by Cynan Jones
He calculated its size, pushed his thumb into his nose, a thing he did, and nodded again. Should it spin on them, they were clear.
‘Just to the left. Hit it there.’
The thermal anchor hissed away, turning the air into a stream of steam, hitting the calved ice with a crack that made all the men momentarily sick.
They could not see it, but they pictured the anchor thumping a few lengths into the berg then dropping into its body; a strange conflict of heat, it melting and sinking into the ice, but battled, with the deep cold closing round it, refreezing, setting it inside solidly.
The berg gave a distraught boom, a strangled sound of grief that echoed over the water.
‘She’s a beauty,’ said the harpooner.
‘A beauty. All the way blue.’
~
They attached the tow lines to the tugs and the RIBs were winched up in the davits, throwing a shadow on the flat water as they hung like things caught in the talons of a bird.
The main line went to the stronger boat that would take the berg eventually all the way to the dock.
For the first stage of the journey, the two smaller tugs would flank the main tug, adjusting as necessary to keep the iceberg stable as it melted somewhat with manoeuvre and the friction of saltwater.
As they secured the tow lines, the men looked up to the wheelhouse of the main tug; and when they were all aboard the main tug to eat before setting south, they looked at the wheelhouse.
Eventually, the captain came out. He’d checked the sonograph, and made calculations, and by now brokered the ice.
‘She’s one hundred and ten. That’s six hundred and thirty-four barrels. Good leading edge, so there won’t be overmuch friction; she shouldn’t waist too much. She’s a funny shape, but she’ll hold.’
‘Like your wife,’ one of the men muttered, to muffled delight.
‘We had two bids. The gallon price was higher south of Dogger. But we’ll lose more in the water and she’ll likely end up fetching the same. So we’re best going short. We also had an offer to park it. How do you feel about that?’
The crew heckled, with mixed accents, unanimously, at the idea. Blunt in their opinions about letting the thing melt to keep prices up.
‘Then we’ll take her into Redcar. With the melt, means you’ll only have to go as far as Sumburgh maybe. This’ll take her from there. We’re promised a calm sea.’
~
The thick smell of oil and grease came up from the dismantled outboards that lay in pieces about the deck.
The pieces lay like artefacts; the crew’s care of them akin to the careful homage of archaeologists.
They scraped away corrosion and the salt, with affection close to love.
Treated the motors as things that were amongst the last of their kind.
‘There’s no bomb big enough to blow a berg that big,’ said the big Icelander.
‘They blow themselves easy enough,’ to laughter.
‘Like someone I know . . .’ retort.
‘Well. Why would you want to, really?’ asked the strange Moroccan.
‘To blow up the city!’ They were used to the harpooner making statements like this now.
‘You wouldn’t blow the city up. You’d just shower it in snow,’ the Lead Man said.
‘The city is a mewling infant.’
‘The city, the city.’ The Moroccan’s clipped-sharp singsong sound.
‘Take, take, take. Imagine how much there’d be to go around. If the cities were just . . . pwff. If they were all just popped, like the bladders on seaweed.’
‘He has a point.’
‘He has an illness.’
The Icelander said, ‘Pass me more bread.’
Behind the boat, the calved berg waited to be towed away, a passive shadow thrown before it on the water.
There was a sense of unrealness to it. Perhaps because it was hard to believe the ice, that looked so fresh and newly formed, was a thousand years old.
~
‘Check the specimen drags,’ the captain said, and the two men on rota went to it.
‘There’s never anything,’ the Moroccan complained, he and the other hauling the heavy seine, hand over hand. The light plankton net already lifted, draped there by their feet.
But when the net came up there was a fish as thick and long as a man’s arm.
A pale subdued gold, the colour of early-morning light on soft flat water. A surprising whisker on its chin.
The fish was inert in the net, placid, and, they assumed, dead. Heavy and arched as if in a hammock.
But as they went to lift it, it flapped. They screamed like girls. A sudden life was in its eyes; some internal energy switched on; and at once it became like a pennant snapping and curling in the wind. Chewing at the air.
When they got it on the deck it stilled again, but for its mouth, small rhythmic gasps, as if it counted down silently the last moments of its life. It thudded once, with a sound on the deck like the thwack of wet rope. Then its counting seemed to slow.
It was the first large fish they’d caught.
‘Shall we enter it into the record?’ the crewman asked.
‘Fetch a knife,’ the captain said.
~
The guts slid from the incision as if in surprise; blood that was almost black leaching over the deck. The men now were like children as they watched.
