Lobster (b)
Curiosity Shop
Excerpt from a fictional book called ‘Emperor’s Waters’
The Bellman would walk the promenade every evening before dusk making announcements. His strident voice would declare lost watches and wallets, handsome rewards and the occasional view to matrimony.
The old man had a curiosity shop on Main Street and it was here that found items could be delivered and lost items reclaimed. People not only lost their things, they lost their words and forgot their dreams. Occasionally, the Bellman would have the luck of leisure to comb the beach for them. It was more difficult to reconcile the stuff of lost words and dreams with their owners. The Bellman would store the stray abstractions on the shelves and display cabinets of the curiosity shop, where they would glitch in and out of existence as they waited for intimacy to be restored with a human body.
The shop’s atmosphere was sepia toned. Its furniture was made from the old ship Bachelard. The cabinet maker had chosen the seasoned oak with full awareness of its grit and density, its longing to be looked at and touched. The Bellman’s care took up where the cabinet maker’s left off, he believed that the shop’s furniture and stock could be curated so as to protect the entire village. It was an attitude underpinned by geometry more than passion. Curiosity does not hurry, it does not assume. It touches despair with the same temperament as joy and temperature. It makes shapes, makes space, asks questions. It is a pity Bellmen and their shops have gone out of fashion, digital storage and communication is miserably unromantic!
One cabinet displayed a meticulous configuration of handkerchieves, odd gloves and pieces of cutlery. Poems, letters and stories were born and unborn on the shelf below, documenting the guilt of the privileged and the outrage of the poor. Below these two shelves was a drawer which held a neatly folded patchwork quilt made out of ten thousand stamps from the letters between two lovers. The lovers had been separated by a long and miserable war and the object had been dream-crafted by their lovechild so that they might finally rest together.
On the wall hung an artwork entitled ‘Portrait of an Evidence Filter’. Ah, how little the artist had understood her husband, his loneliness or magical thinking!
A travelling hat box contained a burdensome crown and a hat which was a size too small. Both functioned to enlighten the wearer upon removal from the head. There was a helmet to protect the delicate instrument of the brain whilst singing and a hat to collect apples.
In the children’s corner was a shelf of paintbrushes, seasonal spy loops, mirrors and shadows, which, with a bit of practice could all be used to catch glimpses of light waves. There was a dressing up box for pirates and clowns. The children’s dream cabinet stored colourful objects which had been ejected into the world with bewildering speed and delightful, obscure purposes. There was a homemade stethoscope, a talking stick whittled out of a branch from the tree your great granny planted over your granny’s placenta, a traffic light system with six different coloured lights each signalling a different dance move and a heraldic multilingual conch shell of course.
There was a suchness cabinet which published the journals of ancient astronauts, the book you wrote and a treatment for contemporary amnesia complicated by Victorian mesmerism. It had to be handled with great care as it used water and electricity.
It was to the Bellman’s shop that Violet brought the Lobster in his hour of need. It was here the Lobster settled and developed the capacity to breathe air and gaze at the sky. In the future scientists would study the anatomy of his eyes in order to develop technologies which could observe cosmic ripples at the edge of black holes. The Bellman’s shop was a very special place.
The Lobster and his Quiet Miracle
The Lobster came from an archaic species in which an individual’s sense of well being increased in direct proportion to the subjugation he excited in others of his kind. This ancient adaptation contributed to the survival of the species on the ocean bed. Our Lobster had a mutant desire for unconditional ease, his equanimous practice of manners and morals was considered such a threat to the community’s stability, that he was sent into exile with a brutality that left his battered body without the strength to escape the current which washed him ashore. On the beach he was discovered by two characters who seldom took refuge in kindness. It amused them to poke the Lobster with a pencil, especially when he grasped it firmly with his enormous front claw and refused to release it. They forced a strange dance upon the poor creature and tossed him back into the sea. The Lobster felt all sorts of uncomfortable sensations in his blood space as he flew through the air towards an inelegant splash. He longed to rest in a rocky crevice or hide in some sea grass, but again the tide washed him ashore. All the while he clamped the red pencil. Not long after, the child Violet came across the wretched creature. Although ignorant of his story, she understood that the Lobster was lost and as such must be taken to the Bellman’s shop on Main Street. The Bellman agreed to relieve the child of her concern for him. The Lobster would not be left as another strange form come to rest on the shore.
Had the Bellman been able to remove the red pencil from the Lobster’s enormous left claw, he might have fulfilled a different destiny. It could so easily have been "Into the pot you go!" However, in those days the north east coast was groaning with lobster and eating it had no status or charm. In fact, the government had passed a law that servants were to be given it for tea no more than three times a week. It occurred to the Bellman that perhaps this pencil gripping Lobster served a purpose other than to be boiled alive. Nobody had ever brought a living creature to the shop before and other than to tend to his immediate survival, the Bellman was unsure how or where to place the Lobster’s suffering. After holding a brief conference with himself he decided what to do.
He fetched seawater in a bucket so the Lobster could breathe and dream in brine that night. The water must not stagnate and so the Bellman went directly to a section in the curiosity shop which was devoted to the practice of aeration. Here, there were wands for blowing bubbles and candles for blowing out, there were music books for wind instruments and to sing from. These were things of happiness and wonder, but our Lobster was gasping for the ocean and it was presented to him within a few short hours in a bucket of seawater aerated by a rudimentary circulating system made from a bicycle foot pump. That night the Lobster found himself displaced and defeated at the bottom of the Ocean in a Bucket. The sensations caused by the violent exile and being catapulted through the air tyrannised his dreams.
Over the next few months the Bellman replenished the bucket with fresh seawater every day. During this time the Lobster would be wrapped with cold, wet towels to prevent the membranes in his gills from collapsing. He was fed fish, crabs, clams and mussels. To begin with, the Bellman’s care was not sentimental, it was founded on a curiosity for the Lobster’s regenerative properties. The Lobster’s vast blood space gradually began to ease as he became acclimatised to living in the Ocean in a Bucket and the Bellman continued to refine its aeration system so that it remained well oxygenated.
The different rhythms and caresses of the circulating bubbles roused the Lobster’s five pairs of gills to the possibility of absorbing oxygen from air. Over time, the membranes of his gills became more adept at mating his interiority with the air. This was especially notable when the Lobster was wrapped in cold wet towels while the Bellman went to fetch the fresh seawater. One such time, the Lobster crawled out from the towels, stretched his enormous claws upwards and deeply breathed in the aerial ocean without fear that his membranes would collapse. It was a quiet miracle.
When the Bellman discovered that the Lobster had learned to breathe air, he mused that the differences between him and the crustacean were not so profound and pervading. Perhaps here was a household companion, not just a curious object with its heart in the middle of its back and a cluster of ganglia floating in a blood space.
Artist: Melissa Martin
Fish Profile
Lobster - Homarus gammarus
Conservation status
Lobsters are believed to have evolved around 250 million years ago.
Lobsters are crustaceans which are not endangered - but are vulnerable to local overexploitation.
Lobsters are crustaceans which are not endangered - but are vulnerable to local overexploitation.
The MCS recently updated their ratings on their Good Fish Guide to reflect the ‘continued and increasing threat to crab and lobster populations’. Fishing involves the use of pots, traps, and creels – which can be sustainable as young and breeding lobsters needn’t be landed. However, there need to be limits set on the number of pots a boat can carry, and the number of lobsters caught (boats may carry 100’s of pots at a time). The MCS call for regular stock assessments, management controls which are responsive to population changes, and capture methods that minimise damage to habitats and vulnerable species.
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