The Fishtank Chapter 1

Nathan is 22, but he’s been in the asylum since he was a kid. He’s wearing white overalls that boast a pink paint stain down the left shoulder. Acrylic, he tells me, but I’m sure it’s oil.

Nathan is holding a soda in one hand, looking out over the asylum grounds. The nurses have warned me that he’s uncharacteristically glum today. While the other patients are busy playing dominoes, Nathan stares at a bed of dying tulips on the other side of a reinforced window.

“I hear you have a story for me,” I say, sidling up beside him.

He cocks his head. “Who’re you?” He’s got a voice like there’s two tongues in his throat.

“Susan Ines,” I offer my hand.

Nathan swaps his soda from his right hand to his left and shakes. “Hi. Susan.” He returns to gawking out the window, a thin sliver of saliva crawling toward his chin.

“About your story…” If the guy can’t manage more than two words at a time, I’m not sure how he’s going to tell a story.

“You wanna hear it? It’s a good un’,” he licks his lips, clearing the saliva. His grin is charming as a child’s.

I nod. “That’d be lovely Nathan. Can I call you Nate?”

“Nathan,” he sniffs, waddling toward a table with a good view. He nestles into a comfy beige armchair, one with a cup-holder for his soda. He wriggles into place, delicately lifting a blanket over his knees and closing his eyes as if to sleep.

“Nathan?”

“Give me a moment,” he trembles.

I lean back, get out my notepad. Hopefully the nurses have led me to something good. It’s hard to resist the temptation of a story from a man who’s spent his entire life in asylum.

Nathan opens his eyes.

Nathan knew his Mum was home from work from the faint smell of fried onion. That meant Paul would be home soon too. Nathan shivered, and slunk to his window, staring down at the garden.

Boxer, the puppy bulldog, cornered a butterfly and gobbled him up. He licked his chops while he plodded back to his shed. The chain that conjoined him and a pole in the middle of the garden went slack. Nathan stuck his fingers under the windowsill and yanked it upwards, spooking Boxer.

“Silly dog!” he yelped, giggling.

Boxer barked his response and sat down heavily, nestling his jowls in the grass. The sky was a pretty shade of pink, the sun cresting their neighbour’s roof, the red tiles lit up white for a moment before fading to brick red.

Nathan sniffed and left his room, locking it from the outside. His head was thumping. If Paul was already home Nathan would run upstairs, he had it all planned out in his head. Peaking gingerly around the banister, he spotted Mum, apron on, thick hair tied back in a bun.

She’d been getting paler every day for the last month. When Nathan had asked her, she just said she hadn’t eaten enough vegetables, and that she’d be better soon.

“Afternoon sport,” Paul squeezed Nathan’s shoulder.

Nathan sniffed, trying to avoid looking at Paul. He was tall, and wide, and always stank of the type of smoke that made Nathan sniff.

“What’s the matter big guy?” Paul crouched so that his eyes were at Nathan’s level.

Nathan shrugged off Paul’s hand and bolted upstairs, weaselling between Pauls arm and the wall to get away.

“Nathan?”

He darted into his bedroom, unable to lock himself in from the inside. Heart thumping like a drum, Nathan squeezed beneath his bed, pulling the covers over the side to shadow him in darkness.

Muffled voices. Paul and Mum. He shook his head, plugged his ears.

Footsteps, coming upstairs. Nathan squeezed against the wall, his Lego set jabbing him in the back.

“Nathan?” Mum’s muffled voice came from the other side of the door.

Nathan wriggled to the end of the bed, looking under the doorframe to see how many feet were there. Just two, Paul wasn’t with her this time. “Yes?”

“I’m coming in.” She was still wearing her korma smattered apron, holding a spoon at her hip. “Where are you hiding this time?”

“Close your eyes.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to tell Paul about my secret hiding place.”

She sighed. “They’re closed.”

Nathan wriggled out and sat at the end of his bed. “You can open them now.”

She fixed him with a raised eyebrow. “What’s got you so moody tonight?”

“Paul.”

“Oh for-“ She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “Listen,” she began, sitting down. “He’s your stepdad, Nate.”

“I hate him.”

“We don’t use that word in this house, Nate! I’ve told you that before.”

Nathan crossed his arms. “You’ll have to keep telling me till Paul leaves.”

“He isn’t leaving,” Mum snapped. “No dinner for you tonight, I think.”

Nathan grumbled. “I don’t want to eat with him anyway.”

Mum opened and closed her mouth. “Goodnight Nate.”

She left his room, closing the door behind her and locking it from the other side. “If you’re willing to apologise, I’ll let you out, Nate.”

Nathan folded his arms and softly wept.

“Big guy,” Nathan imitated Paul’s voice, marching to his window. Boxer sat by his post, growling at the neighbour through the fence.

Nathan took the opportunity and crept onto the window-ledge. The evening sun gave him enough light to see his way to the edge of the wall, but not how far down the drop would be. One of Paul’s hyena laughs made its way from downstairs and made the decision for Nathan, it was worth the risk just to get out of the house.

