Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  Mikey laughs. ‘He wasn’t trying to be a prick. He just looked at the shape and, rather than treat it as an abstract sculpture, he tried to see what it really was and turn it into something that was real; and the real thing he saw was a pig’s ear.’ He pauses to look at the piece again. ‘I just loved him saying that. I thought it was perfect. Yeah, in many ways it is a fucking pig’s ear! And you should be reminded of that when you’re working in the arts. A lot of the time it is shit. Even if you think it’s good.’

  It is only later that I realise Don’s gruffness, his slamming hand on the table, is not an attack, but an attempt to harden me into a shape so I can handle the sea and survive its difficulties. I am too lost in my own head to recognise this just yet on that Thursday morning.

  Instead, I retreat into myself, endeavouring to dull my senses with an anaesthetic of my own design. The strong cocktail of drugs required to induce a general anaesthetic work by reacting with the membranes of nerve cells to suspend responses like hearing, sight and awareness. And yet, there is still debate over what actually happens in the areas of the brain that are numbed in this way. Scientists conjure up various visual images in an attempt to describe what it may be like – a total eclipse in the brain or a slow setting of the sun across the mind. Which horizon line do you disappear behind, then?

  After taking a seasickness pill I pull open the heavy wheelhouse door to be met by bracing sea gusts. I stand alone with my hands planted on the rail that skirts the wheelhouse balcony as I did on the very first night I spent at sea. The crew are hosing away dead fish on the deck, kicking them under the railings with their heavy boots and into the water to be feasted on by seabirds. I wait until the last few birds have got their fill and the men have returned to the galley. There is no one else here now. The whole outside world is empty, unmarked.

  I don’t know if loneliness has always looked like the sea on a colourless day, or if before that afternoon I just hadn’t had the image in my head to describe it, but ever since then, whenever I have felt at my most alone, I see that flat stretch of ocean once again, feel it rise up and cover me over.

  I look down into the water. The phantom bottom of the ocean is called the Deep Scattering Layer and comprises an entire ecosystem of small fish and plankton that rise and fall each day. It was discovered accidentally in 1942 when an American coastal boat trying out its sonar read from its equipment, alarmingly, that the bottom was not 3,600 metres, but only 450 metres. After checking the sonar a few hours later and finding the seabed had sunk back down, they realised that the dense layer it had picked up was in fact a moving body of fish. In the ship’s log, the captain wrote of the sounds they recorded from the Deep Scattering Layer: ‘Some fish grunt, others whistle or sing, and some just grind their teeth.’

  I watch the gulls make their circuits of the sky, noticing how often they seem to travel in pairs, describing figures of eights between themselves. When they reach the stern of the Filadelfia, they abruptly split and race one another long port and starboard before joining once more at the pointed prow of the ship. As the nets break the surface of the water, the gulls flap in great haste towards the boat’s stern. They part into two channels when they get close to the boat, before swooping down to the nets to snatch at the flailing fish. If they fail in their pursuit, they arc back up into the sky, with no effort at all, as if massless, to attempt the circuit again. Trying to decode their patterns of movement, I form impressionistic figures of eight in my diary with various arrows showing directions of flight. Now and then I try to isolate a single bird, holding on to its distinctive markings and following its course. But, by their nature, the creatures function as one raging mass and elude my attempts at differentiation. Watching the ceremonial train of gulls following us, I wonder how long they have dogged Cornish trawlers, their hunting patterns rewritten to incorporate the huge metal seabirds that excrete fish whole. From his solitary position in the middle of the quarterdeck voyaging in the North Sea, Walter Benjamin imagines the gulls as divided into two tribes: those on the east and those on the west, the eastern birds shimmering, still lit by the sun’s last strokes; the gulls of the west appear dark, sharp, angular. Together they form ‘an uninterrupted, ineffably shifting series of symbols, seemingly unceasingly; a whole, unspeakably variable, fleeting mesh of wings – but a legible one’. You cannot help but search for legibility in the precise marks these white birds emblazon across the sky, as their bodies seem to merge into a single streak of wings like the blow of a slow-shutter-speed camera. Perhaps this impulse comes as a result of the lack of communication with the outside world on board ship, making one more susceptible or willing to read design into their motion.

