Trawler (39 page)

“Hey no! Wait!” said Bryan, with extra volume, throwing some internal switch to mega-bass. “You’ve got me wrong!”

“Oh yes?”

“Aye! The scientific name for White halibut in Shetland? In the only no-bullshit zone on earth? The name? It’s
DA FISH
, that’s what,
DA FISH!
And that’s a fact!”

We laughed. Allan laughed, and his hands unclenched off the door jambs, and he said, formulaic, happy, in the full Orkney lilt: “I’m away to ma bed.”

L
UKE MOVED SIDEWAYS
and up, as if something had gripped him at the back of the neck, as you might pick up a cat, and, stumbling slightly, in the space between the tables, he steadied himself with his left hand against the back of our bench and said, in a voice not quite his own: “I’m sorry. So sorry! I must go. I have to work!” And—but the echo or the joke or whatever his brave self meant it to be, it wilted and died in the warm fug, by the door, as he said, so obviously racked with guilt: “I’m away to ma fish-room!”

Poor Luke, I thought, it must have hit him in that instant—yes, because he’d forgotten himself, listening to Allan Besant, he’d begun to live out of himself, free of anxiety, out of time, in real pleasure, the clamps off the head, such a relief, just as if he
was
in a theatre … free of his doctorate. And what is it about doctorates? Why such suffering? Even for a Luke? The otherwise most courageous man you might ever hope to meet? Well, obviously, for a start, it’s an absurd privilege, a great (and expensive, so expensive—other people’s taxes), a great gift to
you
(which you know, which makes the pressure worse): a real chance to discover something entirely unexpected about the way the world works—and the examples of doctoral students’ work changing the way we see ourselves and the universe, they’re too very many to mention: so how’s about Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, pulsating
radio stars, in 1967? An impoverished doctoral student, analysing signals from a new radio telescope, a Cambridge effort, a telescope four-plus acres in area, but that’s not the point, no, only
she
was intense and engaged enough to notice an extraordinary radio source: and she was
young enough
not to dismiss it as
local interference
(because it was too freaky to fit any then-current theoretical model); and for a time the jokey explanation of her elders, who plainly thought it was a technical fault of some kind in this new telescope—it was this: the signal was a message sent by the other life out there that we lonely people so yearn to find. And the older establishment-astronomers named this regular pulse, this signal every one-point-something seconds, LGM—Little Green Men. But yes—like so many fresh-thinking, young, committed doctoral students before and since,
she was right:
she went ahead, unfazed, and found other sources, and
pow!
It was a new type of star. A tiny star, a neutron star, and they’re no more than 10 miles across, but so massive, and they and their magnetic field spin like crazy, and don’t ask me how, but they produce this signal … Yes. See? So why shouldn’t Luke discover something equally remarkable about life in the unknown deep-sea? Why not?

But the golden chance, the great opportunity to spend three or more years pursuing some obsessive interest, the intensity of it, you don’t know it at the time, of course, because you’re all of twenty-two years old,
but here it is,
your real life, and it gives you the foundation for the whole of the rest of your
intellectual life…
So there you go, you must make your own real choice of interest for a doctorate as deeply as you possibly can—something that connects at once with the half-forgotten entrancements of your childhood, something that
really
excites you, the more secret the better, because this is your last chance to
play.
For instance: take your very first sight of a smooth newt in a pond; you, the child, captivated by the mysteries of this life before you, so unlike your own; the smooth or common newt, suspended in this pond, so unexpected, its delicate hands and feet so out-stretched; and it swims, its paddling hands and feet, its zig-zag tail, so ancient, so like the tiniest of dinosaurs straight up to the surface; and it takes
a breath of air, and you see its orange underside and it flits back to safety, and it regains its floating composure, a steady control over its emotions … But hang on a minute—its sex life, like us, there’s no composure about it, oh no: my friend, Tim Halliday now so old, like me, but when he was a doctoral student some thirty years ago, well, his doctoral thesis was on
The Sex Life of the Newt:
and you may laugh—but
he
discovered that the sequence went:
whip, fan, flash and sniff
I remember that, because no one could forget such a thing—and he was a tidy boy, so in the mating season he’d go out with his net and capture a male and a female smooth newt from some farm-pond near Oxford, and he’d bring them back in his collecting jar and release them into newt-sex heaven: his newt-club in his lab, a gravel-bottomed, well-aerated, just-the-right temperature, pond-planted designer-tank-for-newts: a red-light, after-dinner prairie bed, a secluded Masters-and-Johnson, a Kinsey all-permitted sex-club for newts …

I HEARD
, from a very long way away, from far out, from the wildly anxious surface of the deep sea, way out beyond the snug little illusory comfort of the
Norlantean’s
double-hull—I heard
a shout,
as Luke would call it… “Redmond!” It was Robbie’s voice… a shout! But I hadn’t been trained, and
training,
again and again, as Luke said, that was everything;
but this was an emergency,
and it was
Robbie
out there, asking
me,
of all people, to rescue him … And he was right of course, because only Robbie knew me well enough to realize that I was the fattest old fuck ever to go to sea, so I was
insulated,
I had my own survival suit, an excessive covering of subcutaneous all-over yellow fat, like all mammals in the sea, so, sure, I must jump in, and I must fat-swim, and I must
rescue
that little Robbie, so thin as he was, who for some reason had decided to become a close friend of mine … So I jumped off the gunwale of the
Norlantean,
from the stern-deck, and my legs kicked out like a frog and my hands paddled as hard as they could, like a newt, rising for air to the surface, and when I got there, a hero already, I yelled: “Robbie! It’s OK! Your troubles are
over! It’s me! Redmond!
So don’t worry!
Because it’s me! And I’m here! And I’m coming! I’m coming as fast as I can! I’m coming to rescue you!”

