Mr Gregory meets a lobster

I’ve done it now. For a year, I wanted to swim with a lobster – none of your slithery smiling seals or devious laughing dolphins for me. Give me grasping claws, a rough shell and more legs than necessary, and I’m happy. But you need to know why I’m telling you about why fulfilling what sounds like a rather short-term ambition matters. Trust me; you do.

It all started in Sainsbury’s, naturally enough at the fish counter. Every week I would buy a single kipper for Haddock’s late Sunday breakfast. Haddock is a cat. You knew that, didn’t you? No, he’s not mine, but how else would I entice his owner around to see me every week. Haddock would then spend a satiated afternoon asleep on my sofa, until Julie called. Julie. Who would call a child Julie nowadays? It’s hardly the 1960s any more is it, whatever the nostalgia merchants on the telly will tell ‘ee. On telly will tell ‘ee. I like that.

Anyway. Julie was a delight – a happy smiling nine-year-old with only one care in the world on my doorstep. “Have you seen Haddock, Misser Greggy?” she would say, a worried twist playing around her eyebrows. And then she would come in, see the cat luxuriously stretched on my sofa and I would delight as relief washed through her. “Naughty Haddock!” She would say, without any hint of malice or irony, before lugging her barely protesting friend across the road to her house.

For weeks, this routine satisfied us all. Haddock had a few hours respite from his home family, Julie got to know where to find her cat, and I enjoyed her inevitable flush of relief. Only the kipper had cause for complaint, and frankly, after filleting, smoking and freezing I doubt if it had room for an opinion.

Then things changed. I first noticed when Julie started calling me Mister Greggy, then Mister Gregowy, progressing to Gregory just before she stopped using my name at all. At the same time, her distinctive knock on the open door turned into the soulless electronic ring of a bell. I couldn’t think of any reason to relocate the bell any higher up the door frame (it was already pretty high, following a previous bout of tiny pranksters), so I tried to accept that her presence would be announced impersonally. Like the meter readers or that probation officer.

Next, Julie’s older sister came round for the cat. She seemed resigned to collecting it to quell her family’s tears, but she hardly seemed to care about Haddock. She certainly didn’t care about me. Julie used to smile in my house.

Finally, Haddock stopped coming. I saw him around, but he barely looked in my direction, never mind clattering his way through my kitchen window. I saw Julie’s Mum one day. She said Haddock never seems to leave home now they know how much he likes kippers. She said the kippers were Julie’s sister’s idea. I didn’t say where Haddock smelt them first, but I think she knew.

You youngsters look at people like me and think our lives must be empty or just plain strange. Don’t you know that lives fill up in childhood and empty themselves piece by piece? One little incident at a time. You. Sitting there. You don’t know how much a scrap of relief from a child can fill that void where full emotions once reigned free. Yet you judge me.

After Julie and Haddock left me, I found myself spending more time sitting on local walls and benches, watching the world pass. For a while, I found if I dropped some loose change on the pavement in front of me, I could provoke a little flurry of children looking, bending, grabbing and straightening again before counting their luck and their winnings and going on their way. The evident camaraderie between the girls approached relief. Just 70p satisfied. But not for boys. Never for grasping, cut-throat boys.

Then they stopped coming. Or they crossed the street. Same difference. Whatever, as the young will say. Another spoonful emptied from the leaky vessel of my life. There are better things to do than waste money on children’s feeling – even 70p.

The next time I went to Sainsbury’s, Julie’s sister stood behind the fish counter. I didn’t know her. Not at first. Not then. I wanted salmon, but she kept asking if I wouldn’t rather buy a kipper or haddock. I don’t buy kippers any more. Not now. I told her. I did. But she already knew really. Then her supervisor came and asked if anything was the matter, and the air cleared. Except for the fishy smell. There always was a fishy smell. And do you know, I felt that relief again. Right there. In front of her sister’s curling lip and acid stare. As her supervisor (what’s his job title, surely not Head of Fish?) broke the tension, my world shifted a little. And my gaze turned to the lobster.

There was only one. Dead on its bier of ice. Arranged with its claws facing me, defending Julie’s sister. But do you know the funny thing? It had its claws bound with rubber bands. Just like you would see one in a restaurant tank, a gloved prizefighter resting after its final defence. Between Julie’s sister’s mood and me.

It struck me then to ask how much that lobster would have struggled. How much would it fight its own death? How much relief was there in something so cold, so final, so impersonal. Enough. Perhaps more than I could handle. I chose not to ask this aloud.

It took a while to formulate a plan. That’s it. Formulate. That’s what you do to a plan. Formulate then execute. Execute then reformulate.

