The Merman
Page 9
‘Who was the guy in the van?’
‘Jens, a bloke in the boat crew. He was with my brothers when it happened.’
Tommy bent down, picked up a cod head and looked at it in disgust.
‘We’re not sure what it eats yet. Not every kind of fish, anyway. But it seems to like rubbish... fish guts and fins. It doesn’t care for shellfish.’
He tossed the head back into the crate and looked as confused as what he had just said. I didn’t understand any of it.
‘My family have brought up a load of weird things out of the sea,’ he continued, ‘basking sharks, moonfish, porpoises, old mines from the war... in the Fifties there were tuna out there. My dad told me you could see shoals of over a thousand fish, and the biggest ones weighed over two hundred kilos. They brought them up with a hook, baited with mackerel, with steel cables and hawsers. Dad’s got photos at home... ’ Tommy gave another laugh, as if he were reassured by telling old fishing tales. ‘...where he’s standing in the long side of the boat, hooking a tuna through its gills out by the Lilla Middelgrund bank. My Uncle John is standing by, ready to thread a line around its tail fin. Do you know how they located the shoal? With binoculars, a shoal a hundred and fifty metres across – the whole sea was churning. Then in the early Sixties, they just disappeared, the tuna, just as suddenly as they’d turned up.’ He sat down on the stool beneath the window, but got up again straight away, as if he’d received an electric shock. ‘Dad was on the Zentora too, the neighbour’s boat, 1977. They caught eighteen tons of cod in a single trawler net. It was in the newspaper afterwards. Seven people worked flat-out for twenty-one hours outside Laesö to clean the fish. What I’m trying to say is that strange things happen sometimes, people get strange catches, but this is something else.’
I heard the noise again: a low whimper, followed by a sort of wheezing sound, like air being forced through something moist.
‘What on earth is that?’
‘I don’t know what the hell it is. They brought it up in the trawler net outside Anholt. They panicked and hit it over the head until they thought it was dead... but it survived.’
I wondered if he was still ill. If he had a fever and was delirious. Nothing he was saying made any sense.
There was another box on the floor, I now realised, filled with bottles of medicines. There was a label from a veterinary clinic on it. Tommy pushed it aside with his foot. A large dark patch was visible on the concrete floor underneath. Oil, I thought. Or blood? The same blood his brother had wiped off his shoes?
‘Thank God it’s asleep now,’ he continued. ‘Doped up. it’s impossible to handle otherwise. It’s incredibly strong, the bastard. That’s what we’ve got the medicines for. Jens knows a vet. There are syringes there, too.’
I don’t remember what I was thinking, only that something was wrong and Tommy was shaken in a way I’d never experienced before. He didn’t say anything else. Just took me by the arm and pulled me further into the room.
Over by the end wall was a wooden crate, maybe three metres long, a metre wide and about as deep, the kind you use for transporting a boat engine. That’s where the noise was coming from. And the smells... the strange smells... of fish and sea and blood.
I looked down into the crate. And even though I saw what it was, I didn’t take any of it in.
‘What is it?’ I whispered.
‘If it were a female and I’d read about it in a storybook, I know what I would answer. But this... I haven’t got a clue.’
Whatever it was, it was big. It must have weighed several hundred kilos. Its arms resembled a human’s or a large ape’s. A sea-ape, if there is such a thing... long and slender, with small hands on the ends. But its joints faced the other way, and there was webbing between its fingers. There were sort of nails too, or rather claws, blue-black in colour. Its upper body was almost human: you could see a chest and an abdomen with something that resembled a navel. But its hide consisted of armour-like scales, like the skin of a large lizard. There was hair growing on its shoulders: long, bristly hairs, almost like horsehair. It’s difficult to describe what I was seeing, so that’s why my comparisons are strange. Its lower body was shaped like a hammer, a long cylindrical body that changed into a fin, almost a metre wide. It looked like the tail of a small whale. Its lower section was completely smooth, with no hair. But its scales were all black there, and appeared to be even thicker.
Its face was unlike anything I’d ever seen either: half fish, half mammal. Its forehead was low and pointy. It had no nose, instead a kind of nasal bone that stuck out in the middle of its face. Its eyelids were half closed, and behind them you could sense black irises and eyeballs as big as a horse’s. It seemed to be asleep... or hibernating.
‘What on earth is it?’ I asked again.
‘I dunno.’ Tommy shook his head. ‘I really haven’t got a clue.’
I stared at the creature as if entranced. Its jawbones were huge, its mouth horribly broad. I knew that it could open its mouth almost as wide as its entire face. It sort of had lips, too, with horseshoe-shaped bones underneath; you could see them clearly because its lips were very thin. Its skull was pointy, as if it had grown skin over a curiously cone-shaped hat. Its head was covered in the same type of hair as its shoulders: like a cross between human hair and horsehair. On each side of its head was a narrow notch with flaps: like ears, I supposed. And then its neck: short, broad, and where the collarbones would have been on a person: two gills.
‘It’s got lungs and a windpipe just like us,’ said Tommy. ‘And gills as well. I don’t get it.’
