Bonne Nuit Ma Petit Grande Poisson

“Fish are people too!” I cried with an air of urgent desperation, in an effort to dissuade some expat friends from purchasing goldfish to ‘decorate’ their flat for the few months that they would be in Dubai.

Then the floodgates of ridicule opened.

I took it all on the chin, as I’ve done many times before, but I passed no apologies for my feelings about keeping fish. I have been called crazy, sad, naive, even ‘wanting, because of my fervent belief that a fish can not only be a quality pet, but that they can possess an incredible amount of character and are not the disposable decorative item that most people seem to think they are.

Quite a few years ago I moved out of home and into a garret bedsit in Limerick City. My first job was working as counter staff in the new Bewleys Restaurant on Cruises street.  I was an awkward, introverted little thing back then, with the social graces of a pea. I got lonely, so I went to the pet shop.  To add to my already blatant nerdishness, I was also highly allergic to anything with hair & four legs, so I found myself by the tanks. Hanging out in the back of one, away from the rest of the flock (shoal, whatever!) was a roguish looking fella with a look of madness in his eye. He was about the length of my middle finger (which isn’t very long at all), and shone like freshly rubbed brass.

“Bag him!” I said, and off we toddled to start what would be a long and beautiful friendship.

He lived in a still water bowl in those first years. Not particularly active, he preferred to give me Bela Lugosi eyes from the top of the T.V., occasionally spitting out a stone at the glass. I called him Cider, after my favourite drink.

It was in those first couple of years that I began to believe the whole ‘5 second’ memory thing was tosh. I was a regular viewer of a particular soap opera that had a very distinctive theme tune. Coincidentally, I began feeding him around the same time as that show would come on. Occasionally, I would forget, but as soon as that theme tune started belting out, my usually lethargic friend would get stir crazy, dancing around the tank trying to get my attention.

Sometimes I would deliberately forgo feeding, just to see what would happen. I’d walk around the room, watching him from the corner of my eye. In his confined space, he would follow me with a movement of his head. Just for the craic, I’d walk towards the tank shaking the container of fish food. He’d start going crazy jerking his whole body side to side like a dog wagging its tail, but then I’d stop and walk away again.  He would eventually give up on me, just loll there staring wildly, spitting stones at the glass again.  On some occasions he would simply turn his back and refused to play.

Time passed and I moved to Cork to go to University. I decided to get a tank-mate for my little friend, a Black Moor that I called Othello.

Othello died.

He lost his buoyancy one day and spent the following two weeks doing the back stroke in ever decreasing circles. I became quite distressed by the whole thing. Needless to say my flatmates at the time thought I was a total loop, specially when the matchbox was produced and a little hole dug for him in the garden.

Thankfully, my boyfriend was a tad more sympathetic. He arrived at my house one evening with a gift, for me & Cider. It was a brand new tank, a ‘real’ one, with filter system, plants, new gravel, and a tub of catfish pellets. He had come to the conclusion that the space the fish were in was too small, the water stagnated too quickly, and that feeding from the bottom of the tank rather than the top was healthier for them.

The change in little Cider when he was installed in his new home was incredible. He was like a kid in a sweet shop.  He swam around that tank like a Ferrari on a Formula One track. His favourite occupation was swimming against the current, and round and round the back of the filter. The combined effects of larger space, better food and plenty of exercise, was ‘more’ Cider. He grew and grew, and kept on growing.

I moved house for my third year of Uni, and simultaneously, Cider had to get a larger tank.  We were onto a 1 metre long container by then, and he was now the size of my whole hand. Even though he occasionally tried, he wasn’t able to fit behind the filter anymore.  My housemate and I would take him for walks. We would run up and down the length of the room while he followed. Sometimes we’d stop in the middle, faking moves right or left to try to put him off.  He’d jerk with the fake but was never completely fooled, only ever moving when we committed to our direction.

I had a convert in my flatmate, and through her our Cider Appreciation Society grew.

I nearly killed him that year.

He got a touch of fishy cancer, otherwise unattractively known as ‘Fin Rot’. I managed to get him into remission with a treatment that had to be added to the water once a week. One particular week, when my flatmate was out of the house, I decided to give Cider his medicine while I was completely stoned.


Now, the solution had to be diluted in hot water first.

