Trawler (21 page)

“Eh?”

“Yeah, yeah. But you don’t fool me! Don’t be so modest. I thought this was a no-bullshit zone! I thought we’d at least-absolute minimum—I thought we’d agreed to
be honest with each other!”

“Eh? Aye! Big time!”

“So there you are, if you’d just stop interrupting, I could help you. I really could!”

“I’m sorry! Aye! Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!”

“Nuts? No, Luke.
This is science.
So let’s calm down. Let’s be rational. Right? Let’s be
scientific.
Your problem—in biological terms, it’s simple,
now that we know about it.
But of course that means that in your case and every other case it’s deep and complex and there’s fuck all you can do about it—and that’s the great attraction of biology, of ethology, the study of animal behaviour, and the fact is, Luke, you told me yourself, and I’ve seen it in
Aberdeen, in your own nest: you, Luke, are an alpha male. Yes! Nick Davies in Cambridge, I met him once, he did this great experiment. Yes, the Reverend Morris’s bird books, you know,
A History of British Birds
by the Rev. F. O. Morris, BA, Member of the Ashmolean Society, “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” London: Groombridge and Sons, 5 Paternoster Row
—the very first books I bought myself!
And plate one, Luke—it was a
GRIFFON VULTURE
—the feathers, so beautiful, and the eyelashes round its big brown eye, and I watched the clouds whenever I could, because I did
not
want to miss it, the moment when a Griffon vulture would spiral down and land on the Vicarage lawn and eat Roger, for sure, my dad’s fat old bad-tempered Cocker spaniel that kept trying to bite me… And I bought these books when I was eight years old. I saved up my pocket money and every three weeks I’d go with my dad to Salisbury and the two kind old ladies in Beach’s Bookshop let me buy them, one by one. They kept them for me, under the desk to the left of the door. Magical, small red volumes with gold letters on their spines and hand-coloured plates inside—and in one term and two holidays of saving I had the lot! The complete set. All eight of them! Two whole
pounds
and ten whole pennies! And in each volume (magical word!) I wrote my name. And the address of our house, in case they got lost. Redmond Douglas O’Hanlon, The Vicarage, Calne, Wilts. Anyway, where was I? Yes, stop
sighing.
The Hedge sparrow! The Hedge accentor, not, in fact, related to the sparrows, as you know. Well—Morris took the Dunnock, or Hedge sparrow or Hedge warbler or Winter fauvette—how I loved all the
names
he gave his birds!—he took the Hedge sparrow, as he wrote in February 1853, as an unobtrusive, quiet and retiring, humble, you know,
sober
exemplar of the Godly life “which many of a higher grade might imitate, with advantage to themselves and benefit to others through an improved example,” or some such
pre-Origin of Species
natural theology: God’s works, God’s lessons to us in all his Creation! Lovely, so very
comforting …
Yeah, so every night in my little bedroom, lying in bed next to my collection of birds’ eggs in a tray packed with cotton-wool—eggs which, I was sure, all the birds in the garden had agreed to
give me (just the one each): a blackbird, a thrush, a chaffinch, a wren and even a bullfinch—eggs nestled in their wooden tray on top of the chest of drawers: I’d do as promised and read the set lines from my boring little green pamphlet of SPCK bible extracts. Yes! And then I’d read a golden passage or two from my Morris’s
British Birds.
And my dad’d come up for a goodnight prayer and he’d say, ‘Lighten our darkness, O Lord,’ and I’d reach up and switch the bedside lamp off and on a few times. And then I’d go to sleep!”

“Magic! Nuts!”

