Fish out of Water

Fish out of Water
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 30, 2015

Hope is two goldfish pootling in a plastic bag of water.

Small daughter and I stood transfixed in the pet shop. A wall of fish tanks glowed in iridescent greens and blues. A dozen filters hummed a soporific tune. Everywhere we looked, fish were darting hither and yon, their coruscating skins a riot of colours.

In the nearest tank, an orange pipsqueak swayed his translucent tail and lazily glided towards his watery window. Squishing his little fishy lips against the glass, he ogled us with globular eyes.

“That’s the one!” shouted five-year-old daughter, jabbing her finger against the tank. The goldfish didn’t flinch. I took that as a sign of emotional resilience.

“I’m gonna call him ‘Finger’” she said. “Fish Finger for short.”

“Shouldn’t your brother name him?” I said. “After all, it’s his birthday.”

She ignored me, and resumed skipping sideways along the tanks, pressing one eye against the glass when a fish caught her fancy. A teenaged sales assistant in khaki uniform shadowed her like a prison guard.

Daughter let out a shriek. She jabbed at a corner where an odd-looking goldfish was poking around in a weed. “Look! He’s got an orange raspberry on his head!”

“It’s a lionhead,” said the fish curator flatly, barely disguising his contempt.

He turned to me, twirling a net the size of a fly swat.

“She’s not going to bang on the tank at home?”

“Oh, no” I reassured him. “They’ll be in a bowl.”

I pointed at Finger, still staring at us from his window seat. “Can we have that one?” I said. Then I singled out the Lionhead with orange beanie from his myriad strange-hatted siblings. “And that one.”

Back in the car, my youngster cradled her brother’s birthday fish, each plastic bag knotted, but now dangerously close to horizontal.

I drove home timorously, weaving around corners and crawling over speed humps trying not to verify Newton’s first law of motion.

“Finger’s making my hand look bigger,” called my daughter from the back seat, inspecting her palm through the prism of the bag. I tried to explain to her the theory of refraction and how water can magnify images by deflecting light rays but she had the attention span of a goldfish.

“Mum! Finger just touched my finger with his tail. Hey! That’s two times I said Finger!”

Her newly 8-year-old brother was ecstatic with his new pets. He christened Finger’s playmate Flip.

For the next hour, boy glued himself to fishbowl. Finger and Flip played tag for his amusement, ducking between the plastic fronds of their underwater palm tree. At bedtime, he reluctantly wished them good night. Ten hours later he was scurrying down the stairs to bid them top o’ the morning.

After two days, I wondered if our aquatic guests were enjoying their celebrity? Did they mind the constant gawping; the succession of school-children pressing curious faces against their bowl, who banged and tapped knuckles against their glass and dipped grubby fingers in their pond?

For all I knew, our fish felt liberated. Perhaps they thought they were swimming in the sparkling waters of Lake Victoria? After all, food was abundant. Every day, delicate wafers appeared as if by magic on the surface. Life in the goldfish bowl was good.

On day three, we awoke to find Flip swimming backstroke. His tummy looked distended as he took his reverse constitutional around the palm tree. Teenage son caught my eye, smirked and swiped his index finger across his throat. I shot him a warning glare. “He’s fine,” I announced for 8-year-old’s benefit. “Flip’s just swimming upside down for fun.”

Popping home at lunchtime, I noticed Flip had mastered sidestroke, but didn’t appear to be enjoying it. I pleaded with him to buck up for the sake of the birthday boy, but he just looked at me, fins trembling. (No-one feels as helpless as the owner of a sick goldfish.)

It was dark when the kids and I stormed in the door after sport. Flip was lying on the rainbow-coloured gravel, motionless.

“He’s dead! He’s dead!” wailed eight-year-old.

“He can’t be dead,” said his sister, screwing up her face with surprise. “His eyes are open.”

Her brother was inconsolable. “Don’t worry,” she said, throwing a comforting arm around his waist. “He must have banged his head on the glass.”

I shepherded my birthday boy into the kitchen for grief counselling while his father spooned Flip out of his bowl and wrapped him in paper towel. I could make out the impression of Flip’s damp orange body inside his papery bier, like the Shroud of Turin. My husband sidled to the toilet to give him a burial at sea.