I don’t think I need to paint a picture. Suffice to say Cider very quickly got a glazed look in his eyes and keeled over. Of course I freaked out little, but thankfully didn’t panic too much. I scooped him out of the big tank with the little one he used to live in, filling it with fresh tap water.  He lay there lopsided. Obviously mouth to mouth was out of the question so I tried resetting him in the water, holding him upright, gently talking to him, “C’mon buddy, come on … I know, I’m sorry. Don’t die on me now ya little bollix, come one!” Finally, out of desperation I tugged hard on his tail which must have acted like the equivalent of one of those electric shock paddles you see on ER, because he shot across the tank like a bolt of lightening, and banged his head off the far side of it. He spent the 15 or 20 minutes after that darting back and forth along the container, white eyed and jittery.

Once back in his big tank, he found the darkest corner and stayed there, arse to the sitting room, refusing to acknowledge anyone , regardless of what theme tune was played, for about a week. He eventually forgave me though.

Time passed, stuff happened, I graduated, and the Cider Appreciation Society grew as more and more people got to know the ‘Wonderfish’ .  I had to foster him out on a couple of occasions when my job, or travel in general took me away. He kept growing, his tanks got bigger and the process of looking after him became almost equivalent to that of looking after a cat or dog.

















His tank sat on a big coffee table by the picture window of my home.  Anyone coming to the house would pass by the window before coming to the door. Whether it was me, a friend or the postman, they got a wiggly welcome from our fishy friend as they passed. He also seemed to take great pleasure in tormenting the neighbours dog.

One day, our little family got bigger.

I had gone back to college for a while to study photography. Arriving into school one wet Cork morning, I found a stray.  Sitting on top of the print dryer in the Photography department lobby was a tiny tank with half a fingers depth of water. A  little shell-shocked Black Moor was blubbing away nervously in the pool. Crazy lady immediately made an appearance and  started cooing and clucking over the petrified creature.

He had been brought in by my tutor, Harry Moore, in order to find a home for him.  His nervous state was the result of having been cycled down Barrack Street Hill strapped to the front of a bicycle.

I rang my other half  to ask if we could keep him. Once he got over his confusion as to how exactly one could randomly ‘find a fish’, he agreed that we could adopt the little mite.

I called him Harry, after his original carer.

Knowing that Cider may not take to having his space invaded after so many years, I decided to quarantine Harry for a while. I submerged his tiny little tank into Cider’s enormous one, and he was allowed out for supervised walks once a day. I always made sure that the little hatch on the top of his tank was closed down before going to bed.

One Sunday morning however, tragedy struck.

I came downstairs and went to make coffee. It took me a minute to notice my other half standing, one hand on hip the other scratching his head, in front of the fishy mansion.

“What’s up?”
“Harry’s gone!”
“What do you mean Harry’s gone?”
“Missing! Not there! Vanished gone!”

I stood in front of the tank and saw what he meant. Our poissons pool was sans Harry. His little tank was empty, hatch open and flapping in the current. Cider was hanging out at the front of the tank, nonchalantly eyeing us in a disturbingly Dirty Harry-esque kind of way, occasionally spitting a stone at the glass. I was perplexed, but soon my head was filled with crazy thoughts. Cider was easily 10 times bigger than Harry, but he couldn’t have could he?

I neurotically searched out the tank back to front looking for some evidence laying among the stones, all the while returning to Cider’s crazy eyes and unapologetic glooping, desperately trying to allow logic to convince me I was wrong.

Finally, out of the corner of my eye, something from behind the filtration system caught my attention. It was Harry! Closer inspection made me realize that the poor little bastard had been sucked, arse first, into the back of the filter. I switched off the air intake and, slowly, he fell out.

I had two theories about how he got there. One, that I hadn’t closed down his lid properly, he got out, and Mr. This Is My Town Cider had run him out of it straight into the danger zone. Two, and this is the theory I prefer, he got out and, in an effort to relive his youth, Cider persuaded him to have a go at swimming around the filter cos you know, tis great craic!

So there we were, with one unremorseful psycho fish, and one completely tailless wreck.  I gently guided the now practically crippled Harry back into his little tank and tightly shut down the lid. I sat there for ages just looking at him, wondering if he would make it, crying and calling myself a ‘bad mother’.  Everyday I would put a couple of small catfish pellets into his tank, but he’d just loll there and watch them drop.  Every so often he would attempt to follow them, but the lack of a tail fin made swimming almost impossible.

I wondered how long he would last.