It did not seem possible the guts had been contained within the fish. They came out in handfuls of alien shapes and colours that seemed to bear no relation to the lithe thing lain there split now at their feet.
They did not know, the captain nor the men, to keep the milts, nor liver. The insides hit the water like a jellyfish.
‘Do we leave the head on?’ someone asked.
The captain said they did.
The head now seemed disproportionate. Like the outboards on the RIBs.
They could cut the fish up and fry it in the small pans they had. But this did not feel right.
One or two of the crew, seeing the fish already diminished, felt privately sad, and the notion of further dismemberment seemed undignified.
They looked at the captain for he was Captain.
Rightly, the fish should be cooked intact.
Then came a moment of small genius.
They wrapped the fish in a foil survival blanket from the boat’s First Aid supplies. Then slid it into the barrel of the thermal harpoon gun.
All this was done with a degree of melancholy ceremony, as if they aimed to fire the fish beshrouded out to sea in funeral.
But they set the barrel heat to one hundred and sixty and stood back.
I suppose we give it forty minutes, the captain guessed. ‘Give it forty minutes.’
~
When people imagine being out here, they imagine silence, quiet.
But there’s the engines. The constant struggle, noise of the engine, pulling.
Never been able to zone it out. Then again, you listen. It’s like you see with your ears, not your eyes. The sea ahead, if it’s still, doesn’t change much to the eye. But you can hear the current thicken, in the engine sound; you can hear a drop in pressure coming, with the sound changing in the air. Even the pull of the wind, the way the sounds are taken.
When the soft tugs are clear we idle a while, exchange banter. Shouting from deck to deck. Watch the counterweights take the tow lines down under the water; the spin of the winches as they wind back in. Their pitch getting higher the less line. Then they change to the lighter solar engines, and head away. The smell of diesel drops from the air. I hear them for far longer than I see them.
When they’re out of earshot I cut the motor. I know this should not be done. It’s when you can lose a berg, without the movement through the water keeping it stable.
But I do it just to hear the silence. Just a little while.
It’s something that if you’ve never heard you will not understand.
The sound of silence on the Northern water;
and the sound of ice. A berg calving away from some great body.
Like something falling from the face of the Earth.
~
He thinks again of heading away, to somewhere without such constant sound.
The long trips have given him time to make all the calculations. How many tins of food he could amass and store in the hold of the boat, and how long they would feed him. The drums of fuel.
Ironically, the problem would be water.
But it could be done.
How far could he get burning the fuel it would take to tow enough ice to keep him; and where would he go? For silence.
He imagines understanding the world with his eyes again. Having to account contours, and colours, and the solidity of a surface.
A picture of himself, in silence, on a flat sea, a raft of birds beside the boat, and the only sound the knock of his spoon against the edge of a tin of food.
But he knows, as he nears the sea defences, sees the panels moulded from the shredded blades of old wind turbines. He would never do that to the men.
Not with the chance he’s been offered, now, to steer the giant city berg.
It will be historic, he knows. I am the best man for the job. And it will make us rich.
The lights of the dock in the falling light.
But the silence, he thinks. The silence.
POTATO WATER
The sound of vegetables being chopped.
He found the boy in the garden. Curled up like a millipede in the leaves.
The boy was in fever, and sang a song, and talked about his little brother, and a missing dog.
Gone only to collect vegetables; but he brought back a child. There is a fairy tale I remember about that. That my Awa used to tell me.
If I am asked what it is I love most about my husband I say the smell of soil on his hands.
I think if I bit into him he must have the taste of fresh vegetables.
Every day he goes. His garden. That he has dug out at the base of the filtration mound. Rich soil, he says. And moisture. We pretend not to think about why.
Every day he is amazed that no one has stolen the crop. Does not understand how others are not growing things for themselves there too.
It is a filtration mound, I say. And he narrows his brow in bafflement, and rubs his hands, which I think is what pushes the scent of the soil into his skin.
There were butterflies in the rushes today, he tells me.
There are thick white grubs in the earth.
A flame lit, and a pan put on to boil.
~
Drink, I say. Three days now. Nothing but potato water.
The warm steam smells of soil, as if my husband’s in the room.
How is he? he asks when he comes back from the garden.
He is thin, the boy. A collection of poles.
~
They followed the dog out of the city. This is what I understand. The dog they had found (and this is my make-believe, but who knows, I may be right) by the bins of a restaurant, when they were stealing the half-used blocks of soap, and part-empty bottles of expensive alcowash, miniature pouches of tooth powder. To sell and to swap with a child’s bright way with business.
