Just Fish - short fiction

Westway is never deserted, even at three-fifteen in the morning. You’ve driven up from Brixham, four hours on empty motorways, but London roads are never empty. The squad cars are bored, one has decided to tail you.

            The ice is melting.

You’re travelling at a steady thirty-eight, the limit is forty. Your lights work properly, some other things don’t, including the refrigeration. That shouldn’t interest the police. But the blue light flashes in your wing mirrors.

Weeeooooooow, weeeeoooow.

    The ice is melting.

They are beautiful, these fish. Mackerel glisten, shimmer in a hundred shades of green and gold between gloss black stripes. Herring pour from tray to tray, a priceless cascade of silver, tainted gut red, some crushed by the weight of their companions in the bowels of the ship. Skates flap wings one final time and the majestic cod flicks a huge head, in death its silvery sheen and snow-white belly will bland to grey.

Weeeooooooow, weeeeoooow.

                The ice is melting.

The Atlantic Ocean surrendered their lithe, goggle-eyed grace to the net, the gaff, the ice packed hold. Trawlers gathered around the jetty like remora around a welcoming shark, unloaded their cargo. Trays of dead and dying fish surged along the rollers, a mechanical death rattle to agonised gills fighting for water in the cold, arid air.

‘Is this your van, sir?’ Menacing tone, a torch deliberately shone in your eyes.

‘Yes, officer.’

        The ice is melting.     

‘Going somewhere nice are we, sir, at three o’clock in the morning?’

‘Billingsgate.’

If the ice melts too fast, these exquisitely streamlined creatures will not be fresh. They’ll be rejected by fishmongers, restaurateurs and go for cat food; all that beauty and death for the delectation of the city’s pampered moggies.

‘So your van’s just full of fish fingers, is it?’

‘Fresh fish.’

‘Right! Have you got sole, or are you floundering?’ He’s a right joker, this cop.

        The ice is melting.

‘Would you like to have a shufti, officer?’

You open the back of the van. Semi-frozen water slops onto the policeman’s feet as he stands too close to the rubber seal when it sucks free of the door. He steps back, swears. The other policeman takes the torch, shines it in. A thousand golden, alien eyes glint, a million perfect scales glimmer. Striped Mackerel, they have clouds named after them, the mackerel sky you see at the end of a long, clear day. The humble herring, destined for kippers, rollmops and fertiliser, swirl in the water like smoke, seals and whales make no impression on their numbers, only man does that. Giant codfish were kings of the northern oceans, once.

‘Just fucking fish,’ says the cop with cold, wet feet.

‘Yes, officer. Just fish.’

‘I like fish,’ says the cop with the torch.

You give him two glossy mackerel, wrapped in yesterday’s Metro, so you can get on to Billingsgate.

The city’s cats will go hungry, tonight.