Trawler (10 page)

“Some say you shouldn’t go out to the fishing-grounds with the knot tied, only at the last minute should you tie the knot… others the opposite … and so on.” Luke stood up and swung himself round into a small room to our left.

I stood up too, holding on to the steel door-jamb, and looked in: it was a changing-room of sorts, full of shelves and hooks, and in the left-hand corner was a perfectly normal, an absolutely ordinary white domestic washing-machine.

“Some boats I’ve been on—the man who ties the cod-end knot won’t show you how it’s tied: because there’s a risk the magic will be lost if the secret is told. Nuts!” Luke was bending down beneath a shelf to the right, several coils of black electric cable over his right shoulder, trying to force a plug into a socket. “One skipper collecting data for me wouldn’t have thirteen anything. He was keeping records for me—and the haul-numbering took a bit of figuring out to start with—he’d write a series: eleven, twelve, fourteen, fifteen; or sometimes eleven, twelve, twelve plus, fourteen. Nuts!” Luke handed me a battered brown clipboard. The top sheet of graph paper, clamped beneath the rusted clip, was stained with engine oil. “Take that please… Now let’s see …” He reached up and pulled a 3-foot-long rectangular black metal box from the shelf level with his chin. “Scales—the latest! For weighing fish. They lent me these in the lab. But I don’t think they’ve been tried on
trawlers.
Or at least, not in January, not in a storm like this … It’s OK. Don’t worry. I’ve got an old-fashioned one too, as a back-up. Let’s see … we’ve got ten minutes or more, while the boys shoot the net for the next haul.”

And as he spoke the main engines started up, vibrating the ship, vibrating my spine.

“Come on, we’ll set it up here.” He stepped across to a flat steel shelf beside a conveyor belt which divided the cavernous fish-room into two: a steel-sided, steel-grilled trackway that led
from a tall, round, stainless-steel table (down to our left) to a closed hatch at my feet. A slosh of seawater, shin-high, washed across the dark brown swollen slippery wooden floorboards with each roll and, as the ship bent shuddering over to port, a part of the wave of slush and foam ladled itself out via the half-open drop-gate of the port scupper. As she rolled further over and down, fresh white seawater powered in, to toss and curl, as the ship righted herself, straight across to starboard, to repeat the process. “Grand!” said Luke, switching on his scales (a red light appeared to the left of the long calibrated dial). “Magic! It works—even in seas like this!” The steel ceiling of the fish-room was a confusion of pipes and cables (some encased in steel tubes, some simply slung and looped); strip lights; fuse boxes. The stainless-steel sides of the hopper occupied about one-fifth of the space, down in the left-hand corner, and from it another shorter conveyor belt led up to the circular rimmed table. To our right, to the right of the bulkhead door to the galley, lay a wide-diameter ribbed tube, an augur of sorts, a length of giant gut. Directly aft, at the end of the rectangular cavern, another open bulkhead door let dimly through to the net-deck, where the big winches for the bridle stood back-lit by the early morning light streaming in from the stern-ramp, from the bright surface of the heaped-up, following sea.

“Now, I’ll need three or four baskets,” said Luke, “for random samples, a selection of every species we catch. That’s good—those three over there” (he nodded towards two red and one black plastic dustbin-sized baskets, roped to a pipe against the sides of the hopper). “We’ll pinch those. And that one.” (A red basket, to the other side of the main conveyor, against the far wall.)

“I’ll get it,” I said, handing him the clipboard.

Intending to clamber over the 3-foot sides of the conveyor, I began to try to hitch up the civilian trousers beneath my oilskin trousers (there seemed to be so many belts and braces and rubber straps; and the whole outfit was so uncomfortable; and it was so difficult to keep everything up around a moving flop of stomach when the world would not stay still; and besides, my boxer shorts,
long ago half-shredded by jungle mould, had now decided to give up altogether and to drop, dying, around my knees). And then, for the second time—and once again, so gently, without warning, so slowly—I was weightless, I was airborne. The conveyor belt passed beneath me; someone shot me in the left shin; the travelling wave of froth and foam came curling up to wash over me and to leave me, splayed out full length, against the rusty plates of the port side of the inner hull.

