Fishbox Window
　
‘So let me see if I’ve got this straight.’ He pushed the coffee cup a little further away as if clearing the desks for action. He held his hands apart, pinkie edges on the table-top, as if holding an invisible skein of wool. She wondered at the origin of the word ‘skein’. Wasn’t that a flight of geese?
‘You’re telling me that after a few minutes, hours, years or , at best, decades, you cease to function? Your individual being just evaporates? Nothing left but a carcase that breaks down into chemical components? I mean, we saw it on the television broadcasts but never quite believed it. Lots of theories, schools of thought but I mean… complete annihilation?
She nodded. The alien shook his head.
‘I think I’m going to need more java.’ He caught the attention of the girl behind the counter and did the pointing at the two cups, wiggling of eyebrows and thumbs-up thing, but she just stared at him, and he had to go up and order properly.
‘Well, everyone dies at last, don’t they? I mean, even you’re race can’t be immortal, what’s in any being that is worth being immortal? And why do you have an American accent?’
‘No, your right. Or should that be “yes, you’re right?” Anyway, I agree, there is little or anything in anyone that deserves a place in the universe for ever. We migrate into other creatures, even objects if we want to. And the accent is because of all the American television we watch on my home-world, they broadcast so much, you know, everyone else can hardly get a word in edgeways. Edgewise. Not to mention the massive archives we have of their TV. Though the quality is getting poorer.’
‘The archives are decaying?’
‘No, the programmes are getting worse. Shows.’
‘It shows?’
‘No, I mean they say “shows“, not “programmes.”
‘You said objects a minute ago? You can migrate into an apple? A set of spanners?’
‘Now you’re being facetious. An apple! All that hanging around. Getting pulped for your juice, baked into a tart, just plain being eaten.’
‘Or a windfall. Lie on the cool grass of an orchard until you get all wizened up and return to Mother Earth. I suppose that’s a problem right there.’
‘Yes, and a set of spanners, well, it would be a wrench leaving that behind.
No, we would tend to choose something a little more interesting. And, when we leave, the being is in a far better state than before, lives a lot longer, improved dress sense, that kind of thing. But I’m not an authority. Its not really my subject, biology.‘
‘Xenobiology, you mean.‘
‘That’s right, but I’m stoical about it.‘ She didn’t get it, ‘Back on my planet…’ She frowned and he stopped speaking.
‘I wonder if we’ve heard enough about life,’ her voice dropped, ‘back on your planet.’ She looked around, though she didn’t want to, she just couldn’t help it. It was a bit late, half the coffee-shop had heard him talking of ‘his planet’. No-one seemed very bothered. Maybe he was just a very proprietarial environmentalist. Maybe it was just his technique, a cutesy way to amuse the young woman with him, maybe their first coffee together. The speaker was young, good-looking, well-dressed; you wouldn’t think he would need feeble comedic turns to impress, but maybe he was a late developer, had spent most of his youth gawky and awkward and hadn’t yet grown into his young adult skin. An unready imago, she thought. She was glad she had arranged that they meet here instead of at her flat. That one of the problems of running a website but with no premises other than your flat to meet clients. ‘Clients‘, indeed, he was her first, if you don’t count friends and family. He had got in touch to say he loved her photographs on her website and would like to buy a whole lot, framed. Take them back to his planet. Right. Planet. Amusing. But a new enterprise can’t turn down business. Enterprise. Wrong word. Maybe that’s what he’d use to ship home his purchases. It was fortunate that the owner of her favourite café saved on decorating by allowing local artists to exhibit there. Take the client to the café, be safe, don’t let on where you live, let him see the work on the wall, all nicely framed, sell a bundle. It was like he was reading her mind, because he gestured with one hand at the pictures and said, ‘ I’ll take them all. I’m not actually an art dealer, but a lot of my clients would really like these, I could maybe give one or two away, but sell on more. No commission, though, I’ll buy them straight out. As many as you can get to me. Framed, you choose the frames. Price them as you like.
as getting just a little too good to be true. ‘Perhaps you should have a closer look. I think maybe all the caffeine you’ve ingested has affected your judgement, maybe it’s an alien thing.’ She might be shooting herself in the foot, here, doing herself out of hard cash, but she couldn’t just take his money; she wanted some applause too. She stood up and invited him to follow her around the café to look at the pictures. They were all of the Orkney Islands, she had been living there for a while, walking the cliffs, taking lots of photographs, staring out to sea a lot.
