Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  Luke returned his gaze to the control box of small levers above his head. “Redmond,” he said, as if it was all my fault, “why the hell won’t this work?”

  “No idea,” I ventured, which was an understatement.

  “Oh come on, I told you, all these trawlers are different.” He hopped off his box. “You know perfectly well. There must be a master switch. A main power source way above the spray-level.” He stepped across the wet slide of shining floorboards, as if the soles of his boots were suction-pads, and inspected the chaos of wiring and junction boxes above the lip of the stern bulkhead door. “Aye!” he said, jumping up, flicking down a switch.

  The conveyor belt to my left came to life. The circular table, my safe handhold, began to rotate, remorselessly, clockwise—the big, round, trustworthy steel pail of a table began to move; it took its 18-inch-deep sides, its two-and-a-half-foot-wide inner sections, its central steel tube of a tower (double-layered with white plastic subsidiary pails), and my hands, with it.

  “Let go!” shouted Luke, as I fell off my box. “Och aye,” he said with an Uncle Luke laugh, as I swayed back up and on again. “Stay where you are,” he said, back in control under the overhead levers. “Balance with your legs.” Left arm above his head, he pushed up the right-hand lever, stopping the table with one of its receiving sections directly beneath the end of the conveyor—a cascade of big, dark, dead flatfish slid over the lip and slithered across the waiting steel tray, filling it. Luke pulled the lever down, rotating the table one section, repeating the process.

  “So—these new deep-sea fisheries,” I said, trying to sound intelligent, wanting to learn, gripping the stanchion to my right with one hand (and this teacher of mine, I thought, with an uneasy meld of imagined pride and real dismay that I was growing so old so fast—he could be my legitimate son). “These new fisheries—it’s all the fault of the British housewife.”

  “What is?” said Luke, turning another section.

  “Their cooking habits. No French fish-soup. No Spanish paella. Nothing but cod and haddock and pretty flatfish—sole and plaice. So our own fisheries collapse.” And then, impressed by the amount of blood I still seemed to be losing (both feet, inside their sea-boots, felt soaking wet, but my left foot was warm), I had a dying, paternal thought. “Luke, you should be a teacher. You should teach this stuff. Become a lecturer somewhere.”

  Luke, across the table, looked straight at me. He stopped the table, he stopped the conveyor. “You think so?” He straightened his shoulders. He pulled off his blue woolly hat. He held it out in his right hand for a moment, towards me, above the table, like an offering (and I almost took it). He thrust his hat awkwardly into his right trouser pocket. “You really think so?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s obvious—you’re made for it.”

  Luke’s face seemed to grow larger, his eyes brightened, his forehead lost its two deep crosswise furrows. “Redmond, to tell the truth—I had thought of it. You know—becoming a lecturer. In a fisheries college somewhere. The one in Stromness. The place that produced Jason! Or the new North Atlantic fisheries college. In Shetland. At Scalloway. Smashing! A smashing way to live! But then … I have a problem. Big style …” He looked down at the full steel section of tray in front of him. “I don’t know, I don’t think… you know, I just don’t think I’ve got the balls for lecturing.” Luke ran his right forefinger along the outer steel rim, round to the left, round to the right. His hand was calloused and scarred and heavy with muscle. It seemed to belong to a man twice his size. He said: “The thought of it… standing up in front of people…”

  “Listen, Luke,” I said, in one of those moments of sudden, transitory exhaustion when the world goes dead for a second or two, when you feel hypnotized by whatever object happens to fall within your line of sight—in this case his disembodied hand, as it shuttled, left to right, right to left. “You’ve got the balls for anything.”

  “No!” he said, decisively, breaking the spell. “Not for going up on stage. No. I’ve done it once. I was shit scared. I really was.”

  “You were?” I said, reassured, over-eager. “So when was that? What happened?”

  “Not now,” he said, restarting both machines, raising his voice. “I’ll tell you later. Maybe. Yes. I promise I will.” And then, with no pause or warning, he gave me a grin that lit his whole face, a smile that came from somewhere else, the lop-sided, caught-in-the-act smile of a little boy. “And anyway, Redmond, this dream of mine, this teaching business, you see, the fact is—I thought I’d start with you!”

