UNDER THE WHARF looked a dreadful place in daylight. Caverns of old grey wood, criss-crossing crucifixorial beams with dangling slime, murky green water, mossy ladders leading nowhere – must have been dozens of bodies pulled out of here over the years.
‘Pulled a million bodies out of here three year ago,’ said Bob Dodds as he threw off the hawser from the port-side pommel and set them free of the wharf. ‘Gurnard. Dooley told Morrie Empson to ditch two ton of gurnard cos they were only fetching three cents and he needed freezer space. Sneaks out in the dead of night and dumps them in here. But silly bugger does it on the in-coming tide. Coulda walked across this lagoon to the yacht club, next morning. Ha ha.’
Bob was in a good mood. Old Nadine must’ve given him one with his afternoon tea. As per usual, Sticky had slunk aboard and gone straight to bed.
Down the river they went with the tide, passing Captain Calmwater on his way to set his kahawai nets. Royce saluted him as they passed.
‘Ee hoop ye kept tha’ troublesome manhood o’ yours well furrled in yer troosers whilst ashore,’ called Captain Calmwater from his little open bridge. ‘If ye feel the need, geet Bob t’ save ye a skate. They git mair braw t’ longer yer at sea.’
‘What was that about?’ said Royce.
‘You’ll get to understand old George eventually. His Scottish accent gets heavier every year.’
‘But what was all that about skates?’
‘What sheep are to shepherds, they reckon skate are to fishermen.’
Royce pondered then understood. ‘Christ, Bob, that’s … What does mair braw mean?’
‘Prettier.’ And he said no more about it, leaving Royce to mull over the fact that skates sure did have a big orifice.
Then they both fell silent until they had been released from the brooding hold of the bar. It seemed to sit over the join of the river and sea in a turbulent plateau of angry water. There was driftwood flung up onto the end of the Tip Head, about twenty feet above the water. Royce didn’t let himself wonder how it’d got there.
Then they were over the bar. Big waves surged past them from Cape Foulwind, steered by the easterly set towards the beach at Granity. Off the port bow the smoke from the Cement Works stacks hung like atomic explosions. He watched the smoke for several minutes and it never moved. Beyond it, the stained cliffs of the cape looked made of old plywood.
Out beyond them again were the black peaks of The Steeples, big fingers of rock rearing up out of the sea. He’d seen a cartoon once (in a Playboy he’d pinched from Parkhouse’s bookshop). In it was an artist’s easel, facing these two big black pointy rocks out at sea. On the easel was a painting of three big black pointy rocks …
Jeepers! Look at that! Whitebait – everywhere! Yards of it … acres of it!
‘Cripes, Bob, why don’t you bring a net out, like Billy Mosley’s father does?’
‘Because I don’t like jelly,’ said Bob, not even bothering to look at it.
‘Eh?’
‘You see any seabirds having a go at it?’
The sky and the sea were birdless. ‘No.’
‘That’s because they know it’s useless trying; beaks go right through them. At this time of their life whitebait are just ghosts – no substance. It’s only when they get into the rivers – fresh water – they harden up. Good defence, when you think about it. Put that lot out there into a bucket and you’d have a jelly with a million eyes floating in it.’
There was a mountain behind Mount Rochfort. He’d not known that. In fact, from out here, the skyline behind Westport was nothing like it was from the town. For the whole of his life he’d been wrong about what his home district looked like.
Something disturbed him about that. There was always something missing in things, no matter how well you knew them.
‘Had a chat with your little girlfriend, did you?’
‘Linda Harvey? Yeah. Thanks for that, Bob.’
‘I rang some of your mates. Every one of them said she’d probably be in a convent right now if Protestants had ’em.’
‘Yeah, she’s pretty pure, all right.’
‘Well, you make sure she stays that way.’
‘Oh, she does that herself, don’t you worry.’
‘Yeah, so your mates said; only reason I agreed.’
They fell silent, staring out to sea.
Royce saw the swirl around the siren, saw the water thicken and become her hair, and there she was in the middle of it, reaching out to the shipwrecked fisherman – who of course was him. He could see her face a bit better now and he suddenly realised she wasn’t only Linda Harvey – she was also Katherine Ross. Linda and the siren were the dead spit of the girl who played the daughter in The Graduate. It was uncannily spooky. His fate was following the story of the movie, as seen in the painting. There’d been Mrs Robinson – who was Penny Turton in this version – then there’d been a major calamity. A moral shipwreck. And now there was her daughter – holding him up or dragging him down. Which?
