The aquatics section has forty tanks and each one has a heater, a filter and a card on the front with the water readings, written daily, because fish die of a number you did not read. Tank thirty one is empty. Drained, dry, the heater unplugged and on the shelf. Every night it is at twenty six degrees on the probe. The filter, which is dry, runs. And the card on the front, which is blank, has readings on it every morning in pencil, with a fish named at the bottom in the column for stock, and the fish was sold in 1998.
I am the aquatics manager at a garden centre and tank thirty one is the one I do not sell from, because there is nothing in it, and something is being looked after.
The tanks.
Forty, on racks, each with a heater and a filter and a probe that logs the temperature to the system, and a card on the glass where whoever is on that morning writes the readings: temperature, the chemistry, what is in the tank. It is the way fish are kept alive in a shop, and it is the way I know who has not done their job.
Thirty one is empty. Drained in the spring, dried, the heater unplugged and on the shelf beside it, the filter dry.
At night it is at twenty six degrees.
The readings.
The probe in thirty one, which is in a dry tank, logs twenty six from dusk to dawn. The filter runs. I have heard it, the hum and the trickle, from a filter with no water in it. And the card on the glass, which I have wiped, has readings in the morning. Temperature, twenty six. The chemistry, written as it was written in the nineties, with the old units. And in the stock column, one fish. A named kind, a particular one, a fish the section stocked once and has not since, and the card has it as, one, and a note, in the same hand, which says, settled in well.
What has been checked.
The probe, replaced. It reads twenty six in a dry tank.
The tank, at night, by me, in front of it. Dry. The glass was warm. I put my hand on it and it was the warmth of a tropical tank, and inside, in the dry, there was the sound of water moving, and the filter's trickle, and the light over the tank, which was off, was on, the low night light that fish tanks have, and in the light, in the dry tank, something moved. A shape. The length of a finger, turning at the glass, the slow turn a fish does when it sees a face on the other side, and I have kept fish all my life and I know the turn, and the tank was dry.
Who.
The card's hand is the hand that is on every card in the section's old box, which is a box of cards from before the system, going back to the eighties, and the hand belongs to the man who ran aquatics then, the staff say, who had kept fish since he was a boy and who had, they say, a tank at home that was the best anybody had seen, and who had sold a particular fish to a particular customer in 1998, a fish he had raised himself, and had been, the staff say, uneasy about it, because the customer was a child and the child's tank was small, and had written the card for the fish the day it went, with the note, and had kept the card.
He died a few years after. The card is in the box. I have it. It is the card that is being written every morning, the same readings, the same fish, the same note, settled in well, which he wrote on the day he sold it and could not have known.
He is keeping the fish. The one he sold and was uneasy about. In a dry tank, at twenty six degrees, with the filter going, every night, because he did not trust the small tank, and he was right not to, I would think, and he has been keeping it ever since.
What is done about it.
Thirty one is on the system every night at twenty six degrees with the heater on the shelf and the supplier has been asked how a probe reads a temperature in air and has said that it cannot, and has been shown the log, and has said it again.
What I do.
I manage aquatics.
A fish in a shop tank is looked at. Somebody stands in front of it every day and looks, because that is how you see the things the readings do not. He is doing the readings. Nobody is doing the looking.
So I look. At night, after close, I stand in front of thirty one for the ten minutes I would stand in front of a tank with a fish in it, and I look at the dry glass, and I see what I see, which is a shape turning in the night light, and I say what I would say, which is, looking good, mate, and I check the card, and I initial it, under his readings, the way a second person initials a card to say it has been checked.
I have put water in it. That was last week. I could not stand in front of a dry tank and say looking good any longer. Twenty six degrees, filtered, matured, planted, everything a tank needs and no fish, and the card in the morning, under his readings, had one more line, in his hand, which was, thank you, and the shape in the night light is easier to see now, with water to turn in, and I have stopped planning to stock that tank.