“Wow!” said Luke, as, half getting to my feet, I was slung back across the floor to the side of the conveyor. “You flew!” he said, helping me over it. “You flew! I told
you—stand at right angles to a roll. Never
face right into it.” And then, as I held on to the side of the circular table, he said, marginally more sympathetic, “Are you hurt?” He stood to my left, a basket in either hand, just as if he was about to go off and do something sensible, like, say, picking up potatoes, in some thoroughly stable, reliable, muddy field.

“I’m not sure,” I said, confused, fumbling with my boot and socks, rolling up my two pairs of trousers. “I nearly broke a leg.”

Luke laughed. It was a kindly laugh—the merriment, I reflected ruefully, of a lifeboatman who’d seen it all, real injuries, who’d probably pulled sailors from the sea with no legs left at all.

“It’s nothing,” I said, inspecting a three-inch gash, horrified by the volume of blood running down into my socks. “It’s a scratch.”

“It’s a 3-inch surface cut,” said Luke. “No problem. Not worth dressing. You caught your leg on the edge of the conveyor. I saw it all. You flew! But you’ll be amazed—cuts like that, even proper cuts, they heal so fast. It’s the salt, I suppose. It’s not like your jungle. There’s no infection. No land bacteria can survive. Out here—everything heals.”

Luke took my arm. “Stand here,” he said, positioning me on the starboard side of the circular table, a few feet from the wall of the hull. “Stand on this box” (an upside-down fish-box) “and wedge yourself in against this” (one of the stanchions supporting the deck above us) “and then not even
you
can fly, whatever you do. This’ll be
your
place. Your workplace!”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to balance.

Luke dropped the baskets beside me; and with a double kicked-up flash of yellow sea-boots in the fluorescent overhead lights, he vaulted right over the conveyor. Sure-footed, even as the mucus-slimy floorboards up-ended themselves and tilted away to port, he reached the impossible prize of the red plastic basket, released its lashing and, as the floorboards and their cargo of sea-water heaved themselves up and over and down towards me, he vaulted back over the conveyor, the basket flying horizontally out from his left hand—and he slung it down beside the others.

“So here we are!” he said, stooping over a drop-gate at the base of the hopper, just above the bottom step of the small conveyor which led up to our table. “At last! We’re about to add to our knowledge, our knowledge of the new fisheries! The deep-sea fisheries! And believe me, Redmond, they’re new, they really are! As yet—we know
nothing.”
He yanked up the stainless-steel gate. A flap of big, dead, dark flatfish fell out on to the belt. Carried away by his excitement, I caught myself thinking: I don’t recognize any of them, but of course that figures, because we know
nothing.

“Greenland halibut,” said Luke, straightening up. “The boys call them Black butts. Because they’re blackish both sides. And Greenland halibut, they’re really interesting—it’s their
evolution—
because it seems they don’t want to be flatfish any more. They’re camouflaged both sides. Their left eye has moved up to the edge of the head. So we think they swim on the ventral edge, like normal fishes—and not like a flatfish, blind side down. But surely, you’re thinking, aren’t you, their eyes are still wonky, they must be ill-adapted as hunters. But east of the Wyville Thomson Ridge they and the various species of redfish are the main commercial catch. So in biological terms they’re
very
successful. But how? Well—most of the time they live one or two kilometres down, and the answer is, Redmond, we don’t know. They’re right here, a big fish
in UK waters,
common as blades of grass, and we don’t know a damn thing! Isn’t that great?”

“Yes!” I shouted, genuinely swept away, for a moment, by the intricate private life of the Greenland halibut.

Luke disappeared around to his right, to the port side of the hopper. There was a clatter and a scraping, the sound, I thought, of a corrugated-iron sheet being pulled aside, and Luke’s voice, his shout, became hollow, a bounce of echoes. “The French started it all!” he shouted, from inside the hopper. The boom of the declamation reached me in triplicate, stolen, around the edge, by the thud of the engines and the blows of the sea, but still, at the centre, laden with extra authority, amplified. “The west coast of Scotland … Landings at Lochinver … Pioneered this whole thing … 1989
… that
recent… Orange roughy… Roundnose grenadier…

“At the time,” he said, reappearing in front of me, hopping up on a box the opposite side of the table, restored to his normal volume, shape and size, “no one took much notice. But then they landed 50,000 tonnes of Orange roughy. 1991.
Fifty thousand tonnes.
That really did it. Because they’d also made themselves a market. They changed the name, Orange roughy, to
beryx
at first, but that didn’t work, so they thought of Napoleon, as they do, and they called it the
Emperor fish.
And sales took off. The housewife—she loved it. All over France. Same in Spain.”

