FUSH! A story from Poland

Here we go then, as promised another wee short story!

FUSH

'Neptune', a shop full of weird and wonderful things, shells cleaned and polished, minus the big blobs of stinking living snot that once inhabited them. Now hygienic, sanitised, suitable for careful positioning in your pokey little Warsaw flat. That big clam shell would look great on your Ikea 'Lack' table don't you think? Or perhaps those jaws with the little rows of knobbly teeth savagely hacked from the face of some big dumb slow moving fish, something resembling a swimming sack o’ tatties with a mouth at one end, opening and closing rhythmically like the ******* of a small dog with an anal infection. Imagine how wonderful those teeth would look hanging in the bathroom above our toothbrushes, wouldn't that be a real hoot!

Wait a minute though, what's that hanging from the ceiling on a piece of fishing gut? (probably about 20lb breaking strain). It's some kind of fish, a puffer fish I think, one of those fish that resembles an ancient leather football, the sort of ball that some ****** with a handlebar moustache and shorts down to his ankles (Can they still be called shorts?) would be kicking around some muddy field in Yorkshire circa 1920. Consider that football, think carefully about the colour, the scuffing, the polished areas, the cracks and tears, the tonal variations. Now imagine this football covered in hundreds of rose thorns, preferably old dry thorns, the colour of the buildings on ul.Prosna, not young harmless green or mature red. Now try to remember those postcards, the ones featuring drawings of various dressed up animals, a cat with a banjo wearing a George Cole style suit and trilby a la St.Trinians movies, a wise old owl in the garb of a schoolmaster pointing with his cane at a blackboard on which is written the arithmetical gem 2+2=4 while a classroom of mice sit in complete bewilderment, a bloodhound in the guise of Sherlock Holmes complete with pipe and magnifying glass and currently in hot pursuit of a badger wearing a striped jumper and carrying a sack proudly displaying the word SWAG . All of these characters linked by one interesting design feature, yes, one of the most underrated and ill used inventions of all time, the stick-on 'googly' eye. Well this fish has them! stuck on with big messy cum-shots of glue dribbling down his face like thick tears. Just imagine the pain and humiliation this poor creature has gone through. Captured and killed by young dark skinned boys, all arms and legs as they leap from rocky outcrops into the sparkling waters seeking their next victim, finally dried out by the very sun which made his idyllic paradise so special, so full of colour and beauty. During the drying process he has lost his own colour and beauty, his new battered leather greys and browns now allow him camouflage and protection in the drabness of Warsaw as his street facing 'googly' eye observes the passing buses and trams, the barracudas and marlins of Jerozolimskiego.

Suddenly, I recall a visit to 'Deep Sea World' an underwater maze of aquariums in North Queensferry, a young mother resplendent in black leggings, Adidas jacket and Wella hair kneeling alongside a buggy containing a rather comatose looking child. The mother staring into the murky water and repeating over and over, “FUSH, FUSH, ‘AT'S A FUSH!”. Now I stand alone on the damp grey pavement outside 'Neptune', staring through the glass into that polythene eye, considering the sadness lying behind it and I feel myself mouthing that word.