The Stream
Page 15
When the little fish had swum in wide circles with his mouth wide open and had righted himself again and then turned on his side and swum downstream twitching, the strange odours his body squeezed from him became stronger than ever but no fish, not even the male fish, took any notice.
When the sun had gone and the law of continuing had reminded the chokeweed of the plan; when the chokeweed had stopped changing carbon dioxide into oxygen as it had all day and instead began to pour out carbon dioxide as required of it at night; when the thickness in the water thickened and the thing in the water began to press on their gills so hard that their hearts pounded and faltered and clutched with the stress of breathing; when the stones that hung about the other fish held the other fish so fast to the stream bed that they could not have made themselves move even if they had wanted to move, the little cock fish and one of the medium-sized fish from the middle of the queue that had also begun to wobble, both wobbled again.
The little cock fish that had been changed inside by the stains in the water that he could not see or smell and the medium-sized fish from the middle of the queue that had two grey eyes because of all the flukes in them, began to swim and stop and swim side-by-side together, though neither fish was going anywhere that it had decided to go and the medium-sized fish could not have seen anyway because she was blind.
The little cock fish that had been changed in places where no changes should have been made and the medium-sized fish that was blind raced around in tight circles and wobbled and darted. Then the little cock fish began to spiral and loop through the water that was too thick to breathe in and the blind fish turned on her back and swam upside down with her mouth open as though the thing in the water was keeping it open.
Before the night was over and David Hoffmeyer had even left his hotel, the medium-sized fish lay broadside on the bottom without moving and the little cock fish lay high in the water and was sucking at the surface as though drinking in air.
The trout with the scar seemed not to see the little cock fish, nor to notice the bubbles that welled behind its gills and that kept catching the light and bending it into colours. The trout with the scar that lay leaden and weak and closed in on himself did not see the little cock fish stop moving soon after the sun had lit the trees on the skyline again and David Hoffmeyer had reached the airport.
Neither the trout with the scar nor any of the other fish, not even the bullheads nor the loaches nor the minnows that were always on the lookout because they were always in danger, saw Hoffmeyer’s helicopter clattering overhead or knew when it dropped onto the pad in the Broadchalk valley.
None of the fish was aware when Hoffmeyer announced that the site would be extended again because the new products were such a success and none of them heard Earl Johnson telling him that the water problem they thought might be a problem would be no problem at all.
Not a single fish heard the helicopter clattering back overhead but lower, or saw the heat of its exhaust or smelled it, or felt the hot breath that swept through the high corn like a rumour.
Year 5, July
it was as Peter Althorpe was telling the Lincoln inquiry that attitudes had to change or else there would soon be no green fields left and not an ancient brick upon an ancient brick, that all the fish that remained in the stream gathered at last in the pool beneath the falls.
It was as Althorpe was sitting down and Simon Goode was standing up that the water in the pool dropped suddenly, exactly as if the springs in the high hills had passed another critical point.
On the day the last of the wide, flat fields to be ready for harvesting again was being harvested and the fields on either side of that were being ploughed again, the great spring behind the farm suddenly dropped to a trickle.
It was after the shower had started and the hedge around the farm was being slung with cut light, that the next spring stopped.
The water that had once tumbled and roared and fizzed with white bubbles, curved over the falls like bent glass thinly and the fish that had come in search of it seemed seized with a panic. They jostled head-down to get where the last bubbles bloomed and their tails thrashed the surface behind them.
Year 5, August
the chokeweed began to die soon after the weather changed, just as the law of continuing had required in the plan.
On the night that the flowers were being planted out by floodlight and the displays were being put up in those buildings that Tyler and Billings had agreed the Minister should visit, the fish were finding it so hard to move their gills that the water might have been turned to syrup.
The law of continuing had not told the fish how extra oxygen was consumed when chokeweed decayed and that a shortage of oxygen could easily result. It had not mentioned that an oxygen shortage was always made much worse at night when plants were putting out less oxygen anyway. It had not even mentioned how the effects of these two could be made worse beyond imagining if they happened at a time when the water was warm and had less oxygen in it to start with. But still, every fish had been told all that it needed to know about the importance of keeping its gills moving and the thing in the water that was already rampant reminded them one by one.
