‘You wouldn’t blow the city up. You’d just shower it in snow,’ the Lead Man said.

‘The city is a mewling infant.’

‘The city, the city.’ The Moroccan’s clipped-sharp singsong sound.

‘Take, take, take. Imagine how much there’d be to go around. If the cities were just . . . pwff. If they were all just popped, like the bladders on seaweed.’

‘He has a point.’

‘He has an illness.’

The Icelander said, ‘Pass me more bread.’

Behind the boat, the calved berg waited to be towed away, a passive shadow thrown before it on the water.

There was a sense of unrealness to it. Perhaps because it was hard to believe the ice, that looked so fresh and newly formed, was a thousand years old.

~

‘Check the specimen drags,’ the captain said, and the two men on rota went to it.

‘There’s never anything,’ the Moroccan complained, he and the other hauling the heavy seine, hand over hand. The light plankton net already lifted, draped there by their feet.

But when the net came up there was a fish as thick and long as a man’s arm.

A pale subdued gold, the colour of early-morning light on soft flat water. A surprising whisker on its chin.

The fish was inert in the net, placid, and, they assumed, dead. Heavy and arched as if in a hammock.

But as they went to lift it, it flapped. They screamed like girls. A sudden life was in its eyes; some internal energy switched on; and at once it became like a pennant snapping and curling in the wind. Chewing at the air.

When they got it on the deck it stilled again, but for its mouth, small rhythmic gasps, as if it counted down silently the last moments of its life. It thudded once, with a sound on the deck like the thwack of wet rope. Then its counting seemed to slow.

It was the first large fish they’d caught.

‘Shall we enter it into the record?’ the crewman asked.

‘Fetch a knife,’ the captain said.

~

The guts slid from the incision as if in surprise; blood that was almost black leaching over the deck. The men now were like children as they watched.

It did not seem possible the guts had been contained within the fish. They came out in handfuls of alien shapes and colours that seemed to bear no relation to the lithe thing lain there split now at their feet.

They did not know, the captain nor the men, to keep the milts, nor liver. The insides hit the water like a jellyfish.

‘Do we leave the head on?’ someone asked.

The captain said they did.

The head now seemed disproportionate. Like the outboards on the RIBs.

They could cut the fish up and fry it in the small pans they had. But this did not feel right.