The brickwork threatened to give way beneath his feet, the corners of the bricks crumbling and scattering down to the garden, joining Boxer. The puppy cocked his head at Nathan. It made him flinch. One bad experience with a dog last year had put him off them entirely. Paul had thought giving mum a dog was a good present. Nathan knew better. Paul was out to get him.

Thankfully, the drop wasn’t as bad as Nathan expected. He only grazed his knee when he landed. But it set off Boxer. The puppy wouldn’t stop barking from the other side of the fence, bashing his head against the wooden rails, chain taut against the metal pole.

Nathan shivered and ran down the driveway, out of the gate, and toward the city.

He ran till he reached the traffic-lights next to the primary school he attended, walked his way to Grammie’s house, turned left around it, then followed that road until he reached the river. From there, he walked toward the setting sun till he reached the overpass at the edge of Bellford.

And that’s where the Fishtank hid.

The heavy rumbling of cars above shook the underside of the overpass violently, the noise of it rattling Nathan’s eardrums. The door into the Fishtank was halfway down the tunnel, a neat metal door with a big spinning handle like Nathan had seen on bank vaults in heist movies.

Nathan cranked it twice to the left and it popped open, slowly letting the light from inside pool past him. He checked nobody was watching, then hopped in, shutting the door tight behind him. It was his secret, and he wouldn’t have anyone like Paul finding out about it.

The Fishtank was blindingly bright. Overhead the sky shone was as if it were still midday, blaring down heat upon him. Nathan squirmed out of his coat and folded it into a pile on the floor beside the entrance, where he left his socks tucked into his shoes.

The wooden panels of the walkways were warm against his feet. Padding along, the fish in the square tanks beneath him bobbed to the surface, opening their mouths as if he had any food. Nathan narrowed his eyes, looking for his favourite, a beautiful… fish. He didn’t know the names of each of them, just knowing that Paul had called what he’d described a koi fish once.

Nathan would just call them fish.

His favourite was a white one, with orange speckles, and long thin whiskers. It was a big one too, bigger than most of the other fish, but not big enough to eat any of the others. Nathan found his friend and smiled.

“Paul was mean again. He called me Big guy.”

The fish bobbed his head above the water, cupping his mouth into a large ‘O’.

“I wish I had something to give you,” Nathan whispered. “Who feeds you, anyway?”

The fish swam away, looking for food elsewhere.

Nathan leaned back, letting the sun soak into his face, and looked over the Fishtank. The square room was perfectly symmetrical, a door at either end. One was the entrance; the other Nathan had never been able to open. Sometimes he thought he heard voices on the other side, but that couldn’t be right. The Fishtank was his secret.

He stared at it for a moment, willing it to open. It never did.

I’m scribbling the route Nathan walked to the Fishtank in my pad when one of the patients starts stuffing dominoes down another’s throat.

The nurses are pulling me out immediately, as if they’d done it a dozen times before.

But it was hard not to feel the damage was already done. I know I won’t be able to shake the image of that poor Indian man choking on dominoes. The saliva spraying from his lips. The dominoes geometrically bulging in his throat.

Nathan hops behind his armchair, soda in hand. It’s charmingly reminiscent of a racoon, clutching his valuables in his tiny claws.

I’m in a haze but as I walk down to my car with one of the nurses, she explains what I saw was a regular occurrence. The man who nearly died was called Ashwin Sandhu. And his attacker, a skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his temple, was Leon Hunt.

The nurse tells me Leon assaults Ashwin almost every week, but Ashwin just keeps going back to play dominoes with him. I can’t help but wonder who’s the mad one? The man assaulting the same man every week, or the guy who keeps letting him do it?

I drive home listening to Magic FM, tapping my fingers on the wheel.

I’m retracing the steps Nathan claimed to take as I drive through Bellford. For a man who had spent his entire life in an asylum, he knew the town’s layout damn well.

But it was those directions, I couldn’t clear them from my head. From the traffic-lights next to the primary school Nathan attended, he walked to Grammie’s house, turned left around it, then followed that road to the river, which he followed to the overpass.

I pull up at the traffic lights he’d described, licking my teeth, and wonder. How could he know that there was a set of traffic lights next to a primary school at the edge of Bellford? And on top of that, claim he attended the same primary school that my own daughter attends.

I might investigate if I weren’t already late getting home. Nathan was a long-shot, so I’d left meeting him till the end of the day, not expecting the start of a good story. But after I’d filled out all the paperwork, it was nearly eight. Meaning I was going to get back home around at, I don’t know, eight-thirty.

That meant Lily, my daughter, was in bed. Probably reading, but I wouldn’t run the risk of waking her up. But more importantly, Tom would still be awake.

I pulled into the driveway, switched off my Seat Ibiza and went inside. I could see from the window Lily had her reading light on. And I could barely make out Tom’s silhouette, watching TV in the living room.

“What’s for dinner?” I call out, kicking off my shoes and hanging up my jacket. “Tom?”

He’s snoring, head bent back over the sofa, an episode of Friends still running in the background. I smile, kiss him on the forehead and switch the TV off.

As I’m eating my TV dinner, mash, gravy, and peas, I make myself a promise.

I’ll find out where Nathan got his story from.