Dark, Salt, Clear Read online

  I catch myself beginning to fall asleep as the Filadelfia gently rocks on her harbour moorings and sit up with a jolt, knocking my head against the low ceiling. By the time I re-enter the galley, squinting as my eyes readjust to the bright light coming through the porthole windows, I see the other two crew have arrived and are sitting around the table smoking with Andrew. Kyle, freckly and ginger as Don had described, asks if I am the new engineer. Andrew retorts at once: ‘No, you great plonker! Does she look like an engineer to you?’ – to which I take some offence.

  There is still little sign that we are about to set off, so I make myself a cup of tea and take a seat in the galley. Waiting to go out to sea is not unlike queueing for a rollercoaster ride. You are aware of the intensity of the experience that lies ahead of you, and yet you cannot quite name or locate the origin of that fear until you are in motion, staring the loop-the-loop in the eye. ‘On sailing day,’ one fisherman told me, ‘more than anything, you’re just praying that something might go wrong that will delay you from leaving.’ That way, you can get just a few more precious hours at home with your family.

  Don tells me that we probably won’t leave until the evening now, as he hasn’t even done the weekly shop yet. He takes a brown leather notebook from his pocket and begins to write a lengthy list of supplies. This requires extensive planning, the crew constantly interrupting to make personal requests. Kyle and Andrew are particularly keen for more Twister lollies after they got through a whole packet in one day on the last trip. The list takes at least twenty minutes to compose, Don’s notes sprawling across several pages, its eventual form complete with lists within lists and footnotes.

  Curious, I offer to accompany Don on his supermarket mission. It turns out to be the shopping trip of my wildest childhood dreams – every sweet thing, every flavour of crisp and every possible naughty treat that you could ever imagine wings its way into our trolley, most of it in vast quantities. We move through the shop in a kind of frenzy. No meat is overlooked, no aisle left unturned. The trolley heaves with towers of ribs, lamb shanks, pork chops, chicken burgers, whole chickens, bacon, sausages, beef, mince, pork pies, pork slices, ham slices and chicken slices – the high-rise city of a vegetarian’s nightmare. Into a second trolley are slung chocolates and crisps, every kind of vegetable, five or six varieties of cheese, eleven huge cartons of milk, four bottles of arrabbiata sauce, four bottles of squeezy mayonnaise and thirty yoghurts – Don taking care to remove every cherry yoghurt from the industrial-sized box because ‘cherry flavoured anything is disgusting’. By the end of our shop, in which we have covered every aisle of both Lidl and Tesco, the car is heaving with two mountainous trolleys’ worth of jam-packed delights.

  I head up to the heel-shaped wheelhouse and sit cross-legged on a maroon upholstered bench beside Don, who is making the last checks before our departure. This bench will become my main perch for the week – the place where I will sit slumped, my head resting against the wall, gazing out at a square of neatly portioned sea and sky through the wheelhouse window, listening to the yarning (storytelling) of whoever is on watch. The archaic term to yarn still abounds in Newlyn. Certain fishermen are renowned for their abilities to spin a yarn, amassing crowds at the pub as they offer tales about their time at sea. Don flicks some switches and the Filadelfia’s engine picks up from a low growl to an all-consuming roar. We pass the diminutive red and white lighthouse marking the harbour’s edge, head through the Gaps – the thin opening between the harbour walls through which vessels come and go – and out into the dusky evening.

  I have seen the sun disappear behind the land most days on my evening walks along the prom at Newlyn. Each time I wish it would set, just once, over the water, rather than sinking out of view behind buildings. I imagine the dark bay filling up with thick petrol and the sun a lit match, which, on touching the bay’s perimeter, would set the whole sea alight. But as we round Land’s End, with no coast left to obscure it, I finally see the sight I have longed for. The sun in its deep redness sinks down into the sea. I try to catch its last moment, the point at which the line of light is as thin and delicate as the space between an eyeball and an eyelid. And then it is gone entirely, leaving only a soft, red after-image. The performance is more rapid than I had expected, the sky dwindling from fire to dying embers in a matter of minutes. Kyle – affectionately referred to by the crew as either the ‘ginger minger’ or the ‘ginger ninja’ – sees my surprise and nods: ‘It sinks fast, doesn’t it? You don’t notice how quick it goes on land.’ At sea, your eye can trace the whole arc of the sun’s path across the sky each day. There is rarely an hour when you don’t look out at it, using its light to centre yourself against the undifferentiated sea.

  I leave Don bent double over the many flickering screens before his skipper’s chair and go out onto the balcony where Kyle and Andrew are stood in silence, watching the last remnants of the land fade into the gathering night. My stomach is tight, my nerves just holding, the rollercoaster clunking its way up towards the first drop. It is too late to ask to be taken back to land now.

