Bogmail

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘I don’t know yet. I just like having my rifle at the ready.’ ‘I can’t think of anything you could shoot at sea this time of year.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Roarty. ‘Or as Abraham said to Isaac, “God will provide...”’

  They pushed the boat down the slip into the water. Potter jumped in first, sat on the centre thwart, and got out the oars. Roarty gave the boat a shove and climbed nimbly aboard, while Potter rowed out through the inlet which was wide enough to take the oars with a yard or two to spare on either side. As they cleared the mouth and the wind caught the bow, Potter looked over his shoulder and pulled with the left oar, as if about to set a course. Roarty stood up in the stern, wound the starter cord round the flywheel and pulled. The engine spluttered and died. Roarty removed the pipe from his mouth, while Potter wondered if he had let himself in for an evening’s rowing. On the second pull the engine caught, and immediately they were under way.

  Potter shipped the oars in an unexpected surge of happiness. He and Roarty had never before been together in a boat and, though no word was uttered, each had performed his task as if rehearsed to perfection. His happiness came from the knowledge that he was a practical man in the company of one of his peers, someone who could be trusted implicitly to do the right thing in a tight spot. For some curious reason he thought of Margaret up to her ankles in the sea at Whitstable, because she could never bring herself to wade deeper. And it came to him that a man who lived without the company and conversation of a woman missed half the pleasure of life, but that a man who did not enjoy male camaraderie and manly pursuits missed the other half.

  They headed up the bay, the wind astern and white clouds above racing into the north. The glen opened before them; they could now see houses and roads that had not been visible from the shore.

  ‘I always have a feeling of freedom on the sea,’ Roarty said. ‘Of being away... away. Is there anything at all on your mind out here?’

  ‘Not much. I was just thinking what a lovely evening for sailing.’

  ‘She’d run faster than she’d motor this evening. If we weren’t droving for pollock, I’d put up the sail. Pollock, you see, go for a slow-moving bait.’

  ‘There’s nothing slower than rowing,’ Potter said, getting ready to cast.

  ‘It’s too much like work for a man who’s past his best. I wouldn’t begin yet if I were you. We’re still over the bare sand. Wait till we’re above the wrack; that’s where the pollock feed.’

  They were approaching a blunt-headed rock that rose darkly out of the waves beneath its white cap of bird droppings. Potter was sure they were making straight for it until he spotted the entrance to a narrow channel between rock and land.

  ‘This is Éaló na Mágach, the Channel of the Pollock,’ Roarty explained. ‘If you don’t stick in one here, we’d better go home.’

  Roarty took the way off the boat and set up his fishing rod against the gunwale with his foot on the butt so that the feather jig he was using as a lure trolled behind them. He then put the drag on the reel so that it wouldn’t yield line except to a hooked fish. Potter cast astern and sat with his rod over the gunwale while Roarty opened the throttle gently so that they glided through the channel at the right speed for pollock whiffing. Disappointed, they emerged at the other end without a bite.

  ‘They must be feeding deeper, now that the tide is flowing,’ Roarty said.

  He released the drag and paid out more line, while Potter did likewise.

  ‘We’ll go up north, said Roarty. ‘If nothing else we’ll enjoy the scenery.’

  Just as he spoke, Potter’s rod dipped while the reel responded whirringly to the rush of a pollock. The power of the dive electrified his wrist, concentrating his mind on the fight and the moment.

  ‘It’s a monster,’ he said through his teeth.

  ‘You’d be surprised how much fight there is in a small wrack pollock,’ Roarty said slowly. ‘He’s making for the wrack. I should have warned you that the bottom here is snaggy.’

  ‘I’ve got him,’ Potter said, turning the fish’s head.

  No sooner had he spoken than Roarty’s reel sang out, yielding line to a diving pollock. Each of them concentrated on his own fight, countering dive after dive until they brought their fish to the boat simultaneously.

  ‘Two good-sized pollock,’ Roarty said, dropping his fish on the floorboards at his feet.

