Trawler (51 page)

“And you wouldn’t really
want
functional eyes—but there again, its sense
of smell
is
so
acute,
how it can smell things out!—
and maybe you wouldn’t want that either, maybe you wouldn’t want sight
or
smell?”

“Eh? Why not? We
all
want sight and smell.”

“Maybe,” said Luke, reflective on his basket. “But maybe, just maybe, even
you
wouldn’t want to see and smell
too
well—
not when you’re forcing your way head-first up the arse of some poor drowned sailor
. What do you think? Ach—and you’ll be chewing and cutting and rasping, with your primitive horny teeth, teeth on your tongue and palate. And that
must
be an effort, because you’re such a survivor, such a very ancient form of a fish that you have no jaws—you haven’t even evolved a pair of jaws! But you’re rasping, you’re eating your way, as fast as you can (because there’s competition, there’s always competition, because hagfish
swarm
), you’re racing to get to that paradise for hagfish, a liver, anyone’s liver.

“But Jesus, Redmond, what am I saying? It’s true, that
does
happen to a drowned corpse—and the amphipods, like fat shrimps, thousands of them, they pick you clean from the outside … but really they scavenge dead fish and crustacea on the seafloor, they live in burrows in the mud and they come out and scavenge—so why are we talking about my mates, trawlermen? It’s
your
influence, aye, I’ve got crude, I’ve been infected, I’ve got really
crude
, just like you …”

“Oh thanks, Luke, thanks a lot for that—but what are these?” I said, running a finger-nail down the row of spots on its flank. “Decoration?”

“Some decoration! No—you wouldn’t want to do that if this was alive and in the water!
Really not—and
if you did you’d be in trouble big time! Aye! Big style!
Big trouble!
”

“Wow!”

“Aye—it’s
so
complex for such a primitive animal, but sweet and perfect, sweet as a nut! You, say you’re a predator, a shark, and you see this hagfish, a mouthful: it doesn’t even have the first-line defence, scales. So in you go! But that’s a mistake, a bad mistake! Because these spots, as you call them—there’ll be around 150 in all—they’re pores, glands. This hagfish, just like that—
zap!
” (He tossed his head.) “
Zap!
And it’s produced
five gallons
of slime … mucus—and this mucus is
disgusting
, sure, but worse than that, it’s
deadly
. You, the shark, have this truly horrible stuff, five gallons of it, all round your head—so you shake your head, and lash about, and then you start to panic, you struggle to get it off, to get free, but it’s in your mouth and eyes and gills and the harder you struggle the tighter it closes in; you die by strangling, suffocation.”

“Jesus!” I said, backing off a bit.

“There’s a great guy, working for his doctorate—aye!—at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, much younger than me, and he keeps lots of pet hagfish and he milks them. Douglas Fudge. Smashing! He’s only in the second year of his thesis and yet he’s worked it all out—the pores hold tiny packets of dry mucins, and fibres coiled up in thread cells.

“You threaten a hagfish—it squeezes all its glands at once; five grams of slime-powder and dry thread hit the sea; and they hydrate, they swell faster than any other substance we know. And sure, you’ll say—you’ve strangled your big shark, more or less instantly, but now you’re in trouble yourself, aren’t you? You’re going to suffocate in your own slime … Well, no, because you have another talent (and as far as I’m aware you’re the only animal on earth that can do this). Feeling unwashed? Bothered by your own coat of slime? (As we all are, at times.) OK—you tie yourself in a knot and squirm the knot tight down your body and wipe yourself clean. But your enemies, your predators, the people out there who really bug you—not one
of them
can do that…”

“I should hope not!”

“Aye! So they get strangled!”

“But Luke—all that sounds very highly evolved, doesn’t it? And yet you said they were
the oldest fish in the sea;
and I admit, they certainly
look
like it, but what did you mean?”

