“Esmark’s eel-pout!”
So I took two photographs—and Luke tossed Esmark’s eel-pout on to the gutting table, for later transferral down the exit chute, food for the kittiwakes …
“The Blackmouth catshark!”
Lying at my feet, maybe a yard long, its brown mottled back shiny in the overhead lights: yes, there was no doubt about it: the so-called Blackmouth catshark was a dogfish.
I said, my energy seemingly recovered (perhaps all that sweat-exercise had done me good): “It’s no a catshark—it’s a dog-fish! Woof-woof!”
“Worzel! Grow up!” said Luke, still a little severe. “Dogfish are catsharks. But here—look” (he held it up) “this one is rare, a real deepwater catfish, down to a kilometre and more—and see?” He opened its mouth: yes! It was black inside, and so many teeth… Luke cast it up and on to the table.
“And this” (a grab at the basket, a fish at my feet), “this is the spurdog, the Common dogfish—from the first haul.”
The real dogfish—something I recognized, and how! The great meticulous pleasure of those A-level dissections, T. H. Huxley’s biology course, as it still was then—it all came back to me; and to Luke I said: “On Old Olympus Towering Tops a Finn and German Pick Some Hops.”
“Eh?”
“It’s a mnemonic—you know, an aid to memory: the cranial nerves of the dogfish: occipital, trigeminal… oh shite, well, Luke, there you go: at least I remember the mnemonic …”
“Aye. So what?” (Up and across went the dogfish-and-memories.) “Look—I may not even use these photographs in my doctorate, but I need to have them, all the same, just in case.” And, one to each hand, he laid a couple of small squid on the floor: “The Short-finned squid! The European flying squid!”
I took their pictures—and Luke lobbed them on to the table. “Hey Luke—come on!” I said. “What’s happened? Don’t be so aggressive all of a sudden … What’s up? You call it a European flying squid… And yet you won’t tell me about it?”
“Oh—Worzel, let’s just get this job done!”
“No,” I said. “Certainly not. No! That’s not right. The bargain was: you’d tell me about things!” And, indignant, for the first time I drew myself up to my full height (well, I couldn’t do that before, could I? Not with the floor chucking you all about the place), and, like a Dowager-Duchess, I repeated: “Certainly not!” And, thanking Luke’s absurd ideas of job demarcation (learnt at his Antarctic station, surely?), because, after all, it was obvious, he knew far more about this poncy camera-kit of mine and could take far better pictures than I ever would—I said, tucking my camera into my ample Dowager-Duchess oilskin jacket: “No info! No pictures!”
“Oh for Chrissake!” said Luke, almost mean. “I told you—it can happen to us any time now. And it’s sudden and total—you can’t speak.”
Slightly alarmed, I meant to say, man to man, in words as commanding as Big Bryan’s: Luke—the European flying squid! Tell me about it now—or else! But instead I heard myself say (and meanwhile Luke had slapped a couple of small flatfish at my feet), “Oh please, Luke—it won’t hurt you—please tell me about the European flying squid!”
“OK! You win!” said Luke, disgusted, backing off, sitting on the edge of his blue plastic basket, drawing his right hand across his forehead and then, for some reason, snatching off his blue woolly hat (anger!) and stuffing it (right hand to the small of his back, forward, down, and into the pocket of his jeans beneath the oilskin apron-and-trousers)… “Squid—well they’re not my thing, nothing personal, you understand, they’re about as interesting as marine biology gets, and that means they’re far more interesting than most animals on land—but, can’t you see? It’s impossible to know everything about life in the oceans! I’d like to, I try, I really do—but sometimes I can’t take it any more, you know, because it’s all so exciting, so unexpected, you couldn’t invent it for yourself! No! Never! Sometimes it gets overwhelming, you know, like the biggest lump in the worst storm you ever saw! Aye—and I feel myself drowning… Because I can’t know it all! I’m reading for my doctorate, for Chrissake, that’s all—and yet you, you seem to think I should know everything!”
“Oh Jesus, Luke! I’m so sorry, don’t be silly, yes, but maybe I do, I did, you know, yes, you’re crazy, but I’m sorry—forgive me, no, it wasn’t like that—” And, guilty, I took the huge camera-and-flash out from under my oilskin jacket.
