Listing to Port

1. Think of a number, any number. Add four, and multiply by two. Subtract six. Divide by two. Subtract the number you started with. Now, what do you end up with?
2. There was a number that was caught in a maze, very like the one just constructed, and had to eat its way out. It was a dangerous process, costing an amateur mathematician three fingers and a chunk of thigh meat.
3. The mathematician was stitched up by a doctor at the tallest hospital in the world, which had just been constructed. It was twice as tall as any other building in the world, and one could look down from its upper floors at clouds passing by. All the staff at the hospital were new and none of them knew their way around.
4. The doctor got lost on his way home and had to sleep in a broom cupboard in the kidney department. He had a dream about being served a meal of purple food by a mysterious veiled woman. It would have been such a good dream, if only boiled beets, candied violets, red cabbage, blackcurrants, roast aubergines and plums had had some kind of joint flavour affinity.
5. The woman closed the door of the dream and took off her veil. Then she poled her boat along the river to the next dream she was contracted to appear in and put on a great cloak of peacock feathers. It was a dream for an aging judge, who was to be bent double in a box and whispered to.
6. The judge, however, was late for her dream, because it was snowing that night and the traffic around London had tied itself into a historic knot. It was the sort of knot that one gets in sewing thread, requiring only gentle pulling (or in this case, the movement of a single, unremarkable car) to undo. But nobody had the wider perspective to see this, so it remained in place all night until a squadron of police officers painstakingly cut and unravelled the thread elsewhere.  
7. The road’s four lanes became a silent, black-and-white maze of snowy vehicles, navigated by blanket-wrapped figures. The driver of the car at the heart of the knot spent the night with twenty other drivers who had decamped to a nearby lorry with a heating system. They played cards all night and thought up increasingly ridiculous terms for snow. Hey, said the lorry driver, as dawn began to break. Think of a number.

1. There were two detectives who went to a small village on the edge of a marsh. The earth was black in that place and the cold waters black too. There were no paths through the marsh, which was a maze of blasted thickets and dry, crackling reed-beds where strange birds lived. No water could be said to flow into or out of it. There were rumours that time went in different directions in different parts of the marsh and that its waters flowed from now to then rather than from here to there. Nevertheless, a reed-cutter had ventured into its nearer parts to gather eggs, and she had found a body on a mudbank, so the police were called.

2. They had a bit of a thing for each other, these detectives, but nothing would ever come of it because one was married and the other had too much of his identity tied up in being straight. Neither of them was particularly near retirement, but one was older than the other. Their companionship was based around their taciturn refusal to talk about their pasts, which one must assume were both murky and mysterious. In the village they found no-one missing and no-one suspicious. Though there were those who said that human finger-bones and the like had a habit of washing up in the marsh and it would be well to look out for a serial killer. There was a fortune-teller who gathered up the bones, because she was on the look out for her long-lost son who had slipped off playing into the marsh some years ago. But they were not the bones of a child, and she had taken to casting futures with them instead. This near the marsh, the bones would only fall in spirals, revealing nothing of themselves to anyone.

3. The detectives placed the remains, which were mainly skeletal, in a body bag in a refrigerated trailer. The next day most of the locals gathered in the village hall. There was an old man who said he was sure the murderer would be there but everyone, it seemed, had stayed out of the marsh for months. Someone said to see the fortune teller in her mouldy house by the willows, and since there was no other option, they went.

4. The fortune-teller was pleased to see them, for she was often lonely. She did not think she knew the body, she said, but she did know the marsh. She showed them a great black crystal with a spiderweb of incarnadine flaws at its heart, opaline and shimmering. It is a paradox, she said. Paradoxes grow around here like mushrooms. What with time in the marsh the way it is. I can show you the trunk of a hollow tree that is entirely crusted with them, down by the pool where I found the finger bones. Growing off all those petty little frog intrigues dragged back and forth through the years. But I have never found one so large and so strange. I truly think it could be worth something. I was hoping to pass it on to my son. The younger detective looked into the crystal and thought he saw his future written there, and he needed to know more like he had never needed anything. But the fortune teller shut the box. It is for my son, she said. I can show you the pool where the finger bones wash up, and maybe you can find the key to both losses for me, and I will bury it with him. I have never dared to dig there.

