Trawler (5 page)

There was an earthquake blast of deep noise. The
Norlantean
came to overwhelming life. The deck, seized by fever, was hit by rigors; we shook as if some maniac had us by the collar. The top of the funnel appeared to blow up; it erupted and was obscured, in a smoke as black as squid ink, a plume so thick it looked solid.

“Otter-boards!” Luke shouted in my ear. “They’re otter-boards! They power along at an angle in front of the net. They keep the mouth of the net open. Hey, Redmond! Big style! We’re going to have a grand time, you and I!”

“Luke!” bellowed Robbie Mowat from the quay.

Luke, responding like one of Galvani’s frogs’ legs, shot to port and caught the heavy curl of mooring rope. Robbie Mowat hauled himself back over the side. We were off.

T
HE
NORLANTEAN
MOVED
gently out into the harbour. No one on the quay, no one on board the other trawlers—on the high-bowed, squat-sterned, rounded Scottish inshore boats that hugged the sea, their shapes pleasing as a buttock—no one, anywhere, took the slightest notice of this great event. And neither did a group of twenty or so eiders—big sea-going ducks with forward-sloping heads and heavy bills, the females brown, the males in winter plumage, all-over black but for the white blazes on their folded wings: they sat snug on the water by the harbour wall, out of the wind, resting, half-asleep.

“Luke, shouldn’t we go and see Jason? Say hello? Wouldn’t that be polite?”

“Now? No. It’s one of the rules—you never distract a Captain when he’s manoeuvring out of harbour.”

So we stood against the side and watched as the white lighthouse-tower and attendant buildings, half-camouflaged against the snow-covered hills, passed to port; and only when we were parallel with the last cliffs of Dunnet Head to starboard, the most northerly point of the mainland, did we take off our boots and oilskins and climb up the stairs to the bridge, in our socks.

Jason was sitting in the right-hand one of two black swivel-chairs, behind a large U-shaped spread of a wood-panelled console, packed with instruments. He rose to greet us.

Jason was tall and dark; he had a slight stoop; he was lean,
loose-limbed, quick; he was full of restless energy. (Of course, I thought, he’s a direct descendant of those virile young Spanish officers who swam ashore from the ships of the Armada wrecked on the Orkney rocks …) “Redmond, it’s perfect for you!” he said, shaking hands, speaking very fast. “Perfect! Exactly as you specified—the worst weather at the worst time of year. There’s a Force 11 up there now and the forecast—it’s a 12. And that’s a
hurricane!
Perfect!”

“Smashing!” said Luke, with a manic laugh.

“And Luke—did you bring your minilog for the net? The depth and temperature recorder?” Luke nodded. “Yes? Good. Well done. Because I really would like to know the optimum depth for redfish.” He turned towards a big-chested, powerfully built man of about his own age (all of thirty) who was bending over the chart-table, a table tucked away to the right and facing, through the all-round thick-glass windows, the stern of the trawler.

“Bryan Robertson,” said Jason. “First Mate.” And they both laughed. “Redmond O’Hanlon, unhinged writer,” announced Jason, as if he was the host of some television chat-show. (Well, yes, he could be, I thought; with those Spanish looks, the dark brown eyes, the high thick black eyebrows, the long black eyelashes, and so articulate … he’d pull ratings of 8 million plus, entirely female.) “Luke Bullough, sensible scientist. A man of reason from the taxpaying trawlerman’s own Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen.”

We all laughed.

“Welcome aboard, boys,” said Bryan, in a slow, deep, lilting bass. “You’ve picked one hell of a time to come. And that’s the truth.” (And you, I thought, should be an opera singer.)

At that moment we emerged from the sheltering headlands into the Pentland Firth. The waves seemed, to me, to be excessively long; the edges of their crests broke into the spindrift; the streaked foam blew in thin trails from left to right, spattering on the wheelhouse windows. The ship rolled in the cross-sea and, just in time, I managed to grab the edge of the console and save myself from pitching backwards down the unprotected stairs.

“So Redmond,” said Jason, flinging himself with graceful ease into his high-backed seat (which, I was appalled to see, had a
belt-harness. Did things ever get
that bad?).
“You’ll be wanting to know about the instruments? Yes?”

