SALLY BREEN: Reef Fish

Photograph by Emmanuel Newton

Part of you knew you’d end up here with Alec, with his tongue inside your mouth but part of you’d held out hope that you wouldn’t. You know this kind of thinking is naïve. That the dreams spooling from your head are snakes, and he’s in control of the ladders, that if you hesitate or look back, you’ll be salt blown away into nothing. That you gotta stay curious, stay for the conversation, for how the wine is liquid gold in your glass – for how Alec’s world is a window onto elegance.

Back at the share house the boys will be playing four-person shooter games or watching endless pirated episodes of Family Guy, toking on bongs and eating chicken and corn. And you are here with Alec, in a hotel, in a golden city, in a view that would price out your monthly income in a night, in an expansive muted restaurant with velvet seats and waiters who know how to appear and disappear. Where everything rests in its rightful place. The big spoons and the little ones. The cocktail fork and the knife. How the waiter brushes the crumbs from the bread you break onto a silver tray. How your legs against the crushed velvet are so young.

At home you would have been watching your lover play in his pilled tracksuit pants, washboard abs retreating every time he wrestles with the controller. Smiling at you when his avatar kills something. This fascination with Alec is different. It has nothing to do with wanting to touch him. This is about what you think he sees in you. And what you want him to see is this mountain of how you write, how you’ve been scratching out signals in the rock for years. How a man like him can push a contract across a table and suddenly you’re in a cable car and that mountain is nothing. How fast you lift.

In the reflection of your face in the mirror beyond his head, in the shiny badge on the waiter’s lapel, is your dream. Alec has heard you scratching into the rock. He has sent the rope down. And the whole time you are being entertaining and telling stories, trying not to sink too deep into that cocoon, to admit you’re bored – the whole time – your dream is sitting there in another corner of the restaurant, watching the sea salt explosion of an oyster sliding down your throat. And by the end of the meal, after the dessert wine and the petrified grapes, your dream has gotten so big it is hovering over the room – enormous and purple and resting on the other diners like silk, though the only person who can see your dream is you.

After dinner you’ll wander with him by the hotel’s enormous pool, body languid from the wine, from the effect of being dropped into this glowing fish tank, you’d only ever admired from the outside; palm fronds brushing against your bare shoulders, rocks glowing underwater, light glistening off of scales. Reef fish careening away from the echo of your heels and the shadows you throw. Somehow, the fish stay alive in this beautiful fake sea, confused by the curved blue concrete walls that should yield but never do.

Nothing about Alec suggests he might be scaley underneath, cashmere sweater, pleated slacks, navy blazer but when he comes closer, scaley is how he feels. When he pushes you into the trunk of a palm tree, he is a creature come out of the deep, not like the reef fish, but something gelatinous released from a graver hole, an English gentleman, slimy as moss underneath. And it surprises you that someone so worldly, so old, could not know how to kiss. That his little English mouth and his little English lips could feel so cavernous. And in the few seconds when you allow his tongue to roam around inside you, you are thinking of falling back into the pool, of what it would feel like to sink into a waiting school of Angelfish and have them carry you away. Instead, you put both your hands on his sunken chest and push.

In the cab you notice a tiny bit of purple caught on the hem of your dress.

Years later you’ll see Alec at a writers festival when you have half a toe inside your dream and you’ll be watching when he says, ‘What beautiful creatures,’ gazing up at his female assistants descending a staircase, flush and glittery in their silver dresses and sparkly eyeshadows, ready for the free party he has thrown, and you’ll think of the pretty reef fish stuck in the hotel pool, when he rammed you into that tree, knowing he wants you to watch him, moving towards all those tinkling young women, arms outstretched.

SALLY BREEN is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Griffith University, and Executive Director of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT). She is the author of grunge memoir, The Casuals; and the neo-noir novel, Atomic City. Her short form work has been published widely. She lives in Gold Coast, Australia.