My father loves me very much.
I want to start with that because it’s the most important thing in the story. We live in a cynical world, where people take your words and pull them in all kinds of different directions, to make them mean all kinds of different things. So I’m repeating: my father loves me very, very much.
He bought me the fish tank one rainy April morning. No, it was my idea. I pointed it out to him. We kept walking past the shop, and in the window was an enormous, front-parlour piece of a fish tank. There were little castles, treasure chests, staircases, even a kind of fish-elevator the fish could swim inside and outside of.
He didn’t buy it for me because he was sick. He bought it because I kept telling him I wanted it. Not obsessively, I’m not like that, but persistently. I would mention it every day. I’d mention it over breakfast, and Mummy would roll her eyes, Not the fish tank again, it was a joke in our family. Our family had many jokes.
The fish tank sat in a corner of my bedroom, right by the door. It was the first thing you saw as you walked in. There were only two kinds of fish: orange and black. I never saw them do anything very dramatic, outside of the two times a day we fed them. Then they would scurry like thoughts to the surface of the green, plastic box of water my parents had bought for them. Sometimes they would fight for the flakes as they fell through the water to the sand on the bottom. But outside of this, they were fairly placid.
I think I love my father more than my mother. My mother is cynical, acidic, bitter. She complains a lot, even when things are going well. My father never complained. He was a happy, generous man, who just thought too much about things sometimes. As a daughter I should know how they met, but they gave so many different versions that in the end one narrative just ends up proving all the others wrong. I used to care which one was the correct one, but not anymore.
It was my mother, not my father, who first started talking to the fish. She would tap the glass walls of the tank when she came home from work, frustrated, as though a machine she had bought wasn’t working quick enough for her. Instead of swimming towards her fingers the fish would dart away. My father always found this funny.
He had a job working with old people. He would drive a ‘teapot bus’ into town every day – a bus with a kitchen inside, which old people could board and sit down on and drink tea and chat with one another. He parked it on the flag market in front of the museum – parking old age in front of old age, he used to say – and made tea for anyone who wanted it. For the lonely, the isolated, for the people whose children had given up visiting them, or whose partners had long since passed away.
One day I came home and saw him crouching on his knees in front of the fish tank. When I tried to ask him what he was doing, he put a finger to his lips and shushed me. When I came back from the kitchen half an hour later, he was still there, one hand spread out on the glass of the tank, staring at the fish.
I laughed about it with my mother at first, until it became a habit, a gesture he always performed whenever he got back from work. We watched him silently from the doorway of the kitchen, the care with which he kneeled, and spread his fingers out against the bubbling glass of the tank. Although I had never been to church, it was how I always imagined people kneeled down in a pew to pray.
One day he told me an ancient spirit was speaking to him through the fish. He told me this with such conviction, such self-seriousness, that not the slightest desire to laugh arose within me. I listened as he talked about the spirit that had contacted him, moved by the reverence in his voice, by the carefulness with which he corrected himself as he spoke. When he finished I asked if I could be alone for a while, because I wanted to cry.
I cried on and off for about a week. I never let my father see me. My mother tried all strategies: ridicule, interrogation, visits from relatives, audiences with common friends. My father was always evasive. Because I never mocked him, he was more open with me. He told me there were several spirits talking to him through the fish. Some of them were nice, some of them malevolent. I asked him how he knew which was which. He said he could tell from the kinds of things they asked him to do.
One day I came home and there was another man with him, kneeling beside him by the fish tank. My mother was in the kitchen, preparing her own supper. I could hear her clanking and clinging away from where I was standing in the living room. The man who was crouching next to my father, one knee on the floor, was very young, with the face of somebody in TV or film: clean-shaven, spotless, full of enthusiasm. He looked at me and smiled silently, as though he had been told everything about me already.
Soon there were three or four people in the living room each evening, just kneeling by the fish tank. They were always different people: old, young, extrovert, introvert, chatty, mute. There was no space for everyone to put their hands, so sometimes somebody would sit in the armchair by the fire, or stand by the low bookshelf under the window. The strangest moment was always as they were about to leave: they would stand around in the middle of the room for a minute or two and look at one another in silence. When these scenes happened I always went to my bedroom.
My father said there have always been people doing this. He said there were thousands of people around the world doing it right now, but most of them kept quiet, and just did it in twos or threes. When he said this I thought of my schoolfriend Jadie, who also had a fish tank. I wondered if Jadie’s father was one of the fish tank people. Or maybe Jadie was a fish tank person herself.
When my mother finally moved out of the house, I went to stay with her. The whole process was strange: there was no divorce, no court case, no hearings, nothing official at all took place. My father gradually disappeared. I went to the ‘teapot bus’, which my father used to drive for his job, but somebody else was in charge of it. Nobody could tell me where he was. I went a few times to our old house, but he never seemed to be at home. My mother, with her mean streak, said that he had turned into a fish and was living in somebody else’s fish tank. It was the kind of joke she would make. But when our old house was sold, I realized for the first time I might never see him again.
I still hope to bump into him. I once saw one of the fish tank people on a bus, riding around town. I asked him how he was and if he remembered me, but he said he didn’t. Our town is not too big, and there are three petshops in the middle of it, which I visit from time to time whenever I have an afternoon free. Sometimes I even look closely at some of the fish, scrutinizing their faces, in case I see anything that resembles him.