5. She gave them a map and a spade and sundry documents of her son’s that could be used to identify him. The detectives thanked her and, having little else to go on, packed sandwiches for a trip into the marsh. As they walked the sun ticked back and forwards across the noonday mark in the sky like the second-hand of an ailing watch. When they reached the pool, the younger detective started digging. The older leaned on the willow tree (they had not thus far checked its bleak crack for more glittering paradoxes). He opened the packet of documents and began to read. The first one was facts and strands of hair and identifying marks. The missing boy, it seemed, had had a wine-stain mark on his left shoulder.

6. The older detective had just such a mark on his shoulder, and he knew that as a child he had been found wandering (though he did not like to discuss it). He realised that he could be the fortune-teller’s long-lost son. He told the younger detective of his suspicions. But the younger detective, in sudden fright of losing the crystal’s speaking flaws to him (or of losing him to the crystal’s speaking flaws) jerked back the spade and swung at him with it. It hit the older detective in the neck and he bled out on the wet mud.

7. The younger detective threw the older detective’s body into the crack of the rotted-out willow tree by the black pool, where it hung for several days before slipping down into the water. It drifted into the currents of the marsh and washed back and forth through time, shedding small bones and shreds of skin along the way.  Eventually the body fetched up on the reedcutter’s mudbank, three weeks before it had been laid to unquiet rest. The reedcutter found it, and called the police.

8. Some two days into the future, the sun ticked back and forth across the noonday mark like the second-hand of an ailing watch. The younger detective walked out of the marsh and into another story, which we are not concerned with here. He no longer needed the crystal. Before he left, fearful of evidence, he tipped the bag containing the skeletal body into a cracking reed bed. The body slipped into a deeper current where time turned itself inside out. It took the bones and reclothed them in their raiments of past years.  

9. Twelve years before, a thrashing bag bobbed up from the current onto a sandy bank, and tore itself open under the moon. The older detective crawled out, young and gasping, with his memories scrambled. He stumbled South, out of the marsh, back to the city. It seemed he had been somewhat changed. He no longer bore the fortune-teller’s mark, he could not remember who he was, he bore no documents. In time he married a nurse, and the itch of the memory of the younger detective faded from his brain. But he knew that he himself had had a flair for detective work. So, after some years of rehabilitation and retraining, that is the field he went back to. Eventually, he was paired up with an older partner who was as taciturn as he about his past.

10. Some time later, they got a call about a body in a marsh…

1. There was an apartment building, I think it was in London somewhere. In the penthouse lived an entirely unremarkable couple, who had passed through thirty years in the world without leaving any mark on it. They did not quite realise this, living as they were on a day-to-day basis busy with small actions. But everything they did seemed to be erased shortly after they did it. People forgot them; their spilled coffee melted away; the people at the local shop greeted them every day as if they were new to the area. Certainly they seemed to have no family. In the end I am not sure if this was bad luck, or the action of some vengeful and powerful enemy.

2. On the floor below the penthouse lived some robots. Before their retirement, they had been involved in a top-secret surveillance project and hence they were conditioned to enjoy the view. Needless to say, their existence was also top-secret and, since they had been largely abandoned by the government, they had had to devise complex strategies for continuing to operate in peace. One of these, they thought, was to seek out forgettable and reclusive people and live near them. They were able to recharge from the electricity supply. For spare parts and oil they had taken to making orders from Amazon, then answering the door in a full-size Peppa Pig costume which a disgruntled London Marathon participant had discarded next to the building. Due to their compact, modular nature they were able to fit in spaces inaccessible to humans with no outward sign other than the occasional scritching noise. This was fortunate as they were often raided by the police (who had noted the apartment’s electricity use as highly suspicious) and had to all hide under the floorboards. Otherwise they spent their time making an enormous quilt, which one of their former operators had told them was a good way to pass the time.

