This skin and all its chromatic hues

Yen

Sep 24, 2024

It was the start of summer and the weather outside was sour, like a great terror had descended upon the city. The rain had continued for days and I was bored, with nothing to do except walk the sodden streets and remain beneath my umbrella, watching an endless river of dirt be swept away and out to sea. It was bleak and boring and pretty much the perfect representation of my life.

OK, so, exaggeration. It wasn't that bad. It’s just I’d wanted that time to be spent in the sunshine and warmth. I wanted the beach and waves and to lose myself in some wild and surreal tale as my shadow lengthened and the gulls overhead cawed and squawked. I wanted to hear the cicadas at dusk and wonder at where their thick and hopeful bodies remained hidden amongst the bark and soil. I wanted to ride my bicycle, to feel the wind through my hair and the beat of my heart as I edged too close to the city’s trams, those great steel beasts with their perilous tracks etched into the concrete. And goddammit if I didn't just want to sit in the warm of the night licking gelato from a cone and people-watching for hours, making up stories about the lives of those I’d never even met.

I wanted all that, but instead it had to rain. And I didn’t even mind the rain so long as it was short bursts of the full-on torrential, the kind that comes from nowhere and just crashes down upon the land with all its force. That, or a fine drizzle. One or the other. Not the indecisive in-between that soaked through to your bones, made all the worse by a sky overhead that threatened to never be blue again. It was rubbish and disappointing, the days having quickly lost all meaning and flooding from one to the next. I was listless and frustrated, needing to feel something, to have a sense of accomplishment, something tangible. Anything. Anything at all. What I had, though, was boredom and a distant longing, formed even from just a handful of days. Which was ridiculous because school was done. Finito. I was out and finished, exams ticked off and completed. I should have been basking in that rare freedom of a holiday that amounted to essentially forever, yet I felt the absolute opposite of relaxed.

So yeah, welcome to my stupid brain.

The other thing: my parents were away, off in the Caribbean, or Bermuda. I didn't pay attention when they told me. It was some expensive cruise somewhere hot and an obvious attempt to restore their marriage … again. (Shouldn't have married in the first place; that's how you fix that one. And yes, obviously then there wouldn’t be me, but hey, if I didn't exist I wouldn’t know, so who cares?) With them away, I was home alone, or near enough. Cam was off with her boyfriend pretty much every day and night, so I never saw her. Not that I wanted to spend time with her. Urgh. She’d reached that age of—how do you say it?—mega bitch? I think that’s the term. It was a phase I was determined to avoid, though often Cam said I was the bitch, the snappy little sister who’d rather spend her time alone buried in books than doing the things I should be doing at my age. At my age? What? Whenever she said that, which was often, her words carried such disdain it was as if I was a decade younger than her and in some seminal period of life that should be curated with the greatest affection, when in reality her mere two additional years granted her what, exactly? A lens through which to show me what not to do? A detailed map of stupidity? If that was the intention, she was succeeding. Drunken antics, weekends written off, puke-stained tops and mornings clawing through come-downs, sobs of never again…

Yeah, no thanks. Not for me.

Oh and let’s not forget the endless string of boys that fawned over her every move. Until Eric, that is. Sickening. But even though this newfound relationship of hers seemed like stability, some kind of drama was going down with her, I was sure. I just didn’t know what. It was like she was 15 again, and of course I was the one who caught the brunt of it. Her favourite line, wailed at high pitch: Oh my god, you don’t know anything! (Special emphasis on the anything.) She’d then pause, tack on an at all at the end, as though those two additional words would lend further truth to her vitriol. And more recently, spoken almost in consolation: Just so you know, sis, you’re not going to cope. She meant at uni. Let me translate: Take my advice, don’t go. Eyeroll. Get me there as fast as possible.

Often, I’ve found myself wondering which was the more likely: she was adopted, or me? I came close to asking mum once as the four of us sat down at dinner. Didn’t, though. It was one of those rare nights when everything seemed OK and mum and dad were actually laughing. Pretending to laugh, more like. Come on, did they really think I couldn’t see what was going on?

And it’s not like I didn’t have friends. It’s just I could only handle them in small doses. My social batteries would burn out from a single evening and take at least a week to recover. They knew that. I’d told them. And even if I did have 65 Messenger notifications, did they really expect me to actually read them? I’d let them build up to some magically high number, then go on a binge and respond to each, purging myself, knowing full well that doing so would leave me just as drained.

You’re a nightmare, Yen.

That message was always in there, somewhere. From Fria, my—hold on, let me just gag—bestie. I shouldn’t be so harsh. She was, in the quite literal sense, my best friend, but she always wanted me to tell her everything, like she was some kind of human diary for me to inscribe my daily thoughts.

Yes, Fria, I am fully aware, I'd tap back, then toss my phone onto the bed, hoping it would land face-down and that she’d sense such and wouldn't feel the need to reply back. Couldn't we just keep texts to one message, one reply, a that's-that-and-no-need-to-go-any-further scenario? Many times I’ve thought about ditching my phone entirely, or just ripping the sim out and holding a hammer over it, tempting myself to smash it to pieces. Boy did people have it easy in the 80s. What I'd give to be an 18-year-old back then.

