Trawler (16 page)

“Aye!” Robbie shouted—for some reason at Luke: “If your wife, your girl, Kate—if she wants to come and see you off at Stromness, you say, No. Never. You must never do that. And Kate, there’s to be no knitting on a Sunday—because that will mean the sharp needles will tear the net. And there’s to be no washing on the day before we sail, and especially no washing-machine, because that’s almost as violent as the sea, a Force 10!—and that’ll be washing me down in a whirlpool to a watery grave. And as you know—sailors’ graves have no headstone, no resting-place, no peace—unless they go down with their ship in Scapa Flow. Aye. No flowers grow on a sailor’s grave, as they say—so dead trawlermen, they come back to
the places they loved, the people
they once loved, on land, at home. Aye…” said Robbie, the joke turned bitter and real. “Aye,” he said, gutting furiously. “Aye!” he shouted. “And always turn your trawler with the sun!”

“That’s right,” said Luke, taken aback, only just loudly enough to be heard above the onslaught from outside, above the inner, engine-pulsing, shaking, mind-emptying noise. “I’ve just heard this one, Robbie. But I’m sure you’ll know it. Although mebbe not—because it’s from Shetland. Get this—if you’ve had an unlucky streak of fishing, you can sometimes cure it by
burning the witch.
You know? You take a fiery burning torch around the boat and smoke out or burn the bad luck. They still do that—or so I’ve heard. And I’m sure you know that some say that for a new net to be lucky, then a virgin must piss on the net…”

“Holy water!” I shouted, pleased, somehow restored to myself for a moment. “Holy water! From the primal font!”

“Aye!” yelled Sean, putting an arm across my shoulders. “You old freak! You’re old enough to be my father, my focking
grandad!
Cool!
Holy water! You hear that, Robbie? Robbie, Robbie, dinna get the horrors! Dinna get on a downer! You’re great, and you beat it, that alcohol-drug shite, that whole scene, and you dinna even smoke! You did it, man! Tell him about it, tell Redmond here, and Luke—tell them about it!”

“Aye, well, it’s no a great story,” said Robbie, gutting away, still upset, speaking far too quietly. “It’s like this—it’s all to do with alcohol. You know—SAD. Seasonal something depression. That’s it right enough. It’s difficult, so they say, to live in the dark more-or-less for half the year, and then in weak sunlight in the summer—it’s light, aye, but it’s no enough even to ripen the focking barley, no even for our own malts, Highland Park, Scapa Flow. We have to import barley! Aye, anyway, mebbe it’s no excuse, but it’s the northern-belt drinking, so they call it—the way we all tend to drink till we canna stand up. And I dinna just mean here in Orkney or in Shetland. No—it’s northern Canada, it’s right across, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Finns, northern Russia, Alaska, right across—even the Eskimo, the Inuit, you give him a bottle and he canna stop. So there you are. I tapped two policemen.”

“You what?”

“I
tapped
them, Redmond. I smacked them in the face. Right and left. I knocked them out. Unconscious.
Pompf!
They just went down. The one moment they were insulting me, right there, big fellas, you know? Really big. In the bar. And the next they’d gone. They left me alone. Just like that. They went.
Pompf!
I was surprised, I really was. No more hassle. Except there was. Because they hadn’t really left at all. Turned out they were there all along lying on the floor. Right in front of me. So they won, really! They should have left…”

Sean, much excited, yelled, “They didna know! They hadna chance! If they’d minded it was you, Robbie, Robbie Stanger—they’d’ve left right enough. Aye—no messing, man, they’d’ve bin out of there like the furry things that live in fields, right back to their burrows in Edinburgh or the Lowlands or wherever they focking well came from …”

“Redmond, I didna know them,” said Robbie, morose. “They were Scottish, outsiders. I hadna been to school with them. I didna know their families.”

“So then what?”

“Then what?” Robbie turned to me. He brightened. He gave his shoulders an odd little power-waggle. He stretched back his neck. He laughed. “I went to prison!”

“To prison?” I repeated stupidly, bemused.

