Scareduck

Four months I've been abroad. Brittany. I've not picked up a word of the language. Neither of them, neither Breton nor French. They're all spits and trills that I just don't have in me. Nothing like one another, though.

An old lad with a bit of English gave me a job as I got off the boat, Godsend, I thought. He gave me two days off per month, fourteen hour shifts and peanuts as renumeration.

Remuneration, sorry.

There are some positives. I’m a long way from home. And I’m brown as a berry. Although I've a diamond of new moles on my chest that are cause for a bit of worry. Worried I might die of something, I suppose. There's a joke, if you like.

The hours are madness, they follow the moon. Low tide, four in the afternoon yesterday, for example. A man called Martin drives the amphibious boat down the slipway and the tourists and local walking club stop and stare at us.

A young lad with his wetsuit unzipped almost indecently low lies on his side on the deck. Myself and the starers admire him just the way he likes it. Six asymmetrical abdominal muscles that tremble when the wheeled boat judders towards the sand. A lean and narrow chest with tiny pointy nipples. Hairless as a marble man.

I pretend some of that admiration is for me, that it gets divvied up for all the crew. But my musculature is well hidden under fat and sensible workman's clothing.

Thanks to the young lad’s radiant sex appeal, the dramatic angle of the boat going down the slipway, I feel proud like a whaler or a pirate, like I'm something special, or a small hand in something special. A wooden leg or a hook, even.

People look at the good-looking lad but they also look towards the noise of the machinery, there's usually fear in their eyes. We could squash them with our big boats, roll right over and drive into the sea with the turning tide, the bodies would wash away under us and out towards Guernsey.

Only four of us on our barge. A tight crew, tight knit, you might assume. No. I haven't spoken a word to any one of them, yet. Not even the skipper. Well, once, but I mostly used my hands to ask for a sup of water. The language is a source of anguish. I'll never get it and no one wants to be spoken to in English.

Least of all me.

Maybe the other three are close, thick thieves, I don't know. They seem to tease and bully each other constantly, they make rude hand shapes and sometimes shout.

The skipper is middle-aged, in the traditional sense. Grey and way past his prime. The young lad is living his glory days and loving it. He sometimes catcalls women in sunhats walking their dogs and fears no repercussions, he's too pretty.

You're wondering why he doesn't catcall women in bikinis, or topless women, women on show.

This is not a bikini kind of beach. This is a farmland of saltwater and sand. Seven square kilometres of mussels. Little elliptical dark blue shells that open like books and hold this orange, mindless meat inside.

Myticulture they call it; maybe I have learned something. It's just wooden stakes wound with thick rope. Miles and miles of black wooden stakes embedded in the foreshore of the bay. Wound with thick rope and that’s where the mussels grow.

The old lad explained it to me and printed out an a4 sheet with an Artificially Intelligent translation of some key words I didn’t even recognise in English.

The eggs are like plankton, one tiny girlmussel makes millions of them. The eggs altogether are called spat. Well, no, they become spat once the eggs are stuck on the ropes by their beards. And then in a year you have a few centimeters long mussels covering the ropes, the stakes. You harvest them and you can eat them in restaurants by the bucketful.

I don’t eat them. I had a taste on my first day, most disgusting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. A heap of them, shells more brittle than cockles but more beautiful, still. Countryside nightsky blue patterned with sand stars and galactical stripes. But my word, the insides.

Slimy, slippery, salty, warm. They’d been doused in white wine and parsley. The French fries on the side were lovely. But why does anyone eat these? Enjoy them, even. The folk here are mad for them.

It’s a simple job so I like that about it. Our boat has a big crane on its back, a kind of cylinder pincer that drags the ropes off the wooden stakes. We’d pull up about six tonnes a day. I think when the season changes we’ll be winding the ropes and doing oddjobs but for now we’re harvesters. We follow the tides and are admired by the tourists, the sun burns my skin, bleaches and thins my hair. Or maybe I’m just going bald with time.

The old man beckons to me when we drive back up and unload our tonnes and tonnes of mussels onto the warehouse floor. He doesn’t smile, not at me at least. He has a small office room at the front where he manages contracts and complaints and gives me my pay from a strongbox on the desk. I’m told to sit in there and he sits across from me.

I ‘ave problème.

He knows he should say “a problem” but has no desire to speak English correctly. The Irish have the same inclinations, I realise.

Tell me about it.

I keep my sentences as straight and clean as I can but that’s actually more difficult than it sounds. I raise my voice against the steely roar of engines outside. I'm nervous whenever I speak in this country. Or any country, maybe. How was it before?

Fucking birds. Zey eat mussels. First, it is seagull. Silver seagull. Zey are still problème. But now also macreuse.

He scowls and holds up a palm in my face. Wait, he means. He pulls out an ancient iPhone and looks up a word. The phone speaks to me twenty seconds later

SCOTER.

I don’t know what that is, I say to him and shake my head and make that kind of doleful frogface that makes people look apologetic.

He taps at the phone with an index finger and a minute later turns it towards my face. A blurry j-peg is there of a black bird sitting on the water. It has mysterious white markings before its orange beak and eyes like marbles. It is a seaduck, harmless and lovely looking.

Yes, I see them sometimes when the tide is in.

I walk the coastal path alone as a hobby, there are miles and miles of cliffs to do. I’ve heard tourists complain of the eyesore the mussels stakes make. From above they are rows upon rows of black pinpricks in the sand. Actually as far as the eye can see. When they aren’t hidden by the tide, the turn of the moon.

The cliffs harbour kestrels and herring gulls. I sometimes see kittiwakes and guillemots. I’ve learned their names from signs dotted along the path. The signs have English translations included. I don't know how to pronounce guillemot. Or kittiwake.

It’s problème, big fucking problème, the old lad says.

Why?

Zey eat! he shouts at me, face going baby blue with fury. Zey eat my moony, more zan ze fucking seagulls.

He means money but he says moony. I understand, so it's fine. But I don't know why he’s shouting at me about this.

‘Ave new job for you.

Ah.

Gardien.

The word sounds like guardian, sounds impressive. A word for superheroes and angels. Fantastic. The old lad kills my reverie with his iPhone.

GUARD.

You want me to protect the mussels from these ducks?

What’s ducks?

The scoters.

What’s fucking scoters?

The bird you showed me. The black bird that eats the mussels.

Yes, of course! You don’t go on boat now. I give you less moony per hour, but more hour, so you ‘ave more moony end of week, okay ?

This is disappointing. I’m quite tired, I don’t sleep regularly or soundly. The heat chokes. The loneliness… Ah, it could be worse, you might say.

Okay, I say.

I still follow the moon, but now I go alone. The moon’s neverending pull dictates my days, my nights. When the sea flees from the bay and the mussels are exposed to elements and scavengers, I must be there to run about and wave my arms and be a terror to the invaders. I wear a bright orange jumpsuit so the ducks recognise me. I wade even as the tide flees back to land and sometimes do my job right up until the saltwater rises up above my shoulders and I think I might let it take me. The birds laugh at me, they dive fearlessly at hightide and steal mussels from under the water. There is nothing a man can do. The wooden stakes have little skirts, I learned. I have learned much and nothing. Little white skirts to prevent crawling creatures from climbing up and devouring the mussels. I saw a lobster this morning bypass the skirt, clamber around it with the grace of an ape. It should have been impossible. These things are supernatural. Up slowly it went for a long nibble. I was afraid to touch the thing. While I was looking at it a pair of birds laughed behind my back, one black, one white. They cackle and caw. I keep at it, follow the moon.