This Thing of Darkness (33 page)

57

I work hard. I’m a good cleaner, accurate and fast, and I like the strictly utilitarian approach of the on-board fittings. Their boltedness. Their unbreakability.

The kitchen work is harder. I think that’s because it’s hard to cook unless you have some feel, however basic, for what you’re cooking. I lack that feel, but even I am mostly capable of tipping a two-and-a-half litre can of macaroni cheese into a saucepan and putting the thing on to heat. I don’t know what you’re meant to serve with macaroni cheese – the tin doesn’t tell me – but I open some tinned pilchards and heat those too. Then I’m worried that macaroni cheese and pilchards doesn’t seem like much of a meal, so I get a huge block of cheddar cheese and grate a mountain of that.

Make toast, because everyone likes toast.

My plan was to avoid much interaction with the men. A simple way to obey Honnold’s ‘don’t give or take shit’ injunction. But we’re not at the fishing grounds yet. The ship has already, on its long stopover in harbour, had any maintenance work it needs. Net repairs, oil changes. So the pace of work seems easy. Not the six hours on/three hours off rhythm that’ll be ours in due course.

Coxsey and Pearson are on deck, doing some electrical work – possibly connected with the tether management system that Lowe is expecting to see. MacHaffie’s not involved in that. He’s theoretically got some job down in the fish-holds. Servicing the refrigeration system, I think. But whatever his task is, he keeps bobbing up in the dining room, begging a cup of tea.

He gets his tea. I try to stay largely silent with just a sprinkling of surly aloofness, but my efforts don’t last long.

MacHaffie is maybe fifty. From Orkney, he tells me, born and bred. Didn’t set foot on the mainland – of Orkney, that is, not Scotland – till he was fifteen. Twenty-five before he saw Scotland itself. Over thirty before he saw England.

He’s got a twinkly charm to him, a lightness. As though he’s saying, in his heavily accented Orcadian, ‘Ah cin tale thoo’re a peedie lass wantin tae dae thee best, but we baith ken thoo’d ower blether wi’ me than wipe yon teeble again.’

So I do the jobs I have to do, but also blether wi’ Caff, as he tells me to call him.

Honnold, he tells me, is a good skipper. That is, if I understand right, one who runs a safe ship and can be relied upon to find fish. Of Coxsey and Pearson, he says, ‘I’m nae flought the baoot wi’ thaim lang, bit they seem hard-workin’ enaw. Guid fishermen.’

Buys, the mustachioed mate, he doesn’t know. ‘First time oan th’ baoot, the lenth o’ ah ken.’

Which doesn’t necessarily mean much, since people come and go.

At midday, I serve up my pilchards and pasta, and those things together with the cheese and the toast turn out to be culinary successes and I feel stupidly proud of myself. Two meals done, and neither of them fuck-ups.

I clean up. Figure out a strategy for supper. Check the bathrooms. Give them a quick wipe over.

Go up on deck.

I like the way you can actually see the weather here. Watch the wind moving the water. See where a rain shower thickens the light. Where a cloud-window expands to allow a spill of golden light to widen across the unsteady sea.

The evening passes.

The days.

The
Isobel Baker
is Honnold’s own boat. Heavily mortgaged, of course, but the title is still his. He’ll earn the major share from this catch, but – after diesel and food costs are deducted – the crew will share what’s left and I can sense their fluttering hope for ‘fair winds and stowed oot nets.’

We get to our station, which turns out to be the edge of the continental shelf, where the seabed drops to the deep Atlantic floor. We are, in effect, on the final edge of Europe, its outermost boundary. Our beat ranges from the Porcupine Bank at its top edge to the Goban Spur on its lower one. We’re a hundred, a hundred and fifty miles west of Ireland. The area we’re patrolling is a strip of sea perhaps sixty miles long, by thirty or forty wide.

A strip of sea, through which any Anglo-American cable has to pass. Through which the Atlantic Cables line
does
pass.

A cable, and also plenty of fish, as our nets attest.

As we hit the fishing grounds, Caff’s ‘hard-working enaw’ alters, in my mind at least, to insanely hard-working.

The work never stops. The nets keep dropping, their maws always gaping. Caff’s faith in Honnold – ‘he kens hoo tae fin’ the fish’ – seems amply justified. Catch after catch is hauled over the stern ramp, black and flapping. In the processing room, a pair of men – whoever’s on duty – stand with knives, expertly selecting, gutting, filleting, discarding. Plastic buckets fill with guts and livers. With fish too strange, too unknown, to eat or sell. Heads, eyes, fins, tails. The silver slime of fresh fish scale.

My days and nights blur into one single unit of time, crazed by sleeplessness. The men sleep when their legs buckle. Wake six hours before they’re ready.

