Dark, Salt, Clear

by Lamorna Ash

  For the final flourish of his tour, Paul gets out his iPhone and starts to play recordings of bird calls, a modern-day Pied Piper sounding them out from their hidden nests in the thick foliage beyond Newlyn’s edge. Dusk comes at the same time they do: goldfinches, firecrests, black-tailed godwits, their arrival signalled by a cacophony of chirrups.

  25

  A PASSIONATE RAGE

  I heard the news that a Newlyn fisherman had committed suicide my first day on the Filadelfia, when another fisherman messaged us on the VHF to ask if it was really true. After Don confirmed it, the other fisherman did not speak for a while. Eventually he answered, sounding almost exasperated: ‘But I had a drink with him the day before yesterday.’

  Every person I speak to has a story about the tall, joyful figure, universally loved in the town and who was only in his thirties. When I met Nathan for a drink on the day of my birthday, as soon as we sat down he said ‘So my mate, he just topped himself.’ I said I’d heard, but that I’d never met the man.

  ‘Yeah, twat,’ Nathan replied, before explaining that it was this fisherman who got Nathan his first berth on a gill-netter, having met him at some rave somewhere, who trained Nathan up and was one of his closest companions in the industry. The tragedy has left him blindsided. Several people speculate that the taking of his life was partly to do with the fact that he had been landlocked for months with an injury. ‘I knew he was unhappy,’ Nathan says, ‘everyone knew he was unhappy. I’m just angry the way he’s done it.’

  The young fisherman’s funeral is the day before I return to London. That morning, there are many more boats in the harbour than usual as skippers have chosen to delay trips or return early for the service. In The Aran Islands, Synge describes how the grief he witnesses at the funeral of an elderly member of the community on Inishmaan is not a ‘personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years’. Rather, that funeral contains ‘the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.’ This seems to me the most beautifully articulated observation. I feel it could have been written about Newlyn.

  The fishermen walk solemnly up the hill towards the parish church at Paul, dressed not in their usual oilskins and wellies, but in smart dark suits and polished shoes. I think of the rage I have encountered in Newlyn. It is a rage that builds up, not just in response to the sea’s violence, but as a result of continuously feeling unheard. It is a rage that grows from seeing large companies take over the fishing fleet; a rage as once more fishermen read in the newspapers that the government will ignore their pleas for a fairer division of quotas and more thorough up-to-date analysis of fish populations; a rage as each family-run shop is taken over by a homogenous national brand; at the floods of tourists, who arrive in summer months to stay in expensive holiday cottages that simultaneously push up house prices and locals out; rage at the lack of jobs for young people save for seasonal tourism and fishing; rage at having to watch those things that had once seemed essential to life in Newlyn being eroded away. It is this tide of rage that has driven the people of Cornwall eight times now to London over the last few centuries, demanding no longer to be ignored by politicians in matters that affect them directly. It is a rage that springs from helplessness. You can feel this rage in Newlyn’s alleyways, down by its harbour walls, kept at bay until, at desperate moments, it bursts forth with overwhelming intensity.

  I watch as the funeral party snakes its way back down into the town from Paul church. A trawler leaving through the Gaps, where the Christmas lights have already been strung up ready to be ceremonially turned on the next weekend, blows its foghorn. The sound, usually loud and indignant, today sounds plangent – a wail of mourning sent out to the sea. There is a time-honoured ritual in Newlyn that after funerals everyone walks back down to the Red Lion for a piss-up. Danny, the skipper of the Golden Harvest, says they have already factored in a day off pilchard fishing tomorrow because it’s likely to be such a big night. Always in Newlyn there is this finest of lines between tragedy and humour. As each storm at sea is followed soon by a day of flat calm, so each tragedy merges celebration with communal grief.

  Synge writes of this change after the funeral of the elderly woman. ‘We walked back to the village, talking of anything, and joking of anything, as if merely coming from the boat-slip or the pier.’ After funerals on the Aran Islands great quantities of poteen would be consumed. Synge hears that one night, after the funeral is long over, ‘two men fell down in the graveyard while the drink was on them. The sea was rough that day, the way no one could go to bring the doctor, and one of the men never woke again and found death that night.’

