WITH A HISSING gasp the cod-end of the net welled up out of the deeps behind. A thousand insane seabirds lowered towards it in a giant fist of beaks. Bob went sternward to give it a peruse. Jesus! Dangling from the gantry was a miserable pudding of bewildered fish. Bob’s worst-ever catch – even the stickers left in the net after a window amounted to more than this. He stumped through the avalanche of net water and wrenched the Jesus knot. A dozen flats, two skates, an inevitable eel and some trash splashed to the deck. No one had even bothered to close the scuppers. He did so now, then swept the pathetic mound of fish to the starboard side of the deck, away from Betty.
‘I’ll help you clean them when this one’s in the slurrybed,’ she said, not looking up from the line.
‘The what?’
‘Yeah, I forgot to tell you, there’s a hell of a lot to be done.’
‘A slurrybed?’
‘Yeah, but first we need to land this fish soft – extra soft. Whatever you’ve got: carpet, hammocks, foam rubber … Best thing you’ll probably have on this tub is bedding.’
‘Bedding?’
‘Mattresses – and the rest: blankets.’
What? ‘Balls! No way my bunk’s going under a friggin’ fish!’
He had marched across the deck to confront her face to face. Trouble was, she was still negotiating the goddamn fish and his eyeball confrontation ended up in her left ear. Still, he had to be big. He’d handed over the reins a bit easy – he needed some authority back. Without a bit of re-assertion, Sticky might start getting ideas again.
She glanced at him and he winced: she was blazing right back, looking every bit as ferocious as he was trying to be. She’d tempered her ferocity with impatience as well, and it was working bloody well, damn it. She returned her attention to the fish as she spoke: ‘We’ve spent the last God knows how long trying to land a prizewinning fish that’ll get you into the history books, Bob, and you want it going ashore looking like a goddamn rape victim? Tuna are incredibly fragile, believe it or not – the faintest touch on that fish, Bob, and it’s ruined. You touch it with your hand you’ll give it a bruise like a birthmark. That’s how delicate it is. Your hand’ll burn a bruise in its hide like a branding iron.’
‘You’re not jemmying my bed from under me with bullshit like that, Betty!’
She turned abruptly from the fish. Their noses were, at last, all but touching; eyeball battle had been joined. ‘You know how we catch the fuckwit that touches a tuna, Bob? Huh? His fingerprint is burnt into the skin! You wanna get yourself a record fish, it’s gotta be unblemished.’
‘I’m more interested in getting that thing to the weigh-shed, Betty, than into the friggin’ record book,’ snarled Bob.
‘That a fact, Bob?’ she snarled back. ‘So when people see it in the Guinness Book of Records you don’t mind if they say, “Jesus, why didn’t that butcher of a fisherman treat that fish with a bitta respect?” huh?’
Christ, he could feel himself being stumped for words.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing for nothing,’ she went on. ‘I think this fish does deserve a bitta respect. If we’re gonna drag it outa the sea for good and ever, I think we’ve got an obligation to let the world see its beauty. Unblemished. Don’t you? If we’re gonna get branded as butchers why don’t we just cut the thing free right now?’
Her eyes, in the frequent glances she now cast him, were not bending. He glared wordlessly back but could feel hypocrisy softening the look on his face. How can you stay ferocious with someone you agree with?
‘Royce,’ he snapped, ‘go get your mattress. And Sticky’s.’
The kid set off, frowning and nodding. Betty was, between glances, concentrating on the slicing circles of the line. The left tip of her lip was curled up as if she was smiling.
At the top left corner of each circle, as the fish headed back towards them, she would lean back on the line. It was done delicately, at a rate that added perhaps one mile an hour to the fish’s approach. Very gradually she was drawing it to the boat.
