Trawler (24 page)

“Great! I love that! Christ, Redmond, you got lucky,
big time!”

“Yes, yes! But I haven’t finished! Get this! You know what?
At the end of the very next month,
when she’d left for good, when she’d gone to Rousay for ever, he won the Crafoord
and
the Kyoto Prize for biology! Worth
much
more than the Nobel!”

Luke yelled, “Goal!”

I yelled, “Goal!”

And then, together, we yelled: “Go-aaaal!”

A
FTER A SILENCE BETWEEN US
, from the darkness that threw itself about, Luke said: “Redmond, your thought, you know, it’s all broken up—it’s fractured. What
is
this? Why do you want my opinion?”

“Fractured?” I shouted, stung (but I resisted the impulse to sit up with outrage, with instant aggression, because the top of my head still hurt from the last time, and how
civilized
you’ve become, I thought, as I lay there, rigid). “Fractured! Come
on—it’s obvious:
Bill Hamilton, like you, was an alpha male. But in his case he was mentally, not physically, absent. You see, Luke
—it comes to the same thing.
Because he was never 100 per cent available to the person he loved most in normal life. Because of the constant presence, the unremitting pressure of a possible
shout,
as you call it, from his very own personal pager, like yours, the essence of his life, the whole purpose—but in his case it wasn’t from the lifeboat station, it was from the subconscious on-call of his own ideas.
Imagine it:
Quick! Drop everything! Get out to this one! Save it! Before it disappears for ever!”

“So no woman could stay with him?”

“Right! She decided, unconsciously, once she’d had her alpha-male children (and Luke—look here—I never met Bill’s children but I’ll
bet
they’re brilliant), she thought—Jesus, if I want to be happy, if I want to feel
totally
noticed, if I want to be full-time
no-distractions 100 per cent valued by a male whose life will be centred on
me,
then, while there’s still time, I’d better go grab a decent, hard-working, useful, indispensable dentist! And who the hell could argue with that? Jesus, Luke, when you reach my age,
the toothaches:
our inherited fish-ancestor sensitive long-snout nerves all squashed-up in our pug-dog faces—and to our
teeth,
for Chrissake! And if there’s a God, that’s another big mistake he’s got to answer for, you bet, and come to think of it, my dentist from always, Bob Farrant, it’s a damn good thing he doesn’t know how much I really value him!” (And Jesus, I thought, the whole left side of my face—it hurts, and has it gone puffy? Do I have an abscess? Yes, I think I do, but “Bad luck, babies!” I said to them. “You several billion parasitic bacteria breeding like Irish rabbits in my back upper-left dead molar’s root-canals, where you and I know there’s no blood supply, so no phagocytes of mine, no antibiotics of Bob Farrant can penetrate. Bad luck, babies! Bad choice! Because you and me,
all of you,
we’re going to drown together!” So how’s about that,
you filthy little shitbags?”)

“Och aye! Aye! So what? Your
teeth
is it? Jesus! You sad old
freak!
But what about W. D. Hamilton? Eh?
Aye—that was really interesting!
So why? Why do you want my opinion? Here I am Redmond—I’m ready for it,
right now…
”

“You are? Well it’s—homosexuality!”

Luke behaved badly. He snorted. He probably, I thought, judging by the muffled, snuffly sounds, was laughing outright, his face, his waggly ears, stuffed into his pillow.

“No! No! You stupid scientist! You marine biologist you—and what could be better than that? Eh? You’re a bozo like the rest of us! You’ve got it all wrong! You don’t understand what Hamilton’s most famous work, that great paper on kin-selection—you don’t realize what it means! Of course you don’t! Because you’re a heterosexual like me—and heterosexuals have made this
stupid
myth, to protect their dignity, their macho sense of themselves for—probably two hundred thousand years! Okay-so we had an inkling of it in recent popular biology with Lorenz’s geese—you know, that threesome, the two bonded bisexual males
and the one female. And how she bred! Of course she did
—two
guys to forage for her,
two
guys to beat the shit out of all the other geese and any passing fox! But you’re right, I hear you, Lorenz had been a real Nazi, so quite rightly no one took any notice. Still, he
almost
redeemed himself, and he did get that Nobel… But yes, yes, you’re right—even that’s not the real point, I’m wandering.
The point is Hamilton’s work.
So elegant. Worker-bees, they share half the Queen’s genes, but they don’t breed, they work, they defend,
they fight,
and that’s the best way, statistically speaking, to pass on their own genes to the next generation.”

