Catch
by Pat Black
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Amber finds a hobby she loves in Scuba diving – something to help her escape from the stresses of life. Will she find the freedom that all creatures – from the smallest to the greatest – crave?
_____________________________________________________________________
The boat puttered out to The Crook, a strange little peninsula which curved a question mark across the water. The sea loch was shallow at this part, and there were all manner of things to look at beneath the surface for the intrepid, or the plain silly; a full double decker bus, one or two fishing boats, the odd sunken Ford Orion and whole armoured divisions of shellfish.
At the signal from the dive leader, they suited up. Amber felt self-conscious in her one-piece bathing costume and was glad to zip the neoprene suit over it. Her facemask was polished to a high sheen, and blades of light shuddered across its surface as The Cookie Cutter weaved over choppy waters.
Only six members of the club joined them that day. Grim and overcast, it was hardly the worst conditions they’d ever swam in, but enough to deter some of the less fanatical.
Jack was there of course, as was Peter. They’d positioned themselves either side of Amber as they made their final checks, and had both been attentive when it came to helping her strap the tank to her back.
Peter – squat and powerful as a Samoan, and almost as dark, said: “So, did you check out those Red Sea websites we were talking about last time?”
“I had a quick look,” Amber said. “Amazing pictures. The water’s so clear. Lots of colourful fishes out there.” She fitted a depth gauge to her wrist and looped the weight belt around her waist. She strained against the lead and the mass of the bullet-shaped tank; gravity was an offence now, an irritation. She longed to be in the water, free from the burden of physics. And other things.
“Lots of sharks in the Red Sea, too,” Jack said. He was the more attractive of the two men, with the look of a surfer rather than a diver. Tall and ginger, with a proud outcropping of red hairs on his chin, he had a natural athleticism – a marked contrast to Peter’s gym-stewed bulk. “That’s why the prices are so low these days. After what happened to those swimmers off Sharm-el-Sheikh.” Jack made his hands into shadow-play jaws, and mashed them together.
“Well, every cloud, and all that,” Peter said, furiously buffing the inside of his mask. “I guess it keeps the sea clear of amateurs. Me, I love seeing the sharks out on a dive. That’s why I do it.”
“Easy to say when you won’t run into one,” Amber said.
Peter shrugged. “Oh, there are sharks around here. Old fishermen will tell you all about blues coming into the sea lochs. Big ones, too. Seven, eight feet. One swears blind he saw a Mako.”
“Listen to the action man,” Jack scoffed. “Do you have underwater knife fights with them, and such?”
“You better watch out, man. They’d be attracted to your hair, that’s for sure.” Peter grinned then darted his tongue out from between his teeth. It made him look like a man wearing a mask.
Sighing, Amber left them to it and made her way out of the cabin, flippers slapping against the deck. The three others, including the dive leader, Tony, were already out by the transom. Tony – a squat little frog with his orange and black wetsuit and bulging beer belly – had a mobile phone to his head, away from the rest of the guys. He signalled to Jim, the pilot of the Cookie Cutter, to cut the engines, and then hailed the group.
“Okay, slight change of plan,” he said, in his mellifluous Aberdeen accent. “We’re going to head just around the Crook. There’s a fisherman out there in a spot of trouble. He’s asked us to have a look at his creels. Up for it?”
They were, and the boat followed the sandy outer curve of the Crook. This was a more tourist-centric area, with brightly coloured huts and B&Bs lined up on the shore, a quilting of reds, pinks, greens and baby blues. In the distance, one or two boats bobbed down the inlet towards the sea. Green hills bordered the bay and dense, gruff fir trees stood sentinel at the top. All of this scrolled past them easily as they caught up with the boat a few minutes later.
The vessel was around 40ft long, and its fleet of lobster creels hung dead in the water, studded with barnacles and shimmering mussels. Some even had lobsters inside, clambering over one another in the cages.
The captain, a squat, frowning man with permanent sunburn, said: “There’s something caught up in the creels, down there. Something big. We darenae pull it up any further, or it’ll upend us.”
“You didn’t go over that old bus down there, did you?” Tony asked. “That’d do the job, alright.”
“Nah, we’re naewhere near that, man,” the fisherman said. “I’d be awful obliged if you could take a look.”
“What do you reckon it is?” Peter said, hands on the transom, staring at the black water.
Tony shrugged. “Who knows? Could be a whale. We get a lot of them out here.”