‘Right. If this thing ain’t gonna end up looking like it’s been napalmed, we’re gonna have to get its temperature down, quick smart, when we deck it,’ said Betty. ‘A rectangle of fish boxes – say ten by seven – with a big tarp over it’ll do the trick. The chutoro muscles on that thing are so hot right now it’ll cook itself when it comes up.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Bob replied, being really sarcastic: ‘We gotta get that chewtoro muscle cooled down, all right, Betty.’
‘Thank God you’re starting to get your head around the problem,’ she replied.
Jesus, don’t Yanks recognise sarcasm when they hear it?
THEY MADE THE slurrybed; filled it – two buckets of ice to one of seawater. Bob got into the hold and did the ice digging, handing the buckets up to the kid. He saw the kid’s head looking down with every shout of ‘Ready’. Sticky’s head appeared only once, black silhouette against the lifting sky. A sudden whiteness against the black – the hoik of spit he’d been expecting.
The slurrybed was filled. Bob climbed out of the hold. Warm, unrefrigerated air bashed his cheeks pleasantly, and his breath stopped turning up in tufts of mist in front of him. There was a ten-foot swimming pool on the deck, held in by black plastic sheeting. It sloshed in time with the wallow of the boat, singing with the clinking and tinkle of colliding ice.
‘I’ll need a glove,’ said Betty. ‘A right-hand one.’
Bob gave her a chapped leather glove from the heap in the new toilet unit. ‘You okay? You want a rest?’
‘No. I’m used to it. I’ve been on longliners up north. Whenever the Japs got one this size they handed it over to me; they’re too small and weak. Mind you, those fish didn’t fight as hard as this one – the Japs put horse tranquilliser on the bait.’
It circled just under the surface now, still swimming so fast it seemed a continuous silver line. It never jumped, it never thrashed. Its surges were steady and insistent. It brought to its attempts to live the ceaseless purpose of a chess player. You could see it, crackling and shimmering – big as the Norm Wells clinker-built dinghy he was doing up, in his shed. It was so big, so beautiful you somehow felt religious about it. You stared down at it, unsure – as it blended into the seething water – where it began and ended and just awed by its displacement of so much of your sight. It was beautiful and perfect. Holy shite, if he didn’t find a tear in his eye!
He put his hand on the line, just to feel the life at the other end. They were hauling something, against its will, out of the depths of the last place we know bugger-all about. It was literally like hauling a nightmare out of your own head – and enraging it as it came. Bob could feel these massive, dense throbs shooting into his arms from the trapped thing, circling the sea. Warnings came, in a sort of underwater morse – ‘Are you ready for what you’re causing to happen here?’ – coming up from the zagging nylon and into his mind.
How he started thinking about the Minotaur, raging and gnashing in its deep den, he didn’t know. He couldn’t remember anyone telling him about the Minotaur and it’s unlikely he’d have read about it because he didn’t read books. But he was thinking about it now, and about how it was inexorably coming towards him.
BOB WAS HOLDING a gaff. Beside him the kid was holding another, which he was to pass to Betty at the right moment. Meanwhile, Bob’s head was buzzing with his own instructions from her. Had to gaff it in the bottom jaw, close to the teeth as possible. Heart of a tuna is very close to the jaw, it seems, and you don’t want to heart-gaff it – hell of a mess and the whole fish is ruined and will never win prizes or end up in a museum or whatever.
They weren’t bad gaffs – Bob had made them himself. They’d hauled up mako before today. And once, a 600-pound tiger shark. Been a bit of a fraught day, that one. Bob’d been crewing on Ted Hartley’s plastic-hulled forty-footer. Ted had leaned over the side to shoot the bugger to quiet it down. Well, missed the friggin’ shark and put a .303 bullet through the hull. There they were, trying to pull an eleven-foot shark outa the water and get it killed before they sank and ended up in the sea off Westport beside it.
Point was, the gaffs had looked big enough for the job at the time. Seemed to have sorta shrunk since then.
