Frozen parrotfish imported from the Caribbean are for sale in south London fishmongers. The Scaridae are specifically reef fish: the beak-like fusing of the front teeth which gives them their popular name has evolved so that they can browse on corals. The parrotfish does indeed damage corals, just as a blackbird damages worms. What counts is the balance of such activities, especially in an ecosystem as delicate as that of a tropical reef. Pulling parrotfish out of reefs in quantities sufficient to supply an export industry cannot but have an unbalancing effect. Through a complex chain of relationships, the reef will inevitably suffer from their absence, as it certainly will from the methods used to catch them.
This is doubly exceptionable since the members of this family make indifferent eating except at the moment they are caught. Then the otherwise uninteresting meat is delicious raw, marinaded for fifteen minutes in lime juice, oil, tiny native onions and black pepper. Frozen into woody curves in a bin in a Peckham fishmonger’s, a parrotfish merely pretends to the exotic, its blunted colours ghosts of what they were. Who knows whether their corpses are there to satisfy the nostalgia of an immigrant population or the local consumer’s fickle desire for novelty. Either way, a reef off Barbados or Jamaica is now undergoing a change which will most likely be permanent.
The ocean’s emptiness appals the swimmer, but only because it can supply nothing for his own survival. He cannot entertain flabby polemic about dolphins. His is the mind of a man lost in the sea. Yet even as he struggles to save himself he is hollowed out by despair. What is it that he is saving? The thought corrodes his every intention. In this wide salt world which he treads he is nothing, has nothing but a face mask and a pair of trunks. Until one loses everything it is never clear what it was one had. Now, in a bleak inner glimpse, he finds he has dissolved. The landscape of his own past, his private history, seems to have vanished, leaving only a sense of attrition. As he glances down through the water his body dwindles whitely like a distant peg and sheds a small discoloured puff of urine which briefly unravels itself in thready convections like those of lime juice being diluted. Nothing but ocean. His entire body is dissolving, too. He only ever existed as three-tenths and that fraction is melting into water.
However, this 30 per cent contains an animal which does not want to die. A passive animal, maybe, but still perversely convinced that help will turn up as if by more than mere chance. Sooner or later someone surely has to pass within hailing distance of the psychic beacon he must have become, broadcasting his distress signal on all frequencies. He squints at the sun. Now that he no longer wants it to be stuck vertically at noon it seems reluctant to move at all. Night with its hope of fishermen is still many hours away.
The swimmer tells himself he need not bank only on them. He has been overlooking all the other sorts of boat which continually cross these waters. Besides tattered inter-island launches, there are all the craft which used to fetch up on ‘Tiwarik’: friendly gunrunners, wanderers from the south with their faces wrapped against the sun, poverty-stricken vagabonds neither peaceable nor violent but chance-takers of more or less competence. Any of them might spot him from miles away with a vulture’s quick eye for a weakening beast. He tries to imagine into being a huge arch of cloud letters in the sky: REWARD!, and underneath a gigantic arrow pointing straight down whose tip balances on his sunburned head. It is a message aimed impartially at any of the seagoing mavericks who still inhabit this last corner of the ocean.
So hard does he will it that he soon thinks he hears, above the infuriatingly loud slop of wavelets, the faintest putter of an engine.