Though the law of continuing had told the trout with the scar and all the other fish as much as they needed to know, the trout with the scar seemed too preoccupied with himself to take notice of anything.
The trout with the scar did not see the gaunt trout with the hooked jaw and the huge head and the one blind eye suddenly drive his nose into the stream bed and stir up the dark clouds, or even feel the fish’s tail thrumming against his flank before it stopped.
The trout with the scar did not sense the little hen fish that carried the eggs that could never have matured, drifting away upside down before she began to spiral and loop.
The trout with the scar did not know that the hen fish from behind the three posts had rolled onto her side and had been driven forward and had spiralled so far into the chokeweed that she became only a pulse of green light.
The lank trout with the scar that had the leeches all over him and the tapeworms in his belly and the stone in his head and one good eye because parasites had commandeered the other, saw nothing of the way all the fish in the pool were beginning to pitch and tumble. He did not see the leeches and the worms and the soft-bodied things and the things that stood up in tubes swaying as though dancing at the wonder of it all. He heard nothing of the gulls that dived and screamed and backed away from one another, tugging.
The trout with the scar knew nothing because of the way each breath had become a shallower breath since that night had begun. He had already been taken by the thing that was everywhere in the water and that had locked him in his own tight curve and sent him looping stiffly into the margins.
By the time the announcement was being made about the new medical research centre to be built at Farley from money not spent on a tunnel at Stinston, the trout with the scar had no conscious movement left in him.
By the time Nick Brewster of Cogent Electronics was staring into the bottom of his glass in Kuala Lumpur because his wife had just called him to say she wanted a better life and a divorce, the trout with the scar was being seized again and again by the thing in the water that the heat and the pumps and all else had created.
As Paul Tyler and Geoffrey Billings were making their respective final checks and the Minister was looking for the first time at the notes prepared for him and Dame Vanessa Bennett was telling the Guardian that the only hope in the long term was for human beings to change their behaviour but that to ask them to change their behaviour was tantamount to asking them to change their nature, the trout with the scar was being driven head-first into the chokeweed because his tail had acquired a will of its own.
By the time the Minister and David Hoffmeyer were smalltalking about the importance of governments and industry working together and Simon Goode the biologist was writing his paper on butterflies, the trout with the scar that was lying on his side with
silt in his throat was rising up on the chokeweed because the weed was compressing beneath him.
By the time the Minister was putting on his hard hat because the pictures of him cutting the ribbon would look better if he did and the man in Gothenburg who was so fascinated by England was frying an egg, the chokeweed had made a pillow for the trout with the scar and the spasms of his gills and the jerkings of his tail had eased him onto it.
As Lisa Pearce was framing the shot that would show the scissors on the ribbon in close-up with the crowd behind and Jo Hamilton was going shopping because she could see nothing to celebrate and the Curator of Farley museum was seeing how well the artefacts found at the Frontage looked in their specially designed cases and the trout with the scar was gasping, the water in the stream that the law of continuing had created, shrank further. It left the dome of the great fish’s eye exposed above the surface and the sun began to dry it.
As the Minister took the scissors and stepped towards the ribbon, the trout with the scar in the stream that had been planned before the wolves had prowled there or the bears had roared there or the wild pigs had truffled in the loose-littered ground, stopped splashing.
As the Minister opened the scissors with his right hand and offered the ribbon to them with his left and paused and smiled this way and that for the cameras, the tail of the trout in the stream that had flowed as clear as melted time through meadowsweet and hemp agrimony, through burr reed and brooklime, through purple loosestrife and flag iris and balsam, trembled and fretted and arranged itself slowly.
The eye of the trout that the kingfisher had scarred tilted forward. The crowd pressed closer, anxious to miss nothing.
As the cut ribbon separated and the silken ends fluttered, the eye of the trout that had lived as quick and light as water itself, stared sightlessly as though at something finally arrived, then rolled loosely back.
The dome of the sky looked down at it.
And applause rang out.
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Brian Clarke
First published in the UK in 2000
by swan Hill Press, an imprint of Quiller Publishing Ltd
This edition published 2012
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84689 147 2
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