Free Quilt by Nicholas Royle Page B

he would make any particular speech at all at this point, in this revolutionised dining room, in the presence of so many family and friends, as well as a handful of more or less complete strangers.
    – It was hard, especially at the end, a matter of such precarious hope – as any of you will know who may ever have bought and kept rays… I don’t know, is there anyone here?
    And he looks up, surprised at his own question, to a tide of blank faces.
    – Perhaps not. But the trickiest part is bringing a ray home in its transport basin. You have to give it time to acclimatise to the change in water, introducing the creature to its new environment with all the care in the world not only for its own wellbeing but also for your own, since these, after all, are dangerous creatures. It is usual to cover the ray’s sting with a piece of plastic piping during transport, but at the other end, I mean back here at the pool, it was then a matter of removing the plastic hose from each. Not to do so is to invite infection, but to do so is at least as hazardous to the handler as to the ray itself. It was, I confess, a slightly hair-raising operation and I couldn’t have done it alone. So far, at any rate, itwould seem to have been effective, but naturally it should be stressed (as the speaker now notices one of his cousin’s youngest children, a boy of perhaps seven, wander up to the edge of the pool and try to peer in), I should have stressed at the very beginning that these beautiful creatures can also be very dangerous, and when you lift up a section of the lid, as I have just done, and they come to the surface like a club of old wraiths having been stirred by some unexpected knock at the door, don’t for one moment suppose that it would be safe to put your hand in and give them an affectionate stroke (the cousin now calling the boy away from the edge) as you might have considered doing if you’d encountered similar rays in a so-called touchpool at a sea-life centre. These rays have not had their stings removed and this is not, I repeat, not a touchpool.
    It may be, after all, that to the bereaved speaker, as to a storyteller, a peculiar authority befalls. Yet he pauses once more, curious as to how long he can continue without someone, perhaps his aunt, breaking into ridicule, or at any rate passing some kind of comment.
    – What do you feed them on? blushes the teenage daughter of another cousin.
    – On shrimps, he replies, a little snappily. Fillets of whitefish, trout, river perch, with occasional live food such as earthworms and red mosquito larvae.
    – What’s a touchpool? asks the small boy still lingering near the lip of the unroofed section.
    – A good question, declares the grief-stricken man, in a voice louder and more trembling than he might have wished.
    He realises in a flash how careful he must be in his choice of words now, already risen up inside all his hatredfor the commercialisation of rays that has, in so many coastal resorts around the world, reduced the experience of seeing to one of touching, as if they were puppies to be stroked or rabbits to have placed in one’s lap, um likkel inkydinky strokey. No, he has to rein himself in here – otherwise he will frighten the young boy, not to mention appear quite crackers to this gathered group of friends and loved ones. He must, if only for the sake of a certain decorum, fight against the impulse to spit out the euphemistic and quietly nauseating compound phrase ‘touchpool’ and denounce in the most vituperative terms all those who have ever been responsible for participating in, or merely encouraging , a state of affairs whereby visitors to an aqua-life centre can feel at liberty, or feel even that it is their right , to touch these creatures, when all the research stresses that rays have extremely sensitive skin all too readily susceptible to trauma. Still the words rush out of him.
    – The last thing in the world you should do to a ray, he says, is