  Looking back at my time in Newlyn, all moments seem to converge on this last day: a hundred river mouths flowing into the same area of new sea, their waters mixing with the salt water, groomed through by the waves. Devastation that springs out of the quotidian cannot be rationalised. ‘Even the report of the 9/11 commission,’ Joan Didion writes, ‘opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States”.’ I think of how one such ordinary cloudless day became the day that Nathan’s father’s boat sunk, just weeks before he would have left fishing forever; the ordinary day when a whale washed up on Long Rock; the ordinary day we set out on the Filadelfia that was the same morning a young Newlyn fisherman hanged himself.

  That night, I go to the Star to say goodbye to everyone before my early train home the next morning. Debbie has transformed the Star into a decadent Santa’s grotto with gleaming gold and green decorations hanging off every available surface, the pub now crammed with those from the funeral party, who have drifted down the hill from the Red Lion to continue celebrating the dead fisherman’s life. In some ways the mood is like any other day in the Star. There are the usual waves of laughter punctuated by long yarns, the habitual silliness and play interspersed with more serious musings on life and losses. ‘No matter what,’ one fisherman tells me, ‘when you lose someone at sea, or to the sea, or whatever…’ He pauses. ‘Well, you just gotta look out for each other after a tragedy like that.’

  26

  ’OME

  When I imagined my time at sea, I never saw it raining. My mind retained some childish logic along the lines of: there’s so much water out there already – how could there be more? But my final day on the Filadelfia is marked by torrential rain. Its needle-thin lines draw slants across the sky, rendering the sea’s once smooth surface rough and scaly.

  In his meditation on architecture, the Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes of his amazement that even for the snail, a creature whose entire life is experienced from within the confines of a shell, ‘the great cosmic rhythm of winter and spring vibrates nonetheless’. The universe’s rhythms seem to vibrate almost more profoundly in those who are shut off from the everyday passage of time. As a blind person is better attuned to their other senses, we feel keenly each word from the land that pierces our sea cocoon. Time does not melt away at sea, as one fisherman warned me early on, but arrives in sudden vibrations sent skipping out from the land like a skimming stone across a lake.

  On the Filadelfia we watch the six o’clock news each day, and though the stories seem muffled as if coming from a long way off, they shock us back momentarily to the concerns of the land. We rear our heads from our metal shell to feel the freshwater rain droplets splash our faces and, in that moment, are returned to the coastline: an image of Denise rushing outside to bring in her sodden washing springs to my mind, then cuts to an image of the jam-pink stone of Penzance prom, which appears to become diluted in downpours, dribbling pink streaks into the sea.

  The rain blurs the work on the boat, causing moments to run into one a
nother. Hauls leads to more hauls; the guts from indeterminate fish mix together on the silver table before being hosed down and thrown back into the sea. And yet, the mood on the boat has altered since yesterday. Moments of levity arrive with increasing frequency, flooding in like the sudden opening of a sluice gate after much time barricaded down. The men break into spontaneous song in the fish room; they skip across the deck; grins pass over their faces as the glints of particular memories of home catch their minds’ eyes. We are almost ready to go home.

  That morning I watch Don leafing through papers, making notes and filling in his online skipper’s log, which details the fish we caught this week and the time of our hauls. He sighs into his coffee as he punches in one calculation after another, swearing under his breath when the antique computer freezes for a third time. There is something disquieting about seeing a fisherman’s face lit up by a computer screen. Many of them lament how the growing bureaucracy presiding over the industry has forced them to become paper-pushers, and they hark back to the times when they could roam the sea freely. In the short story ‘Poseidon’, Franz Kafka reimagines Poseidon as forever buried under paperwork. ‘What irritated him most,’ he writes, ‘was to hear of the conceptions formed about him: how he was always riding about through the tides with his trident. When all the while he sat here in the depths of the world-ocean, doing figures uninterruptedly.’ There are still hoops fishermen must jump through, lines and boundaries demarcating their passages through the sea. Kafka’s tale ends with Poseidon becoming bored with the sea and returning to dry land at last. ‘He let fall his trident. Silently he sat on the rocky coast and a gull, dazed by his presence, described wavering circles around his head.’