“Aye, we know all that…”

“Okay? You do? So let’s skip the intervening stages! And we come to my point, at least I
think
it’s mine, but you know how things are in science, you’re all so paranoid, so bitter-competitive, but yes, I’m sure this is entirely original, in its general implications, but Luke, you can have it, of course,
gratis.”

“Oh,
thanks. Gratis!
Thank you, Redmond. Aye!
Nuts!”

“The army of Sparta. You know how it was organized?”

Luke snuffled into his pillow. He blew. I heard it. Distinctly. He surfaced, presumably, and he blew again: “No!” And he re-snuffled. And Luke’s hilarity, I thought, it is so unfunny. How can he possibly laugh at a time like this?
And laugh
fit to bust—just when things are so
very
serious.

“Good!” I said, or rather I shouted, because, to be heard at all, to overcome the noise of the fear out there we had to
shout
across the four-foot gap between our bunks … “So just remember Luke—every one of those warriors certainly had a mother, yes? And a heterosexual father? And he probably had several heterosexual brothers and non-lesbian sisters, right?”

Another, highly offensive, pillow-whoosh: “Right!”

“So his gene-bank was at home? Yeah? Like a worker-bee?”

“Aye!” And then, in the dark, an oxygenated, unimpeded laugh, right out in the open …

“Luke!
Stop it!
Because I tell you—listen!—we’ve got homosexuals all wrong! They’re
not
effeminate. As heterosexuals males, especially in science, like to think. So how’s about the guy who
made the synthesis that formed the early basis of your own new science? Eh? Alister Hardy. Or E. B. Ford, one of Hamilton’s own heroes, a misogynist poofter if ever there was one!
Butterflies,
yes? The Number One in the Collins New Naturalist Series,
and
he wrote Number Thirty,
Moths, beautiful books!
His friend Kettlewell (you know: Ford and Kettlewell—the famous natural-selection experiment with the Peppered moth) tells a great story about Ford: they were in the Canadian forest, studying their moths and butterflies, and base-camp was a log-cabin. Kettlewell came back from collecting one day; Ford was in the cabin at the work-bench; and in the doorway between them was a whacking great Grizzly. From inside the hut came Ford’s irritated little voice, ‘Go away bear! I’m
very
busy! Go away!
You’re in my light!’
Well, of course, the perfectly normal, respectable—and, at that moment, upright bear, had never seen anything quite like Ford, so it ambled off, disgusted, shaking its head…”

“Redmond, you’re so bookish …”

“Luke, that’s a compliment, yes? Or you think that’s not macho or something?”

“Not macho?” Luke woofed with laughter. “What’s that got to do with it? With
anything?
You’re such a kink, Redmond! Such a screw-up! Jesus, how old are you? Fifty-plus! And to think I used to be sure that people like you, writers, whatever—I used to be certain that people like you, at least, as they grew older they became wiser! What a laugh! What a horrible joke! But then I knew, I knew we’d have fun, you and I! You’re so bookish. And of course that’s a compliment! Even though it
is
a bit kinky, as you’d say, because the content of those books, it’s not the whole story, is it? Redmond, I’ll bet you, ten to one, you’re the kind of freak, I’ll bet you—you’re the kind of freak that opens a book you fancy,
when you think no one is looking:
you open it right in the middle, don’t you? And you place your big nose—and hey!—you’ve got a nose just like Mister Punch! Anyone tell you that? It almost meets your chin! Aye! You place your nose right at the bottom of the gulley between the two pages and you push it up to the top, inhaling, taking a deep breath. Aye, you’re the kind of kink that
smells
books!”

“Yes! You bastard! Yes. I do. I do!”

“And so do I!”

“You do? So we’re friends, Luke! Eh? We’re
real
friends! For life!”

