Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line—a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials… And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something—it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all…
“Aieee!” shouted Luke, creasing up, two blue-gloved hands across his ridiculously flat stomach. “Aieee!” he shouted, straightening, trying to get a grip on himself, failing, creasing up again. “It’s dead!” he yelled. Luke was laughing, really laughing, which was unnecessary, you know; it was stupid of him. “It’s dead! Redmond! It’s dead! Aye! Bad dreams? Eh?” And for some reason he snatched off his silly blue woolly hat and stuffed his face right into it. “An anglerfish!” he shouted, muffled. “Nothing but a common anglerfish!” His eyes, bright with laughter, appeared above the blue woolly stupid comforter of his hat. “Aye! A whopper! I’ll give you that—a real whopper!”
ONCE I’D GOT my left leg over the sill, and Luke had begun to behave like an adult again (sort of), between us we lugged the 5-foot length of pure horror out of the hopper (Luke lifted the massive head, the bulbous holding-sack of body, and I helped, holding the tail, right at the end). After all, I thought, my heart still thumping, it’s all very well, but Christ, the damn thing nearly killed me—abject fright, OK, but so what?—Just stop laughing, will you?—After all, Luke, it’s all your fault, it really is… We slopped the giant terror into a white plastic fish-box (one of the two boxes loose in the fish-room, boxes which rode the wash from the incoming, outgoing sea, port to starboard, starboard to port, all day, all night, forever). And Luke lashed it to his specimen basket.
“That was great!” he said, more or less in control. “I knew we’d have fun, you and I!”
The monster was too big to fit in the box: even with its powerful tail bent into a semicircle, its broad head reared up above the rim; and its eyes, even though I now knew they belonged to a mere anglerfish, seemed not one whit less malign. Three or four inches behind its hypnosis-inducing globular pond of a right eye were two growths, one the size of a chicken’s egg, the other, an inch to its left, an emergent bud no bigger than the egg of a blackbird. Both eggs were fertilized; and they’d shed their shells—they were a dull orange-yellow filigreed with the red traceries of blood vessels.
So this is an anglerfish, I said to myself, well, so what, it doesn’t look in the least like its comforting little picture in my Collins Pocket Guide, Fish of Britain and Europe—not emotionally, that is, it doesn’t prepare you for the shock of the real thing, not when it’s about to take your ankle right off, and I’m fond of my ankle, it’s mine, and besides …
“So Luke,” I said, huffy, asserting myself (I know things too, yes I do), “these growths, that’s the males, right?” I prodded the growths with my finger—they were both surprisingly hard. “I know about anglerfish. The males are tiny, yeah? They’re minute, free-swimming little fish until they find a big female, yes? Then wow, they get it right, it’s not just a passing moment (OK, probably an hour and a half for you), it’s not just penetration of the female with a mere penis, there’s nothing casual about it, no: it’s total, real commitment for life, not even a feminist could object, because you go right in, head first, it’s total penetration and you become completely absorbed in all her concerns, yeah? You lose your mind, your will power, your own identity, your eyes, your lungs, your gut—you make no mess—you’re no bother, really not, because you’re not only prepared to do the housework, the washing-up, you also agree you’ll never go out again. You’re a sensitive new male, that’s for sure, because whatever she decides to do, wherever she wants to go, you agree, because as it happens you’ve also lost your voice, and your legs. In fact all you’ve got left is the bit that she really cares about—and that’s your balls. So now that’s all you are, a gland for sperm. But from your point of view, I agree, from my point of view—it’s not that bad, in fact there’s a lot going for it, this new life. Because you never have to go out to work again…” (On the bench by the door to the galley we tugged off our boots, released ourselves from our oilskins.) “Luke, look here,” I said, unable to stop. “Luke, don’t you see? You can forget the entire strain of sexual selection—the horrible sweat of so-called honest advertisement of your qualities to potential females: you know, the male-male competition she watches so carefully before she makes her choice. In other words, how do your male contemporaries rate you? Are you really a good farmer? Can you bring in the fish, like Jason? And let’s wait and see—will your contributions in art, science, literature, music or football really amount to anything? Let’s see, let’s have a good hard look at your long white tail (if you’re a Bird of Paradise) or the short purple underside of your tail (if you’re a woodpigeon). Is there any shit on it? Are you diseased? No, Luke, you can forget all that pressure, you really can—all you have to do is lie in bed all day and feel warm and snuggly and prepare: you look at lots of porny mags—until your moment arrives. Because, remember, you’re attached—the little that’s left of you—and even now, when you’re just your balls (the insult of it!), you’re described as parasitic. There you are, stuck in somewhere around the area of her genital opening and—hey, here it comes—at last she’s releasing her egg-veil, a diaphanous veil of eggs. And at one touch of those silky knickers you’ve had it, orgasm after orgasm!”
