SOMETHING THAT STICKY would never admit in a million years was that he felt sorry for the fish. All those years since he’d left the dredge and gone fishing and he still hated to see people like Bob booting the poor bastards around the deck, letting the little ones pant to death when they could have been biffed back in time to live.
Well, it was all about to happen again. The warps were in, doors secured to the bulwark. Birds had turned up in their millions as usual – they reckoned they knew from the gear change of the boat’s engine when a haul was coming up. He unclipped the lazy wire from the second door, lowered the scuppers so the fish couldn’t defect back into the sea from the deck, and clipped the net-roller rope on with a C link.
Took off the backstrop, then the swivel. The bridles came up …
‘What’s that big netting for, Sticky? That’s huge wide mesh. Anything but a whale would get through that.’
It was the kid, the bright-faced kid – Laura’s issue – standing out of the way in the semi-built new toilet unit.
‘It’s called the sweep,’ called Sticky, in reply. ‘Acts like a sheep dog. Sort of herds the fish into the net. Mesh’ll get smaller soon – they call that part the bunt.’
‘Bunts the fish into the net?’
The floats appeared, and then behind them surfaced the net, lolling like a massive red whale.
That’s probably what the kid thought it was at first. He was gawping at it with eyes as big as Dooley’s.
Bob cut the engine; the boat wallowed and the kid was jerked out of the dunny unit by the new gravity.
That toilet had been semi built for nigh on ten years now, by Sticky’s recollection. Either Bob’d run outa money or he didn’t want Nadine getting ideas about becoming the crew. You still shat over the side till you had an on-board toilet unit. And sheilas couldn’t cope with that.
Mollyhawks were hoeing into the fish through the netting but luckily there were no seals around. Sea maggots. Sticky had no sympathy for seals: bit the tails off fish and left them. More wasteful and vicious even than fishermen. He’d shot a few in his time. One or two people could do with shooting too.
He turned away from the kid and unshackled the wing chains.
Bob had stopped the forward winch and came down to the stern. He grappled the net with the lifting hook and wound the rope around the surge drum. The warp wires slackened as the big net-roller on the gantry took over. The net began to come aboard.
‘This is the bunt here,’ Sticky called to the kid as the mesh narrowed. He whacked tangled dogfish from the webbing. They plummeted towards the cod-end.
The floats bobbled out of the sea and up to the net-roller like a giant’s balls passing overhead. The floats were soon covered by winding layers of net. Water crashed out of the crushed net like Niagara Falls.
‘You’ve missed some,’ called the kid. He was pointing up to the net-roller where a dozen or so small flounder were being wound into the winch and carved up by mesh.
Bob, peppered by net water, glared at the kid with malevolent disbelief. ‘Christ, now he’s a friggin’ Greenie!’ He shook his head to show how amazed he was.
‘Stickers,’ Sticky called back. ‘Can’t be helped.’
The cod-end came up, hissing with water. It looked like a huge, pulsing heart with cut-off arteries made by the mouths of a thousand dismayed fish.
Talk was useless over the manic screams of the scrabbling gulls.
The cod-end – the bulgy bit with all the fish in – swung aboard. Bob pulled the cod-end rope – the ‘Jesus knot’ some called it. The fish avalanched onto the deck.
Not a bad catch: mostly flats, a good selection of rounds. A twenty-five-pound conger eel burst out of the maul and swam across the deck on its own slime.
YOU GOT THE net back out as fast as you could. You stood up to your knees in fish, tending to the gear.
Sticky waited for Bob to re-tie the Jesus knot. No one touched that knot but the skipper. So if it was left untied, or came undone, there was no question of who was to blame. Captain goes down with his own slip, so to speak.
There was a cord fastened to the knot that you could pull if you wanted to window the net – i.e. let all the fish out. Bob’d done it the day he saved the kid’s arse, evidently. Sticky himself had never had to window a net – last thing on earth a fisherman wants to do. But sometimes, when you looked down at those poor, gasping sea creatures, you wished to hell you had.
The net peeled off the roller and slithered back into the sea. Birds went crazy as the sun-fried stickers fell up to the surface and the avian decibel level went a notch higher.
Ten minutes later you were trawling again.
THE FISH LAY in a spreading heap, slowly skidding across a lava of desperate slime.
