Fiction by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch
My feet prickle and the orange fish in the water dart and glint, flocking to gorge on my dead skin, crisscrossing tracer bullets in the illuminated tank. The nibbling tickles like the bubbles in the glass of cava in my right hand. I lean back into the petrol blue cushion and stroke the white piping covering the seams. There’s a lighter band of skin around my ring finger. I slide my hand under my thigh where I can’t see it and look into the fish tank below my chair. Red frangipani flowers float on the surface of the water, fleshy lips parted in a sigh.
I wandered into the Aqua Bliss Fish Spa after walking from my hotel to Passeig de Gracia. I never do this kind of thing and I thought all those years of pounding the beat had made me tough, but police issue footwear is more comfortable than sandals.
An assistant helps me lift my legs out of the water and leaves me to relax in a dark leather club chair after drying me off. This is the ‘Extravagance Treatment’ highlight, a thirty-minute foot massage washed down with a second glass of cava. After the fish pedicure, I can’t eat another tapas of anchovies, but I’m always game for a foot rub and some bubbly. My eyes close, the swish and splash of water and bubbles lull me, a whisper of pear drops wafts past, warm hands cup my feet.
Hola. Soy Maria, says a voice, an English twang to the vowels.
Forgive me if I don’t open my eyes, I mumble to the girl sitting at my feet. She anoints them with oil, pressing her fingers deep into the soles, pulling and spreading my bones, pinching and kneading my sore muscles. Argh, I let out a moan, half-human, half pussycat. This is the most relaxed I’ve been since the divorce. A week in Barcelona seems a good way to start spending my share of the settlement.
There’s a smell in the oil I can’t quite place. It carries me to gilded altars, the chill of a darkened pew, a priest swinging a thurible suspended from chains. The swirling smoke of incense rises in the air. Is it myrrh or frankincense? I’ll have to ask the girl. When I open my eyes, all I see is the crown of her head. Her thick strawberry blond hair cascades over her shoulders, hiding her face but I make out a snub nose sprinkled with freckles. There’s something familiar about her complexion, her accent, and then I remember.
The thick locks of hair, more reddish in the daylight of the spa, appeared dull blonde under the strip lights in the police station. As if she hears the click of my memories falling into place, she looks up and recognises me too. After she witnessed the man murdered, we had to help her reinvent herself elsewhere, but not before she told the world what she had seen. Unlike the men who scattered and ran, who lost faith, who betrayed him, she stayed and spoke up. I remember throwing a rough woollen blanket over her head before we ran from the squad car and snuck her through a side door of the courthouse. An armoured vehicle as big as a snowplough thundered past, flanked by a full police escort, sirens blaring. Our decoy worked. Then we wrenched her from her life and erased all the traces.
So this is where she ended up, but I know better than to say a word. Her eyes are the colour of the Aqua Bliss Fish Spa. As we stare at each other, they fill with tears.
I want to ask her about her new life, how she can make friends without a past she can share, her life in danger if anyone identifies her. Her eyes quiver and a silver droplet falls on my foot. I want to reassure her she’s safe, but the threads knotted in this tapestry of lies keep me quiet. Bowing her head, she wipes away the tears from my feet with her hair.
Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch is a UK dancer who lives in Zürich, Switzerland with her husband and son. Her work has been published in El Pais. In between running her dance studio and writing, she enjoys lifting heavy weights and wild swimming.
