Not that I’ve seen too many of them. Still enough, it seems like there’s one or two every year, come back from the tanks.
How many years will it be for me?
“I could be dead when you’re fished from the tanks,” says Syllabub, considering. “I could be old.”
It’s hard to think of her as old. There’s too much flash and quickness to her. Too much of the flexible, too much greed for the new.
“I’ll be all wrinkly, with my tits down by my knees. And age spots, probably. Gran’s got lots of age spots.” She giggles. “Like a civet cat, but I don’t know that the smell’s the same.” She’s lifted some perfumes of late, spraying the ones she didn’t sell over the bed linens and rolling over them until all her flesh smelled of musk. “You’d love me when I’m old, wouldn’t you?” she says.
“I’d try,” I say and she clicks her tongue, pouting. As I said, romantic—though it was a practical romanticality, if there’s such a thing. Someone would come along sooner or later. Someone not me, someone warm-footed, and she’d find a way to call it fate. Maybe even a series of someones, and me not even recognizing her when I came back, if I came back, staggering along the Street, new-born to bipedalism and blaring it to anyone who looked.
But it wasn’t just the walk that told what they were. It was in the way their mouths hung open, gaping open and shut with drool coming down, and them not bothering to wipe it away. Course they could have been country folk, staring at the Street with wide eyes as though they’d never seen the like, mazed by the mix and bustle of it. If it weren’t for the drool and the walk, and the possibility that they really didn’t know where they were.
No. That’s not true. The Lady of the Scales has had her shop for generations and it hasn’t moved a meter. It’s not the street geography they’re lost in, poor fish-mouthed creatures. It’s the time: the consciousness of years passed. Or not passed, but if they turn back too quickly the disorientation doesn’t have time to confuse them.
Confusion doesn’t long outlast a knife through the throat. Grudges tend to fall off after a few decades, people find better things to do or get knifed themselves—the kind of person who carries blades and pays the kids pennies to watch and tell if a fish comes back out that door doesn’t do so well with associates, I reckon. Relationships are an inconvenience sometimes.
“It’s not always the crooks though,” said Syllabub. She’s a romantic streak.
I thought the people who had themselves turned all over scales for a bad love affair were missing their brains as well as their legs. No wonder their matches turned sour, wedded as they were to the dramatic before anything else. If you could make the decision to give up everything in life—friends, family, even the nodding acquaintance and all the sights and smells of a neighborhood grown familiar through time—enough to swim off into the future, then you could make the decision to give up one person.
I reckon it’s only hysterics that makes anyone choose the former. The desire for attention, to wallow in grief. I thought so before I’d come to the Lady of Scales and I thought so even more now, knowing what I had to lose and not actually willing to do it for anything less than life.
Turns out there’s something more than hysterics to it, something sickening. I’d thought she weren’t cruel, the Lady, but when the goldfish I’d finally chased down and netted is turned out onto the floor, there’s a girl in a soaking bridal gown stepping out of scales and crying like her heart would break. Jilted, poor thing, and run off to life as a fish so she wouldn’t have to see him again.
“Gods, didn’t you have a mother?” I say to her, helping that warm weeping weight up off her knees. “Didn’t you have any friends?” Being thrown over’s never pleasant, but we’ve all been there and surely a few solid weeks of drink and whining could have made the difference. Her gown’s old-fashioned but even I can tell it cost a lot, all fine with lace and little pearls sewn on so she could have afforded the indulgence, could have sold the pearls for months at a brothel with men more skilled than the one that dumped her, so you think someone would have been there to take her in hand.
“I didn’t think,” she says, sobbing, and it turns out the silly girl did have support about her but she ran off straight from the temple, humiliated and miserable and in just enough shock to throw her life away for nothing, for the Lady of Scales took her bridal necklace and hocked it, turned the poor wailing thing fish-face before she had a chance to think better of herself.
It doesn’t seem decent, somehow.
What seems even less decent is the way Syllabub’s staring at her, all pathetic and sorry-like. “Your dress is very out of date,” she says, and that’s enough for me to see where this is going. If that were last season’s wedding gown, last decade’s even, there’d be people for her to go back to. But it isn’t, and there won’t be, and I wonder now how often the mama of this little goldfish came to Lady of Scales, wanting her daughter back and not being able to get her. Hundreds of shining fish swim here, all of them identical, and she could only bargain with her own life for one.
“Is her mother in one of those tanks?”
The Lady of the Scales looks at me, considering. “Do you really want to know?” she says.
I don’t.
It’s the bloody Street of Endings, that’s what it is.
No one ever said any of the endings would be happy.
Except one of them is, because this is the moment Syllabub’s bitch of a grandmother wanders past, up off her arse for the first time in bloody-ever, and when she sees her grandchild with her arms around this poor lost creature—this poor lost rich creature, her flesh all heated even though she’s just come out of the chill and wrapped in lengths of wet silk—there’s a smile there that speaks of tea leaves and I’m a clever girl, I am, it doesn’t take long to realize that I’ve been screwed by two members of the same family.
No wonder that skinny mark was so set on his vengeance. No wonder I never recognized him, even moving in different circles as I do. She probably paid him off, pawned everything she owned because she saw pearls in her tea leaves, and goldfish. I’d like to think it was all a scam but she’d leave nothing to chance, and I’m damn sure that after the pawnbrokers she gone to make another bargain, and bloodier.
And me, halfway through my own, and stuck with it because there’s a place in the tanks now the little bride is out and the Lady of the Scales doesn’t care for pikers. Our bargain’s sealed already, with sugar buns and fish nets. She’s taken my coppers and even if I can gouge a confession out of granny it’s not going to make a difference for me.
“I’ll wait for you!” says Syllabub, for the last time before she’s booted from the shop, because as spiteful as I’m feeling right now I’m not going to make her watch me change, blowing kisses through the glass while I blow bubbles. She’s innocent in all this, never could lie to save herself, and she’s promising to wait because she truly believes that she will.
I wonder if it’s crueler to let her grieve over a goldfish than a gutted body. If it’d be worth letting her grieve a grandmother as well, or if I should let the old bitch teach her disloyalty, and how to do away with guilt.
“Don’t wait,” I say.
The scales come.
The Gift
Julie Nováková
“Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t make a grave mistake by accepting the Ramakhi gift.” Floriana Bellugi sighed and ran her palm through her hair. I couldn’t tell whether she’d done the gesture absently or arranged it just to seem so. Nothing could be certain about her. “Look at the cohort who’d been adults at that time. How many are still around by now?”