©1992

The group, again. Everyone was talking from a protective bowl.
Lynn had come as late she dared. She sat on the free chair – the hard-backed chair – vertiginous, in a fog that hid only her thoughts.
They could look out but she couldn’t see in. With hers it was the other way round. Dan held forth, leg cocked over his soft armrest, spilling forth his life. Having arrived in the middle of it, she could follow nothing, and crocheted shapes in her hair with a finger. All the fishbowls but his were blank, with blank smiles gushing laughter. In his, a male parrot-fish circled.
Her cigarette shook, a sparkler in a toddler’s hand. Carol nodded at Dan, going ‘ahhh-mmmm’, her counsellor’s way of concealing boredom. Her voice faded with every cadence, her eyelids drooped at some inner turmoil. Lynn crossed her thin freckled legs, wobbling on the high chair. She froze when Carol smiled at anyone else.
Carol now smiled at them all, not blankly, nor professionally. An overgrown girl of 34 who wore, always, black Vietcong pyjamas and low brogues. Lynn tugged her ancient skirt over one bony knee.
The window rattled. It rained, the wind and the city; heavy and dark as wet hair through a comb, opening pathways. On the street, a little girl escaped her mother. Lynn watched her lead Mummy up the steps, onto the bus. What if she’d kept going? Would the future be different? Each moment swells with history, a wave at sea that never breaks.
Lynn wished her heart would stop knocking like a loose bearing. A honeycombed hill waited at the end of time for them all.
Carol winked at her. She went hot and her cigarette tried to leap out of her unadorned fingers. It was like accepting a ring whose stone has just been cut for you. Such moments were the stones from which her utopian city was building.
Carol asked about her week.
“Oh fine I guess the usual – nothing.” She recrossed her legs and went through the skirt-tugging ritual again. It never seemed to annoy anyone else.
“Did you go out at all?”
“Out? I want to, but – “
“She always does more than she lets on.” grinned the other therapist, all curly hair and chewing gum.
“Well”, she reddened, “I went for a walk. Just to the shop. You know. I – didn’t – go in.” Each word was a file passed lightly over her front teeth.
“Great!” said Carol, making her jump and the chair creak. “That’s really fab. You’ve done so well.”
“Er, but – thanks.” She’d not done well at all. Who couldn’t go into a bloody shop? The only trouble Carol had was coaxing her in. Lynn wanted to stand outside and talk, just about the news, even the weather; but it was never time for that.
Dan the client smiled too. He was nice, but not her type. He had one white hair in a light moustache. They were all getting on well. They were all getting on. Especially her.
“Yes, she’s done extremely well. Extremely well.” enthused the other therapist, Boris, tossing a wrapper in the middle of the circle and looking quite sexy, she supposed. Her fishbowl was still murky. Carol’s eyes closed slowly, laugh-lined.
“Yes, remember to pat yourself on the back once in a while.” she said.
The rest gave her a few claps, as usual. Predictable, safely structured. Nice people; just dull. No wonder they were bloody problem-ridden.
They’d helped her a lot, especially Carol. Carol saw the rising, rainy paths beyond the hard windows, when she closed her eyes. Carol liked the mallow, Lynn’s favourite flower. But she was married to some noxious yuppie. Lynn had never met the husband, but gathered he was the studious-father type. He’d be like Dan, she imagined, and stubbed out her cigarette – to sighs of relief.
You never got to see a therapist’s family, so she felt safe. And she’d need a lot more sessions yet. Shrug she did at Carol’s effusive praise for the slightest advance, but it was lifegiving, like the sunlight that was sprinkling down now the shower had passed, straight into her fishbowl. One thing she couldn’t imagine was how she’d do without it. What if she got ‘therapy-addiction’? No doubt there was a therapy for it.
The group talked off each other’s ‘achievements’, and repaired for International Roast. She had tea, like Dan. He liked her? She shuddered at his accidental touch. She smoked again. Carol smoked, a rare one, a tainted bond. The rest sank into torpor, their undentisted teeth into sweet biscuits. She sat next to Big Dan and watched Carol pick at her black pants and chatter with one toe on end like a slovenly ballerina, or juggle with the invisible words. The rain had irrevocably gone.
They went out for their adventures.
She rode with them to the shops. They dispersed; she was left with Carol. She congratulated herself for having arranged it this way yet again.
“How long since you’ve been into a newsagent’s, Lynn?”
“About fourteen years.” The bowl was as light as air.
“Really? Ga-a-ad!” Her voice faded like shortwave. “I know – uh huh, right.”
Her eyes closed to some internal objection. Or rejection. Lynn felt dirty and old.
They went in. Just like that. Magazines proferring nymphs in high-cut bikinis smouldered on the low shelf. A newspaper’s front page crackled: a brown baby expired in the gaze of the cameraman. Lynn sent her gaze over the blank ceiling, and it found a flyspeck. People were mumbling like schoolgirls. The shop was muffled with fading paper. The prices were outrageous. She was out of touch.
