by Lamorna Ash
Back in Newlyn on Halloween, Mike and Rose Dyer – who started up a crab-processing factory together and now spend most of their time playing boules for the Cornwall county team, and in the summer wake at two in the morning to take their boat down to Porthcurno to catch mackerel – had invited me over for dinner. After a decadent meal of scalding-hot tiger prawns in oil, garlic and chilli, crab salad, mussels cooked on a bed of salt, and crisped cod, all washed down with a homemade, and quite lethal, blackberry wine, Rose came to join me on the sofa, holding carefully in her hand the shell of the crab whose flesh we’d just eaten.
‘Mike says you’re trying to learn everything about fishing,’ she said, looking down at the crab shell nestled in her palm. Since retiring, Rose told me, she had spent a lot of time considering the life she has had – one full of joy and children and grandchildren. ‘Something had to give up its own life for us to have this one,’ she told me seriously, gesturing around their lovely home. ‘I don’t think a lot of people in our industry talk about that – but I can’t believe they’re not feeling it somewhere in them.’ She turned over the shell to reveal its pale yellow and pink interior walls. ‘That’s a living thing. I don’t know what that means exactly, but it’s important to keep remembering it.’ She handed the crab shell over to me. I looked at the holes from which its void-black eyes would have peered. This was the first time I’d properly spoken to another woman about the fishing industry; there were no female ‘fishermen’ working in the town when I was there, though there had been one or two previously. Rose’s philosophical outlook blindsided me, articulating the way in which, ultimately, fishing communities are dependent on that which they hunt – a life for a life, in its crudest terms.
The blood still runs from that first ray. I dig my fingers into its oozing mass of guts and saw at them with my knife until they come clean away in my hand. As instructed, I make two further slashes through its gill slits – the evenly spaced holes that just hours ago had allowed it to breathe freely as it glided through the water. It is only later, while watching the fishmongers at work in Stevenson’s, that I learn that these disfiguring gashes have no other use than to allow fishmongers to get a firmer grip on their produce – an unnecessary, final defilement of their body. With the guts still in my hand, I falter. I lean forward as if to retch, my face growing as pale as the lifeless body before me, and then, as if to distract me, Kyle takes the intestines from my open palm and throws them against the table. He shouts ‘Paintball!’ as they explode bright egg-yolk yellow. And I am savage once more, cackling away with him and joining in to cause further intestinal fireworks along the silver table.
When I am back in the city I do not recognise myself as the person who drives knives through the hearts of rays. Describing the act of hunting in the Arctic, Lopez writes that ‘to hunt means to have the land around you like clothing’. You are the most in the world that a person could be, forgetting your neighbouring companions and noticing only the thing you are hunting for. The world is stripped down to the present. ‘It means,’ he continues, ‘to release yourself from rational images of what something “means” and to be concerned only that it “is”.’ If I had not allowed the sea to cover me like skin, to let myself be part of the Filadelfia’s world wholly and unreservedly, I would have found it much harder to make it through the trip. True hunting, Lopez suggests, exists outside linear time and space and is the closest we can come to dreaming while still awake.
As I gut, I slide between times: my own past, present, future, those of the men around me and of the fish themselves – all of us existing in this precarious world above the water, only a thin metal hull dividing us from the chasm underneath. Hands inside, amongst the bodies of fish, we are turned into haruspices, reading the future written in the straggly lines of entrails. There are hundreds, thousands of circling times chasing below us. Each species of fish is on the move – their shifting environment dictated by temperature like those Cornish surfers who emigrate each winter to chase the sun to Australia. Fishermen depend on the continuance of these intangible timelines. It is they who notice first when the world tilts slightly and a species that has never been seen before this far north is hauled up out of unseasonably warm British waters, learning the signs of climate change long before we do in cities, designed as they are to vanquish time. My physical connection to those fish, the literal opening of their bodies and directing my attention to the secrets inside of them, engenders a permanent change to the way I view fish when back on land. I notice the colour of their skin, the shape of their eyes, the way they have been filleted, and which parts of them are left behind. I imagine the men who gutted and buried them in ice, the ones who graded them, piled their bodies in boxes and sent them off upcountry.