3. There was a man who was writing a book, and he lived two floors below the penthouse. He survived on a small pension from the Department of Springs, which he had been awarded after a tragic pogo accident had led to him losing one and a half legs. He had been writing this book for fifty years. It was a beautiful thing and very long, with all manner of gilded maps and illustrations and equations and fold-out origami clocks and collages and flipbook animations. One volume was nothing but a series of holes in coloured pages which combined to spell out ever-changing poems; another contained only one enormous folded map of a city almost exactly the same as his own, combined ingeniously with a diagram of the nervous system of a rat. There was a book set in barely-discernable dark greys which was full of maps of caves. The fiftieth volume contained a hollow chamber which was always stocked with a tiny bottle of sherry and told of the coronation of a king in the book’s world. In the seventieth volume, the characters mounted an escape through a hole in the back cover, leaving behind themselves only a small trail of lost full stops. After this, the pages of subsequent volumes were largely blank or abstract, or dealt only in matters of space, time and geometry. The current volume, however, told of the author’s struggle to lure his characters back (he assumed they were living, like mice, in the walls of the house, and that this was what had been causing the scratching noises) via the medium of smells, and as a consequence his southward windows were stocked full of herb pots; thyme and rosemary and fennel and bay.

4. Three floors below the penthouse was an apartment that was entirely full of insects, from floor to ceiling. Because the insects entered the apartment via a private drainpipe on one side of the building, and exited it via the sewers, the other occupants were not aware that they were there. Indeed, they were generally held to be good neighbours, because they were mostly quiet and did not leave rubbish in the hallway. I am not sure why this apartment was such an important staging post on their journey, or where they came from, or where they were going. On summer nights, when the scent of thyme rose in the air, those insects who were currently in a winged phase would dash in joyous zigzags around the apartment’s congested spaces before falling to the floor to mate.

5. Six old women lived in the apartment on the ground floor. These women had once been in a ladies’ cricket team together, but had fallen on difficult times after an unsuccessful attempt to use occult powers to improve their fortunes. Since that day, they had been haunted by the hairy ghost of W. G. Grace. The ghost was most put out at finding itself haunting a London flat and would frequently invite other ghosts of his era around to complain at them. The old women thus usually found their sleep interrupted by querulous Victorians. They welcomed the quiet buzzing and pattering of summer nights, which they assumed was some kind of air conditioning system above, as it partially drowned out the constant spectral grumblings they were subject to. On these nights they all sat up and drank saffron gin in their huge bed.

6. Below the old women there was no flat, only a basement. Although it had been intended for the storage of cleaning equipment, it was currently officially marked as unused, and its plywood door was closed with an enormous padlock. However, it proved easy to remove the door from its hinges. The basement had therefore been inhabited by a succession of squatters, and was currently the home of a young man and his labrador. In the daytime, they pretended to be statues on the riverbank for the amusement and edification of tourists. The basement was rather damp, and so they did not care to spend longer there than could be helped. However, they happened to be in on the night that the ghosts of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who had been getting drunk on saffron gin fumes, stumbled through the ceiling. Gilbert and Sullivan, who were pretty shitfaced, spent the rest of the night singing a new operetta about the many humorous problems faced by a ghost in the modern world (by which they meant the Edwardian era). Unfortunately, only the dog was awake.

7. Some days later, the dog (who was plagued with earworms which it was entirely incapable of expressing) took a wrong turning and ended up in the building’s malfunctioning lift. It was rare to find the lift venturing down as far as the ground floor, because one or other of the inhabitants of the building had levered open its workings and poured irn bru into them. The dog travelled to the top floor, where it howled and howled under the impression that it might have been singing until its owner came to find it. And that night, everyone who was heading home headed into the wrong apartment. Perhaps the dog had been singing after all, who knows?

