Touch by Graham Mort Page B

his back and the meal went cold. Whenever we had fish after that my mother had to search through it for bones and my father would search after her, probing it with his fork until we felt sick watching him. Sometimes it was cod or haddock rolled in breadcrumbs and fried, but usually it was grilled mackerel that my mother brought home fresh from the market.
    Much later, I remember my mother buying fish fingers and cooking them for tea. My father came home and said, What on earth are these? and when my mother explained that it was fish with the bones taken out he was delighted. It was a long time before my mother tired of the blandness of fish fingers and we had real fish again. Even tins of pilchards had a spiny piece of bone that caught in your teeth and had to be lifted out carefully from the little fish. I remember how the cat loved those bones especially, mewing like a crazy thing and rubbing against my legs with her ecstatic, hypocritical fondness.
    Sometimes we caught sticklebacks in the stream below the house and kept them at home until the water went foul and they died, belly-up and stinking like the worst cowards.
    My father came to me at bedtime when my sister was safely asleep in the next room and my mother was busy over the ironing board, pressing his white shirts for work. When he touched me it was like opening the pink gills of a fish and I caught the faint smell of saltwater as if there was an ocean or estuary inside me. Afterwards I could feel it washing backwards and forwards. Backwards and forwards inside me like a wave over strands of slippery weed.
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I’ve got a seashell here in my hand. Faintly pink with dull purples and blues. They lie sleeping in the rough surface until water lights them and they glint with memories of the sea. My little sister found this shell on the beach and gave it to me because I was crying over something. Because my father in his swimming trunks and long arms and hairy belly had got too close and hurt me. The shell whorls into a tunnel like the inside of someone’s ear. I called into it for help or for sheer love of the sea where it swayed in green glassy waves. Inside the sea and inside me tiny fish were darting, silvery as those shoals of stars that turn the sky to milk at night.
    I remember the first time I put my ear to the ear of the shell and we heard the sound of the sea in each other. The shell pink and clean as the inside of my body, gleaming when it was wet in a hundred subtle colours, which I learned to call hues . He’d spidered his arms around me under the water where no one could see the hurt, just our heads bobbing like corks. It was no use calling out because everyone yells with cold or surprise when they enter the sea.
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A fishmonger must lead a strange and beautiful life. Rising early from sleep to drive off and collect his boxes of treasure from the wholesale market. Inside them, on ice, lie the closely packed bodies, the blinded eyes of fishes. Or perhaps he rises even earlier, before dawn tinges the sky. Driving all the way from our town to the coast, walking the quayside, waiting for the fishing boats to come home, standing where the fishermen’s wives wait fearfully near an angry sea. There he can choose from the open crates of freshly landed fish, bear witness to the strange, deformed monsters that the sea has made inside itself. Deep down, away from the light that we take for granted but which never reaches the ocean depths.
    I can’t bear the thought of a polluted sea, its poisons twisting the exquisite bodies of fish that gather there under the waves like dreams. Under the waves where the light of day is only a faint green glow. I can’t stand the thought of what we’re doing to the oceans and long for the purity of saltwater and wind and passing time.
    I’ve seen my own body like that in other dreams. Tangled in a fisherman’s net and dragged out from the deep with my long dark hair wrapped around my waist,