Chapter One
Jane is lying with her head on Mike’s chest, blinking at the morning light filtering through the curtains. The shapes of the room are drained of colour. Her clothes, heaped on a chair, his orange oilskins hanging from the back of his door, his boots, two empty glasses. A condom wrapper gleams dully on the bedside table.
She listens to Mike’s heartbeat: lub-dup, lub-dup, lub-dup; the low thrum and rumble of it.
The air in the room is cold. Under Mike’s duvet their bodies are warm. She breathes his smell, the faint salt of his skin, the slight tang of his armpits. It is intoxicating, this being close to another person. Six months ago she hadn’t touched, really touched, another human being in ten years. The skin she was used to was that of dead fish; the ice-cold slither of salmon under her hand. And yet now here she is, naked under a duvet with a man, up close, his chest hair tickling her nose, the rushing of his blood in her ears.
She is very happy. She doesn’t think she’s ever been this happy. She wants to stay here forever. But the clock on the bedside table reads 07:32, and she’s going to be late for work.
Jane sits up; yawns in the frail blueish light. Looks at Mike. He is a big man. She is tall, but he is taller than her, and broad, his dome of a head like a mountain top, crowned with rust-coloured hair, fringed with a thick beard.
Mike stirs, grunts. Rolls onto his side, blinks up at her. Jane’s self-conscious, suddenly. She wonders what she must look like from that angle; if she has a double chin, if her armpits stink. She squeezes her elbows to her sides.
‘I’ve got to get up,’ she says.
‘Mm.’ Mike rubs his eyes.
‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Mm,’ says Mike, reaching for her. ‘No. Stay a minute.’
He kisses the side of her, just below the ribcage. His beard tickles her skin and she shivers.
‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I’ll be late.’
But within ten seconds she’s back down under the duvet, tasting his sleep-ripe mouth.
The factory hoves into view, the huge white box of it gleaming in the winter sunshine. Jane’s car judders over the cattle grid, and she pulls up in the car park with a squeal of brakes. She checks her watch. The time is eight fifteen.
‘Shit,’ she says.
She steps out of the car, slams the door shut. The trawlers are unloading in the dock, bright crates being winched onto the shore by men in orange overalls. It was where she first met Mike, on a fag break; he was a trawlerman back then. He asked her for a light and as she handed him her Zippo their fingers touched, and something happened to her – a chain reaction of explosions travelling down her body, klaxons sounding, red lights flashing, an announcement on a tannoy: human touch, we have human touch. She hadn’t realised how touch-starved she was. And the brush of warmth, the feeling of a man’s hand, wakened something, some deep primal urge, a fire lit in her loins. She’d felt dried up down below, no sexual urges for years and years, but she swore she felt her ovaries release an egg then and there, like a rusty old gumball machine given a kick. Rolling it down the fallopian tubes.
She hadn’t planned to be in a relationship. It was the last thing she’d wanted. She’d been living like a nun, a neat, small, serious life. But her body had overruled her brain, drunk on pheromones. They’d had sex that evening, after a few pints in the bar of the Baltasound Hotel, stumbling back to her caravan, buttons pinging off, their mouths hungry, skin fizzing with electricity.
As she hurries across the car park towards the factory, she thinks back to this morning, straddling Mike, her hands gripping the headboard. The orgasm she’d had, slow-spreading and radiant. She feels heat rise in her cheeks as she pushes in through the metal doors, into the women’s changing room. It is empty. She unhooks her pair of yellow vinyl dungarees from a peg, pulls them on over her jeans, jams her rubber boots on her feet, tucks her hair up into the hairnet.
A middle-aged woman with a buzzcut slams the door open.
‘There you fuckin’ are.’
‘Sorry, Pat,’ says Jane.
‘You’re late.’
‘I know.’
‘Well?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Am I not going to get an explanation?’
Jane thinks back to pulling her underwear on hurriedly, back to front, Mike laughing in bed, and tries not to grin.