“Yes! But Morris got it all so very wrong (not that we can really blame him, because the
Origin
wasn’t published till 1859) and in particular he fucked up with the Hedge sparrow! Big time, as you’d say. Because Nick Davies in Cambridge, not so many years ago, he took a length of hedge and he DNA-fingerprinted every Hedge sparrow in it. (You know those nests, you must do—you must have sought them out as a kid—the dull brown little birds, Dunnocks, in the dull ordinary hedge: and then you find a nest
—pow!
The miracle of it! The perfect sky-blue eggs!) No? Well anyway, he got these extraordinary results—in the middle of the hedge, you know, the dominant male, the one with sex appeal as defined by Hedge sparrows, the famous guy, the great scientist, the President, the rock-star, he had his nest. And how do we know he was the alpha male? Simple! Because
all
the females for hundreds of yards to either side fancy him like crazy. And how do we know that? Is this a Just So Kipling story as jealous molecular biologists stuck in their airless labs like to say? Are they wrong? Is Dawkins right? You bet he is! Because all the females for hundreds of yards to either side fancy the top guy like crazy. And how do we know that? Because in
his
nest, every single one of those sky-blue eggs belongs to him—he’s the undisputed dad. And in the nests immediately to either side of his down the hedgerow, half the eggs are his—and so it goes on, until in the far outer reaches of his line of influence only one of the eggs in the distant nests will be his. Now, at the time, the mathematics of all this in the current computer models made no sense at all—why was he so
profligate with his energies? So much so that he died at the end of the breeding season? The mathematics made no sense—until two young female doctoral students arrived in the lab. They knew what was wrong! Pronto. They solved the mathematics in a couple of weeks. And how? Because they instinctively considered the problem from
a female point of view.
The alpha male, the Luke in the hedge, he had sex appeal. Right? He’d got it. Whatever it was. So every female wanted him. The mere thought of him made them weak about their tiny knees. Yeah? Got it? So they didn’t give a damn about him
as a person,
you understand, and why should they? Only his regular mate could be expected to care if he died of clinical conkers at the end of the month. And Luke, you may have forgotten, terrestrial biology, you know, so boring for you, but in House sparrows the direct stimulus of spring sunshine—rays straight through the top of the skull—it tickles their dormant testicles, the hormone-release swells their internal balls to
fourteen times
their winter size. Now, I know, don’t bother-Hedge sparrows are not related to sparrows at all—but I’ll
bet
they get that very same feeling in their boxer shorts. Yes? Anyway, the
women
don’t care what he’s thinking—all they know is that they
have
to collect at least some of his sperm, even if it’s only the one time. So they wait and watch—and when their own low-ranking husband is out foraging for insects to feed the family, working his third-class arse off, and when the rock-star’s high-ranking wife is off doing likewise (because an alpha male has
no time at all
to devote to domestic life), then this low-ranking female whips up the hedge, just ahead of her low-ranking rivals, and she flutters her wings like a begging fledgling; and she lowers her head and she raises her vent—and she lures him off, fast, behind a bush. And it
has
to be fast, because if her low-ranking terminal yawn of a jerk of a hard-working husband sees them together—he’ll desert her, the nest—finish. And she can’t afford that, not at all. But it’s still worth the risk, because she’s had this great excitement, this massive orgasm, and all her internal sexual cilia have been beating fit to bust—and she’s got the alpha male sperm stored right up there in a special pouch, waiting for her next egg to slot down the
tube. And so, however many times she couples with her low-ranking jerk of a shaming husband, she can rest easy—at least one of her eggs will meld her genes (deliciously) with those of the highest achieving, super-sexiest man in town.
As judged solely by her fellow females.
Because that’s the point. You see, Luke, when I was young,
when I was alive,
biologists of my generation (not that I was a biologist)—they didn’t bother to
read
Darwin, they didn’t know that
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
was really a two-volume brilliant treatise on the importance of sexual selection
by female choice.
They thought that the study of animal behaviour had begun with Von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen!”

Luke, in a high voice I didn’t know he possessed, as if he was being strangled, said: “Redmond?”

“Yes?”

“I
am
not
a Hedge sparrow…”

“Of course you are! That’s exactly what you are! Look—I forget the precise figure, but let’s say it’s 30 per cent: 30 per cent of the eggs in that hedgerow were actually fertilized by the local alpha male. They were nothing to do with the lower-ranking husbands who’d been duped, who sweated away to bring up the resulting chicks. It’s now called the
sexy-son-syndrome
(isn’t that great?)—the female unconsciously wants, needs, to mesh her own genes with some guy that all the other females have decided is irresistible, pouting-gorgeous, centre-spread
fit,
because that’s her one big chance to spread her own genes, the essential
her,
throughout the next generation. Via an alpha male like you. And if you don’t believe me, consider this
(as you
might say): you upend a hedgerow (and I
think,
Luke, that this is my very own contribution, entirely original, but consider this—I’m giving it to
you,
Luke,
gratis)—
and what do you get? A tower block! And guess what? A DNA study
was
mounted on a tower block in Leeds, under the guise of an HIV survey, and yes! Thirty per cent of the children in that tower block were entirely unrelated to the poor sods who thought they were the fathers! So it’s not surprising, is it, that
every
mother-in-law, when face to face with her daughter’s
new baby, whose red globby crumpled features might very well belong to a Martian, for all she knows, turns to her son-in-law and she goo-goo croons: ‘He/she/it’ (if it’s a hermaphrodite)
looks exactly like you!’
Because
she
can be sure, she knows her own wizened born-again genes
are
in there OK, and she knows damn well that those genes need feeding, supporting.”

