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  To take my thoughts off my mounting seasickness, I break the silence and lamely ask Don what he’s thinking. ‘I’m blank,’ he tells me gruffly. I come to learn that Skipper Don is very different to the man I know on land. Out here he barely speaks. Here in the dark, the wheelhouse lights casting shadows across his lined forehead and eyes, he reminds me of a character from a Joseph Conrad novel.

  In Conrad’s narrative, centred on a boat called the Narcissus, the old sailor Singleton keeps himself apart from the other men on the boat. ‘Alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle,’ writes Conrad, ‘he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself, who should have come there into this place as quiet as a sepulchre to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler.’ Singleton is one of a dying breed of old mariners. ‘He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike impulses and his man’s passions already dead within his tattooed breast. The men who could understand his silence were gone – those men who knew how to exist beyond the pale of life and within sight of eternity.’

  We have left the pale of life behind now. At sea, you enter into a kind of monastic existence: imprisoned and yet free, roaming, but in the most confined space possible. I slip off to bed, promising Don that I’ll be up at dawn for the first haul of the day.

  Lying in my bunk, I feel restless and try to draw my mind down to where the nets are trailing along the dark, clear waters below us. I imagine the huddle of fish building up inside the cod-ends. I will have to try and learn how to exist beyond the pale of life out here too, allow the sea to soothe my emotions and land memories, and make them more manageable.

  4

  GUTS

  One of the frustrating side effects of seasickness medication is that it holds your body in such deep slumber that it becomes almost impossible to wake before its effects have worn off. Though I set my alarm for 5.45 that first morning on the Filadelfia, I sleep right through and rouse to find it is 9 o’clock and I am alone in the cabin. I imagine the crew glancing over at me sleeping soundly, while they have worked through the night – another dead-weight passenger they are bound to carry this week.

  Sea dreams tend to be expansive and, more often than not, horrifying. My half-asleep journal entry from my first night in the hot, dark pink mouth of the Filadelfia’s cabin reads: ‘Dreamt I was watching a chat show that got inside my mind’ – and, as an afterthought: ‘Sort of worrying it’s still in there.’ That is to say, within the dream, I could not shake the droning theme music that underlay this particular chat show, transposed directly from the trawler’s own creaks and groans, until long after it was over. It was like a kind of tinnitus, a wordless tune that I feared would be stuck inside my head forever. The boat’s music pierced my subconscious, undulating through my dreams.

  It is strange trying to remember the experience of the dream now. Ordinarily my diary serves as the tip of an iceberg, telling me that there is some memory down there in the water and it is my job to dive below once more to rediscover its shape. With dreams it is the opposite: all I have left are the fragments I write down while cocooned in my sleeping bag, the ghostly blue light shining on my words. Even the handwriting of this particular dream entry is unfamiliar, as if a stranger snatched away my diary and wrote their own memory in it, leaving something impenetrable.

  As I lie in my bunk, overheating in the tracksuit bottoms I’d been too exhausted to change out of, I try to calm my elevated pulse. I can still feel seasickness menacing somewhere about my person. And so, though I hate the way it muffles my senses, I take another pill before scrambling up the ladder to join the men upstairs.

  I enter the galley to multiple jeers of ‘Nice lie in?’, ‘Get your beauty sleep?’, and ‘You must have been so tired from all that work you did on the boat last night!’ I make a silent promise to myself that I will have at least proved to them that I am not completely redundant by next Monday.

