‘The Pet Shop Boys, the Skeleton, and the Dead’ by Grace Gageby
ONE
Before the shop opened each morning, she would complete a circuit of the humid room, scanning tanks for motionless fish floating belly up with unseeing milky eyes. She would catch them in a small net and transfer them to a plastic bag which she carefully knotted and disposed of in the back. There weren’t too many dead ones on her first Monday morning: a deceased neon tetra ignored by his shoaling tankmates, a lonely piranha carcass devoured by a catfish.
‘Make sure to always do this before we open,’ was her first instruction. ‘Not in front of the customers.’
She spent the rest of that Monday picking water snails from the guppy tank and feeding them to puffers. (‘They have strong beaks. Make sure you don’t get nipped.’) The work was strangely meditative: the perpetual hum of the filters, the muggy warmth, and the soft splashing of fish rising to the surface of the tank to demolish handfuls of flake food. Every day began with a group huddle where new orders, finances and the bizarre array of customers were discussed.
‘That fucking prick who ordered the African lungfish still hasn’t paid his deposit.’
‘That pair of bettas haven’t spawned yet.’
‘Because the tank temperature is probably too low, ya melt.’
After spending years enamoured with all things aquatic, she rapidly lost interest, having acquired an oddly calculating attitude towards death. Fish skeletons which had once been lovingly buried in the back garden, graves adorned with a single dandelion, were soon unceremoniously flushed down the toilet.
TWO
Before she started work at the hospice, she had a romanticized vision of what it would be like. She would befriend a grumpy old man, and transform him into a doting grandfatherly figure with her youthful vigour, like in Up or Gran Torino. She watches too much television. When the nurse would inform her the old man had died in his sleep, a single tear would slide down her cheek, and at a later date she would find that she had been left half of his inheritance, much to his ungrateful son’s chagrin.
John was the only one patient she visited who was verbal. The others were stroke victims, or had dementia. John was completely blind and always sat upright, immaculately dressed and hair perfectly combed. He was open about his displeasure at the quality of the food, and his dislike of overly chatty volunteers who he claimed were solely there to build up a CV. She flushed with pride when John began to ask to be fed by her every week, mainly due to the fact she spoke sparingly. He took childlike joy in his daily treat of a single slice of white bread slathered in fluorescent strawberry jam, which you were to place in his hand folded into a triangle, and a triangle only, or you would be on the receiving end of a vicious denunciation.
Behind his armchair, his wall was littered with photos: a handsome face in a pristine suit, a grandad eternally throwing a child into the air, a tanned man in a cap on his last holiday abroad before the diagnosis. A few months in, when she arrived for her weekly shift and saw an empty bed and a blank wall, she felt ashamed that instead of a pang of grief, she felt only the thud of detachment.
THREE
And then she was finished with the hospice. Years later in college, where everything happened very quickly, a lecturer posed the question: ‘When Joyce refers to “the dead” in this story, who does he really mean? Because it’s not the man in the coffin.’ And she thought about this and thought it sounded profound, and when they studied Joyce she thought about the Joycean, and when they read Melville’s Bartleby she thought about work that happens out of sight.
FOUR
Her mother had a detached, voyeuristic fondness for funerals.
‘Well it was an excellent service. Lovely music. It’s a shame she wasn’t alive to see it.’
Once, her mother brought a rock in from the garden and engraved it as a headstone for the family cat, who was not dead.
‘I went to visit Edward today,’ she would say over a cup of tea.
Edward was a skeleton at the local graveyard who had burst out of his coffin, and could be seen if you peeked through the keyhole of his crypt. On sunny days he was illuminated by beams of light that filtered through the crumbling ceiling.
She visited him weeks later, only to find his crypt had been renovated, the peek hole now filled with cement. The tombs and headstones towered on either side of her. A small, elfin man appeared as though from nowhere. His face was partially obscured by a green fishing cap, and he carried a plastic carrier bag out of which he appeared to live.
‘Who are you looking for?’
He was shovelling handfuls of popcorn into his mouth and practically inhaling it.
‘I know the name of every person buried here,’ he boasted.
Perhaps he was a gatekeeper between the living and dead, the map of all the crumbling headstones etched into his mind Or he may have just been insane.
‘There’s three Jonathans over there,’ he said.
She thanked him and walked on. He continued to pop up in the distance, waving at her across the grey maze.
‘I’ve found two more over here! Ten years dead!’ he shouted. He followed her then, weaving between rows upon rows of dead people, leaving a trail of popcorn crumbs in his wake.
From issue #11: spring/summer 2021
About the Author
Grace Gageby is a third year English and Philosophy student in Trinity College Dublin, and a regular contributor to Trinity News and Tn2 magazine. She works as a guitar teacher, and was raised in Dublin.
