Trawler (50 page)

“Luke!”

“Aye, I know—and
please
don’t tell my mum, my folks … Still, it
was
some time ago … But all the same …”

“So, the actual
writing
of the doctorate? As opposed to the fun, the excitement, of lifeboats, of trawlers? Yes, Luke, you’re hooked on the adrenalin-rush, that’s
your
problem; so—
did you get any writing done?
”

“Aye—I did! So sod you! Excuse me! Yes—I did… Three chapters. Well, very short chapters … and I did those in no time, in two weeks. Aye—I did those in the two weeks before I got to know Dougal—before he told me about the community halls, the dances! And after that… Grand! Big time! And I met all his relatives by marriage; and just about everyone else on the island. But all the same … as it happens … I don’t think I ever saw a district nurse.”

“Of course not. District nurses—
you have to hunt for them
.”

“But for the thesis, you know, to be honest, I really
did
try—when I first got there, ach, with the curlew calling, and Golden plover actually
breeding
all over the place, and I was all alone and there was nothing else to do, so it was
easy
. I moved the smaller of the two kitchen tables under the window of the ground-floor big bedroom. And that looks straight out to this wild sea. And I found exactly the right chair and I got to work.

“But there’s a low-walled enclosure immediately outside, once a nursery for young vegetables, I suspect; and in the far left-hand corner of this small enclosure there’s an upturned white fibre-glass dinghy. And as you try to concentrate on your work (statistics! I
hate
statistics!) and you look out the window—a baby rabbit will pop out from under this dinghy; he’ll check out the world, he’ll wiffle his nostrils, you know, and he’ll start right in on the serious business of eating grass … And you get back to work and do some calculation and write down some boring figure—and then you look up: and there’s another baby rabbit, ears flat, peering out from under the upturned boat. Aye! There’s a whole family: a doe, a big buck, and
lots
of children… And guess what? They’re all that smashing soft brown, you know, as rabbits should be—but every last one of them has this little vertical white stripe—a flash! That’s it: a flash!—right in the middle of their foreheads, just above their eyes; up a bit and just between their big soft brown eyes …

“I tell you, in those two weeks, I got
so
fond of my rabbits … And you, Worzel, you’d
love
those rabbits—aye, just right for you, you white-haired old Mr. McGregor, you.” (Luke rocked
with laughter.) “Aye! You could push a wheelbarrow about up there! And manhandle a watering-can! But you,
you don’t fool me
, you’re an old softee, you’ve lost it—so you could never shoot those rabbits!”

I said: “Cold iron!” And touched the stanchion to my right.

Luke, the laughter instantly frozen inside him, said: “Jesus! Aye! What was I thinking?” And “Cold iron! Cold iron!” (And he touched the stanchion to his right.)

And I said: “You superstitious git!”

B
EEP-BEEEEP-BEEEEEEP
went the siren.

“Shite!” said Luke, springing up so violently that he knocked over his seat, the red basket—it was empty. “Come on! We must clear all this!” With both hands, left, right—one skate, two, up and over to the exit-chute, three skates, four … And when the skates had Frisbee’d away towards the light he began to throw the discarded fish on the gutting table after them. “Robbie—hell
kill
me if he comes in and finds his table in a mess like this!” … Luke could move so
very
fast; whereas I had collected the camera, sure, and put it round my neck, and I was doing well, easing my stiffened back this way and that (Ow! Yes, there’s no doubt about it, my back
hurts;
so I must be
old
) and I had very nearly succeeded in the great, present and still almost possible achievement of standing up straight.

“Worzel—come on! What
are
you doing? Quick! We really
do
need to clear this place up before the boys arrive—hey! And what’s
in your
basket? The blue basket—is there anything left? Have we missed something? Go on, dumbo,
Mr. McGregor—
tip it up!” Luke laughed; yes, I thought, annoyed, Luke’s temporarily frozen capacity for laughter has thawed out fast—in fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if young Uncle Luke is about to pretend that he’s never touched cold iron in a little spasm of fear in all his life, no, not
once
…

“Go on! Tip it up!”