  “You did? But Luke… that’s great. The lecturing, I mean. It’s so good to know that even you—even you’re afraid of something.”

  “Me? Redmond, look, I’m afraid of everything I really am.” He stopped a fresh section of table under the conveyor. “And there again, ach well, teaching… Research, the deep sea, the oceans, papers, books—money and time for everything I live for! But forget it. Because there’s no way I’ll ever be able to stand up in front of hundreds of people and talk. It can’t be done. Simple. So if I ever get my Ph.D. sorted I’ll just take off somewhere. Work my passage. Go back to the Falklands.” He moved the table on one section. “Because the fact is, Redmond—no one, but no one, is going to be as easy to teach as you.”

  “Of course not,” I said, pleased.

  “Because absolutely no one—zilch—no one that I have to teach will be as completely monkey-bollock clueless as you are.”

  “Ah.”

  “Imagine it! Teaching in Orkney or Shetland… Every last one of them will be a trawlerman’s son. Or they’ll know everything already, like Jason. Redmond—imagine it!—imagine trying to tell Jason what to do …”

  “But you won’t be telling a young Jason what to do! You’ll be talking about marine biology, the possible distribution of fish, I don’t know, life cycles, animals in the deep sea.”

  “Forget it!” he said, jerking down the overhead lever, rotating the three full trays in the circular pail right the way round to where I stood. He shut off both machines. “Forget it! It’s just a dream or a nightmare or whatever. It’s OK. I’m resigned to it. I know what’ll happen. I’ll have to get my old job back. Fisheries Inspector, the Falklands. With a Ph.D. So please, let’s not talk about it any more. And anyway, I wouldn’t get a post at Scalloway. I’m not good enough. And besides, you must concentrate, Redmond. Focus. The Greenland halibut, the Black butt. Because I must teach you to gut them—and gut them fast.” From fish-box to fish-box he came round to stand beside me, collecting, on the way, from their lodging place in the crack between a rusted pipe and the rusted ceiling, two 6-inch-long knives with red plastic handles and stained steel blades. He handed one to me. “Because it’s not just one or two Black butts you’ll have to clean—it’s one or two tonnes of Black butt.”

  Luke pulled two pairs of new blue rubber gloves from his trouser pocket. “Sean gave me these. They’re for us. Direct from Jason. But he said—or at least, Redmond, I think he said, because he speaks real Caithness, and even I find that difficult to catch, you know, but we’ll be OK eventually, you’ll be amazed how your understanding increases as you work with someone—it can go from one word in ten to as much as one in two; anyway, Sean said, ‘You’re lucky, boys,’ he said, ‘you really are. New gloves! Now donna even think of asking for another pair. Och no. Because the skipper will na have it. Boys—he keeps them in the wheelhouse, in their plastic wrappings. And he counts them every watch, like a pile o’gold!’”

  “But that’s great, Jason’s got it!” I said. “Two million pounds in debt—and he’s managed to fetish all his anxieties down to the rubber gloves!”

  “Ach,” said Luke, giving me my sacred pair. “Leave me out of this. This spooky stuff. I hate it. I really do. Life should be rational. Sean told me—if you do ask Jason for a fresh pair, he goes wild-eyed. For the boys, it’s a joke. But not really. Because they understand. Every time you ask—even if you show him your old pair, ripped to bits on red
fish spines—he’ll say, ‘Don’t you realize? Have you any idea? Every other skipper charges his crew full retail price! And these—they’re the very best! Eight pounds and thirty pence a pair!’ And then he gives you this terrible piercing look, and he’s shaking all over, and believe me, you dream about it—it comes up in your bad dreams, for weeks afterwards, you dream about it, you panic, it’s Jason’s head…”

  “And then? What happens then?”

  “Then? Ach well. Then, of course, Jason gives you the gloves.”

  “So he’s a good skipper?”

