cutting out stars all around, metal rays telescoping into the night sky and toppling back with the weight of leather and chrome, humming all the while, remorseless, merciless gutters of space...

Only the pancake fish disturbed the calm. I heard close to me the smallest of splashes as it kicked against its confinement, a pattern of droplets beating within. At last that sense of urgency overtook all the others and I was running from the library, documents, meetings, timetables spinning and shrinking with it as I fell through a side door, tripping down grimy steps and onto the street, my bag beating against my back as I flew downhill, skidding on crisp packets, hopelessly searching for water, blind, drenched in the rain, and I felt myself lurch suddenly away from the pavement, into the abyss –

A black and white man in a fedora hat caught me, staring into my eyes underneath an instantaneous moon.

But I ran again and saw that he was gone, and saw in a lurch that the shop fronts were familiar. Racing across the road, I fell against a boarded doorway, a prickling like leaves running all over my skin, walls standing on end. The aquarium sign hung aslant from its hinges, blackened and illegible, gashes of paint hanging down in strips. Shattered windows screamed in black patches. Adverts for discos papered the boards.

The street boiled and rose behind me, bubbling up and warping into a tumultuous wave, bearing back like the head of a cobra, reeling, ready to drown me – I felt the roar behind me as I sprinted, faster than ever before, down, down in spirals, crashing into the cul-de-sac and reaching the bathroom, clinging onto the bath taps as the world rocked. I began to run the water, pulling off my shoes and settling my toes in the cold iron tub.

I watched the water gently envelope them, gathering around like a blanket and tucking them under in one swift swell. I ran the plug chain between my toes, huddled away from the cleaning products lined up along the edge of the bath. There was to be no better company for me there, and I had to take the pancake fish from the bag.

I sat it between the taps. We stared at each other as the bath began to fill. Still it hovered. Still it did not move. The tiny fish around it had fallen to the bottom of the envelope, but the pancake fish was still intact, none the less blue. It rose and fell an almost imperceptible amount as its lungs filled and emptied, but its eyes were relentless. Two perfect white circles tunnelling into mine. The water had reached my hips.

I stood up and picked up the envelope, holding it at arm’s length. Even as it swayed its eyes were unmoving. All at once, the door burst open and there stood the landlord, an immense pile of bacon, sweating and rolling out of his cerise shirt, arms braced against the frame, great stubbled face breaking open and roaring. I cradled the envelope to my chest as he broke inside, palms thumping either side of me and I slipped, back into the bath, clanking down and underwater, feeling the fish slipping from the bag, flapping onto my stomach – clammy, wriggling, all over me – but the sleep paralysis had hit and the water churned and the landlord’s cloak draped in the bath.

It would seem that that should have been the end, but by an unforetold piece of luck it transpired that the plughole was another escape, and led all the way back to the stone floor of the knight’s chamber. We landed, the pancake fish and I, in a heap in the middle of a pool of sunlight. It was jerking on my chest, slapping its rubbery sides, gaping, staring up at me. Its sideways face, its white, empty eyes seemed to be the only thing in the universe.

And then it was gone. The knight was limping towards the window, haloed in sunshine. I scrambled to my feet in time to see the pancake fish falling through the air; nose pointed upwards to the last, its eyes never moving from mine until they were too small to be seen.

The knight was panting against the wall. I didn’t look at him. The morning mist that had consumed the pancake fish drifted forty feet below, stroking the tops of subdued terraces, still saturated from the night before, dripping softly and sparkling in the first rays stretching over the hilltops.

The knight extended a hand and poked me in the ribs. I scowled and stretched out further, yearning for those hills that the night had swallowed. They were colossal, rolling playfully out into the horizon, a smell of peat twisting on the breeze, the most joyful, dewy green spilling out beneath the sky which was untangling itself from the clouds and relaxing into blue. 

He shifted behind me and leant so that he could put his head on my shoulder. His heartbeats were still wild, burrowing into my back. I felt for his hand. As the sun inched higher, it revealed a little dent in its light, like a tiny thumb over a lens. As it lifted we saw for an instant the great stag outlined at the head of the valley, and out of the mist below shot a bird, on the smallest thread of a tune, tumbling off into the sky. I thought at first it was a macaw, but as it passed our window I saw the fainter shades of a blue tit, piping up and down where nothing else could be heard.

I turned to the knight to see that he was quite oblivious, inspecting the wound where his robes fell open, poking at it with a comical look of concentration. But the sunlight was in his eyes, exploding them into a mess of blue and green and yellow, a circular sunrise of meadows and sea-sand, so that I laughed and hoisted him up and helped him back into bed. As the sunlight made rainbows I learned the constellations of freckles and the shallowness of sleep, and we stayed up so late that the sun set in the North.

Vicky Bailey