Last week I asked what you’d like me to write next (if anything!) I gave three options, and a comedy fourth option, which I hoped no one would tick. They were:

1. Book 5 in the Rockpools series.
2. A sequel to my first novel The Wave at Hanging Rock
3. A ‘brilliant’ new standalone novel. (I was being hopeful about the ‘brilliant’)
4. The Complete Illustrated History of Dandruff, in seven volumes

The results were conclusive (though you can still vote if you really want to push number 4). They showed that 52% wanted a sequel to Hanging Rock, 27% wanted a new standalone thriller, and 20% wanted book 5 in the Rockpools series. (Only one person wanted the History of Dandruff, but I won’t shame Debbie from Texas by revealing who it was.)

I’m secretly pleased – well not so secretly now – as I’ve been contemplating a sequel to The Wave at Hanging Rock for a while. So here’s some news. I’ve decided to give it a go!

As such I sat down this week to re-read it. I wanted to refresh the story in my mind and check if I’d left anyone alive at the end. Then I got to the ‘Crab Scene’. And that’s what got me writing this to you.

What is the Crab Scene?

I have a very strong memory of writing this scene, Or actually perhaps I don’t remember writing it, as much as the feeling afterwards. It was a nursery day, which meant I got to drop the kids off for a few hours, in which time I’d gulp down a coffee and get some words down, but I had no particular plan what to write (I didn’t plot in advance in those days). And this scene came out. A story-within-a-story, this life-and-death battle (with crabs) which on face value had nothing to do with the story. As I finished the scene, and dashed off to get the kids I clearly remember thinking what a monumental waste of time, I’d let myself get carried away and written utter rubbish. I’d have to rip it out later and redo it. I was kicking myself.

But many months later, when I finally ‘finished’ the book, I left the scene in. And then, when I (nervously) gave the manuscript to friends and family to see what they thought, it was almost always this scene they talked about, and often in a positive way.

So when I got to the scene this week I was curious. Was it awful, as I first thought, or was it actually brilliant, as my presumably rather-biased family thought? Or was it somewhere in between? And something else occurred to me. I can ask you guys again. The ability to get feedback from dozens, possibly hundreds of readers on whether an extract of writing works or doesn’t work, is not something I’d considered doing before, but now I have considered it, it seems so obvious, and so obviously incredibly helpful.

So I’ve clipped the scene out and put it below. It’s 3500 words, or five minutes read, and there’s a survey at the end that will take no more than a minute to fill out. I’m super curious to see how it actually went down, or goes down, with real live readers!

Thank you!

 

The story so far:

Jesse, our narrator, is a fourteen-year-old Aussie kid who was moved to Wales against his will when his father died. He’s now part of a tight friendship with two other local boys who share his love of surfing. But there’s no waves so they’re bored – which leads to one of them showing signs of his growing and dangerous personality disorder…

It was late summer, nearly two years had gone by since I moved to Wales and we were fishing from the pier. We were going for flat fish – flatties we called them cos that’s what they were back home in Oz. We had a couple of crab lines down to get bait. We didn’t fish that often, only when there was nothing else to do, but it was that sort of a day – grey, a bit windy, the ground boggy and soaked from rain. Crabs were easy to catch. First you had to climb down the rusty iron ladder on the side of the pier and twist off a few big juicy mussels from the thick wooden legs, then grab a rock and smash them open until the orangey-yellow meat was exposed, bits of iridescent-blue mussel shell tearing into it and releasing the juices. Then tie that to a line and drop it down. The crabs were quick to find it, you only had to wait a minute or so, and they were so stupid they would hold onto the smashed mussel even when you pulled them up out of the water and onto the pier. Even if the wind caught them and knocked them into the pier legs, the crabs would still try their best to hold on. I didn’t much like the next bit.

It was OK to smash mussels up, I know they’re alive really, but in a way they’re not. Killing them was like smashing a nut or something. The crabs were different. They’ve got little eyes on stalks that watch you, and they’ll scuttle away and hide in a corner if you don’t hold onto them. But fresh crab meat was the best way to catch flatties, and you had to kill the crabs to get it.

Darren was the best at killing crabs. His brother taught him the technique. He was down in Swansea, training to be a vet, and he was a vegetarian. The technique was to hold the crab by the outside of its shell and quickly stab the knife down between the two eyes then give it a little twist. The legs would kick and clatter on the deck for a bit, but you could tell it was dead right away, and once it wasn’t moving it was much easier to cut up, or if it was a little one, to just thread a hook straight through it. Then you could cast it out and although you maybe still felt a little bit guilty, you knew it was out there helping to attract a flattie which you were gonna eat. So that was OK. Even so I was happy enough for Darren to do the killing.