You can buy scuba kit on eBay, you know. It only fits together one way. And it tells you how in books. You hardly need to speak to anyone. And you certainly don’t need training. That’s for return tripsters. Not for true lobster reliever believers. He-hee.

I chose a windy day. Late afternoon. Early closing. Quiet. No other divers around. Kitted up, I flopped into the water over the harbour wall and swam out into the swell. The books don’t tell you how absurdly hard work that is. I was sweating by the time I was over deep enough water. My salt mixing with the lobster’s world. I had read that all you need to do to submerge is to let air out of your jacket. My pockets were lined with dense, greasy lead bricks. But my tank was heavy with air. Too heavy.

I hated the farty bubbles spluttering from my jacket as I slipped below the surface. As I started to sink, I turned turtle, the tank pulling me down. Looking skywards, past my trail of bubbles spiralling away, and my fins. Not flippers, they say in books. Fins. As in finale. The sun blinked behind racing clouds, and my world shrank and grew fitfully darker. As each cloud cleared the sun, my visibility increased. I was inside a giant soupy lung, coughing seaweed and wheezing fish. Except it was quiet. Blissfully quiet.

At 20 metres down, my body jolted. My bottom hit rock bottom. After a couple of dreamy minutes, looking skyward, I rocked over on to all fours, the air still rushing from the regulator clamped in my mouth. I could barely feel my fingers, but I switched on a torch and stumbled along a trailing rope until I found my prize. There. Facing me in cold animation. Lobster. Potted pugilist. Claws unfettered.

With one hand and a stick distracting her beady eyes, I grasped her back and pulled her free from the pot. She kicked her tail, scrabbled her legs in a cartoon cliffhanger and thrashed her wild claws. But still I held her, and still she held me, with her eyes. Her cold, unforgiving salty eyes.

I smiled. Really. I released my jaw’s grip on the mouthpiece and smiled. I held the lobster over my head, silhouetted in the faded light, and let her go. Release. Relief. It flooded though every cell of my being, and my head swam with the lobster’s freedom.

I was close to death when they dragged me from the water. So they said. But we all are, aren’t we? Only a stupid person needs someone to tell them that. I was whisked to a hyperbaric chamber and pressurised for three days while they cleared me of the bends. Three whole days in a pot. Longer than a living lobster. Even dry chickpeas only take 20 minutes in a pressure cooker.

I asked the nurse how I came to be there, and I’m sure he said I was helicopulated. Flown there when nearly fucked. I like that, too.

The Coastguard interrogation lasted longer. You know. Where did I get the equipment? What did I think I was doing? What do I mean I don’t have any diving qualifications? Was I really diving alone? Don’t I know easier ways to kill myself?

They didn’t understand. They had to let me go. They said I’d done plenty wrong but nothing illegal. The law’s not always an ass.

And do you know? That was over a year ago and the lobster’s relief is with me still. Now. Here. Inside my head. Nitrogen narcosis they said it was – that delicious drunkenness of the darkened depths where lobsters talk and starfish dance. But I know different.

They talked about sanity, but that’s ok. They haven’t seen the iridescent blue shimmering of a lobster’s tail, the Oxbridge coordination of its oarsman legs, or felt the callused carapace. Above all they haven’t talked Lobster. They wouldn’t understand.

Later, for a while, I tried learning about lobsters, but no one could tell me what I wanted to know – what they think, what they feel. The welfare wankers projected their own angst, and the scientists talked serotonin levels. Not one of them had asked a lobster. And I didn’t like their look on their faces. Nor they mine.

They assigned me a social worker. Social Sally I call her, but she thinks she’s Mrs Penhalligan. She calls me once a week and comes round to see me with biscuits. I don’t mention marine life to her. I just say “I’m still feeling a little vulnerable.” And eventually she goes away, leaving her biscuit crumbs and coffee rings on my table.

But I do Google for lobsters. Have you tried it? On the internet. You know. Just look at Google News. There may be over 2,000 entries for lobsters every day. Soon someone will ask the right questions, and then I can talk to them. Phone a friend. Another lobster linguist.

What Social Sally doesn’t see is how that one act of dual liberation – mine and the lobster’s - has refilled our lives. I print the Google News and sit on the walls and benches reading it every Wednesday. A man once joined me. He had with a penchant for prawns, but our crustacean companionship was only short-lived. He sidled crabwise out of my life and never really revelled in language.

I sit there totally absorbed, come rain come shine. Few people disturb my Wednesdays now. They pass - children, girls even – without giving a second glance. Mine or theirs. Even Julie and her scowly sister barely break their stride. I don’t need their approval. I don’t need their attention. Just their oblivion. There is a lifetime of relief in that.