  Potter unhooked his catch more slowly. As he watched the dying pollock gasping for air, he could not but acknowledge a sense of life’s imperfection. It was a handsome fish with a dark-green back and olive sides and just a glint of reddish-brown that showed more clearly as it came up out of the water. Noting the perfect curve of the lateral line and the long lower jaw moving pathetically with each gasp, he felt, perhaps a trifle piously, that a sportsman’s life is not made simpler by his love of his quarry. Still, he did not take his reservations seriously enough to reel in his line.

  ‘The pollock is a bonny fighter if you take him near the surface,’ Roarty said. ‘If you hook him in deep water, he puts up less of a struggle. After the first dive he’s exhausted—his swim bladder inflates if he’s hauled up too quickly. The only way to fish pollock for pleasure is with light tackle. It makes the struggle less unequal, but don’t tell that to Rory Rua. I’ve seen him fishing trout on the Lough of Silver with a wooden otter trailing ten or twelve baited hooks. Now that is something I could never bring myself to do.’

  They were now out of sight of the glen; the scenery had become wilder and more magnificent. The sea cliffs towered above them, great striated faces of dark and creamy rock with contorted seams that spoke of mighty geological upheavals. As he looked up at them, Potter experienced a rare sense of exhilaration, as if the cares of life lay full fathom five beneath him. The perpendicular cliffs inspired in him a sense of soaring. He inhaled deeply as if he could not get enough of the salty air.

  They continued northwards for another mile until they had come to a deserted village on the far side of the mountains, but neither of them had got as much as a bite. Potter felt that it did not matter; he was enjoying the play of sun and wind on the green-blue water as well as the dozing seagulls and vigilant cormorants they passed on the way. Roarty spent the time pointing out rocks and coves and recounting the legends enshrined in their names, while Potter listened with the kind of attention he might have given to the Ancient Mariner.

  ‘We’ll try drift-lining for a bit,’ Roarty said, cutting the engine. He filled his pipe and stretched his legs, one on each side of his rifle, as if he were savouring the delights of heaven. Meanwhile the boat drifted with their lines trailing on the tide but both reels remained silent.

  ‘What did you make of the murder hunt?’ Roarty asked between puffs.

  ‘It’s all rather unreal. I can hardly believe such a crime has been committed here in remote Glenkeel. The superintendent who interrogated me seemed to take the same view. He asked me a few perfunctory questions and then thanked me for my help.’

  ‘And yet there was a human foot. I saw it with my own two eyes.’

  ‘I’ve heard about that, a frozen foot in good condition. McGing was puzzled to know if it constituted a sufficient proportion of the human body to warrant Christian burial. He threatened to ring up the bishop after Canon Loftus refused to give him a straight answer.’

  ‘McGing is a fool—worse, an officious fool. He is taking it all too seriously.’

  ‘It’s meat and drink to him. He’s been waiting all his life for a mystery only he can solve.’

  ‘If he doesn’t solve it, no one else will. The homicide squad have gone back to Dublin. We’ve seen the last of them, I’ll warrant.’

  ‘What I can’t understand is why a man who presumably had committed the perfect murder should stir up trouble for himself by presenting the police with his victim’s foot.’ Potter spoke as if he had been giving his deepest thought to the matter.

  ‘I think myself it’s the work of a hoaxer bent on showing
up McGing for the ass he is. The foot may not be Eales’s after all. It may well have come from the body of someone who died a natural death. I’m half-expecting Eales to turn up one of these mornings looking for his cats. If he’s still alive somewhere, he’ll be back to collect them.’

  It’s possible, but unlikely,’ Potter said after a moment’s reflection. ‘Alternatively, the murderer may have wished to leave McGing with a mystery he would appreciate as a change from ragwort and brucellosis. Who knows, the foot may only be a first instalment. A hand or head may follow. Only time will tell.’

  Potter was aware of Roarty’s scrutiny in the sharp evening sea light. It was a pensive scrutiny as he puffed at his pipe and jerked the line to give the lure a semblance of life in the water.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine why anyone should wish to kill poor Eales,’ Roarty said slowly. ‘Indeed it’s hard to imagine whatever it is that makes one man kill another.’

  ‘Some men are more inclined towards evil than others.’

