Philip Marsden - The Main Cages

Laughter rang out around the creek.

Max spotted Jack. ‘Ah, Maurice – your fisherman!’ He came over and looked Jack up and down. ‘Are you un vrai pecheur ?’

‘Hardly …’ muttered Jack.

‘Know how to tell a true fisherman?’ Max turned to the others.

‘You ask him,’ said the woman called Peter.

‘He catches fish,’ said the anarchist.

‘The smell!’ Max made a show of sniffing Jack’s shoulder. ‘Sea-salt … damp … soap …’

Anna Abraham came out of the cottage, wiping her hands on her apron. Her sky-blue scarf was tied peasant-style behind her neck. She said quietly to Jack: ‘Please – I need your help.’ She had a crisp, rounded accent: Icelandic, according to Mrs Moyle, whose late husband had spent five years fishing up there and had come back speaking exactly like Mrs Abraham.

He followed her inside. On the slate floor of the kitchen were four hen crabs. One of them was slowly snapping a paintbrush in its claw. Anna lunged for it but it scuttled away. Jack removed the brush himself. He captured each of the crabs and put them in a large bucket. Anna Abraham boiled water on the range and Jack dropped the crabs in one by one. When the crabs were cooked Jack smashed the claws with a scale-weight. He showed Anna how to open the carapace and extract the good meat with her fingers.

‘What a strange fruit the crab is!’ Her hands were smeared with crab meat. ‘Maurice said he had a very interesting time fishing with you.’

‘He told you about the rock?’

‘What rock?’

Jack told her about Maurice’s day spent on Maenmor.

‘Poor Maurice!’ Anna was still laughing as they took the plates of dressed crab outside.

When Jack rowed back, it was nearly dark. A thin moon had risen over Pendhu and its light glittered and spread across the water. He rowed on into the middle of the bay, filled with an elation that he could not quite explain.

The following afternoon Anna Abraham came to call on Jack. She brought him a bag of cherries. When he opened his door, she made a mock bow. ‘You must accept my thanks, Mr Sweeney – twice.’ And she made another little bow.

‘Twice?’

‘One – for explaining to me the crab. Two – for saving our lives in the storm.’

She was not wearing her headscarf. Without it, she looked different. The hem of a fawn raincoat reached down to the top of her Wellington boots and she said: ‘I am out for a walk. Will you come?’

So they walked along the front eating cherries. The sky was a deep blue and there was little wind. They followed the path to the end of the houses and up out of town. At the top of the hill they caught their breath and looked back over the roofs to Pendhu Point. The dark tops of the Main Cages were just visible beyond it, ruffed with white surf. In one corner of Dalvin’s field were the first of the visitors’ white tents. Anna said, ‘They look like mushrooms.’ At the lifeboat station, she stood on tiptoe to peer in at the boat and was amazed how ugly it was. ‘A bull in a barn!’

There was a small beach below the station. Anna pulled off her boots and paddled in the water. She splashed through the shallows and then they sat on the rocks and she laid her bare feet on the weed and looked at him askance. ‘You have bird’s feet, Mr Sweeney, here beside the eyes. We say that’s a happy sign.’

‘In Iceland?’

‘Iceland?’

‘You are from Iceland, Mrs Abraham?’

She laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m not even sure where Iceland is. I come from Russia!’ And she jumped down from the rocks and ran back to the water.

Two days later Jack rowed up the river to Ferryman’s Cottage. He had brought the Abrahams a turbot. Finding no one there, he wrote a note thanking them for supper. He put it on the table under the fish, then changed his mind: he rolled up the note and jammed it into the fish’s mouth.

One afternoon in late July a red, snub-nosed lorry drew up on the Town Quay and Jack and Croyden stepped away from the wall to meet it. On the side of the lorry was written ‘Hounsells of Bridport’ and in it were twenty brand-new pilchard nets.

Jack remembered Hounsells as a child. He remembered the treacly, creosote smell that came from it; he was told it was a factory for ‘fish-traps’ and always imagined a fish-trap as something like an underwater mousetrap, baited with tiny sacs of treacle.

Helping to unload the nets, fielding as he did so the half-respectful jibes from Parliament Bench about doing a ‘bit ’a shrimpin’’, he picked up pieces of Bridport news from the driver. His farm was now in the hands of a ‘fat Devon man’ who was selling off some of the woods. The driver did not know Jack’s great-aunt Bess but he did know Arthur Sweeney – Jack’s cousin – who had made himself very unpopular by cutting down two famous oak trees. Jack was more pleased than ever to be free of the land.

The Maria V was almost ready. It was time for Newlyn and the pilchards. The summer pilchards, said Croyden, that’s what makes or breaks the year. For him it was even more critical; if they failed, he would be forced back to the building sites. From the long-lining he had taken home almost enough to pay off last winter’s debts and Maggie grudgingly accepted that he should carry on. With the boat’s fifth share Jack had rented a net loft above the East Quay. Already it was filled with gear – some of his pots, a number of dan buoys, a pile of inflatable buffs, countless cork cobles and a couple of miles of warp for the head-rope.

He had also recruited a new crew member. Bran Johns had left to join his brother’s boat so they took on Toper Walsh’s son, Albert. Albert was a deft, wiry man in his forties. He was a whistler. He didn’t whistle on board because it was bad luck but Croyden did allow him to hum. He had an appealing half-smile and an elaborate cipher of nicknames. Because his hair had once stuck straight up like a brush he was called ‘Brush’ Walsh – but for some ‘Brush’ became ‘Deck-Brush’, and in time ‘Deck-Brush’ became ‘Deck’ and ‘Deck’ mutated to ‘Dee’ and then ‘Dee’ became ‘Double-dee’ and simply ‘Double’. Most had no idea why he was called Double as he was now completely bald.

In Newlyn, the fishing began well. In the first week they cleared nearly £50. At the end of it, Jack received a letter addressed to Captain Jack Sweeney, Maria Five, The Harbour, Newlyn and delivered by a boy from the post office. It was from Mrs Abraham.

Dear Mr Sweeney,

Thank you for the fish! I drew him quickly – then cooked him. Now I am sitting outside the cottage. It is very early in the morning and as quiet as Heaven. Maurice is asleep. He was up in St Ives and they had a big meeting of painters. They all get together for a meeting and speak nonsense to each other and they agree important things and then they go out and drink and talk more nonsense and disagree about everything. I stayed here. What is it like catching pilchards, I wonder? I think of you out on the sea with your nets and here I am sending some magic messages from Polmayne.

Anna Abraham

[She had drawn a picture of a line of birds flying over the horizon towards his boat; as they came closer the birds dived into the sea and became fish and were gathered up in his nets.]

Jack lay on his bunk in the mid-afternoon. It was very hot. He could feel the sun on the deck above. The boat creaked against its warps. They had landed thirteen thousand pilchards that morning and now they were tied up in the inner harbour and everyone was asleep. But Jack could not sleep. He was lying on his bunk with the letter in his hand and he was watching a patch of sunlight where it spilled through the hatch, sliding back and forth against the bulkhead. She’s being friendly, that’s all. She is married and she is being friendly. He tried to tell himself that is just how they are in Iceland or Russia but he did not try that hard because it was much more pleasant in the hot afternoon to lie on his bunk and think of her – and it was pleasant at night when the nets were out and they were waiting to haul, pleasant in the morning too when they were motoring in with a hold full of fish.