A little Restoration slap and tickle at The Bitches Ball
I'd always fancied an aquarium full of slowly swimming tropical fish, even before the next-door neighbour gave me an old fish tank. I even managed to sell the notion of "Tropical Fish as Pets" to my family. I should have known better.
"Are they easy to look after?" I asked a friend who owned a quartet of beautifully striped angelfish.
"If they aren't ill, yes," she said. "Earlier this year, one had a fatal infection, and I had to kill it."
The old toilet approach, then? Apparently not. According to the internet, the kindest way to kill an angelfish is to slice its head off.
"I had to put it on a chopping board and behead it with a butcher's knife," said my friend.
So I steered clear of big, sexy angelfish and got a few orange fish with black tails, and a little scarlet Japanese fighting fish. "Very hardy," said the Fish Man. We put them in the tank. We fed them. We named them (Flicker, Glimmer, Fishee, Shee). We watched. A week later, one was found, decapitated, in the filter. Another died. Then the final two expired. The children cried. I cried.
I returned to the fish shop. "You know those fish you sold me?" I said. "They all died." "Did you use a Cycle of Living Bacteria?" asked Fish Man. "No? Then they would have suffocated in their own ammonia." He took pity on me. "Here you go," he said, pressing a warm bag into my hand. It contained 12 tiny tropical fish.
I bought some living bacteria. I dechlorinated a tankful of water. I heated it to 74 degrees. I slowly put the new batch in. They died. In stages. Night seemed to be the favoured time. Each morning, I would send Mr Millard to look.
"How are the fish?" I quavered. "Er, two gone today," he would whisper, after performing mortuary duties with the net.
I found a new fish shop. "You need to Run Your Tank In for ten days," said Fish Man No 2. I set up the tank again. Bacteria, heat, anti-chlorine. We ran it in, for ten days.
Then we introduced two fish. Almost immediately, one died. But the other survived! It even went on holiday next door for a week when we were away. But wasn't it lonely? "Shimmer's lonely, Mummy," said the children. So I went back to the fish shop, and bought four more. One was very aggressive. It chased Shimmer behind the filter, so Mr Millard humanely despatched it. Unable to face the decapitation option, he put it behind a flowerpot in the garden.
For a while, all was well. We inspected the fish minute by minute. The whole family was transfixed with the life-or-death struggle in the tank. Death had the upper hand. The fish started to behave oddly. Standing vertically in the water. Gasping for breath. I put in industrial amounts of bacteria. I fed them. I starved them. To no avail. They all died. Even Shimmer. The empty aquarium stands in our kitchen, a monument to the vanity of trying to recreate a coral reef in N1.
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