  ‘It isn’t man who is evil, it is God.’ Roarty spoke with surprising vehemence. ‘He created an imperfect world in which evil regularly triumphs. How can such a world be the work of a good deity?’

  ‘Perhaps he is more complex than you imagine, not merely a ‘flat’ character in a Dickens novel. Perhaps he is both good and evil, like his creation. Perhaps he is at war with himself, just like the rest of us. Forever at loggerheads, never at peace.’

  Roarty studied Potter’s clean-cut jaw, wondering if he were being serious or just talking for his own entertainment. There were such men. Men who talk and talk and can never be serious about anything.

  ‘Consider his much-vaunted ecological system,’ Potter continued blithely. ‘Herbivores eating plants and carnivores eating herbivores–that makes sense only to scientists.

  Consider it for a moment as a sentient human being and it becomes an obscenity.’

  ‘Are we saying the same thing?’ Roarty was trying hard to ignore his suspicion that Potter was taking him for a ride.

  ‘No, you say that God is evil but I say he is both good and evil. While you merely see the disease-bearing viruses, I also see the benign micro-organisms that enable us to make strong beers and delectable wines and provide you with a livelihood and now and again alcoholic bliss in the evenings.’

  ‘If he isn’t wholly good, why believe in him? Why not simplify your life by wiping him off your map? It isn’t difficult. I’ve done it and I don’t regret it.’

  ‘I’m afraid his absence would raise too many questions. A godless world is a world without music, and that is for simple souls, men who live by mensuration, men without a sense of the numinous, which ultimately is a sense of poetry. Do you lack a sense of poetry, Roarty?’

  Now he was fully convinced that Potter was riling him. Potter was so convinced of his own intellectual superiority that he refused to engage in anything except the most inconsequential conversation.

  ‘There’s more poetry in mathematics than in the collected works of Shakespeare, Milton and Dante put together,’ Roarty said. ‘I’m fully convinced that in a thousand years’ time all serious poets will be mathematicians and their poetry expressed not in words but in mathematical formulae.’ He turned on the thwart, galvanised into life by the whirr of his reel.

  Potter watched him playing the fish with all the unobtrusive skill of a man who has done something more times than he cares to remember. He was puffing at his pipe as if he were back in the bar, as if a tussle with a pollock was no more arduous than pulling a pint of stout. A glint of red showed in the water, and the exhausted pollock came up over the gunwale to beat a weakening tattoo on the floor. It was a large wrack pollock, seven pounds if it was an ounce, and Roarty appraised it with lofty objectivity.

  ‘He was a stout fighter,’ he said. ‘His first rush was like a mad bullock on a tether.’

  ‘We had come a long way from Eales’s foot in our conversation,’ said Potter.

  ‘So we had.’ Roarty picked up his rifle and took aim with lightning speed. Potter, turning, caught sight of a bull seal sliding off a rock about sixty yards off the starboard bow.

  ‘A heart shot. He didn’t feel a thing.’ A little diversion to jolt Mr Potter out of his complacency, thought Roarty.

  ‘It was rather unnecessary.’ Potter was seriously taken aback.

  ‘If God is evil, why be good. For a moment I felt I was he, remote, capricious, death-bestowing. What happened to the seal happens every day to innocent children, except that they suffer before they die.’

  Potter was perplexed to discover a side to Roarty that he had not previously noticed. He hadn’t seen him as a man of lightning impulse; he had always found him unhurried and considered in thought and movement.

  ‘It was far from godlike. However impressive the marksmanship, it entirely lacked reason and purpose.’

  ‘It was a fair cull. And I did it from the highest of motives —to improve the flavour of the cod you and Nora Hession eat in Garron on the way home from the pictures.’

  ‘What nonsense!’

  ‘It may interest you to know that the cod in these waters are seriously infested with parasites that hatch from the eggs of worms in the stomach of the seal. Next time you have fish and chips in Garron, think of that.’

  ‘Blarney and balderdash,’ said Potter, getting to his feet. Facing downwind with his back to Roarty, he unbuttoned and got ready to send a virile spray over the gunwale. The boat was bobbing, and every time he tried to pass water the dip of the boat made him tighten his grip on himself.

  ‘I can’t do it. It seems ridiculous but every time the boat pitches I tighten.’