I couldn’t get any words out. Just stared at whatever it was that I had never stared at before in my entire life. The puffing noise, I understood, was coming from its gills, but only when it breathed out. It seemed to be breathing in through its mouth.
Then, suddenly, it moved, a sort of shudder went through its body, and the movement resembled nothing I had ever seen either. There must have been bones and muscles involved that other animals do not have: simultaneously a light and heavy movement, incredibly clumsy and smooth at the same time. Its head turned towards us, the eyelids flickered and my instincts told me to back away and to run, but I stayed put, as if I no longer had the strength to move.
For several seconds, I thought it was going to open its eyes and look at me. But instead it sank back into hibernation, became almost motionless, except for its ribcage, which steadily rose and fell. There was an open flesh wound on one of its cheeks. You could see right inside the creature’s mouth there. You could see its tongue that was big and pink like a cow’s tongue, see its teeth – fish teeth, loads of them, relatively small, but razor-sharp. A little further up by its temple was a large bruise. There was blood clotted around it. Small bone chips were sticking out of its flesh.
‘They used the boat hook,’ Tommy said in a quiet voice. ‘Its whole cheek was torn open. They didn’t have a choice, it could have killed them.’
‘But how... I don’t get it.’
‘With its tail. It’s aggressive, I’ve seen it myself... and really strong. He must weigh two, three hundred kilos.’
He took a cigarette out of the packet his brother had left behind, and lit it. I had never seen him smoke before; it looked almost indecent. Like photos you might see of street children in impoverished countries. He took a deep drag without coughing. Then he bent over, fumbled over the creature’s body down there and turned over a flap of skin on its tail fin.
‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘It’s a male.’
Even though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t help looking. Its penis was the most human-like part of the whole creature. It looked like it could be on any grown man at all. It felt shameful to look at it, sort of like spying on someone in the shower or peeping through a keyhole at somebody doing something dirty.
‘Leave it be,’ I said. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘It doesn’t notice anything. You can touch it. The body, I mean. It’s totally pumped up on
this stuff.’ Tommy picked up a syringe that lay in the bottom of the crate, and a brown bottle that had a little liquid sloshing around in it., ‘Anaesthetic... the stuff they use at the zoo to put animals to sleep. He’s had the same size dose a polar bear would get. He won’t wake up for hours.’
It was only now that I realised the creature was tied down. A heavy rope was wound around its tail fin. Its arms, or what you might call its reverse-jointed limbs, were fastened to the bottom of the crate with steel cables. I felt confused in a way I’d never been before. My whole head was swimming with questions, a mishmash of questions, an entire landslide: what it was, where it came from, why it was still alive, and how long it would survive like this.
Tommy took my hand and placed it on the creature’s body. It was cold and slimy. I felt how my hand sort of stuck to its hide. The whole thing just felt wrong: that it was here in the first place, that it had a gender, that it was bound and drugged up, and that Tommy wanted me to touch it.
‘Let me go!’ I said.
‘Calm down. There’s no danger. It can’t hurt you.’
‘It’s not that... it just doesn’t feel right. Tell me what happened instead.’
It was the Tuesday before when Tommy’s brothers had gone out on their boat. It was perfect fishing weather. As I understood it, that had to do with the winds: they affected the surface temperature and made the cod shoals head towards the fishing banks. That was why they took an extra deckhand out on the boat: they might have needed another pair of strong arms if they got a big catch.
First they had gone to their usual reefs, the places where they knew the fish would normally be. But the echo sounder had shown only small shoals not worth trawling for. They had lain still just north of Marsten and discussed what to do: head back to the marina or head out further to the north-west. Finally they decided to go in the opposite direction, towards Anholt. In fact, those were Danish waters and, according to the rule book, they weren’t allowed to fish there. But Anholt was special. Not that long ago people in Glommen had relations on the island, married into each other’s families, fished together; the border only existed on the nautical charts.
It was around midday when everything happened. They were by a bank a few nautical miles inside Danish waters when the echo sounder showed a large shoal of fish. It was moving strangely, Tommy said, not at all like it should, sort of splitting up and then joining together again, suddenly diving and then immediately coming back up towards the surface. Nobody said anything, but they suspected it might be porpoises or whales that were hunting in the shoal. It was unusual for whales to come so far into the Kattegat, but it happened sometimes. Pilot whales, for example, had made it as far south as Öresund. After talking it over for a while, they decided to put the trawl net out. There were no Coast Guard boats in sight, and if any fishermen from the island turned up, they would turn a blind eye to their presence. With the eldest brother as the helmsman, they followed the shoal at a leisurely pace. Tommy’s next older brother Olof and the lad, who was called Jens, were standing on the shelter deck, each with a pair of binoculars. They were hoping to catch a glimpse of a whale, or at worst a Danish Coast Guard vessel that they would have to get away from as fast as possible, hopefully without needing to let go of their net.
All that was significant in leading up to what happened next. The fact that they were there against the rules, that they were breaking certain laws. People from Glommen were known for their suspicion of authorities: customs, the police, the Board of Fisheries. And maybe there were other things on board the boat that made them unwilling to involve outsiders.
