Another Rendition of the Fish Market

Take this whole thing as a joke, but the day which really ended it for me, was the one we went to the fish market. It was the hottest day of that summer, which while a simple fact, certainly didn´t help the situation. Nobody had said the fish market would be worth a look, it was my idea to go, I had to drag him out of bed, throw him into the shower etc. The market was near a temple district, one of those rebuilt, burnt down in a fire jobs. Shops, full of the usual knick-knacks, dried foods and all. Not five minutes after we got there, I took not a bad picture of an old guy hanging up a bunch of ducks. Looking at the picture now, it reminds me of a photo I´d seen in a magazine; white ducks hanging upside down, getting their throats cut, flapping wildly, spraying blood on each other. I can hear a universal groan... just what we need another woman who gets upset about killing animals! My picture of plucked dead ducks looks a little overexposed, an accurate shot of how bloody hot and glarey that day was.

Before that day, to be perfectly straight with you, I´d already been thinking about getting away from Reece for good, his drinking and phobias were becoming a drag. His world was a mess: sleeping all day if he could get away with it – and he often did, given that he could work from home. He dozed with one ear open waiting for sound of his boss messaging him via Skype. He drank all night and this made for meeting some interesting characters, but also for times like...times like when I realised he couldn't protect me from anything, and neither cared to do so – the episode I´m referring to is nothing special. Just a small badly lit restaurant, white paint peeling of the walls to reveal dirty brown underneath, a drunk middle-aged business type leaning too close, telling me how he likes to get pushed about in a wheelchair in airports all over Asia and Europe, pretending to be sick. He´d get drunk on the aeroplane and then too lazy to walk, he´d demand a chair. It was good to have somebody wheeling him around, he didn´t like to be without someone to order round – he´d even bought his maid to the restaurant! I can still picture that scene with disturbing vividness: Reece has his arm about the man, the man is buying Reece drinks. Reece worships this decaying mess, who is breathing all over his girlfriend.

And so... I wanted to just to get out during the day, do something other than drink and get interested in the city that, for better or worse, we were so tied into. It was a shame it was so hot, and Reece was so hungover...but the perfect day never comes. This day, or more specifically, this trip to the fish market, would make or break us, as ridiculous as that may sound.

We were already sweating by the time we got to the first stalls on the street which led to the market. The first thing we looked at were Geoduck Clams. Elephant Trunk Clams, Reece called them. He said that they didn't farm them in Asia, but from California all the way up to Alaska. The bigger ones on display could well be over a hundred years old. As usual I had no idea how he knew this stuff. It seemed unlikely that he´d been preparing this trip by googling things, that was more my style. Disgusting things Geoducks, like very wrinkled penises. Gross, but I couldn't stop looking at them – a salesman picked one up and water squirted from its siphon. At least it didn't squirm, that would have been unbearable.


Down the street past various crustaceans, clams, fish heads, undecipherable fish bits and eels we came to the market proper. I stopped by a polystyrene tank of turtles. God where are they from? Reece asked the seller, a very smiley man, who said Brazil. If the animals there could´ve spoken I would´ve blocked my ears...but this is a silly thought.

The floor in the market was wet rubbish covered metal and I was quite concerned about falling flat on my face. Look you haven't noticed? said Reece pointing, I looked, a mezzanine level, small hovels for sleeping in. The fishmongers lived above their stinking produce. This discovery led to Reece´s first complete sentence of the day:

´The problem with us...you see nothing of the greatest horrors but pick up the most minor faults – your days ruined by such things as a slug in salad, here this all passes you by.´

I didn´t know quite how to respond to this. I looked at him, his frown, the life of the people who never left their fishy building on his mind, his face kinda green. Damn, I had been hoping to eat some seafood, but now the sensitive idiot would never stomach it.

We made our way out the back. Men were shovelling fish off trucks to the waiting fishmongers, grasping their square white plastic buckets below. The men on the trucks, standing in fish to their knees, revelled in being above the others, barking contemptuously at those who complained at what they were given. My camera battery failed at this stage, I badly wanted some pics of those tattooed fellows. My cell phone camera just couldn´t do them justice.