‘Car wouldn’t start,’ she says, shoving her bag in the locker.
Pat shakes her head. ‘I’ve no idea how that rattle o’ shite is still on the road,’ she says. ‘It’s more rust than car.’
‘The sea air,’ says Jane, slamming her locker shut, pocketing the key. ‘Not good for it.’
Pat looks at her clipboard. Narrows her eyes.
‘Heading,’ she says. ‘Get a move on. And don’t be late again.’
‘Yes Pat,’ says Jane.
The factory stinks of fish and ice and blood and metal. The machinery roars and hums and hisses. Salmon come tumbling down a chute to Jane’s right, and the man next to her – Anthony, his name is written in marker pen on the back of his overalls – jostles them free from the packing ice, spreads them out, passes them to Jane one by one.
In front of Jane is a guillotine, a blade that she controls with a foot pedal. She slides the fish beneath it, presses the pedal, and the blade comes down, cutting the head from the body, the skin splitting cleanly like rubber, blood spitting out. The heads tumble onto a little conveyor belt running along the floor, rumbling off to be made into cat food. Then Jane slides the headless body to her left, where another pair of gloved hands slices the fishes’ bellies from neck to tail. Then a string in their necks is cut, their insides hoovered out, the roe stripped, sun-bright gelatinous eggs, scooped into buckets. Round they go, a never-ending stream of fish, slid from hand to hand across the stainless steel, until they end up in their tin cans, clean and neat and bloodless.
The job is monotonous but Jane doesn’t mind it too much. When she first got here, she treated it as a punishment. Like a self-flagellating monk, she let the noise, the smell, the cold, the sheer backbreaking tedium of it batter her, exhaust her, obliterate everything else. At the end of each day she was so aching and drained that sleep came mercifully quickly. But now she’s used to it. She’s stronger, and faster, and she doesn’t mind the monotony. It’s almost meditative. As she heads the salmon, she daydreams. About Mike, mainly. About Mike, and her, and what they are to each other. About their future.
He quit the trawlers a couple of months after they met. Took over his uncle’s mussel farm. ‘Aquaculture,’ he told her. ‘That’s where the future is.’ He’d taken her out on his boat one morning, as dawn broke across the ocean; showed her how they hauled up the ropes, encrusted with oil-black shellfish, how they chipped away at the months-old seaweed, green and purple, to reveal the mussels clinging to the rope, thick as grapes on a vine.
Business is booming. He has a slick website full of artsy black and white photographs: lines of floats in the bay, the wet deck of a fishing boat, Mike’s hands shucking a mussel. ‘The most northerly British mussels,’ it reads, ‘washed by the purest North Atlantic water. Organic, sustainable, natural.’ Mike had cooked some for her one evening, with white wine, garlic, and cream. They’d been full of flesh, fat and delicious, the butterfly shells vulval, aphrodisiac, tasting only faintly of the ocean. Heart-shaped, too. Was it a coincidence that was the night she told him she loved him?
At lunchtime the klaxon sounds, and Jane peels off her gloves, stretches, pulls a pack of Marlboros from her pocket and goes outside. She lights her cigarette and peels a blob of fish meat from her overalls, flicks it to the ground. A seagull swoops down and gobbles it up.
The sun has gone in. The sea is slate-grey beneath a sky the shade of mother-of-pearl, a tanker crawling across it in the distance. Jane breathes the cold air deeply, trying to clear her nose of the stench of fish guts. A truck rumbles past with the cannery’s logo on the side: a blue mermaid. Jane always thought that logo was strange. Suggesting what? If they caught a mermaid they’d can her? Crack her carapace, scoop out her roe, hoover out her guts, behead her, fillet her?