Unnatural. Species that never went near one another were lying there, cheek by jowl on the labouring deck. Just lying there, panting, writhing, squirting out that slime that was their only cure for contagious diseases like airlessness. Soon they’d be ‘split’ – reduced to bony blueprints and thrown away as ‘frames’.
Gurnard were grunting pathetic warnings; embolised puff-fish had blown up into spikey balloons in protection against a force they’d never dreamed of. They rolled uselessly across the wallowing deck.
All these fish. These embers of fish. They looked unnatural; out of place, thought Sticky. It was like accidentally seeing someone with their clothes off. The clothes of these fish was the sea, and now they were naked. This whole thing was out of place, this whole process – this boat, these fish: they were all in the wrong place. No hunter on this planet so brutally disturbed the nature of things as a fisherman.
Meanwhile the poor bloody fish just lay there, puffing, dying the politest deaths we know. Eyes wide in nightmare, every one of them right now seeing a ghost.
THEY DIDN’T SEEM triumphant with this amazing big catch of fish, Royce noticed. Hardly talked at all. He wanted to creep a bit closer but that friggin’ giant conger had disappeared under the winches somewhere, and might be lying in wait. Apparently they don’t die until sundown.
Bob stood up, rooted around under the winch with a gaff, hooked out the eel and beheaded it with one shot of his knife. So much for that theory. Head was consigned to the deep – body lay on the deck like an inner tube from a Kenworth tyre.
Bob came past him and hauled out a pile of plastic boxes with STOLEN FROM SCULLEY’S on the side. He biffed them up the deck near the fish.
‘Come and learn the fish,’ he snapped to Royce.
Royce was boldly stepping down the deck when – Christ! – another conger, nearly as big, thrashed itself out of the pile.
Just keep it in view.
The wallowing of the boat made the eel slide across the deck to Bob. Without even thinking about it, it bit the heel of Bob’s gumboot and wound itself around his leg. Jesus, this was anaconda stuff. Bob didn’t even look down, as he flicked it off his calf and then back-heeled it into letting go, against the steel side of the boat. Off came the head in the now standard manner. The instantaneous brutality on both sides was a bit breath-taking, really.
Holy shit! A skate hurled towards Royce, flapping its wings through the air like it did underwater. It crashed into a plastic box behind him, thrown by Sticky. Another, much bigger, was inexplicably thrown back over the side by Bob.
More skates filled the box. On top they were black, with intelligent, Oriental eyes. Underneath they were white with short square mouths and perfectly even fangs. Now and then an upside-down skate in the box mimed a cry of agony, forming a huge perfect O with its once-square mouth.
Sticky and Bob were kneeling beside the pile, sorting the documents of fish into boxes. They wore aprons and rubber gloves and worked with great speed. Big skates, little flounders and ‘rubbish’ fish were flung back into the sea. Most of all there seemed to be flounders. TWO STOLEN FROM SCULLEY’S had been filled with them, and Bob went for more.
‘Five types of flounder,’ he said when he got back. ‘That’s an English flounder – very white underneath. That’s a turbot, spots on the belly. That’s a brill, yellow.’
‘And that’s a witch,’ said Sticky, holding up a slightly smaller flounder that didn’t seem to have done anything to deserve the unkind name. ‘It’s got right-hand guts – all other flounders have left-hand guts. And it’s full of little bones – impossible to eat.’ He threw it over the side.
‘When someone you don’t like pesters you for flounders,’ said Bob, ‘you give them a sack of witches.’
Water from the net above them fell onto some of the fish, giving them a false lease of life. A new flapping frenzy broke out – for about a minute.
The birds had moved out to sea, diving for the thrown rejects, so the noise had abated. A little red octopus extracted itself from the heap and set off down the deck. It found a tiny slit in the scuppers and slid through. Sticky had seen it too.
‘No bones, see? They can get through anything you can pour water through.’
‘Clever, too,’ added Bob. ‘Bigger IQ than most of the grommets I’ve had on this friggin’ boat.’
The fish were all categorised into boxes of species.
Sticky was already gutting flounders: a little crescent slit in the side and a two-fingered scoop of the creamy insides.
Royce thought of Dana Glover.
