The Fish Tank

Ruth took off her gumboots at the back door. Entering the kitchen through the garage, she threw her rain hat on the drainer and dragged her fingers through her flattened curls to lift them from her itchy neck and forehead.

The scene was much as she expected. Paper cups, napkins and crumbs littered the table. A half-demolished bowl of trifle supported a precarious serving spoon, which had dripped a fair proportion of its contents on to the polished wood. Drops of blancmange were already hardening around the edges. A half-eaten sandwich curled on its solitary plate. The bread was dry. The house was quiet. Obviously the party was long over.

“Rachel?” she called. “Rebecca? Anyone home?” She did not expect a reply. The novelty of self-catering worn off, the nine-year-olds were probably inflicting themselves on some other long-suffering mother on the estate.

She started to clear up the mess, aware again of her gratitude to her mother, who usually took charge of the youngsters between school home-time and the time she could get back from the University. Today Grandma had gone to the dentist, but first she had prepared a cold Birthday buffet.

Ruth was slightly hurt that the kids had wanted to serve themselves and not to wait until she was home to share in the celebration. Still, she supposed, they were growing up now and would depend on her presence less and less. Wasn’t that after all what she wanted? Juggling a fatherless family and a career had never been easy. Always, there was guilt. Either one failed to provide enough money, or one failed to provide enough love. Whichever route you chose, inadequacy was a way of life

Ruth even felt guilty towards her mother. Much as her mother loved the children, she found them hard work, and would have preferred to see her daughter settled with a male provider, caring for her children herself and postponing the use of her more intellectual faculties until her primary reproductive responsibilities were fulfilled.

Into this irresolute frame of mind, the sound of muffled sobbing did not strike a chord of incongruity.

“Rachel? Is that you?”

She opened the door to the hall and listened at the bottom of the stairs. The sounds were certainly coming from the girls’ room. The door was open. The curtains were drawn. The disconsolate sound was coming from Rachel’s bed, as she had guessed it would. Rachel, the moral giant of the family: the sibling who insisted on right behaviour; who lectured her sister and her friends on the proprieties; who vetoed the more attractive felonies, was, as a result, often condemned to tearful and lonely righteousness.

“I told her she mustn’t, Mum”. Rachel sounded very worried.
“Who mustn’t what?” queried Ruth, in a fore-doomed attempt to clarify the narrative. She knew it for a pointless reaction and expected no more response than she received. From long experience, she knew enough to listen for key words that would give her the clues she needed to unravel the tangled skein of her anxious daughter’s logical thread and negotiate the maze of her explanation.

Rachel’s twin, Rebecca, with her friends, Charlotte and Nicola, had gone into Mummy’s room. “I told them they mustn’t.” There Nicola had persuaded Rebecca to let her look through Mummy’s microscope on the windowsill and smashed a slide by winding down the wrong lens. Then, bored with a view of rainbow light and her own eyelashes, caused by faulty alignment of the mirror (all of which the knowledgeable Rachel had tried to explain with the usual lack of success of a resident prophet) she had taken the top off the aquarium and stuck her hand in to capture one of its bright inhabitants. Here the meandering tale ceased its exploration of inconsequential side-roads and culs-de-sac to collide with a brick wall of incoherence.

A shaken Rachel wailed and blubbered as at some midnight nightmare. All that Ruth could accept was that Nicola had hurt her finger and the other girls had taken her home. The rest of the story made no sense at all.

The tank contained - not fish - but butterflies.

So far, Ruth had not had time to study them closely. One of the forest workers had brought them to her that morning in an old cigar box. He said they were from a colony he had disturbed, feeding on some dead animal in the woods.

She had done no more than tip the box into an empty fish tank and secure the lid before it was time to leave for the University. The girls had joined her, briefly, in admiring her captives’ rich colouring before she shooed them to the car to take them to school in Lyndhurst on her way to work in Southampton.