  All week the crew have been avidly discussing their tactics for making the most money possible at the market when we return. We learn through snatches of conversation on the VHF when other boats are planning to land this week and what the prices are looking like at auction. In the past, buyers have been known to work out between themselves what prices various fish should go for before the auction, leaving the fishermen completely at their mercy. ‘People shouldn’t just play on other people’s livelihood like that,’ one trawlerman tells me. There are weeks, too, when you just might be unfortunate and barely catch anything. In these times, morale on the boat reaches its lowest. ‘There’s nothing worse than that feeling,’ Don tells me, ‘and, as the skipper, it all comes down to you. Your men are all depending on you for their pay packet.’

  This week, we’ve been lucky. None of the other trawlers at sea with us are going to harbour on the same day. The only other large boat landing for the Tuesday morning market is a gill-netter, which does not target the same species as us (tending to catch mainly hake and turbot in their static nets), so is unlikely to have a dramatic effect on our prices. While I watch Don growl at the computer once more, I imagine his very first days on a fishing vessel as a decky learner, before all the legislation came in and the sea was a watery region full of promise.

  He looks up from his writing, noticing me watching him. ‘What you going to call this book, then?’ Before I can start to reply, he answers for me. ‘What about: Don,’ he mimes the unfurling of a banner, ‘Part I?’

  Around two o’clock, Don starts preparing his much-anticipated weekly roast dinner, the meagre size of the galley’s oven and lack of surfaces in no way limiting his culinary ambitions. Every dish, pot, pan, tray and flat surface in the galley is made use of, often at least twice with a quick wash in between as its previous contents are decanted into another bowl. As soon as one element is boiling, it is rotated with another pot, the stove constantly spilling over with flecks and spittle from various gravies and juices. It is an acrobatic procedure; Don skilfully twists and twirls like a ballet dancer in his slippers, now chopping, now stirring, now peeling – and, miraculously, managing to navigate the boat and conduct three successful hauls in the meantime.

  Each time I offer to help chopping some vegetable or other, Don yells territorially: ‘You siii’down!’ It is his galley and this is his special supper. He wants no interferences or challenges to his authority. He does, magnanimously, allow me to observe his making of the cheese sauce for his cauliflower cheese (from scratch) so that I will be able to replicate it myself in the future. There is no end to my learning on board the Filadelfia. This involves the most furious, sustained beating of butter, flour and cheese I have ever witnessed, overlaid throughout with colourful language.

  The end result is one of the best meals I have ever eaten. From the oven, Tetris-like, comes a steaming tray of golden roasted ‘fuckin’’ potatoes, swede mash, Yorkshire puddings, an overflowing pot of cauliflower and broccoli cheese, perfectly crisped, honey-roasted parsnips and tender strips of beef. On the stove bubbles a great cauldron of thick gravy, as well as pans of peas and carrots. We each take our place around the table with our enormous mounds of food. Silence falls over the galley as everyone concentrates on the feast before them. Every now and then one of us wipes our brow or stretches, willing our bodies to fit in more, before continuing with the task at hand. At last, every plate is mopped clean, and Kyle has, somehow, managed to finish off most of the leftovers too.

  While we sit nursing our bloated bellies, the TV is turned back on and we find ourselves confronted with Johnny Depp’s eyeliner-smudged and darkly tanned face swinging the wheel of the Black Pearl with gusto. There will probably never be a more appropriate environment for watching Pirates of the Caribbean than shoulder to shoulder with four fishermen as you push through the running sea on a wet night. The crew guffaw and slap the table as the pirates run rings around the Royal Navy officers. And when Elizabeth Swan joins the buccaneers, exchanging her corset for a pair of men’s trousers and a sword, I cannot help but glance down sheepishly at my fish-stained tracksuit and think of my yellow-stripped knife hanging up on the deck. We watch the film right through, snug from the winds and rains drawing around the boat, the heat from the oven fogging up the galley windows.

