I can’t sell my car, it smells like fish

“Have you got one of the new company cars?” I said.

“No.” she said

“Why not?” I said

“I can’t sell my car, it smells like fish.” She said.



My regular readers will know that I am not a great conversationalist when it comes to small talk. I find it dull and so my mind wanders and I will say inappropriate things or, more often, simply wander off. At corporate functions, this is something of a liability and so I am ever vigilant against telling stories that begin, ‘well we were completely munted of course and then…’ and I try to respond politely to observations about the weather or television.

At my current employer, the danger is Friday night drinks. They occur on the company premises and occasionally feature members of the ‘senior management team’ and therefore stories about things that my friends or I did while munted are not appropriate and wandering off in the middle of a fascinating story about how difficult it is to find a good tailor these days might well lead to a shortening of one’s contract.

At Friday night drinks, I nurse a single light beer for 30 minutes while nodding constantly and mumbling ‘a lot of weather we’ve been having lately’ at what I judge to be appropriate intervals. My contract continues, so the intervals must be reasonably well judged.

I’ll pause here, to note as an aside that I have observed that in a room of people, up to about 20 people that is, more than about 50 and it doesn’t happen, there will occasionally be a hush pass over the room at random intervals as the various conversations ebb and flow. For some reason, each conversation in the room synchronises for a brief moment and everyone stops talking. Usually these moments occur just as I am announcing loudly that I am departing to visit the facilities.

I mention this, because it will be relevant later in the story. Keep it in mind.

So it was with no small amount of glee that I heard the response ‘I can’t sell my car, it smells like fish’. It’s not an expected comment and promises a story. It may not be unique, but it is certainly an unexpected juxtaposition of those particular words. Google for one, has never encountered it. It sounds to me like something that would be found in an Hungarian phrase book.

“Why does your car smell like fish?” I asked. It seemed like a reasonable response to the comment, but the reaction was slightly forlorn. She stared at her drink and her mouth took on the form of a straight line. Various causes of a car smelling like fish flitted through my brain, not all of them appropriate for mixed company and so I held my silence.

“We went to a koi auction.” She said.

“A what?”

“A koi auction. You know, koi, the fish. Koi carp.”

“There are koi auction?”

“Oh yes, my husband collects koi.”

“And your car smells like fish from koi auctions?”

“No, well sort of, but no.”

“OK” I said. When a story is in the offing, the best strategy is to say as little as possible and wait. I adopted this strategy. She sipped her drink, set her mouth briefly into a straight line again while she carried on some sort of internal discussion, turned to me and told the story. I hope I can do it justice.

Her husband was rather taken with koi and had built a pond, or a series of connected ponds it seems, in the yard and had now reached a point where he felt it was ready for the koi. Koi auctions being an actual thing, the family - mother, father, daughter - were bundled into the car and taken off to the koi auctions.

The visit was successful and husband had purchased a total of eight koi. One of them was especially large and the others varied from middling to small.

“We had a big plastic tub for the koi and we had each koi in its own plastic bag of water to take them home. You can’t put them in together, they have to be in separate bags while they’re travelling.

“So we tried to put all the plastic bags in the tub, but my husband had bought more koi than he first planned to, so although we had most of them in the tub in the back of the car, the big koi was in a plastic bag on the back seat.”

“Oh dear.” I said.

“Yes.” She said. “So about 10 minutes after leaving the auction, there’s this almighty ‘SPLASH!’ and my daughter, who was in the back seat, screams. My husband nearly crashed the car and then we pulled over to the side of the road. The big koi’s bag had burst and it was flipping and flopping around. My daughter was screaming and had climbed up the back seat onto the ledge at the back of the car and was basically trying to exit the car by pushing out the rear window. My husband just kept saying the same bad word over and over again.

“So now my husband is climbing into the back of the car where the big koi has somehow flopped its way under one of the front seats. He’s trying to get the big koi out from under the seat, I’m trying to calm my daughter enough to get her out of the car and my daughter, who I thought would be traumatised for life, is now actually quite fascinated by the entire episode and peering intently at her father.”

“Quite an incident.” I said.

“Oh, it’s not over yet.” She said and I clapped my hands with glee. “My husband starts yelling ‘get some water’ and so I looked around, but we were in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred meters up the road was a shop of some sort, so I said to my daughter to run up and see if they would give us some water.

My husband still couldn’t get hold of the big koi and it was wedged under the front seat. They’re very slippery you know?”

I concurred that koi must indeed be very slippery and my story-teller was kind enough to ignore that my comment was made around muffled laughter. At this time, there may have been a tear on my cheek as well.

“My husband finally got hold of the big koi and managed to put it into the plastic tub on top of the bags of other koi. At about this time, my daughter returned with a small paper cup full of water.”

I must confess that the image of an eight-year-old girl returning with a small paper cup of water tipped me over the edge and my muffled laughter became outright laughter. Tears that had previously only threatened, now poured happily down my cheeks and my story-teller bore this with the good grace of one who realises the absurdity of a situation, but feels obliged to go on nonetheless.

“My husband was frantic. The big koi was the most expensive one you see, and so he asked me to go to the shop and get water, which I did. I hurriedly explained the situation to the people in the shop and although they didn’t seem to believe me, they gave me a bucket of water. I think just to make me go away.

“I came back with the bucket of water to find my husband under the car. The big koi had burst the plastic bags of some of the other koi and one of the other koi had flopped out of the tub and ended up under the car. My husband’s legs were poked out on the road-side of the car and cars were driving past and so I was worried about someone running over his legs. I stood on the other side of him and tried to shoosh the cars away.”

If I had calmed slightly from my earlier howling, that was lost at the prospect of my interlocutor ‘shooshing’ away cars. Once more I was helpless with laughter.

“The koi that were still in the tub were splashing all the water out and so there seemed to be no point putting the bucket of water into the tub. My daughter was crouched on the other side of the road looking under the car and yelling ‘There he is! There he is!’ and occasionally yelling ‘You got him, you got him… awwww, you missed him.’

“Eventually my husband managed to get the koi that had gone under the car and put it back into the tub. Then he took the bucket of water and poured that into the tub too. He said he didn’t care about them travelling together any more and they could all just stay in the tub.

“Unfortunately the one that slid under the car was especially keen to be free and the extra water in the tub from the bucket made it possible for him to flop out of the tub and onto the floor of the car again.

“My husband managed to get him back in the tub and then put his jacket over the tub and told my daughter that she had to hold the jacket in place. My daughter said she couldn’t sit in the back seat because it was wet. ‘So are the fish’ said my husband and although this didn’t seem very logical, I felt it wasn’t the best time to argue.”

“Did you get the fish home ok? I asked

“Yes.” She said in the tone of one who in their quieter moments might wish it were not true.

“Do you actually even like koi?” I asked.

She paused and said “Well yes, I do, but I like the smaller ones, not the big one.”

“How big are they?” I asked and it was here that the room went silent for a moment.

That thing that I told you earlier would be relevant later? Well it’s later now and it was now that the room went silent long enough for her to hold her hands about 20cm apart and say

“I like ones that are about this big.”




Photo courtesy Arden - originally posted to Flickr as Wow, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6104726