“Of course. Yes please,” I said, both hands clamped on the wooden lip of the console-top, beside the fax machine. My legs, I realized, were having a breakdown; they were sending absurd signals to the brain; they’d lost their moral fibre; just when I actually needed them—they’d ceased to function. “So what’s this, Jason? A storm?”

“This? A storm!” When Jason laughed, his entire lanky body joined in: all the visible outlying bits twitched, for fun, in different directions. “Bryan! What do you think? Force 7? 8?” Bryan shrugged. “Yes—you see, Redmond, we have
almost
everything here. More or less all we need. But there’s nothing to measure wind-speed. Because that’s a waste of money. We don’t need it. Pointless. Either you fish or you don’t.”

“And when do you don’t?” I said, vaguely conscious that I had lost not only the power of standing-on-two-legs, but also of speech.

“You only stop fishing when the wind ahead is more powerful than the engines below. Simple. You stop when you can’t keep the net open. But Redmond—always remember: you make no money when you’re hove-to. And you make no money when you’re asleep!”

Jason waved his right arm, so flexible it seemed double-jointed, towards his far left of the console (to which I was attached, like a limpet) and swept back round to the right, coming to rest again on a small black lever at his side, from which, I assumed, he was somehow directing the ship. (A conventional wood-and-polished-brass spoked wheel waited unused, like an ornament in a pub, in the centre of the U.) Various screens, side by side, faced threateningly out of the backward-angled, maroon-coloured surround of wood. On the broad ledge directly beneath them were ordered papers, incomprehensible-looking manuals, detached flexible controls—and something that I recognized from my previous life: a perfectly ordinary comforting yellow mug full of coffee; but even this yellow mug seemed exotic because it sat six inches out from the ledge, in its own projecting wooden nest…

“Most of this comes from Woodsons in Aberdeen,” said Jason. “As you would expect.
That’s
a JRC model 2254 4Kw 48-mile radar. I’m taking a course with them next month, when I get ashore.” He spoke, and the hand moved, so very fast that all the screens blurred into one. (And anyway, I reminded myself, you can’t even use a computer. You’ve never tried but you can’t, and that’s that, everyone’s allowed a phobia or two, or five …)

“That’s the original JRC R73 radar,” he said, keeping his brown eyes forward, on the sea ahead. “And I’ve got two DGPS receivers—marvellous! There, see? A Valsat 2008 Mk2 and a Trimble NT 200D. Now
—look—
these interface with the plotters
here.
And
there.
That’s a Raccal Decca CVP 3500 unit. And that’s a brand-new Quodfish plotter from Woodsons. And these are for back-up. It’s worth it—”

(Almost all my conscious effort began to go on suppressing the upwelling thought of the morning’s breakfast—so long ago but now so very present. That earth-mother in the cauldron of a café; if only we’d known; she was obviously a most distinguished poisoner: a woman of experience, one of the élite. She had made me
eat
that stuff. But it’s OK, I said to myself, all you have to do is boa-constrict, python your oesophagus, keep it all down. And I could see the ooze on the black pudding, the grease-sweat beneath the bacon, the globular wobble and glisten of eggs …)

“You’ve used these, Luke?” I heard Jason say. “Of course, you have! But Redmond needs to know. See? Redmond? This is a Magnavox MX 200 GPS; and that’s a new Furunco LC90.”

“Hey Redmond!” said Luke,
à propos
of nothing in particular. (Or had he picked up something subliminal? An early ancestral-mammal tree-shrew shriek of distress…) “Bev’s Kitchen,” he said, wandering about the room. He is unconcerned, I thought; Luke is pecking at grains of information like a young cockerel in a chickenhouse and yet he is
so
unobservant: he is apparently unaware that this hutch has somehow got itself airborne, that it is strung up in place on a big dipper … “A mistake, don’t you think?”

“Bev’s Kitchen?”

“Yeah. You know. That place in Nairn.”

“OK, Redmond,” said Jason. “Now look at these. The fish-finders. You
must get
the hang of these, and fast. Here’s the main one—an Atlas Electronic model 382 colour-sounder …”

(Fish fingers? Please, no. In any case, I whispered to myself:
I must not be sick in here.
That really is obvious. This is not the place to throw up. Really, really not… Not at all…)

“That’s original, reliable. But this is better—a new 28/200 KHz model JFV 250 3Kw—”

“You know,” said Luke, preoccupied, punching up some diagram on a screen or a laying box in the centre of the airborne henhouse, which was full of feather-dust, and mites, as you might expect, and the air was super-saturated with droplets of Bev’s eggs, and you couldn’t breathe … “That place where we had the best breakfast on earth. And all for £1.50—and now you’re going to waste your money!”