“Aye. Jesus.
Spare us…
”

“Uh?”

“Well, aye,
it’s not really funny,
because there’s something else I’d really really like to do, as
a pure pleasure,
in my life, as you call it. Imagine! I get a job at this new outlier of the brand-new idea of the University of the Highlands and Islands (can you imagine anything more romantic?) and in this great new reborn country, Scotland!”

“You do?”

“Aye! At the North Atlantic Fisheries College at Scalloway, in Shetland. Wild, Redmond! Wild in every sense! And Scalloway—so beautiful! So that’s
my
impossible fantasy. So listen! As you’d say (and by the way, Redmond, it’s such a pain, the way you say that)—so listen! Here’s the constant dream—I’ve already won a job at the college! Nuts! Right?”

“Right!”

“So somehow or other I’m already
teaching
(aye, I know,
impossible!)
and I have my research
(anyone
can do that!)—and the Boss, the President, whatever he’s called, he takes me aside in a corridor one day. And it’s January, you know, and there’s a Force 11 storm outside, and yet inside the college itself, it’s so
warm,
and the lights are on, and my halibut-breeding programme is going so well and by now I have a little cottage
all of my own
down the road, one of those
beautiful
little cottages, aye? You know? Those cottages that look so
right
they might have
grown
where they stand?”

“Yes! Yes! But come on, Luke! I’m not the only one whose mind is fucked! You’re
wandering!
Yes! Yes! You are! So what’s your point?
Indeed, Luke,
it occurs to me, your thought is
so fractured!
Yes! Yes, it is! So perhaps you can’t remember?”

“Aye! Well, Redmond! Know what I mean? Stop being so
aggressive!
Aye. Stop interrupting!”

“Och aye! Nuts!” I said, pleased with myself, and then,
unbidden, the nuts tumbled out, and to me, they all seemed so
very
funny: “Pea-nuts! Hazel-nuts! Brazil-nuts! Testicle-nuts!”

“Jeesus! Stop it, Redmond!
Be your age,
right? And listen! Because I’ve got a long-term mortgage on it, because I have a
regular, secure job,
right? Aye? So I have this
beautiful,
this really old Scalloway cottage …”

“The Vikings!”

“No! But yes—it’s old this cottage, of course it is! And snug! And so good to look
at, from every angle,
and it’s built long ago by real masters of the art: it’s built to withstand a Category Five hurricane, winds at 200 mph-plus, and it has a little walled-in garden at the back—and there in the Highlands and Islands University, in this warm corridor of the
college,
the Boss, the President, he says to me, he says: ‘Dr. Bullough’ (because by then I’ve
got
my doctorate from Aberdeen), ‘Dr. Bullough,’ he says,
‘I
don’t want to pressure you in any way, but as you know we’re a
very
young institution and we’re trying to build up a library in marine biology,
a library of international standing
and it so happens that
every
member of the Committee decided—and so I think we may call it a
unanimous decision,
don’t you?—we decided, every one of us,
without exception,
that you, Dr. Bullough, you are the only man capable of building up our new collection. I’m sorry, I truly am—but there’ll be no increase in your Lecturer Grade One salary to cover the extra work—we have no provision for that—but it so happens that we’ve just received a
very
generous bequest for the buying of books. From the widow of a famous Whalsay trawler-captain! It’s OK, Dr. Bullough, nothing said and so on… and I fully expect you to refuse, and
no one
will think any the worse of you, but…’

“And I say, Aye! Aye! I’m your man!’”

“Luke—you’ve begun to
swear,
I’m certain of it!”

“I do? I did? Well—I’m sorry. But who cares? Because it’s just a silly fantasy, and I’m never going to be able to lecture. So that’s it.
Finish…
When all this is done, Redmond, I’ll have to be off back to the Falklands, as a fisheries inspector, and there’s nothing wrong with that—because those guys do a great job: know what I mean? The fish stocks in the South Atlantic are still
so rich—
and
without those inspectors you can say goodbye to the whole lot! The Japanese … But on the other hand of course I may as well slit my throat with a gutting knife!”