So anyway, massive tangent. It was on the sixth day of ceaseless rain that I decided to visit the aquarium. I hadn’t been in years. It’s more of a thing for tourists, or those with kids. Something for, I don’t know, winter. It’s not something you just go to on a regular basis when you actually live in the same city. I mean, at least I didn’t think so. Did people do that? Was I the unusual one not making monthly trips to the aquarium to stare at fish? Christ, why does that even matter? I went, because what else was I going to do? I sure wasn’t going to sit and scroll on my phone like everyone else. I had my book, and … yeah so there was a part of me that thought maybe it’d be fine to spend a day on the sofa timing how long it took to read a single page, noting it down, repeating the process and praying that with each turn I’d be a little faster and my rate of reading would increase until I was consuming books at a pace of one a day—because seriously, how are you meant to read all the books by the time you’re 30?—but I didn’t do that because … because doing that would admit something about myself and why would I ever want to do that?

Fuck. Tangent again.

So I went to the aquarium.

Even with the rain outside it wasn’t busy, and with it not being term time it meant there wasn’t the risk of some awful school trip full of clamouring kids interrupting my slow and silent meander through the world of fish. I skipped the penguins. The penguins were cute, but I felt bad for them. An aquarium isn’t the Antarctic. It’s a cold and artificial chamber and dwelling on that fact just made me depressed, and maybe the penguins really were depressed, so I followed the signs toward the deep sea and tropical exhibits because I wanted to see the jellyfish and surely the more simplistic array of neurons embedded within the body of a jellyfish didn’t allow for concepts such as depression. There’s something strange and alien about jellyfish. Their bodies are so weird, floating endlessly in a void that may as well be outer space, and when they oscillate through light displays it always makes me think of that film, The Abyss. Another reason: I was reading Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and there’s this scene in it where Toru recounts his date with Kumiko and how they went to an aquarium and he hated being around jellyfish but Kumiko was entranced and he just stuck it out. Nothing much happens, but that's kinda the point, like in all the books of his I’d read. Somehow, that scene with Toru and Kumiko was so strong that I wanted to put myself in an aquarium looking at jellyfish, and though there was no Toru beside me it didn't matter, it was more about just trying to be there in some weird parallel moment. I even opened up the book and reread several passages, imagining myself as Kumiko. “And look at the beautiful way it swims. They just keep wobbling along like this until they’ve been to every ocean in the world.” I reread that line and tried to imagine the jellyfish before me visiting every ocean in the world, but then I got sad because they never would. The only ocean they now had was small and artificial. Maybe jellyfish really were like penguins.

After a while, I stood up, intending to leave, but then I noticed something to my left. It was a large tank, just like the others, the water inside taking up the entire space from the floor to the ceiling. Within it, though, swimming in a kind of gentle flourish, wasn’t a jellyfish but a huge cuttlefish. Its colour was a dark blue. Then of course it wasn't and it became a myriad pattern of ochre and gold, just as those bestowed upon a forest in autumn. It glided up toward the glass, its surface cascading through a rainbow of hues. It had noticed me, I was sure, and I found myself walking toward it, its globular eye staring into mine. It was beautiful. I put my fingers to the glass and spread them out, wanting to touch it, thinking that perhaps it was against the rules to touch the glass, but I didn’t care. The cuttlefish moved toward my fingers. The eye still stared at me. We weren’t touching, but somehow it felt like we were, like all that colour flowing down to its arms could transcend physics and seep through the glass and actually reach my fingertips and oh my god it was magical, like this was just some rare moment that had never happened to anyone anywhere and here it was happening to me and if I could taste the colours then I’d be tasting a thousand flavours as they cascaded from its skin and into my own and moved throughout my body and they were just so—

“They're called chromatophores.” The voice totally broke whatever spell had been forming.

I dropped my hand away from the glass and turned and saw a guy standing now by my side. He must have been my age, maybe a year older. He wore a simple blue t-shirt that bore the aquarium's logo and a tag with his name. He was clutching the handle of a big a brush for sweeping the floor.

“Thank you,” my eyes dropped to the badge, “Jeremy. I know that they’re called chromatophores. I have read about them.” I enunciated the last a little too slowly and turned back to the glass, wincing. I genuinely had read about them. I had to, for a school project. It was possible I knew more than he did, what with his apparent floor-sweeping role. I kept staring at the show the cuttlefish maintained, not daring to turn back in case I saw Jeremy blush. I knew he'd be blushing. Boys always blushed when I spoke to them. Don’t ask me why. It’s a mystery and I hate it.

I heard him swallow, though he didn't walk away.

I sighed. “I'm sorry. People always think I don't know things.” My eyes tracked the swirl of colours the cuttlefish was making. The swirl changed to a pulse and it seemed in sync with my heartbeat. Thinking I’d left it long enough, I turned to Jeremy. Nope. Not long enough. He was blushing. Was still blushing. I could tell, even in the dim light. To his credit, he hadn’t moved away. “I mean my sister,” I added, trying to disarm it. “She thinks I don’t know things. She would have said that I didn’t know anything about cuttlefish, even though I do, and it’s not just chromatophores, it’s iridophores and leucophores and, well maybe that’s all of them, but anyway we did a poster on them in Biology and so that’s how I know…” For some reason, I was still talking. I shut my mouth and turned back to the tank.

The cuttlefish hadn’t moved, but now its colour was a deep blood red that morphed into a bright pink at the fins. Was it trying to mimic Jeremy?

“It’s really beautiful,” I said, watching as the colour finally subsided and it strobed into a light blue.

There was a gap of silence, and then I heard Jeremy speak.

“Yeah,” he said. “Beautiful.”

to be continued…

SLAKE

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