The crew soon catch on to my complicated relationship with ray gutting – oscillating as it does between pure joy at the physical, sensuous nature of it, more palpable than with any other fish species, and a kind of prolonged horror at my own actions. It becomes a running joke: any time an especially large ray is caught in a haul, they cry up to the wheelhouse: ‘This one’s for Lamorna!’ The feral version of me commits herself to ray gutting with verve, a maniacal expression of delight as her hands drip with guts and she slices between cuckoo rays with their round leopard spots on either side of their body, leopard rays and blonde rays – my body disappearing under the growing piles of them. Offhandedly, someone refers to me as ‘Raymundo’. The name passes around the table and I adopt it for myself eagerly, delighted at last to have my very own fishing nickname. I hold it to my chest. Raymundo. I am Raymundo, the savage slasher. It feels like a badge of authenticity. I am like the Newlyn fishermen now – like Cod, like Lofty, Wordsy, Shitty, Crab Dad, Nocte, Joe Crowe, Ben Gunn.
I did not think the world had any colour left to lose, but by the afternoon shades have continued to leak from the sea and sky until they are both the same void white, the line of the horizon disappearing with it. The sky spills down into the water and I imagine the Filadelfia drawing up day stars in its hauls – or perhaps it is that the sea rises up into the air so that jellyfish, squid and rays dip in and out of the constellations.
I look out at my bleached cloud city, which has not budged all day, and then head over to the bench in the wheelhouse to continue reading Arctic Dreams. The most extraordinary mirages seen by man are those that appear at sea or in colder regions like the Arctic – Fata Morganas, so-called superior mirages. Inferior mirages occur mostly in deserts, when the distant object is inverted and doubled below its actual location, creating the illusion that there is a body of water on the ground, reflecting the object in it. Fata Morganas are much rarer projections appearing above the original object. They materialise when the temperature of the air closest to the ground is colder than that which is above it. The cold dense air causes light rays to bend upwards, tricking our minds into believing an object is higher in the sky than it truly is. The Flying Dutchman ghost ship is thought to have originally been a Fata Morgana – an image of a distant ship projected upwards into the sky, from which there grew a great body of maritime folklore.
True mirages are not works of the imagination, not fantastical new cities opening up above us, but merely a reflection of the known world – the ordinary raised up. These visions in the sky can sometimes be so vivid that whole land features – mountains, lakes, whole islands even – end up drawn into explorers’ maps of the Arctic. Years later, when other explorers returned to follow the maps passed down to them, they found the scribbled-in landmarks had simply evaporated. ‘President’s Land’, ‘King Oscar Land’, ‘Petermann Land’, and the Croker Mountains, were all later found to be nothing more than mirages.
On the Filadelfia, too, islands erupt without warning from the water. On occasion, these are faint mirages, but more often than not it is your mind playing tricks on you, expanding to fill the vast canvas it is presented with. Newlyn fisherman-turned-artist Ben Gunn told me that when fishing up near the Arctic, he found that if you stared
at the ice fields long enough, they would transform into any kind of shape you wanted: ‘Churches, houses, wherever your imagination takes you, you’re in it. You flick your eyeballs and it’s changed again.’
The places hidden from us are the points from which our imaginations flow. We do not get to see what is behind the horizon or below the surface of the water, and so impose on these unknown spaces, those unreachable things which we desire: some fishermen who have lost friends or family at sea remain convinced they are still out there. Kyle throws bottles containing his number into the water, hoping they may be discovered one day by a being who will speak across the world, across time even, back to him. Lopez writes that sometimes nature seems so illusory, so indescribable, that we cannot help but let it merge with our own fictions. When he follows a bear’s tracks up to a hole in the ice, but finds no tracks coming out again, he says that one can start to understand the Eskimo’s belief that ‘there are bears walking around on the bottom of the ocean’. Our desires for storytelling and mythology bleed into the sea, giving it a distinctly human hue. Like my imagined abolishing of the horizon line and reconciling of sea and sky, fishermen must see themselves as becoming part of the world in which they spend half their lives, letting the water’s skin be their skin.
