He had no wife they could say cuckolded him; he had no children who got poor marks at school; he had no grandfather who bubbled over his senility on street corners; he had no cousins who were cat-o’nined for stealing; he had no aunts who painted their faces for tourist men at nights; he had no attachments which made him vulnerable to abuse; he had no one to be called into shame over.
And so no one had ever higgled him down on the price of his fish. If he said that the green-skinned, beak-teeth parrot-fish were a shilling each, it was impossible to shake him. The woman could call the fish gangrened, she could say it had slimy skin, she could say it was not a fish, she could say anything, it would not matter.