Without even being asked, I serve a full meal at midnight, in addition to the other three. My portion sizes increase too. I cook enough food to feed double the number of people who will actually sit to eat it, and nothing much goes to waste.

If I’m not cooking, I’m cleaning.

If I’m not cleaning, I’m hauling food out of the holds, ready to start the next meal. Or changing the propane cylinders that fire the cooker. Or trying to dispose of a bucket of slops without falling over in these rising Atlantic seas.

I do my best in the processing room too.

Honnold asked me to keep the room ‘vaguely clean, if you can,’ and I understand now why he was so provisional in his request. The room is awash. With sea water tramped in from outside. With the fresh water used to clean blood from the gutted fish. With guts and slime.

I use a plastic broom to sweep the mess into a corner. Try to slide a shovel under the slippery pile before the moving deck heaves it aside and away from my bucket, a thing the size of a laundry basket. One time, the pile includes an eel – or something like that, a sea serpent, I want to say, a python of the deep – and the damn thing evades my shovel every time I try to lift it. Slithering away as if still alive. A six foot cord of black and glistening muscle, ending in a mouth large enough to swallow itself.

Buys and Coxsey are on processing duty, and Buys watches my efforts with a bloodshot eye.

He says nothing. The ship is, in any event, by now so noisy – with the engines, the clatter of processing machinery, the pumps and compressors, the unceasing assault of waves against the hull – that we don’t talk except when we need to. And when we need to, we shout, mouth to ear. Gestures big, emphatic and repeated. Swearwords falling like seaspray.

Another attempt with the shovel, another failure.

I’ve been awake twenty-one hours now – Honnold gave me three hours off, but I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even lie down really – and I don’t know what to do. Don’t know how to get the fucking eel into the fucking bucket. Keep trying, keep failing, as the ship bucks and the greenish light clots the air.

Buys drops his filleting knife. Those things are so fearsomely sharp that they snick through a fish as long as a man’s forearm with only a whisper of effort. The knife rattles around the steel fish tray, as though in search of its next victim.

Buys approaches. Demented as I am, as he is, I think,
He’s going to hit me. I can’t get the eel into the bucket and Jonah Buys is going to hit me
. I sort of accept it, too. There’s an internal logic in my head which says,
That’s only fair. Your job was to get the eel in the bucket and you were given a fair old try at it
.
You’ve no reason to complain
.

But Buys doesn’t hit me. Just takes the shovel from my hand, and with three or four smashing blows splits the eel into rags. Doesn’t divide it cleanly, by any means, but leaves the thing in a series of bloody stumps, connected by tatters of skin and the white threads of exposed nerves.

Buys fixes me with that bloodshot eye, nods, goes back to his knifework. My shovel has no problem now heaving the mass into my bucket. It feels as though the world has become more orderly.
Ah yes, that’s how you clean a room. You smash any once-living creature into fist- and foot-sized fragments, then just shovel it away
. I carry my bucket over to the trash chute, where our discards go, and send the eel, and all its fishy co-travellers, to the next stop on their black roads.

Take the clean-water hose and spray enough cold water on the floor that I can sweep up most of the slime and offal too small to shovel. The movement of the ship and the encouragement of my broom pushes the water out to the scuppers, and away.

The room is for a short moment almost clean. Clean that is, given that this is a world in which the fish guts hanging from the wall-mounted fire extinguisher, the blood and slime staining even the ceiling fixtures don’t strike anyone as something that needs to be removed or dealt with. There’s a bucket of fish guts in between Buys and Coxsey, but I don’t feel like moving it and I don’t think they do either.

I stow my broom, shovel and bucket back into the wall-clips next to the mallet used to budge the sorting flaps when they stick. Nod at Buys and Coxsey. Go on to the next thing.

The sea, which was well behaved when we were in Ireland’s sheltering embrace, is rougher now. Unbound. Honnold tells me that the wind isn’t particularly high – force six, approximately, a ‘strong breeze’ – but my sea legs don’t really manage the waves that result. I don’t get sick, but I do – often – lose my footing and find myself slammed against an iron wall, a wooden bulkhead. In the kitchen, after I scald myself twice, I get better at using the steel clamps for the cookware. Learn to fill pots to no more than one-third their level.

We fish.

We work.

We survive.

And on our fifth day out at sea, Honnold tells me, ‘There’ll be four more mouths for lunch. And ye can please check their cabin.’

Tells me this, as I’m up on the bridge, bringing him a hot drink. The mugs we use have lids and drinking spouts, but even so I’ve managed to scald my hand for the I-don’t-know-how-manyth time that day.

I nod. Offer a thumbs up, because that’s easier than screaming through the noise.

Honnold waves for me to go, then has a second thought and summons me back.

