Trawler (36 page)

As Luke and I sat down in our usual places (me on the inside, next to the wall, Luke on the outside, next to the aisle, the two of us opposite Allan Besant), Bryan said, “Hey Luke!” the volume notched up several stops: and we got the message, because it was as plain as a boom could be; and it said: You two, whatever you do, don’t start
yacking
like fishwives, about fish, or anything else, because we three here, before you interrupted, we were having a
serious
discussion, and that’s rare, that is, that’s not a pleasure you get every day… And then a fresh small joy, a new thought, struck his sea-worn tired black-bearded face, and lightened it (by about 50 per cent, I decided, my head craned back against the bench-rest; and only a
boom
like that, yes, only volume
that deep, reverberating around the steel plates of the enclosing claustrophobic dangerous galley, only a wave of sound like that could startle me off my clapshot…) and Bryan, the inner Old Man of the Sea, the outer First Mate, the young man with such a vigorous ultrasound, whale-communicating system, said: “Luke! That’s it! Now I come to think of it!
Of course—
you’re the one to resolve this argument, this debate we’re having, Robbie and Allan and me. You see it’s like this—I was just saying: I’ve been reading Captain Sutherland’s book about his life, you know, the man who taught us all, at the Nautical School in Stromness which, by the way, he built up himself, from nothing! And I admire him for that, of course, as we all do, but I also admire him because—in my opinion—he’s written a good honest book and he admits he was an alcoholic and he takes no pains to hide that fact! So Luke—what do you think?”

“About what?”

Luke, I was reassured to see, had somehow managed to swallow half his clapshot but his pork chop, as yet, was untouched. So this clapshot-thing, no, it wasn’t just
me…
I was sane, too …

“Aye, yes, I’m sorry.” Big Bryan looked concerned.
“You weren’t here.
It’s this—the
Longhope
disaster. The night those boys in the lifeboat were sent out to their certain death. They knew it.
Every last one of them.
They
knew
they’d no be returning. And yet they still went. Not a one refused to go. They all knew they were away to their drowning. And they went. They were no heroes! Ordinary men with jobs ashore! Aye—they were no in the Army or the Navy!
They were no even paid—
and someone sent them off to die, and that’s a fact! And the long and the short of it, Luke—it’s this: Captain Sutherland thinks that amounted to manslaughter, and the RNLI should have faced charges! So
you—
what do you think?”

“Ach. If there’s a shout—you go. Simple.”

“But what if it’s to certain death—like the
Longhope?
March 17, 1969-”

“You go.”

“Captain Sutherland says …”

“Look—if you thought of yourself,
for one second,
instead of being
entirely
focused on the saving of other people’s lives: you’d
never
go, would you? This Sutherland of yours—has he ever done it? As far as I remember, excuse me, he was in the
Merchant
Navy. He’s no idea. We’re not even in the
Royal
Navy. You can’t think like that when it comes to
saving
lives. You can’t weigh risks. No: we’re
not
in the Royal Navy. You can’t think like that! We’re volunteers—you get a shout! Simple! You go! You always go …”

“Aye, me grandad,” said Robbie, in an entirely different tone of voice, reducing the unbearable tension (what a gift, I thought,
and why hadn’t I thought of something?).
“Me grandad,” said Robbie (and Luke, in a fury of some kind—dedication? disgust?—attacked his pork chop,
wop!
slice! off the bone!
pow!),
“me grandad was an engineer on the Stromness lifeboat—and he had to go out and look for the
Longhope
people. Sutherland was really angry about all that, me grandad said, aye, Sutherland wrote to the RNLI, the papers, the Government in London, the whole ching-bang,
because all the Longhope people drowned.”
Robbie, in his white off-duty singlet, leant back, defensive, tense against the bench-support behind him; he crossed his absurdly muscled arms across his ridiculously over-developed chest and
ping!
I thought, that cheap singlet wasn’t made to withstand such pressure
—zap! flack!—
they’ll be strands of cotton shot like cartridge fluff, all over the galley… But, with a nanosecond to go, Robbie relaxed, leant forward towards Luke, and said,
“Sutherland’s a good man,
a man who feels too much inside, you know, and that’s why he’s an ex-alcoholic like meself; and Sutherland said there must be decisions taken, sometimes, when you
don’t
send a lifeboat out, when you’re brave enough
not
to send all those volunteers to their certain death…”

“Aye!” boomed Bryan, excited, turning on Luke. “Sutherland’s right, he’s a good man, it’s obvious, right enough. Sometimes you
don’t
get sentimental—you must think like a Viking.
Death happens.
Or rather, I should say:
sudden death happens.
You canna deny it, Luke. So sometimes you must let those people die who are going to die whatever you do—it’s the sea, you’ve got to
face it, so sometimes you must look death straight in the face and say: ‘OK, death—I see you, but no, not this time you’re not, this time you’re not going to have
one more man
than you’ve got already!’ Eh? Luke? Is that right?”