“Aye! To prison!” he shouted, coming alive, as full of life as a stoat in spring. “To prison! Inverness! Do you know? Have you any idea? Prison—I’m telling you, marvellous! A holiday! A hotel for trawlermen! I still canna believe it, Redmond—we had a
menu,
I promise you we had a
menu,
and you could
tick off the
food you wanted. You ticked these little boxes on a list, like a laird! Aye—and my mates in there, and the screws, you know, they were so respectful, it was Robbie this and Robbie that and so you’re a boxer and a trawlerman, are you? ‘So what can we get you, Robbie, because you’re ashore now, you know, and a trawlerman, that’s no a life for an ordinary man who’s right in the head. No, we dinna see many trawlermen in here, that’s for sure, because all those fockers drown at sea, poor buggers, so you’re a rare piece of scum you are, and are you comfortable, are you getting enough to eat?’ And you willna believe it but there
was football.
All these wonderful things. And you were never cold.
No cold at all.
And trawlermen you know, the football, they’ve got the legs, they can’t help it, they can kick the focking ball for miles!”

I said, “I’m sure they can!”

“Goal!” yelled Sean.

“Goal!” yelled Luke.

“Aye!” yelled Robbie, encouraged. “I didna tell them at first. They didna know. But I was running for Orkney in the Scottish North District Championships in 1980. We came third in the league. Aye, but in 1984 I was running in the Cross Country League, the Open Championships in May. And I won. I focking won. I focking won the race!”

“Goodonya, Robbie!” yelled Sean.

“Magic!” yelled Luke. “Magic!”

“Aye—so our team, the football, Inverness Prison, a great place, a great team, we beat the shite out of anyone they set against us!”

“Well done!” I shouted.

“And the kitchens!” shouted Robbie. “You wouldna believe it! All the kit you needed—and then some, lots of stuff you’d never dream of! And guess what—they let me cook in those kitchens! Aye. Big time. Tatties and beef and all sorts, for hundreds of people at a time! You know—they let me do that every day, every day I wanted, a white coat and a hat and the steam and the warmth and the friends you make! Aye, that was grand …”

Robbie fell silent. His face lost its life. He began to slit and gut at twice his normal speed—a flick of the knife, a pluck of the hand, a scoop into the tray, an angry, upward throw.

“So then what?” I said, trying, and failing, even now, to get a grip on yet another slimy Greenland halibut, a Black butt. “What happened then?”

“Och aye,” said Robbie, tense, furious. “I shoulda known. They were bastards all along. Real
bastards.
The lot of them.”

“Eh?”

“Och aye, Redmond—dinna go making excuses for them. Real bastards. All of them. You know what?
It’s meant to be the law.
The focking law, for Chrissake! The judge
promised
me. He made me a promise, right there in front of everyone. He said, plain as could be, though I couldna take it in at the time like, ‘Mister Stanger,’ he said,
‘I
hereby sentence you to six months!’
Six months,
Redmond, so there I was, enjoying every minute of it, and I thought to myself like, Robbie, I thought, it’s OK, you’ve nae worries, none at all, there’s nothing you can do about it but you canna go to sea, you’re safe and warm in here, you’ve nae a worry in the whole wide world and you’ve the three months owing to you yet, every day of it…”

“So?”

Robbie, affronted, mimicked my accent.
“So?
I’ll tell you
so!
Redmond—they threw me out! Right there and then—they didna
care! They didna mind—they owed me three full months! Aye, the bastards, they threw me out, just like that, with never a word to me, never a word. They threw me out for good behaviour! Jeesus! If I’d known they could punish you like that, if I’d known they could do that to you, Redmond, throw you out for good behaviour—I’d’ve tapped the Governor, that’s for sure!”

TWO TRAYFULS LATER
, when my new section came to rest in front of me, I found myself staring at three fish that I certainly did recognize—right here in this cold foreign place, fish from childhood, the perfect, the ordinary mackerel, the same mackerel that I used to be sure were the most beautiful fish in the sea. They had the same bright-green, shining, glossy backs alive with patterns of indecipherable mystery-message inky writing; the same go-fast forked tails; the same five finlets over and under the wrist of the tail (to keep them on course at speeds you couldn’t imagine); and they even had those small fins to each side of the tail, just like the silver fins, the stabilizers, on my Dinky Toy Gloster Meteor, our first jet-fighter—and for the same reason, as I think my father explained: to keep them level on their supersonic whizz-bang flight beneath the surface of the ocean. And the white of their tummies was still as bright as the light off the level sea at the height of a childhood summer …

“Luke! Luke!” I yelled with sudden eight-year-old excitement across the cold circle of steel sections. “Whass mackerel doing here? In a deep trawl?”

