Exploris Aquarium

The sun was gleaming proudly as our bus pulled out of Elms Village and headed towards Botanic Avenue. For the past few days it had been wet, rainy, and overcast, and just the sight of the sun cheered me up. Today I would not have to worry about my jeans being soaked up to my knees!

Victoria had told us she thought the bus trip would last about two hours, and I was prepared to be bored. We had taken the very last seats, where there are five cushioned places all in a row; there were about six empty rows in front of us, and then a group of Chinese students.

“There aren’t many people,” I said. “You’d think they’d try to fill up the whole bus.”

On our other adventures, to Giant’s Causeway and to the Titanic Museum, the buses had all been full. This worried me, just a wee bit, because I wondered if we had made the wrong decision in laying down eight quid to go. Besides, the two hour trip worried me. I had homework to do.

We left South Belfast via a protestant section of the city, and soon we were brushing past an intensely green landscape. Hundred of hills rose up before us, covered with sheep, cows, green grass, and the odd house. The houses in the middle of nowhere are often the most beautiful. They are made of stone and look old, quintessentially Irish, before Westernisation and Britain came and imposed their dominance.

As the minutes passed, a marsh suddenly appeared on our left, and then a wood, full of strange trees that looked as if their branches were raised above their heads, as if trying to catch our attention. The forest grew right up to the road, where a little stone fence divided fairyland from our world, and the leaves remaining on the trees brushed against our bus. It seemed as if the green landscape wanted to pull us in and take us with them; bushes everywhere hemmed us in, and the sunlight that came our way was muted by the colour.

We also passed through two little villages. My favorite was Greyabbey, because of the beautiful scenery and houses. I could write a story about this place, I thought, I could live here—I feel as if I have lived here before, a long, long time ago.

It only took us about an hour and a half to arrive in Portaferry, where the Exploris Aquarium is. It was smaller than I had expected; I had been dreaming of large rooms full of nothing but glass windows separating us from water, tinted blue from the lights, where we could gaze at fish. A part of me had been hoping for a glass tunnel, where above our heads would float great white sharks, tiger sharks, and hammerheads; or perhaps even some more docile, but still large and sharp-toothed, relatives eyeing us from the depths. But the outside of the aquarium only looked like a large white house instead of the megalithic steel structure I had been expecting.

The first room we entered was only small fish, like crabs and lobster, and then cod, and other fish. There was an open exhibit with sting rays, starfish, and sea anemone. I took a few pictures. Mel pointed at a neon orange lobster, half of its body hidden by a rock, and said, “Delicious.”

“Mel,” I said, “Nobody is going to eat it!”

She frowned. “It’s good,” she said, and moved on to a larger window with cod.

“Mm, cod,” Hannah said, just as I appeared at her shoulder, “You taste really good.”

I hoped this wasn’t going to be a pattern. I didn’t want to look at the fish merely to appreciate how they tasted cooked. (Although I had eaten a very nice fish and chip dinner a few nights before, starring a nice large piece of cod, and therefore was in no position to judge. Looking at a real cod, with its little beard on its chin and a silver stripe, made me feel a bit nauseous, the way I do when I look at a feathery red-faced chicken and realise I love eating it.)

We moved on into other rooms, full of seahorses, which are oddly unshaped in real life, their tails refusing to curl. They blobbed around aimlessly, shapeless and pointless and certainly not elegant.

“A seahorse,” I said, torn between amazement and confusion.

“A horsesea,” a boy standing by me corrected. I blinked, the joke totally lost on me.

“It looks like it’s going to throw up,” Hannah said about one of the seahorses, and that about summed it up.

In the little room was also a flat Dory-esque fish, from Finding Nemo, except oddly colourless and disproportionate, called a Unicorn fish, and then a Lionfish, which was beautiful and zebra-striped, and apparently poisonous. About at this stage there was a giant crash of water from a watertank behind me that, to quote Hannah, sounded as if someone had just fallen in, and so I decided to seek refuge in the room with the sharks. 

 There was a little baby shark and a stingray in the center of the room, and the stingray was amazingly show-offy. It keep coming to the surface and bobbing, as if to say, I’m here, I’m here, adore me! It also started to dance, by flapping its (for lack of a better word) “fins”, which propelled it backward. Sometimes it would come up to the glass and press itself against it, showing us its soft white belly, and its gaping mouth, which it would flex for us, hoping we would be impressed. The shark also came up, but this was less impressive, because it’s mouth seemed tainted red, and I was worried that instead of the blood of an enemy it was slowly dying and needed medical attention. 

