It was a shell shop. Here on the high street, just down the road from the
mall, the place sold seashells. There's a nursery rhyme about someone who sells
seashells; she does it at the beach. When I was a kid, and very much in the
habit of collecting and hoarding shells, even then I thought that this poor
woman was probably wasting her time down there on the sea-shore. Seashells are pretty, sure, and of course
everybody wants them, but the point is they're free. You can pick them straight
up off the beach, and looking for them is most of the fun. Well, ‘fun’ is too
strong a word - looking for shells is really just busywork. There’s not a lot
else to do at the beach, and finding more and better specimens than your sisters
is a way to give the whole hot sandy beach-going exercise a point. Once they're
home, dried off, no longer shiny, competing for attention with
brightly-coloured plastic and toys that actually do things, shells gather dust
and lose their appeal.
If I thought about it - and I did, being somewhat given to pointless
introspection, even at a young age - I assumed that the seashell lady was
probably operating out of some kind of barrow, wheeling her shells through
streets broad and narrow like Molly Mallone. Even if she wasn't shifting many
units, competing as she was with an entire beachful of freely-available
samples, I reassured myself with the thought that at least her overheads must
be low. And, I reasoned, she probably had a comfortable side-line in ice creams
or hotdogs on sticks. The notion that peddling seashells could be sufficiently
lucrative to sustain any more than an itinerant seaside stall never crossed my young
mind, yet here we were. Standing on the pavement, me a grown-up now but with a
no less impressionistic grasp of retail economics, faced with the fanciful
notion that a person could pay high-street rent on the back of a trade in manky
old crustaceans.
I’ve walked down this road fairly frequently, and it is maybe a testament
to my general obliviousness that I’d never noticed this particular shop before.
I mean, it didn’t really stand out; the signage was nothing flash. Faded paint
on cracked boards blended into a block of similar low-turnover mall victims, tired
but trying. The neighbours were a hair salon named for some hilarious wordplay,
a record store with a window display featuring an album released four years
ago, and a bridal boutique that just had to be a front for something more
sinister. It rubbed up against them without catching the eye particularly,
although once you registered the contents of the window cabinets you would
definitely look again. There were some impressive individual specimens –
oversized conches, a delicately swirling nautilus, the sort of things that
would really show your sisters who was boss, from a shell-finding point of view
– but pride of place was reserved for the creative output of an artisan clearly
possessed of an obsessive attention to detail, a singular imagination, and considerable
time to combine the two. Dragons, horses, little dioramas, herds of elephants, flocks
of geese, mermaids of course and dolphins of all sizes jostled for space in the
window, each lovingly rendered in tiny seashells. I mentally raised my hat to
whomever it was that had allowed their need for self-expression to take them to
such a bizarre place, and to whatever quirk of the laws of supply and demand
had provided that person with retail frontage on the high street. The patina of
dust on several of the pieces suggested that this craftsperson was not in step
with the tastes of the general public, which made the whole thing more
mysterious, as well as totally awesome. Why had I never noticed this treasure house before? Particularly
given that even out here on the pavement, the air smelled like those
shrimp-flavoured ‘grain snacks’ that I seem to be unable to stop myself buying at
the Korean supermarket.
"Oh right, here we are." Ms. Millicent Crow sounded as though
this was where we'd been planning to end up all along.
"Is this where we'd been planning to end up all along?" I never know where we're going when we go for
our walks. “I didn’t even know this place existed.”
"Yeah, I told you. I want to
get a seahorse."
"Oh right, the seahorse. I thought that was just a sort of
aspirational goal, like how I want to get a 1970s telecaster. It never crossed
my mind that you were planning on actioning it. I didn't think such a thing was
possible."
"Well, here we are, actioning it. Watch
me."
So we went in, and if you can imagine what a shop that sells seashells
might look like, that's how the place looked.
Long and thin, low ceiling, shelves, dust. And shells. A lot of shells. When
you find them on the beach, seashells come in all the colours of the rainbow,
streaks and swirls of purples and reds, subtle yellows and faint tinges of
blue. You really have to see them close up, clean, and in good light to appreciate
that, though. En masse, in poor light,
on dirty shelves, shells are basically cream, the colour people have been
painting the villas around here since the mid-nineties. The colour charts call it 'Dutch White,' or
'Belgian Vanilla,' but its more honest name is 'English Tooth,' a sort of
nicotine-stained shade of ivory, if the ivory had been soaked in a month of weak
morning teas. The light was dim, and the bone-coloured shells sat on long shelves
and racks like skulls in a catacomb. And there was the smell, of course. It’s
hard to describe the smell, but think about how even a very clean and
sun-bleached seashell smells a little when you get up close. Salty, a bit fishy. Dry, sandy, sunny, dead. Multiply
that faint smell by the thousands of shells on the shelves here, and you get
some idea of the atmosphere in the shop. Not unpleasant so much as pervasive, not
going away. You could touch the air, and it made me want to wash.
There was nobody else browsing in the shop, and the counter, half-way along
the wall on one side, was empty. The low light and general cobwebbedness gave
me the impression that customers were an infrequent intrusion here, and it was
pretty obvious that this was the kind of place where an odd-looking man of
indeterminate age could quietly appear behind the counter at any point,
seemingly without moving or opening any doors. He would be wearing the sort of
garment that I think people call a 'smock,' which is a strange word when you
mutter it to yourself in a dimly-lit and odd-smelling seashell emporium on the
high street.