It took Sticky about ten seconds a fish. Bob was chopping fins off sharks and throwing them in another box. When it was full he beheaded them and gutted them in one motion: in behind the little under-fins and one slash down to the bum-hole. The birds’ noise reached pandemonium levels when the shark guts arrived in the sea: maybe they were looking for rellies.
Sticky was still working as he said: ‘There’s mercury in the sea now. It gets into plankton. Little fish eat the plankton, bigger fish eat them … And so on up the chain to the big sharks. Mercury poisoning. One of the saddest things I know is that all those great big makos is as mad as hatters.’
‘Well, stone me, another friggin’ Greenie,’ grunted Bob.
‘HOW MUCH WORTH of fish is there here?’ the kid had asked, as it all lay there on the deck, still shiny, before the slime started.
‘About as much as you cost me last time,’ Bob had snapped and the kid’s face had fallen like a spooked sharemarket.
Funny why you say what you said, Bob reflected later. A lot of the time it was because the answer fitted the question – not because it answered it, but because the question had been really asking for it … if you see what he meant. Like an Eric Morecambe answer to an Ernie Wise question: the answer was funny because the question made it that way.
When you thought about it, everyone could be divided into how they answered questions, really. Some people, like him, he supposed, looked to see if there was an Eric Morecambe answer first, while other people – like Sticky – just answered the friggin’ question. In other words Sticky had got no sense of humour.
Mind you, no sense of humour was a bloody sight better than half a sense of one. Like Toby Phibbs the bank manager, who was always making these half jokes that you have to respond to because he was the friggin’ bank manager, and that made you keep your gums bared in a smile and doing laughter-shorthand till your face nearly fell off its bones.
Truth to tell, Bob regretted what he’d said to the kid. His face had been as shiny as the fish – then it had gone as slimy as they would. He was a good-looking kid, and, like it or not, that always helped: good-looking was trustworthy; ugly was not. Want proof? Just put the kid beside him, Bob, and ask some stranger to point to the bad bastard and you knew exactly where that finger would go. Straight at ugly ole Bob Dodds. You saw it everywhere: looks give you a fifty percent advantage every time. He knew this because he’d studied it – from fifty friggin’ percent behind the eight-ball, of course.
But there was another thing. This was a pretty radical theory, but Bob reckoned the kid would have turned out much worse if he hadn’t been good-looking. Like, let’s face it, he was going to be bad anyway – what with a ratbag father and hopeless mother – but the nature of his badness was somehow … good. Christ, what was he saying?
Look, Bob saw the bad bastards, the real bad bastards, the ones that were getting into drugs now, and were getting hooked up with the gangs over the hill. Bob kept a bit of an eye on the kids around the town – knew who was what, who was coming down on who. He did a bit of informal policing now and then – a back-hander here, taking an off-her-face schoolkid home to her mum there.
Now the bad bastards, they were the shifty-faced ones who sort of sneaked into crime. This kid Royce, looking like bloody Adonis, walked smack into it, face first. I mean, he floats down the river in a stolen psychedelic yellow survival suit, for crissake! He’s caught in a car with the bare-arsed secretary of the headmaster! There’s nothing furtive here – if there’s such a thing as public crimes, he commits them.
He’s worth saving. Bob sure as hell wouldn’t have saved any of those bloody McKenzie Gang lot, from down the Esplanade: they were past redemption, lost boys. Couple of lost girls among them too.
‘HERE,’ SAID BOB to the kid, who was gawping at him from the new toilet unit, ‘come and do these skate. Put these on.’ He hauled off his gloves, handed them to a dubious Royce. ‘You grab them by the head, top upwards, you get a grip on the gristle of their skin – watch your fingers aren’t too far down the mouth side or you’ll lose them. Then you hold it up, make an incision here, by the gill, then slash downwards.’
The kid was tentative at first, then enthusiastic, then a world expert and overall, friggin’ useless. He cost Bob about a hundred and fifty bucks in rejected skate wings.
‘You’re a totally bloody hopeless case for treatment,’ said Bob when Royce had finished. He was taking the gloves off, smiling, pleased as punch and not believing a word Bob had said. Thought he’d just graduated to friggin’ brain surgeon.
‘Next retrieve, you can gut the eels,’ said Bob, chuckling inside – he’d seen the kid’s face when that big bastard had burst out. ‘Now go and check the stew.’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Royce, and belted into the galley.