  “Ach. I can see. You don’t understand. How could you? But the boys do. Jason—he’s not just a good skipper, for Chrissake—they love him.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Please, Redmond, stop saying of course. Because it’s like make-up on a woman’s face. It doesn’t mean anything, does it?”

  “No, no, of course not… I mean …”

  “Well, here. Look.” He picked up a yard-long Greenland halibut. “You’re privileged. You really are. Because all these deep-sea fish you’re going to see will be big mature adults—and I often think this, because this is a new fishery, and in years to come people will say, about my measurements—that Luke Bullough, how he exaggerated! The whoppers he told! But here, come on, hold this—” (my gloves only just got a grip on its smooth slimy skin) “—you take a Greenland halibut. You open it from its green side, its black side, its blind side. You slit the knife through the gill arch between the ventral fin-pair. Here. Then up to the end of the gut. Here…” (The gut seemed far too short to sustain such a big fish, the soft organs far too compact; the whole lot contained in a small pouch, a tucked-away wallet…) “Then you take it all out, this little handful, a little handful of liver and gunge. Then you slit the oesophagus, see? Here. And you scrape out the little heart. It’s tiny—but it’s important. The merchants really hate it if you leave the heart in. You must scrape out the little heart.”

  “Hi, boys!”—and even as the floor dipped away through, it seemed to me, 45 degrees, Sean, appearing through the stern bulkhead door, managed to impart a swagger to his rolling gait. He shouted, “Hi, boys—that’s it, work your asses off.”

  Big Bryan, First Mate, and Allan (equally broad-shouldered, athletic, but not quite so big) pushed past Sean without a word. To the left of the door to the cabins and galley they pulled up an outsize iron hatch (as if it was a sheet of aluminium); they unroped the large ribbed tube, the giant gut, from its place against the port wall, retied one end to the lip of the main conveyor, worked the other down through the hatch and, climbing on to the top rungs of a ladder, or so I assumed, they disappeared down into the fish-hold.

  Sean was standing on a box to Luke’s right. Robbie (who’d materialized so fast and silently I’d no idea where he’d come from) stepped up under the levers, in control.

  I said to Sean, “Where’s Jerry?” And, looking at Sean, imagining Jerry (the friendly young jovial punk with the crew-cut, the Nicorette-inhaler, the earring), I lost concentration, and my third Greenland halibut, half-gutted, slithered back into my section, the full steel tray in front of me.

  “Fock it!” said Sean, with his squashed-up grin. “You nearly took yer thumb off! Jerry? He’s the cook. So he’s gone to the galley. In one hour—breakfast. Two meals a day. Breakfast, dinner. Meals you’ll never forget!”

  “Grand!” said Luke, dropping ungutted Greenland halibut into his red plastic basket. “Breakfast. Redmond, you remember? Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn? How you never wanted to leave? How you wanted to stay there for ever? Well, this is something else. It always is. It’s five, six times as big! I meant to tell you then—‘Redmond, if you think this is a breakfast. Just you wait. Redmond—try it on a trawler!’”

  A memory trace, a sharp wave of nausea, swept up my gullet and dissolved my next anodyne ignorant question in a back-of-the-throat pool of bile and acid.

  “Hey Luke!” said Sean, elbowing him, with excessive force, in the ribs. “What you doing? Redfish, no. But Black butts—you’re meant to gut them!”

  “This,” said Luke, one blue-gloved hand, despite himself, rubbing the point of impact, “this,” he said, in automatic, serious (some things in life really do matter) scientific mode, “is a random sample. Sean—I’m taking five. That’ll do for now. There’ll be many more, later, at different stations, places, hauls to you. Right? I’m going to sex, measure, weigh and age them. And the same applies to all the other significant species we catch. It’s OK. I’ll gut them later.”

  “Age them!” said Sean, with a laugh.

  “Aye—I’ll cut out their otoliths, and pop them in a specimen bottle, and label each one, and then we’ll age them in the lab.”

  “Otoliths?” said Sean, interested, his knife poised in midair. “Their balls? Tits? What’s that?”

  “Their ears,” said Luke. He laughed. He liked Sean. “Ears!”

  “They don’t have ears!”

  “They do, they do!”