This shouting is unbearable, Reece moaned

´OK lets go home´, I said, giving up on having a full and interesting day out of the apartment. The trip had still been worth it on balance though I thought, despite the smells and smirking salesmen.
We headed for the the subway stop, it was one of the more dirty ones – surrounded by the usual unhygienic looking kiosks, which have refrigerators that never seem to work, and even the warm bottle of ´iced´ tea you buy tastes of eggs. Still crowded on the weekend, there were no guards at this stop in a shitty part of town to make sure people could alight before others got on. And so, we were submitted to the usual scrum of bodies. I was troubled by the fact that this still bothered me even after living in the city for some time.

It was quite a long journey back. Reece quickly grabbed an available seat and offered it to me, but I preferred to stand. I listened to the slightly distorted recording endlessly reminding us of which stop was coming next, until it lost track of the progress of the train and became nothing but misleading information. I tried to ignore the atmosphere: the light of the Shanghai subway which makes faces look slightly green, and the subtle yet insistent smell of disinfectant, most people find this all a little disturbing on the senses I guess. I was able to block it out with vague funny memories, back as far as my school days, again this must be how most of us cope. I looked at Reece slouching and found with a kind of triumph that he obviously did not have such a ability to deal with the situation. ‘Feeling OK?’ I asked, as we whisked along. ´Yea´ he grunted. His face, however had taken on that tight look and he was rocking himself back and forth, almost imperceptibly – but it was there, one tortuous thought going through his head over and over.

The funny thing, I thought to myself, is that the actual thought was unimportant, it was the repetition which counted. The hell of your mind skipping out like a CD. At the next stop a seat became available, on sitting down I suddenly realised how tired I was. I fell asleep moments after.

When I became conscious we were still five stops from home, I was able to remember the last scene of my dream... a train suspended in thin air - racing haphazardly between massive green cliffs, it seemed like it was defying gravity, such was its forward acceleration... I hated when this happened, I am an empty vessel, and sometimes dream Reece´s dreams. He suffered from acrophobia and the falling train was one of his fantasies. I´m not afraid of dying, he always said ( rather pretentiously to my mind), just the falling.

When we got home I found it vaguely amusing the way Reece kissed the apartment floor, so happy to shut himself off from the big bad city. He´d picked up some beers on the way home and soon got a bit of a buzz going. We started talking about the treatment of turtles in those parts, glowing in theorizing about human cruelty. Reece become quite animated and really began to champion the case for other countries banning turtle exports to China. ´Even turtle populations in the States are under threat from the exploding demand here´ he claimed. This was interesting at first, but I soon realised that we were falling back into his irrational world: the thought of a Sisyphus-like turtle, ever trying to climb the side of its glass bowl only to repetitively fall back into water, filled with its own waste, became far to much for him. Not surprisingly his next step was to start telling me about his recent nightmares. Two kept on coming back to him, both contained animals. In one he was looking down, suspended in the air (as usual acrophobia was involved) above a bay, the shallow water full of Great White Sharks with horrible blind, mutant eyes, split open by prodigious growth.

In the other dream, both of us were looking at flats back in Wellington – one flat had dogs which jumped up – I was afraid, I am very scared of dogs you see.

The second flat we went to had a pet pig. The pig, to Reece´s disgust jumped up too, threatening to put its mud covered trotters on people, rub its fleshy snout against your thigh. It didn´t just jump, it bounded fences and did flips, performing with grunts of pleasure. But, apparently, nobody but Reece thought this odd, both the people at the flat and I acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. Reece was convinced these dreams meant something, something important for us. I sighed inwardly – these dreams were dreamt under the influence. Don´t you know, Reece, such dreams mean nothing? As I looked down on him and the ever increasing pool of drool, I tried console myself that it was better to be living with a little boys imagination than a car freak or religious nut. He was still wearing his trousers and a T-shirt which smelled of dry sweat. At 38 he was already getting a bit paunchy, but his unkempt hair surrounded a fairly youthful face. Is it simply genetics which dictated it, or did his mental refusal to grow up have a physical manifestation?