YOU PUT BAKING soda in it, and lots of salt. It wasn’t too bad – you took a mouthful of stew and then two bites of fresh bread to soak up the taste. Not the first time it’d happened, by a long chalk.
‘And instead of burning stew, next retrieve, you’ll be down in the friggin’ freezer, where you belong,’ said Bob, with his mouth full. He watched the kid duck his head down to his burnt stew as if he was gonna snorkel it up with his nose.
‘Not a bad wee catch, actually,’ said Sticky. ‘That about usual, Bob?’
‘Nah, quite large, really, Sticky. Probably biggest we’ll get.’
It was a necessary lie. Bob had got a sneaking feeling, since they’d set off, that Sticky was sussing out the inshore situation. Could well be thinking of changing to trawling. Up until now he’d fished ling, but that business was stuffed. No way Bob’d’ve taken him on as crew if he’d known Sticky had a hidden agenda. Probably why he signed on – to pick Bob’s brains. Well, Bob didn’t really need more competition. Had a nice little earner here; no need to share.
‘There used to be eighteen boats July through to October on ling,’ Sticky was saying. ‘Now it’s down to six. Individual catches down fifty percent on last year.’
‘Yeah, it’s tough,’ said Bob. ‘Trawling’s no better, mind you.’ They swapped a glance – Sticky was checking the pupils of Bob’s eyes, to see if he was bullshitting. ‘Jeez, you know well as I do, Sticky, two co-op trawlers spent the season tied up. Inshore catches weren’t sustaining expenses.’
‘Yeah, but skipper of one’s in jail and the other’s the Calliope,’ answered Sticky.
No flies on Sticky. He wasn’t having a bar of that one – Calliope would probably have been tied up anyway. Run by Don Marchant, laziest fisherman in Westport. They called Calliope ‘The Paua’ because it was always stuck to the wharf.
‘You go out to the Hokitika Trench or the Cook Canyon,’ said Sticky. ‘Just acres and acres of foreign ling frames floating around. Those Jap and Russian longliners are going home with 350 tons of ling: they’ve just hoovered the bloody lot. And they’re getting that as “by” catch! It’s not even the bloody stock they came down here to fish! Plus 900 ton of “mixed” catch – and I bet a hell of a lot of that is unreported ling, too.’
‘Yeah, but funny thing is, Sticky, I was thinking of converting to ling myself.’
‘You’ve got to be joking, Bob! It’s dead!’
‘Nah, it’s about the only thing I can do, Sticky. Look, you take my boat here. I trawl at 3.1 knots. I have to – the doors of my net have a warp pull of 1000 pounds. That’s about 200 pounds too much for the 180 brake I get out of the engine. If I could get down to 2.1 knots – like I could do, hand-lining – I’d halve my fuel cost – halve it, Sticky – I’m using 48,000 litres a season! But while I’m trawling I can’t economise, see? I need that speed to get a decent net-spread, see? Boat my size is much better adapted to long-line. Same as yours, I’d think; what’s your engine – straight-eight Gardner?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Just like mine,’ said Bob heavily.
‘Really?’ said Sticky, just as heavily. Bastard wasn’t falling for it.
‘Yep. If you take my advice, Sticky, you’ll stick where you are. Sea’s always greener on the other side, eh? Ha ha. You know that’s bullshit as much as I do.’
‘Oh, we fishermen know all about bullshit, Bob.’ He turned to Royce. ‘You know about fishermen and their yarns, eh? The one that got away and all that.’
THEY HAD A reasonable haul with the second retrieve; fortunately Bob’s own bullshit was holding up and the catch was indeed a bit smaller than the first. The kid had gutted the four moderate-sized congers they got, and did all right. ‘Aargh!’ he’d shouted at one stage. ‘It’s dead but I can feel its muscles rippling under my hand!’
Then the stupid bastard boxed himself into a corner of the freezer while stacking bins of flats. Come to think of it, Bob recalled, so had he, first time out.
After that he’d slipped on a little flounder that’d fallen out of the net-roller and went arse over tip on the deck. Christ they’d laughed.
While they were deck-hosing down the carnage a big red boat come over the horizon and headed for the bar.
‘Sapun Gora, Russian longliner,’ said Bob. ‘It’ll stop two miles out – outside the harbourmaster’s jurisdiction – and then Tommy Tyler will be out to collect a $500 passenger.’