Amber fought a strange fear – an uneasy feeling about deep water she thought she’d already conquered. There was only one response to this. “I’m up for it. I’d like to go down with you,” she said.
Peter, Jack and Tony made up a foursome to go down and have a look. “Remember,” Tony said, “stay clear o’ the creel line. We don’t want anyone getting snagged up, too. It would look dreadful on our insurance claim.”
Amber placed her mask on, a tight but reassuring band of pressure around the back of the head, and clamped down on the regulator. A buoy was floated out in the space between the two vessels, and then the four of them flopped backwards off the deck.
Amber straightened out in the water, body aquiver with adrenaline after the sudden rupture between this world and that. It was always colder than you supposed, even at this time of year. She gave her ears a quick blast to clear them, and looked around for her colleagues.
The water had a greenish tint, a glass bottle murkiness that smothered distance. Seeing Tony in his orange and black wetsuit, maybe 12 yards ahead of her, she felt a curious thrill; when viewed away from the billowing creel column of creels and the shadow of the giants on the surface, he was framed in darkness. It was hard to tell how deep the water went here, and impossible to know what was beneath.
And yet here, at last, was freedom, the joy of immersion. A curious lightness caressed Amber, tickling her tummy even as the bubbles surged over her mask. This was her victory over gravity and things of the earth; she wanted to swim in arcs and cartwheels, kicking her legs as hard as she could, zooming beneath the dappled surface, chasing the sunlight. She hadn’t joined the diving club for company; nor had she joined to meet a partner. And she hadn’t joined the club in order to be invited out for drinks with people like Peter and Jack. There were times she’d even thought of digging the ring out of the drawer and putting it on for the duration of these trips. New people didn’t represent freedom to Amber; not in the same way these moments did. The things of nature documentaries in her youth, sitting rapt in front of clear blue water.
What she lived for were those times when you let go of the rail, and plunged in.
Peter and Jack hung in the water until she righted herself, faces unreadable in their neoprene hoods and masks. Then they all kicked out after Tony as he skirted the edge of the creels and angled down into the darkness. The fleet of creels was spread out over a wide area, black rigging waving at them through the water like strands of kelp, stretching down as far as anyone could see into the darkness.
Tony jerked back in surprise, before signalling for them to wait.
They saw it soon enough, a mass of whitish tissue caught in the folds of the net. When it formed itself into recognisable shapes, Amber felt dread seize her by the throat. The edges and points poking out of the rigging signalled an instinctive fear, prehistoric warning signs; a conical snout and huge, diamond-shaped fins. It was immense, astonishing in its girth, and quite clearly dead. Belly-up, its gills gave only a feeble flutter in the current, and its tail hung limp, curling away into darkness.
“Yeah,” Peter sniffed. “It happens a lot out here. I’ve been in the water with a few, a bit further north, offshore. But I swear I’ve never seen one that big, man. I swear to it.”
“Yeah.” Jack rubbed his ginger topiary. “I’d say at least thirty feet. Easy.”
Peter held his hands wide apart. “More than that – it’s as long as the boat, nose-to-tail. The breadth of the head... I mean, just look at it.”
As if you could do anything else. Trussed up the side of the fishing boat, just beneath the surface – as far as the fishermen dared reel it in - the basking shark didn’t quite look real. With its strange, squat head upturned and its jaw compressed, it looked more like one of its deadlier relatives.
After talking to the coastguard, it was decided that the fish should be towed out towards the deepwater channel and then cut free from the nets; it was too big to land, and the carcass could present a potential problem for most boats in the area where the water was shallow. It was illegal to catch the basking sharks now, although whole industries had once thrived around the peaceable giants on this coast.
“Why did it come into the loch?” Amber asked.
“Nobody knows,” Peter said. “I guess they can get lost.”
“Mating, maybe.” Tony nodded at the fish. “That one’s female.”
“Shame what happened,” Jack said. “I guess it tried to fight its way out, while the creels were anchored to the bottom, but couldn’t get out. Boats crash into them all the time. You see wounds. In their sides, bits nicked off their fins. They don’t seem bothered by humans at all. They don’t back down when we come close.”
The fish’s knotty shroud seemed like an offence, an insult. Amber, although awed by the thing, wanted to reach out and touch it. She felt desperately sad for the creature.
“Why should they bother with us?” Peter asked. “Our boats mean nothing to them. They’re so big. That’s why they don’t swim away.”