Strangely, as the weeks passed, he began to find some strength, and started grabbing the pellets as they passed him. Unbelievably, as the months went by, his tail grew back. I couldn’t quite find it in me to let him out of his little cell though, for fear of another ‘accident’.

About a year down the line, however, that decision was taken out of my hands.

Clearly, I had done it again. I’d fed him and not securely refastened the lid. Once again, I walked into the room to find the other half standing in front of the tank with his hands on his hips. Terrified, I ran over to it . My multiple visions of carnage all disappeared when I got there though. Harry had gotten out alright, but there, at the far end of the tank, were the two,  the small nestled between the fins of the big, cuddling.


I couldn’t believe it. They became quite dependant on each other over the years.  Harry would groom Cider, and Cider would wrap his fins around Harry in their downtime, and mind him like an egg he was hatching.

Once free to roam around the big tank, Harry started to become fatter. As Cider got older, he began to lose his colour. Once the colour of brass, he started developing white patches all over his body.  His tail just kept on growing, spreading out behind like a white-haired banshee.

Eventually, a dramatic change came over all our lives. My relationship with the other half ended, and I needed to fix myself. I decided to leave the country. The fate of Cider and Harry caused me great distress. Unable for the tears anymore, and even though they didn’t really have the space or the energy, my parents came to the rescue and offered to look after him until I got home.

As I left the two boys in the family homestead, my dad tormented me with jibes about how he would look after him until he was big enough to take pike fishing. He would fake lack of understanding, and harass me with plans to batter and fry them for Mum’s Saturday tea, but behind my back he was buying bridges and bubble machines like the one that drove the fish mad in Finding Nemo. Mum regularly popped into the sitting room to chat to them when she’d get up in the morning.

Dad devised an ingenious pipe and pump system to empty the water out of the tank when it need to be cleaned.  He’d make little videos of the two boys and send them to me over the internet. Last time I was home, Cider was almost completely white. He seemed to have stopped growing. He was clearly a little less active than the last time I’d seen him, but still his same old cantankerous self.  Harry has almost quadrupled in size and his colour is changing too. His whole belly has gone from black to gold.

Sitting there watching them grooming and regarding each other in the mirrored end of the tank, I started building their new home in my head. When I finally return to Ireland, I will buy a little cottage in the countryside.  In it I want to build a tank as wide as it is long and inset it in the wall, space for them both to retire.

I said to my dad before I left the house to return to my job in Dubai, “I’m going to have to provide for them little feckers in my will I reckon!”

It’s been almost five years since I first left Cider and Harry with my parents.

This morning I received a text from home. It reads,


“Deepest regrets, Harry is an orphan. Cider left us last night. Love Dad.”
________________________________________________

Daddy kindly buried Cider under the apple tree in our back garden, anointing the re-packed earth with a can of Scrumpy Jack in honour of an incredible life.

He even wrote a poem for him;

Beneath the rain and windswept sky,
We bid dear Cider fish Goodbye.
While in the Derg the Pike did cry,
'Tis with us the fish should lie.

With patience and with fortitude,
We tolerate his solitude.
A tasty dish, he should be ours,
But for a promise made.

Beneath the Apple tree he rests,
Cider soaked with Pappa's Best.
Now Harry swims a Lonesome trail.
Missing still that Angel's tail

Poor Harry! What will he do?
___________________________________________________

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the many people who have helped me look after Cider over the years; Sean, Carmel, Martin, Nano & Steve, Julie, Ciaran, Pet & Manus, but most of all Mum & Dad. He wouldn’t have made it this far without you.
xxx
M.

A Short History of Smoking

Waking up this morning with that metal and mucky ashtray taste in my mouth, and death rattle in my chest, I find myself feeling the need to quit.  It’s that same ‘never again’ feeling that I get after a night on the beer, which, as it happens, is also keeping the no more tabac feeling company today. Thank you Mr. Arthur Guinness for inviting me to your birthday party last night, but really, it was cruel of you to force that last pint down my throat … and as for the bullfrogs? I’m sure there is a convention somewhere in the world that’s supposed to protect people from such unmitigated abuse.

I picked the box of lights up off the beside table as a reflex action on my way to my laptop. I’m sitting here now, flicking the lid open and closed on the damn thing. I find myself tuning in to these little habitual tendencies every so often, and wondering where they came from.  I have a whole lifetime of them wrapped around cigarettes, from how I open a new pack, the pre-mouth fiddling, the hand action when I do decide to light up, to just simply playing with the box, twisting it round and round between my thumb and forefinger.

