Nikolay and Liam were paired together by the geography teacher, who congratulated himself on his initiative. He didn’t know much about Nikolay except that he was poor and lonely. He didn’t know much about Liam except that he was rich and popular. He assumed they were merely opposites, and good for one another because of it. He gave them a week to come up with a poster. Make it something about climate change, he told them, as he wiped sweat from his forehead. This terrible heat.
Liam didn’t want to work with Nikolay. Nikolay was a loner. He was always talking to himself. His head jutted forward, and he had dark, searching eyes. He was strange. There was no other word for it and there was no way–no fucking way, Liam had said–that he would work with him. But the geography teacher wouldn’t be moved, and so, the day before it was due, Liam came to work on the poster.
At first, they tried to work outside. There were benches near the pitch where they could sit. Nikolay enjoyed that. He liked fumbling with his notes while Liam leaned back and closed his eyes. But it was so hot. The pitch was turning brown. The tarmac surrounding the school felt soft under their feet. Where could they go, Liam demanded, that wasn’t boiling hot? One of the English rooms was empty. Nikolay closed the blinds, which helped.
Nikolay could tell Liam was bored, and already in a fractious mood because of the heat. And because of Nikolay. He slumped over the desk, his eyes half- closed, as if he would fall asleep.
Nikolay picked at the pieces of their poster. Pictures of forest fires, smoke- filled cities. Dried-up river beds. Everything was shockingly, luridly red. He didn’t know what else to do. He had already eaten his lunch, but still ached with hunger. He didn’t want to stay in. He didn’t want to go out.
Nikolay knew what the geography teacher was trying to do. Nikolay was a lesson for Liam. It was supposed to be good for Liam to know him. It was assumed that, eventually, Liam would learn to take Nikolay’s strangeness as shyness, his quietness as good manners, and his watchfulness as insight. It would make Liam think of himself as a generous person, if only for one hour, one minute.
Nikolay walked past Liam’s house on his way home from school. It had only been built a few years ago. It was enormous. Stark, clean lines and huge glass windows. A wide, regimented garden swept around the entire house. The flowers were tall and delicate, with their names written on small labels and set into the ground, and the trees had been mercilessly cropped. There was order there on a scale Nikolay had never seen before, and he would have loved to run amok in it. He wondered about the sort of person such wealth, space, and order would produce.
‘Why do you smell like that?’ said Liam. The sound of his voice made Nikolay jump.
‘Like what?’ he answered. He heard his voice breaking and repeated himself. ‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know what it is. Rain. It stinks.’
It hadn’t rained in a long time. When it did, it came in torrents. ‘It’s just the beach,’ said Nikolay. ‘I go there a lot.’
‘Do you not wash your clothes?’
‘It’s just that I was there before school.’ He had been spattered with seafoam which had stuck to his hair.
‘Why do you go there?’ ‘I like it.’
‘By yourself?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Nobody had ever asked Nikolay this before. ‘I don’t mind being by myself.’
Liam scrutinised him. Nikolay self-consciously plucked at his hair. ‘There’s an old place there,’ he found himself saying. ‘An old house. It’s abandoned.’
When he had found the house, it had seemed like its own strange, self- contained world. People knew about it, of course. The eyesore down by the coast. When the sea started eating away the rock, the owners had fled.
‘A house.’ Liam rubbed his eyes. He looked at Nikolay with renewed interest. ‘Abandoned.’
‘I found it. It’s my place,’ said Nikolay.
‘Don’t think you’re important because of that,’ said Liam. ‘We have loads of houses. We’ve the one here and another in France. And another in America.’
‘This house is mine,’ said Nikolay. He had never claimed ownership over it before.
Liam was silent.
‘We should finish the poster,’ said Nikolay.
‘It’s my birthday tomorrow,’ Liam said, suddenly.
‘Happy birthday for tomorrow,’ said Nikolay, surprised. Then, because he didn’t know what else to say, he added, ‘Will you get anything nice?’
‘Probably. Lots of things. Toys. Sweets. But I don’t want that. I’m not a child.
I’m treated like a child.’