 About that point the fish supply ran out, and we got to see the seals. There was a little baby seal all by itself in a small pool, and its gray head watched us forlornly. After taking at least four pictures of it apiece, we moved on and saw four rehabilitative seals under a red light. They were all named after food, and were called Ginger, Wasabi, Marshmallow, and Cinnamon. They were all in for different reasons, and some plaques told us about their rehabilitating process, and how after they were healthier they would go out and join some other seals in a second pool, and from there go back to the ocean. After watching Wasabi raise its head and try to smile for us, and about dying from the immense levels of cute contained in his cell, we went outside and watched five healthy seals playing around in the water and swimming up to us, also basking in our attention.

“Can we take them home?” I asked, but nobody seemed to think this was as good of an idea as I did.

“Seals bite,” Victoria said.

That didn’t dissuade me at all.

The last room containing animals was an exhibit room, with starfish, anemones, sea urchins, sting rays, and two different types of sharks. At 1.30, a man working for the Aquarium came with a long silver hook, and whilst explaining a bit more about the types of animals and their habitats, he pulled some up for us to pet.

One of the larger stingrays was as much of an attention hog as his dancing cousin, and he kept bobbing up very amiably, in a circle, letting us poke his nose and stroke his back and soft underbelly. Victoria adored this. Every single time he came by she would plunge her hand into the water and place her entire hand on his back or stomach. Hannah had a more cautious approach. She would reach out a finger or two and stroke its nose or the flat part of his skin between his eyes. I reached in, and was surprised by how rough his top half was, and how extremely soft his underbelly was. The effect was unpleasant for me, and I let the stingray alone.

Stingrays, the man told us, are actually related to sharks, which explains their hard skin. Sharks have little teeth-like skins that are rough; not quite so rough as sandpaper, which is too fine, but a bit like a cat’s tongue, except more like leather.

The man then got one of the small sharks to move around, and I got to touch a shark for the first time in my life. I love sharks, and one day I hope to swim with them. I reached out and put my hand on its back, and found that it had a softer skin than the stingray, although there were still bumps in its skin.

The second breed of shark was larger, and it was unusual because it was simply resting like a log at the bottom of the pool. Most sharks need to move, or else they cannot breathe, but this type of shark could. I touched his skin, too.

After he let us hold the starfish, which I didn’t like because it had tentacles and suckers, which felt weird on my skin. The sea urchin also felt weird, because it was covered with little prickly needles, like a hedgehog, that moved around. The last creature to go around was a scallop, which is actually a shell. When the man picked it up out of the water it opened it’s “mouth” and it spat out water. This is supposed to propel it forward in the water, but it doesn’t work so well when in the air. I was surprised to realise that this is what I eat every time I go to Red Lobsters. I’d never realised scallops were simply the meat inside of a shell, and that a shell could—well—feel. 

 After that, we went upstairs, which had an exhibit on how fast animals swam, and also boasted a imitation of a Mastodon’s jaw. Mastodon’s were giant sharks alive when the dinosaurs where, and luckily for Hannah, who really hates sharks, they died off billions of years ago. Victoria and I got our pictures taken inside of its jaw. We’re both very tall, and we fit there with room to spare. A mastodon could have swallowed us whole.

 With the photo shoot over, we went and had lunch in the cafeteria. It was delicious, and cheap, which I appreciated. Victoria had soup, Wheaton bread, and a doughnut. Hannah had a sausage roll (which are these really amazing sausages wrapped in flaky pastry), apple pie, and tea. I had a hamburger and tea and a Frankenstein cupcake.

With the aquarium basically exhausted, we went to the museum and spent the rest of our time in the gift shop. I bought a little Macaroni penguin, which I named Porter, who is currently watching me type. 

 We safely left the aquarium a little after two, and sat outside waiting in the sunshine for the last stragglers. A large black dog, wet from a dip in the nearby pond, came up, and it let Victoria, Hannah, a male RA, and I pet it and coo. Mel, who had been wandering around, appeared, and we got back on the bus and I got to again watch the green hills of Ireland slip by, reaching out to touch the glass. A black dog was playing in the turf. People were walking and biking in the afternoon. The cows and sheep were still grazing. Hannah was trying to take a nap in the seat in front of me, trying to shield her eyes from the sun with a little curtain. Victoria was listening to the Hunger Games soundtrack and staring out of her window.

I closed my eyes, and imagined the feel of sharkskin, and imagined swimming through the ocean with it at my side. I saw the sandy bottom of the ocean floor, with stingrays hiding and waiting for its prey. I imagined dolphins and giant turtles and whales, but mostly I imagined the giant forms of large sharks, and reaching out to see what their skin felt like.