‘With respect, Betty,’ he’d muttered when he’d heard the plan and how he and she were going to gaff it, ‘with all due respect, why not give your gaff to Sticky? Two blokes can …’
‘You can give him your gaff if you like,’ she’d snapped, ‘but I wanna be sure that at least one person knows what they’re doing.’
‘But Jeez, this is a friggin’ monster, there’s no way you can …’
‘I won’t have to. It’ll be helping me.’
‘Eh?’
‘Once it reacts to the gaff it’ll start swimming up the boat. You use its own energy to get it over the ramp: you’ll never be pulling its green weight.’
‘And pigs’ll …’ Bob had muttered … but not too loud.
THE FISH WAS like a big ray of light, now, brightening the sea. It made him think of an angel. Its two dorsal fins were both still up, and between them and the tail were little pyramid shapes of finlet that glowed pure yellow. God, it was lovely. It was heading towards them, down the home straight of its never-ending circle. It was as close as it had ever been and would surge so near they could almost touch it as it curved down the side of the boat. Here it was, a great big halo of shimmering light …
Betty leaned suddenly back against the line until she was at an angle that would have made her fall over without its resistance. She was pushing into the deck with her heels, stepping backwards, breaking almost into a run. Those legs were pulsing back, powered by the great big gluteus maximus muscles of her rump.
There was a smack that shook the boat. She’d hauled the fish into the hull at about fifty miles an hour.
She gave the line to the kid, grabbed the gaff. ‘Keep it taut; it’s stunned, don’t let it sink.’
Line was playing slowly out through the kid’s limp fingers.
‘It’s sinking, you dumb bugger!’ snapped Bob. He rushed to the side. ‘Pull it up!’
The kid came out of his trance of dumbness and pulled. It wasn’t a big pull – only from his wrist – yet he pulled that monstrous fish up like an Apostle. It came up, and the kid was standing just above it, hand raised as if hailing it.
It lay on the surface, upright – that big proud fish wasn’t going to lie on its side for anyone. It looked like one of those nuclear submarines, hugely humpbacked, with its two dorsal fins up like conning towers. You could see its face with fat cheeks, a big, undershot V mouth and round blue eyes, one of which was staring right at the kid.
And he was staring back. They were taking each other in, no doubt about it. They just sort of froze there, staring: the young man and the sea creature.
‘Bring it around to the stern,’ said Betty, breaking into the private moment.
‘Hang on, Betty,’ said Bob urgently, ‘you’re gonna spook it. It’ll panic in the potwash and get minced in the propellor.’
‘Tuna ain’t scared of disturbance,’ she replied. ‘They like it. It looks like broiling from a school of trapped fish. Potwash is a sight for sore eyes to a tuna.’
The kid set off down the deck – he’d taken on a sort of saintly quality as if he wasn’t quite there – past the net-rollers, under the gantry, down to the corner of the stern. With one slow swish the fish followed. Bob watched it sort of dissolve into the water of the wake. It disappeared with a last flash of – yeah – sunlight on mirror. Yeah, this immense fish was the friggin’ looking-glass they’d all walked through.
There was a last little thud of movement from the hillock of dying fish on the deck – a sort of pale echo of the tuna crashing into the hull. A salute to the king.
Bob walked down to stand by the kid. He looked into his glazed eyes: ‘You got pretty close to that fish, then, son.’
‘It looked at me, Bob,’ he panted. ‘It was really looking at me. I could feel it.’
‘Yeah, I saw. You was bonding like crazy.’
‘Yeah, I could feel its – thoughts. Sort of.’
‘You were mighty close. So tell me, did you see my friggin’ wrench?’
‘OKAY,’ SAID BETTY quietly. ‘I’ll need a big screwdriver and a mallet. Keep the fish – and yourself, guys – as calm as possible, right? Royce, put your hands over its eyes if you can. Get it upright on its belly when I tell you to. Leave me plenty of room to work around the head and don’t drag it by the tail. You got any more of that 350-pound micofilament, Royce?’
‘No, sorry, Betty – it’s all part of the line.’
