#34

Somewhere in the realm of my mid-20s, I was living in Sydney and I got a call from my Mum. My parents lived interstate and Mum liked to call me up to catch up on a regular basis, often at inconvenient times, but it’s something I miss now that I’m living on the other side of the world. On this occasion she was calling to tell me about Sarah.

Sarah was Dad’s pet Saratoga. A Saratoga, also called a Jardini, is a type of native Australian fish, quite elegant with a long body and large scales. Dad always described it as “an ancient fish”, because apparently this species is so old that it used to hang with the dinosaurs.

“What’s up, Mum?” I asked as I answered the phone.

“Well!” Mum replied, dramatic and huffy, “I just spent the last few hours helping your father resuscitate a fish.”

“Er…what?”

So it turned out that my Dad had decided not to keep Sarah anymore and he’d instead given her to his friends who owned his favourite local Chinese restaurant. Not as a menu item of course, but as a decorative display at the front entrance. As a beloved pet, my Dad was concerned that Sarah would be stressed during the 20 minute drive to the other side of town so he decided to drug her with fish anaesthetic to ease her traumatic journey.

So he squeezed some drops of fish anaesthetic into Sarah’s tank. Unfortunately, he misread the instructions on the side of the bottle and accidentally dosed her with one hundred times the recommended amount. A few minutes later, Sarah went belly-up.

“So we spent the next few hours moving the bloody fish through a tank of clean water to get the water flowing through its gills again.”

“Wow,” I said, “Was she okay?”

“Oh yes, she was fine in the end. New owners are very happy, fish is happy, Dad is happy, everyone is very happy.”

Fish was very happy indeed in fact. A few weeks later, Mum gave me an update on Sarah’s new restaurant lifestyle. Apparently at the end of each night, the big ancient fish would stare through the glass of her tank at her new owner who would feel rather sorry for her and decide to feed her a special treat. What was the treat?

“Moreton bay bugs!” announced my mother.