Circling Fish (originally titled: Fish Painting! - for some reason)

Here's a copy of a story I wrote for a Writers Group in Bristol for Halloween - I decided to go with a spooky story about my own experience of paintings as a child. The eponymous fish painting is actually from a childhood memory of a painting my parents owned and had hanging in their bedroom. It is true that my Grandad had terrible taste in art. 

I think this story goes out to him.

(Typed story after the break)

Circling Fish

James Taddler from a very early age found much of his Granddad’s art collection disturbing. I say art collection, but of course no one involved would have phrased it as such. In fact the artworks were never spoken of at all by any other member of the family. Perhaps no one wanted to hurt Granddad’s feelings by questioning his evidently questionable taste. But in any case, the collection, such as it was, was taken for granted by everyone – it was, as the saying goes, part of the furniture. This was not, however, the case for James.

Because for James it was incredibly difficult not to notice them; not to see them staring out at him or suggesting some strange feeling he’d never experienced before. For instance, on three of the four walls of the living room were hung three golden framed, gold-leaf-gilded portraits of stylised Asian women adorned by extravagant foliage and robes. Their faces and bodies had an air-brushed quality which extenuated their exotic – almost cartoony – figures. If James were a student of Art Criticism he might have commented that they were very much in keeping with Western Orientalism – extended truly to the point of kitsch. But in this case, at the age of six or seven, James was not such a student and instead found it hard verbalising his feelings towards the pictures.

Instead he found they simply made him feel uncomfortable – not in the sense that he had some latent attraction to them - but that they seemed to him something like portals into another world.  A world which had no right positioning it’s portals in his Granddad’s house – or, for that matter, being portals which were actually chosen and positioned by his Granddad.

The worst of these paintings was in the room where he slept when he and his parents visited. He would, at certain moments in his life, distinctly remember being offered a digestive biscuit and a cup of milk towards the end of Blind Date (another incongruity in his Granddad’s behaviour was to insist upon Blind Date) and at this being gripped by a fear that - once he’d finished these bedtime treats and once he’d been walked up stairs and tucked into bed by his Mum - he would be left with that hideous pair of fish hanging above the bed.

The painting was of two giant carps following each other in a circle; their bristling whiskers touching the ends of the each other’s sinuous tail. And these horrible fish did this strange dance – this preternatural ritual – all in a field of green-grey water. To James it felt, more than any other of Granddad’s pictures, like a very real gateway into something otherworldly – held back from this world – from this world of Blind Date and biscuits; of milk and quietly falling asleep on your own in a dark room – held back by the thinnest rippling film of water.

He would lie awake staring at that picture for what felt like hours and hours at night; sure that if he were to fall asleep something would happen in which that thin green-grey barrier would effortlessly give way and a deluge of strangeness would engulf him, still asleep, and that everything would change without him knowing. Everything would change in some irretrievable way; leaving only that dance – that circling of fish.

When his Granddad died, James Taddler, now aged 30 or so, was once again confronted by the fish painting, along with all his Graddad’s other pictures which were left to him in Granddad’s will – rather depressingly. When he saw the painting of the fish he partly recalled the strange feelings which it had inspired in him as a child. And, being 30 or so, James decided that for a laugh he’d rise to the challenge of sleeping once again in the same room as those terrible, circling fish. Suffice to say that the next day James donated all the paintings – along with the fish painting (especially the fish painting) - to the Charity shop on the high street. 

***

It turns out the painting which I had in mind when writing this story was not in fact of two fish at all but this one, lonely carp painted by M. C. Escher. Unfortunately I'm not a great fan of Escher as most of his paintings seem to remind me of horrible 70s record covers which, again, tended to disturb me as a child (clearly I was a bit sensitive to creepy surrealism). 

Happily this painting does have an emphasis on the surface of the water which was something I wanted to express in the story -  clearly influenced by the painting's separation between under-, on-, and out-of- water worlds. 

Enough self-analysis.