“Do they have books on goldfish – Carol?” She used her name for the very first time, after eleven weeks. She kept them; goldfishes, and names. She held herself taut.
“Would you like to ask the man?” tested Carol.
“No.” she lied, stung. A cash register beeped. So they beeped now. (Noticing progress was like noticing ageing.) Purchases were made smoothly as they looked on.
“Look.” Carol showed her a massy, glossy book on AIDS. “Got to be careful, it says.”
What on earth made her pick that up?
“But not – ” Say it, she said, saying nothing. Carol moved off, farther into the depths of the shop, to a place where the daylight, the greylight, from its picture-windows faded, and the whorled fluorescent light was faulty. She had no bowl Lynn could see. A friend of twenty-five – no, thirty years ago appeared, at the end of a feathering tunnel of golden, bitter rain, the colour of goldfish, and lightly laughing sunshowers, and spangled autumn leaves. It was the light that was hissing. The memory was dying like a voice. She felt cold jets of panic, of grief, that turned to fingernails and ran down her cheeks. Yet her topaz city glimmered on the world’s rim like a rising moon.
“Beatles?” asked Carol of someone – of her, apparently – flipping through a magazine down the back. “Ga-a-ad, old! All of it passes. It’s not fair, somehow, is it? I’m not jealous of the kids.”
Lynn joined her quickly, able to remember Elvis. Carol reached up on tiptoe, then thumbed through a garish heroic fantasy, hushed. Lynn loitered in her protective orbit. She had wanted to say, “Not lesbians”, but it was too late. A tremor ran through her, panic, the lowest note of a cello. The horizon never arrives, nor does it leave you.

“I hated being alone.” Lynn said, out in the tall damp air. “Thought women on t.v. could see me, in the end.” People ignored them, flooding past with bags.
Carol said, “Paranoia. Quite a common experience. Yes … what did your husband say?”
“Oh I never told him. He’d have got me locked up.”
“Ah … “
“Well, didn’t he? But that was – 1971, Carol.”
” … yes, when you’re alone you lose your ability to be alone, you know – shut out – no, I mean detached, in a positive sense.”
Shut out from all sides, thought Lynn, recoiling from the accidental brushings of pedestrians. “Self-possessed.” she replied.
“Not like a goldfish!”
Carol’s prescience frightened her. Yet she was balancing on one toe and gazing off somewhere, perhaps to the end of the world. A pinprick of rain on Lynn’s forehead made her sway with giddiness, and her will swirled like fog.
She touched Carol’s rumpled sleeve with an arm that swung too wide as she regained her balance.
“Or even a lesbian.” she said, as her heart thundered.
“Yeah, uh – shit, my husband!”
“When’s he – ?”
But there he was. This wasn’t unusual, it was unheard of. And what a stupid, stupid thing to say. Lynn withered in the magma of self-hatred. She wasn’t a teenager any more.
“Patrick!” Carol waved, hands and body. “Over here. Hi!”
Panic, seasickness, rainsickness. Lynn had nowhere to sit but the hard wet pavement, which would not swallow her up. If she must fall let it be into Carol’s arms. It had been the same with Nina on the quadrangle. Passed up, passed on. A new earth had risen since then, but now she was too old, they probably wouldn’t believe her: it was worse to be humoured than hated.
She dared not ask Carol, it wasn’t fair. Die now, one and indissoluble, late and obsolete, the world on the edge of weeping? Ridiculous. Feeling wasn’t fashionable. Paper tore nearby. Boris was coming back.
She gathered that Patrick was tall like Carol, straight-looking, watching her stare at her torn shoes. He had a beard. Ugh. Her fishbowl went opaque.
He said “Hello” to the shy little housewife before him. He was nice too. She couldn’t fight that. They chatted, all four, old friends. Each cadence faded, each moment. The city was blowing away like embers in a whirlwind.
In the morning the birds go: don’t let me die, don’t let me die.
Smoke cured her.
“Carol – ” She’d trod the firm earth down to a wafer, and the rain lingered like paw-prints on her fishbowl. The others had gone, Patrick was coming with them, they must leave; she’d come late to start with, hadn’t she? Carol’s voice faded; her own too, into mysterious agoraphobic ignominy. (There’d been nothing on goldfish. At Carol’s prompting, she’d bought the sword’n’sorcery epic, with Jimber-Jaw and Muscly Thighs on the cover.)
Down came the rain.
Into the car they bundled, out of breath. Lynn broke away, weaving down the blurred footpath, only her fishbowl to protect her. The path had no end. Carol was surely right: detachment. Touching others while letting them be, brushing past them without mercy, leaving them breathless like those fallers by the wayside she learnt about in Sunday School. A goldfish doesn’t give a damn: but then it doesn’t go anywhere, either.
Not seeing the bemused passers-by she flung the heroic rubbish into the road, and a screeching wheel ran over it. As they cried out after her, she rushed under a sky fading like white lichen on a grey rock, hair sopping, fishbowl tossed away. For at the end of eternity, utopia was burning.