  The other bird in great abundance while we are at sea is the gannet. They too complete ritualistic patterns of movement during hauls. But after weaving around the Filadelfia’s perimeter, they break the rules of the cycle enacted by the gulls and cut through the surface of the water, adding a third dimension to the shape. More magisterial than gulls, these are warrior birds, with faded ochre patches on their heads, like army caps, and striking kohl-black markings around their eyes which are painted with a bright blue line like a gas ring, that tricks one into thinking they have huge blue irises. Their wingspan is vast and when they are preparing to dive, they tuck their dark sheaved feathers right close against their bodies so that they don’t make a single splash, and re-emerge moments later from the water with fish. Unlike the loutish grabs of the seagulls, they rarely miss. There is a brutality to them, too. They have seen more wars than the gulls, their bodies often raggedy and battle-scarred. I have heard many a yarn about fishermen being attacked on deck by ‘monstrous gannets’.

  In the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes how, unlike his brother Hector, Aesacus despised the city and escaped to the forests to climb the lonely mountains. One day, he catches sight of the nymph Hesperia resting in a sunny clearing. Alarmed at the sight of the unknown man watching her, Hesperia flees and is pursued by Aesacus all the way through the forest. When he is almost in touching distance to his object of desire, a snake darts into Hesperia’s path and fatally bites her upon the ankle. Racked by guilt for the part he has played in her death, Aesacus throws himself from a cliff and into the sea. The goddess Tethys, unable to resist the chance to meddle with human lives, sees him fall and transforms him into a diving bird. Aesacus tries in horror again and again to dive to his death, but each time finds himself pulled back up into the upper airs. From my viewing platform, I look out at the strong gannets diving for fish, each of them a lover denied death and forced to forever leap without falling.

  There are often bird stowaways on trawlers. When Andrew was working out in the North Sea a few years back, a flock of starlings travelled with them and for two weeks warbled outside the wheelhouse every morning. Kyle tells me that there was once a pigeon on the Gary M that got itself stuck in the wheelhouse and no one noticed until they were far from land. He tells me the pigeon was pretty unbothered by the adventure. In fact, he was really useful and ate up all the fish scales scattered across the deck and trodden through to the wheelhouse. When they got close enough to Land’s End on the way home, one of the fishermen opened the window and let the pigeon free. Kyle says it got hundred metres away, then realised life on the boat hadn’t been so bad, turned around and started flying back. Somehow, it misjudged the position of the wheelhouse window, crash-landed into the sea and died there and then.

  This was not the ending I had imagined to Kyle’s story.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘Sad, really. I liked that pigeon.’

  Another fisherman told me that after his father died, ‘the same bloody seagull’ followed him all over Newlyn. ‘There’s a story, see,’ he said. ‘Die a fisherman, come back a seagull.’ This is why, despite their fish thievery, it is considered very bad luck to kill a seagull because you never know who they might have been before. Like Aesacus the diving bird, it is difficult to imagine deaths at sea as final. Instead, we imagine a transformation o
ccurs under the waves, bearing these sad souls aloft once more along the sea winds.

  I watch one last Aesacus dive-bomb the sea and trace a final seagull’s path around the boat, before coming back to myself. My fingernails have turned pale blue and my eyes are watering. I hug my arms to my body and am relieved to notice the outdoors has wrung out most of my lethargy. Returning into the Filadelfia’s hot belly, I go straight past the galley to the bathroom. Staring into the crooked mirror, my face obliquely reflected back to me in fragments, I tell myself: ‘You can do this. These men do this every week and you’re here for eight days only.’ I say it out loud. ‘You are tough – you’re tougher than you think.’