‘Okay. Once it’s in, cut off about five yards of leader line for me. Have it ready straight away, okay? And if any of you haven’t got rubber gloves on, don’t go near the fish.’
It ended up they all had rubber gloves – four pairs of dishwashing gloves from the galley.
Three blokes in washing-up gloves: three great poofs setting out to boat the biggest fish in the sea off Westport.
THE PROPELLOR BOILED the sea into suds a few feet below him. Bob stood at the end of the stern ramp. Beside him was Betty.
‘This is all bullshit anyway,’ snapped Sticky suddenly. Bob had sort of forgotten about him. ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ he snarled, uncaring and dangerous. ‘We’re hauling this poor bugger outa the sea so we can skite about it. To make ourselves into heroes. Is that the way for commercial fishermen to behave? There’s no market for a fish that no one’s seen before.’ He turned to Bob and for the first time in ages actually looked him in the eye. ‘You remember that sunfish, Bob?’
Yeah, he did. He remembered when Jackie Mosley had caught a sunfish – shot it with his seal gun, so they said, while it was sleeping on the surface. Biggest thing you’ve ever seen. Cleaned out his hold to fit it in, got it ashore – and had to pay the fuckin’ council to take it to the dump. No commercial value, see? And what was the worth of this thing? What’s the market? Who’s going to buy a one-off sea monster? Tuna didn’t taste that good anyway. Course Angelo’d buy it, cut off the steaks for the unsuspecting hungry – call it red groper or something – and give the rest to the friggin’ cat. They were through the bloody looking-glass again.
‘I gotta say, Sticky’s got a point here. We’ve got established markets and this thing’s not on them. We know what fish are worth and who wants what. This bloody great thing we know nothing about. There’s a point in saying let the damn thing go before we bust a gut boating it and risk God knows what damage to the deck. That thing’s a freak. Let the poor bugger go; less time we spend on it, the more time we’ll have for another drag.’
‘Way I see it,’ said Betty quietly, ‘you’d better ask the kid. His fish.’
Fact was, she was right. Fish belongs to the person who set out to catch it. This law of the sea was sort of confirmed right then, by the fact that everyone turned to look at the kid.
‘Finders, keepers,’ said Royce, eyes wide and greedy. ‘No way I don’t want Karen bloody Phibbs not seeing this fish.’
THAT ATTITUDE LASTED until about ten seconds after they’d got it up the stern ramp.
It came out of the water like an eruption, flicking itself up the ramp like Betty’d said it would. She and Bob both had gaffs in its lip and were hauling like grim death. Betty was silent while Bob was swearing like a trooper – but Royce noticed his voice was waily as if really it was fear he was letting out, not anger.
The fish came out of the water upright, then flopped onto one side to get the big muscles down its body really going. You could see them rippling and its scales – big as matchboxes – were crackling with light and clacking like marbles. Sometimes you could see under the scale edges – like the uplifted armour of gladiators.
Betty unhooked her gaff and crouched beside the fish, seeming to get into its rhythm, moving in time with its struggles. If she slipped under it she’d be crushed to death. Didn’t stop her, though. As it flipped into the air once, she put her hand on its pectoral fin underneath, and pushed it flat against its body. It seemed a kind thing to do – as if to stop it landing on it and breaking it in its fight against drowning.
Everyone had got totally drenched within one second of the fish bursting out of the sea, and God knows how high it’d flicked water, but it was still coming down ages later. The boat was shuddering with the thuds, even when they got the fish onto the mattresses. Those thuds were enormous. You got the feeling that some of the force from yesterday’s storm was now raging on the deck.
It was amazing and near and real and … its colours were so clean and shining; it sparkled so bright it dazzled you. An electric rainbow, that’s how you’d best describe it. He was already regretting his attitude, and what happened next brought tears to his eyes.
Betty wacked it with the mallet, fair between the eyes.
