by Nick Fisher
Adrian’s hate for Matty runs deep like the layer of brown fat in a mackerel. Deep inside. Hugging the spine. Laid down year on year, like a seam of geological hate that runs through to his core.
Adrian’s hate for Tim is like a cod worm. Anisakis. Burrowing into his flesh, near the surface, in the muscle. Most of the time he can bear it. Overlook it. Pick the orange-bodied nematodes out of the meat and move on. Extract Tim from his mind in the knowledge that Tim and Matty will one day have some infantile bust up, probably throw fists and shout ‘cunt!’ in each other’s faces. Then the little prick will never put a stinky trainer-shod foot on the Kitty ever again.
Adrian can let the parasitic hate he harbours for Tim wash over him, most days. But there are days, times, when the toxins that those worms of hate leach out into his bloodstream start to affect his brain. Times when his hate for Tim is so close to causing an eruption of earth-scorching proportions. Close to making Adrian do something that he will wish he hadn’t.
Times, like with Tim’s gun.
Tim’s fucking gun.
One morning, after he stepped over the transom and lit a Lambert and Butler, he lifted the front of his crusty, stained fleece, in an imitation of some south Los Angeles gangbanger, to show Matty what he had hidden in the waistband of his tatty, low-slung jeans.
“What the fuck?” says Matty staring at the grey metal.
“Heckler and Koch,” says Tim in a conspiratorial whisper. “Heckler and Koch P30 FDE.”
Adrian seeing the pistol grip of a gun pressed against Tim’s puppy fat belly.
“Anodised aluminium finish with an Ambrose Dexter grip.”
“The fuck,” says Matty, getting hot for a nano second, at the notion that Tim was packing a real shooter.
Of course he wasn’t. It was a replica of the Heckler and Koch P30, as supplied as standard issue to the US military and Police Departments, which was fitted with a magazine capable of firing ten rounds of .45 duty grade ammo. Tim’s Heckler and Koch fired .177 air gun pellets, or little silver BB balls. And was powered by a little metal gas canister of CO2. The sort that gets used in SodaStreams, racing bike tyres, nail guns and self-inflating automatic life jackets.
“Can kill a man,” says Tim, taking it out of his waistband with squinty-toothed pride. “If you know just where to hit him.”
Matty saying this was bollocks. Tim saying he saw it on YouTube. Fact. The rest of that day and other days spent firing at seagulls and arguing about where anatomically you need to shoot a man with an air gun pellet in order to kill him. Until the thing finally jammed solid and Tim swapped it for a bottle of shoplifted Irish whisky and a replica samurai sword. No seagull ever died. The gas canisters always running out, or the mechanism jamming. Which usually meant Tim had to take it apart, putting the gun pieces one by one on top of the engine box. Telling Matty he’d been practising taking it apart blindfold – “like in Vietnam”.
Adrian wanting to jam the barrel of the Heckler and Koch P30 in Tim’s ear. Right in the hole. Pull the trigger. Over and over again. See if that would kill a man. Or a prick of a boy, at least. But it’d probably just jam or the gas bottle would run out. Like it always did.
“Know much those cost?” whines Tim about the gas canisters as another pellet fails to be propelled in a fatal fashion towards a blissfully unawares shitehawk.
Tim slipping the spent gas canister out of the guts of the pistol grip.
“Read the comments on the forums,” says Tim. “All the military guys and the Feds rate the P30’s grip. Feel it.”
Tim passing the fake pistol to Adrian. And for the first time Adrian taking it in his hand. Feeling the comfortable weight, lifting it, pointing it at Tim’s head. No gas. No bullets. Tim not even flinching.
“It’s an Ambrose Dexter grip,” says Tim.
“Ambidextrous,” says Adrian.
“What?”
“Ambidextrous.”
“It’s Ambrose Dexter.”
“It’s ambi-fucking-dextrous. You twat,” says Adrian, the bile rising in his throat. “It fucking means… it can be used in either…”
Adrian stops. Catches himself. Lets the bile subside. Drops the gun on the engine box. And walks back into the wheelhouse. Closes the door. And starts the hard job of packing his anger away again. Damping it down. Deep. Forcing it into corners. Stuffing it. Trying to make it fit back inside him. Safely. So it didn’t spill out. He closes his eyes and tries to breathe.
