Trawler (4 page)

A young man with short dark hair and a prematurely ragged face, dressed in a red oilskin jacket, yellow oilskin trousers and blue rubber gloves, was chucking the white plastic boxes down through a hatch.

“Hi,” said Luke, and introduced us. “We’re from the Marine Lab. Can we stow our kit somewhere?”

“Aye,” said the young man, with a lopsided grin. “I’m Sean, like the film-star. Dump it up on the bow.” He had a strong harsh Caithness accent. “When you’re ready I’ll show you the cabin. And boys!” he called after us. “Welcome aboard! And the forecast—it’s for a Force 12!” He gave an explosive little laugh.

We transferred the luggage; I moved the car to a bleak little car-park over by the ship’s chandlers—and when I returned Luke and Sean were standing chatting and smoking in the bow. Sean, with both hands, turned each of the four big locking-handles on the steel door to the shelter-deck; and we carried the metal boxes and plastic baskets and kit-bags inside, stacking them next to a line of lashed oil-drums, paint-cans, piles of coiled rope. The shelter-deck was U-shaped, built around the base of the bridge, a protective steel cowling, enclosed against the weather from the bow, open at both ends aft to the working deck. Round on the starboard side was a narrow steel door, roped open, leading to the wheel-house and the lower decks.

“No workclothes inside, boys,” said Sean, tugging his jacket over his head, dropping it on the deck and stepping neatly out of his trousers and boots. “The skipper won’t have it.”

In domestic dress, we followed him over the high steel sill of the door; in front of us steps led up to the wheelhouse; to our
immediate right a steep stairwell led down to the lower decks. Sean grasped the rails, raised his thighs at right angles to his body, and, in a blur of blue sweater and blue jeans, slid down into the depths and disappeared. Luke, facing forward, sprang down the stairs after him; and I followed, slowly, one foot per step, facing backwards.

“Three crew cabins,” said Sean standing in the dimly lit passage, jerking his thumb at the doors. There was a full wraparound smell of rotten fish and, after the sharp wind on deck, no air to breathe. More or less intact imitation-wood brown panels covered the steel walls and ceiling; cut-outsides of cardboard boxes formed a sensible, easy-to-clean, bung-overboard carpet: it was obvious that no woman had ever entered this place.

“The galley’s down there.” Sean’s face broke into an emphatic, grotesque, infectious grin; his bloodshot eyes lit up with pleasure; it was clear that there was no guile in him; it was clear that he was everybody’s friend.

“And I’m the Second Cook!” He nodded towards two closed doors opposite the galley, to starboard. “The skipper’s cabin! The engineer’s cabin! They’ve got tellies in there! OK, boys—there’s yer berths!” (A door right forward, to port.) “Must go! See ya!” And he went back up the stairwell like a springbok.

“Smashing,” said Luke, opening the door. “He’s a smashing guy. But he’ll poison us.”

Four bunks, in two tiers, filled the dark, airless cabin. Luke said, as one practised in such matters: “Lights? Lockers? Toilet? Shower?” He threw a heavy metal switch by the door and a lamp (in industrial, protective casing) came on: by its small glow we could see that the mattresses on the two lower bunks had been cleared, and that the two upper bunks were piled high with discarded clothes, sleeping-bags, rammed-in cardboard boxes and the ship’s supply of lavatory rolls.

“A shower!” said Luke, stepping between the beds towards a cubby-hole in the bows. The door of the makeshift shower-room, crumpled in the middle as if it had taken a heavy blow to the stomach, had come off its bottom hinge and was tied back with
string. In the left-hand corner of the room was a lavatory; Luke pushed down the flush-lever. “It works!” he said, delighted. And then, looking round, “Christ!” he said. And we stared at a huge, inward bulge on the outward-slanting plates of the bow. “Big style!” said Luke. “Sean told me that Charlie Simpson, the second skipper, had had a ding. He hit something. But no one seems bothered… And anyway, Redmond, we’ll be fine. She’s double-hulled.”

So we decided to forget about it, and to try out the mattresses: Luke in the bunk to the left, me to the right, against the wall. “Not too good,” said Luke, stretching out full length, wiggling his toes in his blue socks. “But again—never mind. Because we certainly won’t be spending much time in here.”

“Why not?”

“Because you and me and the boys will get an average of three hours’ sleep in thirty-six.”

“You’re joking!”

