Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
The Fish I Do Not Name
A trawler hand keeps every column of his deck log honest but one, and lets the days fill the gap.
- dated: "the open season"
- narrator: "Bertie Soames, trawler hand"
Open season — the fourth day.
Every creature we lift comes into the deck log under its proper word: herring, hake, gurnard, dogfish, the sprats by the barrel. There is one catch I take at slack water that gets no word. I will not put its word in this book either. The space under species stays open, and I keep a column beside it, and in that column I write the day instead: the fourth day. That is the whole of my log that concerns it, and the whole of this diary that will.
Open season — the seventh day.
The mate, Sam Tullett, asked why the species line holds days where herring ought to sit. I said the log squares itself where the log needs squaring, and he laughed and said a log that squares itself is no log, and I let him keep the last of it, because a hand at sea lets a deal go. The skipper, Mr Greatorex, reads the book for the fish office and signs it, and he has signed seven days of it and never once looked twice at the column. If the pale flat ones have a word the port would know, I am not the man to give it to them, and the slack-water hours down the estuary side can keep that secret cheaply.
Open season — the tenth day.
Counting, tonight, to see the season square against the book. We have been ten days out. In the unnamed column there are twelve lines. I ran a straight edge down them twice, lamp held steady, second lamp held over the first. Twelve. Two of the lines are not mine to account for and not mine to cross out, and both sit in a hand that keeps my letters the way mine does, close and forward-leaning, and the ink on them is the same ink as the rest of the page. I entered it as found. That is the phrase we use on deck when the net brings up what nobody cast. I did not sleep after, and I did not wake anyone, and the log squares itself.
Open season — the same night, late.
If I gave the catch its word, the column would close, I think, and the extra days would dry up with it, and I think that is exactly the trade I will not make. A word like herring is a cheap word. A day is not a cheap day. The open season runs to the forty-first day by the port's own reckoning, so there are lines still to come into that column whether I take them or not. What I cannot square, and will not pretend to, is the arithmetic of it: twelve lines against ten days. Whose two days are those, and whose season are they logged in?