Fishbowl

The fish begin to go missing.

Alba comes in once a day, six times a week, for miscellaneous cleaning duties. She keeps finding water on the floor of the Aquarium Room in the mornings, which she dutifully mops up; and she overhears Mrs Baskerville, striding around in her Louboutins and archmage’s robe, cellphone tucked against her shoulder, irritably saying, “—Course it’s not the staff. And do what with them? Walk out with dead fish in their pockets? Swallow them whole? Don’t be ridiculous, Richard—” as she steams about, discarding her bag and coat and keys but none of her steely office mien.

The latest acquisition in Mrs Baskerville’s collection is still under wraps, until the big holiday party reveal; all the fish tanks painstakingly moved to frame a ballroom of statement couture, where the only statement is a deafening chorus of oneupmanship: SEE how impractical this is! SEE the disposability of a million-dollar outfit! SEE how rich I am! and the environment itself becomes a smug refutation, a debate-framing blitzkrieg: Mrs Baskerville so outclasses them all in their tawdry squabbling that she can burn a billion on the set for the little couture-proxy bitch fights of her closest lessers.

The tank is an architectural folly in glass, a postmodern snigger of a thing; aquarium whimsically reshaped as fishbowl in the large, a globe large enough for not just an anthroform figure, but their surrounding cloud of person-scale fighting-fish fins. It can’t possibly be enough space to be humane, interior volume rivalling Alba’s apartment downtown. The mermaid spends its days swimming around and around, black eyes sweeping the room as though cataloguing grudges.

And in the nights, Alba’s sure, when the lights are out and nobody sees, it creeps out of its fishbowl like an enterprising lab octopus, slithers to the floor and across it, to the other tanks. Catches Mrs Baskerville’s other prizes. Eats them.

Alba sees it being fed, sometimes, other staff coming and going with buckets of live delicacies; it’s hardly refusing its meals. No, she thinks; no, it takes its captor’s things away out of intelligent spite.

She runs a mop through the evidence, again; shoulders hunched defensively against the fathomless black stare that rakes her back, the silent flick of fins like billowing capes, like long hair haloed underwater.

Mrs Baskerville is in her study when Alba makes the rounds of the upper floor, sipping some viscous beige health concoction and doing paperwork. Nothing that couldn’t be done at her office.

Her first week, Alba had frozen under her gaze, the matter-of-fact command to bend over to empty the wastepaper basket — no, Alba. From the waist. Mrs Basterville had impatiently, ever-so-slightly contemptuously, seen fit to explain: she’s married, nothing is going to happen to Alba. But Mrs Baskerville likes to look.

It might not be practical for Alba to clean the house six days a week, those parts of the house only someone trusted should, in skirts above the knee; in silk stockings; in a garter belt. These things appear, bought and paid for and delivered without a word to Alba’s apartment. Someone of Mrs Baskerville’s wealth need not say that refusing her just looking could make for unfortunate life prospects.

Alba runs the paperwork in the wastepaper basket straight through the shredder built into her little cleaning cart. She doesn’t look at it; she’s trustworthy. It’s why she has this job, this trusted job. If she suspects that most of it has been printed without necessity and moved direct from paper tray to bin, in order for there to be something for her to bend from the waist to pick up, whenever Mrs Baskerville desires to look—

She is too trustworthy to go around having suspicions. Too much another of Mrs Baskerville’s collection of things.

“I’ll need you to be here extra hours for the party preparations,” Mrs Baskerville says, and Alba nods and murmurs and escapes on the rest of her rounds, forever uncomfortably aware of way her legs move, the way her walk looks, in her impractical-for-cleaning bought-and-paid-for heels.

There’s water on the Aquarium Room floor again, already, on her way back down. She sighs and gets the mop; rolls up her sleeves.

Glass squeaks, behind her. She doesn’t freeze; halts what she’s doing in a calm and controlled way, glances over her shoulder as if nonchalant.

The mermaid is pressed to the glass, coiling tail sliding along the interior surface, singing slick. Arms hooked over the rim, fingers tapping softly on the air side of the transparent wall, framing the face looking through. Eyes boring into Alba.

She looks at it, writhing muscle and scale and spined membrane, long fingers and inscrutable stare.

She turns back to her mopping. Slowly, not with the mouse-quick twitch of prey, as if it can be fooled.

Alba doesn’t know why she needed to be here. The party happens, and she waits — upstairs, in Mrs Baskerville’s study, where she told her to.

“Have a drink,” she’d said, and Alba had stuttered about driving, which Mrs Baskerville ignored in the way that rich people can ignore things which don’t suit them: “I can have you driven.”

Alba held a drink, to placate her. Waits.

She is too trustworthy to go around having suspicions about what she’s waiting for.

Eventually, the sounds downstairs die away, replaced by the sounds of cars departing outside. Mrs Baskerville briefly reappears, looking annoyed; “I have to take care of a few things. Make yourself comfortable.”

She meant Alba should sit somewhere. Look pretty, be obediently waitful. Alba sat, for a while longer, on the edge of a chair with her hands clenched on her thighs; then when the waiting dragged out, quietly took herself downstairs. The fish tanks, having been a backdrop for indifferent eyes for a while and then tidied away, are in a quiet, dark room off to the side of everything. She stands among them — the pale glow of tank lights, the hum and bubble of aeration, the slow and silent movements. Pockets of peaceful, alien existence.

She drifts close to the mermaid’s fishbowl. Wraps her arms tightly around herself and leans her forehead on the glass. Gazes dully at the mermaid, which stares back, fins bannered wide in threat display against the evening’s stressful pantomime.

“There you are,” Mrs Baskerville says. She puts a hand on the small of Alba’s back; she smells of the botanicals in expensive gin cocktails. Alba can feel her scrutiny, on the side of her face. “What are you thinking about?”

Alba looks at the mermaid. “Captivity,” she says, and closes her eyes, unable to look into its implacable black gaze as her boss’s hand slides interestedly down over the curve of her ass, and then, beneath the drape of her skirt, begins to investigate the way back up.