‘What _do_you want?’ asked Nikolay.
He didn’t think there could be much that Liam didn’t already have. Liam walked around like he owned the ground. Nikolay could hardly admit to himself how much he envied that. The knowledge that came with it: of how to act, how to impress, how to be. Anxiety, fear and self-doubt seemed not to touch Liam at all.
‘I wish I had a place I could go. Of my own,’ Liam said. ‘My parents don’t know me. They’d never think of something like that. I’d like to be by myself sometimes. That’s what I want.’
‘My mum…’ started Nikolay. The few times she had left him to school, the two of them walked in silence, an arm’s length from one another. How unloved he seemed compared to Liam. How unwanted. ‘My mother doesn’t really know me, either.’
Liam nodded his head slowly. They sat in silence for a moment.
‘I think I have something you’d like,’ said Nikolay. ‘For your birthday.’ Liam cocked his head, barely concealing a smile. ‘No need for that.’
Nikolay understood that this was meant to be a kindness. Nikolay couldn’t afford the right sort of gift. It would be such cruelty to put him in the position of getting something, and another cruelty to have to accept it, and then hide it forever. It would be hurtful for people to discover such cruelty in themselves.
‘It’s a shark,’ said Nikolay. ‘A what?’
‘It’s in the house.’
Liam’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean? What kind of shark?’
‘A small one. It’s in a tank.’
The shark had stopped Nikolay in his tracks when he’d first found it. He’d never seen anything like it. Even after he went home, its image spun in his mind like a coin. Heads or tails. Heads: the shark’s mouth fixed in a wide, broken-toothed grin. He had glanced around him, already suspicious of some hand swooping in to take it from him. Tails: the shark flicking itself away to the bottom of the sea. It was the best, most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
‘And you’re giving it to me?’ said Liam. ‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Nikolay paused. He didn’t know how to say it. ‘To feel like yourself.’ Liam stared.
‘I mean,’ said Nikolay, ‘I feel like myself in the house. And you said you need a place of your own. And the shark is like a place, do you see what I mean?’
‘No.’
‘A place to go.’
Liam seemed to relax, as if he had accomplished something.
‘It’s the big brick house on the seafront,’ Nikolay told him. ‘We can walk there. It isn’t far.’
‘Never seen it.’
‘You must have,’ said Nikolay. It was inconceivable to him that Liam didn’t know about the house. But then Liam already had so many houses. So much space. Another thing that was inconceivable to Nikolay, who counted every inch. It would never have occurred to Liam to look inside the sea-house. It would never have occurred to him to look for abandoned places at all. Nikolay felt pleased to be able to show the house to Liam. The lesson could cut both ways.
‘We can go now. We can just walk out of school,’ Nikolay said, surprised at his own boldness. Everyone would take one look at Liam and let them pass. It wouldn’t take cleverness. Easy.
As they picked up their bags, Liam asked, ‘Is the shark alive?’
‘Preserved,’ said Nikolay, carefully. He thought that had been clear. To preserve, he had read, is to protect, to save from; it is a thing which preserves; it is a place set aside for protection. ‘Preserved,’ he said again.
But is it alive? But is it alive? But is it alive?
Liam led Nikolay out of the school. As Nikolay had predicted, nobody stopped them. One of the receptionists looked up at them and, catching Liam’s eye, looked down again. Liam walked with his hands in his pockets, and Nikolay did the same. The air smelled of dry, gasping earth.
Once they were clear of the school, Liam sighed and stretched. Then he told Nikolay to lead on. Nikolay felt pride in that, but sensed that Liam’s interest in him was on loan. It would all depend on the shark, he knew.
He talked about it while they walked. It was a she, he was sure.
He talked partly to Liam, partly to himself.
He made up what he didn’t know. It felt to him like the same as knowing. The shark was one of five pups born on the seafloor near a reef in the
Pacific. They are born alive, like us, he said. She would have tussled with her brothers and sisters in the womb. She still carries the marks of that first encounter, before her living memory, on her belly.
