Trawler (18 page)

We laughed.

And Sean said, “Cold iron!”

And Jason said, “Don’t you worry, Redmond. No, it’s true, we
can’t
promise you a Deepsea angler. But don’t you worry—the sea’s
full
of strange things, and some of them are a lot stranger even than any of your Deepsea anglers, believe me … I’ve caught a few big deep-sea sharks in my time, Greenland sharks, and they’re
odd—not
so much because of the way they look, or even because of the things the fisheries scientists like Luke tell us about their habits: no, they’re odd, Redmond, because their flesh is
poisonous.
It’s toxic! And who the hell could have expected
that?
Shark meat, great! But not this one, no—it can
kill
you! Now the real wonder is this: the Icelanders, pure Vikings really—and the Vikings are a people that I have a lot of time for, as a skipper, you know—the Icelanders use the Greenland shark for its oil and skin,
and that’s not all, because the flesh, they don’t waste that either, they bury it until it’s putrid, dig it up and dry it—and eat it! So how did they work that out?”

“From the Eskimo, I shouldna wonder,” said Bryan, at the table to our right. Bryan, Big Bryan, was big all right—dark-haired, black-stubbled, a Viking none the less, a Robertson; his deep-set dark eyes were now haggard with physical exhaustion, but they still looked like the eyes of a man who took his time, who wouldn’t be hurried, who thought deeply about things that had not yet begun to trouble Sean, and which I had ceased to care about—such as the purpose of life. There was a small silver stud in the lobe of his left ear, perhaps a potential payment to Neptune, perhaps not. He wore a wedding ring. Bryan, I thought, he’s a Viking that even the superstitious monks of Lindisfarne might be compelled to respect, despite themselves …

He was saying: “They’re also known as the
Sleeper shark
because they move so slowly—they’ll no give you a nasty surprise” (in my reverie I’d missed something, some vital information), “and as the
Gurry shark,
from gurry, like slurry, except it’s the offal, the mess you sluice overboard after fishing or whaling—and in Greenland, the Eskimo, the Inuit, they bung seal guts and blood or whatever’s to hand down through a hole in the ice and bring the sleepers to the surface. And they’re big, really big, they can be 20 feet long—Redmond, only the Whale shark, the biggest, up to 70 feet long, the Basking shark, around 40 feet, and the Great white, around the same length but chunky—those are the only sharks that weigh more. So it’s worth the hunt!”

“Aye that’s right,” said Luke, “but they don’t just feed on carrion. Because you often find them with a parasitic copepod
covering
each eye and we think these copepods are bioluminescent in deep water, six or seven thousand feet down—fish go for their little lights and the shark eats the fish head-first,
snap,
and that’s why, mostly, you’ll find the fish in their stomachs have no tails!”

Sean, directly opposite me, in comradely mode, said,
sotto voce,
“So there you go, man, there’s plenty that’s freaky that’s no a Deepsea angler. It’s like they say,
a little knowledge really focks you
up,
so it’s cool to cut it out!” He gave his head a half-flick towards Luke (sitting right beside him) and, leaning forward across the table (its surface covered in sticky Velcro to hold your plate in a Force 7 or 8, but in this (a Force 9?)—you had to hang on to your plate with your left hand and fork your clapshot and haggis into your mouth with your right), he gave me an expressive, a knowing, squashy wink of his left eye.

I was beginning to feel better, a little less terminally, throat-cuttingly foolish and empty, and besides, the clapshot, the neeps and tatties, the buttered mash of turnips and potatoes (Orkney crops that, even that far north, you really could rely on) was warm in my stomach (Jerry was a
great
guy), and the haggis, it was special too, Orkney haggis, yet still familiar—I decided that I actually liked minced sheep’s-oesophagus-and-stomach, both lengths of colon, the rectum, the entire alimentary canal, as long as it had that reassuringly acrid background taste of gunpowder … And the more I ate, the less apart, less cold, less alien, the outside world became.

So, “Jason,” I managed to say, hoping that he’d realize I’d had it, surrendered, abandoned any claim to combative male status, “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever caught in your nets?”

“Ah, let me think—” said Jason, and gave me a friendly, knowing smile.

