The better targets were usually plumper. More ready to sample the noodles, the street dumplings. I should have remembered, but Syll was whispering at me, hot breath smelling of red beans and rice with a little onion for flavor and all I could think was how we’d planned to visit the caviar shops for her birthday but we’d gambled away the price of those piled glossy eggs, those neatly chopped sides all laid out in their prim little bowls, and lost the money to a mark that didn’t pan out because we were the marks that time, and too stupid to see it. Hence the need for some quick cash, because “I want to know,” Syll had said one night, tucked into each other as we were. “Whether they pop or crunch. I want to know for my birthday.”
“Clever girls like you should have no trouble,” her granny had said, knitting needles clicking away and her cat’s-arse mouth prim as if she disapproved of our particular brand of cleverness. Not that she ever set that disapproval for much when it came to sharing the spoils; half of Syll’s takings went to keeping the old bitch in tea. A little appreciation wouldn’t have gone amiss, is all I’m saying.
“Well, wouldn’t I wait for you?” I say, as if our situations were reversed. And she hums happily enough, seeming to miss that I didn’t answer anything and didn’t offer any promises neither, because they’re dry things, are promises, set out to bake in the sun like betrothal bread, and all my coming days are wet.
“You always liked to swim,” says Syllabub. She’s used to making the best of, but how she remembers that now I don’t bloody know, seeing as we’ve only been swimming the once. Only a blind fool would go swimming in these waters, and they’d have to lack a nose as well, or be so stuffed up from ‘fluenza that they’d do just about any idiot thing.
Or be drunk. We were drunk, that one time, on foreign wine that tasted of kerosene and lucky not to catch the cholera.
“I’ve never seen girls so stupid,” said granny, when she came to fish us out. Accusations of cleverness were well in the future then, after she’d had a chance to read our cups over, the pair of us shifting and sifting leaves different together than separate, apparently.
Her granddaughter never had the same stomach for the hook. She’s more a hindrance than a help in the Lady’s shop, after I’ve handed over the buns and all the little savings I have, not enough for black eggs but enough to buy transformation and fish flakes for generations, perhaps, because the Lady is good with investments if choice gives her the chance. She says I’ll get half back when I change again so she’s not cruel with it, won’t ever put someone out on the streets with nothing. The rich pay everything they have, same as the poor, it’s the time spent away that pays off in the end.
If some other poor fool driven to this fishes me out tomorrow, I’ll barely have enough for a week’s rice flour. Not that it’ll matter, I’d be dead before sunset anyway, no miser worth his salt would let a grudge loose that soon; they pinch onto pride tighter than pennies. “But if you’re here for a hundred years even your coppers can become something more substantial,” she says, as if the thought of windfall is enough to compensate for everything I’ll have lost by a century’s swimming.
I can only hope the bargain will pay off, and that the same can be said for the fish I’m about to net. That’s the other part of the price, the put-off payment. There are dozens of goldfish in her tanks, hundreds of them, and only space for another if one is taken out again. Guess who gets the responsibility of choice, along with a net?
“Not that one!” Syllabub cries, just when I’ve got one of them trapped in the corner of a tank, my net almost around it. She pouts in my direction. “It looks sad. Don’t you think it looks sad?”
“It’s a goldfish,” I say. “None of them are very bloody happy, are they?” Whether or not this one’s going to be happy to be rescued I’ve no idea. I can only hope enough time’s passed for whoever it was. Time enough and not too much; it can’t be luck to start my own transformation by sending some poor bastard out to death or a new life in a world with nothing familiar in it.
“Some of them look happier than others,” she says, and I have to wonder just what was sprinkled on those sugar buns because they all look the same to me, those goldfish: vacant little faces, trailing fringed fins behind them with an expression like they’ve forgotten what’s following behind.
I hope they don’t bloody know what they’re swimming away from, what they’re swimming towards. I reckon it’d be tolerable, being a goldfish, if it’s goldfish all through. Goldfish with human feeling, though, human memories…
“If it’s sad it’s probably because it’s had enough of living in an aquarium,” I say, determined to believe it and lunging with the net, but a small jostle from the girlfriend and the goldfish escapes to swim another day, merging with the rest of school at the other end of the tank.
“Sorry,” says Syllabub, shrugging, but it doesn’t take a magician to know that she isn’t, really. She skips out of reach, the floor shaking beneath. It makes me wonder what happens in earthquakes. The shop is rickety and bowed at the corners; I can see clear through cracks in the floor to water. One good shock and suddenly the sea’s full of little fishes, with no way of returning to their old selves.
I’d like to think the people who caught them would bring them back to the shop; come bearing soup bowls of seawater, carp in the chamber pots. More likely would be goldfish skewered over an open flame; the little bones ground up for tonic, just in case medicinal efficacy crosses over between species.
“Maybe if they want to go off cold-cocked,” said Syllabub, sniggering, when I was foolish enough to confide my fears. She’s got a hard-on for frigidity jokes lately, but when I bury my feet between her thighs and wriggle toes it’s usually enough to shut her up for a bit.
The Lady of Scales is laughing in the background. I wish I could say it was mean laughter but it’s like she finds us genuinely funny, her own little romantic comedy duo. There can’t be many of those played out in this place, but perhaps I’m giving us more originality than can be credited for.
In fairness, no one’d ever seen her laugh at the fish-that-were, the people she’d turned back and sent off, fair flummoxed and stumbling over thresholds.
We’d all seen them, and none of us were much for laughing either. There was something in their faces—not a remnant hint of scales, no. Nothing so unsubtle. It was the disorientation that gave them away. The slight stagger, as if the balance was just returning to new-old limbs, a rolling gait different than that of sailors, for the Street of Endings was built over water, the thick sweet scent of salt. Built that way for suicides, for the walking off of piers and the quick retrieval of bodies for the organs, ground down and sold on for sex aids. Why you’d want a drowned man’s cock powdered into your tea I don’t know. It doesn’t seem a very stiffening thing to me, but perhaps men see it differently. The trade’s a brisk one, that’s all I know.
It’s brisk enough for goldfish, too.