Touch by Graham Mort Page A

asking for her over and over.
    â€˜Where’s Mummy? Where’s Mummy?’
    The man, in a dazed voice, repeating, ‘It’s alright, she’s here, it’s alright.’
    Their voices meshed. Like the cries of gulls that circled the flats each morning. Mary imagined Des pounding up the stairs with his bald head gleaming and his jacket and shirt sleeves flapping at the elbows. Jack-the-Lad with his arms full of lilies. Taser . That was hysterical. But she didn’t laugh. She watched the glitter of lights that lay beyond the window, mapping each street. The earth she stood on was slowly turning. Here she was, upright, clinging to the wall. Beyond a single sheet of glass lay the long fall. Glass that was neither a liquid nor a solid, but something in between. Indeterminate, even by the reasoning of molecular dynamics. Glass that had been a mountain, an ocean, a tide of sand washed onto a beach on one day of history. Glass that had been changed by fire, incandescent in an iron crucible, in furnace heat. Now here it was, cool, between her and everything. There was the game of chess, unfinished, each piece staring into battle. There was the lift, rising with her husband inside. There was that stranger cradling their child. And outside was the world. All that treachery. The night.

Why I’ve Always Loved Fishmongers
    I’ve always loved fishmongers. Ever since I was a child and stood in front of their windows in the town where there was a row of fish shops following the hill down to the market square. I love the red, honest hands of fishmongers and their smeared white aprons. I love the fishy smell of them. And I love their thin, worn-away knives that are so very sharp. The way they slide them along the spine of a mackerel or herring. The way they lift the backbone clean out.
    There’s something infinitely treasurable to me about the grotto of a fishmonger’s window, its cornucopia of the sea. And let me tell you, I hate the bloody mess of butchers’ shops. The butcher is a crude mechanic by comparison with the fishmonger’s artistry. He shows only parts of an animal: their rib-joints, loins, neck, legs, kidneys, livers and lungs. But the fishmonger offers you the whole creature you’re about to devour: head, tail and fins. Though they’re dead on his slab you can imagine their lives in the rivers and the seas so easily. You can see them leaping from the phosphorescence of the fishing boat’s bow-wave or hurling themselves upwards over the sheet silver of a weir.
    I love fishmongers and the clean, hygienic windows of their shops. Their piles of ice like the jewellery of a snow queen, their heaps of winkles and mussels and oysters with sequined shells. Their fans of herring and trout, skate wings and sea-bass, red and grey mullet, the fillets of hake and cod and huss, the fat coils of conger eel or the dull red meat of shark steaks cut from behind a staring, savage head. Silvery mounds of sprats and sardines, sliced whiting and coley, hake and halibut and the slack, gaping mouths of codfish. Lastly the shells of live crabs or lobsters, those anachronistic war machines of rusted iron. They way they stalk blindly about their tanks, the armoured, predatory spiders of the sea.
    Let me tell you that this is a love affair that will not go away. Each night I dream of fishmongers unpacking their crates of ice, lifting out the slender, delicate bodies of fish under the moon. Cradling them tenderly in their mercurial slime and bearing them away like lovers.
    My father never touched me until I was eleven years old. Then we had a secret and my mother’s eyes behind her smudged spectacles stopped seeing. Let’s be clear: my father was never a fishmonger and he disliked eating fish, though he spent hours trying to catch them. I remember him choking on a fish bone when I was very small. I held onto my little sister and watched him go blue as my mother pounded