The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work Read online

  ii. A Logistical Journey

  It is impossible to follow fish without an appetite for humiliation. No one wants to open up to writers, who bring in no money and are liable to cause trouble. Even in an era of increased political transparency, businesses remain uninterested in acquiring observers. Attempts to trace – let alone to witness or photograph – how warm-water fish reach our tables are liable to provoke within the industry some of the same suspicion which must have greeted enquiries into the slave trade in the 1780s. I contact fifteen seafood importing businesses. Three of them have the same sculpture of a marlin in the lobby. All refuse to discuss the details of their logistical networks.

  There seems no alternative but to head to the Indian Ocean, hoping to pick up leads on the ground. In Male, the capital of the Maldives, the photographer and I check in to the Relax Inn, whose titular command we find ourselves unable to obey. For the first five days, we encounter nothing but dead ends. To kill time between fruitless appointments, we wander the city, visiting patriotic monuments and mosques. Behind the Seagull Café, we discover a small cemetery dedicated to dead holidaymakers, most of them from Norway, Germany and England. They are commemorated here not because they were unwanted back home, but because their relatives wished for them to spend their afterlives in soil more congenial than that found in their frozen, fog-bound homelands. The park honours not only those who managed to die here but also an equally large contingent who sorely wished to do so but in the end succumbed elsewhere, perhaps claimed by one of the many viruses which haunt the rain-sodden European plains in midwinter.

  Our fortunes change when, after a discussion with a well-connected hairdresser, we secure an appointment with no less a figure than Abdulla Naseer, the Minister for Fish, newly returned from an official visit to the United Nations. Wearing a pair of crocodile shoes, the minister greets us with gravitas, having a lucid awareness of his power, not just over the lives of fish, but of their captors too. After patiently listening to our story, he shouts a few orders to his subordinates in the next room, then offers to introduce us both to a tuna exporter and a group of fishermen in the northern islands. On our way out, he hands us a set of his business cards, allowing us to flash them at anyone who might cause us trouble on our peregrinations around his heavily policed island fiefdom. Unsure of how to pitch my gratitude, I suggest we have tea the next time he is in London.

  We travel to an almost perfectly round kilometre-long coral island, in the second most northerly atoll of the Maldivian chain. From the air, it is easy to mistake the place for a tourist resort, though from close up, it is lacking the requisite water villas, spas and couples from Baden-Württemberg renewing their marriage vows. There are only basic breeze-block huts, emergency water tanks donated by UNICEF, flies, a two-room school funded by a Saudi Arabian mosque and a single shop. We are informed on arrival that our fishermen have been stranded at sea by a broken engine. So we spend three inconceivably long days waiting in a boiling tin hut fitted out with two camp beds and an en suite tap, and reflect on the life of beetles and the sadness of small islands. In temperatures which reach 35 degrees centigrade in the shade, we often squat under a tree on the main patch of waste ground, watched over by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the Maldives, the dictator, poet and Islamist whose portrait stands sentinel, by law, on every one of the country’s two hundred inhabited islands – and who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to my late father.

  At mealtimes, the locals disappear into their homes to fry up a medley of fish, coconut and onions, but as we lack the requisite culinary equipment, we come to rely extensively on the stock of the local shop – whose owner also becomes our only friend, it being hard to find kindred spirits in small communities. We have chocolate biscuits for breakfast, tinned tomatoes and mayonnaise for lunch and ketchup and sweet corn for supper.

  At last, the engine is fixed and we head out to sea. The fishing boat is under the command of captain Ibrahim Rasheed, a thirty-three-year-old father of five whose livelihood depends on his ability to track down and club to death at least fifteen mature tuna in the coming twenty-four hours. Tooth-brushing came late to the Maldives, but the practice has taken hold as firmly as the executives of Colgate-Palmolive could have hoped, thanks in part to a television campaign featuring a shark with vividly gleaming dentition. The tube lives on a shelf in the fishing boat’s combined kitchenette-toilet. At breakfast time, we join the crew in the main cabin for a freshly cooked meal, our first in many days: miruhulee boava (octopus tentacles) followed by an invitation to chew a bunch of areca palm leaves.

  After breakfast comes a succession of card games. The tuna below us have a few more hours in which to partake of life on the planet. It should not be presumed from this image that the author is in any way lacking in empathy or bonhomie, or that he would be unable (as is sometimes suspected of intellectuals) to take his place, man to man, amongst a group of illiterate Indian Ocean sailors exchanging anecdotes in an unfathomable Indo-Sanskrit tongue. He is merely in that preoccupied state, of necessity involving a distant gaze and extreme concentration, which often accompanies attempts to control runaway intestinal inflammation.