“OK! So!” said Luke, not moving but, disconcertingly, shutting his eyes tight. “Squid! There are two great and weird things that you need to know about squid! One: you remember your Darwin and The Origin and how he talked us through, step by step, the probable evolution of the mammalian eye? Because that was his big test! Because religious people said: ‘Up yours!’ Excuse me. But they did—they said, ‘OK, just you explain to us how the human eye evolved!’ Because what use could a wonky blurry half-formed eye possibly be to anyone? No! God made it—perfect, fully formed! Well, no, as it happens, because he didn’t. No—for humans, proto-angels, whatever we were, you’d know! Pre-angels, wingless angels, so special, each of us, and yet we still have to shit at least once a day: and the odd Worzel-angel—that one throws up!” Luke, happiness re-approaching, opened his eyes and looked at me, and almost laughed: but no, he shut them tighter than ever (which wiped the furrows on his forehead down to his eyebrows and away off his face, his brow was stretched clear—and, even as he concentrated so hard, he looked ten years younger, back to his early twenties).
“No—fact is—get this! God prefers squid! Our own god-given perfect eyes—they’re nothing of the sort! What a lie! Like all religion … No: God likes squid best. Their eyes evolved entirely independently of the vertebrates’ and sure, they developed in much the same way, convergent evolution, but their eyes are so superior: because their retinal cells face towards the incoming rays of light and they have their ganglion-cells, their receiver-cells, behind them; whereas with us, God was having a sleep, he messed up, big time! Because our ganglion-cells are in front of the light-sensitive cells—they really foul up the light-rays forming the image … Aye, compared to a squid, we’re practically blind!”
“Jeesus!”
“Please, Worzel, please—stop saying that, because it’s so lazy of you, and I hate it!”
“Ah.”
“Aye—and the second thing about squid? Is that what you want?” Luke, perched on the surprisingly rigid rim of his blue basket, a hand on each knee, eyes tight-shut, said: “Is that what you want?”
And “Yes!” I said, standing there, limp, I’m afraid, and: I don’t understand it, I thought, but I did. And I wouldn’t put my best friend through this, whatever it is; but there again, I thought, isn’t Luke now one of my best friends? And the inner voice, in Luke’s clear tones, said to me: “Grow up! There you go again—talking like a teenager!”
“So—squid. Number Two (and that’s your lot). Aye: the nerve fibres of molluscs—squid are molluscs—they never evolved the myelin-coating, the axon-sheaths, the electrical insulation that we have around our own nerve-fibres, which are from around one-fiftieth to one-thousandth of a millimetre thick: no, but who cares? Because the rate at which nerve fibres conduct impulses increases with their thickness—and guess what? The squids, between their brains and their mantles they’ve evolved nerve fibres that are one half of a millimetre thick! So pow! They’re fast: jet-propulsion from their mantle-funnels! Plus an ink-blast to fool their predators! And—it really is almost instant—how’s about their all-in spectacular camouflage colour changes?”
Luke, the lesson over (could teaching really be that painful? Yes, I supposed, it could, and, anyway, it obviously was), Luke opened his eyes; he got to his feet, and, as if nothing untoward had happened, he gripped my shoulder, hard, in the usual way—the photographic routine, even though the floor was juddering with nothing more than the thump of the engines, and: “Go on!” he said. “Full flash! Two exposures each—f.32 and f.22, bracket them! Witch! Long rough
dab!”
Click-flash! Flash-click! Twice. So satisfying. Just as if you were actually achieving something …
And “OK!” I said, as he threw the flatfish, one after the other, backwristed, as if he was spinning a couple of Frisbees into flight—and they landed, perfectly, in the exit-chute. “OK! So why was that last squid called a European flying squid? Who ever heard of flying squid? Flying fish, yes. Flying squid, no. So it’s some kind of historical misnomer? Some charming mistake?”
Luke, who, a moment before, had seemed to be back in possession of a peaceful sense of self (perhaps he thought the lesson had gone well? Well, it had, it really had)—Luke, disturbed again, chucking, with unnecessary violence, two very strange little fish to the floor in front of my boots, said: “Misnomer? Charm?”
“Well, you know…”
“No! I don’t—flying squid, they fly! It’s only academics like you, marine biologists who never leave the lab—it’s only people like you who sneer at the stories of men who go to sea, the reports of trawlermen way out in mid-ocean: yes, it’s people like you, it’s people like you who make our lives a misery, trawlermen like me; and you treat us like peasants; and you don’t even bother to read my scientific papers or, if you do, you pretend you haven’t!”
“Eh? Luke?” (Well—I was very flattered; me: a marine biologist? But the rest of it…)
“Oh Jesus!” said Luke, grabbing my left arm (quick as a squid, I thought, pleased with myself). “Aye. Yes. Aye. Don’t you mind that… I’m sorry. I warned you, Worzel… But I’m forgetting myself—for a moment there I think I thought you were this terrible bitter senior guy in the university, in the department; you know, you know the type, we all do, he was passed over for promotion …” Luke brightened, he smiled, he let go of my arm. “But there again—don’t you ever use words like misnomer again or, worst of all, magisterial or, even worse than that: first-class mind!”