RIP Flip.

We’re heading back to the pet store today. Flip’s under warranty (I think).

In a cat flap

In a cat flap
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 8, 2013

I’ve always been a cat person. I don’t like to admit it because cat people are snooty and aloof and picky about their food. Dog people, on the other hand, are irrepressibly gleeful and outdoorsy and are always excited to see you.

I have tried to become a dog person, because dog people are universally liked. They don’t know meanness or envy or discontent. But it’s their dogs I don’t like: dogs who press their wet noses, like cold liver, into my crotch. Dogs with big teeth and drippy tongues who clumsily paw at me in greeting (and not in the nice way my husband does it). Or dogs with stumpy legs who’ve tuned their bark into a shrill yap-yap-yap that makes me wince.I see dog people in clumps at the park in the evenings and feel jealous. I catch a drift of their doggy conversations as I dig holes in the sandpit and fetch balls for my children: “What a lovely shiny coat! What do you feed her?” I hear one fellow say to a cocker spaniel owner. (I try to avoid shiny coats – they add three kilos). “What breed is he?” asks another. I want to yell out: “I’d like to see your pedigree, you mongrel!” but I have too much breeding.

Dog people live their lives on display. They’re always promenading around our park looking relaxed and contented as this frazzled mother herds her children across the oval to the school gate. On the way home, I feel obliged to stop and coo over the neighbourhood’s Tibetan spaniel the way I gush over babies in prams.

I like to laugh at dogs hanging out of car windows as much as the next person. I just don’t want to drive with one barking at nothing in my ear as I try to change lanes on the freeway. For me, getting a dog would be like taking on another child, and I’m still trying to train the three I’ve got. A cat is all I have time for. Cat owners don’t meet in the park every evening. They have no such camaraderie. They think being labelled a social recluse is a compliment.

So the kids and I troop off to the Cat’s Refuge Home – half a dozen sheds full of deserted moggies. It’s quiet and clean and all the pussycats are curled up in their cages napping, or being aloof and arrogant – knowing they’re too beautiful to be homeless for long. I ask the sour-puss attendant if the kids and I can go in and pat them: “You’ll need to gown up first.” Like (incompetent) surgeons we try to sterilise our hands with pink pump-action goop, wrapped in our crunchy plastic aprons. The kids are competing to make the most noise by crackling their gowns. The attendant frowns at us, then stalks out of the shed. We four are left alone with a clowder of cats.  

And then we spot Alfie. He is the smallest and pounciest of a litter of abandoned kittens, a piebald mop of fluff. Above his little white mouth is a two-finger black moustache just like Hitler’s.

I immediately feel sorry for him – how could the kitty gene pool be so unkind? I pick him up and give him a cuddle. I I tell him that it was Charlie Chaplin who first sported the toothbrush moustache in 1914, well before Hitler. Alfie breaks into a tiny purr.

Then smallest child trips over her scrubs, and Alfie – startled – wriggles free from my arms and performs a forward somersault in the pike position before landing lightly on the ground. We all agree he’s talented enough to come home with us.

At the counter, I buy a $150 kitten, $64 worth of kitty litter and $40 worth of vet-recommended biscuits. Sourpuss attendant, all smiles now, says Alfie will also need an identity chip fitted under his skin in case he gets lost. I book him in for next week: “If I bring my 3-year-old along, can you fit one in her as well?”  

Now we are a family of five plus a cat. Alfie is loved by everyone in the house which is just as well, because within a week I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with his kitty litter scattered like gravel all over the laundry floor.

And the pet shop – who knew? There are two-storey cat houses with carpet on the mezzanine. There is a $140 four-post cat scratcher made of seagrass. And there are cat jumpers (small and medium – tough luck if you’re a fat cat). Collars can have diamonds or sequins, or scary-looking studs (for bikies’ cats).

I went there to find a cheap cane basket for Alfie to sleep in, but all the cat beds on display had Posturepedic mattresses and (fake) fur doonas. With no cane baskets in sight, I choose the cheapest bed in the shop: black igloo-style with white paws stamped all over it. I was embarrassed walking back to the car with my $50 pet igloo but a couple I passed gave me a wink and a smile. They must have been dog owners.