He jabs down at the computer screen in front of him, some kind of automated chart-plotter. Clicks some buttons. Brings up a weather map overlay. Blue lines deepening into black.

‘Weather’s coming in a bit,’ he shouts.

I don’t know what that means. Not really. I offer an omnipurpose shruggy-nod, intended to indicate a general OK-ness with whatever it is he means.

Honnold changes the scale on his chart. Zooms out to maximum extension. He places a long finger on the centre of a whorl of black-blue lines. The whorl is two thousand miles distant, somewhere in the tropical waters east of the Caribbean.

‘They’re having a fair auld blow there,’ he comments. ‘We’ll pick up whatever’s left over. A proper storm, I expect.’

The view from the bridge shows a sea with larger waves starting to rise among the many smaller peaks and ridges. And all of them, the big waves and the small, crested with white. The bridge windows are wet with blowing spray.

But the weather that concerns Honnold is nothing we can see. It’s what lies over that bucking horizon. The dangers incubating in those dark clouds, those tangled winds.

‘Ye might want to cook cold for a wee while. Only if it gets difficult, mind.’

Nod.

‘And get some cot boards up in the spare cabin.’

Nod.

Cot boards: things to stop you rolling out of your bed in heavy seas. I’ve already got mine up. I thought these seas
were
heavy.

I don’t say anything further. Nor does Honnold. So I go below, to the one empty bunkroom and its four beds. Get the cot boards in place, with difficulty. Place a magnetic voice-recorder on the underside of the lower aft bunk. I’ve no idea if the damn thing will pick up anything useful in the racket, but there’s nothing to do but try.

I think,
This is it
.
All this is about to finish
.

In my sleeplessness, my friends move about me in silence.

Derek Moon, who died with his skull cracked open and the blue light of Swansea Bay in his eyes.

Ian Livesey, who hung in the clear light above a city he didn’t know. Whose beloved cried salt tears at his going.

Jazz MacClure, with her maroon top and beaded collar. Who isn’t a part of this story, and yet who accompanies me still.

And Gina Jewell? Does she belong here? I don’t know. I don’t know her face. Never saw her in death or life. Gina Jewell, whose photos are blurry, old, newsprint things. Prints which don’t tell me about the person she was, the corpse she’s become.

But these echoing walls, these shrieking waters are no place for complex thought.

I do my work.

We catch our fish.

The endgame nears.

58

They arrive in a small vessel, the
Kate of St Ives
. A fishing boat, yes, but one far smaller than our own.

Four men. None of them, I’m relieved to see, look anything like Buzz’s e-fit. The guy who was in the barn with me, the one who walked away. If that guy had been present, I’d simply have declared my true identity to Honnold.

Identified myself as a police officer, the newcomer as a murder suspect. We’d have radioed for help and the Royal Navy, or any navy, could have boarded us with perfect legitimacy.

But the guy isn’t here and I don’t want to declare my true identity. Don’t know if I’d still have a job, if I did that.

The new arrivals: four men and an ROV.

A Remote Operated Vehicle. Yellow buoyancy tanks on top. A machine about my height. Four feet wide. Nine feet long.

Thrusters. Lamps. Cameras. Cutting and coring tools. Pump.

A set of connection points to supply power. To send and receive data.

The machine comes up over the stern ramp. Hauled over the lip by the A-frame extension to the gantry which Lowe noted.

Buys and Pearson are on deck, with some cabling. Bolting a drum winch to the superstructure, making use of fixings that Lowe had noted in his report as being non-standard for a vessel of this class. As being of recent vintage. As being suitable for a tether management system.

The four new arrivals aren’t introduced to me.

Two of them, it looks like, come with the ROV. They’re the ones checking how it’s stowed. Directing Buys and Pearson on their cabling work. I suspect those two are simply men doing a job, technicians provided by whichever company hired out the ROV.

Then there’s a computer guy. Glasses. Skinny. No more comfortable in oilskins than I am. No more natural on this moving deck. He’s needed up here because some of the connectivity issues require his input, but basically he can’t wait to get out of the cold and spray.

The last guy is the boss. The one all the others defer to. Even Honnold takes orders from him. When there was some difficulty arising, because waves kept on rising over the level of the stern ramp, the boss guy summoned Honnold with a click of his fingers and, with a gesture, asked him to spin the ship through ninety degrees, so that waves would hit broadside on and leave the stern ramp clearer of water.

As it happened, Honnold refused that request. I can’t hear what he said, but I think his gestures were indicating that the ship wouldn’t be properly stable at that angle. And, in any event, neither Pearson nor Buys, nor the two ROV specialists, care about the waves. When a wave comes in at knee-height, or thigh-height, they just let the thing come and let the thing go, then get on with whatever it was they were doing. The four men all wear harnesses and safety lines and aren’t troubled by the ship’s movement.

