Trawler (35 page)

Robbie and Allan, eyes bright, looked thoroughly entertained: after all, here was something unexpected: a tutorial given by a trawlerman, a fisheries inspector from the South Atlantic,
now at their own fisheries lab, the Marine Lab, Aberdeen, where so many new techniques had been invented that had eased their lives and improved their catches and incomes—and for Chrissake he was a
lifeboatman,
too—and with him was this white-haired old Worzel, older than their fathers …

“Well, I can answer
that,”
I said, delighted—because I had this instant, a multiple image of the great brown powerful river (the opposite shore a blur on the low horizon): the Orinoco, the Congo, the Amazon (and the island in the mouth of the Amazon, not that I’d seen it myself—it was the size of Switzerland): and all day long, mesmerizing, without a break (wherever you were), the remorseless brown river carried whole tree-trunks, branches, smashed-up rafts of white-weathered wood dislodged in a freak flood from the inner meander of some stream in the far interior—always, for ever, towards the ocean… “Rivers!”

“Rivers?” said Luke.

Robbie smiled.

Allan Besant, for some reason, put his right hand up above his head on to the stop-start lever of the conveyor and, without activating anything, himself leant forward, to hear better … And I realized that we were having a four-man conversation… So it was not the deep-pounding rhythm of the engines, the mind-emptying thump of the diesels that had enclosed us. No, of course not, across all registers, it had been the appallingly more powerful sound-waves from the sea, the insane wind …

Luke, with a half-smile, repeated: “Rivers?”

“Yes—I’ve seen it, an endless succession of broken trees, branches, mats of vegetation, on their way to the sea, above all in the Amazons and the Congo—but also from the fierce little rivers of Borneo!”

“Aye!
Yes—
that must be right!” Luke shouted. (And
so gratified,
I thought, yes: what a good teacher you’d make …) He lowered his voice to mere loud speech, became scholarship-serious: “But the text-book explanation given, for example, in Tony Rice’s grand little summary of it all in the official Natural History Museum booklet,
Deep Ocean,
it’s this—he says that trees from
coastal forests
—unlikely as it seems,
he admits, he says that these trees must fall into the sea,
sufficiently often
to make it worthwhile to be an abyssal wood-boring bivalve!”

“Aye!” yelled Robbie, so happy, cheering me on (and I thought: friendships, this is
friendship,
the most precious long-term emotional pleasure we can ever hope to experience…). “Rivers! There you go, Worzel—the whole ching-bang!”

And Allan, newly friendly, pulled down the large overhead lever, which started the hopper-conveyor, and the small lever next to it, which set the gutting table in motion; and then, realizing that all our trays were still full, he pushed both levers back up, hard.

Whereupon, from the hold, as if they knew that up here in the partial light we’d been enjoying the life of the mind, knowledge—those
other
things beyond mere labour—and excluding them, down below, from the hard-won contents of Luke’s brain: Bryan or Jerry or Sean sent the hammer-blow signal, steel-on-steel: Bang! Bang! Bang!—You lazy bastards! We’re out of fish!

So we went back to work, in earnest, sorting redfish, and the world shrank once more to a blur between the hands, of red and silver and painful spines and the occasional other fish (Luke, from my left: “Gut that one!”) and steel edges and tubes and clanging drop-gates… And at last, for us, the haul was over … When Luke—so thin, young, wiry, so manic and committed—bent down, quick as a cat-strike, and came up with a yard-long fish of sorts (so where had he stored that? Aye, as he might have said, of course,
under
his stand-on fish-box …): a fish that, in its bulk, was all head, with a short and rounded snout tipped with horny plates, a large, underslung mouth—and a thin following body which tapered down to a real look-alike rat-tail, which was all the more convincing because its muscly last few inches were young-rat pink …

I thought: it’s a rat-tail, a fish of the black depths, a grenadier—and hey, even I can now recognize a grenadier when I see one!—but this was different, it was elegant, in its way, yes, it was even graceful… “It’s a rat-tail! It’s a grenadier!”

“Well done, Worzel!”

And Robbie yelled: “Goaaal!”

And Allan Besant, less generous, said: “Goal.”

“Aye,” said Luke, laying the fish gently in his tray on the empty and stationary gutting table. “It’s a Roundnose grenadier,
Coryphaenoides rupestris
(and don’t they sound
great,
the scientific names?—and one day we’ll find out what they mean,
I promise we will),
but right now, Worzel, would you mind? Could we photograph it, please, alongside the Roughhead,
Macrourus berglax,
you know, to compare the two? Would you mind?”

