The goblin shark lives near the bottom of the ocean. Like the narwhal, he is a unicorn of the deep. One of the many unicorns we dismiss as ‘not real’ because he doesn’t shine with the beauty we imagine imperative. Instead, scientists call him a living fossil; they’re not sure why evolution has let him pass. He is death, swimming out of sight. A fairy tale, his skin crinkled and pink, as though just born. Sometimes, fishermen accidentally haul him to the surface and hurriedly throw him back. No one wants an ugly history, dying, on the deck of their ship.
In the sea, we lose our colour, the deeper we go. Until skin becomes transparent and not-quite-there. Ghost shrimp, and glass squids. Vases of the deep: organs blooming in fluorescent lights, and bodies floating like brains. If the sea is the sky, these are our aliens.
I like to sit at the bottom of the bath to see if I lose my colour, too.
When I am half asleep, I like to talk to myself as though I am underwater.
When it rains, I stand outside and wait for my scales to show.
Crocodile icefish live in the depths of Antarctica. Swimming stars with transparent blood. They have no haemoglobin or myoglobin so, beneath their jelly skin, you can see them pulsing. Musical fish, beating, with bright, white hearts.
We don’t have many exotic fish at the aquarium. But we do have mantis shrimp. You might not think that’s exciting, but it is. They are the size of a finger, and have the most complex vision of any living creature we know. Humans have just three colour cones. We see blue and red and green and all of the colours those can blend. Butterflies have five colour cones, and their rainbows are brighter. The mantis shrimp has sixteen, and we have no idea what their world looks like. Colours that don’t have names slinking across the waves.
The mantis shrimp can also eat octopuses, and even break aquarium walls.
We keep a very close eye on them.
Scientists have invented an injection for colour. It hasn’t been tried on humans yet, only monkeys. A cure for colour-blindness.
My dad is colour-blind.
Scientists also believe that some women have four colour cones. That their skies look different. That their blues are more varied. Colour enthusiasts chase these women all over the world. We have an obsession with things just out of our reach.
I’m sure that gravity has a colour.
I like to think that colours were created by children, somewhere. Breathing names out into the dark.
When I was small, I saw a documentary where a blind man regained his sight, and he looked down at his black jeans and said to his wife: ‘You told me these were green. Green’s my favourite colour.’
And she laughed and said, ‘I wasn’t going to let you wear green jeans. And, anyway, I thought you’d never know.’
He’d had those jeans for six years.
Did you know there is a shade of blue called Space Cadet?
And did you know that, in China, shades of blue are called shallow or deep, not light or dark?
Our aquarium uniforms are orange. They are not very flattering.
My favourite tank is the water tunnel. A huge pool full of squid and stingray. The public walk beneath it, surrounded by water above and around, so they can imagine that they are at the bottom of the sea. I watch children run from one end to the other, holding their breath the whole way. Giggling nervously, tapping the glass to make sure that it’s strong enough.
‘This is like a submarine!’ a young boy cries, colliding with my leg.
He doesn’t apologise.
When Finding Nemo was released we had our busiest weekend ever.
‘Excuse me,’ his mother says. ‘Are any of these fish for sale?’
Transparent zebra fish are used for cancer research. Scientists like them because they can see their insides without ever having to cut them open. They plant stories inside and wait for the end.
Once upon a time, I jumped into a story.
I won my first goldfish at the summer fayre in a child’s version of beer pong. I remember my parents, outraged, shouting at the headmistress. Stuff about promising children animals as a con from the local pet shop. A free goldfish so long as you buy the expensive tank to put it in. Some redundant bridges. Food. And cleaning equipment, too.
‘We should just flush it down the loo,’ my dad said, holding the plastic bubble of water.
A mini world.
A lost soul stuck in the centre.
And off we went to the pet shop, my father swearing profusely, and my mother telling him to please be quiet, otherwise people might hear.
Things have changed a lot since then. For instance, in America, now you can buy GloFish? (Experience the Glo!?) – genetically modified fish that glow in the dark. They come in red, green, orange, blue, pink and purple. They were originally bred to help detect pollution.
Have you seen those people taking a break from their shopping, who pay to have fish nibble at the dead skin on their feet?
They laugh while it’s happening. Garra rufa. Toothless little carps from Turkey.
Put on a show!
Smile for the people!
Now, now. Eat them nicely.
In ancient Egypt and Rome, military commanders painted their nails to match their lips before they charged into battle.
Perhaps if I dipped my feet into the tank, they would eat away at the skin between my toes. Gnaw at my rough edges and let me emerge a princess. A water nymph.
Because princess is beauty.
So they tell me.
Every single day.
Did you know that we used to think that princes and princesses had blue blood?
In Inuit mythology, a giant called Sedna was unhappy with the men her father wanted her to marry, so she married a dog instead. Her father threw her into the sea in outrage and, when she tried to cling to the side of the ship, he cut off her fingers with an axe. Her fingers fell into the sea and took on a life of their own. They became the seals and whales of the ocean, and Sedna grew up to be a goddess of the deep.
I like origin stories.
When I grow up, I want to be …
The vampire squid that lives at the bottom of the ocean. It turns itself inside out and morphs its organs into traffic lights. It has three hearts because it has learned that one is not enough.
At the weekend, we do something we probably shouldn’t.
Something we definitely shouldn’t.
Once all of the children have gone home, we lock the front doors, change our clothes and hold our breath.
We section off the big tank, and filter the floodlights. Mr Farani says it’s the only way we can make ends meet. Things have been quiet recently. But not on Saturday nights.
We can’t talk about it loudly. It’s passed in whispers through the streets. We dim the bulbs and shine subtly. Like GloFish?. Like plankton.
Dinoflagellates are a sort of plankton and they are bioluminescent. They have two tails, and create a red tide when all of them come together. This is called an algal bloom. A red sea.
This is not the same as The Red Sea. That’s Al Bahr al-Ahmar and is something else entirely. It touches nine different countries and has twenty-five islands, and seventeen major shipwrecks that it’s swallowed down whole.
There are lots of plankton there, too, though.
People think that plankton are entirely insignificant, but together they weigh more than all the other living things.