Fish in the Sky Read online

  Clara’s black hair whips the air in front of me, and her scent fills my senses. I stretch out my hand.

  The cheetah holds his prey down with one of his forepaws and presses its head down with the other to expose the victim’s long, soft neck and bulging red artery. Then he sinks his white fangs into the flesh; the skin tears, and the blood spurts out.

  I grab her shoulder with my fingers, and she turns her head, graceful and delicate, and for a brief moment, I meet her sparkling eyes, totally still in the midst of all this mayhem. And I’m all puffed out. She swerves, proud and strong, and changes direction; I’ve almost got her, but I trip and manage to grab her shoulder again just as my leg slips. Slowly, slowly my back plunges onto the gravel. She glides above me in midair, falling closer and closer, her mouth opening in bewilderment, her eyes growing bigger. She lands on me, and our bodies are thrust together for one endless split second; black hair strokes my face, sweet perfume envelops me, and her long white neck gently brushes against my lips. I feel the artery, feel the soft spot where the artery vanishes behind her earlobe.

  A piercing shriek breaks the sound barrier as she leaps to her feet in fury. She dusts off her white sweater and stands over me, breathless, as I lie there like a fool and blink. It’s as if I’m reawakening from the sweetest dream, the magic all gone, everything running at normal speed. Far too normal speed.

  “Who said you could pounce on me?” she snaps, glaring at me as I clamber to my feet. Her cheeks are red, her hair messy, with one lock of it stuck to the right edge of her mouth. She brushes it behind her ear again with a swift move of the hand and adjusts two barrettes. She’s got pearl drops in her earlobes. I stand there like a night troll watching the sun rise, knowing that it’s too late to run and hide. I’ve turned into stone.

  “I — I didn’t mean to,” I stutter.

  I’m about to lose all power of speech when she raises her hand and I see her white palm in the air and feel a burning sensation on my left cheek, long before I hear the powerful smack. The warm breeze is still blowing, and someone somewhere in the neighborhood is beating the dust out of a rug on a clothesline, and a rhythmical beat resounds between the houses. Or is it the beat of my heart?

  The bell sounds across the yard, which clears in seconds as everyone runs back toward the school, charging through the entrance and up the stairs. I stand there alone with a stinging cheek and a blazing heart.

  Peter kneels and handles his father’s camera with a professional air, adjusting the focus and aperture and pointing the lens at the falcon, which I hold high up in the air. The idea was to take a picture of the bird in flight. Peter is playing the role of the National Geographic photographer and demands perfection and no compromises, but my arms are killing me from holding the falcon. Peter wants to frame the picture in such a way that my hands won’t appear in the photograph. After a number of attempts, he’s finally happy. He nods with a knowing air, and the bird sinks into my arms under its own weight.

  “We have to do everything in our power to ensure that the first issue of our magazine is a success,” he says as we turn down the alleyway, our usual shortcut to Peter’s house.

  Back at Peter’s, everything is in a state of chaos as usual. Molly, his mother, is walking around with his youngest sister in her arms but still manages to plant a kiss on Peter’s cheek and say hi to me and how I’ve grown, although I haven’t actually grown since my last visit here. With the baby hanging on to her, she butters bread for us, heats some cocoa, and sets the table. Peter doesn’t bat an eyelid when his oldest sister comes yelling into the kitchen, leans over him, and accuses him of having taken her makeup kit and threatens to murder him twice over if he doesn’t give it back.

  Compared to my house, Peter’s house is like a battlefield in a war movie, with grenades going off all around you. If there’s ever a moment’s peace, it’s only the calm before the storm, and then all hell breaks loose again. And Peter, the sage, sits in the midst of all this devastation. Peter has all the levelheadedness of a man who has seen just about everything in life and therefore is never thrown off course. Even though he hasn’t turned thirteen yet, he has the life experience of a fully grown man when it comes to dealing with the overdose of women in his daily life and having to repeatedly force his way into his own room, over barricades of dollhouses, Barbie gadgets, clothes hangers, and cosmetics, only to discover that his youngest sister has just eaten a stamp from his prized collection.

