Trawler (8 page)

A leering trawlerman stared back. He wore a tartan cap with a bobble; his eyes were enormous, their pupils a pair of
ventilation-holes in the plywood; a ring hung from the lobe of his left ear; the scar of a knife-slash, freshly stitched, disfigured his right cheek; the tough shoots of his beard were perhaps ten days old. Drawn in thick black felt-tip pen, his portrait was signed,
“CHUKKA FROM DY JANUARY ’95”
in the top right-hand corner, and
“BLAKEY FAEBCK MAY ’95”
in the left.

My gullet and stomach rose out of my body: up above the trawlerman they flapped right and left, like fish-tails; still rising, they jinked and dipped and surged; they broke surface and, like dolphins, leapt undulating forward on the mass of bow-wave. They played, they plunged, they drove down in one irregular turbulent fall—down through me, the engine-room, the hull, and into the deep circular rotating waves below us. With a double sideways lash, a violent flip-flap, they rose …

“Out!” I managed to say aloud. “Out!” Go on, said the sequence of disjointed, feverish images, get this slimy head, get this long fat nematode worm of a body out of this burrow of a sleeping-bag and extrude the whole lot into the lavatory…

Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward-bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped
SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD
. I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guinness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps, to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.

Congratulating myself, assuming it was all over, I pushed down the lever and, hoping that I had not woken Luke, I wiped up the splash-zone with my face-flannel and managed, tottering, to squeeze out the goo in the basin.

I crawled on all fours back to the edge of my pitching bunk, hauled myself up, and slithered back inside the safe, army-green, Arctic-warfare, nylon-silky, sweat-soaked, tapering tube of
a sleeping-bag. I wiggled my toes, I flexed my ankles. And this, I decided, is here and now the highest available of physical pleasures. A shiver of anus-tightening happiness spread up from the base of my spinal cord to the back of my skull. So that’s it, I whispered to myself, now you’ll be fine.
And no one will know.

And in half an hour my intestines ejected me again, to repeat the process. And then once more. And again, until there was nothing left to throw up. Not even bile. And still I crawled out to retch into the bowl, my new, my only, my porcelain world. But it’s obvious, I tried to tell myself, it’s OK—we have
not
evolved to do this thing. Tens of thousands of years of minor fishing and gathering mussels and cockles along the shorelines: yes; our ancestral flat-worms wriggling along the seabed in search of food for several million years: yes; even our life as jawed fishes, an adventure which began 425 million years ago: certainly; but
at no stage
were we stupid enough to allow ourselves to be bunged about on the
surface
of the open ocean. No—to do that you have to be mad like Jason or Bryan or Sean or a Robbie, or even (and this thought was oddly worrying) Luke. Because Luke, why, he’s doing this not for money, but for an interest, for
scholarship.
Luke is bonkers, Luke is barking. And, with this resolving thought, gasping for air like a lungfish, I fell asleep.

In my dream a giant flatworm, one of the
Platyhelminthes,
each of its mucus-slimy segments as big as a mattress, fastened on my shoulder. It had a bill like a duck. It was a Duck-billed-platypus platyhelminthes, and shaking me. Luke’s young weather-beaten face, a foot away, filled my entire field of vision. “Wake up!” it said, manic.

“Luke—the
platyhelminthes,
the flatworms, do they have segments?”

“Eh? No. Of course not… Wake up! Come on! Wake up! We’re at the fishing-grounds. It’s first light up there. There’s a lull in the storm. It’s Force 8. It’s OK. There’s a heavy swell, but it’s OK. Jason’s about to haul! Your first haul! Up! Now!”