We’d been there maybe half an hour and I’d climbed down to get the mussels and was putting my shoes back on while John and me watched Darren pulling up his crab line. There was one crab on the end, quite a big one, pretty feisty. It was holding on to the bait with one pincer and waving the other in the air like it was warning us to stay back, like it was a dangerous predator or something. With his arms outstretched, Darren swung the line over the side onto the pier decking then gave it a jerk to make the crab fall off. It didn’t have far to fall and landed upright, now with both its pincers waving in the air. Darren used the blade on its flat side to hold the crab in place, while he got in a comfortable position to dispatch it.

“Why do you always do it like that?” John asked, from where he was sitting with his back to the wall.

“I told you. Ben told me to do it this way. It hurts them less.” For some reason John often got a bit annoyed when Darren mentioned his brother.

“Still hurts though, having that knife stuck in your head.”

“Yeah but not for as long. You don’t want them to suffer.”

“It’s only a crab. What does it matter?”

“It’s just better this way,” said Darren. Ben was nine years older than us and only John ever thought to question the wisdom those extra years brought.

“Maybe it makes them better bait?” I said. I’d learnt by then the warning signs for John’s moods, but not how to ward them off. “I mean maybe they release some chemicals or something if they’re in pain that puts the flatties off.”

“More likely to be the other way round if you ask me,” said John, and he scrambled to his feet.

“I mean, think about it. If you’re a flattie, you’re going to want to eat injured crabs in the sea, cos you’re less likely to get pinched on the fin or something, so you’re going to want to sniff out those injured chemicals.”

Darren looked troubled by this. He was still holding the crab down with the knife, the blade bending under the pressure he needed to use, the crab slowly flexing the legs it could still move.

“I think it’s more to do with just not being unfair to the crabs,” he said. “Ben says you should try and make them not suffer.” He made no move to kill the crab. It was like he knew what was coming and was powerless to stop it.

John said nothing but he crouched down low right in front of the crab and stared at it for a long time. Despite its situation it was still trying to eat a morsel of mussel flesh that it had ripped off from the line.

“Doesn’t look too worried to me. Look, it’s still trying to eat.”

We only had two fishing rods, John’s was the best one with a good casting reel. Darren’s was a bit old and knackered. I think it used to be his brothers. Mum didn’t have enough money to buy me a rod.

“I know,” said John, still crouched down in front of the crab. “Let’s test Jesse’s idea. Pull up the other crab line Jesse, get another crab. We’ll put Darren’s injured crab here on one rod and a dead one on the other, and we can see which is better at catching fish.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I protested.

“Yeah it was.” The way John said it was all magnanimous, as if he was too generous to take the credit himself. I wanted to argue but I didn’t. Instead I moved over to the second crab line and tugged it gently. It felt heavier than just the mussel so I knew there was another crab on it. For a moment I considered pretending I hadn’t caught anything, but I felt John watching me.

“That’s it, pull it up,” he said.

I did so and when the bait broke free of the water there was another crab attached, clinging on with its back legs while its pincers delicately fed it morsels of mussel meat.

“That’ll do, bring it up here and kill it Jesse. Darren can injure his one a bit.”

You might wonder – with me saying this now – why didn’t we see John for what he really was back then? Why didn’t we get the hell away? The truth is I don’t know the answer, I’m just telling you how it happened. And it’s not like John was a monster, at the time it felt more like he just hated limits, wherever they were. He would search out our limits and push them, test them, force us to go beyond what we were comfortable with. It wasn’t just killing crabs. It was jumping off cliffs, he’d make us go higher, it was diving down to explore the rocks when the sea was still, and when there were waves it was making sure we were all looking for the biggest one, or the gnarliest one. Whatever we did he was always pushing us, and that felt… I don’t know, intoxicating. He charged the air around him with this charm and energy. We were addicted to just being near him. Because he made us better people. At least that’s what he somehow made us believe.

* * *

“Come on, you can do it. Here.” John often kept a hunting knife strapped to his ankle, and he unsheathed it now, handed it to me. I’d pulled my crab over the pier’s deck now and dropped it down, where it continued to eat, oblivious to its fate.

