Trawler (17 page)

“Quotas, Redmond,” said Luke to me quickly, with a worried half-smile, a concerned, caring kind of look. “Quotas—that’s another thing you need to know. Here it’s chaos, in the UK, in the EU, a disaster. But in Iceland, yes, they
deserved
to win the Cod War. They’re brilliant, they’ve devised their very own system, brilliant. And as an ex-Falklands Fisheries inspection officer, I should know. That’s something I really do know about. Get this
—they’ve rds.
Anything you catch, you land. No waste. No waste at all. And then it gets clever—if you land too much haddock, for example, by law you can buy that extra quota from someone who’s not fished enough haddock, who has quota to spare. So gradually the bad skippers are
bought
out—only the Jasons survive. So they have fewer, more efficient boats—and there’s more money for those boats, and more money for government-funded patrol vessels. In their 200-mile territorial limit, within their very own exclusion zone, there’s
real
control, benign regulation if you like, because it’s strict but fair. Every skipper can see the sense of it. There’s no
point
in a grab-it-now, ghastly, destructive EU free-for-all. The young stocks are monitored,
really
monitored. There are
lots
of inspectors like I used to be—enough to go aboard any trawler they want, whenever they want, and if more than a quarter of the fish in a random sample they measure on board are under-size, then that whole area, the current nursery area, is closed to fishing. And that is why, Redmond—that’s why every night Iceland Air flies cargo planes into Heathrow packed with full-sized cod for the UK fish and chips!”

“Far out, man,” muttered Sean, just loud enough for me to hear. “Get it on, baby, because right now I need a joint, know what I mean? A stiff joint, well inspected, full-size, 2 feet long!”

THE LONG HAUL
, or rather the long gutting of the absurdly productive short haul, was over—there was nothing coming up on the conveyor so Robbie switched it off; Luke went to hose out the hopper. “Redmond! Take a look at this!” came his shout (but not
with real excitement, not as if he was confronting an almost-sea-bat). “You’ll like this!”

Expecting some minor curiosity, I stepped into the stainless-steel hopper, right leg first, over the sill—and stopped. My left leg (despite its outer oilskin protection, its inner high yellow rubber sea-boot complete with steel toe-cap) refused to follow. From my brain it received the down-both-legs forked message before I did. It already knew that my right leg, at the level of the lower shin, was one engulfing snap away from a permanent goodbye to a length of oilskin, one half of a right yellow welly complete with its toe-cap of steel, one still flexible ankle and a perfectly usable right foot.

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line—a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials… And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something—it wanted to
eat.
And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste,
haute cuisine,
no, that was not its thing. Not at all…

“Aieee!” shouted Luke, creasing up, two blue-gloved hands across his ridiculously flat stomach. “Aieee!” he shouted, straightening, trying to get a grip on himself, failing, creasing up again. “It’s dead!” he yelled. Luke was laughing, really laughing, which was unnecessary, you know; it was
stupid
of him. “It’s dead! Redmond! It’s dead! Aye! Bad dreams? Eh?” And for some reason he snatched off his silly blue woolly hat and stuffed his face right into it. “An anglerfish!” he shouted, muffled. “Nothing but a common anglerfish!” His eyes, bright with laughter, appeared
above the blue woolly stupid comforter of his hat. “Aye! A whopper! I’ll give you that—a real whopper!”

ONCE I’D GOT
my left leg over the sill, and Luke had begun to behave like an adult again (sort of), between us we lugged the 5-foot length of pure horror out of the hopper (Luke lifted the massive head, the bulbous holding-sack of body, and I helped, holding the tail, right at the end). After all, I thought, my heart still thumping, it’s all very well, but Christ, the damn thing nearly killed me—abject fright, OK, but so what?—Just stop laughing, will you?—After all, Luke, it’s all your fault, it really is… We slopped the giant terror into a white plastic fish-box (one of the two boxes loose in the fish-room, boxes which rode the wash from the incoming, outgoing sea, port to starboard, starboard to port, all day, all night, forever). And Luke lashed it to his specimen basket.

“That was
great!”
he said, more or less in control. “I
knew
we’d have fun, you and I!”