They slowly walked around the café ignoring, and being ignored by, the drinkers in ones and twos, murmuring or deeply involved in books, crosswords or portable computers. He walked ahead, though she wished that the direction of their tour had allowed her to take the lead, so that she could spend more time at her favourite pictures, impress them upon him just by a longer exposure . As it was, she had to slow him by trying to exert a little magnetic pull, dragging a foot, fiddling with the leaf of a plant, get him to slow at this one, that one. She remembered this seascape. Walking into the teeth, freshly sharpened, of a force 8 gale she had despaired of being able to stand steadily enough, to be able to weigh down the awkward tripod enough, to get any photographs at all. But this shoreline could not be ignored. The breakneck waves, their tops ripped away by the gale, grayed, vaporised, it was like watching clouds being born.
‘You seem attracted to dereliction. To things rusting or falling apart. Why is that?’
‘I suppose because when things are new they are alike, but when they start to decay; they decay uniquely. It doesn’t have to be sad, though. As you see, there are a few pictures of old, abandoned cottages, a bit of a cliché, I suppose, but I like them, and I think they needn’t make us feel disheartened.
I like to think of all the moments within that must have been joyful; the birth of a child, the recovery from an illness, the music from a fiddle or a of a song. This one, look, though it seems abandoned, it wasn’t really because I found a blackbird sitting on her nest inside.’
’So, though humans were no longer in possession, it was still a home?’
He moved further along . ‘Lots of these, windows, in one state or another. Tell me about them.’
It was true, there were quite a few pictures of windows. Some were whole, most were broken, many were blocked up. ‘I suppose it’s because they are a sort of picture themselves. A picture pictured. Framed, glazed, like pictures. A whole range of subjects, some dark, hardly anything visible, when I’ve shot from outside in, some framing a landscape or seascape, but with frames that tell you something about the time and people who first framed that picture. Even when the window frame is totally blocked up, the material becomes the picture, the old metal, the stones cut into rough blocks or just natural, just lifted from the shore. Or wood like in this. Fishboxes.’
‘Boxes for fish. That’s the creatures that used to live in your seas.’
‘Well, I think that there are a few left.’ ‘Yes, a few. I suppose too many of them ended up in boxes like the ones someone’s used to block up that window. From bumblebees to blue whales; everything’s on its way out’.
Nothing of that sort had occurred to her, she had just liked the texture of the old wood framed within the stonework of the window. ’They didn’t think, then, that the fish could ever disappear . Not for ever. Though they’d disappear for a season or two. I suppose it must have crossed their mind then, would they maybe never come back?’
He continued looking at the series of windows. He thought that perhaps she was always on the outside looking in at the long-gone lives of the people who had lived there, or on the inside watching the world go by outside. The blocked-off windows, wood or stone where glass had been, were like the closed eyes of the dead. She was photographing them without realising, it seemed, the forensic nature of her work. He turned and looked at her for a moment before moving on, as if she were a specimen in a museum, a specimen of an extinct species. She tried to distract herself by looking at her own photographs, concentrating on the seascapes. Waves in colour or black and white, water frozen yet not ice. All unique, never to be repeated exactly, exactly ,as these ones captured here. Captured? Nonsense, she thought, captured no more than a mountain is ‘conquered’ by some arrogant mountaineer. She was thinking of how, as far as she could remember, someone drowns or nearly drowns in every one of Iris Murdoch’s novels, engulfed by existence itself, experience realised as a liquid, when he asked her if she could use another coffee. She sat back down at their table and they discussed the number of pictures he wanted, the frames, the time it would take to deliver. She was stunned at the numbers he could take, and, without asking about prices, he handed her a cheque. The generosity of the figure nearly made her drop her specs in her soup, as the old saying goes, though she wasn’t, as she explained when telling the story later, actually wearing her specs, and wasn’t having soup, and there is no such old saying.
Out in the street, as they were saying goodbye for now, she realized that she hadn’t really found out what he did, only that he wasn’t an art dealer.
’Do? I’m in real estate.’ He turned and walked off. She turned in the opposite direction and walked away.’ ’Real estate!’ Another of those Americanisms he’d picked up. She smiled until she realized the import of his words.