I’m beautiful, but who isn’t? Beauty is a natural, even an inevitable, aspect of life on a coral reef. Interlopers’ eyes may well be drawn to my four-eyed beauty, but I know they’ll soon be distracted. How could they not?
Monday
Angelfish. Cherubfish. Rock beauty. Blue tang. Sergeant major. Indigo hamlet. Together we are a silent symphony of colour and our theme is always the same: diversity. Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, as someone or other once said. All those weird land-walkers have to do to understand the glory of life on Earth is to stick their heads beneath the surface of the waters that roll over a coral reef.
Tuesday
That’s exactly what happened to that Fleming fellow who used to swim here. The one who stayed in the house named after a duck. Bufflehad? Oldsquaw? Not sure, but anyway, he was the greatest nature writer who ever lived. (Goldeneye! That’s it.) He was much too clever to write about nature for people who identify as nature-lovers. He wrote about nature for people who had no idea they loved the stuff.
Wednesday
He called his hero after the bloke who wrote the local bird-book. Whatshisname. James Whatshisname. He used to come here every year to write another book and they’re all about roseate spoonbills, giant squids, hummingbirds, octopuses, rats, bats, scorpions, a shellfish called Venus elegans, kingfishers and orchids. In one book he lists of 22 species of poison plant.
Thursday
I get a mention in the story he called Octopussy. Well, not me personally: one of my ancestors, a butterflyfish like me who lived and loved on this same reef just off the shore below Goldeneye. “Not today, sweetheart,” says the bad guy to the butterflyfish as he snorkels along the reef in the way the writer fella did every day he was in Jamaica.
Friday
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He never asked why I have four eyes, though. Well, the two eyes at my aft end are false, but in some lights they look more like eyes than my real ones. So suppose you’re a bad fish trying to eat me: you go for the wrong end and, with a sudden brilliant wriggle, I’m gone. And they’re not the same as the pretend eyes another butterflyfish has: they tell the world the unequivocal truth that I’m me, and not to be confused with anyone else, however beautiful. And that’s a damn good thing for him alongside.
Saturday
When you see one butterflyfish, you generally see two: we’re that rare thing in the fishy life, a species of mate-for-lifers. He’s just as beautiful as me, don’t worry. We feast quietly on the invertebrate life of the reef, weaving our way through the apparently impassable places along the reef, sometimes on our sides, sometimes even upside down: we can reach places the clumsy fish can’t even imagine. And right now he and I have an important task to perform. After all, the more butterflyfish there are in the world, the more beautiful it is. The Goldeneye chap would certainly go along with that.
Foureye butterflyfish CV
Lifespan Five years or so
Eating habits Anthozoans, since you ask
Hobbies Beautiful manoeuvring
Sexual preferences He swims alongside
Photograph by WaterFrame/Alamy