Luke, the clapshot gone, the pork-chop bone picked brittle-clean, said: “Bang! Up go the maroons, the flares!
Mayday Mayday!
And you get a shout! Ring-ring! And you’re half-dead, in deep sleep, and no, it’s not the alarm clock, it’s four in the morning, no—this is the real thing! And you’re warm in bed—and the desperate, the serious ones, they always seem to happen at four in the morning!”

“Aye, Luke,
wait,”
said Bryan,
“that’s not it.
Look—a Liberian-registered ship grounds at Grim Ness, South Ronaldsay—the height of the spring flood-tide, an easterly-going tide of course, 10 knots or so, and against a wall of sea, as Sutherland calls it, a wall of sea built up in a four-day storm from the east, so there you have it, the worst local conditions, a fockin’ maelstrom, call it what you like, but no 1960s lifeboat could possibly survive it, no chance, the lifeboats then, they weren’t
designed
to turn turtle: no one could survive if the sea really played with you, flipped you over, end-for-end… Aye, the
Longhope
lifeboat was lost on 17 March 1969 … And Sutherland knew them all, the coxswain, Dan Kirkpatrick, a man with fifty fockin’ years of experience of the Pentland Firth; the two Johnston boys, great hard-working lovely lads, you know, fishermen in the Firth, booked in to study at the nautical school that very next winter; and one of his favourite students, Eric MacFadyen, who’d gone home for the weekend and stayed over the Monday at his mother’s request, as Sutherland says, to help out on the farm, I shouldna wonder, whatever—and so he, too, Luke, he got the
shout
as you call it… Well, Captain Sutherland hoped that Dan would have seen sense and hove-to, in vast seas, right enough,
but out of the tidal eruptions…
But no, that night he was a lifeboatman, so he went as straight and as fast as he could through Brough Sound
on that night, at that time,
with such a lifeboat, to try to save the lives of those sailors on the Liberian-registered
Irene,
and thereby—and as Sutherland says he
must
have known he would—he drowned himself and his young crew…”

“Aye! Right!” shouted Luke, straight at Bryan. “It’s a shout! And yes:
that’s what we call it!
So what’s wrong with that? There’s men out there
—they’re drowning.
And excuse me, this Sutherland of yours, he seems to forget—sometimes,
in fact more than sometimes—
there’s women and children too! So who the hell’s going to take the decision
not to go?
This Sutherland of yours, I’ve heard of him, of course I have, I’ve read his letters in the RNLI archive, we all do, and maybe, perhaps, his letters helped in the re-design of our lifeboats, but I doubt it—because there’s something wrong with him: and why? Why’s he jealous of us? Eh? What did he do in life? Was he ever a lifeboatman? What did he
do
in life? Bum around the Merchant Navy? Get bombed in the war, as everyone did? Hit the bottle? Throw away the bottle? Run a college? So what?
Who do these teachers think they are?”

“Your father!” boomed Bryan, straight at Luke, equally fired up: “Your
father,
that’s who!” He paused, half turned away, looked down at his empty plate on the table in front of him… we waited, in a silence that obviously belonged to him and no one else … “Or maybe … I suppose … yes, it’s more likely, isn’t it?… It’s
you
who thinks
they’re
your new father … Aye … Because here’s this man who’s
paid
to care for you—but you, you as a pupil, a student, of course you don’t see it like that: no, because this is the new ideal father of your dreams who shares your interests and knows everything, and besides, he hasn’t messed things up with your mother,
and that’s a fact …
Aye, you can be pretty sure he hasn’t even met your mother … And so you start to love him, just like you loved your real father when you were a real child…”