Once the
Kate of St Ives
has unloaded her cargo, her captain gives a quick thumbs up to Honnold, bridge to bridge, then sails off to the south-east. It doesn’t take long before her little bulk is lost in the larger masses surrounding her. It’s almost as though she was never here. A winking bubble, a butterfly’s dream.

I watch for a while, but I’ve got work to do, so don’t watch for long.

Go below.

Clean the bathrooms. Go to the galley. I’ve brought some one-kilo tins of chilli con carne up from the hold. Open six of them, put the stuff on to heat. Add some Tabasco, to make the stuff chilli-ish, then realise that the tins probably came with chilli already added.

Oh well. I probably shouldn’t have added salt either.

I try tasting the slop in the pan, but can’t really tell whether it tastes right or not. To be on the safe side, I water it down with another couple of cans.

Rice.

I know you have to have rice with chilli, but I’m not very good at it. I put two kilos of rice, plus plenty of water in a pan, and put it on to heat.

I know you’re meant to put salt in rice, but I think I’ve oversalted the chilli, so I compromise by not adding any now.

Things cook.

My evolving technique is to wait till something is bubbling on top, but only just beginning to burn on the bottom. There are probably better ways to manage things, but this way works for me. And if the seas get any higher, I’ll just make sandwiches.

The chilli looks OK. The rice looks a bit funny.

People troop in to eat. Not Caff, because he’s off duty. Probably asleep. Not Buys, because he’s on the bridge and someone takes food up to him.

The two ROV guys take their food and introduce themselves. Ryan and Eddie. English accents. Friendly.

My guess is that the pair of them are contractors who mostly work for the offshore oil industry. North Sea. Perhaps the seas west of Shetland and the Hebrides. They have a bluff, nomadic confidence. Something open.

The computer guy comes in, looking pale. Looks at the food. Says, ‘Ah Christ!’ and walks straight out again. Ryan and Eddie laugh. Mime throwing up. Grin at me.

The boss guy, Connor, takes his food. Sits next to Ryan and Eddie. Doesn’t talk either to them, or anyone else. Eats rapidly, with quick darts of his fork. At one point, he gazes up from his plate. Fixes me with dark eyes. Scrutinises me, as though adding me to some collection of specimens in his mental catalogue. Once my data is inputted, recorded and checked, his eyes flick back to his plate, the small, female cook no longer of interest.

How I like to be.

People want tea. I give them tea.

Caff gives me his plate. Breathes out through his mouth, miming ‘hot’. Laughs.

There’s quite a lot of leftover rice, I notice. Glistening snowballs. Hillocks and caves.

The fishing stops.

The men are angry. Coxsey and Pearson, when they’re not on deck, are down in the dining room, drinking tea and muttering.

‘We’re in the fucking fish,’ says Pearson, ‘and we’re not fucking fishing.’

It’s his money he’s thinking of. His lost earnings.

I’ve seen Honnold talking to Pearson and Caff. Promising them cash, I’d guess, but the mood is still ugly. Once I’m in the corridor leading down to the processing room and I see Buys squaring up to Connor. I don’t know what the argument is, but there’s flame in the two men’s eyes. Physical aggression flickers in the space between them.

They see me, separate, let me pass. My mop and bucket like a letter of passage. A herald’s flag.

Buys has the legs of a sailor, legs that move him with the ship. Connor is OK – he’s better than me – but he’s not a mariner. Even as he was glowering at Buys, Connor had his hand on a bulkhead support, keeping his balance.

Connor would be dangerous in a fight, but Buys would be worse. And Buys knows how to use a knife.

The ROV is readied.

The machine is prepared. The winch. The tether. The data cable.

Ryan and Eddie have set up a control room in a little cabin beneath the bridge. Monitors that show what the ROV is ‘seeing’. Keyboard and joystick-style controls to send commands. The computer guy – ‘Wee Philly’, as the men are now calling him, though I’m not sure that he’s even called Philip – helps a bit with that, but he’s still pale green and has the manner, willowy and surrendered, of a bride reluctant before her wedding night. I’d be the same, I think, except that the sea was calm when we first sailed and my adjustment has been gradual. Any case, Wee Philly’s suffering doesn’t matter much to anyone. His hour of glory is yet to come.

And still the seas rise.

The waves heap up.

Foam from breaking crests is blown in streaks down the wave-fronts, like snow lying on a rocky mountaintop. The valley between each successive peak is fifteen feet deep, I guess, though it’s hard to tell. The spray is constant now and the wind strong enough that I avoid going on deck. If I do go up to look at the weather, I keep a grip of a handrail. Stay on the lee side of the wind.

Force seven, Caff guesses with a shrug. Force seven and rising.