“Ugh,” I said, from somewhere in the large intestine, yawning for air, mouth open, like a hippo.

“And the JFV 250 complements this,” said Jason, raising his quick, lilting, intelligent voice, warning off all further interruptions. “The JFV 120 50 KHz—so there you are, Redmond! But you also need these receivers, of course—if you’re going to compete, if you’re going to give yourself a chance. So this is from Scanmar in Aberdeen—an RX 400 with a colour monitor for data from the actual trawl and the doors, the otter-boards. And I think, on balance, that you’ll find this is the most interesting piece of kit for you, for you as a writer—so go and have a look!” The hand waved towards the stern, at a short collection of screens positioned almost flat on a waist-high ledge at the aft-end of the wheelhouse: five impossible paces away. “That’s from Smith Maritime at PD—with that you can shoot and haul on automatic or manual. But the really clever thing is this, Redmond—go on! Go and look! It works with the data from the Scanmar sensors.
It adjusts the trim of the net during towing.
So what do you think of that? Eh? Is that clever? Or what? It can haul in or pay out one of the warps—until you’ve got optimum alignment!”

“Aye,” said Bryan, unexpectedly, full of admiration, from the far corner.

“Well, go on!” said Jason, looking round, swift as a falcon. “It’s interesting. Take a note. Do something. Do whatever you writers do.”

“Can’t.”

“What?”

“Can’t move.”

“Redmond,” said Jason, in a flat voice, not bothering to look round again. “You’d better go below.”

“Can’t.”

“That bad?”

“Ik.”

“What?”

“Nutting.”

“Jesus!” said Jason, closing his eyes, throwing his head back, pulling his right hand across the top of his face. And then, “Bryan!” he said, recovering. “Could you clear that chair?”

Bryan, despite his muscles, nimble as an otter, piled the papers and books neatly in a trough on the console, took me by the arm and, kindly, without a laugh or even a smile, inserted me in the second helmsman’s chair.

“Sit down!” said Jason. “Hang on! Look at the horizon. They say that helps—concentrate on it. A stable line. The only thing that doesn’t move.”

(Except that this one did—the far-too-close horizon was not a line at all, but a series of chaotic serrations, the bright edge of an upturned saw that, against the whirl of grey sky, cut without plan or rhythm …)

“Oh well,” said Jason. “Cheer up! It won’t last. It’ll soon be over—won’t it, Luke?” (Luke, absorbed in some task of his own, rearranging wires or computer feeds or detonators on the far side of the console, faced away.) “Or maybe it will—because of course some people
never
adjust. They can’t. People like that—they just keep throwing up, they get dehydrated, and if you don’t put them ashore in a week or so they damn well die on you! People like
that
—they really wreck your fishing.”
He looked straight ahead. “But you’re not like that, are you?”

“Ugh. Nik.”

“It’s called marasmus, I think,” he said, picking up and replacing the Cellnet phone at his side. “Death from seasickness, some silly fancy word like that. Anyway, you’d know…”

“Uck.”

“And of course we’ve got the usual boring things.” He took a fast gulp of cold coffee. “Mini-M Boatfone Units for voice, e-mail and fax by satellite. A Motorola 7400 x mobile. And there’s Philips CCTV all over the vessel…”

I closed my eyes. The three of them talked and talked, Bryan and Jason in their Orkney lilt, and Luke, now, in his spare, unemotional, flat trawlerman-and-lifeboat-crew English. And I held on to the arms of the safe enclosing chair as the
Norlantean
moved back and forth and sideways, and up and down—through (in words I’d read somewhere, and cherished): “The six degrees of freedom—pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw.” This mantra was, somehow, a deep comfort. So the
Norlantean’s
response to that indivisible chaos out there, which Jason said was a mere Force 8, nothing at all—it could be broken into parts? It could be named? Which meant that someone else had felt like this—and maybe even in a lousy nothing, a Force 8. Which meant that I was not alone. So I felt better. And I repeated the mantra to myself, sometimes with eyes open and sometimes with eyes shut—and every time I got to yaw I went ahead and yawned, gasping like a fish.