in a tight double helix, their bodies rippling together in gentle languor. Inspired by this demonstration, Andie slipped her arms around my waist and squeezed until I jerked in pain.
I guided Andie to the shark tank, expecting a little more tenderness from her. A nurse shark burrowed its snout into the sand, scavenging for leftovers.
The PA crackled and a voice announced feeding time. Kids rushed to the glass as a diver descended into the tank clutching a wire mesh bag of frozen fish. The diver dealt out the fish like an underwater Jesus feeding the five thousand; the food in the bag did not run out.
Aware of his audience, the diver let his hand linger in the maw of a black-tip reef shark to the shrieks of alarm from the children. Andie smiled at this spectacle, her lips stretched back, revealing teeth that overcrowded her mouth. She was all torpedo sleekness in a grey, sleeveless dress.
We exited the aquaria and flowed into the lunchtime crowd.
Andie stayed in a service apartment opposite KLCC. A basket of fruit on the coffee table enhanced the sparseness of the living room. I noted the absence of an aquarium.
‘What did you do with the wrasse?’
‘I bought it as a gift.’ She waved her hand around as if the question were lingering cigarette smoke and changed the subject. ‘Are you hungry?’
We phoned for sushi from a Japanese restaurant near KLCC that provided delivery. Our food would arrive in thirty minutes. Andie selected a pomegranate from the fruit basket. As she started peeling away the skin of the fruit, she told me a story.
A beautiful girl was born to a Thai mother and Swiss father. Her father left not long after she was born. When the girl came of age, she found out that she was different from her friends. She looked like a girl, but was not one on the inside.
‘How so?’ I asked Andie.
‘She can’t have children. She has no womb,’ Andie replied, and with the sudden shift to present tense, I realized she was talking about herself. Andie had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome; her body had resisted the development into a male by remaining stubbornly feminine. She was not a transsexual and she hated the term ‘intersex’.
‘I’m not a freak!’ Andie ranted, ‘I’m not caught between the two sexes.
Males and females are the ones who are strange, because they are the ones who are incomplete. Women are always searching for their other halves and all that magazine bullshit.’
Andie took a deep breath, piled the pomegranate seeds into a glass bowl and joined me on the sofa. She put her head in my lap and asked me to drop the seeds into her mouth. I asked her what I had done to earn this pleasure.
‘I just spent a whole afternoon with you,’ she smiled up at me. ‘And you’re the first guy I’ve met around here who doesn’t ask dumb questions about me. You live in the “now”. Suppose it comes from watching fish all the time.’
The seeds burst with a tart pop. As the juice spilled, it stained my fingertips scarlet. Like the diver with the shark, I let my fingers remain between her lips for a second too long. She sucked and nipped the pads of my finger, not quite playful. If she drew any of my blood, it mingled with the juice.
Over one of our sushi dinners, I mentioned mating to Andie, about how marine creatures did not go through the awkwardness of sex on dry land.
When she had cleared her plate, she went to the bathroom. Andie called for me after ten minutes. I heard the taps running from outside and knocked on the bathroom door.
She poured in the bath salts and the foam and issued me instructions:
‘Don’t turn around until I say so.’
I heard the taps running, water gushing out. Inspired, I invented a name for a new cocktail: ‘Sex in the Bath’. Foam spilled over the rim on the bathtub and drifted over to my bare feet.
‘You can look now.’
Andie had skimmed off a layer of thick foam and fashioned a bikini out of it: bubbles shining on her wet skin like sequins sewn onto a body stocking.
The water sloshed around as I climbed inside the tub. I lifted aside a handful of wet hair pressed against her shoulder blades, strands of kelp left on white sand at high tide. The strap of lather on one shoulder had split. I nipped and rasped my teeth along the ridge of a collarbone until I reached the notch at the base of her neck. I dipped my tongue in, the skin tasting salty the same as the mussels at dinner a few hours before. The rest of the makeshift bra had dissolved, exposing her tiny rosewood nipples. My hand reached between her thighs and sought out her niche, fingers discovering that her hole was as shallow as a navel. Andie gasped and shoved me back with the contained violence of a self-defence class. We slid in rhythm against the wall of the tub. Male sea snakes cannot disengage from females until mating is complete.
My livingroom had a built-in marine aquarium, equipped with backlit glass, harsh and vivid like a screensaver. The cleaner shrimp from my shop were servicing a blue-striped angelfish.
‘Humans think they can study animals in tanks and cages, and put them into categories.’
Dressed in a terry-wrap robe, Andie walked over to the window, her profile slashed into shadows by the Venetian blinds. Her rants began like our lovemaking, a sharp tangential stab in a random location, growing in intensity as she located an available target.
I tried to distract her. I pointed to the aquarium. ‘Are you talking about my fish?’
‘You make them sound like they’re your property.’
I went over and put my arms around her to soothe her displeasure.
‘You don’t own me-I’m not one of the fish in your shop.’
‘I have a duty to my shop.’
‘Your shop is your property, which has its own set of conditions. She loosed the belt on the robe and opened it before taking my hand and pressing it on her soft breast, ‘Duty is unconditional. When you’re with me, you are beyond all that.’
‘No.’ I struggled to deny my body’s responses. ‘Can we talk about you?
Or us??’
Andie rolled her eyes at me and pushed me back towards the sofa.
‘Remember the deal, Jack? You don’t ask dumb questions about me or anything. We enjoy what we can when we can.’
On the sofa, the bathrobe fell down around Andie as she climbed above me, a goddess holding up the canopy of the night sky with her body. It was dim under her robe as the moist velvets of our mouths mingled. When she placed her mouth around what she humourously called my ‘seahorse’, I forgot about duty or business.
Andie was right; my shop was my property and my duty although I had been neglecting it. Dead live food drifted in plastic basins, air pumps broke down and filters clogged up with algae and gave off the metallic tang of nitrates.
My courtesy transformed into curtness with customers. As families waited for a table outside the dim sum restaurant, they allowed their children to wander into my shop. I shooed them away with a broomstick, annoyed that these conventional lives and their offspring had intruded into my floating world.
A man entered the shop, tall and white-haired, his skin so tanned that it gave off a violet lustre in the strip lights of the fish tanks. His appearance attested to a life spent under the sun. The juxtaposition was odd; what was his interest in an indoor hobby like aquarium fish-keeping? I realized the connection when he put a plastic bag on the counter; the cleaner wrasse was swimming inside.
‘I’m returning the wrasse. My wife told me she bought it from here,’ he said with a faint European accent.
I did not answer and tightened my grip on the broom handle. Andie had lied to me about her marital status. Deceived as I was, I had no desire to be killed by a jealous husband.
‘Okay, relax.’ He held up a gnarled hand to assuage me. ‘My ex-wife.
Well, not until she signs the papers. If she signs them.’