The wheelhouse door slides open and Matty walks in acting like there’s no question of tension. Just-another-lovely-day-on-the-boat. He plonks the two cans of Scrumpy Jack on the bulkhead in front of Adrian. “Present,” he says. The two cans of cider skidding on the cheap Formica their dad bought in an under-the-counter deal to fit out the wheelhouse surfaces, and most of the kitchen at home. Adrian looks from the cans to his brother with cold eyes. Matty oblivious, too busy watching the flame of his Zippo lighter, as he teases it swaying towards the half-smoked joint between his lips.
Adrian began attending AA meetings 14 months ago. He’d been clean and sober almost ever since. He’d had a couple… well, three… ‘slips’ since his first meeting. Two had been proper full-on binges. Three days, back-to-back: vodka, cider, beer, pub, shed, boat, coke, more pub, cider, collapse… Twice… Then home. Home to Helen. Recriminations. Tears.
His pregnant, scared wife crying with fear and confusion. This followed by several nights sleeping on the sofa. Or lying awake on the sofa, feeling the cold jelly fingers of depression and self-loathing tearing at his soul. Feeling like he’s moving backwards with his life – turning into his father – repeating a terrible mistake, over and over again, even though he knows exactly where it will all end.
It was hard for Adrian to accept he was an alcoholic. Hardest of all to know what being an alcoholic meant, in terms of drinking or not drinking. The men and women at AA talking of ‘total abstinence’. A life free of alcohol, drugs and all mood-altering chemicals. He’d achieved this state in bursts. In spurts. A few weeks. A few months at a time. But after a while it would fall apart. Often for no good reason. No big event. No catastrophe. Sometimes it’d happen when he was feeling very good about life. When there was hope and happiness and a future to look forward to. Sometimes it was exactly that tiny moment of joy that threw a spanner in the works, by making him think that a couple of beers, a pill, a toke, a tiny line, would just make this joyful glimpse of sunlight, feel even better. Needless to say, that thought was invariably the prelude to shit meeting fan.
Matty looks up from his now glowing joint straight into Adrian’s cold stare. “Oh yeah… forgot,” he says, lying. “I’ll leave one in the sink. Case you change your mind.” Matty tugging a can out the plastic handcuffs and cracking the ring pull, filling the wheelhouse with the tangy chemical scent of industrial cider. He sucks deep. Burps. Burps again. This time with a little laugh, leaving the wheelhouse sliding door half open as he goes back out on deck.
Adrian’s anger now cranked up two more notches. If he thought he was pissed off when Matty first came on board, now his fantasy is taking the conger eel gaff down from the peg in the wheelhouse, stepping out on deck and jamming the stainless steel hook deep into Matty’s neck.
Adrian has to take deep breaths. Count them in and out. And say the Serenity Prayer to himself over and over and over again. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”
Fourteen miles out into the English Channel, heading south by south-east at a bearing of 135 degrees, in a sea that hid some choppy short swells, the Kitty K pushes across the tide at eight knots. It feels pathetically slow. The other, bigger crab boats from Weymouth harbour can cruise at 16 or 18 knots, in comfort. Slow or not, the Kitty K sounds like she’s straining near to breaking point. Something deep within her bowels grinding and clanking. So, Adrian winds up the volume on the VHF radio to mask the pain that makes her growl.
He catches the tail end of the forecast from the Portland Coastguard st
ation. A low-pressure front is edging across the Atlantic, pushing in towards the Western Approaches of the Channel, down to the south-west of Cornwall. The front would be bowling along the Channel by mid to late afternoon, bringing thick rain and big seas. Adrian looks out of the seagull shit-smeared screen, now with the officially-confirmed knowledge that this is as good as it’s going to get. From now on, it’s only going to get worse.