“Not at all. This way of life, Redmond—it’s not easy. In fact I can’t think of anything remotely like it. Your friends in the Special Forces, for instance—even in battle they don’t have to go without sleep like that for
twenty or thirty days at a time.
Or do they?

“Of course not. Even the youngest SAS trooper can’t do it-he cracks up. In fact that’s exactly the warning the Major in the training wing gave me: the very best guys can withstand almost any mental pressure; but
no one
can hack sleep-deprivation.

“And besides—the three hours of sleep don’t even come as a three-hour sleep. There’s no time to complete even one normal ninety-minute sleep-cycle. It’s broken up into separate periods of an hour, at most. You have to take your chance in between hauls, when the net’s been shot. But only when you’ve gutted and sorted and packed and stowed the catch from the previous haul. And Redmond—the size and frequency of the catch depends on the skill of the skipper. The more incompetent the skipper—or, maybe, if you’re lucky, if he’s an older man who owns his boat, who’s paid off his debts, who can afford to take it easier—the more sleep you’ll get. But Jason: he’s already famous among
trawlermen: they say he’s the best there is.
And he owes two million pounds.”

“But Luke—I love my sleep. That’s the very best time of life-sleep, dreams! I need at least ten hours …”

“And anyway” said Luke, not listening, staring up at the low plywood ceiling of his bunk. “They
do
crack.”

Apparently absorbed by some new thought, or perhaps some familiar inner problem, with his right index finger he began to trace an imaginary diagram on the low plywood ceiling of his bunk. “You’ll see. They crack up. When they come ashore. They get violent.” The diagram gathered pace. “And you, Redmond, you, too—you’ll crack up …” He paused. “And so will I. I’ll crack up. I always do. You’ll see. You don’t know who you are. You drink. You go berserk.”

“But Luke—at least you’ve got your work, your research; you have real interests outside yourself.”

“Yes … Maybe … I suppose so … But sometimes that doesn’t help. Sometimes you’re too far gone.” He turned his head to look at me, across the three-foot gap between our bunks, the diagram abandoned, if not concluded. “But I’m forgetting. I’m sorry. You—you don’t have to join in. You’re not expected to help.”

“Of course I must join in! How else will I know what it’s like?”

“No. You really don’t have to—and anyway you probably can’t. The boys—they’re manic. They’re very highly motivated.”

“I’m highly motivated!” I said, huffy. “Well, sometimes …” I added, suddenly struck by an unaccustomed moment of self-knowledge. “Now and then, in short bursts … at least… I can
remember
being…”

“You don’t understand. They’re
young.
The moment someone’s not up to the job, he’s voted out. It’s a cooperative. Only the engineer has a regular salary. That’s how it works. They’re all self-employed. You’d be
amazed
how hard people can work when they know they’re in it together—and yet they also know that each moment of communal effort increases their own pay, directly.”

“Yeah. It’s a hunting group. I’ve seen it in jungles.”

“Not quite. Because here the hunting never stops. Ten days. You must fill the hold. And that’s not possible—because the hold’s so big it might as well be infinite.”

“Ah,” I said, pressing myself flat down into the comfort of my thin, sour mattress.

“Half the gross goes on the boat, so called. To pay off the bank. Eleven grand of the remaining half goes on expenses. The diesel, the engine oil, provisions, that kind of thing—right down to the cost of the fish-boxes. You have to pay 25p a week for every last one of those boxes! And then the fish market hits you with a landing due—from one to four pounds for each full box you bring ashore! The remainder of the gross—it’s split into shares. The skipper gets two shares. A crewman gets one share—or three-quarters if he’s a trainee. A crewman ashore on his time off—around one week in three—gets a half-share. And then, of course, Jason has to cope with all the incidentals, the unexpected—he had to have the engine redone in PD, in Peterhead, last month: it cost
seventy grand
to have it fixed and it should be like new, but it isn’t, or so Sean says.”

Luke swung his legs off the bunk and stood up. “Come on—we’ll be leaving for Stromness any minute now! And out there in the Pentland Firth, with some of the most powerful conflicting currents in the world. And in this weather! Redmond—we may not be able to keep our balance, at least not to begin with—and we certainly won’t be able to stick our stuff into lockers …

“Er, Redmond,” he said, turning round half-way up the stairwell, “you don’t mind me asking, do you? But, well—do you get seasick?”

“I’ve never been seasick.”