Before dinner, Andrew takes me up to the gutting station and hands me an incredibly sharp knife – ‘You’re on a roll now, Raymundo. It’s time you learn how to fillet.’ He brings up a frosty monk, plaice, lemon and haddock from the fish room and slaps them down on our quasi-operating table. With filleting, he explains to me, you have to feel gently for the backbone of the fish as you cut through its flesh, letting your knowledge of its anatomy guide the knife through. It is a world away from the harsh, staccato stabbing of gutting. Instead you make one, unbroken movement along the centre of the fish: not a dot, but a line. Andrew starts me off on flatfish. The blade glides so easily through the plaice that if you jerk it up even a little bit, you lose half the flesh. He teaches me to caress the knife along the rough bumps of the bone, remaining attentive to the feel of it so as never to lose contact with the fish’s spine.
Despite his coaching, the fillets I draw from the plaice are rough and jagged. ‘Never mind,’ Andrew says, throwing the limp forms over the deck to the seabirds. He chucks me a monk instead – ‘much easier’. To fillet a monk, you make a nick in the skin at the end of the tail and then pull it away from the flesh, like taking a sock off a foot. After feeling for the monkfish’s chunky bones, he instructs me to make a clean swipe through the meaty white flesh first on one side of the central bone, then on the other, to create two equally thick fillets. We work for a good hour, slicing through each fish and putting them into plastic bags for the crew to take home to their family and friends at the end of the trip. Just before we go back in for dinner, Andrew digs around in one of the boxes on deck and asks if I’ve ever eaten raw scallop. I shake my head and he breaks one open with his knife, spearing it and passing it over to me. Sweet and delicate in flavour, it tastes of the sea.
The late-night haul around eleven is always the wildest. Outside it is ‘as dark as a dog’s guts’, as Don puts. The sea seems to absorb all else into it. If I fell in now, I think, I would not hit water but disappear without a sound into its depths. The bodies of fish, illuminated by the trawler’s lights, gleam white. They stand in two large heaps, like treasure. Now and then, a roving fish eye is caught in the same lights and flashes demonically. Sea-dwelling hunters have an easier job seeking out their prey at night. Drifting along the seabed, they search the moonlit waters above them for dark patches, which indicates where its prey hides. Certain species have evolved to overcome this shortcoming. The bobtail squid, closely related to the cuttlefish, has a unique adaptation to avoid being seen at night. It participates in a symbiotic relationship with a variety of bacteria that is bioluminescent – a living organism that emits light. These bacteria gather in the squid’s light organ, where they are fed an amino acid and sugar solution. In return, the glowing bacteria allow the squid to mimic the moon and stars’ milky glow so that its shadow body is hidden under cover of light – an optical illusion called counter-illumination.
Several gnarled spider crabs scuttle across the Filadelfia’s deck and I give them a wide berth. Sea urchins roll from left to right across the sodden wood, curled up into protective spheres dotted with spikes so sharp that they can pierce through gloves. And everywhere there are the dismembered legs of starfish that found themselves tangled in the net and ripped apart. Alongside them too are sea-beaten cans, pieces of plastic and hats. I am amazed by how many hats are pulled up by trawlers, mainly caps, but the odd beanie too – and once an old boot. The scene resembles the aftermath of a violent battle.
Beyond the detritus scattered across the deck are the cuttlefish, writhing in their boxes and sending out sudden jets of black ink that add blood spatters to the scene of devastation. Andrew tells me that you get to know from holding them exactly when they’re about to squirt from the particular way their body tenses. ‘Like this,’ he says, and demonstrates by pointing a cuttle at Kyle, drenching him a moment later in black ink. It streams down his face and he wipes it away with a glove, still grinning. On the gutting table tonight are also a couple of massive ling, once the most common fish caught by fishermen, but these days seen rarely and worth nothing. I decide they are my least favourite fish. Their long, thrashing bodies are reminiscent of eels and, when they die, their innards come up through their mouths so it looks as if they have vomited bright pink sausage meat.
Before I head down to bed, I look out of the wheelhouse window to check whether the cloud city is still hanging there. You can just make it out in the night, looming above us, the bright stars piercing it like the lights from flats. I think of Newlyn. I think of home. All of a sudden it doesn’t feel so far away anymore.
