Trawler (30 page)

“Redmond—cheer up!” (I pulled on my half-shredded blue gloves.) “I’m
going
to show you the most extraordinary things, real things, not like the shit we talked the other night…”

“Ah.” I took the clipboard with its stack of Marine Lab record sheets, so many headings, so many columns …

“Aye—and did you know, the boys, they call you Worzel, Old Worzel? That’s great! You’ve got a nickname. You know—after that scarecrow on the telly with white hair and whiskers and all
crumpled up and he comes alive and moves about a bit. That’s great! Magic! A nickname! So they like you!”

“Right…”

“Oh come on, just because Jason sent you up on watch. That really shocked Bryan, I can tell you, he held up his hand, gave you five fingers, five minutes. And then we all shouted, “Old Worzel’s on the bridge!” or some such. Christ, Jason
moved.
So fast. And when he’d gone—God how we laughed!”

I sat on the up-ended fish-box, gripping the clipboard in my right hand, the stub of a pencil in my left, like an angry schoolboy, and I felt mean, but I couldn’t express it, because the cold had got to my facial muscles. You’re just like your cat Bertie, I thought (and had a moment of schoolboy homesickness)—because when he’s stroppy, with his ears laid back, if I push them forward and hold them forward, he forgets how annoyed he ought to be, and he starts to purr, and eventually, overcome with ear-signal pleasure, he chirrups.

“Aye. Sorry. So look—this is great—dingle days!” chirruped Luke. “Well, almost—I’ve sorted the main groups in each basket. So let’s start with my favourites from the Polar basin, Polar sculpin, they can live up to 3 kilometres down, the cute wee things with horns on their heads that we always seemed to catch in pairs! Remember?”

“Eh?”

“Here—look!” (In his right hand he held out a couple of little fish.) “But hey! You can’t wear
gloves
for this! I’ll need you to take measurements, do intricate things, and if we’re
very
lucky we’ll be here for hours, I hope so, this is our one big chance—science at last! Because Jason—he told me he’s going flat out, due north, yes! To one day’s steaming from the ice cap!”

“Oh, Jesus …” I took off my gloves, dropped them to the floor. And I looked at my hands, for more than a moment, holding them this way and that in the harsh overhead electric light, and I regarded them with deep satisfaction, and felt better, because they weren’t girl’s hands any more, or, at least, if they
were
female, they were the hands of the most frightening of sod-you
fishwives—even on their backs they were so covered in puncture wounds from the redfish spines that they were almost young again; you couldn’t see a single one of those age-spots … And the feeling was even good physically, too, because I couldn’t feel the punctures one by one any more, my hands just burned, they felt very hot, the only part of me that felt warm …

“Redmond!” shouted Luke, right beside me. “What the hell are you doing? Flapping your hands about? Please—look
—please
don’t do that, you know, go off like that, it’s spooky, your trances, whatever, you know.” (The two small fish, maybe 8 inches long, were, I was surprised to see, still in his right palm, in front of my nose.) “I had a relative once, and I went to visit her, in an old people’s home—and she went off just like you do! So sometimes I think—sometimes I think you really
are
Old Worzel!”

“Shit. Thanks …”

The two dead Polar sculpin nestled in my left hand. Their skin felt rough, their big heads had these knobs on top, not really horns, but tubercules, the buds of horns; they were brown, blotched with darker brown bands and yes, there was no doubt about it—they could have been the Miller’s Thumbs I used to try to catch with my net in the childhood stream at the bottom of the Vicarage garden … I felt I was ten years old again, in shorts and black welly boots: you lifted a stone and a Miller’s Thumb shot out, a rocket-trail of sediment behind it. And the little net on the end of its bamboo pole? Well, it was
always
in the wrong place … But I must not go off—what did he say? Go off! Jesus …

I laid one Polar sculpin on the scales, and the other, its husband or its wife, I placed gently beside it on the steel shelf.

The heavy steel door to our right slammed back and Robbie stepped over the sill. He was dressed, I was envious to see, in his equivalent of a dressing-gown: a white singlet, a pair of dark-blue tracksuit-bottoms, and white trainers. I thought: even Robbie’s
away to his bed;
but there again, he deserves it, and come to that—how lucky you are that no one here expects
you
to wear a singlet … Because Robbie has an absurdly muscled chest, and
biceps.
There’s no flab and shame on him anywhere. In fact—to dissect
Robbie: that would be a gift for any medical student: you would not have to cut through those thick layers of yellow fat. No, little Robbie is without price, an example of male structures at their very best, a rare reality, a one-to-one match for those diagrams of perfection in
Gray’s Anatomy.