1. There was once a giant who lived in a tower by the sea. Life was not easy for giants in those days and she had lived alone a long, long time. One morning she woke from a vivid dream, full of whisperings and fumblings and gasping cries, to find the roof of the tower had split in the night, and the room full of wet birds fighting and jostling at the windows and shitting on the bed. It seemed she had been taking her pleasure to the gulls’ clumsy wingtips and to the suggestively susurrating sea. In frustration, she took off her clitoris and rolled up all its tendrils until all that was left was a smooth, round pebble. She went out to the beach, where a light drizzle was falling, put it down among the million other clay-coloured pebbles on the sea-wet foreshore and stepped away; and when she was certain that it was not findable again, she went back to the tower, pulled a tarpaulin from the cupboard, and went back to sleep under it.

2. I do not know what became of the pebble or the giant, but fifteen years later only the tower’s ruined stump and the rumour of what had happened remained. There were three lovers who had heard the rumour, and they travelled to the beach and made a bonfire in the ruins. That night, when they had drunk a good amount of whisky, they took three pebbles from the beach and gave them to each other as a pledge of love (for they had also been reading about the love-gifts of Adelie penguins).

3. In later years, the lovers were forced by circumstance to live on different continents. They wrote each other thyme-scented letters and spent larger proportions of their hours flying and moping than they would have believed ideal. One of the thyme-scented letters was lost in the post, causing a minor romantic bust-up. They did not know it, but the lost letter had slipped out from a broken crate at the airport and was blown by a force 10 gale over the wet, flat fields all the way to the sea, where it sank and was used as an unusual-smelling breeding site by starfish.  

4. An old man gathered the baby starfish up and sold them in a round fishbowl to a woman who collected stars. In her dark and glittering house, the starfish grew and grew, eventually ending up in a black-painted tank that had once been a bath. Once a year, on the longest night, the woman would wheel her chair into the bathroom and sing songs to the starfish about how their life would be when they returned to the stars (for she seemed to be under the impression that that was where they were from).

5. There was a widow who lived in the same town, and every day on the way to work she went past the house of the woman who loved stars and peered through its shrouded windows. She thought that she was in love with the star-woman (though this was debatable, as they had not even met). She thought that she would like to keep the star-woman in her house and feed her glittering broths. She thought sometimes that she would like to rescue the star-woman from her house after a fire and tend to her wounds and comfort her gasping pain; and sometimes she thought of causing the gasping pain in the first place. But the star-woman did not take lovers. So the widow instead drew a picture that represented in her feelings in perfect and pure and unchallengeable geometry, and she felt much happier once she had managed to abstract them from the messy and unsuccessful human level. Then she had the picture tattooed on her back.  

6. The picture was published in a magazine and became famous. Indeed, the widow soon found herself not short of would-be lovers wishing to touch it, and even entertained a brief but disastrous tryst with the star-woman herself, who was a great reader of magazines. After her death, some of her younger lovers sneaked into the funeral home and stole the tattoo, which they had made into the cover of a fat book of blank paper. It seemed that some curse hovered over the book, or something of that sort, for no-one could ever bring themselves to  write in it. Eventually a rumour arose that it was already written in, if only one could find the way to reveal the words, and a community of esoteric scholars grew up around it.  

7. The scholars met every year by the sea; they did not have the book itself (only a few had ever seen it) and so, in an effort to understand it, they took it in turns to draw the book’s cover on their own skin. And sometimes this was done in great seriousness in well-lit lecture halls; and sometimes this was done beside bonfires on the beach at night, with the air thick with pot-smoke and the pebbles sticky with kicked-over margaritas. And had the mystery they were investigating existed, I think the second set of methods would have come closer to understanding it.

8. One year, without knowing it, they met on the giant’s beach; but by then the tower was long gone and only the clay-coloured pebbles remained.

