Wyl Menmuir - The Many

Clem is already pulling the first of the boats down the beach behind the tractor and the crews are in various stages of preparation, having spent much of the afternoon in the pub. Where there are jellyfish, there are fish behind. The crews take any sign they can.

Only Ethan is launching alone. After Daniel he hasn’t found anyone else willing to go out and he’s back to fishing alone and each launch now is marked by an argument with Clem. Whether or not Ethan can handle the two-man boat without help, whether he should go out at all, whether he is clear enough, focused enough to fish, and he tells Clem damn you to hell and operate the tractor. Clem, for his part, doesn’t put up too much of a fight. He’s said his piece and Ethan’s not the first fisherman to ignore his advice. The other three skippers know Ethan well enough to steer well clear.

Standing up on the sea road, Timothy looks down onto the beach, his coat collar pulled up around his ears, and Ethan wonders what type of omen this is, what effect the incomer’s gaze will have on the trip.

As the boats leave the mouth of the cove, they sail through a bloom of jellyfish, iridescent clouds of them gathered in the churning water. And though the boats sail out a fair way from the shore and the bloom thins, they don’t clear it, and every man curses under his breath in the knowledge of what is to come.

No fish, no fish, no crabs, no shrimp nor shark, just jellies. Jellies tangled in the nets, that burn and sting and leave criss-cross patterns on arms and hands, long white welts from fronds that stick and burn and scar. It’s been a right of passage in the village since before Ethan’s father was a boy.

Ethan, Rab, Tomas and Jory are on the far rocks at low tide gathered round a thin, stringy jellyfish washed up on the rocks. Its network of nerves shows blue through the transparency of its body. Ethan wants to back down now, but they have already discussed this. It is his turn, the last of the four. Rab and Jory, as the strongest, hold him until he stops struggling. Then Tomas pulls up the sleeve of Ethan’s shirt on his right arm and he and Jory hold the arm still while Rab puts a hook through the jelly and holds it up in the breeze. Jory and Tomas hold the arm tight and Rab raises the jelly up and draws its long fronds back and forth over Ethan’s naked arm. The breeze is offshore so it doesn’t carry the sounds of the screams back towards the houses, and instead his cries drift out over the waves and mingle with the shrieks of the sea birds.

No fish, no fish, no shrimp nor shark, just jellies. Ethan, one hand on the wheel, the other steadying himself against the cabin wall, looks out to the spaces in between the sentinels, the unmoving container ships, tied to their positions by miles of red tape issued and reissued endlessly by a faceless, disembodied authority. It makes him think of Timothy, of his arrival into their lives, of his imposition on them. He fights the temptation to point the boat out between two of the container ships and push out through to the other side where the fishermen do not go, away from the memories Timothy has brought in with him, away from Perran.

The radio crackles into life.

‘ Idler , this is the Idler . We’ve got a catch.’

Though it is Jory talking over the radio, Ethan sees only Timothy in the words that spring out over the static. He near as runs back to the helm and pulls the Great Hope round in the direction of where Rab and his crew are already lowering their nets and he makes his course windward of them, jams the wheel in position and sets about at the back of the boat to lower the net he’s got in place.

He drops and pulls the net twice empty and it is only the sight of bodies being pulled up into the boats around him that keeps him shooting it again. The third time he raises the net he knows he has landed something by the change in the drag and the weight just before the bulk of the net surfaces, dark bodies thrashing about in the bottom of the gathered net amid the jellyfish. He swings the catch up over the deck with the pole, and drops it down gentle as he can and unfolds the net, avoiding the fish as they arch their backs on the deck.

He shifts the jellyfish to the side with the pole and flicks them back over the side of the boat before he inspects the catch. The dogfish look burned, as though with acid, their eye sockets elongated and deep, showing through to the bone at the edges and there are white lesions down the side of each body. Their rough black skin is dull and flaked away in patches, the fins thin and ragged where there should be muscle, and he looks each one over quickly before dropping them down into the hold. By the time he is finished, he’s tired to the bone and several times he drifts too close to one of the other boats and they shout over to him to shift before he holes someone.

The radio is busy with chatter and the sound is as unfamiliar to Ethan as is the catch in the hold. Ethan does not join the others comparing catches, though he lifts the hatch several times to check the fish are still there. He rests a while and stares out again beyond the container ships while the others drop their nets over and again, though their luck is out now and none of them catches anything more before they give up and head back to shore.

There are several cars and vans parked up on the coast road when they arrive back into the cove and Clem radios in to tell them he has sold the fish before any of the boats make the shore. Ethan wonders who would buy this half-dead catch the sea has thrown up. Not restaurants, he’s sure of that. Perhaps the pharmas, hoping to extract god knows what from them. Either way, he is glad he did not have to conduct the deal and, as the fish are being lowered down from the deck, he asks Clem who the buyer is. Clem nods his head up to a dark blue executive-type car parked up on the road. Two men are standing by a silver van parked beside it and stacked beneath the shuttered hatch in the side are several white industrial boxes. The two men are watched by a woman dressed in a long grey coat and they exchange words. The three of them look out of place in the village, the men in suits too light for the season and at odds with their surroundings as they ferry the crates down to the beach.

After the boats have all been pulled up above the high tide mark, Ethan sees one of the younger fishermen is sitting with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, on the hard standing, shaking and retching onto the concrete floor in between his feet.

They stay out on the rocks late into the night, through Ethan’s long hours of vomiting and sweating and swearing at the other three boys, who alternate between laughing at his self-pity and bringing up water to cool the burning on his arms. After he has screamed long enough, and asked them and pleaded, scared about what will happen if they do nothing, he holds his arm out and the other three boys piss on the rows of white welts criss-crossing his forearms and though he swears and curses at them, he thanks them too for the relief from the pain it brings him.

‘Santo here got tremors after he caught a jelly, didn’t he?’ says Jory grinning when he sees Ethan looking over at the boy. ‘Dropped off the net as we pulled it up and wrapped up nice round his arm like a bracelet, and he didn’t like it too much. I’ve told him, piss on it. Told him we’ll all piss on it, but he won’t listen to me. Thinks I’m a sick bastard.’

‘Who am I to argue with that?’ Ethan says.

Jory shoots Ethan a look, grins again and returns to pulling out his remaining crates from the hold and passing them down to Clem, and Ethan looks in to see whether the other man has fared better. Jory’s fish are in no better state than the ones Ethan brought back. Larger than they have seen in a fair while, but in bad shape all of them, half-dead before they were even landed. Ethan feels they have done these fish a service, by bringing them to an end, by pulling them out of the dark streams and channels into which they have strayed. Jory is happy with the catch. Says they all should be. They’re to be paid for the catch sight unseen, and once they’re in the van they’re someone else’s problem. What they do with the fish from there is their own business, that’s clear enough.