“You’ve got to do it. If you’re gonna fish I mean.” He settled back on his heels to watch. I’d seen that John’s technique was always much rougher than Darren’s. He would just stick the knife kind of casually into the crab’s back and then attend to his line and hook, or sometimes just chop the crab straight in two and pick one half up to put on the line. I didn’t know which way I was supposed to do it, and felt the weight of the knife in my hand, trying first a stabbing grip, then changing my hand over to more of a cutting action.

“Just stick it in. Come on.” There was a curious look on John’s face, he was watching me, not the crab.

I changed back to the stabbing grip and held onto the crab at the edge of its shell, where its pincers couldn’t reach. I brought the point of the knife down on its back and pushed a little. The shell was too thick to yield and I didn’t have the courage to keep pushing. Instead I looked up at John, to check I was doing it right. He nodded with enthusiasm so I raised the knife quite high and then released it, using its own weight to drop down. That way it was like I wasn’t quite responsible.

It didn’t work, the point of the knife didn’t go in, but the shell cracked a little and some greeny yellow slime oozed out.

“Eeewwy, gross,” said John.

“Kill it properly Jesse,” said Darren.

Kinda horrified that I’d hurt it I turned my head away and brought the knife down again, this time much harder, and then twisted the blade like I’d seen Darren do. I felt the blade crack through the shell and bite into the wood of the decking boards.

“That’s it. Now cut it in half and put it on Darren’s rod,” John instructed me. “Then cast it out, while Darren injures his one.”

I normally didn’t much like threading the hook through, but I was glad of the distraction this time, and like with the mussels, the thing in my hands already felt like a piece of meat, rather than something with thoughts and feelings, not that I knew if crabs had all that stuff. Even so I was glad when I’d cast it out of sight and it sank invisibly into the flat grey water. But Darren still had his crab fidgeting under his knife and he and John both looked at it, although they were thinking different things.

“Maybe pull one side of his legs off,” John suggested. “We could put the hook in one of the leg sockets and out of another one.”

The uncertainty was painted all over Darren’s face. “I don’t know. Ben says you shouldn’t…” he began, but he stopped, knowing that mentioning his brother just wound John up.

“We could pull its legs off after its dead?” he suggested. The crab’s eyes swivelled from one boy to the other, as if following the conversation, as if it knew this was Darren’s last hope.

You could see that John considered this. “In a funny way,” he started, “I don’t think it would mind being used as an experiment. Its death is for something that way. Something important.”

With this the decision was made, and Darren wasn’t going to argue any further.

“You keep holding it down, and I’ll kind of crunch its legs off.” John stepped around and crouched down beside Darren, his knife back in his hand. He poked his tongue out in concentration as he lined up the blade against the side of the crab, and then pushed it slowly down. There was a delicate cracking sound as the steel bit through the outer shell and severed the four legs as one.

“Now let it go, see if it can walk.”

The crab had barely reacted, but finally released from the pressure on its back it made a move to scuttle sideways to the pier edge. Its good side still worked and it was able to make some progress, but the stumps of the legs in its broken side just waggled in their sockets while more green juice oozed out.

“If I was a flattie I’d eat that,” said John, satisfied. He reached for his own rod and easily caught up with the crab. He picked it up and after a moment’s consideration poked the hook into one of the sockets, and forced it through the body until the shiny silver tip reappeared through the creature’s belly. John let it go and it swung out from the end of the rod. He walked a few feet to the pier edge and began to swing the line as he manoeuvred the rod out behind his head. When the crab was at the far extent of the swing behind him he cast it forward, pointing the rod out to sea. The crab flew out into the air behind the lead weight, the whole assembly seemed to hover briefly as its momentum carried it away, and then it plopped into the water and John’s reel fell silent.

“There. Now we’ll see which works better.” John settled the rod against the handrail and sat down with his back against the stone wall.

No one talked much for a while. It sometimes took ages to catch anything, and sometimes we didn’t catch anything even if we fished for hours. We had a few more mussels, but I didn’t want to catch any more crabs for a while and I could see that Darren felt the same. Instead we watched the two rod tips, waiting to see which one would twitch first.

“Fishing is pretty boring,” John said after about fifteen minutes had passed.

“Yeah,” Darren agreed. You could see the distaste had gone away already. We were back to normal.

“When are we going to get any waves?”

“Dunno.”

Surfing was our fall back conversation. I read somewhere that part of what makes it so addictive is that you can’t do it every day. It can be flat for ages and there’s nothing you can do, just wait and make sure you’re ready for when the waves do come. And all you know is that one day they will come again. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know, but I do know that whatever it was we were doing pretty quickly became boring compared to the thrill of surfing.

