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Go shoppingCold. As bitter and as brutal as you can imagine. We needed those skins more than ever this year and the temperature was continuing to drop steady and fast and without any sign of a let up.
[private]I’d been awake since the moment I could feel my own breath falling back across my face like shards of shattered glass. The bag I was in had a hole at the bottom which I’d managed to wrap my toes away from, but when I came to with a shudder I was sure I felt my wee sister sucking on them thinking it was her own thumb.
She was quiet; head to toe, her fair blonde eyelashes dusted over with frost.
On the other side of the cabin my father and elder brother lay in a shared bunk. The top bunk had been smashed when my elder brother had fallen through the slats during one particularly violent storm and it had never been mended properly. My father was always saying that one day we’d fetch back more than we needed to survive and be able to get a new boat. I used to draw my dream boat on my pad with a pencil I’d snuck out of school. Hadn’t been back to school in a while and no one had come knocking for the pencil either.
I jack-knifed my way out of the bed, this grumpy silver caterpillar, my concealed limbs all metallic and crunchy and went to the porthole wiping the condensation away with my mitt and searching for a sun that had never shone in my lifetime. The waters were still. A vast black vat of inedible liquorice polluted with factory wastes, nautical debris, the token pram and plenty of jetsam—the frozen blue excrement of which doing little to break down in the period since the final flight over the dock. Every piece of matter glinted—a beacon to man’s excessive and devastating consumption in the blood moon.
In the distance I made out the dark ominous shapes of some of the towns that lined the shores of the opposite bank of this unfathomable lake, fires burning in their windows, the greedy, tricky eyes of the freemason. The coals where luminescent with raw white heat, each one a sun and bringer of life. They shone bright but brought little warmth to those born and bred on the other side. Through telescopes they sneered.
The boat eddied on the frozen lake. There was a let up and the dull moan of the tyres on the dank dock was as good as any cockerel in our lives. It was time to set sail and hunt this sea of rubbish.
We cast off, all hands on deck, eight hands smothered in threadbare fur mitts. Sometimes it was less painful to be the hunted.
The lake brought us food, it brought us shelter and it brought us currency to barter with amongst ourselves. Their waste was our gain. Their waste was their folly too; entertaining as it must have been to see us dressed in their hand me down waste papers and cardboard boxes. All of this was our armour against the darkness that settled from tree to wave and scarecrow in-between. Their waste brought the eel, the ultimate treasure to us all.
Our ears were deaf with the roar of the furnaces with which they burnt any hegemonic detractors. We signed to each other, our lips sewn shut and a vow placed in our hearts only to speak when the sun returned. Though I had misgivings, it meant more than just this orange stuff of legend rising through the skies.
We signed and we listened to the low frequencies the boat made as it cut its path through all the rubbish. There was plenty to differentiate the scrape of a long sinewy piece of rubber from an unwanted factory conveyor belt along the hull from the tough scales of the eel. Every once in a while a bright white floodlight would play across the tides of refuse and the eels scarpered to a greater depth. We had to learn to be shrewd and hunt between the gaps in the rays that the others fired across the waters with the sole objective of illuminating our plight and frustrating our efforts as we toiled with all these scraps of red and plastic and tin and blue and carbon attached to our bodies; us the people of their bins. Funny to see a man who looks like a tatty armadillo scrimmaging through the islands of trash, his hands and face muddied with low grade engine oil and drained of any ounce of pride and dignity as he scampers from one end of his stinkpot raft to the other cursing his and his families being. Runaway rat, runaway plastic rat with tissues as eyes and plugs as teeth and jump from your sinking ship.
It wasn’t long before we hit our first and only school of eels that night. They hung around the buckled goal posts of the old rugby fields, coiling their hard bodies around these glistening tusks of ivory and staring us down with their dead grey eyes They snaked their way through the engine block of the old green-keeper’s tractor buried amongst the rusting clubs and its tappits sparked once more. We heard the grumble and the roar. With their tails they dragged the green sprinklers out of the water and pushed them towards us thinking it may confuse. Little did they know. Just because we hadn’t plotted this course deliberately or otherwise before didn’t mean we didn’t know that eels no matter how sly and cunning always displayed the same wily trademarks. Thank whoever once reigned over us that they hadn’t learnt or they had no desire to evolve due to their nasty overzealous plenitude. I was glad my mouth was shut because my elder brother and father would not tolerate me saying things about the slime we had to skin for nightwear and eat to fill our bellies. I hated their coils curling amongst my intestines. I hated the way their bodies struggled as we placed them in our mouths and swallowed and then the way the tail darted down my throat its barbed like head with those fungi invested gills bound for my stomach and travelling at such a velocity I feared that one day it might actually puncture it. Oh, I secretly prayed that we might evolve and be able to eat and digest the parts of planes innumerate amongst this sea. My sister secretly prayed that she’d develop such a hunger that all that may famish it was the bodies of the others. She signed it to me one night as I slept, but I saw her through my eyelids. I saw how she motioned with her mouth biting and chewing her way towards their land and not stopping there until an almighty belch scared the sun out of hiding. No-one knew what my father and elder brother thought. We presumed knots and best fishing practices as they were older and had lost sight of childhood.
The haul was good. Their poor, callous faces as they saw the weighted skins of their brethren dragged behind the boat lifting their playpen tractor and all these jangling clubs screaming to the surface. I worried the haul was too big for the raft for when it landed and they tried to escape turning the deck to a slimy patina of turgid mouth infested seaweed on which for us to comically roll. The deck we found ourselves on near caved in!
My father, undeterred, was jubilant for there were more than enough skins here to last another moon cycle, maybe two or three and he clapped his hands and skipped round the tank we now housed these eels in allowing them to dry out naturally for better flesh and a higher gauge of skin and stop thrashing. And then the floodlight hit us, setting the deck ablaze and allowing the eels to see through their dead eyes at who we really were.
My father continued his dance of success and he lifted my sister upon his shoulders and baffling to me she clapped and taunted the others who hid behind the light and my elder brother blew kisses of all things too! But, I heard their laughter across the waves of garbage and above my families claps of joy. I heard them and it followed me to sleep that night. A night where no one complained of the cold but me, a night where aghast at what I opened my eyes to nearly tore the stitches from my mouth.
We had our skins alright.
My father, older brother and little sister were inside the bodies of the eels who’d escaped that tank, their chest cavities blossoming with nowt but their faces peering out at me silent; my wee sister, the strangest of flowering buds and I felt something starting at my toes.[/private]
Bruce McClure is a writer and DJ based in London. He runs the independent music label Seed Records. He is also a former member of performance art collective Le Couteau Jaune.