I went into the bathroom, and looked in the mirror, I was only wearing a singlet – my state of undress had no erotic motivation, I had taken my pyjama pants off for a rather violent bowel movement and was still cautious about replacing them. I looked at my reflection, I was still a fairly young, reasonably attractive woman – you´ll have to forgive me for the tepidness of my statements, that´s just the way I am, I find everything to be more bearable when you don´t go out on a limb, nice reliable understatement – that´s the way forward. I stretched out my arms like an actress in the DVD I recently watched.

The actress had been a famous child, playing a number of cutesy roles. In the film I had watched she played a heroin junky. That was the point her career took off. By playing a broken soul, she could finally be taken seriously. It was an interesting progression...the child star, to heroin junky, one can´t beat that kind of downfall if you take a succession Hollywood characters as a progress of a single entirety, a wretch on screen, a path to professional respectability in real life – to me another strange mask presented by the world. At this stage I got bored of looking at myself and my mind ticked over and I began to think of Reece´s fear; why a falling train?

Why not get your silly acrophobia in one of the many skyscrapers we were always staying, working or living in, or on planes like your old man, but you went for trains and went for them bad I guess. It doesn´t matter if it was planes, trains or automobiles does it? I suppose it was real for you, can I at least believe that? Just as long as you had it – not so bad as it stopped you doing things, but just enough that it was inevitable. Do you remember those scenes from childhood stories? falling in space forever; sinking into the Mariana Trench with lead weighted legs; the magic spell of the staircase that never ends? Yes? Magnificent the feeling of eternity in a second, or the same second forever.

At this stage I began dreaming, I was sitting in a hotel lobby waiting, I read and I read, but Reece did not come back... then, as dreams work, I saw where he was. He was walking along train tracks and I knew his thoughts: Exhilarating if he met a train on one of those long bridges, there he could chose being mangled or the relative bravery of jumping.

Or would there be to run for it, make to the end of the bridge get off the tracks? Or time to put your thoughts in order before the end? Brave acceptance or panic, that´s all you wanted to know. Once you knew that even going on living would be possible perhaps, but that´s not the way things work out. I think that´s a line from a Western, I don´t need you here to tell me though.

The dream continued. He was found below a bridge by some passing local. I had reported him missing at the police station. The police smiled, they weren´t going to do anything and this only differs from every other story you´ve ever heard or read in that I had no expectation that they would. I simply wanted them to contact me when they heard something. Would they email me? It´s funny to think of people in this world who don´t email. But they´re out there. We have to know everything instantly these days and so the existence of these non-mailers may in future cause phobia in others. I hope they cope better with it than you did with yours.

And then came the part you wouldn´t have liked Reece, all the rigmarole: filling in of forms, informing your family, finding out how much it would cost to send your body back home.

I can even remember the exact amount of money, a good practical dream in other words, and taking its advice, I´ve since split with the man. Who wants to spend their life with an alcoholic hypochondriac full of childish nightmares? I still wear the watch with the picture of Putin on the face though. The one Reece bought me at the shop in Nanjing which sells Russian souvenirs, made in a factory near Nanjing! Well I don´t actually wear the original watch, the piece of crap stopped ages ago – but I´ve replaced it with another one, from a street vendor here in Shanghai, who might very well purchase his stock in Nanjing?. He drove a hard bargain, a bit of a bastard really, must have known somehow I really wanted one of those watches. I should turn myself into a harder bargainer. I´m going to hit the fakes market tomorrow. I´m obstinate enough. I´ll put who-bloody-ever on the ipod, and look straight ahead. You never could do that, Reece, too disorganised for technology and too unfocused to look straight ahead – you lacked the skills needed for the modern world...and so it´s better you´re gone. Compared with your putrid corpse-like self I prefer the vendors at the fish market, their squalid abodes and the way they do business down to two decimal places. I even prefer their government, which drags them through the desert, for a few sluggish gains and savings, that see them survive as they get dragged through the desert once again. They and I are ready.