Bob’s voice boomed into his awareness. ‘It’s a good way to live, actually,’ it was saying.
‘Sorry? What is, Bob?’
‘For a fisherman. A pure life.’
‘Jeez, Bob, you’re not a Christian are you?’
‘I’m a good Catholic, son: that’s nearly the same thing. No, I mean it’s a good way to organise your life. Look at the rich fishermen round the place – Flag, Jackie Mosley – what do they do when they tie up? Go home to the wife, go to bed early, get up next morning and go back to sea. A sort of Christian life – with the religion taken out, like. And what do the broke fishermen do? Tie up, head to the pub, get paralytic, head down Cobden Street, get home to the wife at daybreak, say they’ve just got in, miss two tides in their sleep and still wake up with a hangover.’
‘What’s down Cobden Street?’
‘Molly Pollock’s place.’
HE’D LEARNT THAT there are times at sea when there’s just fuck-all to do. It was no use pretending that there was – that this or that had to be done. It didn’t. Nothing had to be done. At all. You were in a sort of local doldrum.
You sort of got the hang-dog feeling of having been caught out in the middle of making a living, and that even God was lookin’ down thinking, ‘Shit, fishing isn’t perfect: there are big holes in the life of a fisherman at sea, where there’s nothing to do.’
And so He’d sent down a miracle to patch it up – and that miracle was Bob not minding when you sat down with a good book, to read. And, even more miraculous, when Bob himself took out a Field & Stream or Sports Illustrated, and plunked down against the bulwark for a read.
Royce had started with Moby Dick. Holy shit, spare me! What if you were reading Moby Dick and got lulled off to sleep by the swell and dropped it into your lap? He realised he’d brought a factor on board far more dangerous than banana sandwiches – Moby Dick could damage you beyond repair. Perhaps that’s where the name came from – people dropping it onto their bollocks and getting moby dick?
He put it away and ensured it couldn’t break free in foul weather.
But the other book was different. It was short, for a start. And clear. Amazingly clear: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish.
Hey, that’s how it should be said. If Fishing Around the World had said it like that, he would have got as much in School Cert as Gilbert. He read on. It was quite good. In an ulullating lull on the sea off Westport, Royce read The Old Man and the Sea.
FOUR AND A half hours later they were hauling the net in. It was nearly sunset and there was a nippy little wind from the north-west.
‘Colder than a nun’s tit,’ said Royce, using one of the more fashionable new phrases in the district.
‘Twenty years back you wouldn’t be standing there watching machinery pull the net in, boy,’ said Bob. ‘You’d be down there on the stern, kneeing it in yourself. Pull, hold it in your knees, pull, hold, pull hold … three, four yards at a time. Big slop comes in, bang, you lose ten yards, and you start all over again.’
‘Least it’d keep you warm with the effort.’
‘Yeah? Hands purple with cold. So cold that it’s only when you get back to the wheelhouse you find you’ve got a broken finger. Black tape it up and get out for the next retrieve.’ He held up his left hand. The top of the middle finger was missing. ‘Chopped it off in the winch, got it under the warp wire – bam, gone. Was still floating around the deck while I got on with the retrieve.’
‘I heard they used it as bait, Bob,’ said Sticky, ‘and caught a hagfish.’
First joke Royce’d ever heard Sticky make.
The fish flopped into the usual heap in the stern, but one side of the pile kept jumping, well after the other side had stopped.
‘Bet I know what that is,’ said Sticky. He rooted through the pile with his rubber gloves and hauled up a middle-sized black skate-looking thing. ‘Electric ray,’ he said. ‘Been putting a few volts through the other poor buggers around it.’ He threw it over the side.
They did the sorting by the light of the deck lamps. Royce helped, only once getting a clip over the ear for mistaking a snapper for a trevally. Then he did some flounder gutting.
You gut the flats, you behead and gut the eels, you de-wing the skates – the wings are marketed by dishonest capitalists as ‘scallop bites’ – but most of your ‘rounds’ – gurnard, hake, trevally and so on – stay ‘green’, which means ungutted. It’s all got to do with a complicated equation of which sorts of fish are more valuable heavy than with perfect flesh.