  Since everyone is seated about the table, I gather I must have woken up just after the Fishwife Call, when whoever is on watch puts the kettle on, makes mugs of coffee and then heads down to wake up the snoozing crew for the next haul. Every fisherman goes about the Fishwife Call in his own idiosyncratic manner. I hear of one skipper who screeches at the top of his lungs right next to the sleeping men: ‘LET’S GET FISHING!’ Don goes for more of an inaudible ‘Alrightfuckers!’, while others risk their necks performing wild pranks, such as pouring water on sleeping fishermen’s heads, before being chased up ladders by their victims as they swear they’ll throw them overboard. Fishermen are also very particular about their mugs, I discover. Midway through my trip on the Crystal Sea I was quietly informed that I had been drinking out of the cup belonging to Sandris, a Latvian fisherman, and that he was very upset about it. On the Filadelfia, Don has the biggest mug, which has ‘OLD MAN’ painted across it in large blue letters; Stevie’s declares ‘CAUTION: I am horny’; Kyle’s is one of those nondescript mugs that come free with some online purchase. I am given a blue, flowery patterned one for the week.

  Each man takes two three-hour watches. They keep these same times for the rest of the trip to provide some semblance of structure to their days. Kyle has the morning and post-dinner watch; Andrew the afternoon and the so-called Dog Watch (from midnight to the witching hour at three); Stevie the early morning and early evening slots; Don fills in between these hours, returning to the wheelhouse to orchestrate most of the hauls.

  The wheelhouse seems to transform into a new space during each portion of the day, the changing light passing through the line of windows somehow reconfiguring its interior. One crew member on the Crystal Sea – whose dad was nicknamed ‘Force 8’ because he was the kind of ‘nutter who stayed out in huge storms and dodged waves rather than returning to the harbour’ – told me how days are contracted into the two or so stressful hours it takes to haul, plus the watch you perform afterwards. As there are eight hauls every twenty-four hours, seven days at sea feels equivalent to fifty-six days on land. But it is a different kind of time; your family’s lives go on, while you are frozen in this strange state of abeyance in the middle of the ocean.

  Coffee downed, Andrew and Stevie pull their bright yellow oilskins and boots up over their clothes, snap on heavy-duty PVC-coated blue gloves and head out onto the open deck. In the Celtic myth of the selkie, seals shed their skins and climb up the sand dunes, shivering and holding their furless, pale bodies to them as they stumble uncertainly towards the world of men. In each of the manifold variations of the folk tale, the selkie is fated to fall in love with a person of the land while in their human form. Over time the selkie starts to forget the life they spent carving paths through the water with their strong flippers and settles into their human-shaped existence. And yet, in each tale, even as their partner tries desperately to keep them landlocked by hiding their sealskin or entreating them with love, the reader comes to realise that the selkie must at last return to their original form below the waves. There is no other ending possible to such stories.

  Dressed head to toe in oilskins, the fishermen once more become creatures of the sea. I follow Don up into the wheelhouse. On the dashboard are a series of levers to slow the boat down, to put breaks on the hydraulic winches and then bring them up with a rattling whine. Every few seconds Don checks on the position of his crew outside – the machinery they operate is so heavy that, when fishermen have occasionally been caught unawares by it, there have been fatal accidents. In the skipper’s log, kept in the wheelhouse of every boat, Don notes down the precise times of the haul, our position and whether we are with or against the tide.

  Skippers’ logs are intricate records containing the entire life of a fishing boat in degrees, time codes and numbers. Larry, a wiry ex-fisherman with a long grey beard, whose blog ‘Through the Gaps’ documents the daily comings and goings of Newlyn harbour, tells me that he thinks fishing is a ‘three-dimensional profession – not
like that lateral nine-to-five work in an office’. Skippers fluidly move between tidal time, the breeding and migration cycles of fish, crew meal and sleep times, and occasionally the social time continuing back home through phone calls or TV shows (I hear of one skipper who plans his haul times around Emmerdale and Coronation Street so that he doesn’t have to miss any plotlines while at sea) – and, of course, the ever-ticking clock of economic time.

  So tremendous is the pressure that Don barely sleeps at sea. There are skippers who respond to this burden by effing and blinding at their crew, raging at the smallest errors, and I’d half-imagined Don would be one of them. As it is, I never see him calmer than when he is stood before the wheelhouse window watching the haul. He stays well out of the general bustle of the boat, raising his voice on deck only to warn the crew if something has gone wrong. While the other men go down below, resting easy in the knowledge that their work is over for the next few hours, his mind turns over and over. At odd hours I find Don running through past trips in the log, roaming the AIS system, and plotting the Filadelfia’s next move.