“Yes! Yes!” I said, too loud, crass, breaking in, carried away by all this emotion from men who’d seemed to me to be so heroically, so miraculously free of it. “I’ve seen that often! It happened to me
—in loco parentis
indeed! And your tutor thinks that’s
his
burden: to take over from your parents or your school or whatever, when you’re so vulnerable, just emerged on your reed-stem over
the parental pond, yes, late adolescence, drying your wings, you know, in your confusing new metamorphosis, when as yet you’ve no idea—you don’t even know what the brand-new aerial predators look like—yes! In fact it’s
your
burden, the pupil’s burden, because it’s impossible to resist—that moment when, unknown to you, your tutor displaces your father … Yes, I can think of at least two contemporaries of mine at university, students with me who, even now,
thirty-five years on,
still mimic, unconsciously, I’m sure, our tutor’s way of
speaking
(let alone his wafty thought): the pauses, the breathy emphatic diction, the High Romantic Guff… And I can still remember that overwhelming excitement when I realized, in the here-and-now of a grey afternoon, that this tutor of mine really
did
imagine himself to be possessed of an intelligence, a searching genius that, with the almost-possible exception of Beethoven,
had never been surpassed…
Yes, what a privilege, but what a danger… Yes, you can find yourself enthralled for life by some kindly, well-meaning manic-depressive packed to the eyeballs with lithium. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course—you know, the manic depression and the lithium, it could happen to anyone… and it damn well does…”

Luke, Bryan, Robbie and Allan Besant looked at me, silent.

“Well, sorry, yes, you know
—I’m sure that only happens in the arts:
where it doesn’t matter much, does it? The odd student suicide…”

Allan Besant came alive; he disconnected his head and shoulders from the imitation-wood panels of the wall, swung his legs right and down, and, alert, he was sitting erect, opposite me: “Worzel! Worzel!” he said, putting both hands to his forehead and releasing them, into the air, a gesture repeated, fast, several times, a
very
effective signal, which meant what? Exactly?
Please—release me from this insanity,
perhaps, something like that… “Worzel! Worzel!” he repeated, with a huge smile on his broad, open, healthy young face. “Stop your vegetables! Stop your verbiage! Go on—fuck off back to your field of turnips!”

“Eh?”

“Yes, Worzel—no wonder you love your turnips and your potatoes so much! I’ve been watching you, you old scarecrow!”

“Uh?”

“Yes—keep out of this Worzel! Mr. Gummidge! Because you’re a country bumpkin from the far south, anyone can see that, and you’ve been on telly, and we all love you, but you’re not supposed to speak, not really, and you shouldn’t be at sea, that’s for sure
—and you know fuck-all about any of this…
”

Robbie, ignoring Allan, ignoring me, said to Luke, fast and urgent: “Yep. Well, one time, the head man in Kirkwall didna send out the Kirkwall lifeboat and the Stromness lifeboat went out instead.”

(And I was thinking: OK, yes, Allan Besant, so full of life, and I like him,
and it’s a joke,
anyone can see that, and I remember Rosie-bud reading Worzel Gummidge to me, the very first book that was pure pleasure, no fear, and I hadn’t yet been sent away to prep school, so I must have been six years old, yes, but all the same, he’s
right…
And something hit my subconscious hard, in its stomach, if it has a stomach; and I lost control of my face, as you do, and I must have looked lost, devastated, as you
suddenly do,
and there’s nothing that will hide the fact. And I thought blankly, yes, these cliffs of fall, in the mind, these moments of inner vacuum and blank falling fear—they don’t have to last long in reality to last for ever in the memory, do they? So how come it’s always Robbie who rescues us? And I remembered something that Luke had told me in passing, a particularly convincing and horrible explanation for the mysterious disappearance of five or six trawlers, over the years, in perfect weather in the summer North Sea, the sea that’s shallow as a pond—and you can see the same rising bubbles, now and then,
in any garden pond—
yes, the sudden release from the thick deposits on the shallow bed of the North Sea of trawler-sized bubbles of methane gas … The vacuum around you, the instant descent, the closing waters, the ripples outspreading, for a short distance, across the surface calm…)

“They went oot” (when Robbie really meant what he said, he
said
oot)
“because the Kirkwall lifeboat wouldna go oot. No, Luke—I tell a lie,
but it’s a big wee story in Orkney.
The Kirkwall lifeboat went oot—its wipers wouldna work, so they came bloody back in—technical, the
wipers
wouldna work, so they turned back and came in … The Kirkwall lifeboat, they’re still a joke, a joke like, me cousin was in it, and because of embarrassment, he left.”