  “Did you take Alice’s makeup case, Peter dear?” his mother gently asks him.

  Peter looks up from his cup of cocoa with a forbearing and questioning air. Does she honestly think that a naturalist who wants to be taken seriously would use lipstick and mascara? Then she sees that he’s innocent.

  “Tina must have borrowed it,” says Molly to Alice, who explodes in a rage, storming from one room to the next and yelling, in search of Tina to murder her four times over.

  “The mouth on her,” Molly says with a sigh, shaking her head.

  Sometimes I try to imagine that all these girls are my sisters and that Peter’s mom is my mom, his dad my dad. Sometimes I even wish Peter would vanish for a while so that I could take his place. Because, despite all the outbursts that he’s always complaining about, I don’t think he realizes how lucky he is.

  Peter is given permission to lock his bedroom door because I’m visiting. But otherwise no one is allowed to shut a door in this family, let alone lock one. Not even the bathroom. Maybe it’s to make sure his little sister doesn’t get her fingers crushed or so that no one can commit any atrocities on anyone behind closed doors. The only door that can be closed and locked is the one to his dad’s, Jonathan’s, study, which is right beside the living room. It’s full of all kinds of books and trophies from his athletics days. Peter and I need special permission to go in there to read the books. And what books! Wildlife books, nature books, history books, anthropology books. If I had one wish, it would be for someone to lock me in there so that I could read them all.

  Once the door to Peter’s bedroom shuts, he exhales as if he’d been holding his breath all the time we’d been sitting in the kitchen, and walks straight to the fish tank. His tank is bigger than mine, and he’s got more species. He even has a special incubation chamber, some kind of maternity ward for female guppies. He lowers the incubation chamber into the fish tank, catches the fattest females in a green net, and transfers them to the maternity ward. There’s a shaft in the middle that the fingerlings lower themselves through, down to the floor below, to the nursery, where they can grow in privacy, undisturbed, without having to worry about being gobbled up by their parents.

  As Peter putters around with this, I start thinking of Clara’s slap and get goose bumps on my cheek. I want to tell Peter about it but can’t quite find the words. I don’t know if he noticed it when it happened, or if anyone did, for that matter. For that brief moment, the world was reduced to just me and her. Peter and I don’t talk about girls much. At least not as much as our classmates do in the showers after gym, and probably in other places too. The reason being that Peter knows everything you can possibly need to know about them, and what might seem like obscure secrets to most boys are just plain facts to him. He has no interest in the debates at school about whether this girl or that one has dark nipples or light ones, whether she’s got any pubic hair or started to use tampons. He’s seen his sisters’ and mother’s breasts so often that a pair of breasts are no more meaningful to him than a pair of, say, knees. And he’s sat through enough seminars about private female things at the breakfast table, when his mother has been lecturing her daughters on the facts of life, to be an expert on these matters and know them inside out. And therefore they’re not exciting. But on the plus side, this knowledge has been invaluable to him in our nature studies. Naturally we’ve often discussed the copulation methods of various species of animals and wondered about the purpose of all those varied love games that seem to precede the act. For a long time, we racked our b
rains over the female spider, for example, who eats the male after copulation. We never figured that one out. Maybe sex just gives her such a ravenous appetite that she thoughtlessly devours the first thing that she sets her eyes on. That’s got to be the reason the lovemaking time among this type of spider ranks among the shortest in the animal kingdom, something close to a quarter of a second. No matter how cautious and thoughtful they are, one out of three of these male spiders can expect to be eaten by his girlfriend. I’m not quite sure why I’m thinking of these harsh realities of animal kingdom life as I touch my cheek, remembering this morning’s slap. Could I casually slip the embarrassing episode into the conversation without any direct reference to it? I think Peter would start moaning if I were to start talking about Clara, let alone tell him that I’m in love with her. How could I deny it? I love her to pieces and feel so torn inside that I could explode. Isn’t love supposed to be something like that?