When I opened my eyes again, we were in South Belfast. Home, I thought. A few seats ahead of me, I caught Mel looking at me, and I smiled. I’m up, I’m up.

A few minutes later we were rolling into Elms Village. The air smelled sweet with something I couldn’t identify. The sun was bright, but there was a small chill in the air. The yellow leaves were dancing in the trees.

It felt like autumn—a Michigan autumn.

What Happens at the Dinner Table

This week I posted my ballot. For two weeks now I’ve been on edge, waiting for my ballot to come in the mail; I watched Hannah’s and Victoria’s come, and from home I heard that my father had received his safely. This Monday, my beloved ballot finally came to me. By this time, my political woes were causing small ripples in Holly Grove 4; and suddenly we were swapping stories of politicians, views, and socialism.

One of the girls in my dorm, Fiona, told me she identifies with socialism. This was a staggering shock. When I first arrived in Belfast, I noticed the Karl Marx posters hung up by a Socialist Group on campus, and I saw other posters talking about Capitalism in Crisis. I filed this away, attributing it to the rantings and ravings of a minority group.

It was not until last week, when I accidentally found myself in a the middle of an abortion debate, that I realised socialism is more prominent than I thought. For after the lecture a group of women gathered around and one said, rather loudly, “I’m a socialist, can’t you tell?”

Because my high school raised me in accordance with accepted American teachings, my first response was to fly across the room, put a hand over her mouth, close the curtains, sit the woman down, give her a cup of tea, and tell her calmly that we were going to get through this. My second instinct was that I must not have been paying very much attention to my high school teachers, because I really hadn’t the faintest idea of what socialism is, except that a few years ago there were Socialist Obama posters going around the web.                                

I took my troubles to Fiona, who is a saint for listening to all of my Northern Irish woes, and when she told me she, too, was a socialist, once I had fought the ghost of McCarthy in my head, I sat down and started trying to research it. I know Fiona is a rational person, so it must be me, I reasoned, that the problem lay with, and not the entire country of Northern Ireland.

This bothered nobody except Hannah, who thinks that it is a crazy idea to supplement 300 page novels satirizing mankind (Gulliver's Travels) and 20 page poems about how a haircut is a symbolic rape (Rape of the Lock) with Karl Marx and The Soul of Man under Socialism books. She, like a sane human being, is reading Derek Landy books in her free time, which means she bursts into laughter every time she turns a page, and I have to puzzle over whether or not Oscar Wilde is being facetious.

What bothers my Norn Irish flatmates is that we do not understand the charm in Obama.

Hannah is vocal about her political opinions, whereas I tend to hover on the sidelines and watch the debates, nodding and biting my lip. When she got her ballot, she made clear that she was going to support Mitt Romney, because she does not like Obama.

“How can you not like Obama?” the girls asked in a chorus, wide-eyed with suprise.

We gave long, descriptive answers, to which they politely half-listened. “Why do you like Obama?” we asked.

We received varied answers, such as his voice, his age, his good looks, how Michelle Obama was on Disney Channel. Hannah shook her head at me, and said, "All Europeans are the same; they all like Obama," and she told me about her Italian teacher in high school, who had been enamoured of our president.

 Realising we were stubborn about our presidential nominees, told us to vote for Vermin Supreme, and gasped in astonishment when we told them we had no idea who he was. Chelsea whipped out her iPhone, and soon we were learning all about my favorite write-in candidate (who describes himself as a fascist. I’m sensing a pattern here.) Suddenly we were on the topic of their politics, and they told us all about London’sdrugged-up mayor as we swapped misbehaving politician stories (such as the incident where a man threw his shoes at George Bush).

The day before this, I had gone and posted my ballot. I clutched it tightly to my chest as I took it to the post office. I felt as if I had my weight in gold in my backpack, and was so nervous I could hardly notice the leaves falling off of the trees, or feel grateful for the sunny weather we were having. When I got to the post office, it was empty, and I had no excuse to loiter and check over my ballot again. A woman glared at me until I stepped forward and asked to know how much I needed to pay for my ballot. 

"Put it on there," she said, nodding sharply at a little silver weight by me. There was a glass partition between her and I, and it was hard to understand her at all. I placed it on the scale and watched the numbers rise.

"Pound ninety," she said. 

"I'm sorry?" 

"A pound ninety." 

 I pulled the change from my pocket, accidentally pulling out two gold pounds and then two 50p coins. She deftly readjusted my change, handing me back one of my pound coins, and then gave me my change. I put the money away, and then taped my ballot together agonisingly slowly. 

The woman noticed my reluctance to let go of it and said, “Is it important?”

