Trawler (34 page)

“So come on, scumbag! Sperm whales! Copepods! Hagfish!”

“Hagfish? Tell me about it!”

“What? Now? With the siren sounded? You crazy? On deck—bring your camera! On deck!”

O
UT ON DECK
, everything was transformed, etched, washed in the early morning Arctic light: and my own small world had changed: there was a swell, yes, but I could stand; in fact,
I could walk.
There seemed to be no wind: or maybe, I thought, my internal measuring standards of such things have altered for ever … The light was thin and white and pure and, somehow, directed upwards—and there, right above us, in this light I had never seen before, hung three gulls I had only half-imagined, Glaucous gulls, nonchalant gulls from the Arctic ice-cliffs, but their heavy barrel-bodies, their broad wings, their butch heads (they were looking down, straight at me, mildly interested, suspended in this extreme northern world of theirs, a hundred feet above us), seemed to be pink, a dull pink. So OK, I thought, they’re teenagers, so what? It’s just that the pure-white adults have more macho things to do, I expect, like hunt polar-bears.

“Luke! Glaucous gulls!”

“Ach,” said Luke, not even bothering to turn his head. “Gulls. I’ve a minilog on the net.” And, preoccupied, unreachable, he made his way aft to join Bryan and Robbie and Allan Besant gathered at the stern.

Shocked, I said to a kittiwake, hanging in the air 6 feet above my head, “That Luke—I’m sorry, he’s just not in love with you, he
doesn’t care like I do, see? He didn’t even notice the Glaucous gulls (those scary thugs up there, yes?) let alone
you,
you prettiest little gull, jeez, that Luke,
I’m sorry,
it’s just that you’re not his thing, it’s OK, it’s not your fault, it’s him, you won’t believe it, but Luke’s love-in-life, his passion:
it’s fish.”

The kittiwake tilted her head down and right; she regarded me intensely with her soft, dark right eye: her bill was fresh yellow, her black legs and folded feet were suspended, dangling beneath her, so delicate; her pure white-feather wind-fluffed tummy looked so warm—“And hey!” I said to her. “You’re my number-one beauty of the open sea, you tough little oceanic gull, you, I know all about you—you shear and hang and soar and
play
in those Force 12 winds that terrify us so …”

And the kittiwake, I swear, moved in closer and said: “Luke? A passion for fish? Me too!”

“Hang on!” I said, emphatic. “Stay there! Don’t move! This lens, you see, it’s useless, it’s for close-ups of
fish.
So I must go below and change it—to your lens, the 200 zoom. But I
won’t
change my oilskins or my boots. No. This is too important. And Jason won’t know—he’s on the bridge, as we call it. So
stay there,
because
I really
want your picture, for me, OK? To keep for ever…”

I went to the cabin (no problems) and changed the lens (the
pleasure of it:
the outer world had lost its hatred, its violence: I could think again).

And when I came back, yes, she was still there, but less responsive: “Quick!” she seemed to say. “Hurry up! You men, you’re so slow, so indecisive! Because—look! It’s not that I’m indifferent to you, it’s just that, well, I have other concerns in my life, you understand, and I’m
so
hungry—and there’s the cod-end, way back, just appeared…”

So I took her portrait—and one of a gannet waiting on the water, so very bright and white, lit by the low rays of the Arctic sun. And those pictures, I thought, with an absurd rush of pleasure, are the first and second best photographs I’ve ever taken (and oh yes? said the inner voice that countermands all our best
emotions, and deserts us when we despair—so what makes you think you can take a good picture of anything at full aperture and one-sixtieth of a second on a rolling ship?). So (to prove I wasn’t listening) I focused on Big Bryan at the stern: in his yellow oilskins, hood up over his red balaclava, his left hand on the lever that operated the power-block. And he was grinning, he thought it was funny, me trying to take his picture in this swell: even as he concentrated so hard, he’d noticed; it was true—Big Bryan noticed everything, which was another reason, I supposed, why he was the man you wanted on deck, should you decide to fall overboard … And then I turned the long lens on Robbie, beaky-faced, a Pict, in his worn red survival suit, but wearing a jaunty black baseball-cap which told me: OK, he knows about these things, so the Force 12 baby hurricane, the wee storm (as he’d probably call it)—it really is over, it’s passed,
we’re safe.
And next I took a photograph of Allan Besant, in his equally stained red survival suit, its black cowl up around his full cheeks, hatless, his hair cut short but for a bunch over the centre of his forehead, someone slightly apart from the rest of the crew (but why? … I’d no idea).

