Off Lizard Point

by Gilli Fryzer  

KNIPE CROUCHES OVER CRATES in the dull half-light, sorting bait. The fleet has sailed ahead of him this tide, every boat hell-bent on lifting mackerel off Tater-Du.

The man threads his hook and lure, unhurried. He has his own run fixed in mind, the deep waters off Lizard Point where the currents run contrary, where he can do what he needs and be gone before the other boats catch on, or the daytrip boys have even rolled out of bed.  

The Annie-Lou tugs at her mooring.  

A whistle cuts through the rattle of rigging, piped so sharp that a mackerel hook stabs deep into flesh. 

‘Fuck it.’  

Knipe sucks his torn thumb clean, looks up. Curlew heading inland, six sleek birds scudding high above Old Quay. Da would’ve moored up tight at that, but then he was a superstitious git. Knipe checks the anchor chain, wrench in his good hand.  

‘Morning, skip.’ 

Marius, rattling down the harbour ladder.  

Annie-Lou rocks as the deckhand jumps the final rungs, grabs Knipe’s shoulder to balance himself. His grip is as lusty as ever, his gaze its usual vacant blue.  

Steroid shoulders, crabby legs. What women see in a prick like Marius is a mystery to Knipe. 

‘Get a shift on, you lazy sod.’ Knipe un-cleats the stern line and swings it over. ‘Fish don’t catch themselves.’ 

Marius throws his arms wide and the rope slaps across his boots. 

‘Not on me, skip, God’s truth. My girl, she say oh, Marius don’t go, come back to bed, giving me all her oh baby this and baby that. I take her fresh catch last night; she cook it up for me lovely.’  

Knipe stows the wrench inside his jacket. Marius stoops over to release the bow rope, his shoulders shaking. ‘Is easy with lobster.’  

Knipe rolls a tobacco twist one-handed as he eyes the other man. Two hundred pound or more of cocky Belgian shite. Brexit should’ve sorted it all out by now, the bloody lot.  

‘Catch more crabs than lobster, the way you go on,’ he says, flicking the match overboard. Marius laughs again, carries on coiling rope with easy swings. 

Knipe winces at his reflection in the wheelhouse glass, as jaundiced as the sky. He takes a long drag, sucking until his eyes water, as if he’s a lad with his first smoke, as if this is the most alive that he will ever be, here in this wheelhouse with the fishing still ahead of him, with his throat burning and death hanging on his say-so, like always.

He’s fished these waters since he was a kid, knows what’s out there waiting for him. Six miles offshore, those French and Belgian fuckers, lined up on the territory edge, trawling more than their fair share and sod all ever done about it. Newlyn’s fleet this morning, marking the lighthouse at Tater Du and thinking they’ve beat him to the best of the catch for once. And with luck, a shoal of mackerel off Lizard Point, looking to feed.  

Back home Carrie will be getting the little one breakfast, mashing pilchards in a pottery bowl. Mad, that. Not eight months, and the kid already has the taste for fish.  

Marius takes a leak off the stern, hosing steam into the dawn.  

‘Proper job, man.’ The deckhand tugs up his oilskin. ‘That English beer for you, mind. Horse-piss, in and out.’ 

Knipe takes a hard drag to finish, rollup pinched between finger and thumb. How would that prick know a good pint, the watery shit his lot pass off as beer? Or pissing, for that matter. How cruel taking a simple piss can be, how its slow dribble makes you whimper like a dog on the bathroom floor. What it means when your balls have been irradiated to a crisp and you’ve nothing to crawl back to but her cold shoulder in the silent hours.  

Knipe tosses his butt after the match.  

‘Let’s go.’  

The engine fires first time. Sorting the future, what this run is all about. A lungful of diesel fumes to chase the tobacco, the sting of salt spray to smack the pain back down a bit. The kid in his cot a few hours ago, lifting fat little arms up to you, waiting on his dad to come home.  

You shall have a fishy, on a little dishy… Nothing else matters. That blue-eyed boy. 

