My mouth lockjawed by the cold, I said, or thought I said, “Wassa pennant? Wassa back strop?”
Luke ignored me, his eyes set on the appalling swell astern. “Here they come!”
The massive rusted rectangles of iron, the doors, hoisted, clattered tight against their derricks, the gallows, to port and starboard. Bryan and Robbie to starboard, Allan and Jerry and Sean to port, crowded round the derricks, obviously engaged in intricate tasks which yet required great strength (oilskins taut across the shoulders).
“So now the single sweeps are hauled on to the main winch,” said Luke. (And you’re a natural teacher, I thought, but manic. Or maybe it’s just all this excitement, the being at sea, the hunting … but please, I haven’t eaten a thing in years, and I’m fizzed up with Lucozade, and dizzy…) “And when the double sweeps, the doubles or spreaders, arrive at the block, the boys will attach a messenger chain from the net drum to each one. They’ll slacken the singles until the messengers take the strain. The doubles—they’re hauled on to the net drum, on the deck below, and that takes tension off the main winch, so you can disconnect the single sweep. Simple! Alan and Jerry and Sean—there they go, down the port stairway—they’ll be doing that any minute now. The net and the rest of the bridle system—the double-sweeps section—they’ll attach that by the short messenger chains to the net drum. Then the rest of the sweeps—now you call them bridles-are wound on to the net drum. First the two wing-ends appear—they go on to the drum—then the headline with the floats and the footrope with the rock-hoppers. And most of that lot stays on the deck…”
Fortified by a brainful of bewilderment, I released my grip on the bolts of the winch and took a step towards the hopper. Luke grabbed me. “Careful!” he said, guiding me gently but firmly by the arm, as if I was blind. “We had a real lump just now. Awesome! Forty feet, fifty, maybe even sixty. I don’t know. Everyone just stopped and stared up at it. You know, like I was telling you, a real monkey-bollock frightener of a lump! But she rode it OK—up and up. She’s a great boat! We all took a tumble. Even Bryan fell. We all did. I fetched up against the gunwhale!”
“You did? Hey Luke. That explains it… something really odd happened to me down there. Down in the cabin …”
“Look! Redmond! The net!”
And there it was, streaming astern, snaking in the swell, one long green translucent line of mesh, seemingly far too small and narrow and fragile for all this effort, for the work of this whole ship.
“That’s the bellies, nearest us, then the extension—the tunnel—and there’s the cod-end!” (A big green mesh bag, bloated with fish, bobbing on the swell, white and silver, way astern.)
We lurched against the frame of the hopper and I held on, with both hands.
Jason, in blue overalls and yellow sea-boots, a grapnel in his right hand, bounded past us.
The kittiwakes and the gannets rose into the wind, banking round towards the cod-end. The kittiwakes alighted alongside the line of net (and they seemed so light, so delicate, so out of place in all this unremitting violence); they rode the small waves on the big swell with ease; they flicked up their wings as they pecked at the mesh. The gannets, 60 or 70 feet above the surface-hills of the sea, would flip over to one side, half close their 6-foot expanse of wing and, elbows out, streak down towards the cod-end in one long low oblique-angled dive, folding their wings tight against their bodies, a second before impact, to become a white underwater trace of bird and bubbles.
Bryan, back at his levers at the base of the crane, swung the big semicircular power block astern, amidships, and down. “He’s got to manoeuvre that under the net,” said Luke, adjusting his blue woolly hat under his oilskin hood, pulling it further down over his forehead and ears. “Sometimes there’s a rope they call a joker attached to the net—the boys use it to bunch the net and hoist it on to the block—it’s easier that way. The winch hauls the bellies and extension and the boys flake them inboard—until the cod-end comes alongside. And as you can see… Hang on, Redmond, try and roll with the boat… stand with your legs across the roll, for Chrissake, that’s better, at 90 degrees to the roll… we’re beam-on to all this weather, and that’s because the prop’s stopped. Too bad—you can’t risk fouling the net. If that happens you’re powerless, you’re in real trouble, big time …”
The power-block swung back round towards us, towards the hopper. “That’s right. He must keep the block high. To drop the fish in the extension down to the cod-end. Ach well, Redmond, I’m sure you’ve got it now. Got it sorted. My minilog—it’s still on the headline. Hang on. I’ll be back.” And Luke, as the Norlantean wallowed beam-on to the swell, stepped calmly away over the net-troughs, from rim to rim.