“So what are you trying to say? Barking, Redmond! Nuts! Nuts!
So what’s this to do with me?”

“Everything! I’ve been thinking about it. And by the way, Luke, I
don’t
think your problem’s funny. It’s
so
interesting! It’s real. In contemporary society, it’s as if you’re a Yanomami warrior in the Amazons. Napoleon Chagnon lived with them off and on for years and his statistics are irrefutable. If you’re manically brave, if you’ve killed people in the constant low-level group-to-group warfare in the jungle, even if you die at twenty-five, when your reactions aren’t quite as fast as they used to be, when you’re coming of age and losing your ruthless edge, when you’ll probably be picked up by
someone else’s
6-foot-long arrow and pinned back-to-trunk against a tree—even so you’ll leave
six times
more offspring than an ordinary husband. Because the women in the shabono, the oval, communal, stockaded, open-centred dwelling place, like a theatre—they listen
very
carefully to the returning hunter-warriors’ tales around the home fires. And then guess what? For the next warrior-resting week they whip the current alpha male off behind a bush and collect his sperm, fast, when no one’s looking!”

“Nuts!”

“Nuts yourself! Of course it’s not
nuts!
And anyway, stop saying
nuts,
and just a friendly word—you know—stop staying
you know
all the time, OK?”

“Oh come on, Redmond, let’s sleep!”

“Certainly not! Luke—just you stay awake and
listen!
Because this will change your life!
All men should know this.
Biology—it’s such a
wonderful,
relaxing study. And you, you’re supposed to be a biologist. Jesus,
you’re so privileged!”

Luke groaned, an anxious kind of mid-pitched groan …

“So there you go—your top Yanomami warrior will reproduce like crazy, in his brave brief life he’ll spread his genes. He’ll pass on his alertness, his aggression. Whereas you—you
won’t—
because I’m sure that all your many serial girlfriends in Aberdeen (and
each time
you think it’s love, you poor sod), I’m sure that every last one of them is on the pill—so despite your great efforts, your real wish to settle down, your genes stay right there with you. In your bunk, as it happens.”

“Eh?”

“Yes! And you don’t know why! Well I’ll tell you! It’s
really
sad—because in all the societies that are vivid to me, the Iban, the Kenyah, the Kayan, the Ukit in Borneo; the Curipaco and Yanomami in the Amazons; the Bantu groups, the pygmies in the northern central Congo—in all those places, Luke, you’d be the Number One! By now you’d have twenty or thirty children …”

“But please,
please,
Redmond, I don’t want twenty or thirty children …” (And this was said with such unexpected force, such emphatic pleading, that it silenced me. I could almost
hear
him thinking. And then, into this pleasing, mental, thoroughly human world of a one-to-one exchange of ideas—a local, comforting, feel-good
conversation,
one of life’s perpetual pleasures, a pleasure which, if you had a residue of health and energy, you could rely on, no matter what—into this world-for-two there came the sound which we had managed to outwit,
to exclude for at least half an hour:
the sickening onslaught of an outer world that intended to kill us. And I thought: Jesus, Redmond, it’s
such
a luxury to have someone else here with you as you prepare to die, just before that rusted inward-bulging section of bow four yards from our heads finally bursts—if we can’t sleep we must
talk,
we really must, because that sound out there is the source of all fear. The spur for all religions. Yeah, yeah, and I know, dickhead, how often have you said that external fear is
comforting?
That the
real fear
is nameless, internal, the panic, the generalized paranoia, the rocking-back-and-forth anxiety of (say) clinical depression? Yeah, yeah, but that particular outer fear was a human, personal one,
just for you,
the fear of an arrow in the guts, of a Kalashnikov burst, of a
swipe from a machete! And how romantic it was! And how quickly it passed! And how pleased you were, how
proud
you were afterwards! Whereas
this,
this massively weighted indifferent murderous pounding all about us—there’s no romance about it, nothing personal, it’s such an easily forgotten, such a commonplace and truly foul way to die, and it doesn’t stop,
it goes on and on…)