It was love at first sight. The little brother and the dog. They were both scruffy, and moody, and never behaved. Again, that is my imagination.
But you can read a lot from such a small amount of a person. Rightly or wrongly. Or maybe that is wrong to say. It’s not that you read, but you write. You take the tiniest thing you see, and that starts the story of them. The only thing that stops that is to know. For sure. The truths.
I see them clearly. In amongst the shanties and the stalls of the old canal beds. In amongst the shouts and shamming. A defiant little boy with his chest pushed out, trying to be bigger, walking along with the dog at his heels.
And the older brother. Tall and cowed as he is. Not that I have seen him on his feet. A frown I do not think will pass with the fever.
A boy who constantly opens and closes his fists, like he is lifting and letting go over and over again of a responsibility he doesn’t have any choice about.
I cannot think about him any other way than as an orphan . . .
Ah! What a time. The lovely stink of the drained canals. Floors from old pallets. Thrown away carpets we took from the emptied houses. Before they knocked them down to build the higher flats.
How we poured, so many of us, into the space. How we so colourfully flowed.
There is no other place he can come from, this boy.
The sound of vegetables being chopped. A radio in the background.
~
I misremembered. It is not that a child is found in the vegetable garden. It is that a child is taken in payment for the theft of rampion . . .
Or, Rapunzel, as they call it.
The child is taken away.
~
It is dark before my husband comes home.
He looks drawn and tired when he does. For once he is not carrying vegetables.
I did not find him, he says.
Did you think that you would?
I can tell that he did. He is that type of man.
Their dog ran off. They went after it, out of the city. He followed his little brother, I tell him.
He’s talking now? he asks.
When I place my hand on his head, he speaks less wildly, I say. This is what I have learnt.
He fell ill. He woke up. His brother was gone. He tried to keep going after him. And you found him in the garden.
I don’t know what to do, my husband says.
We care for the boy you did find, I say. There is no more.
Did they walk along the riverbed? he asks.
There is mud on his shoes and his clothes. There is nothing else like river mud.
All this way?
The walls thrum slightly as the helicopter passes again, carrying away containers from the abandoned shipping yard. Like a hornet carrying a grub.
They are built out of energy, children, I say. Even when they are ill. They are mainly no more than energy.
Perhaps if I follow the riverbed, he says.
We are not near the riverbed. And you found him here.
But maybe. If I just.
He is that type of man.
~
I do not tell my husband how I strip the bedclothes from the child and sponge away his sweat. And look at every inch of his skin. How my heart races and I feel sick, certain I will find some sign that he has brought some illness from the city, as there are always whispers of. And then that will be that.
~
As he sips the bowl I hold, pecking like a bird, we have a sort of conversation. Distant though he is, I think he understands.
A robin sings outside the window.
What will your brother do, I ask, when he finds his dog?
Go back to the city.
And if he does not find it? Would he go back anyway?
He won’t stop looking for the dog.
He wouldn’t stop.
He won’t stop looking for his dog.
He wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop.
~
In the night, the boy gets worse again.
When the Water Train goes by, a shudder rattles through him. As if the train itself races through his body. A sound felt in the darkness through the air.
It makes me shudder, too, to see him.
I think the train wrenches part of him away. If I believed in souls.
~
But in the morning the boy is sitting up.
I have to go, he says. I have to find my brother.
I cannot help believing the train took away the worst of it. The illness. Dragged it, with that shudder, from his body.
Now there is a thin shake through him, as if he is animated by a faint breeze.
I have to go. My brother. He begins to open and close his fists, and I feel uneasy that I knew this was a thing that he would do.
Yo
u cannot now. I try to make him calm.
He is eight, he says. I have to look for him.
He has to look for him, before he can look after him.
I must look after him.
When I ask him what age he is himself, he lies and says he’s twelve.
He went after his dog.
I know. First you must get strong.
That dog.
My husband will bring courgettes, and beans and greens, and spinach.
He does not look as if he understands what these things are.
You cannot find your brother unless you are strong.
He seems, almost imperceptibly, to nod.
~
Look! my husband says. He holds up a nasturtium leaf and peers at me through a hole right in its centre. Caterpillars, he says with pride.
I do not understand him sometimes.
~
That night the boy goes.
He is barely able to walk, I’m sure.
He climbs out of the window.
He takes a pile of my husband’s dirty gardening clothes from the drywash basket.