The cod-end swung round and up and over the hopper-Robbie untied the knot. A cascade of redfish dull-thundered down into the hidden steel cavern. Luke gave me a push (where’d he come from? Why couldn’t
I
notice things?): “Action! To the fish-room!”

AND AS WE MADE
our way below, we observed the purely symbolic psychological rules: Luke and I, like every trawlerman (and no, there was nothing practical about it)—we clambered out of our oilskins and we forced off our sea-boots on the shelter-deck and we carried them with us the short distance down the companionway stairs, left along the thoroughly dirty corridor past the galley (it was nothing to do with cleanliness), through the bulkhead door of the fish-room—and put them on again at the bench to the left. And I was about to ask: Why the hell did we waste time doing that? When the answer came to me: of course: to
maintain his sanity, to preserve the precious other-world of his domestic and sleeping time, a hunting male must make a barrier, even if it is invisible, a barrier between his two lives, his work and his rest, and he’ll do so in some sharp symbolic way, especially if, physically, the two worlds are only yards apart.

Yes—and I got to the gutting table first (anxious) in order to take possession of the one and only wooden-handled gutting-knife (so comforting), and another question came to me from nowhere (which was in itself a pleasure, a reassurance—so maybe, one day, my brain really would be alive again?): why are all those seabirds up there, the Glaucous gulls (if only they were adult), the kittiwakes, the gannets, the terns (not that we’d seen any)—why are they all so white, so very white? And the nature of this little question was also a deep pleasure, because it was innocent, and external, and nothing whatever to do with the self, and, therefore, healthy, a matter of healing. And the answer came too—from something I’d read somewhere (but no, I couldn’t remember the reference, so yes, my memory was still a partial spray-white-out, closed in with fear, confused)… Terns and gulls and, presumably, gannets (such social birds, all of them)—they have a very high percentage of orange and red oil-droplets in their eyes: they can see for miles right through the atmospheric haze that hangs over the ocean: from a vast distance they can detect a feeding frenzy of soaring and plunging white birds who’ve found a shoal of fish…

It’s become a routine, I thought, it’s almost a way of life, I’m sure I’ve done this for ever, this gutting-table business,
I know what to do
(oh yeah, said the inner voice, so how come you’re so useless at it?). Robbie stood to my right, Luke to my left; Bryan, Jerry and Sean made their way down the ladder to the hold (yes, I thought, I must do that next
—what happens down there?).

Allan Besant stepped up to the table, in control position—and he happened to butt his forehead against the end of the wooden handle of the steel, the knife-sharpener, which someone had replaced, not level in its tight slot between the overhead pipes, but at a downward slant. “Fuck you!” he shouted, with
eruptive violence. Grabbing the handle in his right hand, he hurled the steel, with a lightning backwards convulsion of his arm, across the fish-room where, like a bolt from a crossbow, it struck the plates to port with a horrible intensity, ricocheted halfway back towards him, bounced, with decreasing energy, almost to his feet, and, coming to rest, a pointer stern-to-bow, began to roll, like every loose and inarticulate thing, port to starboard, starboard to port…

Robbie and Luke, sorting redfish, kept their heads down. No one spoke. An hour or so later, Allan Besant, without a word, stepped off his box, walked across the rolling wet boards, retrieved the steel and replaced it, carefully, level, tucked up straight, in its usual place.

Luke, at once, abandoning his tray, his full section of the gutting table, hopped lightly off his own box, to his left, swung himself over the conveyor—yellow boots in the air, as if vaulting a gate—and, disappearing for a moment (I heard the corrugated-iron scrape of the hopper-door pulled open, and shut), he came back round the corner holding something in his right hand: light-brown, flattish, very wet. (So whatever it was, I thought, Luke, on one of his many private visits—the virgin, rich, ready hopper, it seemed to belong to Luke alone—he’s stored that something in there, cached it.) With no apparent effort, he repeated his circus jump, one-handed, and he was there again, next to me, on his box, with a ridiculous grin on his face—and in the light of such enjoyment all tension in the fish-room burnt off like a morning fog …