Robbie hosed down Allan—the
power
of that pump: an aureole of water droplets, an all-round overhead-neon-lit halo for Saint Allan Besant; and then, likewise, as Allan hosed Robbie in his oilskins, the water-cannon blasting, the neon-corona: the beatification of Saint Robbie. And they, I thought, the swine, the blessed, they’re off to eat in the galley… what will it be? Haggis? Yes, God,
please
let it be haggis and clapshot. And (the rhythm of a solemn chant of the Wee-Free Fundamentalist Christians began to swell in my head, in the Gaelic, of course, but well translated: “Oh Holy Mavis and the Tiny Tot/Let it be clapshot and haggis/Haggis and clapshot.”) Jesus, I thought, yes, I’ve
earned
my haggis and my clapshot. Neeps and tatties.
The best.
Please. But now I have to photograph these fish … So I went straight (in full sea-dress, a protest) to the cabin (the
smells
from the galley) and got the Micro-Nikkor lens, and, from the camera-and-flash hanging on its strap from its hook in the laundry-room (“Hey, I’ve arrived—this is
my
hook:
I belong here”),
repeating the little Nikon-mantra (on at 5.6, off at f.11), turned free the 200 zoom, transferred the Nikon base-cap (the
precision
of it, even in plastic, or whatever it was) from the micro to the zoom, stuck the zoom, for safe-keeping, into the right foot of Luke’s pair of reserve sea-boots, labelled, at calf level, in heavy black marker-pen,
LUKAS
(so they were a special relic—from his time as a fisheries inspector on board Antarctic Spanish trawlers?) and clicked on the Micro-Nikkor, and why, I wondered vaguely, was such kit so comforting? So pleasing? Yes, it was a deep feeling, certainly, nothing at all to
do with the actual object—so it was probably genetic, prehistoric. Yes, those males who
didn’t
delight in the perfection of their kit, the delicious arc of the bow, the acme of balance in the arrow: well, they got naturally de-selected before they could breed, they got killed. And the female, she has other things to think about, mere kit is of no interest to her, she cares only for the end result, the successful male itself, so no wonder the girls don’t read bow-and-arrow mags, or gun mags, or camera or Ferrari mags, or trawler mags—no, no, they’ve no time for that primary male testing-stage. (“Boys stuff!” they think. The insult of it! No—all they care about, rightly, is the end result: with the best kit or the worst kit, who cares? Can you bring home … the what? The haggis
and
the clapshot…)

I found myself standing (easily, at last) on the fish-room floor, to port of the hopper, and Luke, next to me, two fish in photo-position at his feet, was
shouting
at me. Why’d he do that?

“Redmond! This is
special!
You know why?”

“Eh?”

“Please
—don’t do this—
you know, sometimes, excuse me, sometimes I think you’ve got Alzheimer’s, excuse me, I’m sorry” (he touched my left arm), “you know, a
real
Worzel, because sometimes I talk to you and you don’t respond at all!”

“I don’t?”

“No, I say something—and it’s OK, I
know
you’ve had no sleep, but I’m
used
to trawlermen who’ve had no sleep, and they
always
react when you say something!”

“Ah.”

“Yes—so
forget
it—but this is
special.”
With his right yellow sea-boot (its inner steel toe-cap) he pushed the two lined-up fish closer together. “You know why?”

“No, of course not.” And, even more testy: “Of course not!”

“Well you
should,”
he said, fired up with this deep fascination in a world beyond himself. “Because, remember?
Two-thirds
of the earth’s surface is the surface of the sea—and 80 per cent of that sea is over a mile deep. And the deep-sea areas of the world are continuous—the deep basins of the Atlantic, the Pacific and
Indian oceans, as the text books say, they all connect, connect! Imagine it! The vast power of those unimpeded currents—and there’s no barrier between them and the great Southern ocean deeps either” (as we began our now slow slide to port, the fish at our feet, Luke’s hand tightened manically on my left shoulder—ow! The strength of little Luke), “and I know about
them—
at least, I’ve gone diving for specimens on their very edge, did I tell you?”

“Ow! Yes. Great! You did!”