“Robbie,” said Luke, his face thinner than ever, taut, black-stubbled, his ears sticking out, thrust forward beneath the rim of his blue woolly hat: “Shall we swap? Redmond—he needs help. You finished with him?”

Robbie and Luke changed places.

“It’s winter,” said Luke, with a grin. “Redmond, you’re like everyone else—you’re a holiday fisherman! Look—last October these mackerel left the surface-waters. And then—well and then-look, Redmond,
I’m only human you know,
all your questions,
question after question, the fact is, look, I need some sleep, I’m not in good shape right now, not for teaching, you know, even practice teaching, but I’ll try, this one last time …”

“Christ, I’m sorry, forget it, I…”

“No, no. That’s not it at all. It’s just that we need sleep. You know,
we’ve had no sleep.
I get
confused…
”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? Aye, well. And then, in November those mackerel
—they all met up together.
Weird, I know, but in November you’ll find them in dense concentrations, in a number of very localized positions, as we say, in little hollows and troughs on the sea-bottom, near the shelf-edge. Around Christmas they start to move out from these tight aggregations, real packed crowds, call it what you will, they spread outwards over the surrounding areas of the seabed. And all this time they’re feeding on bottom-living shrimps, amphipods, worms, small fish—but Redmond, they’re not taking
nearly
as much food as they do later, in their pelagic phase. Towards the end of January, towards the end of this month, right now, or in early February, they form shoals swimming up towards the surface. They start on their migrations, as Alister Hardy describes it, they move towards their spawning areas—which we now know are in the Celtic Sea, south of Ireland, west of the English Channel. They spawn over deeper water towards the edge of the shelf. April to June or July. That’s when they’re pelagic—they feed like crazy on the animal plankton, especially on copepods,
snap, snap,
one at a time. And then in late July or so they change their behaviour yet again—they disperse into these small shoals and move into inshore waters. They change their
diet,
they go for small fish,
pow!
Young herring, sprat, sand-eels, the little fish swarming in the shallow bays round our coasts. And that’s when you, Redmond—when people like you catch them from a rowing boat, with hooks baited with white cotton or even feathers on a length of string!”

“Hey Luke—that’s all so
marvellous!”
(I gave him an awkward oilskin hug, side-on.) “You know, that’s really
special,
that it’s all so intricate, if you know what I mean—so like the life of mammals
on land! And there’s real geography down there. Contour lines! And it’s all got this extra dimension—animals apart from birds that can move thousands of feet, OK, sometimes miles and miles, straight up and down! And the temperature differences!—just vertically, it’s like travelling from the tropics to the North or the South Pole, all at once, right?—And there’s currents instead of wind, and filtered light at the top, and perpetual darkness below … You know…” And then my own manic-tired, vestigial but still functioning mental-censor cut in; an inhibition or two came to life and flashed a warning light. And I fell silent, and felt silly.

“Aye,” said Luke, “and imagine!—If only we knew a tenth as much about this new deep-sea fishery,
right here—
about the lives of all these new fish you’re seeing. For Chrissake, Redmond, we’re not even sure how
old
those Grenadiers, those Rat-tails are—according to one or two tagging experiments, I forget the details, you can’t even trust their otoliths. The same rules, the seasonal growth-rings—they just don’t apply! For all we know those fish may be a hundred years old!”

“Aye,” said Sean, coming alive. “Ot-o-liths! Bullshit!”

“And as for mackerel even—it’s all different in the North Sea…”

“Is it shit?” said Sean. “Well,
fock the North Sea.
Horrible place. One big bad trip, the North Sea. Nasty little place, a screaming come-down, know what I mean? Lucy-in-the-shit-with-diamonds, that’s the North Sea, boys! And these mackerel” (he gathered them up) “they’re going down the focking chute!” (He threw them down the focking chute.)

I said, “Jesus, Sean! You threw them away? Why’d you
do
that?”

“Because Jason’s no got a quota. And by the way, Redmond, Allan, Allan Besant—he says you, he says you focking well look like Worzel Gummidge!”

“Worzel Gummidge?
You’ve read that? Great! I remember Worzel Gummidge! Rosie-bud! I had that read to me before I could read!”

“Read it? Read it!
He’s on the telly.
Dumbo! Jesus wept!”