There was a growing number of butterfly farms in the area with many unusual specimens. Some had been collected as cocoons from the wild and others were consequent hybrids between species never previously found within thousands of miles of each other. Ruth had retained an impression of basic shape and colouring, but had found nothing comparable in her charts.

After hugging Rachel and tucking her comfortingly into her duvet, Ruth checked her own room. The slide was broken. The aquarium was intact and covered. The two beautiful rarities were both present and unharmed. So much for Rachel’s imagination.

Next she phoned Nicola’s mum, Jane. Yes, Nicola was there with both Charlotte and a very apprehensive Rebecca. Jane was putting Nicola to bed as she was over-excited. She would send the other two girls home at once. Yes, there was a story of a bitten finger, but she could find no sign of any damage and inclined to think the best cure was the standard treatment for incomprehensible behaviour – a sharp slap, a cuddle, hot milk and early bed.

Rebecca came home subdued. She had retreated behind her own characteristic defence. "I don’t remember”, she bleated. Exasperated, Ruth administered Jane’s recommended treatment.

Softly, she closed the bedroom door. Now, with the house silent and the children asleep, she could finally examine her acquisitions in detail. Yes, there was something odd about them. They had a more solid appearance than most butterflies. That protuberance she’d glanced at and dismissed as overlapping, elongated “Swallow tails” was actually a true tail. The scales were larger than she would have expected, visible as intersecting diamond shapes with fringed edges: more like a reptile or even a primitive bird, than an insect. The head was different too. Wasn’t that a small beak, rather than mandibles, beneath the bulging eyes? Surely these specimens weren’t insects at all? Whatever they were, she had never seen nor heard of anything even remotely like them before.

She paused with her hand on the glass top.

Perhaps she should wear gloves? Perhaps they really could bite? She heard a noise behind her. “No, Mum, No!” screeched the supposedly amnesiac Rebecca, whilst behind her a whey-faced Rachel added a more subdued plea. “Please, Mum, don’t.”

Painfully, the twins reiterated Rachel’s earlier tale of how the butterfly had sat on Nicola’s finger as she lifted it from the tank to admire it more thoroughly. Then it had folded its wings down around her finger.

As she stretched out her hand to pass its gaudy burden to Charlotte, they had all seen small spines slide out, like tiny, red fish bones from the edge of its wings to pierce her extended digit. Bright, ruby beads welled up along her finger as Nicola stared for a moment unfeeling, then screamed her comprehension and outrage.

She tried to pull the thing off her hand.

Horror had compounded as the creature stretched and tore like plasticine before it would let go. The pieces flung back in panic into the tank had coalesced into a clay-coloured, putty-like lump. There was only one “Butterfly” in the tank when Rebecca took Nicola home. She expected to get into terrible trouble.

The twins were both in tears. Unable to believe them, but equally unable to explain what they might have seen, Ruth reassured them as well as she could by sealing the glass lid to the tank with masking tape, placing it in a wooden crate in the car boot and promising to give it to Richard at work in the morning. Richard, as they well knew, kept a secure prison for snakes, tarantulas and other menaces. He would know exactly how to deal with their macabre pets.

In the meantime Ruth coaxed the twins into remembering how quickly Nicola had forgotten her punctured finger, on which no marks could anyway be seen, and how she had laughed and giggled so much on her way home that Jane had decided she was over-excited from all the birthday fun and had sent her to calm down in bed. Even that had not distressed their friend, who was heard chuckling sleepily as she retreated upstairs.

“So she wasn’t hurt, was she?” Ruth concluded, “And it hasn’t been such a bad birthday, after all, has it?”
Thus prompted, the twins remembered their presents. They cuddled up with their mum to re-examine them over cocoa and biscuits. Peace and harmony was restored. Soon the twins slept again.

At ten o’clock, Ruth was downstairs, ironing clean school shirts for the next morning, when the phone rang.

It was Jane. “Oh, Ruth,” she wailed, “I don’t know what to do. It’s Nicola. She’s disappeared !”

© Sylvia Farley February 2002