“After that, every fish he caught, every one, he would brain and chop up there on the pier and leave for the gulls to eat. He was my friend, but he was cruel.
“The trouble with the squid is they think about us the way Val thought about fish. We’re not food, we’re not sport. I’m not sure they know what we are. I’m not sure they care.”
For a moment, sobriety surfaced. Más looked forlorn. I dreaded the words that would come next. I had become quite good at predicting his laments and tirades.
“We don’t fight for it, for the territory, or for the people we lost. For the love of God, these things ate children, and we just accept it. We should be out there every bloody day, hunting these things.”
I told him I understood the desire to hurt them, that many had tried, but it just didn’t work like that. That most people preferred to pretend they just weren’t there, like fairy-tale villagers skirting the wood where the big bad wolf lived.
“But why,” he demanded.
“Well they are ‘protected’ now, for starters,” I said. “They fight back. But I suppose the main reason is it’s easier than the reality.”
“Easier,” he scoffed.
He raised his glass, to let me know it was my turn to speak. But I didn’t know how to comfort him. So I let him comfort me.
“Your family owned trawlers, right? What’s it like? To go out on the ocean?”
Drunk, in the heat of his kitchen, I closed my eyes and listened.
“The raincoat suicides were a foreseeable event inasmuch as such events happen after many profound and well-publicised changes to people’s understanding of the world around them. The Wall Street Crash, Brexit, the release of the Facebook Files. It is a form of end-of-days-ism that we have seen emerge again and again, from military coups to doomsday cults.
“Most of the people who took their own lives had previously displayed signs of moderate to severe mental illness. That the locations of more than two hundred of the deaths were confined to areas with high sea cliffs, such as Dover in England or the Cliffs of Moher in Co Clare, adds fuel to the notion that these were tabloid-inspired suicides, sadly, but predictably, adopted by already unwell people.”
He pulled the tarpaulin off with a flourish. The green-black boat sat upside down on two sawhorses, like an orca, stiff with rigor mortis, beached on pointed rocks.
It was a naomhóg. In the west, I found out later, it was called a currach, but this far south, people called it a naomhóg. Depending on who you asked, it meant “little saint” or “young saint,” as if the namers were asking God and the sea to spare it.
It was made of a flexible skin, stretched tightly over a blond wooden frame. I dropped to the floor to look inside, still unable to talk. I knew nothing about boat-building in those days, but the inside looked like pure craftsmanship.
It was almost the most rudimentary of constructed vessels and in place of oars it had long spars of unfeathered wood. But where a normal naomhóg was finished with hide or canvas and waterproofed with pitch, Más’s boat was hulled in what looked like glossy green-black plastic stretched over its ribs and stapled in place on the inside of the gunwale.
I ran my hand along the hull. The skin, which looked constantly wet, was bone-dry and my fingers squeaked. They left no fingerprints. I knew instantly what it was, but I wished I didn’t.
“Will you come with me? I’d like to show you my harbour. We might even catch something.”
He was so proud, of his vessel, of his hometown. I couldn’t say anything else.
“I will,” I lied. “Tomorrow, if the fog lifts.”
I remember the harbour before the squid. The water teemed with movement. Ships steamed up the channel to the container ports upriver, somehow avoiding the small launches, in a complicated dance against outgoing or incoming tides, taking people to and from work at the steelworks on the nearest of the islands. Under the guidance of a harbourmaster sitting in his wasp-striped control tower, warships slipped sleekly from the naval base to hunt drug smugglers or Icelandic trawlers. An occasional yacht tied up at the floating pontoon of a small waterside restaurant. In summer, children dared each other to “tombstone” from the highest point of the piers.
When I returned to the island, it might as well have been surrounded by tarmac, like a derelict theme park. Nobody even looked to the sea. It was easier that way.
It was bright outside when I left Más’s house. He had more friends, or at least acquaintances, than I had thought. None outwardly seemed to blame me for what had happened. Many expressed surprise he had made it that far.
Más himself had been less forgiving. After I turned him in, the local police superintendent let me talk to him. Más told me he hated me, called me a “fucking English turncoat.” He spat in my face.
I told him he didn’t understand. That he had been lucky until now. Lucky he hadn’t been killed. That they hadn’t retaliated.
I wanted to tell him we were working on things to kill them, to infect them, to turn them on each other. I wanted to tell him to wait until the harbour mouth was closed, that the nets were in place, that he could soon take to the water off Ballyvoloon every day. That I would go with him.
But I couldn’t and none of it would have mattered anyway.
I had betrayed him. And I found I could live with it.
Between Mas’s house and Ballyvoloon is a harbor-side walkway known simply as “the water’s edge.” The pavement widens dramatically in two places to support the immense red-brick piers of footbridges that connect the old Admiralty homes, on the other side of the railway line, to the sea. I climbed the wrought iron steps to the peak and surveyed the harbor, my arms resting on the mossy capstones of the wall. The sun was rising over the eastern headland, bright and cold.
I took the phone from my pocket and watched the coroner’s video.
It was mostly from one angle, from a camera I had often passed high atop an antique lamppost preserved in the middle of the main street. The quality was good, no sound, but the colours of Ballyvoloon were gloriously recreated in bright sunshine. The camera looked east, past the pier and along the beach to the old town hall, now a Chinese takeaway.
There, just visible over the roof of the taxi stand office, sat Más on his rock, whittling and chipping at a piece of wood. The email from the coroner said he had sat there all morning, but she must have supposed that I didn’t need to watch all of that.
At 4:00 P.M., his usual knocking-off time, he stood, stretched his back in such an exaggerated way I thought I could hear the cracks of his vertebrae, and packed his things into a large, waterproof sail bag. Carrying his pink-and-white jacket over one arm, he walked toward the camera, hailing anyone he met with a wave, but no conversation.
However, rather than cross the beach for the bar at Tom’s, he turned left down the patched concrete of the pier.
At that time of day it was deserted. The last of the stalls had packed up, the tourists had made for their trains or their buses.
The angle switched to another camera, on the back of the old general post office, perhaps. It showed Más standing with his toes perfectly aligned to the edge of the concrete pier’s “T.” After a few minutes, he removed several things from his pockets, folded his jacket and placed it on the concrete.
He opened the bag and withdrew a banana-yellow set of antique, old-petro waterproofs. He stepped into the thick, rubbery trousers before donning the heavy jacket and securing its buttons and hooks.