“Aieee! No!”
“Goaaal!” shouted Luke, the real or imagined bitterness of this outer or inner academic temporarily flung out of his mind and overboard. “Aye! Flying squids—they fly! Pow! There’re several species—they’ve wide fins and extra-broad membranes on their arms and they leave the water with such power they can fly for sixty yards or more—and we’ve well-documented accounts (yes! from merchant seamen!): these squids have struck ships a good twenty feet above the waterline!”
“And so,” I said, seizing my chance in all this euphoria, but still tentative … “Giant squid? Sperm-whales?”
“Ach! All right!” said Luke, with a happy grin, like old times. “But first—take these little beauties, OK?”
The top one, furthest from me, was brown-backed, silvery-stomached, with a long fringe of rear fin top and bottom, a whisker, a barbel, beneath its chin—and two long trailing feathery filaments stretching from its gills to beyond its anus: so what were they for? For feeling about the pitch-black mud?
“The Greater forkbeard—cod family,” said Luke. “But this one” (he bent down and stroked it, he ran his right index-finger along its slim flank, tracing its lateral line), “this one I really like.”
And by now, with all my training, I told myself, even I can see why: it was a very beautiful streamlined little fish, its back mottled light brown, its flanks a light red, its underside—well, its underside was pink. So it was a girl-fish, a fish off to its first adult dance, a proper ball…
“You know why?”
“Yeah—it’s a young girl; she’s off to a dance.”
“What? Spare us! No, well maybe—who knows? No, no—this is a rockling, a deep-sea rockling, a Bigeye rockling. And I like them now, Worzel—because I can see they’re your kind of fish.”
“They are?”
“Aye!” He picked it up. “See? The front dorsal fin—it’s like a line of hairs, isn’t it?” (It was.) “And the fish lies flat-out half-asleep on the sea-bed, taking it easy, you know?”
“Ah.”
“And the only part of it that moves are these hairs, modified fin-rays, and they vibrate constantly—and they waft a current of water along this groove around and beneath them, see?” (Maybe there was a groove there; but you’d need a hand-lens or squid-eyes …) “And you’ve guessed, haven’t you?” (No, I hadn’t.) “Of course—the sides of this groove are lined with exactly the same kind of taste-buds you find on a tongue! So the rockling can lie very still in its bunk day and night, tasting the water around it for a passing prawn or crab or bristleworm—and it need only stir for a meal when it really feels the need!”
“Great!”
“Aye,” said Luke, pushing the two little fish aside with his boot, turning back to his basket, “I thought you’d like that!” He straightened up, a big, heavy, grey skate, held at the base of the tail, in each hand. “Aye, I know, Sperm whales … and I remember! It was a bargain! In return you—you were going to find me the perfect wife, or some such… aye! You know what? You—you’re crazy, barking!”
“Thanks … But I do have the perfect wife for you. In fact, Luke, I can tell you exactly where to look for her—the only place you’ll have a chance; and it’s very specific: yes, your one possibility of real happiness, lasting happiness, happiness for life. And, by the way, it’s not a joke, I’m serious—and I don’t think you should laugh…”
“I wasn’t laughing,” said Luke, with a laugh, plainly interested, despite himself, laying another pair of skates out on the floor. “Sperm whales, aye! But these skates, they’re Arctic skates, adapted to the furthest north, Raja hyperborea—and they’re interesting too. You know their behaviour? No one has a clue. And if you don’t believe me, get this, big time! The very last haul, when you were in the hold—around 150 skates came up in the net, but all Arctic skate, and all the same age, and all male! So what the hell’s going on?”
“A regiment. A club. An old-boys reunion …”
“Och aye. Your usual bullshit—but where are the females? Are they all together too? And what about the young? The different stages, eh? Where are they?”
“No idea!”
“Aye—and neither has anyone else! Now I want a series of pictures of these skates, to prove they’re all the same sex and the same age—I took a random sample from the 150: six. And I know that doesn’t sound much, but it was the best I could do. Because Jason has no quota for skate; they were in the way; 150 big skate! The boys had no choice—even though skate-wings are a feast for a king, God, Darwin, whoever, they’re so good to eat, and such lovely animals, and yet out they all went, dead of course, because nothing survives the sudden decrease in pressure from such depths … Aye … It’s a waste, a terrible waste… If only we were governed by Icelanders! Then we could control and manage the seas that belong to us, for 200 miles offshore: aye, and do away with this quota-nonsense, and we’d conserve our own fish-stocks and find out everything about the life-cycle of these skates, and protect the females and young (once we know where their nurseries are)—and gradually our own trawlermen would get as rich as the Icelanders and there’d be lots of fish for the rest of us to eat, for always—and everyone would be happy!”
