You might well protest that all the horror and death I put them through with Hennessy was unnecessary, given that this is exactly where they would have ended up anyway.
Strictly speaking, this is true.
But I am a parasite and a disease.
Doing what I did shortened my journey by a full six months.
The Temporary Suicides of Goldfish
Octavia Cade
Everyone deserves a last meal. Mine was fish, Syllabub laughing her arse off as she served it up. Not goldfish, because that would have been bad luck—the kind of bad luck that comes from gossip about a last meal getting back to her Ladyship and being taken as insult. Instead a poor skinny muddy thing in a thin soup, flounder I think, or catfish.
“They’re not at all the same,” says Syllabub, critical, but they’re fish, aren’t they?
“I didn’t think there was going to be a test,” I said, and if I’d any room left in me for panic I would have panicked then, because the Lady and her tanks are the only thing between me and a bloody end instead of a scaly one. And if I’m to be examined on fish before I’m allowed to become one, then I might as well offer myself up for gutting now and be done with it.
“I thought you’d show a bit more interest than that.”
But it’s all I can do to show any interest in the food instead of fate, the blackened little strips of fish all doused in spices to hide the old flesh. I can taste cumin, pepper, the burn from dried chili—improperly ground, Syllabub’s always been a careless cook, but spices cost near as much as fish and there’s not enough to cover the taste of ammonia. Syllabub gorges anyway, and I pick enough at the burnt edges to pretend diversion before fronting up to the Lady of Scales.
No one knows her true name. Magic has never encouraged exchanges of confidence and so we named her for her skill, and left the past—whatever it might be—well enough alone.
If she objected to her trading name we never knew it. I’d often thought, passing by the shop front and seeing the bright shape of her through the glass, that there was enough of a sense of humor there to play up to it. The orange robes floated around her, and there were gold scales embroidered about the hem. She even bulged a bit in the middle, though that was due more to pastry, we thought, than the attentions of a man. Not one of us had ever seen any of them come courting.
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” says Syllabub. “You put your cold feet against her of a night and like as not you’ll wake up without them.” She eyes me over her bowl of broth. “I can see the upside, is all I’m saying.”
“Oh fuck off,” I say. “Haven’t I been wearing the damn socks?”
“Gran made them specially,” she says, smirking. The socks are blue and orange, carp swimming in lake water with surprised expressions on their stupid faces.
Neither of us ever stopped to think that Syll’s old granny spent as much time with her tea leaves and clients as with her knitting needles. And that we took tea with her every Sunday. I’m almost sure the old bitch saw this coming. Me with my life savings, such as they are, and a plate of sugar buns, silly socks on both shaking feet, and a contract coming close behind.
Pick the wrong pocket and suddenly transformation starts to seem like a decent option. Even if it’s transformation into a fish.
“I saw her stuffing sweet buns again,” she says. I don’t need to ask who she’s talking about. “She’s getting fatter by the day.” This in tones of admiration. Syll enjoys her own round flesh, wants to plump up enough for fashion, but we don’t always have the cash for the cream cakes she prefers, the butter tablets and duck fat and soft cheese. “All soft and glowy. You don’t think she’s pregnant, do you?”
I can’t think by who. The worst-kept romance on the Street of Endings is between the baker and the Lady of Scales, and both of them are women.
“Maybe she’s stuffed full of eggs,” says Syllabub, pettish. “Maybe if you open her up they’ll all be clotted in there like caviar.”
Neither of us has ever eaten caviar. It’s a lack that Syllabub takes personally. The little dishes, the elegant bowls of black roe, of chopped boiled eggs, the tiny spoons of sour cream, the finely chopped watercress… how would it all taste, mixed together for mouths? Do the little eggs pop or crunch on the tongue? Curiosity’s a curse, they say, and I reckon they’re right. It certainly hasn’t done anything for me lately.
“You’ll be the one cut open if the Lady hears you talk like that,” I say. Though really, it’s the baker I wouldn’t put it past. She’s got a long reach, that one, and if it weren’t poisoned profiteroles turning up on the doorstep—I can’t tell myself that Syllabub wouldn’t swallow them down without thinking, it’s not just greed, we’re simply not in the position to waste food—then she’d find herself offered up to tanks anyway, her dead body laid before a lover in the certain knowledge that transformation doesn’t work on corpses.
One of us having to beg sanctuary off the Lady of Scales was enough without the other being offered up as well.
“I’ll wait for you,” says Syllabub, and there’s sincerity on every line of her pretty face but I’ve got my doubts. Theft calls for patience as well as nerve but there’s always an end to waiting in sight, and the Lady of the Scales is no thief. She guarantees nothing of returns. Just that there’ll be one, one day, probably, if she doesn’t over-chlorinate the tanks, or forget the feeding, or elope with the baker whose shop sits just two doors down from her own, give up aquaculture for sugar-work. “One day” might be tomorrow. It might be next century. I’m no fan of luck but I’ve learned to calculate odds, when I’ve got a dress out of pawn for trips to the gambling houses, and my calculations say that there are a lot of girls with warm feet in this city, and none of them are about to be goldfish.
Syll’s always been good at netting things. She’s good at catch and release as well. But she’s tender-hearted for all of that and so she’s come along with, her nose pressed against shop windows, and all I can think when I see her is how she’ll look from the other side of the glass. I pretend not to notice that two of the sugar buns have found their way into her pockets. I’d eat one myself if I weren’t about to throw up.
“You believe me, don’t you? That I’ll wait?” she says. She wants me to believe her, but I reckon that’s as much guilt as anything else, because it was her that I was trying to steal for and we both know it. Her suggestion: that one, he looks rich and stupid, wouldn’t notice if an ox stumbled into him, got that look of distraction I think not.
I should have known better. It’s always the skinny ones that are the most grasping. He’d been a spiny stick insect, that one, for all his suit was silk, and no one with money who walks down the street refusing oysters and grilled mango with honey, whitebait fritters, and milk balls does so for any reason but greed for his pockets instead of his stomach.
Of course he felt my fingers in his pockets. But the catching wasn’t enough for him, nor the boxed ears, nor the appeals to the justice because they’re easy enough to work around, a night in the cells gets you out of another. The contract came out of spite. Not for trying it on to begin with, but for not recognizing him enough to stay away. For a certain type that’s more insult than anything else, but the wealthy have nothing to do with me, how am I supposed to know them? You’d have to work in a bank or business to be stupid enough to thieve from that sort. The petty stealers, the ones that live small like Syllabub and I, well. We’ve more sense. We stick to the moderately well-off, the ones who can afford to lose the price of a meal but not hire vengeance for it.