Luke leant forward over the gutting table, he held out his prize with both hands, and he tilted it, in the beam of the overhead lights, to each of us in turn, to Allan, to Robbie, to me. And yes, even I knew that this something must be special, because otherwise Allan and Robbie would have looked polite, bored, and got on with their work—but, like me, they stared … It was an intense colony of small animals, I could see that, in shape like the honeycomb in a bee-hive, except that this was manic, the tunnels deep, needful, each exquisite little round hole (what? maybe 4 millimetres
across, and so evenly spaced, their perfect circular walls perhaps half a millimetre thick)—every receding tunnel was filled, low down, by a withdrawn purple-white glisten-bright animal…

“What’s this, Worzel?” said Luke, too loud—so that was OK; it was a social-bonding question, one for all of us.

Now, I thought, like a first-former, all of eleven (and biology, then, was already so exciting—in fact, the happiness of such a revelation was almost overwhelming; an instant release into the great testable world: so this is
real?
This is how the world
is?
So:
pow!
And I’ve been trying to regain that feeling ever since …)—I thought, well, so teacher Luke is asking me this question with such over-the-top pleasure, and I got it wrong last time, so yes, sponges are colonial animals, aren’t they?

“It’s a sponge!”

“No!” shouted Luke, with a little jump of
joie de vivre;
he
jumped,
on top of his box. “No! Worzel—no! It’s a mast!”

“A mast?” said Allan, eager, leaning forward. “Get away!
Of course
it’s not a sponge! Worzel! Old Worzel! But shite—the Marine Lab!
The Marine Lab, Aberdeen!
It’s no a fucking mast!”

“Aye!” shouted Robbie. “Yep! The Marine Lab—they canna take it at sea! They, like, they go to pieces!”

And Luke, far from being affronted, became super-charged with the energy that makes the rest of life worth the effort. “It’s a mast!” he yelled, his weathered face transformed, for a moment, into that of a young boy. “It’s a mast!”

He turned it over—and yes, there was no doubt about it: no holes, just a smooth curved surface, a quarter-cross-section of the outside of a massive mast.

“Aye,” said Robbie, without apology. “Yep! That’s right, sure enough—and imagine them wrecked
right up here
in a Force 12 like the last one. January—and in a
sailing ship.
No chance. No chance to keep her head into the lumps. No chance at all. Orkney men, I shouldna wonder. From Stromness. A whaler.”

“Aye, Christ!” said Allan, with excessive passion. “What a
shite
way of life!”

Luke, ignoring Robbie and Allan (this was biology, not history),
said: “Worzel, Redmond!” (So there was more to come, Luke’s interest was not exhausted, he hadn’t finished.) “How would you explain it? Because
these”—
the glisten-purple-white animals withdrawn into their holes, reflecting the overhead lights—“are not
Teredo navalis,
the mollusc, the bivalve of shallow waters, the so-called ship-worm. No! Not at all!”

He tossed the piece of wood over the hopper-conveyor, in a faultless curve—straight into his stanchion-lashed blue basket. (How does he do that? I thought, my mind relaxing back into its usual wish-wash of trivia—why isn’t he a professional bunger, lobber, whatever? There
must
be a post-prehistoric-hunting game that values Lukes who chuck things with their hands as well as the one that makes heroes of people who kick things with their feet? Hey—yes! Basketball!)

“No really, Redmond,
attend,
it’s extraordinary—because these molluscs have come up from the deep sea!” And Luke, intent, was leaning forward over the gutting table as if the piece of mast was still in his hands—and his hands, with a life of their own, began to mime his words. Robbie and Allan, all work forgotten, leant forward, too, watching. “And we now know,” said Luke, “since the 1970s—that recent!—we now know that all across the ocean floors of the world there are
wood-boring
bivalves, waiting.” Luke’s hands, as flat as could be, spread forward across the gutting table, laying out the great plains of the abyss of the watery earth and its population of specialized molluscs, waiting. “Can you think of a less likely source of food?
Wood—
the deep ocean? It’s as far from a source of wood as you can get! Of course, they’ll attack masts like that” (he gave a violent nod towards his blue basket), “the hulls of wooden shipwrecks—but come on—they evolved millions of years before we even stood upright, let alone made boats. So come on, Worzel! No one knows how or when—as yet—but what kept them going before men built ships and drowned themselves?”