Herring Girl Page 19
Now it’s early morning and Flo and me are clumping down to the quayside with our oilies, and it seems every door we pass is spilling out herring lasses, fresh from their day off and full of blether. The river’s fair bristling with luggers speeding home and folding their sails as they come in, like red gulls skimming the water and landing so fast you wonder how they don’t crash into each other.
Mrs G.’s all of a bustle when we get there, about a new order for red herring, for the inns are that busy they can’t get enough. So the ’prentices are set on to clear the rousing floor and we’ve to gip a fresh batch quick as we can. We could of done with fat Sal on the farlane, but word is she’s at the hospital. So come lunch break, Flo sets to collecting pennies for the family, for three shillings can buy a week of bread and bacon bits, which they’ll be glad of with one of their earners laid up.
We go to the hospital after tea, which is my first visit, though I’ve heard tell of it often enough. They say there’s more leave in a hearse from that place than ever walk out alive, but whether that’s because of the state of them when they went in or the care they got, who can say? But I’d guess a fair few must have died from the stink alone – for all the carbolic in the world can’t disguise the smell of rotting flesh.
We find Sal as glum as she might be, with a thumb missing and a hand swollen red as hot coals under its bindings. She brightens a bit when we give her the money, though I wonder what work she’ll manage when she gets out, with just a flipper for a hand.
As we’re leaving, there’s a crowd of Scots lasses jostling at the big door, yelling at the doorman to let them in, and he’s bellowing for them to simmer down. And suddenly they do, for they’ve seen Ellie stomping down the corridor behind us. And she doesn’t have to say a word, for we can all tell from her face that the lass who cut herself on the Saturday has died.
So now Flo and me are backing away, thinking the lasses will push in right past us, but it’s like the wind’s gone right out of their sails, and some are crossing themselves and some’re greeting, and by and by they’re all turning round and heading back to the Low Town. And me and Flo are carried along with them, for we’re gippers too, so it seems like our rightful place and never mind folk staring.
We march down to the Fish Quay, to the farlanes by the ice factory, where there’s lasses still gipping though it’s gone nine. And I see right well how it must’ve happened, for the hurricane lamps are so bright as to hurt your eyes, and the shadows so deep you can’t see a thing; but they’re jumping shadows, of lasses’ heads and hands; and the fish flying into the sorting crans behind them, and the offal bins overflowing, and the ground swilling with grease.
By, but they’re fast! I thought I could build up a canny speed, but it’s nowt compared to what they’re doing. And some are singing a bit, and some blethering on, but by and by they quiet down and the shadows go still.
And though nowt needs be said, Ellie says it anyway; which gets the shadows jumping again, and a hubbub starting. So now Ellie’s calling for them to simmer down and say a prayer for Bella’s soul – that’s the name of the dead lass. Which we all do, and when we’ve said our amens, Ellie turns to one of the coopers and says, calm as you like: ‘We’ll have our lamps now, sir. And our sweepers back. And you’d better pray that’s all that we ask for.’
And that’s the end of it, and they set to gipping again – except I can tell Ellie’s not satisfied, and the lasses still riled, so there’s more trouble brewing.
Now here’s two lasses standing aside, and one’s greeting and the other’s holding her and talking in an arguing way. Then by and by she leaves the greeting lass and walks over to Flo and me and asks if we’re gippers. For it seems they’re Bella’s crew and will lose their jobs if they can’t find a new lass to join them. Did I explain how the Scots lasses always work in threes? Two gippers and another lass who packs the fish in the barrels. So if you’re missing a lass you can’t earn, and might even forfeit your arie.
Flo’s backing off, of course – like I said, she’s always slow to take a leap. But I’m thinking that here’s maybe a chance of better money, and I’m mindful of that daft talk I had with Sam, about us following the herring to Yarmouth. So though Flo’s a face like thunder, I say I’ll give it a try.
We go to their place at the farlane, and the lasses show me the different sorts of herring – the mattiefuls and the spents, all the different sizes – and which crans they’re to go in, which is a deal to catch on to at the end of a long day, I can tell you.