“I bet your old beach in Australia has got perfect surf right now,” said John.

John did this sometimes, talked about Australia, or about other places he’d read about in the magazines. The way he talked about them was like they were somehow nearly within reach, the sort of place we might go to for a holiday or something. I guess it was because he did disappear every now and then on a holiday, mostly with his mum, he’d come back tanned and full of tales about it, what the pyramids were like inside, or how warm the Caribbean was in February. But it seemed impossible to me by then. I felt like I could barely even remember Australia. I sometimes tried to remember the way from our old house to the beach and I could never do it. I could never quite connect the two. And the beach, that white sand, the azure waters and the lush green of the jungle on the bluff, all that had got mixed up with the images from the surf magazines I binged on.

“We should go there,” John went on now. “When we’re older and we can go places I mean. Or Indonesia, we should go there and explore and find places that no one has surfed before. We should open a bar in Indo. That’d be cool.”

That silenced us all for a while. It would be forever before we were even old enough to drive. Until then we were trapped here. A one-beach town where the waves had to be big enough to push up the Irish Sea before they could get to us. It was a depressing thought. I looked around at the coastline that by then was so familiar. The tide was dropping now and the beach was a thin strip of dirty yellow sand and pebbles, a black line of damp seaweed marking the highest point the water had lapped at an hour or so earlier. There were a few people walking on the beach, and one or two huddled around picnics, mostly families from the campsite. My eyes followed the beach south to where it abruptly met black rocks and above them low orange cliffs. These features curved away out of sight as the coastline took a turn to the south, low green hills visible falling into the sea beyond.

“We could explore a bit more here,” I said suddenly. “For all we know there might be better waves somewhere. Better than Town Beach.”

Darren’s eyes followed my gaze southwards, and when he spoke he sounded alarmed. “No, we can’t go there. You’re not allowed to go there.”

“I know you can’t go there,” I said, irritated. I’d been looking at the estate which hugged the coast to the south of Town Beach. It was private land, some wealthy landowner had miles of it all fenced off. Even the coastal footpath took a detour inland to go around the estate.

“Everyone knows you can’t go there,” Darren said again. “It’s private.”

“Alright Darren,” I said. “I didn’t mean inside the estate alright? I meant, I dunno, like further away, beyond the estate.”

“But how would we get there, it’s miles…” Darren started to say until John cut him off.

“Shut it Darren, you’ve made your point.”

Darren closed his mouth and watched John nervously. I knew how he felt.

John had his eyes looking southwards as well now, where the cliffs at the end of Town Beach disappeared around the small headland.

“It can’t really be that private can it? Not to locals like us.” John said.

I almost protested again. I hadn’t meant exploring inside the estate, but then the truth was I hadn’t not meant it either. I’d lived there a couple of years by then, and the three of us had already explored pretty much everywhere else. We knew Town Beach backwards, we’d walked every step of the cliff path to the north, we knew all the coves and the caves, and where it was best to jump from the cliffs into the water at high tide. But up to then we’d always kept away from the estate to the south. But it was probably only ever a matter of time. If I hadn’t known that before, it was pretty clear from the look on John’s face now.

* * *

John’s rod tip suddenly jumped down, and without hesitation he scooped it up and gave it a sharp upward jerk, then held it in both his hands, feet widely planted. The tip went still and we watched in suspense as nothing happened for a few seconds, then it bent right over and John grabbed the handle of the reel and began to turn it and wind the line in. We never bothered with playing the fish or nothing like that, we’d just use all our strength to pull it in. Darren and I leaned over the handrail watching the water below as whatever was on John’s hook was drawn closer to the pier. He was panting with effort by the time we saw a grey shape underwater pulling the line first one way then the other, then it broke clear of the surface and hung there like wet washing on a line, just giving an occasional flap. It was a big flattie, a really good size to catch from the pier. He hoisted it over the handrail and jumped on it with his knife, severing its spinal cord before removing the hook so that it hardly flapped at all. There was no triumphalism in John’s voice when he spoke.

“I guess that proves it boys. Alive crabs are the best.”

It was probably just luck that made that fish choose the living crab that day, but maybe things would have worked out different if it had gone for the dead one. I don’t know, but I do know that over the next few years, a lot of crabs suffered because of that fish.

 

 

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ps. Not the point of this email but if you want to get a copy of The Wave at Hanging Rock (free in Kindle Unlimited), you can here.