AS WE ENTERED THE FUG of the galley, full of people (my glasses misted up again and I took them off, wiping the lenses on my sleeve), I heard Sean’s voice from nearby, to the right. “Come on, boys! What kept you? Jerry’s done clapshot!”
“Crapshot?”
“Clapshot, Redmond. An Orkney dish! Neeps and tatties. And haggis! The best! And boys, as we were saying, it’s true—you deserve it!”
My vision partially restored, I saw that everyone—except Jerry himself, who must now be in sole charge of the Norlantean, K508, up there on the bridge—everyone was already seated: Dougie; Big Bryan, First Mate; Allan Besant, whom as yet I hardly knew; and Robbie, at the four places along the bench-table to the left. To our right sat Sean, opposite Jason—and a place each, a piled plate each, complete with knife and fork, awaited us. “Watch it, Redmond,” I said to myself severely, “get a grip, be a man,” as I sat down in the welcoming 3 foot of bench beside Jason, “you’ve had no sleep, don’t overreact to this simple kindness …”
“Aye!” said Sean, as Luke sat down beside him, opposite us. “Boys! You deserve it! I set the places myself! There’s one of you, dinna get me wrong—and he can gut, that’s for sure! A real help—and we didna expect it!”
“Aye,” said Bryan, in his slow bass voice, not looking up from his food, a plate piled heroically, Homerically high. “That’s a fact. Twenty-one boxes of Black butts … And they came so fast. Down below we couldna believe it…”
Jason, as if he was making a considered announcement in front of some packed hall, a leader of the community, which, of course, I realized, he was, said: “Luke, I can tell you, right now—you really know what you’re doing.” And this too, I realized obscurely, was the very highest of praise, as high as it gets on a trawler at sea.
“Och aye,” said Luke, furiously forking his deep soil of haggis. “Aye, it was a clean catch… the cleanest I’ve seen.” Luke’s pale face, I noticed to my surprise, had turned red—it had suffused with blood in the heat; or was he blushing with pleasure? “Redmond here,” he
said over-quickly, too loud, “you know what he said to me? Boys, there was a monk left in the hopper, a big one, with a couple of growths on its head, cancers probably, and Redmond—he decided they were parasitic males, you know? And he says to me, ‘Luke,’ he says, ‘that’s the life, Luke, because once you’re stuck head-first into a female, you’ll never have to work again!’”
Everyone laughed.
“So those weren’t a couple of males? Cancers? How do you know?”
“Because it’s the wrong species! The wrong order! That’s Lophius piscatorius out there! The monk, a monkfish to the trade. The biggest I’ve seen, but it’s still a monkfish. You—you’re thinking of the Deepsea anglers!”
“Far out!” said Sean, seeing my disappointment. “But they’re freaky, man. I’m sure they are!”
“Aye, Redmond, don’t you worry,” said Bryan, being kind. “And who knows? Maybe we will catch one of the Deepsea anglers. It’s not impossible. And they’re as weird a sight to see, right enough, as weird a sight to see as anything on earth—but the ordinary monkfish, you know, it’s not that ordinary. The female lays eggs like frogspawn—except that the jelly can be 40 feet long and 2 foot across! And there’s an Orkney story that people in a rowing boat off Scapa Flow saw one of those masses and thought it was a sea monster, a dark snaky patch in the water, you know, and they rowed for their lives! Well, it’s a great story, but we dinna know their names. So there you go, it’s bullshit.”