“Yes! Yes!”
“So you—what the hell are you doing?”
“Eh?”
“Why aren’t you taking their pictures?”
“Luke—lay off!” I said, peeved, swinging the heavy camera-kit into position, stooping down. “I’m a man—I’m a bloke—so hasn’t your biology taught you anything? I really cannot concentrate on two equally interesting things at once! No—if I’m listening to you talking so well about skates, how the hell am I supposed to photograph them?”
“But you wanted me to tell you everything!”
“Yes—of course I did. So fuck off! It’s so complicated, isn’t it? Except no, so don’t fuck off, it’s actually simple, so very simple…”
Luke, nonplussed, as he well might be, stood beside me, silent. And through the lens which always, so completely, excludes the rest of the external world: Luke, the Norlantean,
the nearby galaxies, empty space … (Hey! So no wonder so many cameras are sold! And yes! No wonder people like me then forget to use them—so the average number of exposures taken per camera per year is twelve.) But oh Jeesus, and Luke says I must not say that, this skate, this skate that fills the frame: it’s on its back, yes, but it’s so fleshy, flabby, thick, glistening, spotted with brown, and the underside of this individual skate here is covered with green spots that look like mould, and angry red spots that look like terrible on-coming acne; and at the base, the start of its tail, just behind the thick globular head, there’s a puffed-out couple of swellings (its guts?) and then, again, to either side, two thin sticky-out things like a bat’s ears, which protrude beyond two more fleshy elliptical sacs, which give way, yes, still on either side, to two semi-or fully erect (who could tell—except a womanly skate?) to two penises, their stems smooth and thick, the glands of each protuberant, eager, and, apparently, circumcised.
“Luke!” (Yes—I may have yelled at him, a foot away.) “Luke! They’re like me—they’re circumcised! … Well—very young middle-class vicars’ sons in the 1940s, you know, they lined you up on the wooden vicarage-kitchen table, you and the cocker-spaniel puppies—and they docked the tails of the puppies and (much less important) the foreskin of the baby… And it was always done by a spinster-aunt…” And: “Sorry—so sorry!” I said, not to Luke, but to the Arctic skate, because I really did feel that, man to man, I’d intruded, unforgivably, on its deep-sea privacy.
“Oh Jesus,” said Luke, standing there, unmoving (yes—he said Jesus). “If we ever do get home, you know what? Aye—I’ll sleep, as always, more or less without a break for three days and nights, to recover from this trip—and then? You know what? Aye! I’ll sleep for another four days and nights to recover—can you guess? From what? Aye! From you!”
“Ah, sure, why not?” Which, I thought, was macho-nonchalant of me, because, I’m afraid, I really wanted to tell him about a visit to the new London Aquarium with my family where all was all it should be in an ordered world (the sharks! the sea-horses—so small, so intricate!). Yes—until we got to the big shallow pool full of skates or rays (OK—so they were very shallow-water species, but all the same …) And this is where everyone gathered: and they bent over the low side of the big pool—and why? Well, it hurts to say this, Luke, but the rays or skates, they swam up to every visitor, as desperate for friendship as any pussycat, and they had a good look at you—and then they raised their heads right out of the water, and you know what they wanted? Bizarre but true; as instructed by the multiple official notices: you were to wet your fingers in the pool and, very gently, stroke them at the back of their heads. And oh, Luke, shite, they went all trembly, all wibbly-wobbly down their tails, and they hung there in the water, wanting more of it. And of course I didn’t say anything to my wife or young daughter or young son: no, you don’t, do you? Not after a shock like that… (To fall in love with a skate?) But as we left there was a young man beside us with his girlfriend; and he was obviously a soldier on leave (the cropped hair, the non-gym-fit, slim body, the way he moved, packed with assault-course, marathon-energy); and he said to her: “So what the fuck do we eat now? Because I promise you—I’m never touching fish again!” And she said, because women are so much tougher than men, she said: “They weren’t fish, asshole—they were skates!” But I didn’t say anything to Luke because for a thought as awful, as disruptive as that, the internal censor, in and out of fever and coma as it still was—it said: “Redmond! Fatso! Silence!”
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