  The nets that have flowed silently below the water’s surface for the last few hours, their loose strings floating outwards like the tangled strings of jellyfish, are suddenly wrenched up into the air. Both cod-ends bulge with a seething mass of fish. Sprouting in tufts from the nets are frayed orange plastic ropes called ‘dollies’, which provide buffers as the nets are dragged across the stony ocean floor. There is something ridiculously flamboyant about their floppy, clown-orange hair as they rise up from the sea. Working in mirror-image synchronicity on both sides of the boat, the two men heave the nets up and over the deck, tug out the knots in the cod-ends so the contents cascade across the deck in a sudden expulsion.

  The deck is now swamped with fish of all colours and kinds, shaking and fizzing across the floor. A popular saying amongst fishermen is: ‘It all comes out the cod-end’, which is a bit like, ‘It all comes out in the wash’. There exists fisherman lingo for almost every species: ‘morgy’ are dogfish, sea urchins ‘zarts’, ‘paws’ crabs, ‘gizzy’ spider crabs. Those creatures that have survived being hauled out of the water make violent, blind bids for freedom. Looking down from the wheelhouse they appear as sparks splitting off from a central firework. Lastly, the men climb inside the net itself to shake out the last few tangled fish. As soon as they’re emptied, Don shoots the nets back out behind the boat. (‘Keep the gear wet; never waste a tow’.)

  The Filadelfia does not have a sophisticated conveyor belt, as do some trawlers, so the crew drop to their hands and knees and begin sorting through the congeries of fish piled up on top of one another: lemon, megrim, Dover sole; monkfish, haddock, bream; John Dory, crabs, one shining turbot – currently the highest value fish on the market – and cuttlefish, called ‘black gold’ because there is no quota for them, meaning boats may catch as many as they wish. Since the numbers of cuttlefish in the Indian Ocean have declined due to disease, the Cornish fishermen currently supply the rest of the world.

  During our whole time at sea the Filadelfia only pauses for those few minutes when the cod-ends are suspended above the deck. Then she’s off again, dragging her nets up and down the seafloor in deliberate lines under Don’s direction, like a farmer ploughing his fields. It feels disconcerting not to have an end point in mind, to pass back and forth over this vague territory for days and days like wanderers lost in a desert. When the Filadelfia’s bow points towards the west I am aware that the closest landmass is North America, thousands of miles across the ocean.

  While the men work, Don turns on a large sound system at the back of the wheelhouse. The speakers with their multicoloured lights are his pride and joy, together with a library of eclectic music that he has spent years carefully cultivating. Each morning he chooses a different genre to boom out through the wheelhouse at ear-splitting volume. One morning we have a pub rock session, moving between the Eagles, Led Zeppelin and Dire Straits, another it is Dolly and country classics. Today he chooses ‘Elvis with the Philharmonic Orchestra’. Don’s slippered feet, usually left dangling from the high skipper chair, tap along to the rhythm, as he croons softly under his breath to ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’.

  The soaring music provides the backing track to the work going on down below. Andrew and Stevie fling the fish through the air into buckets. Every time they come across small sharks wriggling out of the pile and snapping their strong jaws, they fire them back into the sea like shot-puts. I lock eyes with one and see across its rubbery face an expression of utter disbelief as it flies right past the wheelhouse window. The speakers flash between pink, blue and red, making it look as if we have temporarily escaped trawler life and found ourselves in some downtown karaoke bar.

  Leaving Don with his head sticking out of the wheelhouse window greedily looking out for more turbot, I put on my wellies and pick up a pair of thick blue gloves. Outside the clouds stand around the sky like a waiting herd and the sea is mute. Two of the crewmen are leaning over a metal table in the bow and have already started to gut. They regard me with bemusement as I stagger over to them: ‘Can I help at all?’ Andrew grins, before handing me a small knife along with a large megrim sole. Megrims are the fish we bring up in the greatest quantity and are also probably the easiest to gut. I hold up a silty brown one and feel it squirm in an attempt to escape. The sunlight shafts through its body, displaying an opaque line of detailed bones.