  “Are there any more pregnant females?” I ask, peering into the fish tank with an expert air.

  Bubbles gurgle out of a sunken vessel at the bottom. Two snails are engaged in a motionless race up the glass.

  “Don’t think so,” he says. “The other females aren’t interested,” he adds, opening a little can of feed, which he sprinkles on the surface.

  This gets an immediate response from all the fish, who dash over to nibble at the flakes with their tiny mouths, except for the vacuum-cleaner fish, who stays still at the bottom and, true to his name, waits for the food to sink.

  “How can you tell if they’re not interested?” I ask, feigning no interest in the answer.

  “Well, because if they were, they’d follow the males around the tank and bite their tails.”

  “Right, I see,” I say, fixing my eyes on the snails.

  “It’s always the females who decide,” says Peter. “Remember that program about the lions?”

  It would have been difficult to forget the lion program. That was the first and only time I had seen a male and female of the mammal species copulate. It was actually quite terrifying, because for a long time I thought the male was killing the female.

  “Yeah.” I nod casually.

  “Well,” says Peter, putting the lid back on the can, “it doesn’t matter how hard males try with the females; the females will never give in until they’re ready for it. And how do they do that? Well, by revving them up for action, of course. It’s the same story everywhere,” he adds, examining the guppy females in the maternity ward.

  “And the reason for that is that women go berserk when they’re ovulating and will do anything to get some seed,” he continues. “That’s why they’re the ones who decide when copulation has to take place. The guys just have to be ready for action when the call comes,” he says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  Of course, that’s pretty obvious when you’re talking about a fish in an aquarium or a lion in Africa, but when I try to see how Clara and I fit into this scheme of things, I start to feel hot and drops of sweat ooze out of my pores like suicidal lemmings. I can just picture Peter’s parents: his mom chasing his dad around the apartment, berserk with her ovulation. They’ve obviously got all these kids for a good reason. But could that be the kind of thing Clara has in mind? Could it be that she’s ready for copulation, and might she have chosen me to fulfill her needs?

  The sweat suddenly turns cold under my shirt. Why did she choose me? I feel a heavy burden on my shoulders, pressing me down. What am I to do? What’s expected of me? Am I a sex-starved, roaring lion, ready for action, or a wimp of a mouse caught in a trap? I suddenly opt for the mouse in a trap and feel a pressing need to be alone in private so that I can work this all out in my head. I stand up with some difficulty and take the falcon in my arms.

  “Listen, I’ve gotta go now.”

  “OK,” says Peter, unsuspecting of my state of mind.

  Alice has found her makeup case and sits at the kitchen table with a big mirror, doing her lipstick. She’s put something awful around her eyes, has her hair in a bun, and is half-naked, in a T-shirt and underwear. Two nipples protrude through her T-shirt.

  “What are you gawking at?”

  I look away and stumble into my shoes, half fall into the lining of a blue jacket in the corridor, grope for the doorknob, find it with my eyes closed, step over the threshold, and dash down the steps outside.

  “Officer dismissed! Farewell, Josh Stephenson,” I hear Peter shouting behind me as the door closes.

  I come through the door with the falcon in my arms, my head bursting with irritation and strange thoughts. Mom sits smiling with the phone glued to her ear and glances at me with that look people have when they’re talking on the phone.

  “Of course,” she says, emphasizing the course.

  I go up to my bedroom and put the falcon down on the desk. I’m all restless and fidgety and can’t sit still. Feel like going out for a run.

  “Well, I mean obviously,” says Mom’s faint voice on the phone. “Sure. Sure.”

  My schoolbooks lie untouched on the desk, and when I open them and go over the homework I was supposed to do, I get pins and needles in my forehead. I suddenly feel sleepy. I yawn and stare into a blissful void that no thoughts can penetrate. Mom keeps yakking on the phone in the hall, and her voice carries up the stairs into my room. “Sure,” she says, “sure.” The sun shines through the window until it is veiled by a cloud. Two little flies have woken up too early. One of them is dead already and lies on its back with its legs in the air. The other is still plodding away at trying to break through the glass. He clambers up, falls, and starts all over again. Again and again, and maybe he’s thinking, It’s bound to give in sooner or later.

