‘Is it pregnant?’ I asked, looking at the picture again. It was round, but fish don’t get pregnant with babies like animals do, do they? They can’t, because there is such a thing as fish-eggs, and people eat them. ‘What’s that, stuck to it?’
‘That’s your guess?’ Donald said, pushing the pound coin towards me with his finger and then sliding it away, teasing. He hadn’t teased me like that for ages. It was only a pound, but I snatched for it and he hid it under his palm and laughed. I was worried he was beginning to think I was too old for it. Or by the time he came out of himself, I really would be too old for it.
I stared again, but the dots of ink that made up the picture were too big and the more I looked, the less I could see. The best thing, I thought, would be to put it to one side and then quickly glance at it. Let it think you’d forgotten all about it and then take it by surprise, so that the blots and shadows would stay making sense and not scramble themselves into a puzzle under the bright light of being looked at.
‘Is it a baby fish, hanging on the side? It’s a very blurry picture, Dad.’
‘I’ll give you fifty pee for that,’ Donald said, standing up and rattling the change in his pockets, ‘because it is another fish, but it’s not her baby.’
‘What then?’ I said, and took the pound off the table while Donald was occupied sifting through his pockets for a fiftypence piece.
‘It’s the male of the species, who has bitten her on the side and is pumping his generative fluids into her through a tube between his mouth and her egg-chamber. The process takes such a long time that over the days, or weeks, or months – even years – we don’t really know – he shrinks, his own organs die away and he relies on her totally for his food supply.’
‘So it is like a baby, then?’
‘In some ways, yes,’ Donald said, and risked a look at Barbara. I couldn’t tell if she was listening, or ignoring.
‘More accurately, he is a parasite, because he contributes nothing to the female but those generative fluids I mentioned earlier. In fact, you could even say –’ he flipped fifty pence onto the table. For a minute I was disappointed: I wanted him to pretend to pull it out of my ear.
‘Yes?’
‘You could even say that he’s more of a testicle than a parasite, Lola.’
Then Barbara did turn around. She put the knife down first, very gently on the side of the sink. She put the tomato she’d been working on next to it. Very slowly, so it wouldn’t roll away. She even pushed it with her first finger to make sure it was sitting on its flat, cut end, and the half-done petals were facing the ceiling. She wiped her hands on the front of her apron. Then she turned around.
I wasn’t looking at Donald anymore. I wasn’t looking at anything. I was keeping my eyes very still on the table, noticing the white specks on the wood where the Tipp-Ex had smudged over the sides of the card and dried.
‘What a disgusting thing to say,’ Barbara said.
I won’t forget the way she said ‘disgusting’ – the word split down the middle with a ‘g’ as hard as her teeth. There was a tick of silence. I waited for Donald to fold the paper up and tuck it all back inside the folder. I waited for him to put his hands together and close his eyes. His shoulders were always a good indicator. If they sloped away from his neck it meant it was a bad day. A bad month. It meant he might not reply if you talked to him, or he might start saying something then leave it in the middle, as if he’d tired himself out with the effort of talking. But if his shoulders were up straight, making a corner at his neck, then he was all right. He kept them up, but his face looked as if it was making him tired to do it.
‘I’ll set this table for you,’ I said to Barbara, and started slotting the paper back into the folders. I was careful not to crease the edges, but I did it quickly, and stacked them on top of the washing machine. Then I took one of the green scrubby cloths to the table and got rid of all the white marks.
I did get away to my room with my magazine in the end. I lay on my bed in the dim winter light until Barbara shouted for me. I turned pages without seeing them and rested my feet on the creaking radiator. I only bought the magazines for the free things and the problem pages. Flip-flops with blue flowers on the t-bar where it crossed over the big toe. Eye-shadow triples in little cakes that would fall out of the case and crumble if you weren’t careful and didn’t hold them like they were trays of water that could spill.
The pages were shiny and they smelled like fish. The problem pages. Questions about odour down there and boyfriends who wouldn’t take no for an answer. You would if you loved me. And there was always a helpline. Numbers to ring to find out the answers to your problems. Brook Advisory for the babies. A clinic for periods, and the diseases. Vox-pops about the best place for that first kiss, and a picture of some long-faced woman with a red bow in her hair and dark-framed glasses – chewing on a pen with a telephone at her ear. She was the person to ring if you had problems with your friends.
Problems with friends. You had to have friends to have problems with them in the first place. I imagined what it would be like to be married, to sleep next to the same person for thirty or forty years, and then have them leave you. Not, I decided, as bad as this. I knew, without knowing how I knew it, that adults didn’t feel humiliation the same way.
I flicked through the magazine backwards. Past the adverts for psychics, tarot readings, boob jobs, nose jobs, special tights that would hoik your gut in and make your belly disappear, before and after pictures of chins, of eyes, of spotty foreheads and all-over tans. Pictures of shoes and bags and coats and scarves, past the feature about how you can tell if a man puts a powder in your glass when you’re away at the toilet, and onto the quizzes. They had a special section of their own and the pages were trimmed with a blue border like a Victorian condolence letter.
We always did the quizzes together, and compared our answers. What kind of girlfriend are you? Multiple choice. Chloe read the questions and filled in her answers with a cross, mine with a tick. We added the scores up at the end. I remembered Chloe adding up on her fingers. She wore tiny gold rings sometimes, with pear-shaped cubic zirconia or hearts etched with her initials.
Did Emma have a boyfriend? I couldn’t see it. She was oily and her hands were square and grey and constantly tugging at the elastic of her socks. Had Chloe got her a boyfriend? Some friend of Carl’s? I imagined them out together. Pointy shoes, Christmas perfume – two couples in the car. Carl did handbrake turns in supermarket car parks at night because he liked to hear Chloe squeal. I’d hang on to her in the back, bracing myself against the passenger door as Chloe hurtled into me – her hair flying, her jaw clacking together. I never squealed, but I bet Emma screamed her heart out. Once she knew what was expected, she was compliant. She liked to know the steps. She practised gymnastics until the size of her calves made her socks uncomfortable and her bleeding stopped.
The next quiz was about skin type and I poked my forehead and tried to think about T-zones with dry, tight patches, and stared out of the window. The frost on the grass was thickening. Each blade was coated in its own grey-blue skin of icing sugar. There were darker oblongs on the path where the ice had melted under the strong yellow light from the glass panes in the front door. I didn’t think about anything else. It was just ice. The clouds were heavy and the temperature had stayed in the minus figures since Christmas Day – but no snow yet. I let the magazine slide down the side of the bed. When I dozed I dreamed about Carl pushing an old-fashioned sledge down a big hill. In the dream I watched him, and felt scared, but I was too small and too far away to do anything to stop him.