"What did you say?" we were browsing aimlessly among shells that
seemed to be jumbled up, displayed in no logical order. But how would you
logically order shells? The logical thing would be to not have a shell shop in
the first place.
"Oh, nothing. Um. Smock. Strange word."
"What?"
"Smock. Sounds like hitting
somebody in the face with sock full of meat."
"Ok... why are we whispering?”
“Um, I dunno. Weird.”
“Have you seen any-"
"Can I help you?" An odd-looking man of indeterminate age had quietly
appeared behind the counter, seemingly without moving or opening any doors. He
was wearing a smock.
"Oh! Ah yeah. Yes. Hello. Do
you have any, that is, I'm looking for and I wondered if you had one, I thought
maybe - do you have, ah, a seahorse? At all? A seahorse?"
Millicent Crow doesn't usually babble, but the man had the sort of
unreadable expression that a police officer wears when his partner is asking
you if there's anything else you’d like to mention in any of your other
pockets. An expression at once bored and disapproving, accompanied by an
uncomfortable silence impossible not to
fill with something that feels strangely like a confession.
"I just, I was going to do a picture. You know. Paint it? The ah, the seahorse? I wanted to paint
a seahorse. A picture of one."
The man looked around, left and right, apparently checking to see whether
there was anybody else in his seashell shop.
It was a pointless exercise; we were the only customers, and the thick
dust on the floor towards the back of what I was starting to mentally call the
'grotto' looked like it had been undisturbed for a while. He put his hands flat
on the counter, paused significantly, then he spoke carefully, as though for
the record.
“A seahorse.”
“Mm-hm. To paint?”
"I wouldn't have one of those."
The only word for his reaction was this: disgust. This man, standing in his shop full of musty
old shells, the dried-up remains of a thousand sea creatures – not to mention
the idiosyncratic artworks created in that medium, presumably by his own hands
– this man was responding as though we'd walked in off the street and asked him
to sell us a human fetus to broil up and serve at lunch with the Queen. He
wanted nothing more to do with us, these crass interlopers who had waltzed into
his shop and violated some sort of strict, esoteric taboo.
"Ah, no? I thought you might, you know, since..." Ms. Crow made a
gesture encompassing what was undeniably the sort of establishment that you
would think would sell a seahorse.
"I mean like a dried one.
You know, stuffed maybe? Not in a
tank."
"No." Disgust.
"Do you think you might be getting one?" The mind boggled at the
thought of this man's supply chain. Armies of children combing the beaches of
the South Pacific, a fleet of tramp steamers ferrying crates of shells to a
warehouse in some port town, there to be cleaned and polished in a workroom
full of little old nuns operating clanking machinery, powered by a system of
leather belts connected to wheel driven in endless circles by a patient musk
ox. The retail product would be delivered to the shop once a week by bicycle
courier, and this man or the elderly aunt who was undoubtedly back in the
stockroom somewhere would sign for it in flowing copperplate, slipping a
mimeograph of this week's orders into the delivery boy's saddlebag.
"No."
"Do you know where we might be able to -"
"Can't sell a seahorse."
"I beg your pardon?”
He sighed, as though dealing with a slow learner. "You can't sell a
seahorse. Not these days."
"You mean-"
"That's right. It isn’t legal." From his fleeting grimace,
it was clear that he pined for the halcyon days of the unregulated dried
seahorse trade. It was easy to assume, looking at the yellowing price tags and
the clear lack of custom, that things had not been the same in the dried
sea-creatures business since they banned all the cool stuff.
The three of us looked at each other awkwardly. We’d had no idea, walking
into his establishment, that we’d be asking this guy to violate the CITES
treaty for us. All we wanted was to find a dried seahorse to draw, and now we
looked like the sort of people who go about the place shooting elephants and
turning their feet into wastepaper baskets.
It seemed incongruous that such rules should even apply in this strange
little grotto, this otherworldy sea-shell merchant’s where a mermaid fabricated
from hot-glued periwinkles was the standard stock in trade. It didn’t
immediately make sense that what went on in this rarefied environment could
have any material impact on the population of seahorses swimming gaily through
the ocean blue, and the fact that this fantastical concern was bound by such
mundane constraints as fisheries regulations seemed bizarre when its very
existence seemed to fly in the face of basic economics.
We couldn’t press the point. We had no leverage, and I think we felt out of
our depth – at sea, suddenly. If the man had an old stock of contraband
sea-creatures stuffed behind a loose brick in the chimney, he certainly wasn’t
going to stick his neck out for day-traders like us. He didn’t say another word, but his expression
was eloquent enough. ‘You people,’ the expression said, ‘you come and you go.
You know nothing of the passion of the collector. My stock is wasted on your
kind – wasted! Coming in here, babbling about paints and drawing.’ We walked
out backwards, and his expression followed us down the street, muttering.
We went that way again a couple of weeks ago, and the place was boarded up.
Almost like it was never there, but the air still smelled like starfish.
All of the pictures are by Emily Cater, aka Millicent Crow.