And now Flo’s tying on my bindings and having a cross word at the same time, and I’m getting out my shut knife to start – for this is still a trial, mind, to check my speed and if I can judge the sizes aright.
The place we’re standing is part gloaming, part shadows, so it takes a while to adjust. And I’m that aware of the two lasses’ eyes on me as I pick up the first mattieful, and slit her open, and look round for the offal bin, which is in a different place from where we have it, so that slows me down. Then there’s the sorting crans behind me, which the Scots lasses never even look at, but just sling the gipped fish backwards into the right one. So that slows me down even more, for I’ve to judge it and remember which cran’s which, then aim in the gloaming and pray it’s gone in.
It pains me to be so slow, for I know the two lasses are praying I’ll catch on. But there’s so much to catch on to: the sizes, the places for everything, the flinging. And the other lasses are gipping and flinging so fast as to make me dizzy, and the shadows jumping, and the fish slippery. So now I’m grabbing a fish, but I’ve forgotten for a second how to hold it, but my other hand’s still gipping away, and before I can stop it the knife’s gone in and—
Let me go! I’ll use it, I swear I will—
Oh – but I never even felt it go in—
Chapter Twenty-Three
2007
The doc’s kneeling on the floor next to Ben, a gloved hand gripping each of his wrists, as though he’s been trying to hit her, which he remembers vaguely doing. Not hitting her, of course, but lashing out at someone, or something. And trying to scream, but no sound coming out, like in a dream, which is sort of what being hypnotized feels like anyway.
But this time Dad’s there too, hovering behind the doc, and his face is a total picture – worried and narky and loving all muddled up – which makes Ben try to pull himself together a bit. So where he’d normally collapse back on the cushions with the doc and start crying, to sort of let all the scary stuff out, Dad being there makes him blink back the tears and try for a shaky smile instead, to show he’s OK. Which is what a proper boy is supposed to do, so it’s probably something he needs to get used to.
When the doc lets go of his wrists, there are white marks where she was holding him that turn red straight away, so she starts rubbing them gently, which is comforting, and makes up a bit for not getting his normal cuddle.
‘Is it always like that?’ Dad asks, plonking down on the pouffe, which huffs at the sudden weight of him.
‘I’m afraid this reaction is not atypical in Ben’s case – though it’s rare amongst regression clients generally.’
‘So what the fuck was going on?’
‘Well I can’t be certain, obviously, but my hypothesis would be that Annie’s knife injury occasioned a kind of “short circuit” in her unconscious mind, causing it to jump forwards, as it were – or possibly backwards – to a similar traumatic event.’
‘And that brought him out of it, right? Like when you wake up in the middle of a nightmare?’
‘Something like that.’ She looks around and Ian’s right there behind her, squatting down with his camera on his shoulder. ‘Ian, turn that thing off please,’ she snaps, like he’s a naughty kid. ‘The session’s over.’
Dad rests his big hand on Ben’s shoulder. ‘You all right, buddy?’
Ben shrugs. ‘I’m getting used to it,’ he says, sounding braver than he feels, because the tears are still in there, locked in
his throat making it hard to speak.
‘Well done, everyone,’ says Ian, lifting the camera down. ‘That was bloody brilliant. Fascinating. Fantastic telly. Might even insert a bit of drama doc there if I can get the budget to stretch.’ He pats his pockets, looking for a lens cap. ‘Mary, we must talk about this. It raises all sorts of interesting questions. About Ben’s own knife trauma, for example.’
‘You think Ben’s experience with a knife wound in his current incarnation might have potentiated his rather extreme reaction to Annie’s cut? Well, it’s possible, I suppose.’ She smiles at Ben’s dad. ‘I must apologize, Paul – may I call you Paul? When two psychologists get together it can become rather technical, I’m afraid.’
‘I hope you’re not going to put Ben’s accident in the film,’ says Dad to Ian. ‘Talking about wanting a sex change is fine – well, not exactly fine, but we can cope, can’t we buddy?’ he adds, looking at Ben. ‘But I don’t want to risk the tabloids getting hold of that other story, OK?’
‘Of course not,’ says Ian, rolling up a cable and stuffing it in a bag. ‘You’re the boss.’ Ben can tell he’s not really listening, but Dad seems happy enough – though the doc’s still looking pretty crabby.
‘And Ian,’ she adds, in that same telling-off voice, ‘I’d rather we didn’t discuss Ben’s case in front of him – at least not while his therapy’s ongoing. I don’t want our speculations to influence the outcome.’
‘Right-o, hen,’ says Ian, like water off a duck’s back. ‘But you have to do me a favour too. Would you mind terribly leaving this room as it is till we’ve finished filming? I’ll take some stills, so I can put things back if they’re moved, but it would save an awful lot of faffing about if you could bear to cope with it like this for the next few weeks.’ He scans the room, looking for stray bits of gear.
‘It’s called continuity,’ he explains to Ben’s dad. ‘It means I can splice footage from different days together if I have to, without books mysteriously appearing and disappearing from behind Mary’s head.’ Then he turns to Ben. ‘And I meant to ask you if you’d mind wearing those same jeans and T-shirt for all the filming in this room. Is that OK?’
‘Them Scots lassies were a right hard crowd, weren’t they?’ says Dad as they walk home along the lower bank later, full of Laura’s chilli con carne and baked potatoes. ‘Gutting herring till all hours in the rain.’
‘What freaks me out,’ says Ben, ‘is that lass dying from just a knife slipping.’
‘Why, because you think the same thing might have happened to Annie?’
‘Sort of. In a way. It’s more the thought of everyone working with knives.’
‘That’s the job isn’t it? You should try gutting haddock on the boat in a swell. Half the old lads in Shields have got bits missing.’
They’re passing a shuttered fish and chip shop; squashed chips on the pavement, screwed up paper in the gutter. A few gulls are flapping around the street lights like big white moths. After a while Dad says, ‘Why didn’t you tell me what was going on in them sessions?’
‘You weren’t here. And anyway, I was fine – plus I didn’t want you to stop me going.’
‘Still, it’s a lot for a lad to cope with on his tod.’
Ben shrugs and looks down at their feet, sizes five and ten, walking past the cheapo Italian that always smells of burnt garlic. Then, ‘Dad?’ he asks, ‘How dangerous is it really? On the boat, I mean.’
‘Well it’s much safer these days, if that’s what you’re worried about. The net gear’s astern now, so there’s less danger of being swept over the side. And you can see storms coming on the scanner, and radio if you get in trouble. And there’s no furnace below deck like in the old days, with a lad shovelling coals for the engine. I mean, that must have been pretty clever on a rough day.’
‘Pete says they used to have special hospital ships that went out to the fishing grounds, because there were so many injuries from knives and winches and that.’
‘There’s rescue helicopters now – and sonar to track the shoals. But apart from that, the job’s pretty much the same as it ever was. Hands and feet fucking freezing, clothes ringing wet, salt sores round your neck and wrists, shitting in a bucket.’
‘You never have to shit in a bucket!’
‘Not on Wanderer, no. But the lads on the Tricker do.’
‘They never!’
‘They do too. All for a dozen monk and a couple boxes of baby haddock. Fucking mug’s game.’
The tide’s right out, so the river’s low, revealing the ancient stones of the harbour walls, hung with slimy weed and rusty mooring rings, loops of old chain and frayed rope. Most of the boats are out, but there are a few bobbing down there on the dark water: Wanderer, Colmanhinny, Kelpie.
‘So why don’t they pack it in?’ Ben asks.
‘Why don’t I pack it in, more like? What do you think? Sell the boat and get a proper job? Suit and tie. Company car.’
Ben laughs. He imagines his dad gift-wrapped in a striped shirt fresh from Markie’s with the creases still in. It makes him think of the Incredible Hulk, swelling and going green, then bursting out of his clothes. ‘Would you really sell the boat?’ he asks.