1. There was once a fishwife’s daughter who ran away to sea to lean metalsmithing (why it needed to be at sea is anyone’s guess). In her seafaring days, she sailed over at least three of the lost enchanted oceans and made a number of magical swords to use in exploring the sort of shipwrecks one finds there. On her forty-fifth birthday she was forced to return to land by the sudden eruption of a salt allergy. She determined to enter the third magical sword (which was the least rusty of the bunch) into the royal sword contest. But, on arriving at the contest, she found that entrants were required by law to be members of the King’s Brotherhood of Swordsmiths; an organisation which she was ineligible for election to in several ways. In a fit of temper, she threw the third sword into a thicket and stomped off home to start a carpentry business (which, alas, she was terrible at).

2. There was a youngest son who was just passing by on his way to find his fortune. Since he was still rather lacking in fortune he had been thrown out of the stables at the back of the nearest inn and ended up spending the night in a very uncomfortable thicket. In the morning, he found that many of his troubles had been caused by lying on the flat of a rather unusual-looking sword. He took up the weapon and was fortunate enough to blunder into a pack of dragons on a working brunch. Arriving at the city with seven dragon tails and a red and buzzing sword, he was soon adopted as the King’s champion. He spent a number of fruitful years amassing lost hoards, making babies, and trying to persuade the sword not to eat his friends (it had, alas, got a taste for blood after all those dragons). Stories of his fame spread far and wide.  

3. There was a thin blue dragon who had survived the massacre; he did so by hiding in a tree. In fact, he was so terrified that he stayed in the tree for fifteen years, living on squirrels and sunlight and rain and occasionally drenching the rabbit warren below with lukewarm dragon piss. After fifteen years, the tree had grown round the dragon and he could no longer leave. He found this somewhat bothersome, as did the rabbits. Now, blue dragons can sometimes worm their way between worlds, if given enough time to find the weak spots in the space-time continuum; and this dragon set to chipping out a window into a world that did not have a tree in that place. If took him another fifteen years, but finally the window was large enough for him to slither through. However, by this time the rabbits had banded together and found a champion of their own, who had set up camp on a tree branch and had been nibbling at the dragon’s neck scales for a few weeks. On the evening the dragon was due to wriggle free, the rabbit champion at last prised a scale loose and put a sharpened stick thorough the dragon’s jugular.

4. There was a teenage girl who lived nearby, and who was shunned by many of the villagers for her mildly eccentric views. One day, whilst out walking, she found a tree that was surrounded by the most amazing blue flowers. And then to look up, and see the tree crowned with fantastical bones! There was nothing to do but climb it. And if she came down from the tree into a different world from the one she went up from, well: there was nothing very much to miss in the first world anyway. And how well it had equipped her to live in the second world! For all their myriad fantastical quantities, the inhabitants of the second world were a little silly, and curiously easily won over with a small amount of basic science and occasional acts of compassion. Soon she found herself saving the king of the second world, who was in disguise following a republican coup led by some cranky goblins.

5. The goblins were most put out to realise that the king was not dead after all, and did not put up much of a fight. When it became clear that the forces of light were about to triumph, they called together all their elven servants and set them free with directions for the safest way to leave the kingdom and individual bags of golden fixtures and fittings from the palace bathrooms. Furthermore, they requested, if the elves could see their way to calling in on some of the republican movement’s chief donors and asking them for some aid, it would be very much appreciated. As it ended up, only one of the elves got that far, and the donor was of very little help; but, being schooled in magic, she was able to suggest a location a few worlds away where a hero or two might be found to stir things up in the kingdom a little.

6. The elf came finally to the house of a young boy who had been living a rather dull life with unremarkable parents. Since elves are terrible navigators, he did not realise that he was at the wrong address and informed the boy that he was the Chosen One who was needed to save a distant and magical land. Fortunately, the directions he gave the boy were typically terrible and the boy ended up in the wrong distant and magical land. Although this land also needed saving, the task of saving it could be done by just about anyone; in fact, it was more like a road trip than an adventure. So the boy did as well as any other child might have done, and he was certainly very good at believing he was Chosen. As a reward, he was given three castles in the fairy hinterlands and a host of humorous magical servants.