He glances at the can of Scrumpy Jack cider, rolling back and forth along the inside edge of the grimy steel sink. ‘6% alcohol by volume’ reads the label on the side… Even from this distance Adrian can see it. One of the many reasons he knows he’s an alcoholic is that he can quote the alcohol-by-volume percentage of any drink. Stella Artois, 5.2%. Carlsberg Special Brew (an old favourite), 9%. White Lightning, 7.5%. Britannia Ruby Sherry, 15%. Smirnoff Vodka, 37.5%…
When he drank, Adrian would drink anything. Didn’t matter what it was made from, what it tasted like, or how many times it was filtered, fermented, casked or corked. Only thing that interested him was that percentage number on the side. Alcohol-by-volume. He shudders. Like a goose walks over his grave. He checks the GPS co-ordinates and stares out at the grey moody sea. Twenty-six nautical miles due south by south-west from Weymouth lies a chunk of the English Channel called the Hurd’s Deep. It’s a shelf. The edge of a tectonic plate that crashed into another plate, pushing up from continental Europe – and the English side won. The English side of the plate romping over the top of the continental plate, like a wrestler getting his opponent in a headlock and climbing on top, to body slam him to the mat.
The geological body slam left a huge deep valley of broken-topped underwater hills. Between the hills lies a carpet of hard boulders strewn across the seabed, which is in turn etched with a spider’s web of fissures.
The mixture of the sudden depth and the broken, craggy, landscape of the seabed makes it a safe haven for crabs and lobsters. It’s dark. It’s cold. There’s so many places to hide, and very few predators brave enough to venture into such inhospitable terrain. At the same time, the Channel’s huge tides relentlessly convey endless amounts of food down into the Deeps. So, if you’re a crab or lobster, Hurd’s Deep is a righteous place to grow fat.
Very few of the crabbers from Weymouth bother to set their pots across the Hurd’s. It’s too far away, too deep and too fucking snaggy. Get part of a shank of 20 pots wedged under one of those big boulders, and try to jag it out with the boat winch in a big sea, and shit will happen. The Deeps are infamous as a graveyard of First and Second World War naval ships and merchant cargo vessels. These ships sunk by mines, torpedoes and four-and-a-half inch armour piercing shells. Apart from the 19 military wrecks that litter the subterranean landscape of the Hurds, there are another dozen or more crabbers and whelkers that sunk in the same waters.
The French crabbing fleet working out of Cherbourg and St. Maxime took a fancy to fishing Hurd’s Deep in the early 1990s, when crab prices hit a record high. They came north from their home ports and scattered pots around the Deeps, like a fat farmer’s wife tossing corn for her chickens.
The French crabbers investing in longer downlines, heavier, steel-based pots to counteract the stronger currents, with bigger marker buoys to indicate the position of their 50-plus pot shanks. And then they went to work, trying to remove as much big crab from the Deeps and get it down to market in St Malo as quickly as possible, to ride the price hike.
Three French crabbers were sunk in the first month of fishing Hurd’s Deep. Two more were sunk a month later. And the last one, Allouette, was sunk six weeks after, with all hands lost. The Allouette was lost – like all the others – while trying to free her trapped pot gear from the seabed. Since the Allouette went down, no French boat has ever potted the Deeps again.
The Channel Islands’ crabbing fleet, whose home port lies closer to the Hurds than either the English or the French fleets, have never tried to pot the Deeps. The islander fleet work smaller boats and, living where they do, in the second fastest tidal stream in the world, they’ve grown up with a deep respect for the sea, and for the Hurds in particular. None of the Channel Islanders would even consider wetting their gear across that terrain. Far too dangerous.
Adrian and Matty on the Kitty K sometimes shoot their pots around the edge of the Deeps. And in desperate times they’ll shoot gear across the middle too. It’s a fuck of a long way to steam. It’s the most dangerous shoot. But if the gear does go down well-baited, and comes up again without having to be cut loose from snags, the haul is guaranteed to be a fuck sight better than from pots shot on shallower, safer ground.
A hundred pots shot in the Hurds will reap more crab than 200 pots shot above the shelf. It’s a simple choice – take a risk with less gear, for bigger reward, or play safe and work your tits off, doing shank after shank for a mediocre return.
Commercial fishing’s the most dangerous profession. Statistically, a commercial fisherman is more likely to die at work than a soldier fighting in Afghanistan. Most of the time, the pay is shite too. So for Adrian and Matty there is no real question. If the weather allows them to get out as far as the Hurds, then they go. Simple as that.
More risk. More money.