  The old Cornish word for the sound made by waves slamming against a fishing boat is troze. It mutated in form and meaning to become droze, the sound of multiple human voices speaking at once. The guttural notes of the Filadelfia’s engine almost cover it, but I can just make out the noise of the waves smacking her bow, the indistinct voice of the sea acting upon this manmade thing passing through it. To distract myself from the sense of dread I feel mounting at the back of my mind, I focus my attention on the diminishing coastline. I lean into the spray from the giddy heights of the wheelhouse balcony, echoing the position in which I found Don smoking first thing this morning. Looking back towards the land, the speckled lights of homes positioned along the very edge of the coast play tricks on me in the darkness. At times I am sure they are so distant that this must be the very last moment before they sink behind the horizon entirely, only for the lights from a collection of farms or a small hamlet to reappear again a second later, their distance impossible to judge.

  There are several kinds of darkness. In cities the dark is not an absence of light but a variation of it: evenings are marked by the dusty orange washes from street lamps and the bright white strip lights from shops. Darkness in the countryside falls like a rich, thick shroud, complemented and intensified by the greenness of fields. At sea, darkness has a character of its own. It arrives from every angle, a vampire sucking at all sources of illumination. Colour drains from the world and the sky hardens to slate. As the last few lights of the coastline go out, all certainty vanishes; you can no longer distinguish up from down, sky from sea, but feel as if suspended somewhere between.

  In the opening pages of Moby Dick, that most famous of fishing narratives, Herman Melville suggests that harboured within all men is an inexpressible desire to be near water. On a ‘dreamy Sabbath afternoon,’ his narrator Ishmael declares, ‘posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.’ As we steam away through the darkness on the Filadelfia, each of us drawn by that same compulsion to voyage beyond the land’s edge, I imagine the residents of Newlyn lined up along their harbour watching us disappear beyond the limit of the sea’s horizon. So long as I stay out here looking back to shore, I tell myself, I can’t really be about to spend eight days twenty-seven miles from the coast, working, eating and sleeping in the same room as a group of fishermen, most of whom I just met a few hours ago. So long as I keep my gaze fixed on where I imagine Newlyn to be, I have not really left.

  A row of pale hands grips the rail of the boat’s wheelhouse balcony, each of us looking out upon eternity. The Filadelfia’s derricks, the huge wing-like outriggers from which her nets drag, creak down until they are laid out parallel to the water. We are riding the seas on some prehistoric yellow bird, her skeletal wings the resting place for the multitudes of seabirds who have joined us on our voyage out. At this signal, the fishermen depart from the
wheelhouse to set to work preparing the boat for her week at sea and I am left alone, the dome of the sky above me, the black waves far below. Dressed in their oilskins, the men head out onto the uncovered deck to spread the nets ready for the first haul. They will repeat this performance over fifty times more in the week to come. The ancient, bird-like being heaves her wings back up, pulling the chainmail-clinking nets high up into the air above us, before dropping them down into the water with a smack. They break its surface and disappear beneath. The nets will remain sunken for the next few hours, stroking along the seabed, gathering fish into their cod-ends.

  The salt-licked wind makes my eyes red and I hold the rail tight until my knuckles turn white, in case a sudden wave should reach up and pull me over the side. I feel the thrum of the Filadelfia’s engines through the hard metal, the whole boat’s energy seeming to course along the rail and up into my chest. Without warning, there’s a yelp from the galley.

  ‘Turn the boat around!’

  ‘What?’ yells Don, swivelling his torso around on his skipper’s chair and elongating the a so that the word goes on for many seconds.

  ‘There are no lollies! You forgot to get the lollies, you bastard!’ Andrew cries with a cackle.

  On nights like these, if viewed from a satellite, the open sea must resemble an empty blackness and the fishing boats dotted over its territory, auras of pale light. The only illumination comes from the boat’s floodlights that bounce off the crests of waves as we break the water’s surface, emphasising their brilliant whiteness.

  In my journal I draw out these auras as leaf or teardrop shapes chasing across the page. It is not until much later that I read of mandorlas (the Italian for almonds) in Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets, and realise that these were the shapes I was reaching towards in my drawings. ‘Mandorla’ is the term used for the halo of light that surrounds a holy figure. From the sixth century onwards scenes of Christ in transfiguration or ascension almost always included this radiant, gold-painted aureole, framing his person and raising him above the other figures in the scene. In mathematical terms, the mandorla symbol takes on the new name the ‘vesica piscis’, formed through the intersection of two identical circles, the centres of each lying on the perimeter of the other, like the circle of the sea and the circle of the sky, which the boat intersects and exists between. In Latin, Vesica piscis translates as fish bladder, after the shape of the conjoined dual air-bladders in fish. These so-called ‘swim bladders’, present in bony fish, are gas-filled sacks that allow fish to control their buoyancy, acting like a primitive lung that prevents them from sinking.

  For me, the mandorla/vesica piscis is one of those satisfying, almost ideal shapes that once noticed can be found everywhere, its significance spanning art history, geometry and biology. The shape could also be said to resemble the frame of a fishing boat. Each trawler, pushing through the water in pitch black is surrounded by a mandorla, a glow that emanates outwards in an almond shape, protecting those inside.

  My mind still lost in shapes, Don bangs the door open and yells: ‘Dinner!’

  I come in, my face red and my eyes wild from the sea.

  ‘Chicken burgers and lovely fucking peas,’ he announces. Don tends to use ‘fucking’ as a punctuation mark, a way to divide words and give certain ones emphasis.