ALLAN, SEAN AND JERRY, appearing from the port stairwell, joined Robbie and Jason along the gunwhale where the extension hung from the power-block; the cod-end, bulbous, floated in the swell below, small fish hanging trapped and silver from its green mesh. From the gunwhale Robbie and Allan plucked out the fish they could reach in the extension, dropping them into a big plastic openwork basket at their feet. Sean, in front of me, climbed into the A-frame and lifted back the hatch of the hopper.
Jason threw the grapnel—and everyone seemed to move at once, a confusion of ropes, net, red and yellow oilskins, a swinging power-block. Somehow the cod-end pursued a rope up towards me over the side—and it came to rest, rounded and swinging and full, in the middle of the A-frame, right above the hopper. “The jilson winch,” said Luke, from behind, in my right ear.
No one else spoke. They stared in silence—that meat-stare from the cave-mouth round the fire; except that this, I thought, as I tried to rub a little feeling back into my face, this is a fish-stare; and here and now it’s so cold it hurts, right through, and there’s no fire anywhere …
Robbie, without a word, took off his blue rubber gloves, laid them beside him on the deck, reached in under the big mesh bag and pulled a knot undone. Fish cascaded, out of sight, down into the hopper.
“Come on, Redmond!” yelled Luke, already several yards away. “To the fish-room!”
I followed him at once without a thought, and I fetched up against the roped-back door to the bridge (stairs up) and the cabins (down). “Better take off your boots and jacket,” said Luke, with an expert shake and twist. “Carry them down with you.” Surprised that I no longer felt sick, that I seemed to be able to balance well enough to get where I wanted to go, within a couple of yards, or even less, and that, on the very small scale, the micro-scale, personally, life suddenly seemed to have a future back in its familiar place, I followed Luke down the companionway
“Did you see that business with the cod-end knot?” he said, over his shoulder, as we slid on the cardboard squares of discardable carpet, along the passage past the galley. “Did you see that?”
“Yes, I did. I’d no idea what happened, exactly… But yes, I did.”
“Good, because that’s important.” He dropped his jacket and sea-boots to the floor, and paused to pull down the levers on a white-painted bulkhead-door. “There are several types of cod-end knot. The boys here use a chain knot. Usually only one man in a crew ties it—I suppose it will have come about somehow” (he swung open the door) “that if there was a big shot once, whoever tied the knot that time always ties it from then on.”
“A big shot?”
“Aye,” said Luke, picking up his yellow boots and red jacket, stepping over the high steel sill in his blue socks. “Come on—you know. I don’t have to repeat everything, do I? A shot. To shoot the net. A big shot, a really successful catch.”
“Ah, yes, I’m sorry,” I said, pitching awkwardly over the shin-high steel plate, barking my shin. “Shit.”
“No. No shit,” said Luke, sitting down on a small bench to the immediate left, pulling on his boots, “if that time he tied thirteen loops, then from then on there must always be thirteen and so on …”
“Yes, of course. Great!” I sat down beside him and tried to get my own boot
s on—in short bursts, because it was obvious that you must not lean forward, as the bare washed shiny dark wooden floorboards sloped down and away and your buttocks lifted clear off the tilt of bench… Wait. Here we go. Backwards. Lift a foot. Pull.
“Some say you shouldn’t go out to the fishing-grounds with the knot tied, only at the last minute should you tie the knot… others the opposite … and so on.” Luke stood up and swung himself round into a small room to our left.
I stood up too, holding on to the steel door-jamb, and looked in: it was a changing-room of sorts, full of shelves and hooks, and in the left-hand corner was a perfectly normal, an absolutely ordinary white domestic washing-machine.
“Some boats I’ve been on—the man who ties the cod-end knot won’t show you how it’s tied: because there’s a risk the magic will be lost if the secret is told. Nuts!” Luke was bending down beneath a shelf to the right, several coils of black electric cable over his right shoulder, trying to force a plug into a socket. “One skipper collecting data for me wouldn’t have thirteen anything. He was keeping records for me—and the haul-numbering took a bit of figuring out to start with—he’d write a series: eleven, twelve, fourteen, fifteen; or sometimes eleven, twelve, twelve plus, fourteen. Nuts!” Luke handed me a battered brown clipboard. The top sheet of graph paper, clamped beneath the rusted clip, was stained with engine oil. “Take that please… Now let’s see …” He reached up and pulled a 3-foot-long rectangular black metal box from the shelf level with his chin. “Scales—the latest! For weighing fish. They lent me these in the lab. But I don’t think they’ve been tried on trawlers. Or at least, not in January, not in a storm like this … It’s OK. Don’t worry. I’ve got an old-fashioned one too, as a back-up. Let’s see … we’ve got ten minutes or more, while the boys shoot the net for the next haul.”