I grew up in a smoking household, my father having partaken in some form or another most of my life. Usually Benson & Hedges, though sometimes he would take up the pipe, just for a change.  I remember he collected pipes for a while and used to display them fondly in a stand on the mantelpiece. For a short time, they took the place of socks as his regular present type on birthdays and at Christmas. I think it may have been somewhat of a fashion statement in the early 70’s, judging from the super cool, faded colour photographs of his pitch black moustachioed self with sideburns, blue-sleeveless jumper and pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth, that seem to litter the early pages of our family albums.

Of course, he had grown up with it also. Both of his parents were diligent smokers. My grandfather eventually died from them, and my grandmother may well have, though they called it an aneurism.  She died young, so my memories of her are quite vague.  However, I have a picture of her in my head, a somewhat romantic one built from a combination of family images and stories that my father tells of her. She was a classy lady by all accounts, stylistically a bit of an Audrey Hepburn type who never stepped outside the door without being perfectly manicured, attitude-wise more like Katherine, she’d give you hell if you crossed her.  She loved her fur coats.  In my head I see her standing with one arm folded to provide a rest for her gloved smoking arm, wrist slightly bent, palm face up, two fingers gently holding the cigarette that was almost an extension of her hand, smoke curling in a pure, white, single pillar beside her pale face, occasionally getting itself wrapped in one of her short set curls.

I remember my first cigarette. It was on the back of the school bus when I was about 16.  I physically recall that I had craved it for weeks.  Finally, I asked for a ‘drag’ of Martina Keane’s Major and inhaled it like I’d been smoking for years. I used to reckon that I was already addicted before I’d ever properly inhaled, a combination of regular exposure, and genetic predisposition.

That said, my career began pretty much the same for me as it had done for my father, as a fashion statement. Quite simply, it was cool!  When I was 17, I had a leather bikers jacket and loved having my box of Marlboro reds slightly sticking up out of the top pocket. Of course, it had to be a secret. Not simply because that’s what 17 year olds feel they have to do but, because I was also a chronic asthmatic.  It was a late onset illness, diagnosed when I was 15 or 16. My father, life long and committed smoker though he was, would have ‘killed’ me if he knew.

My brother, who is three years younger than me, became aware of the stash. He’d been robbing me blind for months, but it took me a while to twig. I’ve always suffered from a certain lack of awareness of what’s going on around me. I used to question my memory even then. When I finally did wake up to his shenanigans, it riled me massively, but it also put me in a bit of a quandry. What was I to do about it? I couldn’t exactly go to my parents without getting myself in trouble as well. I decided to try and outwit him using the fear factor. I left the box of Marlies in my jacket with a note wrapped around the 8 or 9 fags that were left. “I know what you’re at. Buy your own, or there’ll be hell!”  A day later when I was putting on my jacket, I pulled out the box to find it empty of cigarettes, and the scrap of paper I’d inserted had a scrawled reply on the back, “For who exactly?”  Scut!

I was in the car a few years later with dad collecting my brother from a day out with the lads in town. We pulled up before he saw us, or had time to quench the hard-ass fag that was hanging from his mouth in true James Dean fashion.  My dad lost his temper and started spewing about how, “that boy is in the shit.” I got defensive and argued that he was old enough to make his own decisions. At that point dad turned on me. I was ‘out’ by then. “100% of people who smoke die young”, I think his words were. “Dad, we all die, and anyway, you smoke!” The argument continued, “You’re asthmatic! 100% of asthmatics who smoke die younger and more painfully.” At that point I lost it, and in a very uncharacteristic manner when conversing with my lovely Daddy, got accusatory! “Dad, you’ve been smoking around us all our lives.  It’s probably your fucking fault I have asthma in the first place!”  At that, the conversation ended, he rolled down the window and chucked the nub of a cigarette he’d been puffing on out of it, honked the horn at my brother, and wouldn’t say a word to either of us the rest of the way home.  He didn’t pick up another cigarette for some 7 years after that.

I remember asking him a few years down the line if he missed them. His response, “Daughter, to this day I would still sell you into slavery for one drag of a Benson!"