24
VORTEX
Before the end of my last stay in Newlyn I wake to a text from Nathan. It says he’d come back to land unexpectedly during the night and would be free for an hour on his boat before they head off again, if I wanted a last chat before I go home to the city. I dress quickly and sprint down to the harbour to meet him on the Resurgam – ‘I will rise again’.
After days dissolved in sea mists, Newlyn harbour is shot through with sunlight this morning. Only the thinnest belt of soft cloud hangs above the horizon line. The water gleams and the fishing boats’ colours glare as if brand new – reds, blues and greens. They move differently in weather like this; each vessel seems to be propelled along with the sea, rather than fighting against it as they do in choppy seas. The suspicious looks I get from engineers and fishermen as I dash past no longer bothers me, as I leap over an upturned red crate on my way to the North Pier. There is no one on deck when I arrive at the Resurgam. I wait a while and then give an awkward yell, ‘All right?’ The heads of several sleepy-looking fishermen pop up from behind windows and out of wheelhouses on nearby boats, ducking back down again as soon as they realise the shout was not for them. A moment later, Nathan sticks his head out of the Resurgam’s galley, wearing a grey knit jumper and holding a mug of coffee. He waves, calling down to me – ‘All right, jump on board and have a cuppa’ – before disappearing again.
The boat is moored further away from the harbour wall than I am used to and I’m not sure I trust myself to make the jump. I close my eyes, uttering a silent prayer as I fling myself towards the birdshit-varnished deck. Somehow, I make it onto the narrow bar of the rail that rounds the boat and grab a hanging rope to stop myself falling over the side and into the muddy waters, before finally jumping down onto the deck. In the homely galley I find a new crew sitting around the table, each with a huge mug of milky coffee before them. The stench of rolling tobacco transports me straight back to the Filadelfia.
I have never before gone for tea on a trawler in the harbour at eight in the morning and find myself privy to that period of quiescence just before the men leave the harbour, when they feel themselves
no longer quite on land or yet at sea. Some of the men read, others scroll glumly through phones. Nathan passes me over a pint of coffee. Up close, I see he has that knackered look that all fishermen carry for the first few days back on the land.
‘I didn’t tell you last time, did I, that my old man was a fisherman?’ he says, pouring milk into my mug. ‘You probably don’t remember anyway, you were pissed!’
Nathan’s father moved down to Newlyn from Grimsby along with many other northern fishermen in the 1970s seeking better fishing grounds. But, unlike many of the other fisherman fathers who trained their boys up to join the family business as soon as they could walk, Nathan’s father forbade him from even hanging around the harbour when he was young. ‘He didn’t want me following the same paths through life that he did,’ Nathan says. ‘He thought the fishing industry was too hard a way of life.’ As a result of this ambivalent relationship with the sea, Nathan’s father devised a plan to leave fishing and find a less precarious job, like trucking. And then, in early November 1997, a few weeks before he planned to hand in his notice, a message was received by the coastguard that the twin-beam trawler Nathan’s father was working on, the Margaretha Maria, had sunk fifty-five miles off the Lizard. When the wreck was discovered near Lizard Point, underwater surveys reported that there were four tonnes of shells and sand caught in her nets, suggesting that she must have capsized after her derricks heaved up such a weight. The whole crew went down with her. Nathan was eleven when it happened. His father was never found, but the remains of the skipper’s body were picked up by chance three months later in the nets of another fishing boat.
Before the advent of technologies such as AIS, during stormy weather fishermen’s wives would climb up to the top of a hill overlooking the town known as Mount Misery, the highest point in Newlyn. From there, they would watch for sails arriving over the horizon and pray one of them would be their husbands’ boat. Somehow, I have never noticed Mount Misery before. When I look back towards Newlyn from the sea, my eyes are drawn first to the harbour and behind that the mouth of the town with its many rows of crowded teeth. Even further back Mount Misery looms behind, a dark green shadow haunting the town, the one place that has not been built upon. I imagine the Newlyn fishwives in their long skirts, necks craned and hands shielding eyes from the morning glare, holding each other together on that sloping hill.