They had had the trawl net out for less than half an hour when they decided to bring it back in. Tommy seemed unsure exactly in what order events had occurred, but then he hadn’t been there. Maybe it was the idea that there were whales in their path, that they might destroy their equipment; maybe they had seen something on the echo sounder or identified some strange movement in the hawsers. At any rate, they started to bring in the trawl net again.
They discovered it when they made the lift. It was tangled up in the net, struggling for its life. As I understood Tommy, they tried to let it out through the side panel, but the creature was too big. Finally there was no other option but to bring it in. It was incredibly aggressive, striking out with its tail, throwing itself this way and that all over the place, and it managed to make some large tears in the net. They had never seen anything like it. At first they thought it was moving like a small whale, Tommy said, and that in itself was a problem because you have to report a catch like that. Then they realised what it was, or in any case what it resembled.
But why didn’t they just chuck it overboard, I wondered. They couldn’t, he explained. They couldn’t even get near it: as soon as they got too close, it tried to attack, and they couldn’t stay out at sea all night. Finally they panicked and started hitting it with the boat hooks. I could see it in my mind’s eye, how they kept hitting and hitting and how the creature tried to defend itself, how it threw itself upon them, biting with its jaws and lashing with its tail fin. I could hear how they struck it on the head, the low, blunt noise from the boat hooks when the gristle and hide split open, the blood that ran, all the chaos on that slippery deck, how the creature’s cheek was sliced open when they tried to hook it, the men’s screams, the terror in the creature as it fought for its life, and how at last, as the boat heaved, it slid through the hatch to the lower deck, struck its head and passed out.
They returned to Glommen with the creature in the cargo hold. They didn’t know what they should do. The best thing, they said, would be to kill it, but that was easier said than done. To do that they needed a gun, but none of them had one. They discussed whether they should contact someone they knew: there were several people in the village who had a hunting licence, but the fewer people who got wind of what they had brought in, the better. Anyway, they would need a larger calibre weapon than an average shotgun.
The brothers had not told anyone what they had brought up that day. Presumably they were afraid of questions about what they were doing in Danish fishing waters, about the duty of notification, about fishing quotas that might already have been exceeded, and maybe because there were other things in the cargo hold that Tommy didn’t mention. When they returned, the creature was still unconscious. Assisted by the dock crane, they lifted it up onto a trailer, rolled it into the hut and tied it down in an old machinery crate while they tried to figure out what to do.
Tommy had been dragged into the story against his will. He had noticed that something was not right. He had heard his brothers coming in and leaving the house at odd hours, heard them arguing downstairs in the games room. From the window in his room he had seen them in the hut, the tarpaulin they used to cover the windows, the strange sneaking around, and he wondered what was actually going on. On Thursday, even though he had a temperature, he went down there. His brothers had gone into town to sort something out; he opened the door with a spare key, went in and discovered the creature. That same evening he demanded an explanation from them. And because the story began to follow its own rules, he was suddenly involved in it.
‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked when he had finished telling his story.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Can’t you phone the police or something? It has to go back where it came from. Or be handed in somewhere... I don’t know.’
From the look he gave me, I understood that that was the very last thing that they wanted to do.
‘I have no idea what they want to do,’ he said. ‘Leave it to die, maybe. But it’s tough. It looks like it can survive a long time on land. A bloody amphibian... uses its gills to breathe underwater... and its windpipe and lungs on land.’
I looked over at the crate of fish guts that was over by the door.
‘So why are they feeding it, if they want it to die?’
‘Don’t ask me. I’m not the one who’s making the decisions here.’
Something didn’t add up. Tommy’s sentences that stumbled, skipped over certain words, went back to pick them up again, sentences that haltingly advanced over invisible obstacles, fell over them and got up again. And why didn’t they throw it back into the sea now, when it was completely helpless?
I detected the smell of the creature again. The mermaid... although it was a man. The merman, merbull, mermonkey... the smell of sea, fish and blood. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and I noticed more wounds, flesh wounds and bruises between its scales, deep wounds where they stabbed it with the boat hooks the way bullfighters thrust and stab at bulls.
‘Do your mum and dad know about this?’ I asked.
‘No. Since Dad retired from fishing they never come down here. Just me, Jens and my brothers... and now you.’
A man, a male, I thought as I looked down into the crate again; the words bore less and less relation to reality. It really was breathing through its mouth, and releasing the air from its gills; I saw the moisture there, the slime and the small air bubbles that formed. And then that horrible wheezing noise when the air was forced out. Tommy touched it, with exaggerated roughness I thought. And then the movement started again, that powerful trembling through the bound beast or fish or whatever it was. Smooth and clumsy at the same time.
‘It’s starting to wake up,’ said Tommy. ‘It can’t tolerate the light. It probably lives down at the bottom of the sea and only comes up to the surface at night.’
And then I saw another thing I had never experienced before. The creature opened its eyelids, or rather the scales or flaps in front of its eyes. It looked straight at me. Its eyes were large, pitch-black and watery, as if it were suffering from an eye infection. But its gaze was completely human, and I noticed it was observing me and wondering who I was. It tried to lift one arm; its fingers scratched awkwardly in the air before its hand sank down again, restrained by a steel cable fastened to the bottom of the crate.