“Yes,” I said, looking sorrowfully at it. If I could, I would have escorted it all the miles back to Michigan, just to ensure it arrived safely.

“You want overnight shipping?”

I asked how much. It came out to seven pound, which was too dear, and so in the end I handed it over with only a stamp and a blue sticker that read AIR MAIL.

“Shall I post it?” she asked. By this time she was annoyed with me, even though there was no one in line behind me. I was wasting her time with my strange attachment to this brown envelope.

“Please,” I said, and she took it from me and tossed it cruelly into a cotton bag with other people’s bills and letters and lives. I had to stifle a cry. 

To cheer me up (that's actually a lie. It had nothing to do with cheering me up) Victoria had us sign up for a trip to an aquarium on Saturday, which I am fairly excited about. Victoria and I are hoping for sharks. Hannah is not. 

What did end up cheering me up was our visit to China China today. It was a Chinese Buffet, which offered me my first taste of duck (gamey, chicken-like stuff that I will not eat again), and some old favorites. it went well, until Hannah ate too much. Then we went shopping for Halloween costumes in all of the thrift stores. Victoria wants to be Little Red Riding Hood. Hannah is going to be a Go-Go girl. I bought a book on anthropology and called it a moot point, because I'm probably not going to do anything for Halloween anyway, so why would I need a costume? 

We trudged home (my feet have been bothering me again),  and met up with two British girls, Jennifer and Rebecca, for our Friday night movie. Last week we watched Easy A, and tonight we watched Notting Hill. One of the characters was purportedly Welsh, and if that was an accurate accent, I don't think I care for it all that much. 

What is truly alarming is how much I've taken to British English. It sounds affected when I say things like "biscuit" and "cheerio" and "mum", even though it slides off of everyone elses' tongue. But it's gotten to the point that words like "cookie" and "mom" sound weird, even downright wrong. A few nights ago I was watching an American show I got for free on iTunes, that new retelling Beauty and the Beast, and the accents bothered me so much that I got a headache. Soon I'll start calling "Zee" "Zed" and I'll stop forgetting that there's a u in labour. 

Then I'll come back home, and I'll have completely forgotten how to spell. 

But, until then, I will enjoy spelling words differently, and I will eat my custard biscuits and toast my Wheaton bread, and I will read Karl Marx. 

Although I'm not certain if I'll clear immigrations with that particular author on my nook.

A Flash of Silver (Courtesy of Belfast Ghost Tours)

Jack the Ripper, as most of you know, is one of the world’s most famous murderers. In the Victorian era, which idolised criminals as often as it made examples of them, the Ripper tales were both daringly, horribly romantic, and just plain scary. The good citizens of Whitechapel feared to step out of their house after dark, because who could know if next time the Ripper would take a woman from good standing and slit her throat, alongside the women of the night?

I’ve heard many theories about who Jack really was. I have read books that claim to be written by him, or by someone who knew him, and I have read many of the letters supposedly sent by Jack to the newspapers. It’s been surmised he was American, as many of his so-called letters saluted the addressee with the word “Boss,” then American slang. Because of the cut of his victims, it’s been widely accepted that he was a doctor, and a smart man, as he was never caught (although his spelling left a lot to be desired).

One theory I had never heard of before, and one that was told to me on a ghost tour this week, was that Jack was a sailor.

Earlier I brought up the Prince Albert Tower, which stands by the River Lagan and tilts to the side, just a wee bit, because of the natural shifting of the ground beneath Belfast. The name Belfast is actually a British bastardization of the Celtic words for mouth of the sandy ford, so this city rests on top of a river, and the parts that are not built over the water is built over bog and marsh. Boglands are notoriously unstable, and so over time the clocktower has shifted ever so slightly. Local legend has it that it tilts from the weight of so many prostitutes. And so we go to the year of the Ripper murders, before the Prince Albert tower had earned its tilt, and prostitutes lingered the city streets after nightfall.

It is night, and drizzling. The wind carries a sharp bite, and even when it stops nipping at your ears and neck the air carries a damp chill. Winter has come early to Belfast. While it is the weekend, and all of the ships are moored safely in the dock, their sailors filling up the local pubs, there are not many people walking the city streets. It is too cold a night for that.

Walking up and down the streets, smiling suggestively at every man that passes her by, is a young lady of the night. Her face is lined prematurely from the stress of the slums, from the weight of lovers whose names she never knew. Most of the men who pass her by refuse to look at her, staring studiously at their polished shoes. These are the ones she taunts and calls after, knowing that anything is better than being invisible. Even their hatred does not burrow so deeply into her heart as their sideways glances. Other men wink at her, but they’ve got girlfriends at home, or they’re poor as church mice. One young man sidles up to her, not a tuppence in his coat pocket, and tries to suggest that they spend an evening together. She sends him away, and he shouts angrily after her, calling her a wench and a jade. She ignores him, tucking her coat more closely around her.