  “Well, aye, suppose they do,” said Sean, wary, plainly thinking that he, the new boy, was being teased yet again. “Far out, man. I mean, freaky. Like, their ears? Who the fock would want their ears?”

  “They’re inside!” said Luke, entranced by this unexpected, this whole new take on fish and their ears. “They’re hidden away. It’s grand, Sean, it really is. Because their little ear-bone, the otolith, it lays down growth-rings every season, like a tree. You put it under the microscope. You count the rings. And there you are! Sweet as a nut!”

  “Nuts!” said Sean, not to be fooled, just in case. “Nuts yourself.”

  “It’s true!” shouted Luke over the thump of the engines, bearing his prize off to his new weighing machine.

  “Otoliths!” said Sean, moving up a box, standing beside me. “O-to-liths! He should tell that to his nan!”

  Robbie, opposite us, the boss of the Greenland-halibut-gutting unit, had, somewhere along the jagged pitching line from the open deck to the sheltered fish-room, changed out of his survival suit (which was obviously, as Dicko thought, something special, expensive, an investment for life to save your life—a flotation suit—and, above all, not a piece of clothing that should smell of fish). He now wore standard oilskin trousers-and-apron (his were red in front, yellow at the back), the Jason-regulation blue rubber gloves, a fish-filthy dark blue tracksuit-top, and a peaked black hat that hugged his head and curved down to cover his ears—and he was gutting fish with unnerving speed, somehow performing the task in one unbroken movement: you pick up a Black butt, your knife in your right hand, you slit it—in goes your left thumb, you runnel the guts on to the table, you sling the fish up and over and down the central tube.

  Sean was half as fast; and I was still on my third big slithering corpse that refused to let me grip it at all, that seemed to be still alive.

  “So, Sean,” I said, “how did you get started, as a trawler-man?”

  “Trouble.” He tossed a gutted fish up in the air and down the tube. “Big trouble. So Jason’s family took me on. They like us! I’ve got fifteen brothers and sisters. So it’s not easy, you know? Aye. Drink driving. The court—they fined me! Three thousand pounds! And it wasn’t even my car. Well, I told them straight, I don’t have any money. ‘Find it!’ they said. ‘You’ve got six months!’ So Jason’s father-in-law, he took me on. And that was the making of me! The Viking. Aye! You should see her. She used to be the biggest trawler in all the British fleet. Beautiful. And I had eight days off in six months. But I made it! I did it! I paid the fine!”

  “Well done!”

  “Aye!” He flipped another fish, with extra energy and skill, way up in the air and straight down the rolling, pitching, yawing tube. “And then Jason’s father-in-law said to Jason (know what I mean?), ‘That Sean,’ he said. ‘He’s good. He’s trained now—so you take him.’”

  “And what’s it like?” (As the ship levelled between rolls I finally managed to snick in the knife and scrape out the little damson-r
ed heart: Black butt number three.) “The work?”

  “The work? It’s no hard, the work. It’s the being away. Eight days off in six months! I never saw my nan. I never saw my mates. So this is much better! But it’s no very warm. Now’s the worst-January’s the worst. But even in summer, it’s the mending the nets up there, you canna go any faster and it’s no very warm. And there again, right enough, you never know the hours you’ll have to work—maybe it’s twenty at a stretch, maybe only twelve. And you’re away all the time. It’s worse than the mining. The miners—they go home! One shift and they’re home! And there again—here it’s more dangerous, much worse. Sometimes, well sometimes, you’re so scared you shit yourself. It scares the shit out of you!” Sean gave one of his happy laughs—an all-in laugh on his squashed-in face, an energetic, infectious, sweaty, biological laugh. “But you won’t, Redmond. Not even when we get this Force 12! You’ll be OK!”

  “I will?” I said, squaring my shoulders. “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’ve chucked it all up! You’ve nothing left!”

  Robbie, concentrating, shut off the belt from the hopper; he rotated the table: every second tray or so, with a sharp metallic clang, he dropped open a trap-door in front of him—the guts fell through into a steel chute, a high-sided trough that emptied itself through the starboard scupper.