“Ach,” Jack said, “terrible shame.”
“Well, it’s food for the wee fishes now,” Tony said, sipping at a coffee. “That’s the way it goes, even for the big guys.”
Jack patted Amber on the shoulder. “You okay?”
She frowned at him. She’d been looking at the thing’s sad, indigo eyes as they peered up at her through a plume of water. “Fine.”
“You want a coffee or something?”
“I’m absolutely fine, Jack. Just having a moment to myself, here. If that’s alright with you.”
He looked hurt when he sat down in the cabin; she wasn’t sure what she regretted most, that expression or Peter’s smirk lurking in the background. Maybe she’d buy Jack a coffee after all, when they were on dry land.
Soon they were at a suitable depth; they watched as Tony got suited up, a machete in hand to slice away some of the creels. He disappeared beneath the surface and a trail of bubbles marked his path towards the white mass of the fish. The rigging jerked and tugged in the water, then went slack. The fish faded quickly from view, and the ship bobbed, suddenly free of its burden.
Then Tony surfaced, knife in hand. He tore the regulator away from his mouth, and yelled: “Come see!”
Amber fixed her flippers, snatched up her mask and leapt right into the water. Fixing the mask to her face, she upended, hanging on the surface like a snorkeller.
There, an immense smudge among the dark green, was the fish. Not sinking to the bottom as these giants must when they die, but moving slowly, its tail sweeping back and forth in slow turns. The gills fluttered, and the head turned this way and that, the outlandish jaw opening as if to taste the water. It was alive; throughout its ordeal, even once it had stopped struggling, something had clung on within that mountain of flesh. Just enough water had passed through the gills, and just enough of a spark had remained in the monster’s ancient head, to keep it alive.
The basking shark came close enough for Amber to touch – so she did, her fingertips tickling haggard skin like the bark of an ancient tree. She felt no fear as it passed her, buffeting her gently, before arcing in the water and heading out to sea.
Then she remembered she must breathe. Amber kicked back to the surface and breached with a great whoop, exhilarated.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Amber finds a hobby she loves in Scuba diving – something to help her escape from the stresses of life. Will she find the freedom that all creatures – from the smallest to the greatest – crave?
_____________________________________________________________________
The boat puttered out to The Crook, a strange little peninsula which curved a question mark across the water. The sea loch was shallow at this part, and there were all manner of things to look at beneath the surface for the intrepid, or the plain silly; a full double decker bus, one or two fishing boats, the odd sunken Ford Orion and whole armoured divisions of shellfish.
At the signal from the dive leader, they suited up. Amber felt self-conscious in her one-piece bathing costume and was glad to zip the neoprene suit over it. Her facemask was polished to a high sheen, and blades of light shuddered across its surface as The Cookie Cutter weaved over choppy waters.
Only six members of the club joined them that day. Grim and overcast, it was hardly the worst conditions they’d ever swam in, but enough to deter some of the less fanatical.
Jack was there of course, as was Peter. They’d positioned themselves either side of Amber as they made their final checks, and had both been attentive when it came to helping her strap the tank to her back.
Peter – squat and powerful as a Samoan, and almost as dark, said: “So, did you check out those Red Sea websites we were talking about last time?”
“I had a quick look,” Amber said. “Amazing pictures. The water’s so clear. Lots of colourful fishes out there.” She fitted a depth gauge to her wrist and looped the weight belt around her waist. She strained against the lead and the mass of the bullet-shaped tank; gravity was an offence now, an irritation. She longed to be in the water, free from the burden of physics. And other things.
“Lots of sharks in the Red Sea, too,” Jack said. He was the more attractive of the two men, with the look of a surfer rather than a diver. Tall and ginger, with a proud outcropping of red hairs on his chin, he had a natural athleticism – a marked contrast to Peter’s gym-stewed bulk. “That’s why the prices are so low these days. After what happened to those swimmers off Sharm-el-Sheikh.” Jack made his hands into shadow-play jaws, and mashed them together.
“Well, every cloud, and all that,” Peter said, furiously buffing the inside of his mask. “I guess it keeps the sea clear of amateurs. Me, I love seeing the sharks out on a dive. That’s why I do it.”
“Easy to say when you won’t run into one,” Amber said.
Peter shrugged. “Oh, there are sharks around here. Old fishermen will tell you all about blues coming into the sea lochs. Big ones, too. Seven, eight feet. One swears blind he saw a Mako.”
