“You can’t sharpen a blade without friction. You can’t strengthen a man, or a civilization, without struggle. Airships and swimming pools and virtual bloody sailing. It’s all bollocks. We should be hauling these things out of the water, like they said we would.”
He gestured through the window of the bar to the gray bulk of the cathedral looming in the fog.
“There was a reason Jesus was a fisherman,” said Más, as if a closing statement.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
The barmaid leaned over the bar to clear the empty baskets.
“Jesus was a carpenter, Más,” she said.
“Six sea scouts, aged eleven to fourteen, had left the fishing town of Castletown-berehaven in a rigid inflatable boat, what they call a ‘rib.’ Their scout leader was at the helm, an experienced local woman named De Paor.
“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 twelve, they had tried to remove all traces of the petro from the children.”
—Jennings, Margaret, When The World Stopped Shrinking, p34
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 crablike on the balls of my feet, with my arms outstretched for balance. The boathouse was in bad shape. Green paint had blistered on the ship-lapped 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, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Without the souwester, he looked more like an ageing 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 recognized 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