  For hours we wander the sea without hope. Then shortly after eleven in the morning – dawn in the warehouse in the middle of England – a school of yellowfin tuna approach from the east, swimming in a V-shape, the older, more confident fish on the outside, the younger ones inside. They are moving at fifty kilometres an hour, on their way to Somalia from the coasts of Indonesia. Because they lack a swim-bladder, the cursed creatures have no option but to advance relentlessly; they cannot pause and rest on the current, like the sedate grouper, or they would fall to the bottom of the ocean and die, only growing more attractive to man by their continual exertions, for it is through the life-long flexing of their tails that their flesh grows muscular and hence uniquely flavoursome. A cry goes up on deck. One of the school, by all indications a heavier, older specimen, a veteran of five years of unmolested navigation, has taken a bite at a bait of mackerel. Fifteen minutes later, he announces himself on the starboard side, panicked and enraged, his tail hammering against the boat. Fifty kilos in weight, he is attempting to prise himself free of the cable tearing apart his palate, but he does not count on two men, above him at either end, reaching into the water with steel hooks and flipping him onto the deck with a victorious cry. Pandemonium follows.

  The tuna has never been this far out of the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken, and therefore ruin, the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain’s brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large, blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of a prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna’s eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. There is a dull sound, that of densely packed brain and experience, shattering inside a tight bony cage, triggering the thought that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves. The fisherman is himself enraged now, striking the beast vengefully, cursing the dying creature in Dhivehi: ‘Nagoobalha, nagoobalha, hey aruvaalaanan’ (‘Bitch, bitch, you’ve had it now’). This is the first tuna he has caught in eight days, and there are six children waiting at home.

  Rich red blood explodes from the creature’s brain and sprays across the boat. Two of the younger crewmen rush forward and slit open his mouth, pulling out his gills and ventilation system. Next they turn their knives to his stomach, releasing the undigested bodies of smaller fish – fusiliers, cardinal fish, sprats – on which he breakfasted at the start of this infernal day. The deck becomes slippery with organs. As the killing spree goes on, I find myself thinking obsessively of my elder so
n, four years old and about the same length as some of the larger fish. It is no longer implausible that, as many religions maintain, we are all, in the end, from moth to president, members of the same large, irrevocably fratricidal family. Unburdened of his guts and his reproductive tract, the tuna is hoisted into the air and plunged into the first of four refrigerated compartments, which will, by nightfall, be filled by the bodies of a further twenty of his companions. One wonders what the atmosphere will be like in the school, 60 metres below, as the survivors pursue their way to Somalia; whether there will be a memory of the absent members and, in the pitch-black waters, a terrible fear.

  We arrive at the fish processing plant – which keeps in close touch with British importers and supermarkets. The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets – which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork. Despite cautionary tales from a range of antecedents from Gauguin to Edward Said, I am unable wholly to suppress fleeting images of a joint future with Salma Mahir, the secretary of the owner of the plant, who harbours as many misconceptions about my country as I do about hers. My Maldivian father looks on.

  The boss of the tuna plant, when he finally arrives, is an unexpected phenomenon. In temperament, Yasir Waheed combines the phlegmatic romanticism of a late-nineteenth-century French poet with the carnivorous aggression of a contemporary Anglo-American capitalist. His favourite book, by Bill Zanker and Donald Trump, is Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life. He is just back from an electronics conference in Dubai, where he picked up a Bluetooth wireless mouse for his Apple Cinema.

  The plant’s fish handlers know how to fillet a tuna with machetes in three minutes. All were once fishermen. The sound of one of their knives cutting flesh away from a spine recalls that of a fingernail strumming the teeth of a comb. All are now widowers. Yasir took pity on them after seeing them weeping on the news after the tsunami rolled round the eastern shores of Sri Lanka and swept away their families when they were out at sea. While there are clear medical and hygienic reasons, in the preparation of fish for export, for requiring that plant workers’ facial hair be covered by surgical masks, that the temperature be kept constantly below zero degrees centigrade and that all aprons and other work garments be incinerated after a single wearing, it may nevertheless be a reflection of something more deeply embedded in the Western soul that it is we who have ended up as the unparalleled masters of artificial chilling techniques, of continual hand-washing and of rampant hygienic imaginations.

  Like someone running into an old friend in a strange land, I am surprised and a little moved when I stumble across a reel of bright-orange labels long familiar to me from my local supermarket. With the picture of the fishermen clubbing tuna to death burnt into my memory, I recognise that I am now a veteran of the blood-soaked processes lurking behind the labels’ serene photograph of a fishing jetty and an azure sea.

  There being only so many efficient ways to cut through air or water, the architecture of the plane evokes aspects of the tuna. The Airbus has gill-like air-inlet flaps near its wheels and fins along its fuselage. Even the lower bodies of the two creatures are a comparable piscine grey. One crate is locked in place below rows 3 and 9 in business class, the other below rows 43 and 48 in economy. On the apron beside the London-bound Sri Lankan jet is a Qatar Airways cargo plane, its windows painted out, on its way around the world, bearing post, vegetables, documents and blood samples. The plane was in Tokyo last night and is due in Milan Malpensa tomorrow, one of thousands of freighters which, without any acknowledgement on our arrival and departure screens, pursue their lonely routes around the earth.