“Listen to the action man,” Jack scoffed. “Do you have underwater knife fights with them, and such?”
“You better watch out, man. They’d be attracted to your hair, that’s for sure.” Peter grinned then darted his tongue out from between his teeth. It made him look like a man wearing a mask.
Sighing, Amber left them to it and made her way out of the cabin, flippers slapping against the deck. The three others, including the dive leader, Tony, were already out by the transom. Tony – a squat little frog with his orange and black wetsuit and bulging beer belly – had a mobile phone to his head, away from the rest of the guys. He signalled to Jim, the pilot of the Cookie Cutter, to cut the engines, and then hailed the group.
“Okay, slight change of plan,” he said, in his mellifluous Aberdeen accent. “We’re going to head just around the Crook. There’s a fisherman out there in a spot of trouble. He’s asked us to have a look at his creels. Up for it?”
They were, and the boat followed the sandy outer curve of the Crook. This was a more tourist-centric area, with brightly coloured huts and B&Bs lined up on the shore, a quilting of reds, pinks, greens and baby blues. In the distance, one or two boats bobbed down the inlet towards the sea. Green hills bordered the bay and dense, gruff fir trees stood sentinel at the top. All of this scrolled past them easily as they caught up with the boat a few minutes later.
The vessel was around 40ft long, and its fleet of lobster creels hung dead in the water, studded with barnacles and shimmering mussels. Some even had lobsters inside, clambering over one another in the cages.
The captain, a squat, frowning man with permanent sunburn, said: “There’s something caught up in the creels, down there. Something big. We darenae pull it up any further, or it’ll upend us.”
“You didn’t go over that old bus down there, did you?” Tony asked. “That’d do the job, alright.”
“Nah, we’re naewhere near that, man,” the fisherman said. “I’d be awful obliged if you could take a look.”
“What do you reckon it is?” Peter said, hands on the transom, staring at the black water.
Tony shrugged. “Who knows? Could be a whale. We get a lot of them out here.”
Amber fought a strange fear – an uneasy feeling about deep water she thought she’d already conquered. There was only one response to this. “I’m up for it. I’d like to go down with you,” she said.
Peter, Jack and Tony made up a foursome to go down and have a look. “Remember,” Tony said, “stay clear o’ the creel line. We don’t want anyone getting snagged up, too. It would look dreadful on our insurance claim.”
Amber placed her mask on, a tight but reassuring band of pressure around the back of the head, and clamped down on the regulator. A buoy was floated out in the space between the two vessels, and then the four of them flopped backwards off the deck.
Amber straightened out in the water, body aquiver with adrenaline after the sudden rupture between this world and that. It was always colder than you supposed, even at this time of year. She gave her ears a quick blast to clear them, and looked around for her colleagues.
The water had a greenish tint, a glass bottle murkiness that smothered distance. Seeing Tony in his orange and black wetsuit, maybe 12 yards ahead of her, she felt a curious thrill; when viewed away from the billowing creel column of creels and the shadow of the giants on the surface, he was framed in darkness. It was hard to tell how deep the water went here, and impossible to know what was beneath.
And yet here, at last, was freedom, the joy of immersion. A curious lightness caressed Amber, tickling her tummy even as the bubbles surged over her mask. This was her victory over gravity and things of the earth; she wanted to swim in arcs and cartwheels, kicking her legs as hard as she could, zooming beneath the dappled surface, chasing the sunlight. She hadn’t joined the diving club for company; nor had she joined to meet a partner. And she hadn’t joined the club in order to be invited out for drinks with people like Peter and Jack. There were times she’d even thought of digging the ring out of the drawer and putting it on for the duration of these trips. New people didn’t represent freedom to Amber; not in the same way these moments did. The things of nature documentaries in her youth, sitting rapt in front of clear blue water.
What she lived for were those times when you let go of the rail, and plunged in.
Peter and Jack hung in the water until she righted herself, faces unreadable in their neoprene hoods and masks. Then they all kicked out after Tony as he skirted the edge of the creels and angled down into the darkness. The fleet of creels was spread out over a wide area, black rigging waving at them through the water like strands of kelp, stretching down as far as anyone could see into the darkness.
Tony jerked back in surprise, before signalling for them to wait.