7. Later on, the elf (who had decided he liked the mortal world and was reluctant to go home) was arrested for driving the wrong way down the M1 and developed an alarming beard whilst in police custody. After a series of increasingly frustrating interviews, he was charged with storytelling and sentenced to shut up.

1. One Sunday, an old woman discovered a hole in a book. The hole was about the size of a fist and of unknown depth; it was accessible only from page 265, and there was no sign of it at all on page 266. The sides were rough with something like dirt or rust. The woman, who had no particular remaining responsibilities, determined to set off on an expedition to explore the hole; the only problem being that it was too small. So she set off to the print shop to photocopy the page and get the hole enlarged to a size she could crawl into.

2. On the way to the print shop, she dropped a packet of pins which she had been intending to take into the book (for she knew that there was often an unmet need for pins on adventures). The pins fell into the road, and were run over by the number three bus. The bus continued for three miles with a packet of pins spinning round on one of its tyres; and then it suffered a loud and spectacular puncture. The bus driver stepped off the bus, tripped on a pin and broke his jaw in three places on a passing brick.

3. The bus driver spent three months with his jaw wired up, drinking chicken soup and watching the most peculiar daytime soap operas. But when he came to open his mouth again, the bus driver found that he could say nothing but “Well.” With the help of a large PPI settlement which he had been encouraged to apply for through subliminal messaging hidden in ‘The Lonely and Desperate’, he hired the finest speech therapist in twelve countries to help him.

4. After seven weeks of intense therapy, the speech therapist managed to draw forth six other words, including 'January’, 'and’ and 'banana’. He decided to write a paper on the case, which he intended to present some months later at a conference in Cairo. However, he was in the end unable to speak at the conference as he had accidentally stuck himself to the bed in the conference hotel room with marmalade.

5. With the help of three phone calls, the speech therapist managed to detach himself in time to take the boat home. However, he found that he had left his foot behind, which was a surprise, as it had not previously been detachable. Fortunately, he had given the hotel his home address. When they found the foot, they were able to post it to him. In fact, because they sent it by airmail, it arrived home somewhat before he did. By this time, he had obtained a fine prosthetic in the port of Rotterdam and was only interested in the foot for sentimental value.

6. Later in life, when short on money, he took the foot to an alien pawnbroker. The pawnbroker paid him fifteen perfect spheres for it. He found, however, that the spheres bothered him; and nobody seemed willing to convert them into cash. So he took them to the Department of Things at the local university, where an archivist offered to assess them for admission into the Permanent Collection.

7. The archivist determined that the spheres were of no interest, as they could not be put into any of the current categorisations. She put them in the bin at the back of the department, where a dumpster-diving chemist took them home and used them to play something a bit like giant snooker-chess-tiddlywinks with the children in her back garden. Interestingly, the archivist later invented the number nine, for which she was awarded a small medal.

8. Seventy years later, the chemist died of a misremembered appendix. The children took the spheres out of the attic, but could not remember the rules of the game; instead, they brought them to family reunions and placed them on the table, where they sat, dully gleaming, amongst pints of stout at the eldest’s wake, and amongst glasses of champagne on the occasion of the youngest refusing a knighthood.

9. The middle child, who had never had occasion to summon her siblings to drinks and spheres, had a habit of stretching in the garden after breakfast. One day she stretched a little too far to the right and accidentally slapped a passing time traveller in the face. The time traveller was irate but, not wishing to interfere with human timelines, contented herself with transporting the middle child’s shed two hundred years into the past. Thereafter, no shed built in that garden would remain temporally stable, and the middle child had to keep her lawnmower in the garage.

