— Not only me, he says to a murmur along the line of all those gathering around the pooclass="underline" I could not have done it without her.
He gestures towards the pristine dark girl by the door off to the kitchen.
— It is necessary, he goes on, to confront a ghastly deception. Triumph is a terrible delusion that must nonetheless be reckoned with. To pretend that it is not there would be as nauseating as to accept that it is. I cannot speak for her (and here he gestures once again towards the beautiful stranger scarcely anyone present has previously met), but I am not going to deny a sense of achievement at having conceived and constructed this ray pool, with its spillway design and lipped feature, at having lined it with the correct quartz sand, after picking over and assessing it, stone by stone, day after day, at having carefully selected the, I think it’s thirteen, individual, perfectly sized rocks, and at having installed the highest-quality filters, pumps, lighting and heating. Everything has been done here that could have been done to ensure an appropriate supply of water and to establish the correct mechanisms for the upkeep and replacing of water, and for the weekly gravel-cleaning and hydrovac. But any feeling of triumph here is at once also its opposite. To achieve is to lose. To suppose that you are winning is to be undergoing absolute defeat.
He pauses, somewhat perplexed at where this speech has come from. Then he carries on with a view to relating as briefly as possible the acquisition of the rays themselves, the initial quandary he had been thrown into by the dealer who encouraged him to buy a number of so-called teacup rays.
At which point at least one local woman, a farmer’s wife, glances down in fuzzy consternation at the teacup and saucer in her hands.
— The teacup ray, the bereaved man adds, as if picking up the demur, is sometimes advertised as a sort of miniature version as of some pigmy species, but really it is just a baby. Don’t be fooled by the teacup talk. I wasn’t, for I had read and talked to plenty of people on these issues, and I wasn’t going to be fobbed off from my original desire to get motoro rays of fair proportions which, as you may be able to see, is what we did eventually manage to do. Not that they are as big as they might be: a stingray of this variety can, in appropriate conditions, grow to a diameter of three feet or more, but these I hope will be happy to stay closer to the size they are now.
— It’s been hard, he goes on, unexpectedly swallowing a word or two, more emotional now than he had been in presenting his speech at the church, not having anticipated that he would make any particular speech at all at this point, in this revolutionised dining room, in the presence of so many family and friends, as well as a handful of more or less complete strangers.
— It was hard, especially at the end, a matter of such precarious hope — as any of you will know who may ever have bought and kept rays… I don’t know, is there anyone here?
And he looks up, surprised at his own question, to a tide of blank faces.
— Perhaps not. But the trickiest part is bringing a ray home in its transport basin. You have to give it time to acclimatise to the change in water, introducing the creature to its new environment with all the care in the world not only for its own wellbeing but also for your own, since these, after all, are dangerous creatures. It is usual to cover the ray’s sting with a piece of plastic piping during transport, but at the other end, I mean back here at the pool, it was then a matter of removing the plastic hose from each. Not to do so is to invite infection, but to do so is at least as hazardous to the handler as to the ray itself. It was, I confess, a slightly hair-raising operation and I couldn’t have done it alone. So far, at any rate, it would seem to have been effective, but naturally it should be stressed (as the speaker now notices one of his cousin’s youngest children, a boy of perhaps seven, wander up to the edge of the pool and try to peer in), I should have stressed at the very beginning that these beautiful creatures can also be very dangerous, and when you lift up a section of the lid, as I have just done, and they come to the surface like a club of old wraiths having been stirred by some unexpected knock at the door, don’t for one moment suppose that it would be safe to put your hand in and give them an affectionate stroke (the cousin now calling the boy away from the edge) as you might have considered doing if you’d encountered similar rays in a so-called touchpool at a sea-life centre. These rays have not had their stings removed and this is not, I repeat, not a touchpool.
It may be, after all, that to the bereaved speaker, as to a storyteller, a peculiar authority befalls. Yet he pauses once more, curious as to how long he can continue without someone, perhaps his aunt, breaking into ridicule, or at any rate passing some kind of comment.
— What do you feed them on? blushes the teenage daughter of another cousin.
— On shrimps, he replies, a little snappily. Fillets of whitefish, trout, river perch, with occasional live food such as earthworms and red mosquito larvae.
— What’s a touchpool? asks the small boy still lingering near the lip of the unroofed section.
— A good question, declares the grief-stricken man, in a voice louder and more trembling than he might have wished.
He realises in a flash how careful he must be in his choice of words now, already risen up inside all his hatred for the commercialisation of rays that has, in so many coastal resorts around the world, reduced the experience of seeing to one of touching, as if they were puppies to be stroked or rabbits to have placed in one’s lap, um likkel inkydinky strokey. No, he has to rein himself in here — otherwise he will frighten the young boy, not to mention appear quite crackers to this gathered group of friends and loved ones. He must, if only for the sake of a certain decorum, fight against the impulse to spit out the euphemistic and quietly nauseating compound phrase ‘touchpool’ and denounce in the most vituperative terms all those who have ever been responsible for participating in, or merely encouraging, a state of affairs whereby visitors to an aqua-life centre can feel at liberty, or feel even that it is their right, to touch these creatures, when all the research stresses that rays have extremely sensitive skin all too readily susceptible to trauma. Still the words rush out of him.
— The last thing in the world you should do to a ray, he says, is stroke it, not to mention exclaim aloud, as I have heard people do in marine-life centres around the world, Ooh, it doesn’t feel like anything I felt before, or It feels, ugh, like fondling a giant frog, or Just like wet rubber, and so on. The sooner the world is rid of touchpools the sooner people might start properly respecting these extraordinary creatures. I say the last thing in the world, but (and here his gaze wanders away beyond the church-goers, and beyond the cousin and wife who had been stuck in traffic on the road from London but have now appeared at the door and mutely joined the others) actually I have witnessed worse something even more disgraceful in the case of a sea-life centre on the eastern seaboard of the United States. An official was seated right beside the touchpool, with a cap pulled down over his eyes, while a group of boys not all that much older than you, I shouldn’t imagine (his raised right forefinger here directly trained on the cousin’s boy near the edge), played at pulling their tails as they went gliding past. The boys thought this was just such a hoot and the official, employed it should be said by a company purportedly committed to the preservation of our great marine world and all the inhabitants of our oceans, merely maintained a blind eye. They were trying to catch then tug along the rays by their tails, worse than swinging cats, and of course the only reason why these little horrors, these mindless shrimps who might have taken a different attitude to the whole thing if they had been warned in advance of having testosterone whipped out of them with piano-wire, the only reason why they were able to do what they did — besides the grotesque and wilful neglect of the fake-dozing official — was because the stings of these rays had been removed. I allude here to an act of barbarity regarding not just the spines but the bulk of the tails altogether, a barbarity most readily appreciated by visiting one of these marine concentration camps, I choose my words carefully, these commercialised marine torture chambers, and witness for yourselves the amputations and the torture chambers and for the ray, for the rays –