Free Quilt by Nicholas Royle Page A

the light is kept on for specific periods to eliminate the growth of algae and so on.
    – It’s a lot of work, young man (an irony this, since he is in truth no longer young, and every day since his father’s death has felt like a month and more). How are you going to manage it? I assumed you were going to be selling the house. You can’t sell it with a great tank like this kerplomp in the middle of it.
    The rays, it seems, divide the company like goats and sheep. For some the sight of these creatures, especially when the son opens up a section of the lid and they come truly flap-slapping up to the surface, all too evidently eyeing the wine-sipping peanut-crunching crowd, is just too weird. A wave, or to be more exact, a cold current of strangeness passes through the audience, as if in collective registration of an extravagancy out of keeping with mourning, beyond any normality one might reasonably associate with a funeral reception, a kind of crazy ensnarement, yes, an unacceptable, improper spectacle best reacted to by the quickest practicable exit, but a wave that, the girl senses, once gone gives way to more diffuse and diverse predicaments of being stranded and uncertain. No one, in fact, leaves. And then there are others, it becomes clear, who are simply in awe, astonished at what the son has done.
    – Not only me, he says to a murmur along the line of all those gathering around the pool: I could not have done it without her .
    He gestures towards the pristine dark girl by the door off to the kitchen.
    – It is necessary, he goes on, to confront a ghastly deception. Triumph is a terrible delusion that must nonetheless be reckoned with. To pretend that it is not there would be as nauseating as to accept that it is. Icannot speak for her (and here he gestures once again towards the beautiful stranger scarcely anyone present has previously met), but I am not going to deny a sense of achievement at having conceived and constructed this ray pool, with its spillway design and lipped feature, at having lined it with the correct quartz sand, after picking over and assessing it, stone by stone, day after day, at having carefully selected the, I think it’s thirteen, individual, perfectly sized rocks, and at having installed the highest-quality filters, pumps, lighting and heating. Everything has been done here that could have been done to ensure an appropriate supply of water and to establish the correct mechanisms for the upkeep and replacing of water, and for the weekly gravel-cleaning and hydrovac . But any feeling of triumph here is at once also its opposite. To achieve is to lose. To suppose that you are winning is to be undergoing absolute defeat.
    He pauses, somewhat perplexed at where this speech has come from. Then he carries on with a view to relating as briefly as possible the acquisition of the rays themselves, the initial quandary he had been thrown into by the dealer who encouraged him to buy a number of so-called teacup rays.
    At which point at least one local woman, a farmer’s wife, glances down in fuzzy consternation at the teacup and saucer in her hands.
    – The teacup ray, the bereaved man adds, as if picking up the demur, is sometimes advertised as a sort of miniature version as of some pigmy species, but really it is just a baby. Don’t be fooled by the teacup talk. I wasn’t, for I had read and talked to plenty of people on these issues, and I wasn’t going to be fobbed off frommy original desire to get motoro rays of fair proportions which, as you may be able to see, is what we did eventually manage to do. Not that they are as big as they might be: a stingray of this variety can, in appropriate conditions, grow to a diameter of three feet or more, but these I hope will be happy to stay closer to the size they are now.
    – It’s been hard, he goes on, unexpectedly swallowing a word or two, more emotional now than he had been in presenting his speech at the church, not having anticipated that