Fiona McFarlane: The High Places: Stories

‘But not anymore?’

‘Not anymore,’ I said. ‘So I suppose that means I’m going to hell.’

And I regretted this immediately; it was such an amateur thing to say. But my head was bad and I was worried I might have an attack — a vertigo attack — right there in his office.

‘God knows your heart better than I do,’ said Father Anthony. ‘I thought you might be a believer because in your lecture you said the way a squid eats is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Ha, ha! I found that very funny. It’s rare these days to come across a good biblical joke. Can I order you some tea?’

Father Anthony is a kind and good-natured man, one of those beaming, healthful men who truly believe drinking a hot liquid in insufferable heat will cool you down, and my heart went out to him — broke for him, really — and I loved my fellow men and wanted to sail home to them instantly. I wanted to have sailed already. And why hadn’t I? Mabel, I suppose, whom only I could save. I was also embarrassed at having said so much. I was talkative in my guilt and sorrow, and would admit to anything.

‘No tea, no thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll have some. ‘A “spot of tea”, yes? I’ll ring the bell. Something cool for you, perhaps, Bill?’

His hand was poised in midair, holding a small silver bell. Did I mention we were both sitting, him behind his desk, and me in front of it? It was like being at school again.

‘Yes please, something cool,’ I said.

I pressed my hand against my forehead, and when the something cool came, I pressed the glass against my forehead too. Father Anthony looked concerned. He looked on the point of ringing his little bell again.

‘When you agreed to give this presentation today,’ said Father Anthony, ‘you asked for a favour in return. You said there was a scientific matter we could help you with. Is it to do with your squid?’

‘With Mabel, yes,’ I said. ‘Strictly speaking, of course, she’s not my squid. She’s not anybody’s — not even God’s. Do you see? I want to free her. That’s what I want your help with.’

‘You agree, then, with those activists in town?’ said Father Anthony. I realised he was referring to the young people I’d seen at the port; I understood that Mabel was no longer a secret and they were here to protest her captivity. This explained why Eric had been so unforthcoming with me.

‘I don’t know who they are or what they believe,’ I said.

‘They want the very same thing you do — to release the squid. You could ask for their help.’

I thought of the boys in the bar and the girls on the dock, of their sincerity, their photogenic martyrdom, and the primary colours of their T-shirts, and I said, ‘Tomorrow, Father Anthony, it has to be tomorrow. Before they find her and turn her into something she isn’t.’

‘Turn her into what?’ he asked.

‘Do you know very much about colossal squid, Father Anthony?’

‘Only the information you presented in your lecture today,’ he said. ‘Their brains are round with holes in them, like donuts. They have eight arms and two long tentacles.’

‘The most important thing I said about colossal squid today, Father Anthony, was that we don’t know anything about them. And even though I’ve been watching Mabel for over a year now, I still know nothing. It’s even possible that Mabel is still immature, that she could get bigger. How can we be sure of the true size of the colossal squid? Who knows what we’ll fish up some day — the gargantuan squid? We might have gone a step too far, calling this one colossal. Soon we’ll run out of superlatives. Wouldn’t it be better just to leave things be? They’ve recorded a mysterious bloop, you know, coming from somewhere underwater, which could only have been made by an animal of unthinkable size. I hope we never find it.’

Father Anthony waved his hand in the direction of his tree-crowded window as if mysterious bloops were none of his business.

‘The squid an infant — interesting,’ he said. ‘But wouldn’t it look different if it were so young? Forgive me, but you must know that at least? You scientists?’

‘No!’ I cried. ‘It’s impossible to tell. Darwin talks about it in Origin : “There is no metamorphosis; the cephalopodic character is manifested long before the parts of the embryo are completed”. A squid is always a squid, right from birth — so we talk of mature or immature squid, but never of infants. The squid has no infancy, which means no nostalgia. It has no Romantic period. Squid think Wordsworth is full of horseshit. They have no childhood! None at all! They’re born adult, and the only change they undertake is death. There is no metamorphosis!’

At the end of this speech I felt as pink as Father Anthony looked. There was a ticking in the room; I thought it came from the ivory Jesus crucified on the wall.

Father Anthony drew a long breath. ‘Do you like it here on our island?’ he asked.

‘Actually I’m thinking of leaving.’

‘Do you crave human company? That’s only natural.’

‘I want to be surrounded by people again, but I don’t have much desire to talk to them.’

‘But you have so many ideas to share,’ said Father Anthony. ‘If you’ll excuse my asking, do you feel quite well? Not everyone can withstand this climate. I myself, many years ago, spent an entire year supine on my bed. The heat, you see, and it led to a sort of spiritual crisis, a lack of faith, you might say, in the sustaining hand of God. I thought I may have dreamed winter. It was only prayer that gave me strength, Bill — the strength of God against the burden of His creation.’

‘Prayer!’ I said. ‘Can I ask you a question? Doesn’t faith feel to you like a deep-down knowing, something you’ve discovered rather than made? And what do you do when you’ve lost that knowing ? Hope that praying to something you no longer know will get it back for you?’

‘Would you like me to pray for you, Bill?’

‘I’m not well,’ I said. ‘I have headaches.’

‘I understand,’ said Father Anthony, reaching out a hand, and I was able, then, to imagine him laid out on a bed, dreaming winter. ‘Why not leave?’

‘Mabel.’

‘Mabel is the squid, yes?’

‘She belongs in the sea.’

‘And what do you propose?’

I explained that the net with which we’d plugged Mabel’s bay was impossible to move with only two men. I corrected myself — one man. Of course he didn’t know about Darwin. Could a priest see the ghost of Darwin? Unlikely. But if all the students were to come down to the bay and we worked together, we could unfasten the net and, very swiftly, move it from one side of the bay to the other, so that Mabel, on escaping, wouldn’t tangle herself in it. (Confession: when I imagine this, I have in mind a delirious scene from the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty where the girls of Tahiti, bare-breasted, hold an enormous net in the water, into which the native men drive schools of fish.) Father Anthony seemed concerned about this plan. He asked if there would be any danger. I told him no, there would be no danger — unlike octopi, squid are not dangerous to human beings. All those old etchings of whaleboats embraced by monstrous tentacled creatures are completely false. I said this, but we don’t really know. No one has ever swum with a colossal squid. But just to be on the safe side, it’s my plan to feed Mabel all the fish I have while the girls move the net. I’ll get into the water to distract her if I have to. I’ll get so close I’ll fill her clever eyes.

‘Select your strongest swimmers,’ I said to Father Anthony. ‘Those girls will take the end of the net farthest from the beach. They’ll be the ones to swim across the entrance to the bay.’