“Ugh. Please …”

“Look—I know, I know, we’ve all been through it—seasickness,
terrible, but so what? It’s not like your malaria or hepatitis or TB or whatever—it won’t
kill
you, so who cares? You’ve been asleep. You slept for
eight hours.
Up! Up you get! Yeah, yeah, everyone knows—it begins with you thinking you’re going to die, and eight hours later it ends, just as you’re wishing you could. But you can’t and you won’t! Redmond, look, remember, they made you an Honorary Member of the lab, my lab, the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen. One of the very best there is! So you’re
my
guest. And these boys—the crew—we’re here to serve them, not just with better nets and fish-finders and gadgets, but to make sure they have a future, that their fishery is
sustainable—and
that, that’s
difficult.
For that we need their respect, if you like, their good will. So, I’m sorry, but
you can’t just lie here.
You’ve been out for eight hours. Eight hours! So up you get—and you’ve got to be quick. The alarm’s about to go. Here. Drink this. All of it.” Luke jerked my right arm out of its warm, sweaty, tubular-snuggle of a home in the sleeping-bag—and in my comatose hand he stuck a bottle of Lucozade. “The trawlerman’s secret weapon! Plus one day of ship’s biscuits, dry biscuits. That’s all you need! Quick! I’ve got a minilog on the net. I must go. See ya!”

“Luko’s Aid,” I said (absurdly pleased).

“Well done!” said Luke, springing to the door like a sand-hopper. “Lousy jokes! You’re back to normal!”

AND HE WENT
.

Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my woolly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still… The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming in to land, and at that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP
. Other,
smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side—and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.

Too surprised to think, or even mutter, let alone swear, I held on to everything that offered a moving handhold and waited, until the tilting floor projected me out of the cabin to the base of the stairwell. Hunched, half-spreadeagled, I pressed myself up the narrow steps and, sitting on the floor of the shelter-deck, an elbow clamped over the steel sill of the door, I thrust my legs into my oilskin trousers and, eventually, my feet into my sea-boots. Standing up, I was thrown against the lashed oil-drums to starboard, but in one or three moves I slotted into my oilskin jacket. Rolling aft, I thought, like a seaman, I emerged from the cowl of the shelter-deck—and was at once thrown face-first into the circular steel side of a 7-foot-high winch. I held on to a pair of protruding bolts, my fingers as committed as the suckers on a squid. A rush of sea guttered in and out of a scupper to my left—and that’s a generous scupper, I thought, because if you fell on this slippery deck that scupper would wave you through with no questions asked—so maybe not, maybe you can’t roll like a seaman if your thighs are merely average for the species and its relatives: round here you need thighs not like a chimpanzee or even a gorilla, round here you need thighs of another order altogether, like
Tyrannosaurus rex.

At the starboard side of the stern I could see Bryan, the breaking spray blown across his yellow oilskins, one gloved hand on a lever at the base of the crane, waiting. To his right stood the other Robbie, Robbie Stanger, I assumed (because, apart from the unseen, the subterranean engineer, Dougie Twatt, he was the
only man I didn’t recognize, that I hadn’t met). Robbie, my appointed protector, balanced himself on the absurdly rolling deck as if he lived there, which, I supposed, for at least two-thirds of his life, he did. And he looked as if he’d grown where he stood—and that too, I thought, is partly true, because in these conditions, unbeknown to him, his muscles must be growing even as I watch. And no matter how extreme the swell, his head, I noticed, stayed level, as if he’d developed a gyroscope in the rear of his upper neck. Just waiting there (for what?), he seemed alert, quick, as energetic as a stoat. His worn, stained red-and-black survival suit, head up over a navy-blue peaked cap, fitted him tight and easy as the cuticle on a shellfish. He was smiling at me. Beside big Bryan (a Viking) he looked tiny; he had dark eyes, a peaky face, a long thin straight nose (he was a Pict…). He’s not
that
far away, I thought, as the deck rolled through 45 degrees. It’s just that beyond this drum of coiled-steel cable and its two friendly bolts, in the middle of that 8-foot stretch of oily sea-frothed deck before the next handhold (the edge of a cattle trough or a net-coaming or whatever you call it), there might as well be a 1,000-foot crevasse. Robbie waved. He beckoned me astern. (No,
I’m not moving.
I’m staying here. For a fortnight, if necessary. And, if I could feel my hands in this cold, which I no longer can, I’d hang on even harder.) Robbie gave me a double thumbs-up, a super-signal. (No, I’m not lifting a hand and as for shouting—you’d need a siren-in-the-throat to be heard in a wind like this.) Robbie gave me an emphatic V-sign. I could not respond. So he sent me a vigorous, an obscene, a graphically pumping one-finger up-yours. So we were
friends…
So at once one-twentieth of the mad, indifferent, violent, uncaring external world ceased to matter …

