To anyone else, Caesar would have seemed an ordinary goldfish, swimming in his orange, bug-eyed way around his tank. To me, though, he was immortal, thanks to one of those family stories that mean so much when you’re a child.
Dad, a Methodist minister in Bradford, was about to leave for a church meeting when he realised that Caesar had propelled himself out of his water and on to the carpet, his orange colouring fading into the 70s brown pattern. Assuming that Caesar had swum to the great aquarium in the sky, my reverend father conducted the traditional fish funeral by chucking him in the toilet, but on contact with the water, the fish began to move.
Surprised, Dad hauled him out, used a paintbrush to remove the carpet dust, and plopped him back in the tank, where he resumed his seemingly contented swim. Dad’s colleagues were unimpressed that his excuse for being late for the discussion of saving souls was the need to save the life of a fish.
After his close shave with the Bradford sewage network, Caesar’s graceful brown-tipped fins disappeared, and it was this reduced creature that I grew up with and came to love through the 1980s.
He lived under a light blue lid to keep his sense of adventure – or nihilistic self-destruction – at bay. Every holiday, I’d put a white sphere of dissolving food in his tank and, when we returned, rush back into the house to check he was OK. When we moved house, he was transported from Yorkshire down the M1 in the car’s trailer, water slopping everywhere. This seemed to be no trial for Caesar, despite the meagre puddle left in the tank by the end of the journey.
As he got older, becoming a teenager like me, there were scares. We’d find him floating listlessly on his side, but he could always be revived in an ice-cream box filled with fresh rainwater – until the time he couldn’t. Caesar’s reign came to an end at the ripe old goldfish age of 14. There was no flushing, and he was buried in the garden, with appropriate rites.
I had spent hours watching Caesar swimming around. I was as attached to him as other people are to their dogs and hamsters. I have wondered since if there was a deeper reason for this surprising depth of connection with a pet fish. I was born prematurely around the time of Caesar’s leap, and Dad rushed to the hospital from another church meeting to be warned that neither I nor my mum were likely to make it. Thankfully, doctors saved us both. I’d arrived by emergency caesarean, and perhaps I grew up with two founding stories of survival and endurance, mine and Caesar’s, somehow intertwined.
My wife has a different take. After we met, she soon encountered my tendency towards spiralling depression and bleak moods. In one of those conversations where you join the dots of a lover’s life with ephemeral details – their childhood holidays, school strife and pets – I told her about Caesar the Immortal and his jump out of the tank. She laughed. “Of course you had a suicidal goldfish.”