* 

Plumes of spray shower fat seals bellied out across the rocks. Guillemot slap and squabble, their shrieks carrying towards the boat. Somewhere above the Lizard’s head, incoming curlew whistle again. Knipe steadies himself, turns bow on in deep water, one eye fixed on the sounder. Marius crouches over the gunwale, readying lines.  

The sounder picks up one mark, then quickly another. The rocks stretch into the currents, reaching seawards for the boat. Knipe throttles back easy, lets the Annie-Lou settle herself now, catch the drift. Marius is quick to drop a line, away to set a second even as the weight sinks the first line deep. Knipe takes a third line to bow-end, silent as the feathered lures are swallowed by the dark water. Marius lights a rollup and starts to jig the first line. He begins humming, and the smoking twist of tobacco dances on that fleshy lip. 

Knipe props himself astern, stares down through flickers of green sunlight. The topmost lures flutter just beneath the waves. A flash of silver shows itself, a glimpse of belly that rolls and is gone. Those whistling devils are right to curse him. Here is as good a place as any to end it, with only the empty waves to face, and the blind rocks watching.  

His old man taught him to fish, to just crack on with the job. ‘Wake up, set to before they all bugger off.’ Summer of ‘86, that was, back when Cornwall’s waters boiled with fish.  

‘Not a bite.’ Marius wipes a forehead beaded with spray. ‘Maybe seals have had the lot.’ 

‘Deeper,’ replies Knipe.  

He is watching the fast-moving current, calculating the fall of a dead weight, the offshore drift.  

1986 brought his first pollock, too; one glazed eye fixed on him as he prised the hook clean from its gullet, and then an unholy face-slap as the fish bucked straight out of his grasp and back overboard. His father, pipe wedged between broken teeth. ‘So next time you’ll hold on, make a proper job of it.’ 

The fish are moving deeper. Knipe feels their wariness. They need the chase, to feel the competition. 

Make a proper job; Da had that right.  

Lizard Point looms green, its serpentine flank varicosed by ancient veins. Knipe moves the boat slowly on, eases back to let the lures wriggle.  

The boy must have something after his dad’s gone; a Cornish name on his shoulders to fish from Falmouth to Portreath. Won’t be mackerel to speak of by then, though. Even with that minister’s say-so, the one that drove down here in his shiny Government motor to promise us all a kingdom of fish, straight after our vote. Right here he stood, on this plundered fucking coast. 

Someday it’ll be the boy’s turn to carry his first catch up for weighing. Would’ve been good to stick around a bit longer, teach the boy a thing or two; how a stone lizard can light fire in a cuckold’s belly, about church-bells that peal under the waves, and whistling birds that snatch up the souls of the damned. That there ain’t nothing to a smooth-talker in a fancy car, except you can bet your last worm he ain’t a fisherman.  

Marius jigs the lines again, up, and down, playing with the depth.  

Got to make a Cornishman of the kid. It’ll be up to Carrie by then, though. But there’s the Annie-Lou too. Not much to leave the boy, but something.  

The shoal bites. Skipper and deckhand work together, easy swings of the arm, elbow cocked, wrist high; tugging each line hard onboard, a practiced flick that strips silver crescents from hooks, sends agate green stripes flapping onto the deck. That’s how it goes. Flick, strip. Life, death, over and over. A wife and son, the most a man can lay a claim to, all you will leave behind; the future tied to what happens out here on the water, here in the slippery present, the blood-flecked twitch, the final flicker and finish.  

Nothing to guarantee the boy but his Cornish name, nothing left to lose.  

Marius tosses the last mackerel onto ice and sets another set of lines in place. One chance to make a proper job of it. Knipe pulls a beer from the ice crate, cracks it open. The Belgian works for it, he’ll give him that, at least.  

‘Beer?’ 

‘This is living, innit, skip?’ Marius drops onto the gunwale. ‘Mackerel biting like crazy, nice cold beer.’  

The deckhand tips his head back and drains the bottle in one. He sits easy, spreading his skinny legs apart. ‘But lobster, that always the king of fish for me.’ A thin foam of beer clings to his moustache. 

Knipe wipes condensation from another bottle and passes it across.  

‘Here.’ 