Luke—he was laughing—appeared beside me. (From where? Search me. I’d given up.) “Well done!” he yelled. “Redmond, you got out of bed! And look here, I know, we’re all different, and for you, getting out of bed—that’s very difficult!”

“Yes, yes. Always has been.”

“We’re hauling. It’s great! Your first haul! Now watch—this
is
really something.
Every time. Because you never know—what’s coming up? Eh? You never know! It’s magic. Smashing! Look about!” Luke, again, shook my shoulder with a manic, a boundless enthusiasm. I peeled my right cheek off the surface of my cold protective saviour, the warp-drum. And I looked about, or abeam, at the huge swell—but there were
gannets
out there, yes, gannets, our largest, most beautiful, most spectacular seabirds, hundreds of them, hanging in the wind, the purest of brilliant white, reflecting the early morning sun, their long thin wings iridescent in the low white light, their black wing-tips setting off their shining white, waiting. And there were kittiwakes, my favourite, my spirit-lifting brave little gull, a gull of the open ocean, rising and dipping, sheering into the high wind. And they were so close, so unconcerned, so close I felt I could touch them; tilting, they were suspended right there beside me, their bellies so white and strokable, their black legs and furled-up black-webbed feet dangling unconcerned, their little black eyes so friendly—and hello, they said, you look odd but even you must be a trawler-man, or you wouldn’t be here, on our patch of distant sea, so far from land, so we trust you, we’re in symbiosis, we live together. It’s a partnership, you see: we give you comfort, we—we’re very small works of art, we save you from depression: and in return you feed us, you give us all those bits of fish you can’t bear to eat yourself…

“Hey Redmond.” Luke shook me again, not quite so hard. “Don’t go
off
like that, it’s unnerving, it really is.” He transferred his grip, taking me by the left arm. “This may be a Force 8, gusting 9. But so what? Who cares? We’re in for a Force 11, maybe 12. But look, Redmond, at this time of year, for Jason, that’s
normal.
He does it every year. So leave the worry to him—that’s what skippers are for—it’s much more important to learn things—so in a moment I’m going to guide you, we’re going to go and stand by the hopper. Because I want you to see
everything
every chance we get. And you have to try and
understand
what’s going on, not just moon around and cling on—initial seasickness, fine, that’s OK
—lots
of trawlermen suffer like you, on their first day back at sea.
But that’s it. You chose this life, remember? So more than one day sick—forget it! Go away. Stay ashore.”

“Yep. Ugh. Absolutely. Stay ashore …”

“Now-any minute, you’ll see the doors, the trawl-doors, the otter-boards (what did you call them? torture-racks?), they’ll break surface—and Bryan and Robbie will winch them up, bang to their gallows port and starboard. They’ll disconnect them, stow them up there. Got that? Then the sweeps pull in the net itself. It’s different, it varies on almost every boat. Weird. But there you go. The British fleet is so individual, haphazard, we never got standardized—and here it’s the ’tween-deck net-drum that pulls in the sweeps, one deck below us, aft of the fish-room (and that, the fish-room, Redmond, as you’ll learn, is the best place, it’s
our place).
Jerry and Sean and Allan are down there now, right at sea level, no protection, no lifelines—and they have to pull in the net, they ride it, side to side. No grip, no nothing, and Redmond, that’s
dangerous.
I’ll show you—you’ll see for yourself. With a following sea…”