The shark spent most of her life in shallow waters. Light used to ripple over her back. The reef would have been pink and brown and yellow and white, increasingly white, from the heat. Fish hid from her when they sensed her weaving through it. For a shark, there is no difference between its body and the water.
People like to look at sharks. Other people like to own them. On the far side of the world a fisherman waited for her, for the sight of the black tip on her dorsal fin above the water, and was paid to drag her on to a boat. She would have been disoriented by her first encounter with the air. The world would have blurred and rolled in front of her, she wouldn’t have been able to breathe. She would have thrashed about. They would have thrown her into a tank. They would have tapped the glass. Food, already dead, would have been dropped into her tank from above. There was, impossibly, a world beyond the water.
Her tank was so small. She could see her own tail following her. Back at home, on the reef, she and the other sharks might corral shoals of fish and then strike. But there was no strike here, only the corral.
Nikolay warms to his story. It is true, he thinks. He can see it in his mind’s eye; the way she settled on the bottom of the tank and wouldn’t eat. Someone, a boy, who went to the aquarium with his mother–the rare day when his mother had the time and inclination to take him–dipped his hand into her tank and waved it languidly in front of her face. Her face was unthreatening. She looked perpetually worried. She wasn’t very big. The boy who idly dangled his hand in front of her wasn’t afraid of her.
‘They wouldn’t let you do that,’ said Liam. ‘They would so,’ insisted Nikolay.
The shark was so lonely and so depressed, she let people touch her on the back, on her head. Oh, the aquarium people said, that’s handy. Later, the boy said he was only trying to tell her, I’m sorry you feel so tired and so alone. But she knew otherwise. She knew it was a show of strength, and arrogance, the way she herself used to drift lazily across the reef while the fish scattered before her.
It took one flick of her tail, one movement of her jaw. The boy was pulled away from the tank by half a dozen others. Her water bloomed with his blood. The boy’s finger drifted to the bottom of her tank.
She didn’t know then that it was the first and last great action of her life. She could no longer be trusted to be touched and stroked in her tank.
Their use for her evaporated. Once they finished with her, they sold her to a museum. She was kept in a tank, with bright lights shining over her to imitate the ripples and blooms of light in the water, but it wasn’t enough. She didn’t look right, suspended in preservative, stiff as a board, and when the interest in her faded, long after the boy with the missing finger left school, learned to stop thinking about her, learned to stop thinking about animals at all, a collector bought her, displayed her, forgot her, and when the sea levels rose and started gnawing on the rock, he left her alone in a big, abandoned house.
He was giving all that to Liam. Her story was part of the gift. ‘She was a requiem shark,’ Nikolay finished, solemnly.
‘Is all that true?’ asked Liam. ‘Yes,’ said Nikolay.
They walked in silence the rest of the way.
The house was old. Red bricks. Clustered chimneys. The front door was stuck fast, and Nikolay led them to the back. There was a knack with one of the old windows. It was heavy. When it swung shut, it slammed down on the sill.
The inside of house was half wild. Greenery had advanced through the walls. Maybe that was why nobody ever came here anymore. The hedges and the trees kept trying to push them out. Nikolay found its dilapidation dazzling.
The dark, the chill, the absence of their parents, the very idea of rooms and rooms, of a whole empty house, of nobody knowing where they were, and the tree branches and the flowers indoors, the distant rushing sound of engines, like a tide, the closeness of the sea, of the green, and the shark, the shark, the shark. They had no words.
They pushed their way through the hallway towards the stairs. The line was blurred between lawn and flower bed, between grass and flower and tree, between beach and coast and house, and indoors and outdoors. The walls were beaded with water. The pale yellow heads of flowers poked between tiles. Trees pressed up against the windows. It was untended, unheeded ground, and Nikolay liked it very much.
‘This is a good place to hang out,’ said Liam. He hung his schoolbag over the banister. A handful of browning petals drifted down and dusted his hair. ‘A few drinks. Some music. Do you drink, Nikolay?’