Royce hosed down the deck. They re-shot the net in the dark, then had a casserole that Royce had cooked. (‘Here kid,’ Bob had said, ‘get this casserole on.’ Royce had looked at it. It was identical to the stews Bob brought aboard, in plastic bags, prepared by Nadine. ‘What’s the difference between a stew and a casserole, Bob? he’d said. ‘You burn stews,’ Bob had said.)
After tea they talked about Dooley’s latest run-in with the harbourmaster. Dooley and Lew Hughes didn’t get on. Up till Lew Hughes took over the job, Dooley used to do the temperatures for the Westport News. It was a fairly open secret that he used to knock a couple of degrees off the hottest summer days: ‘Don’t want those bloody tourists coming over here and clogging up the first tee,’ he used to say. Well, Lew Hughes had taken over and put the real temps in. ‘Polluted the place with bloody outa-towners,’ Dooley used to mutter.
Anyway, Lew Hughes had just told Dooley he couldn’t park his car on the wharf any more, so Dooley’d put a row of scows across the wharf with the forklift and blocked the harbour master’s car in – then gone home for lunch. When he came back the harbourmaster was ropable, so Dooley threw him the keys to the forklift and went inside to make a cup of tea. Thing is, harbourmaster hadn’t got a clue how to drive a forklift, had he? Ha ha.
Then Bob had scratched the bristles on his head (he kept it really short so you couldn’t tell if it was cut or bald) and said he was turning in. ‘Yeah, same here,’ said Sticky.
‘Think I’ll stay up and finish this chapter,’ said Royce.
‘Bloody intellectuals. Waste of good eyesight, is reading books, if you ask me,’ grumbled Bob.
He checked the automatic pilot and headed off to his bunk. ‘Wake me in three hours with a cuppa tea, kid. G’night.’
Royce read on, not really being able to concentrate, listening to the farts and coughs, and, at last, the snores. He put down The Old Man and the Sea and slipped tremulously outside.
He took the line from its hiding-place under the tarpaulin in the new toilet unit. Five hundred yards of 350 nylon. Given that old Inky Staines reckoned he’d caught a six-pound trout on a one-pound line, this line’d hold a 2100-pound squid.
Holy … the consequences of actually hooking such a beast had not dawned on him until this moment – this dark moment floating on a small boat above the black frozen depths, conjuring tentacled nightmares from the deep. That was a bit melodramatic, but more or less true. He hesitated, line in hand. What he was doing was sort of like calling up the devil. He was playing with forces too huge to be fiddled with …
Nah! Soft-cock! as Bob would say.
Royce shook the doubt from his mind and threaded the stolen half snapper onto the hook. He’d decided on snapper – at the risk of being biffed over the side if Bob found out. According to the Arthur Mee’s Encyclopaedia in his mother’s front room it was supposed to be mackerel. But New Zealand didn’t seem to have mackerel – well, Bob ’n’ Sticky had never mentioned mackerel. So, stuff the encyclopaedia, snapper was the tastiest fish around and no giant squid with its wits about it was gonna pass that up.
At the very end of the line he tied on an iron bolt he’d found in the railway workshops and had wrapped in cloth to take off the sharp edges that may cut the line. He lowered the whole contraption quietly over the side.
It scuffled over the top of the water, unable to make downward progress through the boat speed and thick water. Shit. He needed something heavier.
Beside the tarpaulin under which he’d hidden his fishing gear was the toolbox: a big, red, oily treasure chest. ‘Heart of a boat is its toolbox,’ said Bob, quite often.
Royce lifted the lid – not a sound from its well-kept hinges. Inside, the implements lay as neatly arrayed as Sultana Pasties in a packet. He took out the second-biggest crescent – ‘Made in China’ – and tied it to the line. If he caught nothing, the crescent would be safely restored; if he caught what he hoped for – well, even Bob would concede that it was worth a crescent or two.
Down through the dark, shiny water, this time, went the bait. Down to the realm of monsters and the unimaginable. Down to the interminable depths of the giant squid.
He tied the ends around the bulwark between two scuppers then he went to bed. Royce Rowland, first fisherman to try to haul a giant squid from the depths of the sea off Westport.