The monster was too big to fit in the box: even with its powerful tail bent into a semicircle, its broad head reared up above the rim; and its eyes, even though I now knew they belonged to a mere anglerfish, seemed not one whit less malign. Three or four inches behind its hypnosis-inducing globular pond of a right eye were two growths, one the size of a chicken’s egg, the other, an inch to its left, an emergent bud no bigger than the egg of a blackbird. Both eggs were fertilized; and they’d shed their shells—they were a dull orange-yellow filigreed with the red traceries of blood vessels.

So
this
is an anglerfish, I said to myself, well, so what, it doesn’t look in the least like its comforting little picture in my
Collins Pocket Guide, Fish of Britain and Europe—not emotionally,
that is, it doesn’t prepare you for the shock of the real thing, not when it’s about to take your ankle right off, and I’m fond of my ankle, it’s mine, and besides …

“So Luke,” I said, huffy, asserting myself (I know things too,
yes I do), “these growths, that’s the males, right?” I prodded the growths with my finger—they were both surprisingly hard. “I know about anglerfish. The males are tiny, yeah? They’re minute, free-swimming little fish until they find a big female, yes? Then
wow,
they get it right, it’s not just a passing moment (OK, probably an hour and a half for
you
), it’s not just penetration of the female with a mere penis, there’s nothing casual about it,
no:
it’s total, real commitment for life, not even a feminist could object, because you go right in, head first, it’s
total penetration and you become completely absorbed in all her concerns,
yeah? You lose your mind, your will power, your own identity, your eyes, your lungs, your gut—you make no mess—you’re no bother,
really not,
because you’re not only prepared to do the housework, the washing-up,
you also agree you’ll never go out again.
You’re a sensitive new male, that’s for sure, because whatever she decides to do, wherever she wants to go, you agree, because as it happens you’ve also lost your voice, and your legs. In fact all you’ve got left is the bit that she really cares about—and that’s your balls. So now that’s all you are, a gland for sperm. But from your point of view, I agree, from my point of view—it’s not that bad, in fact there’s a lot going for it, this new life. Because
you never have to go out to work again…
” (On the bench by the door to the galley we tugged off our boots, released ourselves from our oilskins.) “Luke, look here,” I said, unable to stop. “Luke, don’t you see? You can forget the entire strain of sexual selection—the horrible sweat of so-called honest advertisement of your qualities to potential females: you know, the male-male competition she watches so carefully before she makes her choice. In other words, how do your male contemporaries rate you? Are you
really
a good farmer? Can you bring in the fish, like Jason? And let’s wait and see—will your contributions in art, science, literature, music or football really amount to anything? Let’s see, let’s have a good hard look at your long white tail (if you’re a Bird of Paradise) or the short purple underside of your tail (if you’re a woodpigeon). Is there any shit on it? Are you diseased? No, Luke, you can forget all that pressure, you really can—all you have to do is lie in bed all day and feel warm and snuggly
and
prepare:
you look at lots of porny mags—until your moment arrives. Because, remember, you’re attached—the little that’s left of you—and even now, when you’re just your balls (the insult of it!), you’re described as
parasitic.
There you are, stuck in somewhere around the area of her genital opening and—hey, here it comes—at last she’s releasing her egg-veil, a diaphanous veil of eggs. And at one touch of those silky knickers you’ve had it, orgasm after orgasm!”

AS WE ENTERED THE FUG
of the galley, full of people (my glasses misted up again and I took them off, wiping the lenses on my sleeve), I heard Sean’s voice from nearby, to the right. “Come on, boys! What kept you? Jerry’s done clapshot!”

“Crapshot?”

“Clapshot,
Redmond. An Orkney dish! Neeps and tatties. And haggis! The best! And boys, as we were saying, it’s true—you deserve it!”

