POEM TITLE Fish Fingers
POEM As Billy Faddock leaned over the edge
to pull in the net full of cod and pretty haddock
A hand gripped his. It slid up his palm and held him.
It snaked up and, wrist to wrist, Billy clasped the other in a circus grip
making sure the marooned body would not slip
back into the bulging net, holding the bubbling mass of a thousand captured fish.
He smiled at his own bravery and stood, anchored to the deck, for if he let the
hand take him down into the quicksand of swirling fish, he knew he’d be dead.
Billy looked down into the mouth of the bubbling net. But didn’t understand this
was the moment of calm revenge. The fishes looked up, opened their jaws, and
licked their bony lips. Billy didn’t notice the sea stop it’s roll and wave, didn’t know
he’d had his chips. The seagulls overhead stalled their flight, and saw the bobbing
boat stop, suspended.
Heart pumping, Billy pulled, like lifting a bodyfrom a grave. Like pulling the dark
from a cave.
Her fingernails were vivid green. No ring: that meant she was available, and his
desire to lift her was now unstoppable. He loved her already. He pulled again. Then emerged a slender wrist.
As he slowly raised her up he thought what a beauty he’d caught, and she thought,
the cod thought, the haddock thought, the lobster and crab thought, the dogfish
and the hake, the sea slug and the sea snake all thought…
this is how stupid men are.
He pulled again, and the full mass of her was a growing glorious thing.
And she? She could smell him now, the man who had netted her.
And she thought, after avoiding the two-leg-ones for a thousand years, now
tangled in the nylon squares that cut her skin and ripped the fins off sleeping fish,
she should get closer to Billy fisherman.
Her body flexed, and she took a last gaspy gulp of salt water before her forearm,
elbow bicep, beautiful shoulders, neck and then head broke the surface of the cold Scottish sea.
Billy saw her beauty. And that behind her shell-like ears were little slits.
Gills.
He was so shocked, he let go, but her hand had his wrist, so he gripped her tight
again and said ‘Come on then, my beauty, come aboard.’ Billy was completely
trawled. He knew he’d have his photo in the local paper, he’d be the stuff of
drunken stories for years in The Lobster Pot.
This was Billy’s first sexual experience. Most boys have some sweaty event in their bedroom when their mum’s at bingo, or when the oldest girl in the school picks
him out for snogging practice, but Billy had missed out on all that – instead
devoting his time to the sinking of nets and the slaughter of fish. He did once have a date with
a red-head called Mairead at the castle gate…
But she never showed. So now…
How beautiful she is, thought the man. How handsome he is, thought the other.
‘Shall I let him hold me and kiss me and dress me in white then take me home to
his flat in Blackness on Sea to cook his dinners and operate his washing-machine?’
Her head and more were out of the water now. Her shoulders as smooth as
sealskin and as strong as a smith’s.
Her breasts – he had never seen breasts except on Agnes the cow so he did not
know how to describe them. The word nice came into his head, yet he knew the
term was inadequate.
And then her waist - narrow enough for a young fisherman to clip his arm round
and walk down the aisle. If only she had legs.
He noticed, below her navel, a belly button the shape of a cockle shell. Below that
was the back end of a sea salmon bright with rainbows and muscle that if she
flicked, her tail would break his legs.
She slap-flapped onto the deck. He tried to stand back to see this perfect
monster. But her nails were dug in, and she laughed as she reached her other hand
up his body, over his chest, and in one flick of a finger ripped off his plastic smock-
coat and the jumper he’d knitted himself. Underneath he had a thermal vest. She razored through it with a single finger-nail.
‘Billy, do you love me?’
He could tell you when the herring raced, locate a shoal of sprats faster than any
other man, catch a shark and cut into steaks before he got back to habour, but this
was alien angling for him. He liked it though, and his breathing
slowed as she slowly slid a finger inside his mouth.
He could taste her. Salt. Fish. The tides.
She ran her finger along his gums and felt his teeth, then inside his cheek.
She purred like a catfish. Never had she felt anything so warm as the inside of a
man’s mouth.
They were suspended, like bladder-wrack at low tide, waiting for the change. A
pause in the ebb and flow of the world.
Then she wriggled her finger along his tonsils like a tiny fishling teasing an
anemone. Then, as Billy laughed, she yanked her finger, cutting clean through his
cheek, inside to out, till he could see the barb of it outside his face and under his
eye. Then with the other hand, as he was hooked and flailing and screaming for
mercy, she hooked his tongue and yanked it tight, like winkling an oyster out of his mouth by the root.
She lobbed the still chattering thing to the fish below and like piranhas they
foamed the water and tore at it with their tiny teeth. The ocean was red now and
she swung her tail and splintered the boat’s winching gear. The cable that raised
and pursed the net snapped and fell; the net opened its mouth wide and the
captive fish, spreading like ink, were free.
She pushed Billy’s body over the starboard side. The seagulls swooped and got
what they could before the mackerel came and stripped him clean. She licked the
blood from her fingers, slid over the side-boards into the firth and, without a
ripple, fathomed down and down and down.
Gone.
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