It curled its body into a huge, eight-foot smile – head and tail high off the deck – then flopped into jitters on the mattresses. And with its upward blue eye it was watching him all the time.
‘Get it upright,’ snapped Betty.
They hauled it onto its belly. It sank, under its own weight, into the white folds of its underneath – which now bulged like a beer pot.
Betty straddled the fish, standing over it like the Grim Reaper, mallet in one hand, screwdriver in the other.
She bent down and was running her hand up and down the top of its head as if massaging it. Then she dug her thumb into a little dent on its head. She turned the screwdriver around, laid the point on the dent and banged it into its poor head with the mallet, right up to the handle.
Then, worse, she started grinding the screwdriver, round and round. The fish gave an earthquake of shudder and went stiff. Its mouth fell open as if in astonishment at such unfair play. The front one of its dorsal fins went up, stiff and hard, and brushed Betty’s big bum as she bent over the murder scene.
Now the fish was trembling in massive shivers as if it was in the electric chair.
‘Gimme that line!’ Betty bawled, and jolted Royce out of his thoughts. Christ! he’d forgotten to cut the piece of line …
He did it while she cursed him without swearing, and handed her five yards of the thick nylon.
She took it, wrenched the screwdriver from the brain of the fish and started threading the nylon down the hole it’d left.
The fish gave a splashed-quicksilver, scale-hissing shiver that shook out the last of its life. Then it flopped, and never moved again. It lay there, towering above the still, dulling heap of little lost fishes from the net.
It was too dreadful. People aren’t adapted to cope with such demolition of beauty. Part of our humanness is knowing that doing this is really, really unnatural; it does things to your psychology that you probably never recover from. Once you’ve seen this happen, you are never the same again. Things that made Royce never the same again had been happening quite a lot lately.
Betty kept pushing the blunt-faced red nylon line down the tuna’s spinal column, mulching it.
‘Jesus, Betty, you have to do that?’
Royce was in a dream and had a feeling he’d said these words himself, but to his surprise he found it was Sticky.
‘Haven’t you done enough to that poor bloody thing?’
His voice was croaky, his eyes were soft.
‘Pithing – Taniguchi method,’ she replied matter-of-factly. ‘You gotta destroy the brain and you gotta destroy the spinal cord before the fish dies naturally. Only way to stop fibrillation in the muscles. Let it fibrillate and you’ve got what the Japs call yake niku – burnt meat. Hang it up for the big trophy photo and the flesh’ll fall off the bone. Now we got a lot to do, so I don’t want no more goddamn conservationist crap. You wanted a fish, you got a fish. We got two minutes of heartbeat left to get this thing pumped outa blood. Keep it on its belly and hand me that knife.’
She made a little stab cut just behind the pectoral fins on both sides of the silent fish. Blood came throbbing out, some of it jetting onto the deck a yard from the fish; other bits of it gushing down its side and staining the pure whiteness of its belly. It was still alive in there. Its brain had gone, but its staunch little heart was pumping on from memory, trying to do the right thing. Jesus, that was just so ironic: the heart didn’t realise it was helping cause death all over again by draining all its own blood out.
‘Get me the deck hose,’ said Betty. All three of them jumped up to do it – Royce realised then that the other two guys were as spooked by her butchery as he was – but he got there first.
When he brought the big black hose back, she had lain the fish on its side and was cutting the poor thing’s bum out – you know that little hole underneath a fish? She’d neatly cut towards it (it gets jagged cutting the other way – Royce knew this from trevally and snapper) starting about six inches out, then around it, in a neat little circle.
Then with a chucking sound of her hand she reached into the cut and pulled out the beginning of its intestinal system – little bum-hole still on the end, the whole important tube following after, in a big bright mangrove of guts.