  Our first dinner on board is a comforting school-dinner-style meal, the chicken burgers and lovely fucking peas supplemented by chips cooked in a deep-fat fryer. Kyle assumes the role of cook, a job that involves scrupulous prepping to ensure each part of the meal is readied in between hauls. In the galley a stench of grease and fat and the strong disinfectant used to mask the lingering aroma of fish, circulate and intermingle with diesel and tobacco fumes to form a single and overwhelmingly potent smell.

  I sit gazing at the huge portion of food placed before me, while the other men wolf down theirs in a few mouthfuls. Andrew teases Kyle about his cooking throughout the week, calling it ‘kiddie food’. Tonight, it is the chicken burgers that are in the line of fire. He claims they are so far from being chicken (‘the chemical rubbish they make those chicken burgers with!’) that you would need to add a third option to which came first, the chicken or the egg? This fails to achieve the rise Andrew had hoped for. Kyle calmly takes it, looking down happily at his own rapidly vanishing plate of food. The crew polish off my last few chips and we sit together for a while cramped along the benches in the galley, each twisted round to face the TV, shouting answers at The Chase and jeering at contestants when they get obvious things wrong. Apart from our final dinner at sea, this is the only time we will all be together like this.

  The show ends. Don returns to the wheelhouse and the other men split off to catch a few hours extra sleep before the first haul. I sit in the galley until the heady smells make me drowsy and I anxiously notice the first swirls of seasickness curling around my stomach. In an attempt to shake myself out of these feelings, I return to the wheelhouse. The haze of smoke hangs thickest up here. It is like entering a fumoir in a Parisian bar, all corners of the room dissolving in smog so that the space could be either endless or shoebox-sized. The men roll cigarette after cigarette to break up the monotony of the watch and keep themselves awake, each inhalation followed by a phlegmatic cough, the air becoming so dense as to take on the form of another fisherman.

  One thing the men do not do at sea, though, is drink. It would be too dangerous, they tell me. Too much is at stake while you’re steering a large boat across an open sea for your senses to be dulled by booze.

  I stand next to Don’s skipper’s chair, an old leather car seat whose foam is leaking out along the seams, and lean upon its armrest for support, rocking back and forth on my heels with the motion of the boat. It is snug up here, the heater burning continuously. Next to us, Don’s beloved money plant sways gently. He got her as a cutting three years ago and now she’s a huge sprawling creature covered in deep green succulent leaves. Money plants are supposed to bring good fortune – Don says she’s brought him a lot these last few years. ‘In bad weather it proper dances,’ Kyle warns me, mesmerised by the waving plant, ‘like it’s trying to hypnotise you.’

  I check my phone to find the last bars of signal have now gone. No new network message arrives on the screen. No Welcome! You are now in the middle of the Deep Sea, you really are roaming now. On the Crystal Sea we had our own Wi-Fi, so I ask Don what the Filadelfia’s account is so I can check in with my parents. ‘There’s no Wi-Fi on here!’ he laughs. ‘Do you know how much that costs at sea?’

  ‘Right, yeah,’ I say, feeling embarrassed and wishing I’d been able to let my parents know they wouldn’t be hearing from me for the week.

  There is no television up in the wheelhouse to mask the lack of human noise, no Wi-Fi to break up the monotony. As such, time is deeper here, the space widening without the endless flick of social media to flatten life down onto small, shiny surfaces. Long stretches of meditative quiet are occasionally broken up by conversations that are themselves nothing like the quickfire, get-to-know-one-another dialogues of the land. I have always believed that the freest exchanges occur when you are not facing one another: on walks, on benches, in cars with your feet up on the dashboard, and while staring at the sea. With your eye travelling freely, language becomes untethered. Each word is given the space to expand and drift. Here, the space between sentences becomes a kind of practised grammar that opens up between me and whoever is on watch. But for the next hour or so we do not speak at all. I stare at the variously whirring machines sending out readings that give a rough, brightly coloured sense of the world continuing beneath us. The Ground Definition Machine draws marks across the screen that resemble a red and green millipede slinking along the ground. If its body suddenly contorts upwards, suggesting the seabed rises dramatically, there is likely to be something large below us, such as an old anchor or submarine cables that we are in danger of pulling up in our nets, or, worse, the object could yank down one of the huge derricks and capsize us
. On a trawler you are potentially only ever seconds away from catastrophe.

  Don guides the Filadelfia along the course he has set using the compass that he turns by minute degrees, following the pink line mapped out along the AIS, the Automatic Identification System – a tracking device that plots the voyage of every water-bound vessel around the world. This first line leads to the location where Don made the first haul on his last trip. Beyond it the map becomes a chaos of spaghetti strings, the paths of previous trips criss-crossing over each other endlessly, along with markers of significance such as ‘Transatlantic cables down here, keep clear’, ‘Huge turbot school here’, or ‘Carn Base: BIG ROCKS. AVOID!’ The screen provides a spatial representation of the Filadelfia’s recent life history, the hundreds of voyages she has made layered on top of one other. If only we humans kept the same records – and could see the lines of our lives, observing those that become thick through repetition, the places to which we cannot help but return.