Aquaria Humanis

Not for the first time, I wonder why my wife has brought us here.

She’s reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, legs crossed in that artful way she has perfected over the years, showing them at their longest and leanest whilst the rest of her posture states, I don’t care how I look.

She is beautiful still, but the cerulean light pits her frown lines, makes craters of her jowls. This will destroy her later when she sees the photos, but for now, I leave her to revel in the image she has of herself in her head.

Turning back to the glass walls, I come face to face with a grinning stingray. There’s some mirth there and I wonder if, in his fishy little brain, he too can see the absurdity of our situations.

I rub my hand across my eyes. I have not been sleeping well: the turquoise waters glow all day and night, both too bright and too heavy for my lids and forehead to carry. I wear the fancy mask she gave me, but the light permeates still.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

She takes a bookmark - an artsy V&A one she ordered online - places it in the book and takes her time laying it on the table. A glance at her watch, a perfunctory nod.

“We’re coming into peak visitor time,” she says. “We should have something really visual: a quinoa and beetroot salad perhaps. Nuts, too.”

“I was thinking about those chorizo sausages.”

My wife sighs. “They’re just not right, image wise.” Noting my dour expression she adds: “Maybe you can eat them through the night-lull?”

I am tired of doing the things I want to do through the night-lull. Even then, she constantly reminds me, someone is watching.

I go to the fridge in the middle of the pod: even this is clear-windowed, showing the guts of our food preferences to the world. The sausages give me a sad wink, and I remove the containers of acceptable foods and arrange them on plates.

My wife personally gathers the children from their respective activities: yoga, painting. She squeezes our daughter’s shoulder, strokes our son’s face, and scoops them toward the glass dining table.

The crowd swells as we start eating. Beyond our glass walls, a few metres of clean blue water stretches to the transparent visitor tunnels, where they will complete a circuit, admiring sharks and a middle class family in one go. Entrance prices are steep, but people are willing to pay for the chance to see a hammerhead ramming the convex sides, or a telemarketing executive taking a dump.

My wife takes delicate bites with her fork, pausing to chew correctly and wash the virtuous meal down with cool water piqued with a slice of lemon. I remember our first date, tipsy on too much wine, stumbling through Piccadilly Circus with slices of pizza. The slices and our fingers were slick with grease. And later, the slide of our lips as we locked together hungrily, the taste of onions and infinite possibilities coating our probing tongues.

“Now, imagine I’m telling an interesting story,” says my wife. She gesticulates and our children nod, curly hair bouncing.

They can’t hear us, the visitors, so we can say what we like. I have the overwhelming urge to smile politely but say “I wish I had big bouncing titties,” just to see if the kids will react. I picture their shocked little faces, scarred perhaps by Daddy’s behaviour.

I wonder how long they’ll keep this up, this facade. The promise of an X Box and ballet summer school are keeping them in check for now, but it’s only been a week: we’ve three left. And they are kids.

“Now, imagine I’ve said something really funny,” says my wife.

I decline the kind offer to fake some joviality and look instead at the crowds traversing the tunnel. A small boy presses his face to the glass, and I hope that it is the Portuguese Man O’ War that’s caught his eye, and not my holey socks that I’ve just spotted on the floor.

We can’t hear them either, but I can imagine the conversations. I had them myself, the first time my wife dragged us here for a visit.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

Is that Donna Karen she’s wearing?

Aw, isn’t the little girl a sweetie pie?

He’s been on the toilet for ages. Do you think he’s all right?

She was ecstatic, my wife, when our application for Aquaria Humanis was accepted. A lot of work went into the application. We had to be just right: attractive, but not intimidatingly so; successful, but not over-reachers; modest, but with a hint that we might do something raunchy.

A lot of work for the chance to be locked in a glass pod in the middle of an aquarium for a month.

And here we are.

#

The evening crowd flows steadily tonight. An attractive couple press themselves against the tunnel pointing, giggling, ignoring the majestic whale shark passing just above their heads. It occurs to me then that they’re flirting with their own reflections in the wall.

I tut, turn away.

“So,” says my wife.

“So,” I say.

“So, we’ve settled in, the kids are asleep. I think it’s time you and I put on a show.”

“A what now?”

She begins unbuttoning her dress, slowly, a gentle sway snaking through her hips. “Come on. You know you want to.”

Over my shoulder, I feel the watchers draw to a halt. The dress slips from her shoulders, shivers to the floor, revealing a hot pink matching underwear set in lace and gossamer.