Nikolay’s first taste of alcohol had been when he was around nine, when his mother had poured herself a glass of wine and he, entranced by the rich violet-red, the froth along the sides, took a drink and nearly choked. His mother slapped him on the back and Nikolay took another sip. From then on, Nikolay sometimes found a small measure of wine in a glass at the table just for him. It seemed to amuse his mother to see him hold his glass by the stem and smell the wine, swirl it, then drink it. He felt as though each sip was a test, and passing or failing depended on his mother’s mood. Still, the wine remained one of the few small moments of affection, or something like it, that they shared.
‘Yes,’ Nikolay said. ‘Wine, sometimes.’
‘My dad drinks,’ said Liam. He bit his lip, deep in thought. ‘I’ll bring some next time. He’ll not miss it.’
‘Next time?’
‘Sure, for my birthday. We’ll have the party here.’ Nikolay saw himself at this party. Liked.
On the ground floor was a sitting room and a kitchen. Striped pink and blue wallpaper, a painting of a street, glass, a broken chair, broken cupboards.
The first floor: an empty bookcase, a mouldy armchair, a toppled table, an ashtray.
Nikolay saw Liam check his watch. He glanced behind him again and again, ignoring the things that Nikolay showed him–the little patch of carpet that remained on the stairs, the broken floor tiles, the slant of the remaining roof beams. This is exciting, he was trying to tell Liam. This is beautiful. Nobody else looks at these things, but we do. Nobody else comes here, but us. But Liam was dying to get away. There was a brutality in his walk as he followed Nikolay.
‘Where’s the shark?’ he asked.
‘All right,’ said Nikolay. ‘Follow me.’
The second floor was empty, except for the shark. When Nikolay opened the door for Liam, the piercing sunlight made them squint. Nikolay liked this room the best. His own small, shabby house was always dark, even with the lights on. The curtains were always drawn. His mother sometimes asked him to open them a fraction and describe what he saw on the street. He was never sure what she wanted to know. The things that interested him only seemed to puzzle her. She’d ask about the weather, and he’d try to find the words to describe the sun. From the darkness of the house, everything outside gleamed. He wanted to go where there was sunlight.
Liam approached the tank. He rubbed dust from the side with his hand, and the tank pitched slightly. The floorboards below it were warped. The shark rocked gently. Grit and slime and debris had scattered across her back and tail. The preservative liquid had evaporated over the years, and she had been kept damp only by the rain that fell through gaps in the roof. But it had been so hot for so long. She was dried out.
‘What do you do with it?’ said Liam. ‘I just look at her,’ said Nikolay. ‘What do you mean?’
The shark looked hemmed in. The edge of her tail and the tips of her fins touched the sides of the tank. The skin near her jaw was flaking. The top of the tank reached his waist.
‘I think she’s beautiful.’ ‘It’s not that big.’
‘She’s not small either.’ ‘Some gift,’ said Liam.
‘You don’t like her?’ He had wanted to show Liam how she looked in the evenings. The light would sink across her back, her lidless eyes. That look of dim goodwill on her face. Permanent, good-natured surprise. He couldn’t think of a better gift.
Liam pounded the side of the tank. Only for the sake of doing it. For the sake of noise.
‘Let’s break it open,’ he said. ‘But why?’
Liam hit the glass again. ‘Because it’s stupid.’ ‘Stupid?’
‘Worthless. It doesn’t do anything.’
‘But we could show people, at the party.’
Liam paused and looked at Nikolay, and then looked away. Nikolay understood that he had been uninvited.
‘But you said you wanted to be by yourself.’ Liam shrugged.
Nikolay panicked. He had given away more than he’d intended. Liam would take the house from him. He scrambled for some way to fix it.
We could sell the shark.
We could charge people to see it. We could leave it here.
We could forget we ever saw it. ‘We could eat it,’ he said.
Liam stared at him. ‘What?’
Nikolay walked to the tank. Was it even possible to eat the shark? People ate strange things all the time. People ate sharks all the time. He had looked it up. Once again Nikolay filled in what he didn’t know with what he imagined he knew. Preserves, like jam. Nikolay was always hungry. He never seemed to have enough to eat. He is growing, his mother has told him. The hunger is normal.