“Not much! Only that their family tree has no branches … but
tree:
that’s no good at all! Not as an image! Family
tree—
pathetic!
That’s
one reason why people don’t realize the age, the
stretch
of time that life’s had in the oceans … This hagfish that I’m holding—this
real piece of life—
its family line is unbranched; it’s straight; it goes
directly
back to its fossil ancestors, the first jawless fishes—and
their
fossils, the impressions of
their
bodies, their record begins in rocks that we can date as 510 million years old. So—in the ocean—you can hardly talk about family
trees
, can you? And besides, the very first signs of the tiniest scraggiest vegetation only appeared on the
land
425 million years ago. And the life in your jungles, as compared to the life in my oceans—forget it! Your jungles began
yesterday
… no, it’s the sea that’s old!”

“Great!”

“But hey! Worzel! What’s that? That noise!”

We listened. Yes—Luke, who still had ears that worked, was right: even I could hear it: a succession of high-energy, manic, heavy hammer-blows; a sound that seemed to be reaching us from above the stern-ramp, at the end of the net-room; a series of fast deep blows from the stern of the working-deck that carried all the way down and forward and through the open bulwark-door to our fish-room to make the peaceful air around our baskets, our old men’s talk, everything good about life: yes, to make it all jagged and ripped apart…

“Oh God!” shouted Luke, dropping the hagfish to the floor, jumping up. “No wonder the haul’s taken so long! No wonder there’s sod all coming down the hopper… Aye! Come on! Quick!” Luke vaulted the hopper-conveyor (and I climbed over, trying to keep up). “Aye! There’s something very wrong up there! A disaster! I’ve heard that only once before in all my years at sea!” We were already in the passage past the galley. “The trawl-doors! The trawl-doors are
locked!
”

Up on deck (the great circle of sea and sky; the kittiwakes; the Glaucous gulls; all of them unconcerned)—up on deck (the light so pure and thin and clear) everyone except Dougie stood at the stern-rail, Bryan at the power-block controls, the crisis obviously over, something resolved.

As we joined them, Robbie said: “Jason here—he was out of that wheelhouse door like a fockin’ ghost!”

And Jason, not at all his usual confident self, shaken, almost pale, said: “That’s it, Redmond! Finish! And no—don’t blame yourself, you did
not
bring us bad luck. The doors flipped right over each other. They
locked
, as we call it. They locked well beneath the thermocline, at around a kilometre down. It’s nobody’s fault. No—you must understand—the contrary current, the really deep southerly flowing current in the Norwegian basin, the ice-melt from the Arctic, that can
be fierce
. It can be calm like this up here, perfect. And yet wild, fast, rough as hell down there. And you never know. So don’t blame yourself, it’s not really a matter of
luck
, all that bullshit. And besides, the catch, it’s not good, but it’s not
that
bad: because we’ve got 883 boxes of redfish and 249 of Black butts—and Bryan, what else?”

Bryan, in his opera-bass, half-sang: “One hundred and sixty-one of Argies; four boxes of Blue ling; one box of Grenadiers!”

And
wow!
I thought,
how it all matters:
at every stage they know how many boxes …

“There you go!” said Jason, cheering himself up. “Perhaps 75 grand, if we’re lucky—but we’ll have a sweepstake on it!”

Allan and Jerry disappeared down the port ladder to the net-deck, on their way, I supposed, to the galley. Sean, a few yards from us, was standing holding the rail, uncharacteristically silent, preoccupied, and he seemed to be gazing astern (at what?).

Robbie, looking very small and Pictish beside tall Jason, said: “Aye, the skipper here” (an upwards nod), “he saved the warps and the doors right enough—but there’s one peedie problem, Redmond, the fockin’ net: it’s ripped to bits.” In his right hand Robbie already held a yellow plastic net-mending needle (which is not really a needle as we know it: because it’s one inch
wide, ten inches long, and, in addition, it is loaded with cord in a complex fashion known only to trawlermen). For emphasis, Robbie waved the needle about: “And guess who?” (A flick towards the vast expanse of the clear Arctic sky…) “Guess who will have to mend it, right enough?” (A flick towards the deck, as if the net was already in position.) “Robbie!” (Tapping his chest.) “
That’s
who! Aye! It’s me that’ll have to fockin’ mend it, all the way home …”

Sean caught the magic word and, in his yellow oilskin trousers, his red oilskin jacket, he spun round, his face squashed up with his very biggest lop-sided grin, and he danced about, where he was, a jig, yes, it was a jig, and he sang a little chant all of his own: “Home! Home! Home! I’m going to see my nan!”