Luke, fired up by the inner sight of all those Orange roughy, all those deep-sea fish flying off the fishmongers’ slabs, stared up at an innocent roundel of small levers directly above his head. He yanked one down. (Nothing happened.) “They did the same thing,” he shouted, still staring at the control box, “even with deep-sea fish like the Black scabbard. The French trawlermen call it the
siki.
Now—the Black scabbard fish—and we won’t see it here, because you only find them to the west of the Wyville Thomson Ridge, they’re all about a metre long. And we know almost nothing about them, about their life cycle.” He pulled down the second lever. (Nothing happened.) “Where are the larvae? Where are the juveniles?” Luke, much moved, looked straight at me. (But I felt unqualified to make a substantive reply.) “Here in the UK people wouldn’t feed it to the cat! But in Portugal and Spain, I think, they call it Espada. In France it’s the Sabre. And it sells well!”

Luke returned his gaze to the control box of small levers
above his head. “Redmond,” he said, as if it was all my fault, “why the hell won’t this work?”

“No idea,” I ventured, which was an understatement.

“Oh come on, I told you, all these trawlers are different.” He hopped off his box. “You know perfectly well. There must be a master switch. A main power source way above the spray-level.” He stepped across the wet slide of shining floorboards, as if the soles of his boots were suction-pads, and inspected the chaos of wiring and junction boxes above the lip of the stern bulkhead door. “Aye!” he said, jumping up, flicking down a switch.

The conveyor belt to my left came to life. The circular table, my safe handhold, began to rotate, remorselessly, clockwise—the big, round, trustworthy steel pail of a table began to move; it took its 18-inch-deep sides, its two-and-a-half-foot-wide inner sections, its central steel tube of a tower (double-layered with white plastic subsidiary pails), and my hands, with it.

“Let go!” shouted Luke, as I fell off my box. “Och aye,” he said with an Uncle Luke laugh, as I swayed back up and on again. “Stay where you are,” he said, back in control under the overhead levers. “Balance
with your legs.”
Left arm above his head, he pushed up the right-hand lever, stopping the table with one of its receiving sections directly beneath the end of the conveyor—a cascade of big, dark, dead flatfish slid over the lip and slithered across the waiting steel tray, filling it. Luke pulled the lever down, rotating the table one section, repeating the process.

“So—these new deep-sea fisheries,” I said, trying to sound intelligent, wanting to learn, gripping the stanchion to my right with one hand (and this teacher of mine, I thought, with an uneasy meld of imagined pride and real dismay that I was growing so old so fast—he could be my legitimate son). “These new fisheries—it’s all the fault of the British housewife.”

“What is?” said Luke, turning another section.

“Their cooking habits. No French fish-soup. No Spanish paella. Nothing but cod and haddock and pretty flatfish—sole and plaice. So our own fisheries collapse.” And then, impressed by the amount of blood I still seemed to be losing (both feet, inside
their sea-boots, felt soaking wet, but my left foot was
warm),
I had a dying, paternal thought. “Luke, you should be a teacher. You should teach this stuff. Become a lecturer somewhere.”

Luke, across the table, looked straight at me. He stopped the table, he stopped the conveyor. “You think so?” He straightened his shoulders. He pulled off his blue woolly hat. He held it out in his right hand for a moment, towards me, above the table, like an offering (and I almost took it). He thrust his hat awkwardly into his right trouser pocket. “You really think so?”

“Yes, I do. It’s obvious—you’re made for it.”

Luke’s face seemed to grow larger, his eyes brightened, his forehead lost its two deep crosswise furrows. “Redmond, to tell the truth—I
had
thought of it. You know—becoming a lecturer. In a fisheries college somewhere. The one in Stromness. The place that produced Jason! Or the new North Atlantic fisheries college. In Shetland. At Scalloway. Smashing! A smashing way to live! But then … I have a problem. Big style …” He looked down at the full steel section of tray in front of him. “I don’t know, I don’t think… you know, I just
don’t think I’ve got the balls for lecturing.”
Luke ran his right forefinger along the outer steel rim, round to the left, round to the right. His hand was calloused and scarred and heavy with muscle. It seemed to belong to a man twice his size. He said: “The thought of it
… standing up in front of people…
”