‘Might be Molly Pollock and her daughter,’ said Sticky and they both laughed.
‘The Orange Roughy, eh?’ said Bob. That’s what they called Molly’s daughter.
He told the kid the story of how Molly Pollock and her red-haired daughter had spent a night on the Sapun Gora, slinging their arses for about half the crew each, and being paid millions in Russian banknotes. When they got them to the bank they found their roubles came to $17.50. Ahahaha!
KID HAD MADE a reasonable cup of tea and then he said: ‘Speaking of ones that got away, you blokes ever see a giant squid?
Bob hated all that giant squid stuff. ‘Oh, great, that’s all we bloody need – Captain Nemo stories,’ he snapped. ‘There’s enough in the sea to give you the shits without needing friggin’ freaks as well.’
‘That’s why fishermen can’t swim,’ said Sticky. ‘Once you know what’s in that sea, there’s no way you’re gonna get back in.’
Bob frowned. Sticky shouldn’t have said that – takes away a bit of your mana. True, though.
‘Jeepers, so you guys can’t swim?’
‘I can,’ said Sticky, and you could hear the smugness in his voice. ‘But then I worked on the dredge, so I didn’t see the things Bob saw.’
‘Right,’ said Bob, feeling a bit angry and hemmed in. ‘So if we sink, you clever buggers are gonna swim thirteen miles to shore, are you?’
‘Well … people come and pick you up,’ said Royce. There was a sort of brave terror in his eyes, from sailing so close to the wind.
‘Not every friggin’ time, they don’t,’ growled Bob, irritated by the bravery but admiring its presence next to the terror. ‘And they’re not usually in bright yellow Michelin-man suits, either.’
‘So what do you do, Bob?’
‘I’ll tell you what I do, smart-arse. If I fall overboard, I get my gumboots off and I stick them upside down under my armpits, and I float on them. If we’re sinking, I toss something that floats over the side, jump in and hang on to it.’
‘Ah, so that’s why you wear gumboots – you can float on them?’
‘Yeah, but more often they keep conger eels from taking your foot off – like you saw today. So keep your boots on. And make another friggin’ cuppa tea.’
The kid was making tea, the sea was flat, the boat was pulling well. Sitting here at the wheel in the La-z-boy, one elbow out the open window, was like driving a ute across the sea. Not bad for a winter’s afternoon. Bob felt mellow.
‘We got taught at school that the giant squid comes into the sea off Westport this time of year,’ Royce ventured. ‘We got showed pictures: they trawled one up on the Chathams – it weighed a ton and was only three years old. They reckon …’
Jesus! Kid was like a dog at a bone. ‘Giant squid, my arse,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve seen an ordinary one eighteen feet long – that’ll do me, thanks.’
‘Yeah, but come on, Bob, you must have seen that tentacle that got washed up at Cape Foulwind?’ said Sticky.
‘One got washed up here?’ squawked the kid.
‘Yeah. Years ago,’ said Sticky. ‘Before your time. Matter of fact I think I went out and seen it with your dad.’
‘You knew my dad, Sticky?’
‘Used to work with him on the Rubi Seddon. I’s with him the day he nearly sunk the bugger. Remember that day, Bob?’
‘Yeah, I remember,’ said Bob.
‘Old Jud Goodger was master then – he’d be dead now, I suppose?’
‘Fuckin’ better be,’ grunted Bob. ‘We buried the bugger.’
Sticky went off into his Tommy Rowland stories.
Bob had seen that tentacle. It was thicker than that twenty-five pound conger eel this morning. This tentacle had been ripped off at one end and eaten off at the other – probably by sharks as it floated ashore. It had gone dry like seaweed and stunk about the same, but it had given him the heebee jeebees all right. Forget your ‘up to 100 feet’, textbook crap: this thing was far longer than that. There was something way way down there, beyond the imagination of your wildest madman. And your orange roughy fishermen and your Patagonian toothfish fishermen were just starting to get down to its depth – and just starting to piss it off.
‘Yeah, I saw it, all right,’ he said when the subject came back to the tentacle. And then – to allay all the complicated feelings it had stirred up in him at the time – he added: ‘I saw it but I don’t friggin’ believe it.’