  The men break from their work to show me how to gut, instructing me to turn the fish over and make an incision into the space just below the head on its flesh side. I find a horrifying kind of satisfaction in gutting. It is the most visceral experience. I make a gash with the knife in the shape of a thin smile and dig the knife deep inside. Being clumsy, it takes me several minutes to pull the glistening purple, pink and crimson guts out. They eventually come out in a single strand, like the magician’s trick of bringing out a stream of coloured handkerchiefs from his sleeve in one flourish. The guts comprise intestines, the vesica piscis ‘swim bladder’, and a strawberry-yoghurt-coloured liver so soft it falls apart as soon as you touch it and has to be flicked out with the knife. Due to my inability to aim, most of this liver lands in my hair which over the week grows thick with unspecified blood and guts. I continue to find scales attached to my t-shirt and bare arms long afterwards, so that I look as if I am slowly transforming into a hybrid fish built up of multiple species.

  To distract myself from seasickness during my first trawler trip on the Crystal Sea, I tried reading a book I’d brought with me: The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s account of his psychogeographic meanderings along the Suffolk coastline. I became fixated on a page included a diagram of the reticular structure of the quincunx that Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English polymath, considers in meticulous detail in The Garden of Cyrus, an entire treatise dedicated to examining the quincunx. Sebald notes that, for Browne, this ‘decussation’ (crossing of lines, as in the letter X) was ubiquitous. He saw it ‘in certain crystalline forms, in starfish and sea urchins, in the vertebrae of mammals and the backbones of birds and fish’. Perhaps because of my seasickness, and the sleepiness the seasickness pills induce in me, the structure became imprinted on my mind. During that voyage, I grew convinced that I saw the pattern everywhere – not just in the nets hauled in and out of the sea, but in the streams of light crossing over the ripples in the water and drawn onto the backs of gutted fish. Now back on a trawler once more, I see the pattern again, this time in the tangled string of glistening guts I drag out of the megrim.

  When I was younger we had a dog that loved to help my dad with the gardening. She would enthusiastically dig up each bulb he planted with an expression that suggested she felt certain she was being supremely helpful. I provide the Filadelfia fishermen with a similar level of support, working at approximately a sixteenth of their speed so that I am still gutting my last megrim long after they have begun on the other baskets of sole.

  Once the megrims have
been dealt with, Andrew pours the next two baskets onto the table: pale lemons and stippled-grey Dover sole. These are much more popular and attract better prices than megrims, which tend to be shipped off to Europe. Lemons are ‘slippery buggers’, as Andrew puts it, that require chasing around the table, a procedure only made more challenging by the fact that my PVC gloves are four sizes too big. Each time I get my fingers around a lemon’s girth, it squeezes out like soap in a bath. I finally manage a firm hold by wedging my finger just below its muscular eye. Once I’ve clamped down on it, the men instruct me to make a minute incision slightly higher up the body than on a megrim, and then tear out its guts. Alarmingly, even after its insides have been pulled clean from its body, the lemon sole continues to flap and twist out from my hands.

  Stevie watches me jab at the lemons. ‘You’re lucky they can’t scream,’ he says.

  It takes years before new fishermen learn the knack of it, Stevie tells me. Out on fishing boats you hear the word knack constantly. The knack does not come easily; youngsters must work for years as an apprentice until the actions become natural and flowing. ‘You can’t just turn up here and say I’m gonna be a fisherman,’ says Andy, a St Ives fisherman with an illustrated fish tattoo running down his arm that reads ‘HAKE AND PROUD’. ‘It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to grow up through the bloody ranks: can you mend? Can you splice? How fast can you gut? We was all brought up like that. You’re always trying to get better at this, get better at that. Fishing never stops moving, you know?’