I had arrived in Ballyvoloon early on a Friday morning. My pilot would not fly till Monday, so I had a weekend of walking the town. Its two main streets, or “beaches” as the locals called them, ran east and west of a concrete, T-shaped pier.
It was near the bottom of the ‘T’ that Más set out his pitch every day, facing the water, but sheltered by thousands of tonnes of rock and concrete. Ballyvoloon was a town best approached from the sea. The faded postcards on sale along the beachfront showed it from that rare perspective. Snapped from the soaring pleasure decks of ocean-going liners long scrapped or sunk, ribbons of harlequin houses rose from coruscant waters, split by the immense neo-Gothic cathedral that crowns the town. Nowadays, the fret-sawn fascias of pastel shopfronts shed lazy flakes of paint into the broad streets and squares below. It has faded, but there is grandeur there still.
Between the town’s rambling railway station and my hotel, I had passed a dozen or more artists, their wares tied to the railings of the waterside promenade, or propped on large boards secured to lampposts, but none dressed like Más. Nor did any carve like him.
“That looks realistic,” I said, my heart pounding, as he snicked delicate curls of blond wood from the block with a thick-spined blade.
“There’s not much point sugar-coating them,” he said, his voice starting as a matter-of-fact drawl, but ending in the sing-song accent of the locals.
“How long have you been a sculptor?” I asked.
“I’m not a sculptor. This is just something to occupy the hands.”
“The devil’s playthings, eh?”
He stopped carving and looked up at me through muddy green eyes.
“Something like that.”
Más lowered the squid he was working on and cast around in the pocket of his jacket. He removed three of the monsters, perfectly carved, but in different sizes and woods, one stained black and polished. The colours seemed to give each one slightly different intents, but none was reassuring.
Other artists carved or drew or painted the squid, but they had smoothed out the lines, removed the barbs, the beaks, gave the things doe-eyes and even smiles and made them suitable to sit atop a child’s bedclothes or a living room bookshelf.
Más did the opposite. He made the horrific more horrifying. He made warm, once-living wood look like the doubly dead, glossy plastic of the squids. These were not the creatures we had released, but their more deadly and cunning offspring.
I hid my excitement as well as I could.
“Sixty for one or 100 for a pair,” he said.
Más let the moment stretch until the sheer discomfort of it drove me to buy.
His mood brightened and he immediately began packing up his belongings. I had clearly overpaid and he could afford to call it a day.
“See you so,” he said, cheerfully and sauntered off into the town.
Once I was back at the hotel, I unwrapped the parcel and inspected the sculptures, to confirm my suspicions.
The other artists may have outsold Más’s squid six or seven times, but he was the only of them who had seen a real one.
“Twelve years after the squid were introduced, the west coast of Europe endured a number of strange phenomena. Firstly, the local gull population bloomed. The government and the squids’ manufacturer at the time said it was a sign of fish stocks returning to normal, that it was evidence the squid were successful in their mission.
“Local crab numbers also exploded, to the point that water inlets at a couple of coastal power stations were blocked. The company linked this to the increased gull activity, increasing the amount of food falling to the sea floor.”
The first flight was late in the afternoon, a couple of hours before sunset. This would give me the best chance of spotting things in the water, as it was still bright enough to see and anything poking above the surface would cast a longer shadow.
The pilot, a taciturn, bearded fellow in his sixties called Perrott, flicked switches and toggles as he went through what passed for a safety briefing.
“If we ditch, it will take about 15 minutes for the helo to reach us from the airport. The suits will at least make that wait comfortable, assuming, you know…”
We both wore survival suits of neon-pink non-petro, covering everything but hands and heads. His was moulded to his frame and visibly worn on the elbows and the seat of his pants. Mine squeaked when I walked and still smelled of tart, oleophobic soy.
“Yes. I know,” I said, as reassuringly as I could manage.
As he tapped dials and entered numbers on a clipboard, I thought of my first flight over water.
My sea training was in Wales, where an ancient, ex-RNLI helicopter dropped me about half a mile from shore. It was maybe 25 feet to the water, but the fall was enough to knock the breath out of me. The crew made sure I was still kicking and moved back over land. The idea was to get me to panic, I suppose. They needn’t have worried. The helicopter was away for a total of eight minutes and if my heart could have climbed my gullet to escape my chest, it would have.
After they pulled me back up, I asked the winchman how I had done.
“No worse than most,” he shouted.
He took a flashbang grenade from a box under the seat, pulled the pin, and dropped it out the open door. He counted down from four on his fingers. Over the roar of the rotors, I heard neither splash nor detonation. The winchman made sure I was harnessed, then pointed out the door and down.
A couple of miles away, I could see three or four squid making for a spot directly beneath us, all of them moving so fast they left a wake.
He gave me a torturer’s grin.
“Better than some.”
“We seen them first, the slicks. That’s what they looked like in the pictures, like some tanker or bulker had washed her tanks. But as we got close we could see it was miles and miles of chopped up fish. And the smell! That’s what the locals still call that summer—the big stink.
“When we got back we found out the squid had become more… hungry, I suppose, and instead of pulling the bits of plastic out of the water, they started pulling ’em out of the fish. Sure we had been eating that fish for years and it never did us any harm.’”
After two days of fruitless flights, I was grounded by fog. Late in the afternoon, I went to a pub. I sat at the long side of the L-shaped bar, inhaling the fug of old beer and new urinal cakes.
The signage, painted in gold leaf on the large windows, had faded and peeled, so I asked a patron what the place was called. “Tom’s” was the only reply, offering no clue if this was the original name of the pub or the latest owner.
Between the bottles shelved on the large mirror behind the bar, I saw the figure of a man in a candy-striped pink jacket through the rippled privacy glass of the door. It opened and Más walked in. He gently closed it behind him and moved to a spot at the end of the bar. He kept his head down, but couldn’t escape recognising some regulars and nodded a salute to them.
Emboldened by alcohol, I raised my drink.
“How is the water today?” I asked.
The barmaid gave me a look as if to ask what I was doing engaging a local sot, but I smiled at her for long enough that she wandered off, reassured or just bored at my insincerity.
“About the same,” said Más. “Visibility’s not very good.”
“No,” I said. “That’s why I’m in here. No flights today.”
“Are you off home then,” Más asked.