Robbie up-ended another fish-box and perched between us.

“Luke,” said Robbie, clearly fascinated by the electronic scales, the Polar sculpins, the baskets of junk transformed into treasures, “I just remembered, Luke—I heard you tell Redmond, you said you didn’t know anything about Black butts, you mind that? Greenland halibut like, you didn’t know where they went to breed. Well, I remembered, just now—and I think I
do—I’ve
been on the Hatton Bank, on a different boat like, no with Jason. We call it Manhattan—we tell the girls we’re off to Manhattan! But Redmond, it’s nae New York, it’s west of the North Feni Ridge, north-west of the George Bligh Bank, north of the Rockall Plateau, aye—and I tell you, Luke,
that whole area should be closed to the new deep-sea fishery!
Aye, they should license the new fishery before it’s too late. Make it like the Icelanders do, or the Faeroese, they’ve got it right, you know, they really have: I’ve been at the fishing in the Faeroe Box, too, that skipper had a licence—£120,000 a year and worth every penny! And you know why?
Because it’s strict.
Strictly controlled. No messing. No free-for-all. No fockin Spanish fish-paedophiles with their illegal fine-mesh nets! Aye—and the
cod,
Luke, you shoulda seen them—bigger than me, and the heads on them! And the haddock—huge!—not one of the boys knew they could grow so big… And lots of Black scabbard fish, Black scabbards, rough brown skins, bristly all over, you know, and even more big Grenadiers—and we sold them all to France, pronto. And Luke, there was a different kind of Rabbit fish, even odder than the ones here, the kind that Sean would say were
freaky, man. You shoulda seen their noses…
”

“Aye!” shouted Luke, startling me. (Luke, I thought, may well blow up with excitement:
Boompf!) “But what about the Black butts?”

“Aye, I’m forgetting, they’re nae like here, in the Nor Nor
East Atlantic—nae, here they’ve very small eggs as you can see for yourself, and guess what? Over Hatton Bank they’re huge fish, the Black butts, and their eggs are big, really big, as big as grapes. Aye—if I do one good thing in my life, this is it. Luke, this is what I came to tell you, you must say to your boss in the lab in Aberdeen, whatever, the Government—Hatton Bank will be closed to Greenland halibut fishing, because
that
is where they breed, that’s where the whole lot come from!”

And Robbie, suddenly shy, overcome (what was it? too much emotion? sudden plain speaking? had he offended against his personal code? I’d no idea)—Robbie, awkward, turned and went, as fast, as he might have said, as a fockin’ ghost.

“Christ!” said Luke, shocked. “Do you realize the significance of that? Have you any idea? Why is it only me? Why don’t more Scottish Office marine scientists get off their arses—excuse me—and go out on trawlers and
listen
to these boys?”

“That’s obvious!” I said at once (trying to forget how sick and ill and abject-frightened I’d been… and if I
was
a government scientist would I come on a trawler in January again, or all-year-round as you’d have to? Or would I change my job? What if, say, there was a vacant post as a bed-tester and salesman in Aberdeen?). “It’s obvious … well, it’s obvious … because there
are
only 6 million people in all of Scotland—so how could you afford more people than you? How many Scottish marine scientists do you think there are? Fifty? One hundred? And they have so many other things to do!” (So: why couldn’t I be a test-pilot for Dunlopillow?) “Besides, get this country in perspective, Luke—do you realize that down in England, in my own county, unbelievably beautiful Oxfordshire, and Luke, so full of trees and so far away, yes,
in Oxfordshire alone,
there are 632,000 people!

“And Luke—all those certifiably brave, manic hairy Scottish warriors, the Scotii, Luke, the invaders from northern Ireland, they were from Orior, the O’Hanlon lands—and if you don’t believe me, Luke, go check out Dunadd, the crowning place of the first Scottish kings: and there you’ll find a trotting boar incised in the rock, and that trotting boar, Luke, that’s the O’Hanlon coat of arms!”

“Aye. Big time, my arse—excuse me—but what the hell’s that to do with anything, and anyway, didn’t you tell me that every second sweet-shop round Lough Neagh is called Redmond O’Hanlon’s sweet-shop? And that there are far more Redmond O’Hanlons in the New York Police Force than copepods in the North Atlantic?”

