— What creatures? And how many are we talking about here? she not surprisingly wants to know.
— Four, he replies, South American freshwater stingrays: Potamotrygon motoro.
There is no certainty as to which variant of the type. They might come from Peru, Brazil or Colombia. Many of these species remain unnamed, even undescribed in the scientific literature, but they are distinctive for the beautiful eyespots on their backs, like leopards, peacocks, chameleons or butterflies, and their bellies white as ghosts. He shows her some photographs.
— I’ve already ordered them, he says.
They are due to be collected on the eve of the funeral and, as if for children to be adopted and brought home to a house where nothing is prepared, with winter coming and no wood chopped or food laid up, they must work like demons to ensure a welcoming environment.
Sometimes he says they, sometimes we, he says things, she notices, that fray or slide off at the edges, splashes of grief paint, verbal splay, semantic bubbles, mimosaturated existence popping before you can adjust your vision to see inside. In the evenings when there is nothing to do besides sit in exhaustion, dusty fusty musty in the twilight of the increasingly empty drawing room, dining room or kitchen, or outside on the garden bench to no sound besides sheep in the field above the house and a washing vaguely up of distant traffic on the road running like an unseen wound along the valley below, they discuss at great length the materials required to be ordered or purchased the following day. Gradually they clear and clean, emptying the dining room sufficiently to paint it.
— We are getting ready for them, he says laughing, slapping it on.
She is surprised at how many of the materials are available locally or at short notice from elsewhere, and at his passion to have the thing done, the rigour of his researches and enquiries, the forays to builder's merchants and aquarium shops in nearby towns, sea-life centres strung along the coast, online companies for aquaculture supplies and aquarium systems.
— I never dreamed we’d custom-build a ray pool, did you?
He makes her face light up with laughter. He works out the volume in cubic inches, divides by 231 to establish how many gallons of water: 2,078. He insists on making the thing out of acrylic, not glass, despite the drawbacks. Acrylic sheets are more easily scratched but they don’t crack or break so easily and, in any case, it’s much simpler to drill acrylic. When it comes to installing an individual filtration system the last thing anyone wants are dead-spot areas of water. Lack of circulation means anaerobic conditions. The spillway design is likewise crucial. We need to make sure there are appropriate corner overflows to take away the protein waste that tends to collect at the surface. Despite the fact that acrylic constructions come with a significant lip to help prevent any creature escaping, we really need a covering. Of this last he explains:
— No problem. I’ll just cut it from egg-crate plastic.
Putting together the frame he shows an expertise and dexterity she has not anticipated in him, forcefully snapping together, securing, screwing, drilling the construction of the stand, taking care to ensure sufficient space inside to enable work on the filter as and when required, tilting and adjusting and finally firmly bedding down the acrylic plates. It makes her laugh at least once a day with an absolutely unexpected pleasure, as if this were really how to live, what to do.
And then everything is ready, as if fairies have been in labour, the day breaks, the downstairs of the house is clear, everything that needed to go to the tip has gone, everything that could be put out of sight in this or that cupboard has been put out of sight, the drawing room and dining room and kitchen and downstairs toilet have been cleaned and vacuumed and scoured and washed. The dining room in particular has been especially arrayed for the occasion, the table moved off into one corner, the candles, cups and saucers, glasses, plates and napkins set forth, the wine, soft drinks and food all in preparation. Everyone who could reasonably be expected to have wanted to know knows this is the day, the church at two o’clock, friends of his parents and family arriving from far and near. He has written his speech and the two of them are ready, he dressed in the black clothes he bought on the morning of the death and she in black picked up on a later outing to the town. They stand clasping one another in the dining room clad in black amazed at what it seems they have done, disbelieving, as if supernatural forces or forgeries must have been at work; it is time to walk down to the church.
They have no black shoes. They have been aware of this for some days but failed to take action. Their shoes by chance are green, and this is the first thing the undertaker and pallbearers notice, by the hearse outside the lychgate, some twenty minutes before the official start of the proceedings. The undertaker shakes the hand of each in turn and looks them in the face, but his primary focus is the shoes. His gaze drops to the ground, bright green trainers, both of them wearing green trainers: what is this about, why for the life of him hasn’t the gentleman got black shoes and the lady for that matter, the sylph-like slip of a girl who must be half his age? What does it mean, this green, this dividing of green shoes among the two of them? It’s a conspiracy, a sign, something not right.
It’s a hot day and the undertaker is sweaty already, a corpulent man liable to feel the heat even without all his clobber on, and whether it is the sun or something about the couple, he is not one to be fazed in the course of things, but he is having trouble with these green shoes on the both of them. And what is their relation in any event? Is she his daughter? No, that can’t be right, nor his sister, no resemblance there either. And those green shoes in which they are conjoined, up to what could an undertaker like himself ever suppose to be other than no good! What a colour! He’ll tell his wife, even more than himself massively overweight, dying off the fat of the land, he’ll regale her with the details tonight. After the second funeral and the forty-mile round trip, that evening back in the flat over the funeral parlour, upstairs from the chapel of rest where the son had gone just the day before with the same girl, the wife saw them then, remember, the son come in to pay his respects and the young woman followed like a cat. He never thought anything of it at the time, regarding what their relation was, but the gentleman come in and the undertaker conducted him through to the chapel, a surreal little living room with no television or other furnishings of the living but a chintzy wallpaper with no windows besides one curtained-off interior window that would, were the curtain drawn back, give view onto the stuffy little corridor. It resembled a retro-room in a shabby provincial museum, how life looked decades ago, or so the son thought. Reproductions of landscape paintings are pinned to the walls, lepidopterously; there is a little table with artificial flowers and a faded doily; and crème de la crème, you look up to see a little picture of Jesus, the crucial accoutrement to the designation of chapel of rest. What else?
Anything else?
Yes, of course, no twitching at the curtain of the interior window needed to catch that. It is the labyrinth at the centre, the bier or bed or bearing point of life. The day before the funeral and this is the one and only opportunity to see his father reposing, almost prostrate, laid almost horizontally but with a slight propping up of the upper body, the shoulders and head just as he had been last time ‘in life’. All our yesterdays a fortnight of solemnity. Day fought to death, seems only yesterday, but then propped up perhaps a shade more, and smiling that faintly Mona Lisa cryptic valediction about which he will never tell anyone unless in a touch, a certain squeeze of the hand, and now so strangeways, all awry, all away, utterly not. As she said when he invited her to come in and stand a moment with him: