Herring Girl Read online

  ‘I want to be a girl,’ the boy blurts out. ‘I mean, I think I am a girl. I mean like deep down.’

  ‘Do you? How intriguing. Tell me a bit more about that.’ He’s a pretty boy; rather girlish in fact, so that’s interesting. Small, blonde, skinny, intelligent-looking. How does one look intelligent? It’s a quality of watchfulness, Mary muses, of attention. Many children seem so vacant.

  The boy stops jiggling and moves on to wiping his palms on his jeans. ‘Ever since I can remember I’ve felt like a girl, even though I’ve been to doctors and that, and they said I’ve got, like, male chromosomes and male “secondary characteristics”.’ He pauses, obviously embarrassed.

  ‘Go on.’ She smiles encouragement and reaches for her double espresso. Caffeine at the start of each session, to get her neurons firing, nicotine at the end, to top up her endorphins; though at her level of addiction it’s more to fend off withdrawal symptoms than for additional stimulation per se.

  ‘When I was little I thought I was a girl called Annie.’

  Something tightens in Mary’s chest when she hears this: a held breath, a surge of adrenaline. ‘I don’t remember it very clearly now,’ the boy is saying, ‘but I used to know loads about her, like where she lived and what her mam looked like and that. Dad says I kept crying and pushing my real mam away, saying I wanted to go home.’

  Mary quells an impulse to lean forwards. If she’s right, this is a classic spontaneous past-life manifestation; the clearest she’s ever encountered.

  ‘Dad says that I made her up,’ the boy continues, ‘like she was an invisible friend, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt more like she was inside me, like she was me, and I was born into the wrong body.’

  ‘And do you still have Annie inside you?’ Mary asks neutrally, controlling her excitement.

  ‘Not really. I can sort of feel her sometimes, like when you see something out of the corner of your eye. But I don’t really know about her any more – except what I can remember from when I was little. But even that’s faded now – it’s like being Ben has taken over. Except I still feel like I’m really a girl.’

  The sun’s in his eyes through the window – nice bright blue eyes – so he has to squint at her. Excellent, Mary thinks automatically. When her clients’ vision is compromised, they ease into the trance more completely. ‘Laura tells me you want gender reassignment surgery, and that you tried to mutilate yourself a few years ago.’

  ‘Dad thinks that was because Mam left and I was upset and trying to get her to come back. But it wasn’t that. I mean I was still upset about her going, but I was even more upset about being a boy.’

  ‘You did say that your father was going come with you,’ Mary chides mildly.

  ‘He was going to, but he was called to a meeting.’

  She hides a smile. ‘Well we can talk for a while today, but if we’re going to see each other properly I will have to meet your father.’

  ‘I’ve brought the money,’ he volunteers, worming a hand into his back pocket and tugging out four £20 notes.

  ‘It’s not because of the fee, Ben. It’s because you’re under sixteen. He has to sign a form to say he agrees for me to see you.’

  The boy’s narrow shoulders sag when he hears this, and he closes his eyes for a moment. Mary’s aware, then, in a way she hasn’t been before, of how very young he is to be doing all this – going to see Laura, setting up this consultation – and what a very heavy, lonely burden it is that he’s carrying. And she has a sudden visceral and utterly uncharacteristic impulse to gather him onto her lap and rock him against her, with his fair head tucked snugly beneath her chin.

  ‘Look, don’t worry about your father now,’ she says. ‘I’ll give him a ring later and sort it out with him.’

  The boy looks up in alarm. ‘Can’t you just write that report? Laura said I need an assessment before—’

  ‘I’m sorry Ben. It’s illegal to assess you without parental consent.’

  He hangs his head. ‘I never actually told him I was coming,’ he confesses.

  ‘I’ll talk to him and explain, if that would help,’ she offers. ‘You’d be surprised how persuasive I can be.’

  ‘No!’ he bursts out, almost shouting. ‘No,’ he repeats, more quietly. ‘Please don’t say anything.’

  ‘Don’t you think perhaps it’s time he knew? If you’re really set on surgery, you’ll need parental consent for every stage of the process.’

  ‘But I can’t tell him,’ he says miserably, close to tears. ‘It would totally freak him out.’

  Mary watches him stuff the money back in his pocket. ‘You know where I am if you change your mind,’ she says opening the door for him. Then, touching him gently on the shoulder: ‘You don’t have to do this on your own, you know.’

  As she watches him walk down the street, a small dejected boy in jeans and trainers, she experiences a wrench that’s almost physical in its intensity. Observing it in herself, she muses that this must be what’s referred to by the expression ‘her heart went out to him’.

  She returns to her consulting room and starts writing up her notes on the aborted session. ‘Client reported spontaneous regression in early childhood, similar to cases reported by Stevenson, Weiss, Shroder, etc. Client subsequently declined treatment due to…’ How ironic that the one case that might have supported her thesis, the only case of spontaneous regression she’s ever seen, has been both proffered then withdrawn on the same day. Perhaps it’s karma, she thinks wanly, a sign that it’s time to rethink her approach.

  She’s just tidying away her case notes when the front doorbell rings. It’s the boy: pink-cheeked and out of breath, as though he’s been running. ‘Dad’s off on the boat now,’ he says. ‘But he’ll be back tomorrow if you want to meet him. Or I could let you have his satellite number.’

  Mary feels like cheering, but satisfies herself with a broad smile. ‘I think I could probably wait until then,’ she says. ‘It would be better to explain things face to face, anyway.’ She conducts him back into her consulting room and he sits down on the sofa again.

  ‘And you can do that report, can you?’ he asks. ‘So I can go on the list for the operation and hormones and that?’

  ‘Of course – if and when it’s called for. But I will have to spend some time talking to you first.’

  Mary pauses, deliberating. Now he’s agreed to let her meet his father, perhaps it wouldn’t be entirely unethical to check whether her suspicions are confirmed? ‘We could make a start now, if you like,’ she suggests. ‘I could introduce you to the way I work, and perhaps we could talk a bit more about Annie.’ Just a few minutes, she promises herself, just to see… ‘You know, I see quite a few clients like you,’ she goes on. ‘People who feel they may be carrying someone else’s memories as well as their own.’

  The blue eyes widen. ‘Other children?’

  ‘Yes, children especially.’ Mary notices with satisfaction that he’s begun to sink back into the red sofa. ‘I suspect everyone has these feelings sometimes, but most people in our society ignore them or push them away. But I think some children may have a special gift for tuning in to other memories.’

  She’s always careful, at this stage, not to say ‘past lives’. ‘Now I want you to lie down with your head on the cushion – that’s right, good, don’t worry about your shoes. I’m going to help you relax and see what we can find out about Annie.’

  The words she uses to induce the trance are so familiar, she could repeat them in her sleep. ‘Keep breathing slowly and deeply. Think of a place you know where you feel happy and relaxed…’ The boy’s under in just a few minutes, his limbs loose and unguarded, like a cat splayed in front of a fire.

  ‘There’s a door in front of you. Can you see it? Good. Stand up and touch it. Think what it feels like under your hand. The door leads to a place in your past. Push it open. What can you see?’

  ‘I’m outside the smokehouse on the quayside, and the lumper’s upending another
cran of herring into the farlane. And here’s the fish tumbling in, all silver and a-slither, hitting the farlane like water and splashing up the sides – and right out, some of them, so you have to scoop them off the ground before some daftie kicks them.’

  Mary lets her breath out in a long silent whistle. She’s listening to a herring girl! Annie must have been a herring girl! It’s all there: the accent, the vocabulary, the historic detail – material no boy of Ben’s age could possibly know.

  ‘Good, very good,’ she says, controlling her excitement. ‘What else can you see?’

  ‘I’m looking down at my hands, and Flo’s beside me, shovelling salt on the fish so’s we can hold them, because they’re that slippy, you can’t get a grip without a roughening of salt. A Shields herrings is that full of oil this time of year, all you’ve to do is squeeze it and the oil’s slipping through your fingers like dripping.

  ‘So now we’re back to gipping again, getting up a rhythm, the dip and slit and flick of it. You’ve to let your hands do the thinking, and keep only half an eye on them, because if you pay too much mind, that’s the best way I know to a sliced finger. Flo picked it up quicker than me, because she was less hasty. But that’s Flo, isn’t it? She likes to be sure what she’s about, but I’m like a sand-flea on a hot dune.

  ‘It’s hard on the hands mind, this job; what with the salt pining them, and the skin cracking, and the salt nipping in the cracks. Then there’s the gipping knife to watch out for, because the edge must be sharp as lightning or you can’t keep up your speed. We bind up our fingers and thumbs with flour sacking to be safe, and that’s a right canny job of itself when you’re dim and bleary of a misty morning.

  ‘They’re alive, some of the herring, when you gip them. They look dead, but when the warmth of your hand gets to them, they start moving: like you’re a saint, bringing them back to life, except the blade’s going in like the very Devil himself, to scoop out the slither, the teeny heart, the wee sliver of its soul.’

  ‌Chapter Six

  2007

  Best fucking time of the day, Paul reckons, striding along the top bank above the Fish Quay. Not quite light yet, couple of boats steaming home with a wake of offal and mewling gulls. Can’t beat it. Smell of bacon frying at the Seamen’s Mission. Further along the bank, Charlie and Jimbo are sitting hunched on their bench as usual, seventy if they’re a day, with their tabs and a six-pack of Stella between them, watching the boats come in.

  ‘All right?’ says Paul as he passes.

  ‘Right y’are, Paul,’ says Charlie, and Jimbo grunts, never much of a one for conversation. Worked the same boat all their lives and still in each others’ pockets. Fishing does that for you.

  Paul takes a deep breath, sucks down the cold brown river smell, along with the chugging diesel from the two boats mooring up and a whiff of seaweed from the Black Middens. And the fish smells, a nebfull like nothing else: the silver smell of fresh-caught, the sharp yellow stink of the scaggy old skeletons in the gutter that even the rats won’t touch.

  Nessa never could stand the smell of fish. The old man said that should’ve ruled her out from the start. She said she could always smell it on Paul’s hands, even after he’d scrubbed them. Reckoned it got under his skin, even though he’d made skipper the year after they got together and hardly gipped a fish since. That was Nessa for you, though: finicky, with all her lotions; squeamish. They all are these days, mind. Herbal this, herbal that. Not that he minds a bit of nicey-nice. It’s just tiring to keep it up all the time.

  Paul’s off down the fish market to meet Dougie, his Shields agent, to go through the boat’s gear: what needs getting, what needs mending. Old Dougie’s all right, if a bit of a stickler for his to-do lists. But you need a lad like that on shore when you’re off on a trip, keeping in with the buyers, the trades; pricing up diesel from different suppliers. The cost of diesel’s wicked these days, and the boat just drinks it on a trawl: with the twin rig you can literally watch the fuel gauge dropping. Still, it scoops the fish up no bother, that rig – nearly three hundred boxes this last trip: cod, haddock and whiting; plaice and lemons; hake, turbot, dabs; couple of halibut, the odd few Dovers. That’s over eight grand for the five days, though there’s fuck-all left once you’ve deducted the diesel and the lads’ shares.

  Dougie likes his tabs, so they’re sat on a bench outside the Mission: Paul sucking on an Extra Strong mint while Dougie puffs away on a Marlboro, ticking things off on his clipboard. Typical Dougie: must be the only lad in Shields taking any notice of that new No Smoking sign they’ve put up in the Mission.

  By the time they’re done, the boats are unloaded and the market’s well under way, with Big Bill Palmer and Weasel Willie clomping through the melt in their Timberlands, working their way round the catches with their chitty books, rattling out bids to the buyers. And forklifts zooming up and down, loading boxes on to the vans backed up outside.

  Paul checks out a couple of ‘sold’ boxes before the market lads shovel the ice on. A few decent halibut and monk; but the haddock are all under a kilo as usual – you never see a decent haddock these days.

  There’s a couple of younger lads hanging about down the far end of the shed, squatting and peering in the boxes: student types, by the looks of it; hoodies and trainers. Weird hair. They’ve got a clipboard each, and a cool box.

  ‘They’ve been here since Monday,’ Dougie tells him. ‘From that lab place along by Cullercoats, that Dove place. They’re saying there might be something up with the fish, so they’re checking.’

  Paul wanders over. ‘Howay,’ he says. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’re taking samples,’ says the taller one, straightening up and pushing a pansy flop of hair off his face with the back of his hand. ‘Just a routine survey. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘You from DEFRA then?’ Paul asks.

  ‘They’ve provided some of the funding, but we’re nothing to do with them really. We’re marine biologists, from the university. Part of a team investigating the effects of water-borne pollutants.’

  ‘What, from that chemical plant in Blythe? I thought they sorted that out years ago.’

  ‘It’s more general trends we’re looking at. Mutation rates, abnormalities, that sort of thing.’ He’s from down south; London by the sound of it. A bit posh, a bit fake cockney like that Jamie Oliver.

  ‘They’ve found some flatties with dodgy innards,’ says one of the market lads, jumping down off his forklift. ‘Males loaded with roe instead of milt.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ asks the tall lad sharply – and he seems pissed off. ‘Look, I promise there’s nothing to worry about. A certain number of anomalies are to be expected in any natural population.’

  ‘How many of these “anomalies” are there, then?’ asks Paul. He’ll have to ask the deckies if they’ve noticed anything.

  The other lad drops a plaice into his cool box and stands up. He’s chubbier than his mate, a pale couch potato with spiky dyed-black hair. ‘It’s too early to say,’ he says, not meeting Paul’s eye. ‘We’re still collating the samples.’

  It’s obvious the lad’s lying through his teeth, but there’s no point trying to push it. He’ll get nothing out of these two. Still, fish with dodgy innards – that’s the last thing Paul needs, the state the business is in right now.

  Nana’s in the flat when Paul gets home, stuffing Yorkshires and profiteroles in the freezer. Paul swallows a sigh. Why doesn’t she keep this stuff at her place? She knows he’s trying to cut back on the carbs. She’ll say they’re for Ben – ‘He’s a growing lad,’ she’ll go – but it’s because she’s narked at how Paul’s shifted the weight, when she’s still Michelin Woman in her red trackie bottoms.

  ‘Howay, Mam,’ he says, filling the kettle. ‘Where’s the bairn?’

  ‘I shouted when I came in, but there’s no sign and his door’s locked.’

  ‘It’s always locked, even when he’s in. Fuck knows what he gets up to in there.’r />
  ‘Lad his age needs his privacy,’ says Nana, piercing the film on an individual syrup pudding and putting it in the microwave. ‘Shall I do you one, son?’

  ‘No!’ he says, sharper than he means to. Then, ‘I’m all right, thanks.’ There’s a freckled banana in the fruit bowl and an unopened four-pack of red apples he bought before he went away. So much for the lad’s five a day. ‘You’ve not been feeding the bairn puddings for his breakfast, have you?’

  ‘He says he’ll get his own, so I leave him to it.’

  He shoots her a look. She’s supposed to do Ben’s meals when he’s off on the boat, but he wouldn’t put it past her to skip the breakfast shift altogether. Roll up later with some baps for dinner instead. Still, it’s the school holidays so he doesn’t say anything.

  He watches her upend the pudding into a bowl and slather cream over it, then take it through the arch to the open-plan lounge. Cost a fucking fortune, this flat: big bay windows right along the far wall looking out on the river. The wow factor they call it. Nessa was on at him night and day till he put in an offer. He’s glad he did though, now she’s gone. It’s safer for the bairn on his own on the fifth floor, behind all them security doors. And Paul likes to think of the lad looking out these windows when he’s away on the boat, and him looking back, like they can see each other, though that’s daft when he’s three hundred and fifty fucking miles northeast, off Aberdeen, trawling for whitefish.

  ‘Bring us a cup of tea, will you, son?’ Nana says, kicking off her sandals and reaching for the remote.

  ‘How you getting on with them books?’ he asks. She’s always done the boat’s books: back when Da was skipper, and before that even, when it was old Skip in charge and Da was third man.

  ‘Nearly done. Them DEFRA forms are still giving me gyp, mind. I were here till past eight Friday getting them sorted.’ (Good, Paul’s thinking. At least the bairn had some company.) ‘Then I had one of them dreams where you go on working. Except I had to take all the papers to Portugal for some reason, and fit them in under my twenty-two kilo limit.’ She chuckles, and it turns into a juicy cough. ‘Had to take out all me party shoes.’