And
I got there (such
a flailing of limbs—and the sea was so salty and my mouth went dry), and Robbie, drowning, desperate, he grabbed me with both hands, so hard, on the ridges of my shoulders; and he transferred his right hand to the hair on the back of my head and he pulled my face out of the water… or, as it now seemed, out of my shallow bowl of soup … “Redmond!” he said, right into my left ear. “So you’d rescue me like? Aye
—I’m sure you would!
Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate that! I really do!”

And Big Bryan, way out in his corner, he was convulsed with laughter: Boom! Boom! “So here comes Worzel!” he yelled, delighted. “Here comes Worzel! Gurgle gurgle! So don’t you worry about a thing, Robbie! Because here comes Gurgle Worzel, gurgle gurgle!”

Jesus—how
very
bad: so I must have been shouting in my sleep … But how come I’d been asleep at all? Because it didn’t feel
at all like waking—and
anyway, how dare they play a trick like that on me? Because I’d been talking,
so rationally,
hadn’t I? I’d been talking, I’d been giving my all to Luke and Robbie and Bryan and they’d been spellbound, as they should be, and they’d said nothing, as they ought… Yes:
I’d been talking:
and they were playing some trawler-game with me … Or were they? Hadn’t I been swimming, and so well, in the sea?

Robbie said, as if Allan Besant had but left that second (perhaps he had): “Redmond, you mustna mind Allan. He’s not like us, he’s not like you and me—because he came into a lot of money like,
a lot,
from some relative he’d never met, I shouldna wonder.”

“Oh boys, Jesus, excuse me, but it’s
so
frightening, this life of yours …”

“Aye. Anyway, he was no prepared for it, if you know what I mean, and mebbe we’d all do the same, how can you tell? So he stopped work at the fishing, aye, and he was a joiner, too, you know—one of the best in all Orkney, but there again, there’s no much work for a joiner in Orkney!”

“No—you don’t understand, it’s so
very
frightening, you know, because I thought I was talking to you, to you, Robbie,” and I looked to my right at Bryan, who’d stopped laughing, I could hear, and who came blearily into focus, “and to you, Bryan; and to Luke…” But Luke had atomized, he was no longer there … And I felt that deep fear that can take possession of you without warning; that fear that seems to arrive in the back of your skull like the talons of a Monkey eagle—and OK, if you haven’t been unfortunate enough to have seen one of them in action, then the sudden cold intrusion of acute anxiety into your mind at three o’clock on an ordinary grey afternoon—and just in case you think you can ignore
that,
well, your stomach starts to hurt, and then it burns, and it’s playing host to a Forest cobra—and no, you realize pronto, this one is different, because this one, no,
you can’t sleep it off…
But, even so, it was some seconds before it occurred to me that I might be going mad … And then I said, too desperate, too loud: “Robbie! Bryan! It’s so frightening
—because I thought I was talking to you!”

“Oh
that,”
said Bryan, at once looking bored, “we all get
that.”

“Aye!” said Robbie. “Dinna you worry. You’re no different.”

Bryan, relaxing, settling back into his corner said: “Aye, near midway on a trip, we all get
that:
we all think we’ve said things to each other and, you know,
such good things,
sometimes, because as you speak you’ll no be getting any interruptions so you can
concentrate,
and say what you really mean, but no, you ask around and
no,
you were asleep like you, Redmond, just now, your head on your plate, at the galley table, that’s normal that is, that’s the usual—but I’ve known people fall asleep standing up, or drop their heads on the
gutting table,
for Chrissake, or keel over quietly into the ice in the hold—and when you shake them awake they’ll deny it and say they were
talking to you!
Aye, but I’ve noticed, once in your bunk, somehow you know it’s dreams, and that’s a fact, so it’s important, it’s important to get to your bed and to lie down, even if you’ve only got the fifteen minutes, and then, once you’re in ya bed, there again, they’re
dreams—
-but when you’re knackered right out and you fall asleep at your job or in the galley here: after
a week or two of no-sleep, that’s right:
you think you’re talking…
So don’t you worry
… You think we weren’t frightened?
The first time it happened? When you haven’t the nerve to tell anyone? Because they’re all older than you and serious men and you’ll be thinking: If I tell
them
about this they’ll know I’m a nutter and they’ll kick me off the boat when we land in Stromness and I’ll never get another job for the rest of my life.’ Aye—but one time you
do
tell them, right here in the galley, like as not,
because you can’t stand it a moment longer,
and you’ve become afraid of
everything—an
d they
laugh,
all of them, and you realize there’s nothing special about
you,
you’ve no need to worry, and that’s great, that is, and so you become a trawlerman …

“But I tell you, Redmond,
you’re
weird, you really are, because you’ll talk to anyone about anything, I’ve watched it happen: you’ve no sense of measure, what’s the word?
Restraint,
that’s it: you’ve no sense of restraint. So it’s important, this, if you want the truth of things, because it’s way under half of would-be trawlermen who last more than the first few trips—even, as I say, even if they’ve been trained in Captain Sutherland’s nautical school in Stromness—and why? The sea? The weather in January? No,
that can’t be it,
because they sign on at all times of year, no: it’s the no-sleep, it’s the
fright,
it’s the terror, even, if you will (and who can tell how scared another man
really
is?), the way they can’t adjust to live with madness, even mild madness, for a week or two, three weeks at the most.
That’s
why they’ll do anything to try and find a job ashore … They don’t like that Viking place, you know, open ships, no shelter, no sleep—the place that made Viking culture and myths and the world-tree, Yggdrasill! The witchcraft and trolls and the little Orkney and Shetland people in their burial mounds, like Robbie,
the only bullshit that I really like…
”