The plan was to take the boys and girls out around nearby Bere Island to spot seals and maybe porpoises.
About an hour into the journey, contact was lost. The boat was never found, but most of the bodies washed up a day or so later, naked and covered in long, ragged welts. Initial theories said they must have been chewed up by a propeller on a passing ship, but there was nothing big enough near the coast.
Post-mortem examinations clinched it. The state pathologist pulled dozens of small plastic barbs from each child. They were quickly identified as belonging to the squid.
A later investigation concluded that the fault lay with a cheap brand of sunscreen one of the children had brought and shared with her shipmates. A Chinese knock-off of a French brand, it contained old stocks of petro-derived nanoparticles. Just as the squid had pulped tonnes of fish to get at the plastic in their flesh in Year 12, they had tried to remove all traces of the petro from the children.
Más’s house was beyond the western end of the town, past a small turning circle for cars. A path continued to a rocky beach, but was used only by courting couples, dog walkers or drinking youngsters. A wooden gate led off the beach, where a small house sat behind a quarter-acre of lawn and an old boathouse.
Síle, the barmaid, had told me where he lived. Más usually gave up carving at about four, she said, had a few drinks in a few places and was usually home about six.
I started for the main house, when I heard a noise. A low murmur, like a talk radio station heard through a wall. It was coming from the boathouse.
I made my way across the lawn. Almost unconsciously I was walking crab-like on the balls of my feet, with my arms outstretched for balance. The boathouse was in bad shape. Green paint had blistered on the shiplapped planks and lichen or moss had crept halfway up the transom windows above the large double doors.
The fabric of the place was so weathered I didn’t have to open them. Planks had shrunk and split at various intervals, leaving me half a dozen spyholes to the interior. I quietly pressed my eye to one and peered inside.
Under the light of a single work lamp, I could see Más standing at a bench, his back to me, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Without the souwester, he looked more like an aging rock star than a fisherman and more like twice my age than the three times I had assumed.
Beyond him lay several bulky piles, perhaps of wood, covered by tarpaulin and shrouded in shadow.
A flagstone floor ran all the way to the other wall, where there lay a dark square of calm water—a man-made inlet of dressed stone, from which rose the cold smell of the sea. A winch was bolted to the floor opposite a rusty iron gate that blocked the water from the estuary. Smaller, secondary doors above protected the interior from the worst of the elements.
As he worked, Más whistled.
I recognised enough of the tune to know it was old, but its name escaped me. It felt as manipulative as most traditional music—as Más whistled the chorus, it sounded like a happy tune, but I knew there would be words to accompany it and odds were, they would tell of tragedy.
Más began to wind down, cleaning tools with oil-free cloths. I had told myself this was not spying, this was interest, or concern. But suddenly, I became embarrassed. I silently padded back across his lawn. I would call on him another night.
As I stepped back onto the path between two overgrown rhododendron bushes, my foot collided with a rusty old garden lantern with a musical crash. I just had enough presence of mind to turn again so I was facing the house, trying to look like I had just arrived.
It was in time for Más to see me as he emerged from the boathouse to investigate. I waved as nonchalantly as I could.
He leaned back inside the door and must have flicked a switch, as his garden was suddenly bathed in light from a ring of security floods under the eaves of his house.
I waved again as he re-emerged, confident that he could at least see me this time.
“Oh it’s you,” he said.
“Hi. Yes, the barmaid, Síle, gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Well, come in so. I have no tea, I’m afraid. I may have some chicory.”
I raised the bottle in my hand and gave it a wiggle.
In the early days after their “revolution” the squid featured in one scare story after another. They would evolve legs and stalk the landscape like Wells’s Martians, they would form a super-intelligence capable of controlling the world’s nuclear arsenal, or they would start harvesting the phytoplankton that provide most of the world’s breathable oxygen.
In the end, they did what biological organisms do—they found their own equilibrium. Any reactions of theirs since are no more a sign of “intelligence” than a dog defending its front yard.
Perrott banked the plane again. It was the first flight during which I had felt ill. The day was squally and overcast, the sky lidded with a leaden dome of cloud.
The squid breached the water, rolling its “tentacles” behind it. There was no reason for the manoeuvre, according to the original designers, which made it look even more biological. But even from this altitude, I could see the patterns of old plastic the thing had used to build and periodically repair itself.
“He’s a big one,” said Perrott, who was clearly enjoying himself.
The beast dived again. Just as it sank out of sight in the dying light, I counted eight much smaller shadows behind it. Each breached the surface of the water and rolled their tentacles, just as their colossal “parent” had.
“Shit.”
These were sleeker machines, of a green so deep it may as well have been black. There was no wasted musculature, no protrusions to drag in the water as they slipped by. These things would never reach the size of the squid that had manufactured them, but that didn’t matter. They were fast and there were more of them.
“Problem?” said Perrott.
“Yes. Somebody isn’t playing by the rules.”
“I had a friend. Val. Killed himself.”
Más had had a lot to drink, mostly the whiskey I had brought, but also a homemade spirit, which smelled faintly methylated. His face sagged under the influence of alcohol, but his voice became brighter and clearer with each drink. The stove roared with heat, the light from its soot-stained window washing the kitchen in sepia.
I wasn’t sure if he was given to maudlin statements of fact such as this when drunk, or whether this was an opening statement, so I said “I’m sorry to hear that. When did that happen?”
“A while back.”
I was still adrift—I didn’t know if it was a long time ago and he had healed, or recently and his emotions were strictly battened down. Before I could ask another qualifying question, he continued.
“When we were teenagers, a couple of years after the squid were introduced, Val and I went fishing from the pier one October when the mackerel were in.”
“By God, they were fun to catch. Val had an old fibreglass rod that belonged to his dad, or his grandad. The cork on the handle was perished, the guides were brown with rust, but as long as you used a non-petro line, the squid didn’t bother you in those days. We caught a lot of fish that year.
“So as we pulled them out, I would unhook them and launch them back into the tide. They were contaminated with all sorts of stuff, heavy metals, plastic, even carbon fibre from the boat hulls. After I had done this once or twice, Val asked me why. I said ‘well you can’t eat them, so why not let them go’. And Val said ‘fuck them, they’re only fish’.