“If it’s stories you’re after,” said Robbie, helping out (I was still finding it impossible to look up from my plate—how could I have got a species, an order wrong? That was unforgivable, that was ignorance when there was no excuse, why hadn’t I read more? Prepared better? Marine biology, yes, maybe there was nothing simple about it…), “then you must meet Malky Moar! Orkney—there’s no a better place for stories. We’ll find Malky, he’s always in the bar. And Malky’ll say to me like—well, it’s true, Redmond, we’d had a focker of a thunderstorm—and the next night in the bar Malky says to me, he says, ‘Robbie, you heard the thunder?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘You saw the lightning?’ Aye.’ ‘Well then—there’s my old man sitting in the kitchen at the farm. You mind the kitchen?’ Aye.’ ‘So that lightning, it comes down the chimney and into the stove. Now my old man—he’s got his feet resting on the stove. You mind the stove?’ Aye.’ ‘So that lightning—it goes up his legs and out the back of his head and it kills two pigs in the yard!’ So in the bar we all laugh like. And Malky Moar, he turns on us and he says, ‘Robbie Stanger,’ he says. ‘My old man—does he keep pigs or does he not?’ And Malky, he looks really angry like, so I say, Aye, he does.’ Because he does. And Malky stops looking angry and he fixes each of us in the eye in turn, and he says, Malky says, ‘I rest my case!’”
We laughed.
And Sean said, “Cold iron!”
And Jason said, “Don’t you worry, Redmond. No, it’s true, we can’t promise you a Deepsea angler. But don’t you worry—the sea’s full of strange things, and some of them are a lot stranger even than any of your Deepsea anglers, believe me … I’ve caught a few big deep-sea sharks in my time, Greenland sharks, and they’re odd—not so much because of the way they look, or even because of the things the fisheries scientists like Luke tell us about their habits: no, they’re odd, Redmond, because their flesh is poisonous. It’s toxic! And who the hell could have expected that? Shark meat, great! But not this one, no—it can kill you! Now the real wonder is this: the Icelanders, pure Vikings really—and the Vikings are a people that I have a lot of time for, as a skipper, you know—the Icelanders use the Greenland shark for its oil and skin, and that’s not all, because the flesh, they don’t waste that either, they bury it until it’s putrid, dig it up and dry it—and eat it! So how did they work that out?”
“From the Eskimo, I shouldna wonder,” said Bryan, at the table to our right. Bryan, Big Bryan, was big all right—dark-haired, black-stubbled, a Viking none the less, a Robertson; his deep-set dark eyes were now haggard with physical exhaustion, but they still looked like the eyes of a man who took his time, who wouldn’t be hurried, who thought deeply about things that had not yet begun to trouble Sean, and which I had ceased to care about—such as the purpose of life. There was a small silver stud in the lobe of his left ear, perhaps a potential payment to Neptune, perhaps not. He wore a wedding ring. Bryan, I thought, he’s a Viking that even the superstitious monks of Lindisfarne might be compelled to respect, despite themselves …
He was saying: “They’re also known as the Sleeper shark because they move so slowly—they’ll no give you a nasty surprise” (in my reverie I’d missed something, some vital information), “and as the Gurry shark, from gurry, like slurry, except it’s the offal, the mess you sluice overboard after fishing or whaling—and in Greenland, the Eskimo, the Inuit, they bung seal guts and blood or whatever’s to hand down through a hole in the ice and bring the sleepers to the surface. And they’re big, really big, they can be 20 feet long—Redmond, only the Whale shark, the biggest, up to 70 feet long, the Basking shark, around 40 feet, and the Great white, around the same length but chunky—those are the only sharks that weigh more. So it’s worth the hunt!”
“Aye that’s right,” said Luke, “but they don’t just feed on carrion. Because you often find them with a parasitic copepod covering each eye and we think these copepods are bioluminescent in deep water, six or seven thousand feet down—fish go for their little lights and the shark eats the fish head-first, snap, and that’s why, mostly, you’ll find the fish in their stomachs have no tails!”