And as he spoke the main engines started up, vibrating the ship, vibrating my spine.
“Come on, we’ll set it up here.” He stepped across to a flat steel shelf beside a conveyor belt which divided the cavernous fish-room into two: a steel-sided, steel-grilled trackway that led from a tall, round, stainless-steel table (down to our left) to a closed hatch at my feet. A slosh of seawater, shin-high, washed across the dark brown swollen slippery wooden floorboards with each roll and, as the ship bent shuddering over to port, a part of the wave of slush and foam ladled itself out via the half-open drop-gate of the port scupper. As she rolled further over and down, fresh white seawater powered in, to toss and curl, as the ship righted herself, straight across to starboard, to repeat the process. “Grand!” said Luke, switching on his scales (a red light appeared to the left of the long calibrated dial). “Magic! It works—even in seas like this!” The steel ceiling of the fish-room was a confusion of pipes and cables (some encased in steel tubes, some simply slung and looped); strip lights; fuse boxes. The stainless-steel sides of the hopper occupied about one-fifth of the space, down in the left-hand corner, and from it another shorter conveyor belt led up to the circular rimmed table. To our right, to the right of the bulkhead door to the galley, lay a wide-diameter ribbed tube, an augur of sorts, a length of giant gut. Directly aft, at the end of the rectangular cavern, another open bulkhead door let dimly through to the net-deck, where the big winches for the bridle stood back-lit by the early morning light streaming in from the stern-ramp, from the bright surface of the heaped-up, following sea.
“Now, I’ll need three or four baskets,” said Luke, “for random samples, a selection of every species we catch. That’s good—those three over there” (he nodded towards two red and one black plastic dustbin-sized baskets, roped to a pipe against the sides of the hopper). “We’ll pinch those. And that one.” (A red basket, to the other side of the main conveyor, against the far wall.)
“I’ll get it,” I said, handing him the clipboard.
Intending to clamber over the 3-foot sides of the conveyor, I began to try to hitch up the civilian trousers beneath my oilskin trousers (there seemed to be so many belts and braces and rubber straps; and the whole outfit was so uncomfortable; and it was so difficult to keep everything up around a moving flop of stomach when the world would not stay still; and besides, my boxer shorts, long ago half-shredded by jungle mould, had now decided to give up altogether and to drop, dying, around my knees). And then, for the second time—and once again, so gently, without warning, so slowly—I was weightless, I was airborne. The conveyor belt passed beneath me; someone shot me in the left shin; the travelling wave of froth and foam came curling up to wash over me and to leave me, splayed out full length, against the rusty plates of the port side of the inner hull.
“Wow!” said Luke, as, half getting to my feet, I was slung back across the floor to the side of the conveyor. “You flew!” he said, helping me over it. “You flew! I told you—stand at right angles to a roll. Never face right into it.” And then, as I held on to the side of the circular table, he said, marginally more sympathetic, “Are you hurt?” He stood to my left, a basket in either hand, just as if he was about to go off and do something sensible, like, say, picking up potatoes, in some thoroughly stable, reliable, muddy field.
“I’m not sure,” I said, confused, fumbling with my boot and socks, rolling up my two pairs of trousers. “I nearly broke a leg.”
Luke laughed. It was a kindly laugh—the merriment, I reflected ruefully, of a lifeboatman who’d seen it all, real injuries, who’d probably pulled sailors from the sea with no legs left at all.
“It’s nothing,” I said, inspecting a three-inch gash, horrified by the volume of blood running down into my socks. “It’s a scratch.”
“It’s a 3-inch surface cut,” said Luke. “No problem. Not worth dressing. You caught your leg on the edge of the conveyor. I saw it all. You flew! But you’ll be amazed—cuts like that, even proper cuts, they heal so fast. It’s the salt, I suppose. It’s not like your jungle. There’s no infection. No land bacteria can survive. Out here—everything heals.”