According to Adrian’s scribbled notes in his little black book of pot marks, the Kitty K is currently fishing 430 pots in total. Mostly in shanks of 20 pots, daisy-chained with an anchor at one or both ends of the line and a pot buoy and flag on a post to mark the down-tide end of the shank. Some of the shanks just have a pot buoy. The flag posts get broken, and maintenance is something that happens infrequently on board the K. The steam out and steam back to port is supposed to be the time when deck hands do pot maintenance. Not on the Kitty. Not today. Not any day lately.
Adrian always takes the wheel – it’s a big brother thing. While Matty sleeps off whatever’s coursing through his veins, and Tim picks his nose and stares out to sea. Adrian always amazed at how complex a job Tim can make of nose picking. Hours pass with Tim’s crooked finger searching, swivelling, and hooking up inside his nostrils, one after the other. Every day Tim seems more dim-witted – only coming alive when Matty’s entertaining him with another tale of ‘How-fucking-smashed-did-I-get-last-night?’ Seems like he’s gradually picking his brains away.
To pull, re-bait and reshoot all 430 pots in one day would be a suicide mission of blood, sweat, tears and sulks. None of them are in the right state of mind or body for that kind of work. So, Adrian has to make mental calculations, based on his pages of black book scribbles, of which shanks need to be pulled, because all their bait will have been eaten up. And which ones can wet for a couple more days. Hoping those left to soak will still have enough rank-smelling fish clamped inside their bait bands to keep on calling to crab.
On the far western edge of his Furuno plotter is an X with the number 076 above it. It marks a shank of 30 pots they shot over a week ago. These pots lying along the edge of the Kidney Bank. Normally they wouldn’t shoot pots on the edge of a sandbank. Edible brown crabs don’t live on sand. They live in crags and ledges, reefs and wrecks. They like structure and cover, places to hide from predators, and places from which to ambush their prey.
The day the brothers shot on the Kidney was a bad day. Big winds, a hydraulic fluid leak on the pipe to the hauling winch and a massive ‘Fuck you. No. Fuck YOU!’ argument that grew to a peak during the afternoon, and reached its climax on the journey home to port. It was about money. Of course. And so Adrian, out of teeth-gritting frustration, had to shoot the baited pots, single-handed, across the southern edge of the Kidney, while Matty sat in the wheelhouse, sulking, throwing acid-bitter glances astern at Adrian, while he struggled to lob the pots, one at a time, over the aluminium shoot-plate.
Adrian thinking the pots might as well lie on the seabed, rather than stink up the boat overnight. And who knows, there might just be a crab or a lobster, lost enough or suicidal enough, to crawl into a pot. God knows, Adrian is. Adrian making a note to himself to bring Kitty
back over the Kidney Bank on their run home tonight to pull the rogue shank. The empty pots could be rebaited in the morning and shot again on the way out to the Deeps tomorrow. Never hurts to have a shank or two within five miles of port. Means if the weather’s too rough to get far out, there’s always something nearby to pull. During long spells of storms, those close-in shanks provide a little tick-over cash to last until the weather breaks.
This is the way Adrian’s mind works. Planning. Looking ahead. Making decisions. Trying to make the best out of what little they’ve got, before they lose it all. This is not the way Matty’s mind works. “Live fast. Die young. Leave a beautiful corpse,” is one of those annoying fucking phrases Matty trots out with his signature cheeky grin – usually to some girl he’s trying to impress – as he buys another round, or gram or over-priced restaurant meal. Chucking money around. Trying to act like Bertie Big Bollocks.
As he nudges the throttle back a few clicks with the heel of his right hand, Adrian bangs on the wheelhouse window with his left fist. “Coming up on one,” he shouts. Loud. Making sure to wake Matty with a jump, and make Tim yank his finger out his nose.
The first haul of the day is like an omen. A premonition for the day to come. A first good haul should be a smooth pick-up of the marker buoy off the sea with the boat hook, two neat loops of line tossed around the capstan, to crank up a clean, weedless pot from the seabed, in one snag-free run.
Ideally, in the pot there’ll be a clattering, skittering, snapping, half-dozen keeper crabs, and maybe a bonus lobster. That kind of first haul is mustard. Any skipper sees that on his first pot, of his first shank of the day, and his heart will fill with hope for the next 30 shanks that lie ahead.