“Well no, not quite, but OK,
yes,
so what?
Fuck you!”

“Aye,” said Luke, “and here you are coming over
all grand,
all of a sudden, have you any idea how
pathetic
that is? Eh? Laying claim to Scotland? Jesus!
And you probably think that one or two of the boys are off the wall!”

“OK, yes, it was a joke, sort of—but the wild pig, you know… Yes, you’re right, Luke,
please,
forget that, Jesus, the crud that comes to the surface on this boat… yeah, no sleep, that wasn’t me, you know…”

“Of course it was!” said Luke, happily, recovering from his rage at all the other Scottish Office marine scientists, wherever they might be. He tilted the (blue) basket immediately to his left. “And here you are—my second extraordinary exhibit! Lump-suckers!”

A layer of glisten-slimy grey-brown little fish looked up at me with their open black eyes, their big heads sparsely dotted with small black shiny growths (parasites? Sea-lice?)… And as far as a fish can be cuddly, I thought… They look so down-turned-mouth sad, so big-eye worried… Yes, certainly, you’d want these little fish to be your friends … You’d want to comfort the lot of them …

“Hey Redmond! I can see—you
like
them! And quite right too, so do I, cute, eh? But also, much more important—they’re fascinating, you know,
biologically.
How did they evolve like this?” He held one up and, cavalier with its dignity, squashed it towards me, belly-up: slightly aft of its throat was a ribbed and grooved roundel, a crater in its flesh. “The sucker! Even C. M. Yonge in his New Naturalist volume in the late forties, you know,
The Sea Shore,
you must have read
that—even
he said the Lumpsucker or Sea-hen was the most remarkable fish you’d be likely to meet on the
coast—partly because of its sucker. Everyone quotes Thomas Pennant—you know, a friend of yours probably, because he’s eighteenth century, the guy Gilbert White wrote his letters to—anyway, I think that’s right, but the point is Pennant bunged a Lumpsucker he’d just caught into a bucket of seawater, and later, when he took the fish by the tail to lift it out, the whole bucket full of water came too! The sucker’s
that
strong!”

“Great! We should tell Sean!
Freeeeky!”

“Aye! And guess what? The female makes her way up and ashore in April and lays up to 300,000 pink eggs between the mid-tide and low-water level, spread over a rock. And then? She fins it back out to sea, gone, buggered off, excuse me, she deserts and saves herself! And guess who stays and aerates the eggs?
Who
takes no food from April to November, his stomach distended with nothing but water? The male! Poor sod. So who’s in guard position when the tide is out and here come the gulls and crows and rats? Who’s not left his post (if he hasn’t been pecked or gnawed to death) when the tide comes in and he does his main job, aerating the eggs with his fins, bringing home that critical extra oxygen? Eh? The male! He stays there when the tide sweeps in with those hungry big, big fish! That’s the kind of father I’d like to be!”

“Jesus, Luke,
calm down,
it’s OK—I’m sure you will be, if you get the chance … I mean of course you will… You’ve got years and years to go …”

“But Pennant and Yonge—they didn’t know the half of it! Even your Alister Hardy got a surprise when he caught Lumpfish way out in the North Sea. And the North Sea—it’s a shallow pond! No, here’s your evidence
—look at them all—
and from 700 to 1,000 metres down! They’re
almost
deep-sea fish. They must be. Unless, and I hate this, unless the net caught them as it was coming up, and that’s always a possibility, and you and I must admit that, because we’re honest, and scientists, but it’s no good for my figures, you know, no good at all, there’s no accurate depth-reading for the capture of each individual fish, that’s the trouble with commercial trawlers… But hey! Don’t be so miserable,
don’t take things so
personally,
eh? Because there’s one more great fact about them! The way they look—their camouflage—does that remind you of anything?”

“Yeah.
One of my aunts.”

“Oh Jesus! Don’t be ridiculous! It’s obvious, isn’t it? We all know they sometimes drift about in the open ocean feeding on comb jellies and jellyfish under floating mats of seaweed—so what protects them from their predators?”

“Give up!”

“Don’t be an idiot—look at them!” He held the lumpfish, now right side up, six inches from my nose. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? They look exactly like a pneumatocyst!”

“A what?”