Swordfish by Graham Mort

Swordfish laid out in the supermarket, next to tuna steaks and mackerel. Marlin, the guy behind the counter offers, wiping bloody hands on his white jacket. Mussels laid on a bed of samphire. You can almost taste the salt. Call me Ishmael. A wide Sargasso Sea. Wind over waves. Barnacles on the hulls of schooners, where a man could be keelhauled. As it happens, I’m shopping for other things. Breakfast cereal, yoghurt, pineapple, white wine. The list written out on a scrap of cardboard torn from a tissue box. So, yes, move on.

Thinking in circles. That’s my academic training, I guess. Swordfish, broadsword, claymore, rapier. The swordsticks of those nineteenth century adventure stories I read as a kid. Balancing a book under the sheets, the batteries fading in my torch. Much later, on the edge of adolescence, reading those Observer articles about gangs with flick knives. Miniature swords wielded to inflict the scars of tribal conflict in the Gorbals or the East End.

Pushing the trolley with my list fastened to the little gadget at the front. I fill it with the things we need. Allegedly. Why do they end up in canals? That would make a good exam question linked to surrealism or the Dadaists. They’re useless for holding water, any more than you’d talk into a lobster phone and expect your voice to carry to the other side of things. The canal bulging uselessly through the city like a varicose vein. It’s full of sky, and not much else, jammed between the old brick-built offices and warehouses.  

I meet one of my former students stocking tinned goods. We exchange, rather than talk. One reason is because I suspect I’ve forgotten his name, though part of me is thinking Simon? We part with a flourish. Goodbye, Simon, take care. He doesn’t turn a hair, trying not to look into my shopping trolley, but looking all the same. Taking what you might call a professional interest. There’s some yellow label stuff in there. I want to say that’s about not wasting produce, rather than saving money. But I hear myself calling him a nosey little bastard, pushing him up against the tinned stuff.

People are looking now and the supervisor, whose mother happens to live on our street, is watching. I move on. If only I had a swordstick Simon wouldn’t be trying many more of those tricks. I find some kitchen roll to wipe off the blood and guts. I wonder if they stock them – swordsticks – alongside those replacement handles for mops and brushes. Though everything seems to be plastic these days, all modular stuff designed to clip together.

What’s wrong with an old-fashioned stave? You may well ask. You could beat a man with one of those. You could beat a knave with a stave. Simon, for instance. That could be a nice jingle for the intercom in here, where someone intermittently but persistently offers customers a good price on pet food. Every sentence starts with WE HAVE in a declarative way that makes you want to burst into that little glass booth and perform a murder. I say perform because the other shoppers would be bound to draw their trolleys into a circle and watch.

I notice Simon is back at work when I approach the till, cutting open a plastic pack of anchovies with a Stanley knife and stacking them. I think of the swordstick they don’t sell versus the glint of steel in his hand. Paper, stone, scissors. If there was an autopsy and it all came to court, the fact that he’s a former student and I’d written certain comments on his work was never going to help either of us when it came to sentencing. I gave him the thumbs up, heading to the fruit and veg section to finish off. May the best man win.

Of course, I’ve lost the shopping list Audrey’s written on that bit of the tissue box you pull up from its oval serrations. Each tissue pulls out the next one, just like in a hotel or B&B. Academics are trained to carry out research, to investigate and evaluate. So, I’ve found that the system has its flaws, especially as the tissues fall too far below the exit point of the box. That strikes me as a system driven by theoretical models that don’t hold up in what we ironically call the real world. All worlds are real, of course, that goes without saying.

Aubergines, curly kale, peaches, sweetheart cabbage. I stock up on walnuts, remembering that I’ve forgotten muesli, the extra nutty kind. Muscadet from the World Wines section, nothing fancy. There’s some fuss in the tinned goods aisle and I can’t help noticing that a small crowd has gathered around Simon who’s supine on the floor. The supervisor’s bending over him. There’s a dark pool of blood spreading away that a customer could easily slip on.

The supervisor retracts the Stanley knife and slips it into her pocket. Evidence, obviously. In case Simon wants to take things further. Litigation being an ever-present danger these days. Of course, he would take things further, like in his essays that plunge into literary theory and emerge into the stratosphere of hilarious surmise. Incongruous, I’d written on one, and, pumping the laughing gas, on another. Nitrous Oxide might have been more precise, but some things are lost on some people.

I’ve forgotten eggs. How you have to open the boxes to check they aren’t cracked. I go back and do that. The shopping list has fallen under a bag of Pink Ladies. By the time I’m queueing at the till and feeling for my loyalty card, an ambulance appears outside, its blue light winking. The supervisor’s talking to the paramedics in their green uniforms. They’re nodding in agreement. As if they knew Simon can’t really be trusted with anything. Let alone the Stanley knife in her pocket. Let alone a three-thousand-word essay on the origins of metaphor.

Graham Mort

Image from Freepik.com – Fish stall with an assortment of fish.