  I put the loo seat down and sit on it, listening to the Filadelfia’s sounds. After a day or two at sea, you get a feel for what the particular vibrations coming from the engine might mean. All is silent now, suggesting we are in that brief period of respite when the nets are hauled out, just before they are shot off once more behind the boat. The gutting must be about to begin. I leave the loo at once and pull my gloves and boots on, ready to resume my bit part in the great show once more.

  That evening, I join Stevie up in the wheelhouse before dinner. He is less forthcoming than the others and I get the sense he is warier of my presence on the boat. Not wishing to disturb him, I take my place on the bench to his right, the two of us looking out at the water without a word between us. Soon darkness vanquishes the grey sky, the whites of our watching eyes lit by the restless machines before us. Stevie turns on the staticky radio above our heads and the Shipping Forecast starts to play out, the presenter’s resonant timbre reverberating through the room as he conjures up the incantatory words that have come to stand for those squared-off regions of the sea around the UK – Dogger, Humber, Fisher, German Bight. After midnight on my last night on the Crystal Sea we listened to the Shipping Forecast too and the echoing memories of those curious words and the warning of gales we heard that night, not heard since, draw the two occasions together more closely. I imagine David’s crew out here now too, half-covered in sea, sitting in silence in their superior, two-chaired wheelhouse, just listening.

  And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at 00.48 today.

  I imagine other Cornish fishing boats besides hearing these same radio waves thrown out across the water from the land, and then send my mind further to visualise the many containers, cruise ships and solitary sailing boats crossing the sea’s many paths, each of their radios altering the quality of the recorded sound, vernacularising its voice better to fit with the distinctive rhythms of their own sea lives.

  Lastly, I think of those listening to the forecast back on the land, lying alone in their beds in dark, motionless bedrooms, letting the words smooth the edges of their insomnia.

  Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, northerly, north-easterly four or five becoming variable three at times: fair, moderate or good…

  The radio seems to make the mood of the wheelhouse lighter, the distance between Stevie and me diminishing with each new verbalisation of the sea’s current condition. Quietly, during forecast intermissions, and with longer pauses than I have with any of the other crew, we start to speak to each other about our lives. He and Andrew usually work together on the Twilight, but she’s getting repairs done at the moment so they’ve been helping Don out. Once it would have been a mad scramble to get a berth on a Newlyn boat; from daybreak men would wander up and down the quay searching for any work going. But these days there are barely enough fishermen to fill the boats and it’s a nightmare finding replacement crew.

  Aged sixteen, Stevie was working as a potato-picker in Scotland when his brother came up and said ‘Oi, I’ve got you a job. Come fishing.’ And that was that. A few years later, almost his whole family had moved down to Newlyn from Scotland. Stevie’s way of living in Newlyn has changed a lot since he first came here. After he and his wife had their daughter, who is now two, he stopped going to the pub, finding he had little enough time at home with his family as it was. He strikes me as the most mature member of the crew, but he also has the sharpest, punning wit, his jokes always delivered absolutely deadpan.

  Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, north-east four or five, increasing six at times: fair or good…

  ‘I’ve missed a lot of life out here,’ Stevie tells me in the dark wheelhouse: his daughter’s first words, her first birthday. He’ll probably have to miss her first day of school too. Every time you come back down the quay and see your children standing there to greet you, another fisherman tells me, they’ve changed in some small but fundamental way that you cannot put your finger on. They might have got taller or got a new haircut, but it’s more than that. Perhaps something happened at school, which has made them that bit tougher, that bit harder. Perhaps they have seen something that has slightly shifted their view of the world, making them that bit less yours. You begin to fight over things you didn’t even believe needed fighting over, concepts of the world that are strange and foreign to you, but your antagonism towards them seems to make your children hate you.

  When my friend Isaac’s father, Roger, came back after a month at sea with a beard, three-year-old Isaac ran away from the strange man to hide behind his mother’s legs. From this point on, Roger knew his days of continuous fishing were over and he started to spend more time on land working as the ship’s husband – the term for those who maintain the boat from the land. Often fishermen tell me that when they know they’re only coming in for one night they silently turn up at home after their children’s bedtime and return to sea once more before they wake. It’s easier that way, less upsetting than having to say goodbye all over again. In between the sea and the land you are but an apparition, a ghost in your own home.