Luke took my arm. “Stand here,” he said, positioning me on the starboard side of the circular table, a few feet from the wall of the hull. “Stand on this box” (an upside-down fish-box) “and wedge yourself in against this” (one of the stanchions supporting the deck above us) “and then not even you can fly, whatever you do. This’ll be your place. Your workplace!”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to balance.
Luke dropped the baskets beside me; and with a double kicked-up flash of yellow sea-boots in the fluorescent overhead lights, he vaulted right over the conveyor. Sure-footed, even as the mucus-slimy floorboards up-ended themselves and tilted away to port, he reached the impossible prize of the red plastic basket, released its lashing and, as the floorboards and their cargo of sea-water heaved themselves up and over and down towards me, he vaulted back over the conveyor, the basket flying horizontally out from his left hand—and he slung it down beside the others.
“So here we are!” he said, stooping over a drop-gate at the base of the hopper, just above the bottom step of the small conveyor which led up to our table. “At last! We’re about to add to our knowledge, our knowledge of the new fisheries! The deep-sea fisheries! And believe me, Redmond, they’re new, they really are! As yet—we know nothing.” He yanked up the stainless-steel gate. A flap of big, dead, dark flatfish fell out on to the belt. Carried away by his excitement, I caught myself thinking: I don’t recognize any of them, but of course that figures, because we know nothing.
“Greenland halibut,” said Luke, straightening up. “The boys call them Black butts. Because they’re blackish both sides. And Greenland halibut, they’re really interesting—it’s their evolution—because it seems they don’t want to be flatfish any more. They’re camouflaged both sides. Their left eye has moved up to the edge of the head. So we think they swim on the ventral edge, like normal fishes—and not like a flatfish, blind side down. But surely, you’re thinking, aren’t you, their eyes are still wonky, they must be ill-adapted as hunters. But east of the Wyville Thomson
Ridge they and the various species of redfish are the main commercial catch. So in biological terms they’re very successful. But how? Well—most of the time they live one or two kilometres down, and the answer is, Redmond, we don’t know. They’re right here, a big fish in UK waters, common as blades of grass, and we don’t know a damn thing! Isn’t that great?”
“Yes!” I shouted, genuinely swept away, for a moment, by the intricate private life of the Greenland halibut.
Luke disappeared around to his right, to the port side of the hopper. There was a clatter and a scraping, the sound, I thought, of a corrugated-iron sheet being pulled aside, and Luke’s voice, his shout, became hollow, a bounce of echoes. “The French started it all!” he shouted, from inside the hopper. The boom of the declamation reached me in triplicate, stolen, around the edge, by the thud of the engines and the blows of the sea, but still, at the centre, laden with extra authority, amplified. “The west coast of Scotland … Landings at Lochinver … Pioneered this whole thing … 1989 … that recent… Orange roughy… Roundnose grenadier…
“At the time,” he said, reappearing in front of me, hopping up on a box the opposite side of the table, restored to his normal volume, shape and size, “no one took much notice. But then they landed 50,000 tonnes of Orange roughy. 1991. Fifty thousand tonnes. That really did it. Because they’d also made themselves a market. They changed the name, Orange roughy, to beryx at first, but that didn’t work, so they thought of Napoleon, as they do, and they called it the Emperor fish. And sales took off. The housewife—she loved it. All over France. Same in Spain.”
Luke, fired up by the inner sight of all those Orange roughy, all those deep-sea fish flying off the fishmongers’ slabs, stared up at an innocent roundel of small levers directly above his head. He yanked one down. (Nothing happened.) “They did the same thing,” he shouted, still staring at the control box, “even with deep-sea fish like the Black scabbard. The French trawlermen call it the siki. Now—the Black scabbard fish—and we won’t see it here, because you only find them to the west of the Wyville Thomson Ridge, they’re all about a metre long. And we know almost nothing about them, about their life cycle.” He pulled down the second lever. (Nothing happened.) “Where are the larvae? Where are the juveniles?” Luke, much moved, looked straight at me. (But I felt unqualified to make a substantive reply.) “Here in the UK people wouldn’t feed it to the cat! But in Portugal and Spain, I think, they call it Espada. In France it’s the Sabre. And it sells well!”
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