10. There were once three second-hand booksellers who found some sheds in the woods near their home, where they lived with an irascible cat. It so happened that, the evening before, the cat had shredded a first edition of Shakespeare’s Laundry Poetry. As a consequence the booksellers were feeling particularly angry. They took it in turns to punch the sheds. which helped a little. Then (seeking a cat-proof storage solution) they took the sheds home and filled them with books. But for ever after, the books they sold were a little peculiar. This did not go down well with the punters and eventually the booksellers were forced to liquidate their remaining stock and go into haberdashery instead. One of the books was sold to an old woman…

1. In a tree by a river, a green lizard coiled and sang.

2. A distiller passed underneath; hearing the song of the lizard, he became convinced that the world needed to be set to rights. But by the time he came home, only a vague sense of confusion remained. He took this confusion and brewed it into a rain-grey liquor which tasted of salt and cedarwood. There was only enough for three bottles. The first he knocked off his dinner table with a clumsy elbow; the distiller’s daughter used the second to kill slugs; and the third was mistaken for the whisky of a famous explorer and spent a number of years at the local museum, next to a stuffed polar bear.

3. At that time, five women who had formed a society dedicated to unusual food and drink visited the town. Hearing of the fabled whisky, they determined to steal it. An accompanying feast for lost adventurers was planned of gannets, shoe-leather and certain rare lichens. The theft was strightforward; the museum was not used to interest in its exhibits of any sort, let alone the interest of criminals. On opening the bottle, they were delighted to find that the alcohol content was high and the taste peculiar, because they sustained themselves in dull years on the stories they told of their great feasts and this felt like the start of a fine one.

4. Passing a junkyard, the drunk women found a bicycle which had once belonged to Adolf Hitler. In a sudden burst of inebriated patriotism, they threw it into the Atlantic Ocean.

5. The bicycle rusted beneath the ocean for three years. A black eel made its home in the seat post. When fish came to investigate the unexpected item on the sea bed, the eel darted out and ate them. One day, on smelling a passing fish, the eel surged out of the rusty post a little too forcefully and laid its side open on a jagged edge, whereupon its fellow eels set upon it and ate it.

6. The fish the eel had not eaten found that it knew something of the giddy joy of life after all (it had never been sure; fish are not often sure). It decided to leave its quotidian fish-life for something more exciting. And indeed it had many adventures, although they were of the quiet, heartwarming sort that do not often make stories. Finally, in the far Southern Ocean, the fish was scooped up from the surface of the sea by a frigate-bird who, as the fruit of a decidedly mis-spent youth, was able to converse with a variety of species. You cannot eat me, the fish remarked, because I am a good soul and by my goodness was once saved from an eel, and the same will happen here. For the truly good can do and be anything they want.  

7. The frigate-bird ate the fish. But it had always harboured a suspicion that it was a fine sort of frigate-bird, definitely above the common mould. And so the fish’s final message stayed with it long after most of its languages had withered into word-dust. In its later years, the frigate-bird found a home in a Southern port city, where it lived on scraps of fish thrown to it by fascinated stevedores. Mostly it sang them half-remembered fragments of the joyously obscene squid-shanties of the deep sea, but when truly grateful (largely when given tuna) it would thank them for their goodness and tell them of the fish oracle who said that the truly good can be anything.  

8. In that city, tiny green lizards lived in every room. And it so happened that some lived in the port as well. One day, ten of these lizards attempted to steal a large chunk of tuna from a cat, who in turn had raided a local fishing boat. The lizards were cunning and resourceful, and (to cut a long story short) the cat ended up in a locked lorry carrying washing machine parts, and the lizards ended up with more fish than they knew what to do with. In particular it was more fish than they could easily carry, and it so happened that they dropped some near the frigate-bird’s nest, and it thanked them in its usual manner.

9. I can be anything I want to be, though the sixth lizard. And it determined that it would be a bird. With some difficulty, it joined the great migration North when Spring came around again, and found a tree in a far Northern land, where it ate summer dragonflies and coiled and sang of the joys of being a bird from dusk to dawn.