The out of town retail park aquarium. A new
phenomenon that accounted for the dwindling numbers here in Seacombe. He’d been
there a few years ago. On the road out to Wirral. A blank, corrugated structure
sandwidged between a cavernous shoe supermarket and a many-aisled sports
megastore.
The vast tank in there stretched upward to
an indeterminate point of bright, white light: A dilute impression of infinity, dispelled as a trick of refraction each second hour, when a backlight flicked
on beyond the disappointingly proximate water surface. The clumsy flippers
of a foolhardy frogman would descend from a small jetty, gurning within his scuba
mask at dumbfounded onlookers as he hand-fed the sharks frozen fish.
To fully appreciate its vulgarity, Godfrey
bade me conjure the structure without its associated walls and water. Imagine, in mid air, those sharks circling above a car park in the north west
of England, for an audience whose primary intent that morning had been to find a
new pair of shoes.
Godfrey shook his head and stared at a vast
brown trout in the opposite tank; motionless but for the slow, sad blinking
of its eye.
A great fear nagged at him, for
whatever it might imply, said Godfrey, that beside Plank's or Newton's constants, it might be
as easy to determine - via summation of a species' mean intelligence - the safe
distance at which a hand is able to place its pet, from the borders of what it might otherwise recognise as freedom.