So maybe I wasn’t the very first post-seasick greenhorn he’d had to suffer on board, which was a comfort, of sorts, and Robbie, I remembered, had told me that a surprising number—a percentage “you wouldna believe”—of fully trained graduates from the Stromness Nautical School went to sea in earnest in winter for the first time and then, desperate to get back ashore, sought jobs in
anything
the fisheries had to offer: in the market as apprentice dealers, or simply as junior you-to-me fishmongers, or in filleting, processing, fish-farming, transport, or even as
lumpers
—casual labourers, summoned at short notice, sometimes at three in the morning, to get down sharpish to Scrabster harbour, to be ready, for £200 a time, to unload an incoming trawler whose crew were too knackered to do it themselves …

Jason now had an emergent all-over black beard (dark as his Armada ancestor’s beard, the swashbuckling sailor who had swum ashore, still feisty, ready to go, escaping easily from the small setback of a mere shipwreck, the loss of everything he owned…). Jason was the man who had had the least sleep (according to Sean, who kept an internal log on everyone’s sleep, measured in half-hours) and Jason was the only man who still looked fresh, in control, sane, easy with himself. “The weirdest thing in the nets?” he said. “It’s got to be the Ocean sunfish. They’re rare, really rare in the north, so it was frightening, that’s the only word for it—it was frightening when we caught one, because we didn’t know what it was. Huge. It weighed over a tonne. Deep body, fins straight up and down, tiny mouth, no rear end, no tail—what kind of a fish was that? We were surface-fishing at the time, and it just lay there in the net, half asleep … But all the same, the size of it…”

“Aye,” said Bryan, “I’ve seen one too—they’ve these thick skins, you canna harpoon them, you canna shoot them with a .22, you’ll be needing a .303!”

“That’s why they’ve no need to worry,” said Luke, “only a net can bother them. So they just eat plankton and seaweed and lie around and sleep like Redmond wants to do—but there’s a penalty for that, boys, because their brains are tiny, and in a fish that can weigh one and a half tonnes, its spinal cord, guess what—it’s only half an inch long!”

Everyone laughed. We’re
bonding,
I thought, half delirious from lack of sleep and, it seemed to me, the increasingly violent movements of the
Norlantean,
K508 (lost at sea, no mystery, a hurricane, a baby hurricane; so there’d be a page, maybe, in the
Orcadian,
and three or four lines, maybe, in
The Times
in London). So, unlike the Ocean sunfish, massively happy, immune from predators, sleeping whenever it feels like it, we’re OK, because we have
big brains…

“And I’ve also caught an Opah, maybe 5 feet long,
beautiful,”
said Jason, getting up, going with long-limbed ease to refill his plate from the clamped saucepans on the stove. “And that was
interesting, Redmond, interesting in itself, so beautiful,” he said, sitting down again, “a dark blue back, gold sides, pink belly—and these
deep red fins.”
He took a mouthful of haggis. Jason even
ate
fast. “And they’re also interesting because they’re related to the oarfish—and that’s weird enough even for you, and as far as I know, Luke’ll put me right, we know sod all about the oarfish. You can’t catch them in a trawl, they’re far too fast, they swim, they undulate like a sea-snake” (with his right hand and arm he made a quick sinuous movement across the table), “you only see them when they’re sick at the surface or washed ashore dead—and that must be really something, because they can be a good 20 feet long and their bodies are flattened, really flattened, a foot or so deep and only two inches across! But that’s not all, it’s bright silver all over, and along its entire length there’s an unbroken dorsal fin that’s the brightest scarlet—and right over its head this fin erects into a brilliant scarlet crest, a mane, a huge Indian headdress! So there you are, there’s no bullshit about it—there’s your sea monster, your genuine sea serpent!”

“So have you seen one?”

“No. No, I haven’t,” said Jason, calming down. “But I damn well know people who have, so don’t you go getting the wrong idea!”

Sean laughed.

“Of course it exists!” said Luke. “It’s been filmed. We’ve got specimens in museums.”

“Oh aye,” said Sean.
“Museums,
is it?”

“And anyway,” said Allan Besant, still looking young, red-cheeked, his finger no longer bandaged, “Redmond, Worzel here, old Worzel Gummidge—he didna ask about
monsters!”
He leant forward from his place in the far corner of the right-hand table, across Dougie. “No, Worzel asked about
sex.
Worzel wants to know about sex!”

Even Dougie laughed.

“So tell him about the seabream!”

“You tell him,” said Jason. “Tell him yourself!”

“Nah,” said Bryan, “dinna go asking Allan. He’ll get it all
mixed up. The seabream, Redmond, they can be female one minute and male the next. And that’s a fact!”

“Transsexuals!” I said.