My vision partially restored, I saw that everyone—except Jerry himself, who must now be in sole charge of the
Norlantean,
K508, up there on the bridge—everyone was already seated: Dougie; Big Bryan, First Mate; Allan Besant, whom as yet I hardly knew; and Robbie, at the four places along the bench-table to the left. To our right sat Sean, opposite Jason—and a place each, a piled plate each, complete with knife and fork, awaited us. “Watch it, Redmond,” I said to myself severely, “get a grip,
be a man,”
as I sat down in the welcoming 3 foot of bench beside Jason, “you’ve had no sleep, don’t overreact to this simple kindness …”

“Aye!” said Sean, as Luke sat down beside him, opposite us. “Boys! You deserve it! I set the places myself! There’s
one of you,
dinna get me wrong—and he
can gut,
that’s for sure! A
real
help—and we didna expect it!”

“Aye,” said Bryan, in his slow bass voice, not looking up from his food, a plate piled heroically, Homerically high. “That’s a fact. Twenty-one boxes of Black butts … And they came so fast. Down below we couldna believe it…”

Jason, as if he was making a considered announcement in front of some packed hall, a leader of the community, which, of course, I realized, he was, said: “Luke, I can tell you, right now—
you really know what you’re doing.”
And this too, I realized obscurely, was the very highest of praise, as high as it gets on a trawler at sea.

“Och aye,” said Luke, furiously forking his deep soil of haggis. “Aye, it was a clean catch… the cleanest I’ve seen.” Luke’s pale face, I noticed to my surprise, had turned red—it had suffused with blood in the heat; or was he blushing with pleasure? “Redmond here,” he said over-quickly, too loud, “you know what he said to me? Boys, there was a monk left in the hopper, a big one, with a couple of growths on its head, cancers probably, and Redmond—he decided they were parasitic males, you know? And he says to me, ‘Luke,’ he says,
‘that’s
the life, Luke, because once you’re stuck head-first into a female,
you’ll never have to work again!
’”

Everyone laughed.

“So those weren’t a couple of males?
Cancers?
How do you know?”

“Because it’s the wrong species! The wrong order! That’s
Lophius piscatorius
out there! The monk, a monkfish to the trade. The biggest I’ve seen, but it’s still a monkfish. You—you’re thinking of the
Deepsea anglers!”

“Far out!” said Sean, seeing my disappointment. “But they’re freaky, man. I’m sure they are!”

“Aye, Redmond, don’t you worry,” said Bryan, being kind. “And who knows? Maybe we
will
catch one of the Deepsea anglers. It’s not impossible. And they’re as weird a sight to see, right enough, as weird a sight to see as anything on earth—but the ordinary monkfish, you know, it’s not
that
ordinary. The female lays eggs like frogspawn—except that the jelly can be 40 feet long and 2 foot across! And there’s an Orkney story that people in a rowing boat off Scapa Flow saw one of those masses and thought it was a sea monster, a dark snaky patch in the water, you know, and they rowed for their lives! Well, it’s a great
story,
but we dinna know their names. So there you go, it’s bullshit.”

“If it’s stories you’re after,” said Robbie, helping out (I was still finding it impossible to look up from my plate—how could I have got a species, an
order
wrong? That was unforgivable, that was ignorance when there was no excuse, why hadn’t I read more? Prepared better? Marine biology, yes, maybe there was nothing simple about it…), “then you must meet Malky Moar! Orkney—there’s no a better place for stories. We’ll find Malky, he’s always in the bar. And Malky’ll say to me like—well, it’s true, Redmond, we’d had a focker of a thunderstorm—and the next night in the bar Malky says to me, he says, ‘Robbie, you heard the thunder?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘You saw the lightning?’ Aye.’ ‘Well then—there’s my old man sitting in the kitchen at the farm. You mind the kitchen?’ Aye.’ ‘So that lightning, it comes down the chimney and into the stove. Now my old man—he’s got his feet resting on the stove. You mind the stove?’ Aye.’ ‘So that lightning—it goes up his legs and out the back of his head and it kills two pigs in the yard!’ So in the bar we all laugh like. And Malky Moar, he turns on us and he says, ‘Robbie Stanger,’ he says. ‘My old man—does he keep pigs or
does he not?’
And Malky, he looks really angry like, so I say, Aye, he does.’ Because he does. And Malky stops looking angry and he fixes each of us in the eye in turn, and he says, Malky says,
‘I rest my case!’”