So I did.

And out came one male Arctic skate and something that looked like a haddock and something else …

I said: “One male Arctic skate and something that looks like a haddock and…”

Luke, now scrabbling about, gloves on, in a tray at the far side of the gutting table (“I’m going to have to hose the whole area!”), jumped up on a fish-box and attempted to peer over the table, across the hopper-conveyor and down at my bit of floor—but he wasn’t tall enough.

“Aye, McGregor—if it looks like a haddock—guess what? It’s a haddock! Ach, I’d forgotten—I
did
keep a haddock, because it came up from deep water, at around 800 metres—and their normal range is from 80 to 200, but it’s not that interesting, is it? Not after all the different species we’ve caught since—so bung it, will you? Just chuck it down the chute. And the skate too …”

“But, Luke! There’s this
other
thing …”

“Oh come on! Bung them!”

So I grasped the big haddock at the base of the tail and slung it towards the chute, the scupper—where it went, sort of, only not quite; so I heard it bounce a bit, just the once or twice, across the floor, towards, I think, the side-wall of the laundry. Encouraged by such damn-near accuracy I took the skate by its right wing, copying the Frisbee-master, Luke (although, it has to be said, I’d never actually thrown a Frisbee). And, with my right hand, and arm, just like Luke: yes, for the best effect you kind of bend your right arm, at chest-level, way over to your extreme left as far as it will go, which you’ll find, surprisingly, is behind your back, roughly in the lower-middle of your left scapula. And then, with all your upper-body strength, you uncurl your hand and wrist and arm and send the Frisbee rotating, uplifted, into the air, a flying saucer, its path steady (because it’s spinning) and laser-accurate … Except that it wasn’t quite like that, not really—because the skate, spinning, it’s true,
exactly
as it should, clockwise, its tail hard-curled to the right, its undercarriage, its
two enormous dicks, bent flat to their right against the wings: it took off, not towards the exit-chute, but in a low curving fly-past over Luke’s curly head and, rising still, slapped, hard, against the upper steel-plates beyond the laundry and—a distinct, wet, multiple zappy slosh—it hit the top of the closed bulwark-door to the galley and dropped to the boards.
Wow!
I thought, if
only
that door had been open and young Sean had been in the passage out there, all unsuspecting, and besides, maybe I
should
have taken more interest in sports at school…

Luke, upset, said: “Mr. McGregor—that was
not
funny!”

“I didn’t mean it to go that way!”

“Och aye.
Of course not
.”

“But Luke! There’s something else here!”

“Och aye?”

“Yes.”

“So what is it?”

“Well, search me, Luke, I don’t know, how could I? I’ve no real experience of these things … But I’d say the bloke in question was
big
, way over six feet, maybe nearer seven …”

“Eh?”

“Yes. Because it looks to me…” (I took a closer look) “… Yes.
Certainly
. A bit has fallen off a drowned sailor. In fact, Luke—it seems to have got clean away.”

“What has?”

“No. That’s fine.
That’s fine by me
. I don’t care. I can take it. If you’re not interested—if you’d rather wash the dishes over there, be a new man, all that, well—I’m a tolerant sort of a guy, so that’s fine by me.”

“You what?”

“No—don’t bother. Why
should
you be interested? It’s just that I’m not used to this kind of thing … But after
all
I’ve seen on this trawler… OK: I am now quite prepared to accept that
this probably havens all the time
…”

Luke, reluctantly, pausing to scrape off fish-scales from the trays as he came, began to make his way towards me round the table. “What does? For fuck’s sake?” (And not even an
excuse me…
)

“
This
does—look! Look at this! On the floor here! It’s
obvious:
some poor big drowned bloke—he’s lost his penis.
It’s taken itself off—
-it’s broken free; and now it’s doing
exactly
what it wanted to do all along; so, naturally, it’s got just a little excited; in fact, it’s semi-erect, right on the floor here,
right in front of me;
but it’s still
remarkably
bendy and Luke—it’s squirming about the place …”

Luke, interested at last, vaulted over the hopper-conveyor, and took a look. “Jesus! You silly bastard! You
silly
bastard! It’s a hagfish!”