She smokes her cigarette. She should quit, she knows. Mike’s trying, at the moment. Chews the gum, puts the patches on his upper arm, shiny squares of film. She’s smoked for eighteen years now. Since she was thirteen years old. As a child she’d been fascinated by her mum’s smoking, the silver machine she used. She’d lick the paper, line the little hammock, pack the shreds of tobacco in it, then squeeze with her one hand and pop! Like a magic trick, out the cigarette rolled, perfect and smooth. Sometimes she’d get Jane to roll for her instead. Shreds of baccy would stick to Jane’s fingertips, and she’d nibble at them, wrinkling her nose at the tang of it, spicy on the tip of her tongue.
She was always nibbling, chewing, as a child. Always had a strand of hair pulled into her mouth, leaching the faint shampoo taste from it. If not her hair, it was paper, torn from the back of exercise books, or plastic – the ends of biros, the lids of Smarties tubes. As they bent between her molars they’d heat up, and she’d touch the warm plastic to her tongue. ‘Will you stop chewing?’ her mother would say. ‘You look like a bloody cow in the field. Chewing the cud. Spit it out. That hair will stay in your stomach and then the doctor will have to cut you open and scoop it out.’
What was that all about? Jane thinks, as she takes a drag on her cigarette. All that nibbling, chewing? Could be that she’d had a deficiency. Iron or something, like those pregnant women who suddenly get a taste for chalk or soil. When she was a teenager, a friend had told her about oral regression. People put things in their mouths to mimic their mother’s breasts. Trying to get back to that warm soft place, that comfort. Bullshit, Jane had said. The thought had made her feel sick.
Why is she thinking about her mother? She doesn’t want to think about her. She stubs out her cigarette, drops it into the metal ashtray bolted to the wall, then goes into the canteen. Grabs a tray, slides it along the rack. Looks at the vats of food beneath the heat lamps.
‘Tuna pasta bake,’ says a woman next to her, wrinkling her nose. ‘You’d think they’d ken by now that we’re all sick of fish.’
Jane shrugs. ‘Doesn’t bother me,’ she says, and scoops some pasta onto her plate.
The woman grunts. ‘I canna stomach it any more. None of it. Anything fishy makes me heave.’ She shovels chips onto her plate instead.
‘How’s things?’ says Jane.
‘Awful night. Millie’s got da nirls. Chickenpox,’ she says, seeing Jane’s blank expression. ‘Absolute nightmare, she wouldna sleep at all. She’s covered. Calamine lotion won’t touch it.’
They sit down at a table. Two other women are there, one with curls dyed the colour of new pennies, the other with grey hair scraped back in a bun.
‘Hiya Dawn. Hiya Jude.’
‘Terri. Jane. Y’all right?’
‘No. I’m exhausted,’ says Terri. ‘Was just saying to Jane, Millie’s got chickenpox. Awful. She was in tears last night with it, wouldna stop scratching.’
‘Aloe vera,’ says Judy. ‘That’s what you need.’
‘No,’ says Dawn. ‘Oats. Fill a sock with them, tie it up, drop it in the bath – that’s what my granny used to do.’
There was a moment, halfway through that sentence. A split second, a heartbeat – just after Dawn said the word ‘bath’ – where something shifted slightly. Nobody watching the conversation would have noticed it. But everyone at the table felt it. A change in atmosphere. A slight drop in temperature.
Jane continues eating, methodically, avoiding the women’s eyes, as they move swiftly on, swapping chickenpox stories. Dawn shows a scar on her neck, Terri tells them about an attack of shingles she had ten years ago, and Jane is quiet, the gluey pasta sticking in her throat.
This is her dynamic with the group. She listens to them, their small gripes and grievances, their family quarrels, their gossip and jokes, and feels a longing; looking in at their lives like standing out in a cold dark street, peering at lit windows. What must it be like to live a life like that? No shadows. No feeling of the past lying in wait for you, a black hole ready to trip you up, suck you down, make your lunch stick in your craw.
‘Oh, Jane,’ says Judy, turning towards her. ‘Don’t forget – it’s Pat’s birthday next week. Her fiftieth. We’re go...