It’s not the little one’s fault, any of this. Not the baby’s doing, the time Knipe walked up from the harbour to find Carrie bending over the back step, chucking her guts up into the garden drain. His own tea dumped on the kitchen table and another fucking lobster snapping its claws in the sink.  

Knipe stands up and reaches into his pocket. The dead weight of the wrench, enough to take a body down.  

‘Yeah.’ Marius takes the beer. He’s watching the new lines, waiting for a bite. ‘King of fish, my friend.’ 

Could even be it was a king, that last one. Blacker than hell and pie-crusted in barnacles.  

‘Some friend,’ says Knipe. ‘I don’t fucking eat it.’ The wrench sits cold in his fist. ‘Brings me out in a rash.’  

It was Carrie’s bent neck, pale between the twin hanks of her bleached hair, that got to him. The cool stretch of her skin, how it taunted him with all the times he’d tried and failed, all the hours he’d spent crouched over that toilet in the dark, wondering if what remained of him even counted as a man. It was then, standing behind his wife in the half-dark with his grip already closing, that he’d understood exactly what sort of man he was, what would come all too easy to him if he let it. 

He’d lifted her hair instead and held it sideways as she threw. She’d looked him in the eye although he wasn’t ready for her to do that yet, a thin stream of yellow bile drooling from the corner of her mouth. And then she’d shrugged. 

‘I’m sorry.’  

He’d dabbed her chin with the dishcloth and tipped his tea into the bin. In the end he’d dropped the lobster into the mop bucket and chucked it back off the harbour wall. Useless old sod, off to snap its claws someplace else.  

Marius jigs the new line some, his attention on the bright lures just below the surface. The wrench cracks the back of the deckhand’s head like an egg, sends him face down across the stern bilge. 

‘So, tell me, what the fuck did you think were you doing?’ Knipe is conversational, legs braced against the swell as he rolls the other man over.  

Marius drags his hand in front of his face, stares at the blood running across his palm. Clumps of hair cling to his wet fingers. 

‘Wha’ the…do wha’?’ 

‘Pissing over my doorstep, you fat bastard.’ 

Marius claws at the gunwale but before he can drag himself up Knipe strikes again. An eye socket splinters like lobster claw. The deckhand crashes backwards against the timbers, helpless as an upturned crab.  

Air bubbles from his throat.  

‘How did I know?’ Knipe rocks onto the balls of his feet. ‘Because I fucking can’t, that’s how.’  

Marius’s forehead creases into bloody furrows. Pink foam erupts from his nose and eye socket, drips onto his chest. A wavering hand flutters upwards, then drops. 

Knipe squats in front of the unconscious man. He lowers his mouth close to a bloodied ear, speaks slow and careful. 

‘And because you left more than just that fucking lobster behind, you piece of trawler shit.’  

The undamaged eye is fixed, glazed as a pollock on ice. A trickle of urine seeps from the oilskin, falls away into the bilges.  

You shall have a fishy when the boat comes in.   

‘You, me,’ says Knipe, hauling the slumped man upward, ‘and this fucking country. We’ve all pissed our last now, one way or another. Made a proper job of it.’ 

* 

The lines tug hard against the current, Annie-Lou pulling at her anchor. Knipe strips another line, sends more mackerel flapping across the empty deck. Fight for every goddamn fish, that’s what he’d teach the boy, hold that slippery bastard tight until the last breath has gone; even when you know your own line is running out empty, if that’s what it takes to bring the catch home, if that’s what you must do to win. Don’t let no-one sweet talk what’s yours away from you.  

What else is there to teach a man’s son but that? 

oOo

Gilli Fryzer is a writer from Kent currently seeking representation for her debut novel. A runner up for the VS Pritchett Prize 2024, her story A Kindness won the 2020 Mslexia Short Story Prize and was translated into German for an anthology of modern European folk tales. Her fiction also appears in the 2022 Bath Short Story Award anthology as well as various other anthologies and journals. One of The London Library’s Emerging Writers 2021-22, Gilli holds a prizewinning creative writing MA from Birkbeck College, University of London.

Learn more at www.gillifryzer.com.