Extract: Wild, Wild Women, by Janis Freegard

A fish was flying over Mākara: large and thick-lipped, casting a great fish shadow over the small, white church. There were bare hills and a telegraph pole. Geese frolicked in the wetland. You could hear them honking. At the same instant, a fishbone caught in the throat of Kim Lee in her Auckland apartment, choking her to death. If only her husband had still been alive, he might have thumped her on the back, or grasped her under the ribs and pushed upwards to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre. He might have dislodged that fishbone and saved his wife’s life. But he wasn’t there; he was pushing up dahlias. If only her neighbour, one Agnes Riley, who sometimes joined Mrs Lee for lunch (or vice versa) had been sitting across the table from her that day — but she wasn’t. All the ‘if only’s. They didn’t save poor Kim Lee, alone and choking. Fish have souls. You’ll see them at night sometimes, out at sea. Lighthouse- keepers — in the days when lighthouses were operated by resident humans and not machinery — told of great flocks of fish souls rising up above the horizon on quiet nights. It was a solitary life, in a lighthouse. You might have welcomed an irregular sight. We each of us have our own inner fish. Kim Lee now, she tried denying her innate fish-hood and that’s why, ultimately, it choked her. Kim Lee’s inner fish was a flounder, flat and rippling over sand. But Mrs Lee failed to grasp that she was a rippling fish; she considered herself more of a monkey — the animal ruling the year of her birth. Charming and mischievous, that’s how she thought she was. But at her peril. Poor Kim Lee. She failed to see the fish within and choked on her own lack of self-awareness. The flocks of fish souls that the lighthouse-keepers saw, on the still tranquil nights (not the roaring, crashing, sea-spray gale nights) — those flocks could number in their millions. Swarming and diving in the cloudless night sky, a magnificent and startling sight. A vision of fishness. The spirit of the watching lighthouse-keeper would rise and soar with them, flocking, pitching, swirling. If you watched long enough, you’d eventually see them merging into one another, into one mass, one massive fish. This was the thick-lipped fish that flew over Mākara: all the souls of the dead fish and the fish- souled. Even those like Kim Lee — the fish-deniers. Ichthyology, they call it — the study of fish. Kim Lee’s neighbour, Agnes Riley, she liked catching them. She enjoyed the stillness of it, the waiting on the water. Agnes was a woman well aware of the fish within. Hers was a sardine: silver-skinned and oily. Back in her mid-thirties, Agnes had worked for a time as a lighthouse-keeper. She’d enjoyed the isolated life, the giant lights, the climb up the spiral iron staircase, the sight of the swarming fish souls over the sea on a clear, quiet night. Agnes Riley had cupboards full of sardines. She ate them on toast and afterwards kept the tins washed clean and stacked neatly in cardboard boxes. It was a two- bedroom apartment, which was just as well: she could devote an entire room to empty sardine tins. Homage to her sardine nature. She thought they might come in useful one day. Her neighbour, Mrs Lee, had never set foot in Agnes’s sardine room; she’d never seen great flocks of fish souls out at sea; and she had certainly never spied the thick- lipped fish flying over Mākara. How could she? She lived in Mount Eden, had done so her whole life. She’d been to Rotorua once, but never as far south as Wellington. While her husband was alive, they’d lived in a small Mount Eden cottage with a vegetable garden at the back. She’d moved into the apartment so there’d be no garden to tend, reminding her of her husband and making her cry into the dahlias; no noises at night that could be intruders, or ghosts, and her a widow, alone and frightened. Mr Lee had gone before his time. It leads you to wonder, though — if Mrs Lee had accepted her flounder nature, might she have found the courage to stay in her small Mount Eden cottage and weed Mr Lee’s dahlias? Would she still have choked to death on a fish bone? It was Agnes Riley who found Kim Lee’s body. She was in the habit of calling on her neighbour every day or so, and when there’d been no reply to her knocking, she let herself in with the spare key Mrs Lee had given her. She could see at once what had happened: the remains of a fish dinner on the table, barely touched; the dead woman’s hands at her own throat where she lay. Agnes cried and then she phoned an undertaker. The Lees had no children; there were no brothers or sisters still living. It was down to Agnes. She sat in the front row at Kim Lee’s funeral. Several others showed up from the apartment block. There was a group from the insurance company where the dead woman had worked; a smattering of old school friends; members of a choir that Agnes hadn’t known her neighbour sang in. The dead are full of such surprises: everyone has little pockets of life they keep separated. It’s not until a funeral or a fiftieth birthday party or some such that they all swarm together and the seams of the separate pockets give way, their contents spilling into each other like fish souls merging. We know our friends better in their deaths than we ever did when they were alive. And you want to say to them: I didn’t realise you sang in a choir; I’d love to hear you sing, but of course by then it’s too late. Agnes herself had never shown Kim Lee the sardine tin collection, so who was she to judge?