The fish man keeps the good one under the counter

Seven in the morning at the wet market and the floor is already wet. It is always wet. That is the first deal the place makes with you: wear the wrong shoes once, and never again.

I go to the same fish man. Not because he is the cheapest, because he is not, but because after enough years he keeps the good one under the counter and brings it out when he sees me coming. This is the whole quiet economy of a market and nobody ever writes it down. There is the fish laid out on the ice for the people passing through, and there is the fish in the polystyrene box tucked by his feet for the people who come back. You earn your way into the second box slowly. You show up on ordinary mornings, you buy the ordinary mackerel, and you do not sulk when the tide has been poor and there is nothing worth hiding.

He does not tell me what is good. He tells me what is not. That took me a long time to understand. A seller who only ever praises his stock is a seller who has decided you will not be back, so it does not matter what you carry home. The one who says, not today, the prawns are tired, leave them, is telling you he expects to see you next week and would rather you trusted him then. Honesty at a fish counter is just patience wearing an apron.

We argue, of course. This morning it was over quantity. He wanted me to take four fish. I wanted two. He held up the two I had chosen, turned them so the light caught the gill, and said, in the flat way of a man who has had this conversation ten thousand times, that a fish this good does not come every day and I would be back by Thursday wishing I had bought more. He was right and we both knew it. I took three, which is how these arguments always end. Not a winner and a loser. A number nobody planned that both people can live with.

You learn to read a fish the way you learn to read a face. The eye should be clear and a little domed, not sunk and cloudy. The gills underneath the flap should be a wet, living red, not the brown of something that has been sitting and thinking about it. Press the flesh and it should push back and forget your finger at once. And the smell, which frightens people, should smell of the sea and almost nothing else. A fish that smells strongly of fish is a fish telling you the truth about its age.

I carried the three home in a bag that leaked a little, the way it always does, a thin cold line of market water down my leg. By the time the kettle was on, one of them was already steaming in the wok with ginger and spring onion and a splash of light soy, and the flat smelled of the morning I had bought it. That is the part no recipe can give you and no supermarket can sell. The fish is only half of what you carry home. The rest is the walk, the argument, the wet floor, and the man who thought you should have bought four.

He was right about that too.