  ‘There’s a knack in pissing in a swell. Here, sit on the thwart and do it into the bailer.’ Roarty handed him a rusty tin can. Potter faced forward and held his penis in one hand and the bailer in the other, but try as he might he could not pass a drop.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said.

  ‘We won’t be going home for another two hours. Since I don’t carry a catheter, I’ll have to put you out on that rock there instead.’

  Potter rowed across to the flat rock where the seal had been sunning itself. Roarty held the boat firm against the side while Potter climbed out. He stood on the rock with the wind on the back of his neck and enjoyed the relief of release onto the froth-flecked water below. It was a strange sensation standing on a rock the size of a dining-room carpet with the sea all around and tentacles of floating wrack along the sides. At the edge of the rock was a small pool of seal’s blood, and Roarty, a bald-headed man in a boat a hundred yards away, was playing another fish.

  He noticed the white bird droppings at his feet and realised that the rock would be awash again before high water. There was no one in sight on the bare cliff tops above. The only sign of humanity was the row of floating buoys marking the position of lobster pots. He and Roarty were all alone in this wilderness of cliff and water. At dawn the fishermen would come to lift their pots. By then the rock would be bare once more and the bird droppings and seal’s blood washed away. He remembered a story he’d heard about Cornish criminals and how they were given a jug of water and a loaf and left on a rock at low water to wait for death by drowning. It was a cruel way to go, watching a rising tide with no possibility of rescue. Roarty unhooked his fish, looked over his shoulder and waved. Potter watched as he rowed to the rock with deliberate ease, and again sensed the overwhelming freedom of the evening.

  ‘The human mind is a mystery,’ he said, getting into the boat. ‘For a moment on that rock I found myself in the mind of a marooned man who sees the tide rising and not a boat in sight.’

  ‘You and I are two of a kind. We have what I call the perception of catastrophe. Without it you can go through life as if it were an acre of garden with a six-foot fence. With it the experience of all human life is yours. Without leaving your hearth you have been with the Persians at Salamis, with Leonidas at Thermopylae, and with the Highlanders at Culloden.’

  ‘Y
ou make it sound like a coward dying many times before his death.’

  ‘No, with this capacity you can forestall disaster by spotting it on the horizon. You can foresee another man’s mistake before he makes it.’

  ‘But can you foresee your own?’

  ‘Good lord, will you look at that gliobach of sea fowl! They’ve come down out of the empty sky.’

  ‘What are they diving on? It can’t be pollock.’

  ‘Mackerel. What they’re really after is the small fry the mackerel force to the surface.’

  ‘Let’s not hang about,’ said Potter.

  ‘Mackerel are not much sport with our tackle but if you want to try your hand, you’re welcome.’

  Roarty, having restarted the engine, was making straight for the cloud of screaming sea fowl. Within minutes the water around them was boiling with playing fish and glinting with the silver scales of ravaged sprat. Roarty, skirting the school, steered around the outside so as not to drive them under, thus allowing Potter to troll on the inside. With the double tug of the first mackerel, Potter glimpsed the metallic side of the fish sheering in the water as he reeled it in. It was a new experience. Unlike the pollock, the mackerel came at the lure with the speed of an arrow, surrounded by scores of open-mouthed rivals.

  ‘You’re not going to try your luck?’ he said when he had bagged about two dozen.

  ‘There’s no need for luck here. They’re practically leaping in over the gunwale. What are you going to do with them? There’s a limit to the number you can eat before they go off.’

  ‘I’ll take them back to your pub. Some of your customers might appreciate a fish supper.’

  ‘It will do wonders for my trade.’

  ‘You’re a hard man to fathom, Roarty. You’d kill an uneatable seal and turn your back on a juicy mackerel.’

  ‘My forefathers may have killed to eat. I kill for sport, and the essence of sport, be it with rod or gun, is skill of eye and arm. There’s no skill in killing mackerel except with light trout tackle. On an evening like this they’d go for a bare hook. The only thing that determines the size of the catch is the speed with which you unhook them. Now a seal is different. Would you be ashamed of a heart shot from a rocking boat at sixty yards?’