  German Bight, north-east five or six, occasionally four later, occasional rain: moderate or good…

  Fishing destroys a lot of relationships. There are not many fishermen out there, Stevie tells me, who haven’t had relationships breakdown due to the pressures imposed by fishing. The difficulty of retaining the balance between land and sea is not just felt by the fishermen, but by the families they leave behind each trip. Once, I was with a fisherman when he rang his wife to ask if she wanted to come down and chat about her own experience of fishing to me. ‘I don’t want to talk about fishing,’ she told him down the phone. ‘You know exactly how I feel about what you do.’ Simon from the Governek reckons it’s actually easier for the fishermen to deal with their time at sea than it is for their wives. ‘We disappear off the face of the planet, sometimes for weeks at a time,’ he says, ‘and we just leave them behind.’

  I hear similar sentiments time and again – often second-hand from husbands – of wives growing to despise their husband’s jobs because, even when they are back on dry land, it feels as if they are always on the verge of leaving again. Fishermen’s wives must be tough, forever asked to hold on, to hold the family together on their own for that while longer. The readjustment once the men have returned from sea is not straightforward, either. Women accustomed to running households alone, practically as single mothers, are suddenly faced with a knackered, unshaven, fish-smelling, stay-at-home husband sprawled out on their sofas. It can take ages to get used to one another again, to remember how to live with each other. A skipper’s wife tells me that when her husband’s beamer was hauled up for repairs, he was stuck at home for two months and it was the closest they’ve ever come to a divorce – ‘Our relationship is not built on nine-to-five, home every night, you know?’

  Stevie has been contemplating quitting the industry for a while. But, like so many men, he reckons he could not stand to work indoors after so many years at sea. To leave fishing would mean completely rewriting your identity. There is a reason that so many fishermen continue working up until they are practically old men. The idea of a life imprisoned by the land frightens them, the way that one lived at sea sometimes scares me.

  My melancholy
passes like a weather spell. After the Shipping Forecast is over I stay in the wheelhouse late into the night, while the men rotate between watches. Kyle and I see an enormous cruise ship in the distance, lights blazing from every window, so that it looks like the whole ship is on fire. Kyle tells me he always fantasises about one day taking the Filadelfia right up close to an ocean liner, climbing aboard and having a cocktail at the bar and a quick splash in the pool.

  Robert Hichens, the man at the helm of the SS Titanic when it made contact with the iceberg on its way to New York, was a Newlyn boy. In fact, there were five Newlyners aboard in total. They are there, these Cornish men born of salt, in so many of our stories about the sea. Hichens was one of those lucky rescued few, on Lifeboat 6 to be exact. After his near-death experience on the Titanic, Hichens’s life was not easy; other surviving passengers attested that he had refused to help rescue other people in the water, calling them ‘stiffs’, a fact that he denied during the US inquiry. Despite these accusations and the traumatic nature of his experience, Hichens continued working on the sea for the rest of his life, dying of heart failure aboard the merchant ship English Trader in Scotland when he was fifty-nine.

  A cargo ship follows the cruise ship a few minutes later, drifting morosely across the horizon. Though at a great distance from us, it still appears monstrously large, its white containers spaced out in tall columns so that its outline resembles the jagged bones of a carcass blown across the seas.

  Just after midnight, having packed my last monkfish for the night, I go back up to the wheelhouse to say goodnight to Don. He swivels around in his chair at the sound of my voice. ‘You know I’m only teasing you? Don’t take everything so seriously!’ he says and goes to the back of the room and turns on the sound system. I recognise the emotive tones of Adele at once. We listen to both 19 and 21 in their entirety, first uncertainly muttering the words to ourselves, before belting out the last chorus of ‘Chasing Pavements’, side by side, into the night. Don has an almost inexhaustible supply of female power ballads. He tells me that when he needs a good cry sometimes, it is these songs that help him to get to that place. I nod, and stand beside him in silence, the two of us looking out at the formless black sea.