They saw it soon enough, a mass of whitish tissue caught in the folds of the net. When it formed itself into recognisable shapes, Amber felt dread seize her by the throat. The edges and points poking out of the rigging signalled an instinctive fear, prehistoric warning signs; a conical snout and huge, diamond-shaped fins. It was immense, astonishing in its girth, and quite clearly dead. Belly-up, its gills gave only a feeble flutter in the current, and its tail hung limp, curling away into darkness.
“Yeah,” Peter sniffed. “It happens a lot out here. I’ve been in the water with a few, a bit further north, offshore. But I swear I’ve never seen one that big, man. I swear to it.”
“Yeah.” Jack rubbed his ginger topiary. “I’d say at least thirty feet. Easy.”
Peter held his hands wide apart. “More than that – it’s as long as the boat, nose-to-tail. The breadth of the head... I mean, just look at it.”
As if you could do anything else. Trussed up the side of the fishing boat, just beneath the surface – as far as the fishermen dared reel it in - the basking shark didn’t quite look real. With its strange, squat head upturned and its jaw compressed, it looked more like one of its deadlier relatives.
After talking to the coastguard, it was decided that the fish should be towed out towards the deepwater channel and then cut free from the nets; it was too big to land, and the carcass could present a potential problem for most boats in the area where the water was shallow. It was illegal to catch the basking sharks now, although whole industries had once thrived around the peaceable giants on this coast.
“Why did it come into the loch?” Amber asked.
“Nobody knows,” Peter said. “I guess they can get lost.”
“Mating, maybe.” Tony nodded at the fish. “That one’s female.”
“Shame what happened,” Jack said. “I guess it tried to fight its way out, while the creels were anchored to the bottom, but couldn’t get out. Boats crash into them all the time. You see wounds. In their sides, bits nicked off their fins. They don’t seem bothered by humans at all. They don’t back down when we come close.”
The fish’s knotty shroud seemed like an offence, an insult. Amber, although awed by the thing, wanted to reach out and touch it. She felt desperately sad for the creature.
“Why should they bother with us?” Peter asked. “Our boats mean nothing to them. They’re so big. That’s why they don’t swim away.”
“Ach,” Jack said, “terrible shame.”
“Well, it’s food for the wee fishes now,” Tony said, sipping at a coffee. “That’s the way it goes, even for the big guys.”
Jack patted Amber on the shoulder. “You okay?”
She frowned at him. She’d been looking at the thing’s sad, indigo eyes as they peered up at her through a plume of water. “Fine.”
“You want a coffee or something?”
“I’m absolutely fine, Jack. Just having a moment to myself, here. If that’s alright with you.”
He looked hurt when he sat down in the cabin; she wasn’t sure what she regretted most, that expression or Peter’s smirk lurking in the background. Maybe she’d buy Jack a coffee after all, when they were on dry land.
Soon they were at a suitable depth; they watched as Tony got suited up, a machete in hand to slice away some of the creels. He disappeared beneath the surface and a trail of bubbles marked his path towards the white mass of the fish. The rigging jerked and tugged in the water, then went slack. The fish faded quickly from view, and the ship bobbed, suddenly free of its burden.
Then Tony surfaced, knife in hand. He tore the regulator away from his mouth, and yelled: “Come see!”
Amber fixed her flippers, snatched up her mask and leapt right into the water. Fixing the mask to her face, she upended, hanging on the surface like a snorkeller.
There, an immense smudge among the dark green, was the fish. Not sinking to the bottom as these giants must when they die, but moving slowly, its tail sweeping back and forth in slow turns. The gills fluttered, and the head turned this way and that, the outlandish jaw opening as if to taste the water. It was alive; throughout its ordeal, even once it had stopped struggling, something had clung on within that mountain of flesh. Just enough water had passed through the gills, and just enough of a spark had remained in the monster’s ancient head, to keep it alive.
The basking shark came close enough for Amber to touch – so she did, her fingertips tickling haggard skin like the bark of an ancient tree. She felt no fear as it passed her, buffeting her gently, before arcing in the water and heading out to sea.
Then she remembered she must breathe. Amber kicked back to the surface and breached with a great whoop, exhilarated.
About the Author
Pat Black is a thirtysomething writer, journalist and bletherer, born and raised in Glasgow. He says he has made that difficult transition from aspiring novelist to failed novelist, although he has had a couple of short stories published. He’s the author of Snarl, a completed novel about a monster that tries to mount the Houses of Parliament. Holyrood emerges unscathed, for now.