  What’s the point of flies? Some of them are born to nothing but a life on a windowsill, spend their entire lives walking up and falling off the same pane of glass, and then die on that same windowsill. Could it be that God created a special type of fly for windowsills? Were these tiny, subtle creatures really solely designed for the purpose of soiling human windowsills? Imagine: a whole species, a whole branch of the insect family, does nothing else in its lifetime. And no individual is of any importance because it’s immediately replaced by another. So even though one of them falls and wriggles its legs, it makes absolutely no difference. Another will take its place. Are men maybe flies on God’s windowsill? Does he sit like I am now, watching human flies scrambling up his window? And if so, can he see me? Am I of any importance? And why am I here, at this desk, in this house, in this country? Why am I the one who is here? And who am I actually? A boy from the west side of town? Why not an Indian, a Frenchman, or an Australian Aboriginal boy? Or a girl?

  My mom’s hand touches my shoulder, and the flood of thoughts in my head grind to a sudden halt. I turn to her, and she looks at me with a probing air.

  “What?” I ask, brushing the hair off my forehead.

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We need to talk,” she says, sitting on my bed, scanning the room for dirt and dust. She stands up again to pick some dirty socks off the floor, sits on the bed once more, and begins to talk, glancing up at the curtains behind me as if she is trying to make up her mind whether the time has come for them to be washed again or not.

  “Well, I was talking to Ben — you know, my brother? Now, it’s such a long time since you’ve seen him, of course; you were so small. Anyway, he’s sending his daughter to stay with us, Gertrude. You should remember her — you played together when we went up north that year; her mother’s been institutionalized — ah, it’s a sad story, the things that woman’s been through. Anyway, Gertrude is coming south and is going to live with us at least until the spring. She won’t be at your school; she’s three years above you — no, four — no, three. Can’t remember now. Anyway, she’ll be staying with us.”

  She folds the dirty socks together and then unfolds them again, stands up and walks away, chucks them into the dirty laundry, reappea
rs with crossed arms, and leans against the door frame.

  “Won’t that be great?” she asks.

  I obviously have no say in the matter. All the decisions have already been made, and I’m expected to give them the stamp of approval with a smile on my lips.

  “And where’s she going to sleep?” I ask.

  “In the little room here,” says Mom, pointing at the door to the room we use as a storeroom, inside my room.

  “In there? Why?”

  “Well, the girl has got to have some privacy,” says Mom, pretending not to understand the full meaning of my question.

  “How old is she?” I ask.

  “Seventeen — no, sixteen — no, seventeen, I think,” she says distractedly.

  I swing on the chair and fix my gaze on the dead fly on the windowsill.

  “Why does she have to live with us?” I rasp out, and start fiddling with my eraser so that the lines on it twist and bend.

  “Josh, honey, don’t give me that whiny tone. Gertrude is your cousin.”

  “So what?”

  “Josh Stephenson, what’s gotten into you?” she snaps, which only angers me even more.

  “Is she going to have to barge through my bedroom, then?” I ask in a rage, hoping Mom will understand that this is no small matter.

  “Don’t be so childish. You can’t expect her to sleep in the living room. And it’s not as if she’s a total stranger; you’re first cousins.”

  “I don’t even know her.”

  “Maybe the time has come for you to get to know each other, then,” she says, vanishing from the doorway. The case is closed as far as she’s concerned. I break my eraser in two, glare at the dead fly, and hurl a piece of rubber at it. Racking my brain, I have a vague memory of a freckled brat with braces and a pigtail that she was always twirling with her finger. It was as if she was using finger language to let people know there was a screw missing in her head, which there obviously was and is. And now this freak is about to move into the room inside my room, walking in and out of my space day after day, some hillbilly girl from the middle of nowhere. And then where am I supposed to undress at night? Or get dressed in the morning? In the bathroom or something?