  Before my last haul, I join Kyle in the wheelhouse to find him doubled up with heartburn from wolfing down his food before the watch. In a fair amount of pain myself, I lie down on the wheelhouse floor, feeling the vibrations from the engine travel through me, as they had that first night, and imagining that the Filadelfia has absorbed me right into her so that I can no longer be said to be my own separate entity. I close my eyes, considering it to be for just a second, but when I open them again, Don is standing above me, giving me a weird look – ‘Last haul. I hope you’ve been praying it’s a good one!’

  I scramble up quickly and take my customary position beside Don as the derricks moan at the immense weight they must draw out of the water one last time. As the fish slosh onto the deck, Don climbs on to his tiptoes, hitches up his loose tracksuit bottoms and sticks his head out of the wheelhouse. ‘What you got for me, boys?’ By now, I am as caught up in the process as the rest of the crew. Like waiting for our lottery numbers to come up, I bob up and down beside Don with my fingers tightly crossed that this will be the haul with which we beat our turbot record.

  It turns out to be the best haul of the trip. The men fill up three and a half buckets of oozing cuttlefish – alone worth around £500 – and as the heap of fish is shifted, we make out five large, gleaming turbot hidden amongst the other bodies. The whoops from Kyle celebrating rise up to the wheelhouse; he was on watch for this haul and so, by rights, takes full credit. ‘We are going with the tide, that’s why it’s so good,’ Don explains sagely.

  Perhaps it is the heaviness of the roast dinner, but, as I watch the men work in synchronisation below us, a tremendous shudder of exhaustion passes across my body. I get no more than a few steps towards the ladder down to my waiting sleeping bag when Kyle and Andrew shout from the deck: ‘Lamorna! Look out the window!’ Almost as soon as I wake each morning, Andrew would smugly announce that I should have stayed up because he had seen a whole school of dolphins right by the boat just after I had gone to bed. Initia
lly, my response to these reported sightings was to give a howl of frustration and vow to stay up later the following night. But as the week drew on and my bedtime got later and later, I still apparently missed the dolphins each night, and I grew suspicious that Andrew, the prank-master, was winding me up all along.

  Suspecting this to be one final joke at my expense, I pull the heavy wheelhouse door open reluctantly and go out into the night. I gaze out at the choppy waters, their serrated crests lit brilliantly by the boat’s floodlights. With each glimpse of a dark patch of sea or arching wave, my head whips round. My eyes squint out at the ensuing darkness, but I can pick out nothing. ‘Ha ha!’ I call down, making to head back in.

  ‘There!’ the crew call again, gesturing with their blue gloves to the disturbed sea by the nets. ‘Right there!’

  When I do at last see them, they are unmistakeable. Right by our gear, a whole school of dolphins, many more than I had seen while on the Three Jays, appear from the depths like silver commas, arcing over the waves, before diving back into the water without a splash a second later. I wish I could follow the paths of their streamlined bodies under the water, see the mirror image of the curved shape they make above the water. Like Melusine with her tail in the bath, I imagine the dolphins transforming into something beyond human comprehension below the sea’s surface, their sleek bodies spreading out, perhaps, in the way that a dress billows in wind.

  Their motion is so captivating that I forget to join the men on the deck for my final gutting as Raymundo. I watch for a long time, my eyes straining to pick out their crescent-moon dives. And then, as when they came, I am no longer certain whether what I am seeing are dolphins or the crests of waves. The cold strikes my face once more and I remember the tiredness in my legs. I count a minute in my head, promising myself to go to bed if I don’t see them again. Like Lopez’s Fata Morganas, my eyes attempt to transform the empty landscape into what I desire to see. I count another sixty seconds; the sea remains vacant. One more…