One Christmas however, Dad’s fasting all came crashing down about his ears when his elder children descended on the house for the festivities. I still smoked, and both my brother, and his lovely Swiss wife were unapologetic puffers. Mum, in her ever hospitable way, allocated an inside space for us to enjoy our wicked habits, for we“couldn’t be trapesing outside into the depth of winter everytime we wanted to indulge, and sure anyway, wasn’t it Christmas.”

That room happened to be the living room.  It had a beautiful open fireplace that would take the smoke up and out of the house without too much trouble. Poor Daddy! Christmas day is his day for the kitchen, and he loves it.  The day begins the same every year. Up with the lark to see what Santa had delivered, (a little less early obviously in that interim after we had all grown, and before the grandkids came along), a nice cooked breakfast, then we’d decamp to the living room while he donned his chef’s hat and opened his first bottle of red.  Like most smokers, myself included, the habit is inextricably linked to alcohol consumption, and for any smoker trying to quit, that is the hardest time.

By the time he’d moved on to bottle number two the poor man was tormenting himself over our open boxes of tobacco, holding them up to his nose and snorting in the mere scent of them like it was cocaine.

I began looking around for the slaver at that point.

Then, like a fool, I opened the door for him. “For goodness sake Daddy, it’s Christmas. Stop tormenting yourself and have one.  You’ve given them up before, it’s not like you can’t ‘just stop’ again if you want.”  Easily knowing then that his struggle was one I’d never imposed upon myself. In the following months and years, he went through numerous failed attempts at quitting.

Unlike us, my youngest brother, a late baby, grew up in a smoke free household. The very sight of a cigarette disgusted him. His vocal hatred of the habit led to Daddy becoming a ‘secret smoker’. For some reason he felt safe smoking around me, but anytime I sat in the car with him when he’d pick me up from the airport, or when I'd meet him in the garden shed, the cigarette entering his mouth was always prefaced with a, “Don’t tell your brother.”

Another one of those, 'don’t tell your brother scenarios’  happened after I left university and used to pop home for a visit in between excavations. I have always enjoyed smoking the occasional joint, something Daddy was quite liberal about. Apart from the ‘joy of the stone’, it had the capacity to ease the discomforts of my skin disorder, which would flare up under stress. I was given free reign to smoke in my parents house, as long as I kept it to my bedroom and my youngest brother, still only 14 at the time, didn’t find out.

One evening I was in my room, having a smoke and reading a book, when Daddy popped up for a visit. I can’t remember what it was that we chatted about, but can remember that he watched intently as I packed a three skinner.  It took me such a long time to learn how to roll that when I finally mastered it, I used to take great pride in the end product. Sitting there admiring my piece of artwork, Daddy asked if I’d make one for him.  I have to admit, it stopped me in my tracks, and my shock was both vocal and visual. Unsurprisingly, his response was something along the lines of, “You forget that there was a time before I was a husband and father! I’d just like to remember what it was like.”  “Fair point,” I said as I watched him leave the room.  I duly obliged his request, leaving my labour of love on the windowsill beside his bedroom door, as I left to take up my next job posting. I rang home a few days later to check in.

Me:     “So, how was it?”
Dad:    “Never again!”
Me:     “How d'you mean?”
Dad:    “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have had half a bottle of whiskey 
             beforehand, but it didn’t take me long to remember why I
             never kept up the habit."
Me:     “Eh???”
Dad:   “Massive crisis! Just two pulls into that yoke, 
             and I was in the toilet desperately trying make the correct 
             choice. Squat or kneel" 

My mouth tastes like pants.  I’ve brushed twice already, and I can still taste the tar.  I don’t know what it is about me that makes me smoke like a chimney when I go out for a few drinks.  I guess, living in one of the few countries where one can still smoke in a bar doesn’t help.  Or maybe it’s just a weak personality.


Dad in his wisdom occasionally tries to give me a pep talk, sometimes in a cruel but kind way, using a bit of emotional blackmail. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve attempted to quit. I’ve fallen off that blasted wagon so many times I’m black and blue. My latest move has been to take up a new brand of extra light, extra slim, menthol cigarettes.  After only a few days, its clear that I’m smoking these cigarettes with the same mentality that a career dieter approaches fat-free cheese.  

“Oooo, no bad stuff, that means I can have double.”

My dad on the other hand is now three years clean. It took a heart attack to get him there, but then sometimes it takes an extreme kick in the backside to find the willpower. Keep it up Daddy!

Personally, I hate having my bottom kicked, so here’s hoping I can find some willpower before boot and flesh meet.