“OK—fine—if that’s your pet name for it. Not bad. But I have a friend who calls his
moldeewarp
and that’s Anglo-Saxon for a mole, because it will only come to life in the dark, in a tunnel.”

“
It’s a hagfish!
”

“Sure—suppose it is: not bad, not bad at all! Because it’s not so young or pretty any more, is it? It’s old, obviously; and at that age it’s
learnt
, hasn’t it? Yes—it’s learnt—you must only search for an
appropriate
mate; and for this one here that means a truly lovely cuddly old hag …”

Luke lost his cool. Right at me he shouted: “
Myxine glutinosa!
” And, in case I hadn’t heard: “
Myxine glutinosa!
” He flicked his short supple body down and picked the thing up. “And stop it, Worzel! My head!
Stop pissing me about!
”

“OK,” I said, extraordinarily calm. “
So don’t call me Mister McGregor
.”

“
Worzel—you’re a schoolboy!
How could the things we’re called, names, labels, whatever—how could any of that possibly matter when you look at
this?
” He held the hagfish six inches in front of my face. So (as short-sighted as Mr. McGregor) I took off my glasses and grasped them by the right ear-piece between my teeth (a salty taste). He said: “The very oldest, the most interesting fish in the sea!”

Light brown, a foot long, three-quarters of an inch thick, muscular, cylindrical, it appeared to have no fins—unless that narrow keel of wrinkled flesh snaking down the centre of its underside and vertically folded into hundreds of little flaps—unless
that
was a fin? And what
were
those white pimples—two lines of them, one to either side of the fin, the central fringe of
flesh? There were two regular rows of tiny white raised roundels—as if the animal had been double-slashed with a razor all the way along the underneath of its bendy shaft of a body, and the twin slits stitched, and it now bore the scars: the entry and exit holes of a fine needle …

“Luke—I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“Of course not! It’s a hagfish!” He waggled it; he curved it about in front of my face; and I thought: OK, so that’s OK, because it
must
be dead—or it would
bite him
. And come to that: where
is
its mouth?

“Where’s its mouth?”

“Here!” said Luke, pinching the hagfish behind the head with the thumb and index finger of his right-hand—as you would hold a dangerous snake. “Here!” He rotated the head, underside-up: set back between a pair of downward-and-backward-pointing tusks, like those on a walrus, was a tight-shut puckered hole, flanked, on either side, by two nasty-looking swellings.

“Don’t be silly! That’s its
anus—and
it’s got a couple of nasty eruptive haemorrhoids …”

“It’s the
mouth
, you hinny!”

“Hinny?”

“Aye, dumbo!” said Luke, inserting the tip of the little finger of his left hand into the upturned mouth that was obviously an anus: “A hinny—the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse:
that’s
you! Because look, feel
this:
stick your finger in here—is that
sharp
or what?”

“Sharp!” (As sharp, to either side, as the edge on the little special wooden-handled gutting-knife.) “OK, so you win! But tell me—which end are its eyes?” (Removing my little finger, resolving never to let a mouth like that anywhere near me ever again, I flicked a tuft of four small horns on its head.) “And what are these?”

“Barbels, feelers. And its eyes, as we say, are much reduced—in fact, as far as we know, they’re not functional.”

Luke (still holding the hagfish in his right hand) restored the blue basket to its usual place, but bottom-up; and he sat on it.

So, with the red basket, I followed suit, and there we were again, two old men on a park bench—except that now, it seemed to me, there was nothing peaceful about either of us: because, well, there
is
nothing restful about the presence or the thought of a hagfish …