“Yes? But of course within all those basins there are ocean holes and deep valleys and canyons that descend and descend—you know—unknown depths, and well,
those
are as cut off from one another as the tops of different mountains on land, but such places, they’re local really, they’re
rare…
”

“So how, how does speciation, Ernst Mayr’s …”

“Come on, Worzel! For Chrissake
—take the picture!”

“Can’t.”

“Eh?”

“Can’t. Can’t move. You’ve got my shoulder!”

“Och aye! Ach—sorry!”

Luke released me: I stumbled to my right, recovered and bent forward until I had the two grenadiers in focus: the Rough-head (top) bigger, chunkier and, in comparison with the smooth pink-tailed projectile, the Roundhead, so scaly he looked dinosaur-armour-plated. Flash!

“Aye! But you were
shaking!”

“Of course I’m shaking!” (And my other inner voice, an unwelcome, new, querulous, testy, old-man’s voice, that, I’d noticed, seemed to have joined me out of Stromness and had tried to speak to me once or twice before, said: “You’ll be
bruised,
you know. All your joints
ache,
but your shoulder will
hurt.
So why don’t you give up,
retire?
Yes, yes—you must find new interests before your family send you to the
very
comforting
It’s-All-Over-Sunset-Totally-Fucked-Alzheimer’s-Goodbye-Home—
of course you must, so how about gardening? Ambitions? Yes, yes, dear—and how are we today? Ambitions? Why—you could get an allotment,
and even without poisoning cats, maybe, just maybe,
you could grow the perfect Brussels sprout…
And why not?
That’s difficult!
There’s nothing wrong with that!”)

“Well, don’t just stand there!
Take another exposure.
And then one more. Come on!
Bracket the exposures.”

“Eh! Yes, yes, of course. Ambitions! The future!”

“What? Hey, Worzel! Aye. That’s it. Well done! But there is
one
great barrier!”

We slid, slowly, back to starboard (even the sea was becoming friendly…).

“There is, across the deep seas
of all
the world’s oceans, just the one great divide—and
where,
Worzel, where do you think that is?”

“No idea!”

“Right
here!
That’s where—right off the UK! And no one in Britain knows or cares!” Luke, deeply offended by our ignorance, grasped the two precious grenadiers by their rat-tails and slung them into his yellow basket. “The Roundnose, you see, technically he shouldn’t be here—and why? Because this is Roughhead country! And why? Because between the two species-distributions, there’s the one great barrier, a bloody great mountain-range, excuse me, a submerged mountain-range that links the continental shelf to the west of us, you know, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, to the entirely different continental shelf that’s us and Europe and the shallow North Sea—a pond!”

The camera kit re-hung on its laundry-room hook, Luke hosed the fish-scales and fish-guts from my oilskins; I hosed Luke, from his chest-apron down to his boots: and from the scatter of water he yelled: “Aye! It runs from south of the Faeroes towards Shetland and Orkney—slap across the Faeroe—Shetland Channel! The Wyville Thomson Ridge! But now—we must eat! Calm down! Whatever! But I’ll tell you about it later, I promise I will…”

“Bollocks!” I shouted.

…

WE ARRIVED LATE
in the galley, very late, but Bryan, Robbie and Allan Besant were still there: Bryan filled his usual far corner at the left-hand table, his back towards the galley; Robbie sat opposite him; and Allan Besant, to our immediate right, shoulders propped against the wall, hands behind his head, lolled straight out along the bench. All three looked up at us—all three very different faces seemed to say: hello, yes, but please, not now, you’ve walked in just as our
intense
discussion is nearing its climax.

Allan Besant, obviously the least engaged, said: “Hi boys! There’s pork chops and clapshot! And Jerry’s made vegetable soup—and we all know, Jerry’s a new boy, and he’s a wanker from the sooth,
Edinburgh,
Edinburgh! But there’s no denying it” (he shut his eyes), “his soups, when Jerry
concentrates, aye,
the fact is, you could travel the world and no taste better” … (he opened his eyes)… “So go get your warm chops—and then, take my advice, have the soup cold. Because that soup, boys, hot, warm, cold, fuckin’ freezin’, who cares? It’s the best!”

We collected our white plates from the vertical wooden rack, our knives and forks from the screwed-down slatted box, our pork chops (one each) from the pan; and, grasping the ship’s ladle, from the equally outsize bolted-on saucepan (next to its twin, one-eighth full of soup), we took an accompanying wack of clapshot: pure, warm, mashed-up happiness.