Walking home one late afternoon, I was surprised by the incongruous sight of a mackerel on the pavement. I mean, I’ve heard of times when it has rained fish, but in this country? In Yoro, Honduras, it’s an annual event that’s been happening for centuries, due to the special climactic conditions there. Was this evidence of the shortest of fishy rain showers? A one fish drop? I’ve heard too of mackerel skies. But I don’t think that is where this fish came from. I’m also familiar with roadkill. Again, I can say with some conviction that this fish was not involved in any sort of collision with a vehicle.
I checked for a pulse, but there was nothing doing. I’d have had to fillet it to carry out a proper post-mortem, but blood on its cheek told me this fish had been hooked. It’s mouth was half-open, as if it wanted to tell me something. If only dead fish could talk. I believe it had been moved after its death. But what kind of person would do that and why? Maybe it had fallen from a fish-laden bag or bucket during transportation.. Pelagic (open-water) fish are used to swimming in shoals. It looked so out of place, in the way that only fish out of water can.
‘What are you doing out here all on your lonesome? You should be in a school.
Haven’t you heard of safety in numbers?’ 10 years or so of roaming the ocean, only to end up like this. Outside number 25 St Anne’s Road, in Babbacombe.
I’ve never really looked at a mackerel close-up. They have a particular beauty, which smoking tends to negate. It’s very much a fish of two halves. The top is black tigery stripes atop a base of vivid dark green. A bit Keith Haring, who sounds like another fish entirely. The underside, in contrast is like a silver foil sunset – hence the mackerel sky, maybe. This one’s torpedo straight (rigor mortis?) with a striking forked tail. You almost want to pick it up and fling it at a dartboard. But that would be no way to treat a dead fish.
I can also tell you that it doesn’t take a spratt to catch a mackerel. Lifting a rod up and down with hooks and shiney bits of silver seemed to do the trick the last time I tried. I’d gone fishing with a friend. You’d be about to pull your haul out of the water when a seal would pull everything off your line. It was impossible not to admire their dexterity. I was alright with catching the fish; it was the killing I had problems with. One friend broke their necks; a French friend beheaded them with a sharp knife. I tried the second method and within minutes I had badly torn a muscle in my calf, simply by stepping down 6 inches from one rock to another. Talk about bad karma.
This mackerel was pointing west, towards the sunset. And dare I say it? The sky was turning all sorts of beautiful shades of pink and purple.
I left it there to its fate, knowing that it was a race as to whether it was a seagull or a cat that would stumble first upon this unexpected feast.
Mackerel is high in vitamin B12, which is essential in the function of cats’ immune, nervous and digestive systems. The word mackerel, now largely out of use, has meant both prostitute and pimp. In the sixteenth century, a pimp’s services were called mackerelage, which rhymes with sacrilege.
Fleetwood Mac(kerel) were originally a group of fishermen and fishwives, who sang sea shanties in the north-western port they fished out of, before they ditched their style for something more raunchy. Some say that without Fleetwood Mackerel, there would never have been Fisherman’s Friends.
That’s something to chew over.