Massing over the pier as we approach is a great swarm of seagulls fighting over a fish head.
They are big, aggressive animals, and we are intimidated. These birds are particularly large and sleek, fat on rejected catch and restless with easy living. This, and not hunger, is the source of their bickering, which we at first mistook for a bitter struggle. After one of the flock, appearing to emerge triumphant, drops the fish, it is only to begin the fight all over again once another bird picks it up. This bewildering performance is repeated several times before we understand that the gulls are not hungry, only bored. The point is driven home by the boxes of fish, left open and with their contents exposed to the sky, at the end of the pier.
After the pantomime bloodlust of the seagulls a more eerie scene awaits us next to the fish crates. A scatter of dogfish laid out on the granite like murder victims , with their mouths gasping and their gills bloody and eaten out.
The seagulls are not the only wild animals to have gotten fat hanging around the fishing boats. As we pass her on the way back to the road, a woman, another tourist passing through, holds her finger to her lips and gestures toward the stone steps that lead to the sea. There, in the shadow of the dock, is a grey seal, staring up at us with expectant eyes. After a while it sighs deeply and rolls over and out of sight. It’s not long before it’s back again, with a partner hanging like a ghost just beneath the surface. This second animal has a much more plaintive look on its face, and its eyes, staring up through the water, are almost completely black. It looks mad. The bigger one is bulkier, with bloodshot eyes. It seems benevolent enough, but I feel, irrationally I expect, a palpable menace emanating from it for all that it appears from some angles like nothing more than an amphibian hound, dopey and benevolent. I notice its tail fins, pleated like a concertina, mobile and ragged like grasping hands- not at all like the velvety protuberances in illustrations I remember. Webbed, rather than finned, with long grasping fingers of bone between. I am reminded of something I saw in the Cambridge Zoological museum that I, for the moment, cannot put my finger on.
No wonder. The Zoological museum has the old fashioned feel of a public educational facility; it has escaped the careful curatorial attention evident in more well established museums of Science and Natural History. In those places everything is laid out in bite size chunks, with the clearest and most useful specimens on show. They are labelled clearly. The Zoological museum reeks of formaldehyde and under the glass top of every vitrine and display case is a riot of dead matter in various stages of decomposition, decay, neglect. The little cards which explain the name and source for the specimens are printed in different fonts and handwriting. Something bottled a hundred years ago sits next to a plastic cell structure mock up which looks like it was modelled in the seventies by a bored microbiologist. Some of the smaller organisms are pinned under magnifying glasses for better appreciation of the details, the rings, the claws, the mouthparts, the sexual organs. Some are not, and languish, inscrutable, in their plexiglass coffins. Darwin’s collection of stuffed birds are there, and the nightingale with its beak wired open. My favourite are the skeletons.
The first time I tried to visit the museum it was dark, and hours past closing time. But what I and my companion had come, really, to see, was hanging in the car park. The skeleton of a finback whale, already dead when it was washed ashore at Pevensy, has had its baleen teeth stamped back in with metal staples, and wallows by the entrance suspended from wire cables. Behind the windows in the roof of the museum proper hang its cousins, the dolphins and the smaller whales, paused as if in flight, following each other in a circle across the ceiling. You can stand in the yawning ribcage of the finback, arms held out, nipped in the embrace of a great, fleshless chest. Let your eyes stray a little to the side and you can see the cigarette butts, stubbed out on the ground beside it. Even before I went in I had seen the skeletons of the zoological museum, the calcified hulk in the car park and the mysterious boiled up configurations through the windows. It was the sea lion which freaked me out though. The skeleton looked like a man forced into its elbows in a gruesome display of supplication. There was something very enslaved about the sea lion skeleton. And it was this which came back to me, looking at its relative, bobbing in the grey waters of the harbour and contriving, so it seemed to me, to look cuddly. Probably, I thought darkly, it would jump at the chance to up and massacre us all, even that little child there hanging over the railings, fascinated but (rightly) too afraid to come down the steps. Rebecca leaned close to me and spoke in my ear ‘It’s amazing isn’t it, their expressions. But at the end of the day, just animals. They just want a bit of fish’.
A local boy rides by on a bicycle and stops to show us how, with a fish picked out of the crates, he can entice the seals out of the water and a little way up the steps. The boom and swish of the water as the bigger one lunges up out of the sea make us all move back, except him. I wonder how many times he has done this with the passing tourists. At first I thought he might be showing off to us, three older girls gasping and whispering as he gets the animals to do tricks, but he seemed, truly, more absorbed in the task itself, in the seal rather than those who were watching it, even though all the locals must have done this often enough that the seals have grown fat off of it. I wonder if this is his pride, in a small village on the coast of Scotland with terrible weather and nothing to do but ride your bmx up and down the waterside after school. We are silent and respectful while he, never taking his eyes off it, tempts the seal, inch by inch, towards us.
Standing in the cavity of the ribs of the Pevensy corpse was an experience which echoed back to me on subsequent occasions, an experience which, perhaps because I was distracted by the conversation of someone else, I did not predict would have the force and resonance it did. It seemed to me at the time pretty special that it should be possible to position myself inside the skeleton of another animal. I was impressed, in an organic sense, by the size of the creature whose generous proportions, in death, admitted me. I was both fascinated and a bit disgusted by the curiosity of humankind, and also by our strange objectivity when set off against a sentimental regard for animals. That we would happily boil and hang the remains of a corpse, and put it in with the cars, and commit the double sacrilege, curatorial and spiritual, of hopping over the scant barriers surrounding the skeleton and stand inside it. This amazed me. But what I would notice after that time most frequently was our astonishing and apparently unconscious desire to replicate, architecturally, the experience of having been eaten.
Look up in a church of impressive size, or in a high ceilinged gallery. Look up as you walk down a corridor in a place of power, or along, even, an avenue of trees. You will see a processing corridor of ribs, receding behind you and proceeding before you. It must be said that no one has on record been known to have survived the process of being in a living whale, and as such it is only fair to acknowledge that the way it looks to have been ‘eaten’ can only be said to have been produced using the faculties of imagination and perhaps experiences such as I have had, a copy or a mime of the real thing, enacted in a grisly puppet. Of course also it must be acknowledged that the whole reason that ribs, of any size, look like they do, is because the design is one which is structurally sound and can also be seen, inverted, in the bows of boats, the rotting remains of which, found on shorelines, do look like those of a huge and decomposing animal, sticking up out of the sand . Even if ribs were, at one time, an inspiration, it seems fatuous to suggest that the designs of our buildings and our ships reflect a hidden desire to hunker down in the hot insides of giants, to worship in caves of flesh, to explore the seas in great, bobbing, welling bellies. But this is what I have done.
Eventually the boy breaks the spell of desire, and starts chucking the fish into the water. Another of the seals has by now appeared, a much smoother customer than the bullish and the ghostly pair by the stairs. It does flips and rolls in the water, keeping a casual distance and a sharp eye out. Eventually, sighing deeply, they all turn over and disappear into the grey water. I stick my head under the dock where I can hear the wind singing through the brine softened wooden staves. Brown and dark and shadow, interspersed occasionally with the faded neon pink of a buoy. A seagull floats languidly down one of the dark avenues. I bring my head back out into the last of the sunshine and we head back to the hostel to make dinner.
The next day we take our time over breakfast almost miss the ferry and pay for it with a humiliating run towards the gangway, huge rucksacks bobbing up and down and all the other passengers looking on. ‘Next time we remember’ Rebecca says once we are safely on ‘when it says it leaves at ten, it means it leaves at ten’.
Mallaig is part of a larger work in progress.
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