(And I at once felt queasy. And this, I said to myself, is only the movement of the boat against the quay; but come on, you’ll get over it; don’t be such a wimp: it’s only that stench of dead fish down there, and the lack of portholes in the cabin, and the smell of deep fry saturated into everything, and your bed made up with chip-shop curtains …)

“Good. That’s all right then,” said Luke, with an odd little smile.

On the shelter-deck where we’d left our oilskins, a fresh-faced young man was unzipping himself from a red survival suit. He had a severe crew-cut, a silver ring through the upper shell of his left ear and a white Nicorette-inhaler tube held between his teeth. “Hi!” he said, taking out the tube. “I’m Jerry. I’m the cook. You’ve met Sean? Us two—we’re the new boys here. See ya!” And he disappeared up to the bridge.

OUR KIT AND LUKE’S
lab equipment safely stowed, wedged and roped in the cabin, we put on our oilskins and walked on to the trawl-deck. How, I thought, am I ever going to decipher the precise working of this crowded chaos of winches, derricks, blocks-and-tackle? of pipes and tubes and levers and rubber feeds? of hawsers and yellow floats and green nets?

“I love all this!” said Luke. “I really do. Can’t help it. I love the machinery itself, you know—the inventiveness of it, the way it all differs from boat to boat.
So much more fun than writing.”

“Yeah,” I said, lamely.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” said Luke, touching my arm, misinterpreting the look of despair I could feel on my face. “I didn’t mean it like
that.
I meant
my
writing—you know, that real ghastly torture, stuck at a desk, all stuffed up in the head, trying to write up my results, my thesis—when it’s a beautiful day outside,
when you could be at sea.”

“Sure, that’s OK. But Luke—where do we start here? You’ve got to help me. What’s that, for instance?” And I pointed at the biggest feature on the deck: four long parallel cattle troughs, filled not with water but with green net and car tyres—or at least they appeared to be car tyres—slotted in the troughs side by side…

“That?” said Luke. He had indeed become a different person: he stood straighter; his movements had quickened; he was confident; and, for the first time, his eyes were bright, alert, full of
happiness. “That? Why—it’s a twin-rig system, of course. Two bobbin-track coamings. Three trawl winches. Norlau units. Jason’s gone for two deep-water trawls. They’re from Seaway Nets of Macduff, I’ll bet you. Ten to one I’ll bet you. Bolshed design: sixty to eighty feet of rock-hoppers.”

“Oh, of course,” I said, none the wiser. “So what the hell are all those old tyres doing? In the cattle troughs? He caught them in the nets, or what?”

“Car tyres!” yelled Luke. “And what was that you said? Cattle troughs!” He bent forward, holding his stomach, tried to restrain himself, failed, and howled with laughter. “Car tyres!”

“Good morning, gents,” came a soft, lilting voice behind us; a gentle, musical accent which I couldn’t place. “Car tyres?”

“Ah!” said Luke, spinning round twice where he stood. “Redmond here—he thinks those are tyres, old car tyres you’ve trawled up!” Luke put both hands to the back of his neck, as if such merriment might take his head right off

“They’re rock-hoppers,” said our new acquaintance, who was obviously older than Sean and Jerry, a veteran in his late twenties, a short, spare, lithe man with sharp eyes and a long straight nose. “Robbie Mowat,” he said, shaking hands. He wore red-and-black oilskins, and a red tartan cap tight on his head. I thought: he’s a Pict, he’s an Iron Age Pict. He’s one of the mysterious people. He’s one of those pre-Scots settlers whose origins and culture and script so baffle archaeologists and historians. He looks
exactly
like those Pictish warriors on their Symbol Stones.

Luke began to introduce us, to explain this tyre business, how such a thing could come about…

“Aye, we know all about you,” said Robbie Mowat, cutting him short. “Jason told us. And Redmond—they are tyres, right enough, in a way. Only they keep the net, not a car, off the ground—they roll over rocks on the bottom, they keep the net from snagging. At least, they do some of the time. Aye—you’ll enjoy it. The trip. I can see—you’ve a lot to learn. But now we’re away to Stromness. And then I’m ashore! So the other Robbie-Robbie Stanger. Redmond—I’ll ask
him
to look after you. He joins in Stromness. You’ll be fine with him!”

With a backward wave, he jumped a hawser, swung himself over the side of the ship, and dropped to the quay.

Two medieval limb-stretching torture-racks, complete with chains, hung port and starboard of the stern, ready to enforce discipline on board.

“Luke,” I asked, with 98 per cent reduced
sang-froid,
“so what are those? Those medieval joint-dislocator torture things?”