‘Well,’ said Liam. ‘You first.’
Why not? He wanted to tell Liam that he was curious about what so many years of darkness and indifference might taste like.
‘And then you?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ said Liam, but he had stepped back.
Nikolay went downstairs to look for a knife. He found one discarded in the kitchen. Liam followed him as he went through each of the battered
cupboards. There were a few cracked plates with a faded floral pattern. There was a fork, and another one. The tines were bent, but it didn’t matter. Nikolay passed a plate and fork to Liam, who took them, stunned.
Nikolay had to stand on his tiptoes to reach the edge of the shark’s dorsal fin. A small piece came away easily enough. He set it on his plate.
‘Are you not worried about chemicals?’ said Liam as Nikolay examined the piece of flesh. He tried to pick it up with his fork, but it was too dense. He used his fingers. It was black. He thought she was completely dried out, but a thin stream of evil-smelling brine spilled down his wrist, under his sleeve. Even this didn’t disturb him. The shark’s flesh was marked by the slightest impression of teeth. A tiny ring. An old wound, nearly invisible. Nikolay might be the only other living creature in the world to have touched it.
‘No,’ said Nikolay. It had not occurred to him that eating the shark could harm him. He considered the possibility and then rejected it. It was a matter of perception. There was nothing to be afraid of.
He looked back at the rest of her. Her mouth was slightly open. She was missing some teeth. Someone probably had them. Hanging around their neck. On a shelf somewhere. There might be parts of her all over the world.
He bit into the flesh where the teeth marks were. It was tougher than he had thought it would be, but it wasn’t rubbery. It was rough. It had a bite to it. He nearly spat it out, but forced himself to chew.
Liam retched in the corner.
‘I can’t fucking believe this,’ he said. ‘I can’t fucking believe you did that.’
The taste of the meat was irrelevant. It was like he was biting through a cross-section of the earth, with his teeth passing through layers of the shark’s life like a drill passes through stratum after stratum of sedimentary rock. He saw her birth, and her death, and his teeth met her somewhere in the middle. At the moment when she was put in the tank.
And now he, too, was gasping in the air, blinded by sunlight. Then he was bundled behind glass, into a tank, and he could breathe again. He was a shark. He was Nikolay. He saw the reflection of his face in the glass. A wide, downturned mouth, and a black tip on his dorsal fin. He had been a person once, and now he was a shark.
He was liked as a shark. Fingertips brushed the top of his head, just above his nostrils. The people outside his tank were an arm’s length away. They liked the distance between them. They liked how shy and quiet he was. They
liked the compassion he stirred in them, the pity. They liked themselves. His odd, anxious face, his downturned mouth, moved them. So out of place. Observing a strange, unknowable world. The shark was a good lesson for them on the helplessness of odd, unlovable things.
Nikolay looked out of the tank, and could see Liam. Liam was pale. He was watching Nikolay through wide, astonished eyes.
Liam reached into the tank. He moved his hand as if he were going to scratch the shark’s nose, like a dog, like a pet. But Nikolay knew better. Nikolay flicked his tail and surged through the water. His jaws opened wide, and snapped shut, and Liam’s finger drifted to the bottom of the tank. Thick ropes of blood bloomed on the surface of the water. If that boy out there, Liam, felt anything, Nikolay was too far from him to notice.
Nikolay could see, tip to tail, the beginning and end of the shark’s life. He could make something of it now. He had been so alone in that other life, so easily ignored. Simply moving through the air had been so hard.
He heard Liam stamp across the floor, then stagger down the stairs. Fuck, he was saying, fuck, fuck, fuck. Nikolay heard him struggle with the window below before, finally, breaking it.
But Nikolay didn’t mind. He had given himself a gift. The heat of the oceans would continue to rise, and the spindles of coral would turn white. One day, he might find himself on the deck of another boat, and placed in another tank. These were the risks of his new body. But today he had achieved the first, and best, great action of his life, and the light in the water was beautiful. He was no longer hungry. He could hear all parts of the ocean at once. He flicked his tail, and all the fish in his path scattered.