Sean, directly opposite me, in comradely mode, said, sotto voce, “So there you go, man, there’s plenty that’s freaky that’s no a Deepsea angler. It’s like they say, a little knowledge really focks you up, so it’s cool to cut it out!” He gave his head a half-flick towards Luke (sitting right beside him) and, leaning forward across the table (its surface covered in sticky Velcro to hold your plate in a Force 7 or 8, but in this (a Force 9?)—you had to hang on to your plate with your left hand and fork your clapshot and haggis into your mouth with your right), he gave me an expressive, a knowing, squashy wink of his left eye.
I was beginning to feel better, a little less terminally, throat-cuttingly foolish and empty, and besides, the clapshot, the neeps and tatties, the buttered mash of turnips and potatoes (Orkney crops that, even that far north, you really could rely on) was warm in my stomach (Jerry was a great guy), and the haggis, it was special too, Orkney haggis, yet still familiar—I decided that I actually liked minced sheep’s-oesophagus-and-stomach, both lengths of colon, the rectum, the entire alimentary canal, as long as it had that reassuringly acrid background taste of gunpowder … And the more I ate, the less apart, less cold, less alien, the outside world became.
So, “Jason,” I managed to say, hoping that he’d realize I’d had it, surrendered, abandoned any claim to combative male status, “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever caught in your nets?”
“Ah, let me think—” said Jason, and gave me a friendly, knowing smile.
So maybe I wasn’t the very first post-seasick greenhorn he’d had to suffer on board, which was a comfort, of sorts, and Robbie, I remembered, had told me that a surprising number—a percentage “you wouldna believe”—of fully trained graduates from the Stromness Nautical School went to sea in earnest in winter for the first time and then, desperate to get back ashore, sought jobs in anything the fisheries had to offer: in the market as apprentice dealers, or simply as junior you-to-me fishmongers, or in filleting, processing, fish-farming, transport, or even as lumpers—casual labourers, summoned at short notice, sometimes at three in the morning, to get down sharpish to Scrabster harbour, to be ready, for £200 a time, to unload an incoming trawler whose crew were too knackered to do it themselves …
Jason now had an emergent all-over black beard (dark as his Armada ancestor’s beard, the swashbuckling sailor who had swum ashore, still feisty, ready to go, escaping easily from the small s
etback of a mere shipwreck, the loss of everything he owned…). Jason was the man who had had the least sleep (according to Sean, who kept an internal log on everyone’s sleep, measured in half-hours) and Jason was the only man who still looked fresh, in control, sane, easy with himself. “The weirdest thing in the nets?” he said. “It’s got to be the Ocean sunfish. They’re rare, really rare in the north, so it was frightening, that’s the only word for it—it was frightening when we caught one, because we didn’t know what it was. Huge. It weighed over a tonne. Deep body, fins straight up and down, tiny mouth, no rear end, no tail—what kind of a fish was that? We were surface-fishing at the time, and it just lay there in the net, half asleep … But all the same, the size of it…”
“Aye,” said Bryan, “I’ve seen one too—they’ve these thick skins, you canna harpoon them, you canna shoot them with a .22, you’ll be needing a .303!”
“That’s why they’ve no need to worry,” said Luke, “only a net can bother them. So they just eat plankton and seaweed and lie around and sleep like Redmond wants to do—but there’s a penalty for that, boys, because their brains are tiny, and in a fish that can weigh one and a half tonnes, its spinal cord, guess what—it’s only half an inch long!”
Everyone laughed. We’re bonding, I thought, half delirious from lack of sleep and, it seemed to me, the increasingly violent movements of the Norlantean, K508 (lost at sea, no mystery, a hurricane, a baby hurricane; so there’d be a page, maybe, in the Orcadian, and three or four lines, maybe, in The Times in London). So, unlike the Ocean sunfish, massively happy, immune from predators, sleeping whenever it feels like it, we’re OK, because we have big brains…
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