‘It’s always a gamble, that’s the trouble. I could sell up tomorrow, then the EU would change the rules and I’d be kicking myself. That’s what keeps you hooked in. There’s always the chance you’ll strike gold – like all them prawn we got last year – or you’ll haul a net full of monk, or they’ll cut the factory quota and give the little lads a proper look-in for a change.’
‘If you gave up, you could still do your nice little earners,’ says Ben. ‘And use the boat for long-distance diving trips. To Norway, or Iceland. That would be so cool.’
The more Ben thinks about it, the more he likes the idea. Anything to stop Dad from dragging that heavy twin rig along the sea bed, scraping up every living thing – sleepy codling and haddock, crustaceans and worms, weed, flatties, the lot – and leaving a wide dead motorway of bare rock and sand behind him. But he knows better than to say anything. He tried once, last year, after he’d seen some photos on the Internet, and he doesn’t dare raise it again. Because Dad just lost it. ‘Fuck the environment!’ he growled. ‘It’s not my job to protect the environment. It’s for governments to make the rules, and me to try and make a living.’
Which is fair enough, Ben thinks, if the rules are good rules. But when the rules make no sense, like that quota crap that makes you throw back any fish you don’t have a licence for, you can’t go along with that. Because that could mean a squillion codling that will never grow up, with their swim bladders burst from being hauled aboard, just chucked over the side for the gulls.
Dad says when the quota rule first came in, the lads couldn’t stand it. So they’d separate off the illegal fish and sell it on the black market – partly for the money, but mainly because it hurt them to throw a good eating fish back in the sea. But DEFRA brought in some new regulations to stop that, when what they should have done was ban twin-rig trawling altogether and outlaw all driftnets with small holes. Or organize a sort of crop rotation in the sea, like farmers do on land, leaving a third of the fields fallow for as long as it takes to recover. It would piss off the lads for a while, but at least there would be something left for them to catch. And they wouldn’t get that stony look Dad gets on his face sometimes, when he knows something’s wrong but feels he has no option; like when the old lads went on and on at him when he started using the twin-rig. Ben thinks that’s bound to get under your skin if you’re basically a decent bloke.
Next day Ian wants to meet Ben and the doc at the library, even though the sun’s blazing so the library will be like an oven. He wants to go over how they found Annie’s address again and get permission to film there.
The doc’s wearing a different shawl, draped over a strappy top that shows the pale skin on her chest and makes her look really young. Ian gets them to pretend to look at computers and maps, so h
e can take some more photos; then Pete takes him through the Staff Only door for a meeting with the Chief Librarian. Five minutes later the door opens and Pete appears with his face tripping him because the Chief’s whisked Ian off to lunch at the Saville Exchange, which is dead posh, and Pete obviously thinks he should have gone too.
Left at a bit of a loose end, Ben and the doc wander off to get stotties from Gregg’s, and then go back into the library to wait until Ian gets back – which suits Ben just fine, because he’s been itching to have another look at the Shields Daily News microfiches again. They’re full of information about normal daily life from the time Annie was alive, which helps him make a bit more sense of his hypnosis sessions, like creating a whole 1898 Sims house when before he just had the people. So it’s full of ads for weird potions no one would ever be allowed to sell now, because they’re probably poisonous; and coal scuttles and mangles and the sort of cooker you have to put coal in – because everything was run on coal in them days, and there were collier boats chugging up and down the river the whole time.
When he’s under hypnosis, he’s only aware of what Annie is doing – trying to get the fish smell off her hands or helping Mam peel the taties for tea. But with the Daily News he can read the fashion column and find out that posh ladies had a special outfit just for riding their bikes. And there’s a whole page near the back about what’s happening on the river that day, like how many herring boats were moored up and the amounts of different fish they caught.
It turns out that 1898 was the best year ever for herring, with more than four hundred boats in the harbour, up from Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and down from Scotland, plus all the usual local boats. Which is so different compared with these days, where the fish market’s just a pathetic little row of fish boxes piled up along one wall in a big echoey shed.