It’s not like she wants to do this. She needs the money. It’s not easy, living in the Belfast slums, with cholera spreading like wildfire, with the rain and damp seeping into everything like a stain, from the walls of her little apartment to her clothes. For every man she beds, it’s closer to the day that her little sister doesn’t have to work in the linen mills, knee-deep in the putrid water that surrounds the machines, slipping her white little fingers into the clogs and gears of the mill whenever the contraptions get jammed. Just last week one of the other prostitute’s sons got his fingers caught and was sucked into the machine, where he was crushed to death. How old had he been? Seven? Eight?

“Are you all right, miss?” a man’s voice says. A customer.

Every man should be treated like a potential client, the woman who ran the brothel always told her. So she puts a flirtatious smile on her face and whips around to face him. “Oh, I’m fine,” she purrs.

“That man looked like he was bothering you.”

He wasn’t a bad-looking lad, she could tell that right away, even with the poor lighting. His teeth looked relatively good. That was important. It was terrible kissing old men, their teeth brown and black, or, worse, gone. And his accent—British, maybe; she thought there might have been a hint of Welch hidden in there somewhere. It didn’t matter. He wore the uniform of a British sailor, which meant he had some pocket money, at least, if he hadn’t spent it all on drink. “Between you and me, I don’t mind being bothered,” she says, “so long as it’s you doing the bothering. You’re not from around here, are you, stranger? D’you want me to help make your stay…memorable?”

His grin widens, and her heart skips a beat—not out of love, or lust, which she stopped feeling years ago, but fear. It’s his face—for a moment, it looks wolfish, dark, alien. But in a moment it is gone, and he is charming as he takes her arm in his and leads her down a nearby alley.       

It is not the alley that she would have chosen, had she had a say in the matter. (She rarely did. Men preferred to pick the spots of their trysts, where they thought no one they recognised would see them.) There were queer stories about that place, about screams and phantom fingers that reached out to touch you. But she followed, falling into routine. How many times had she done this, now? There was no telling, no counting. This was her lot in life. All that mattered was his silver.

And so it goes according to routine, all until she sees a flash of silver—and there’s a knife to her throat.

She screams. Her mum always said she had a cry to rouse the dead, even as a wee baby, and she screams now as she has never screamed before. He wrestles her to the ground, and she feels the silver give a little slip into her skin. A trickle of warm blood drips down her neck. He has pressed the back of her head against the brick of the alleyway, and he is pressing down hard on her chest and her windpipe. Oh, God, she thinks; this is the end. And I haven’t even repented yet. Still she screams, and she digs her nails into the flesh of his face, which again has turned wolfish and evil and dark.

She wishes, somewhere in the back of her soul, that she had let the young lad without a

penny take her.  

The knife is digging deep, and there are black dots in front of her eyes. She can’t see the man’s face anymore, and imagination takes over; she sees red devil’s eyes and horns sticking out of his hair. There’s a strange drumming in her head, and then his mouth is pressed against her ear, whispering something with warm, sticky breath.

And then the pressure is gone.

Have I died? She wonders faintly, but no. There’s a policeman sitting in front of her, shouting. She can barely hear him. Two others are wrestling her assailant to the ground, patting him down. They have the knife wet with her blood in their hands, and they find another one tucked by his heart, and then haul him away.

Later, they tell her that they think he is Jack the Ripper. They have sent him on to Whitechapel, but they can’t prove anything—he is only guilty of trying to kill a prostitute. “Did he say anything to you?” they ask. They beg her to explain how they met, what happened. She refuses to tell.

“He simply flashed a coin, and we went down the alley. Then he pulled the knife,” she says, although she knows she’s not been paid. It doesn’t trouble her. It’s worth her fee to escape with her life.

“But surely,” they say, frustrated now, “He must have said something to you?”  

She remembers his breath on her neck, and her body crawls with revulsion. He said something to her, that night, a devil’s curse.

“No,” is all she says. “He said nothing to me. Nothing at all.”

A month passes. The policemen make a point of telling her that her assailant is free and walking the streets of England. This terrifies her, although she keeps her face blank. After all, there is a sea between England and Belfast. And she’s going to America on the next boat. An ocean is an awfully hard distance to cross.

From the new world, she hears that Jack the Ripper has killed another prostitute. She merely hurries past the newsboys crying the news with glee, and if anyone asks why she’s distressed, she merely claims that she’s homesick.