“Aye,” said Allan, looking mean. “It’s
them
that’s all mixed up!”

“Christ, boys,” said Sean, sitting right back in his place, back against the wall. “And you let me
eat
them! I even took a couple to my nan!”

Luke laughed. Sean’s views on biology, I could see, gave Luke a special, professional pleasure. “It’s OK,” he said, “it’s not like a disease. You can’t
catch
it. In fact it’s surprisingly common at sea.”

Sean said, flatly: “Is focking not.”

“In the sea!” said Luke. And then with a sudden howl of laughter: “The fish!”

“Dirty bastards,” said Sean, not particularly reassured.

“Aye, take the wrasses, for instance, lots of them are hermaphrodite, and females change into males. Our own Cuckoo wrasse, that’s a lovely fish, a cleaner fish, a barber—I’ll tell you about that too, sometime.”

Sean said, “Keep it ter yerself.”

“It’s like Tiresias,” I said. “He’d been both a woman and a man, and he was able to report that women not just enjoyed sex more—they enjoyed it ten times more!”

There was a silence.

And then, “The sneaky bastards,” said Sean. “So how come they keep saying no?”

“You should wash more,” said Robbie. “You should wash your hair.”

“Ach,” said Sean. “Don’t be such a sissy! What’s a pillow for? Eh? It’s a
pillow
that cleans your hair. You should see the state of mine!”

I
N THE NEXT HAUL
there were several hundred blue-backed, white-bellied little fish, a by-catch which excited Luke: “Blue whiting, Redmond! They may look like nothing to you—fair enough—but they
could
be very important. You see, they’re vastly abundant, as we say, but as yet we know very little about their real life cycle, their true distribution. So that’s part of my job too—maybe we could fish for Blue whiting, sustainably. But as yet no one knows. They’re codlets, in the cod family, and here in our fisheries they’re the main food for hake. So I wouldn’t want to be a Blue whiting, not really, because imagine it—at night you go to sleep in mid-water, peaceful as could be, and that’s when the big hake, who’ve been resting all day on the bottom, that’s when they swim up from the depths and swallow you.”

After the haul I stayed behind with Luke in the fish-room, wedged on a box, hard against the side of the conveyor to the hold, beside the small steel ledge on which Luke had set up his weighing-machine. Sean, stepping out of his oilskin trousers and sea-boots, shouted: “That’s it, boys! Go for it! Go for the
science,
that’s what I say! And boys, you’ve got plenty of time for now and that’s the truth! Because Bryan told me—that focking Force 12 you wankers wanted is almost on us, and Jerry’s made sandwiches. So it’s gotta be bad. It’s gonna be heavy, man.
Sandwiches,
for Chrissake. So there’ll no be any cooking, that’s for sure, and
boys” (he held the steel door to the galley and cabins half open), “if we’re lucky there’ll no be any fishing. So you—you’ll be doing
science.
And me—I’ll be in ma focking bed! See ya!”

I held Luke’s clipboard, and in the appropriate columns on the Marine Lab stencilled sheets (a dispiriting stack of them caught in the jaws of the rusted bulldog-clip) I pencilled in the letters and numbers he shouted against the rising chaos of sound outside: “GHA!” (Greenland halibut). “Length—!” and “Weight:—!” (so
many
numbers). And, a quick slish of his short red-handled knife to its underside: “Female!” or “Male!” (a ♂ or a ♀ in the blodgy wet column that wouldn’t stay in focus). And then a quick slit to the head of whatever species of fish it happened to be—and there’d be a tiny otolith in his rough ungloved hand. He’d pick the right size of plastic screw-top bottle from the red biscuit-box held in place against the conveyor-strut by his left boot—and then, most impressive of all, pull a stub of pencil from behind his left ear and, in the gathering violence of the trawler’s movements (which to me now seemed frantic, terminal—how could this man-made thing withstand such an onslaught one moment more?), Luke would
write,
on the steel shelf, balancing himself without apparent effort, and he’d fill a label (so small) headed
DAFS Scientific Investigations
under:
Haul no…. Net … Depth … Duration … Area… Date…
He’d add
AT
(“Average temperature at that depth!”), and there was a system, I realized. There was a basket, red plastic, for each haul so far. “MBE!” (“Grenadiers!
Macrourus berglax!”),
“LIN!” (no explanation), “BLI!” (ditto)… We were going to work through them all. I thought: “BED!” and “BED!” and: “Someone should do something nasty to that Sean, pronto.”