“No!...I…”

She’s smiling seductively, but her voice is pure steel. “Don’t you dare embarrass me.”

“Right.” I step to her, pulling her into an awkward embrace.

“Kiss my neck,” she says. She throws her head back, eyes closed.

I flutter a couple of kisses onto her stretched gullet, catching a glimpse of - oh fuck, no! - a stag party cheering in the shaft.

“Sexily,” she snipes.

I ram my eyes tightly shut, tune out the snuffle of our sleeping boy, the audience pumping their fists in excitement.

Sexy, sexy, sexy, I think. Then I wonder if I’ve still got that pimple on my arse, the one that looks like a dog’s nose. No!

“Can we at least get under the covers?” I ask into her neck.

She pulls my head back, looks me square in the eyes. “I did not do Pilates every day for five months to hide this body under a duvet.”

Her mouth hits mine, gnashes painfully at my lips. I gasp, unable to get my breath.

“Please can we just…”

Her fingers unleash my belt, pop the button on my trousers, yank them down over my hips.

Oh fuck.

My saggy grey boxers, complete with a ragged hole down the middle of the back seam are now on view for all.

“What the hell are those?” she asks. “I said good underwear only.”

Nothing is less sexy than thin white British legs furred with curly leg hair, and trousers pooled around the ankles of a saggy-panted forty-something. I am at once cold and mortified.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to…perform.”

“Try,” she hisses, rolling the offending rags over my buttocks.

While she gets to work, I try to conjure that lusty laugh of hers on the beach in Koh Tao. Or us giggling on the sofa at her Nana’s house, tangled in a crocheted blanket. Even the drunk wedding night sex where her Aunty knocked on the wall telling us to keep it down.

Nothing.

Nada.

Zilch.

“Can we…?”

Lightning flashes of a hundred phone cameras dazzle.

My only hope is that the reflection of light on glass masks some of my shame.

#

My wife hasn’t spoken to me since the non-sex debacle. Instead, she focuses her attention on my left eyebrow, mouths platitudes, writes divorce in all of the seven letter spaces in my crossword puzzle book. I spend my days surreptitiously taking slices off the brie, watching the children go through the motions of their approved activities.

Our daughter is creating a series of darkly scratched line drawings of, what I think is, herself being slowly devoured by a great white. Our son hammers out some angsty dirges on the piano: a fitting soundtrack to the daily rhythm of our lives down here.

The visitors keep coming, and though I can largely tune them out, I can’t resist the occasional mimed death threat.

#

With just a week left, we’re awoken by a rumble. Deep, thrumming, it rattles our very bones. Our underwater neighbours are perturbed: dogfish zigzag wildly, squid form a blanket close to the surface, turtles smack into the glass.

Come morning, the visitor tunnels are empty.

“There must be a maintenance issue,” says my wife to no one in particular.

I try the communication console - “for emergency use only”- but I am greeted by static.

“We’re going to die,” says my butter-curled daughter, matter-of-factly.

Her brother nods.

“Where are the people?” yells my wife, touching her carefully draped Hermes scarf.

It is my son who notices the fish dying.

A tiger shark is the first. He stops moving right in front of the boy’s face, glassy eye never breaking contact, then sinks slowly as though departing in an invisible elevator.

“That was Benny,” says the boy.

More follow. One, two, every few minutes. The fish float, the sharks sink. A mola-mola, rises from beneath us, his body coming to rest pressed against our clear floor.

Our daughter lies down over his carcass. “He’s like a rug,” she says.

“What is happening?” yells my wife. “I’m going to demand an extra day for this.”

The emergency console gives nothing now, not even the reassurance of white noise.

At noon, the lights fail. They flicker first, buzz, hum, fade on the floating corpses of sea life, before putting themselves out in canon.

The darkness is all-engulfing.

“At least I won’t have to watch Petunia die,” says my daughter’s disembodied voice.

“We have to get out,” I screech, trying to prise open the lift doors. “The fish, the lights, something terrible has happened.”

“They’ll come for us,” says my wife’s voice. “We’re celebrities. They have to come for us.”

#

They don’t come for us.

I sit in the dark with my back pressed against the wall. Reinforced, they told us when they brought us in, and 2.6 inches thick. Almost impenetrable, they said.

Almost.

I barely notice it at first, but the trickle at my back is cold, coming through my shirt, licking my spine with a salty tongue.

Oh, I think. Oh fuck.