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The Barrister's Daughter And The Fish a dream by Paul Garner's subconscious I was in the house of a rich and influential barrister, discretely trying to make his young daughter. The house was on a high point overlooking the Waikato River, the daughter was about twenty one, bookishly attractive with glasses and a thin white dress, dark blonde hair, straight, cut short. Everyone else had gone to bed, so we had the house to ourselves. Shunning Marvin Gaye, I put on some Pharoah Sanders and we step out onto the balcony to enjoy the view. We manoeuvre around each other in a parody dance of nervous advances, playing the game, I can see in her eyes that I've won. Suddenly there's a dull thud behind us on the balcony. I look round at a very strange sight; crouching sphinx-like is a person. He is completely wrapped in a very thin layer of packing foam, over a navy blue jumpsuit. The foam is like a bag, with a drawstring around the face, from which he smiles enigmatically out at us. I know immediately what's up; he's a performance artist and this is some kind of guerrilla art project. Right now hundreds of these instant mime-sculptures are being air dropped across the city. We retreat back inside to find some privacy. There's a thud on the roof and I share an incredulous glance with the barrister's daughter; it must be practically raining performance artists! This surreal shower has woken the barrister himself, a big Pavarotti of a man, and we go down into the basement as if there's an air raid going on. The basement is very small and I press up close to the daughter, all in good humour. With a dull thud another artist lands in the basement. Perhaps they're arriving from another dimension and not falling out of the sky after all. In actual fact they are being teleported into place from a central headquarters somewhere in the city. This one has landed slightly awkwardly, with his elbows on the floor and his feet dangling upwards against the wall. According to the 'rules' of this art piece he's not allowed to move. You makes your bed and then you sleeps in it, I guess. The barrister makes to beat the art out of this hapless dogmatist, but I restrain him and suggest to the artist that, principles aside, now might be a good time to leave. I never did quite make it with his daughter, but some time later I was fishing with a friendly policeman and he gave me a huge mackerel. I was flattered, and somewhat at a loss to know what to do with it; the fish was about a metre long and must have weighed several kilos. I dragged it into the backseat of the car with me. It was still alive, though somewhat subdued, having been out of water for quite a while. It flopped tragically against the door trying to get out and I felt a strong twinge of sympathy, or even empathy, for this noble creature. I stroked its head (the soft scales behind the gills) to calm it down. We arrived, somewhere, and I hauled my mackerel out of the car. It seemed to be able to stand on its fins okay so I put it down on the pavement, and it wandered off to explore the neighbourhood. I called it back to me. Do fish have whiskers? I'm pretty sure some do. Its scales were more the consistency of seal fur, though they still had the shiny grey-green colour of fish scale. I patted the mackerel's backside, and to my surprise he 'sat' obediently! I could hardly contain myself (a trained pet fish!) and shouted out to no one in particular, "Look, he sat!" On the other hand of course I like smoked mackerel, and I'd have a hell of a time trying to get him licensed, so I led him over to the warehouse where they'd turn him into fish fingers for me. He would be dead soon anyway, since he'd been out of water too long, so it would probably be kinder than letting him asphyxiate. "Please kill him humanely." I asked the foreman of the warehouse. The foreman was a man of few words, but he propped the expiring mackerel up in the corner of a wall and took careful aim with his air gun. I think the mackerel was daintily washing itself when I had a flash of realization. "Don't shoot!" I shouted, just in time. It was obvious the mackerel had been a cat all along. It stretched lithely and trotted down the other end of the warehouse, perhaps in search of leftover fish heads. Maybe it had all been a deliberate ploy by the cat to score a free meal. It would have disguised itself as a large fish, knowing that I'd bring him to this warehouse, or one like it. Cunning indeed! This was clearly no ordinary cat. It seemed slightly larger than a domestic house cat. For it to have been caught by the fishing policeman it would have to have an amphibious metabolism, or at least be semi-aquatic by habit. It smelled fishy too, and powerful muscles rippled under its coat, like it was the lovechild (love-kitten?) of some unholy union between an Otter and one of the smaller varieties of wildcat. As it came back from the shadows at the far end of the warehouse I could see it had dropped all pretence of mackerel-hood. I can't say exactly what colours its coat was, because they don't have names. The best I can do to describe it is to say his fur was a smouldering orange-red, that struck my eyes as if perhaps in his native dimension he was moving very fast; that its real colour was an invisible ultraviolet that had been Doppler-shifted to this orange in the process of translating across into the slow-moving dimension which we inhabit. Against this backdrop he had bold tiger stripes of iridescent grass-green purple starlight. He strolled past me with the nonchalance of a superior being. Back Copyright © 2002 - Paul Garner.

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