Then she shoved the hose into the little cavity the guts had excavated. Stained water started spurting from the belly. Then, up its head end the heavy, silver gill-slit opened like a flap – big as a dustbin lid – and at first you thought the movement was a bit of life left in the fish doing it. Then water burst out – and you knew there was deck hose water infiltrating that fish’s whole system now. Even the blood – still piddling out of Betty’s cuts behind the pec fins – was softer now, diluted by seawater.
That unknowingly stolid tuna heart was – for the first and fatal time – tasting the seawater it had always lived in.
‘Ole Sweeney Todd, here,’ snarled Betty, hostile with defensiveness, ‘has just set about stopping the rate of metmyoglobin production in the body. So, now, on ice, your fish should last for weeks. Any objections?’
‘Cripes, don’t take this the wrong way, Betty,’ murmured Bob. ‘We’re really grateful; Christ, we woudn’t have known how to start treating this thing. Just that none of us …’
And holy kermoley, even Bob’s voice started quivering! There was some serious grief going on over this fish. ‘It’s all so quick, you know?’ quavered Bob.
‘Yeah, well, it stays quick,’ she replied brutally. ‘We got about ten minutes left. We got to get those gill covers away from the body – but I’ll do it – everyone else is blinded by tears and may cut too deep.’ She leaned down, hauled a silver gill flap back, reached inside and made a couple of short, smart cuts. She leaned over and did the same on the other side. She looked a bit like a shearer when you thought about it. The likeness stopped, though, when she reached in and started hauling guts out through the gill-window of the fish. When she’d emptied it she cut that sort of mushroomy gill membrane out, pushed the gill back into place and you’d never know.
‘Seems to me it’s just heavy work left, Betty,’ said Bob, getting some manliness back. ‘We can take over with the donkey work.’
‘Yeah,’ she stood up, resting for the first time since the fish had come aboard. ‘Why not? Leave the donkey work to the donkeys, eh?’ She handed Bob the knife. ‘He’s all yours.’
Bob took up a stance then gave a shrug and a dopey grin. ‘Dunno if I can get up to your dressing standard, Betty. That was a class act, all right.’
Betty was hosing her arms down. ‘You haven’t been eating with chopsticks for the last ten years, have you? Tell you what: you ever need an operation, make sure it’s a Jap or a Chow – someone who’s got chopstick skills.’
Soon Bob was hauling out guts like nobody’s business.
‘My God, it’s hot in there,’ he said. ‘I could burn me hand on this fish!’
‘Yeah, well, if we don’t get it in the slurry soon, it’ll start cooking.’
Bob worked on, yelping sometimes as he touched a really hot bit.
‘Now you’re gonna have to really scrub that backbone,’ said Betty as Bob stood up and booted away the ankle-deep guts that had accumulated around him.
‘Yeah, we’re up with you on that one, Betty,’ said Bob cheerfully, ‘and just so happens I hired a scrubber for this trip.’ He glared happily at Royce.
‘What do you call pot-mitts in this country?’ asked Betty.
‘Pot-mitts,’ said Royce. ‘But we haven’t got any. We’ve got brushes.’
He retrieved a stiff nylon brush from the cupboard where the rubber gloves had been.
When he got back the fish had been turned upside down on the mattresses and its sides pulled open. Inside was – nothing. Just a cavity where its guts – its engine – had been. There was soft purple gunk along the backbone and between the ribs, and this was evidently what he had to get rid of. He set to work, the deck hose nearby to wash out the results of his scrubbing.
Under the gunk were pearl-coloured bones and a pure white lining before the bright red flesh started.
The head-down nature of the scrubbing and the hard work must have made him a bit blood-to-the-brain dizzy because at one stage he had a vision. He wasn’t looking down, into the cavity, he was looking up, into the arches of an amazingly white church. Christ, this is what a church in heaven must look like – white and pearly and beautiful.
It was about the first Presbyterian thought he’d had since Sunday School, when he was eight.
When Betty announced that the fish was ready for chilling, Royce realised it was only fifteen minutes ago it had been hauled from the sea.
‘So where’s my wrench?’ purred Bob.