  We take off at 8:30 a.m. and head northwest across the Indian Ocean. Outside, to the untrained and unaided eye, the plane appears to be adrift above an unsubstantial, vaporous blue mass, as featureless and disorienting as the sea but, reconfigured through the antennae of the flight-deck instruments (comparable in their abilities to the organic mechanisms embedded in the tuna’s cranium at the spot where the fisherman’s mallet fell), the sky is revealed as a lattice of well-marked lanes, intersections, laybys, junctions and beacon signals. The plane races along airway A418, which runs from the Gulf into southern Iran. Over the town of Shiraz, in a space known to pilots as intersection SYZ117.8, the captain moves across to airway R659, which leads to UMH113.5, a point thirty-five thousand feet above Uromiyeh, the capital of western Azerbaijan, where the Three Wise Men are said to have rested on their way to Bethlehem.

  The cabin crew serve red chicken curry in Economy and a choice of asparagus vol-au-vent or cheese omelette in Business. The skies darken. Occasionally, one catches sight of the very moment when a light is extinguished in a house below. Someone has finished watching television in a living room in Craivoa, Romania, someone in Kalocsa, Hungary, has reached the end of an article in the fashion magazine Nok Lapja, neither of them suspecting the existence of an aluminium missile roaring through the firmament above them. I look at others’ faces and feel sympathy towards them. People stir under their synthetic blankets. If we lived still in the days of ocean liners, we might all be friends by the time we docked at Southampton.

  The plane lands at Heathrow at nightfall. The tuna makes it to the warehouse by two in the morning, revealing nothing to a succession of men in high-visibility jackets about its tumultuous history of aquatic and airborne wandering. The drivers in the warehouse never know at the start of a shift where they may find themselves by dawn. At four in the morning, Ian Cook receives a command from the control room to drive one of the largest of the articulated lorries over to Bristol. The driver has been doing supermarket runs for the last fifteen years. He carries his belongings in a small red bag and has a complicated life, for he has a wife in Lancashire and a friend in Derby. He talks continually on the journey, covering murderers, religious zealots, tax evaders and child molesters, in a monologue whose unarticulated yet nonetheless powerful guiding theme is the decline and eventual collapse of contemporary civilisation. By early morning, the lorry comes to a stop at the back of an aluminium shed in suburban Bristol, on whose aisles the tuna is placed, fifty-two hours after it was first levered out of the aphotic brine of the Indian Ocean.

  The photographer and I crouch in wait behind a refrigerated cabinet, which feels vengefully cold after the torridity of the Maldives. Shoppers amble by, occasionally casting a distracted look at the cuts of the tuna’s flesh. To pass the time, I think back to people we have met along the way. I remember Aisha Azdah, whose job it is to source the tuna’s packaging material. She ordered the plastic trays from a manufacturer in Thailand. One afternoon, we photographed her in her one-room company flat next to the processing plant. On the wall is her wedding picture, featuring Mohamed Amir, a mechanic in charge of the tuna slicing machines made by the Scanvaegt corporation of Denmark. The interest of the photograph seems to hinge on the iron. This is an essay about people who depend on one another and yet have no thought of each other’s laundry. It may be one of the tasks of art in the age of advanced logistics to make sure that Aisha is introduced to Linda Drummond, for in the end, it is she who stops at the fish counter and picks up some tuna steaks for her family’s supper. The photographer and I stand up and explain our story. We tell her about our journey and about Karl Marx’s theory of alienation as defined his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. We ask if we might follow her home. She calls her husband for a second opinion.

  Later that day, Linda’s son, eight-year-old Sam, is unfazed to find two strangers in his kitchen. He hates tuna, but not as much as he hates salmon. He hasn’t forgotten about the wonder of logistics. He knows a lot about lorries and planes. He is also an expert on the world’s oceans, and lectures us as to how the Indian Ocean is not an ideal habitat for fish, on account of its unusual warmth and stillness. He notes that the freezing North Sea suppo
rts infinitely more forms of life, as storms there constantly stir up the nutrient-laden aphotic layer which lies a thousand metres below the waves, and in which the gulper eel, the anglerfish and the vampire squid live. He also makes the ancillary suggestion, less often remarked upon by marine biologists, that our perpetual killing of fish has left the seas choked with an array of pallid oceanic ghosts who will one day gather together to exact terrible revenge on humanity for shortening their lives and transporting their corpses around the earth for supper in Bristol.

  1.

  I became interested in biscuits and one day found myself heading out to the west of London, past burnt-out shops and roped-off demolition sites, to the town of Hayes, the corporate home of United Biscuits, the number-one player in the British biscuit market and its second-largest producer of bagged nuts.

  Through effort and subterfuge, I had secured an appointment with the Design Director at United Biscuits, a man named Laurence (rather than Lawrence, a distinction he repeatedly emphasised). To prepare for my encounter, I had immersed myself in the distinctive literature of biscuits and learnt a range of intriguing facts. I had discovered that the British spend £1.8 billion a year on biscuits, and that the market is technically divided into five categories: Everyday Biscuits, Everyday Treats, Seasonal Biscuits, Savoury Biscuits and Crackers & Crispbreads.