Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  At the mention of Nairn the nature of the problem became clear. I was going to be sick.

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve nothing left!”

  “I don’t care.”

  Jason came in. “What’s wrong?”

  “Redmond’s going to be sick.”

  Jason gave me a quick, kindly grin. “Oh well,” he said, “at least you’re good for something—you’re cheap to feed!”

  I pushed myself to my feet and turned to the door. “What’s that?” said Jason. “There—on the back of your shirt?”

  “Eh?” I said, twisting round to look, imagining a sea-bat sucker, or worse.

  “Oh I see,” said Jason with a sharp laugh, “it’s your mattress!”

  HALIPHRON ATLANTICUS …” said Luke, dreamily, full of batter, rustling down into his sleeping-bag in the dark cabin, getting comfortable. “That was really something. Almost as good as Signy Island. But well never manage to keep it. I don’t like to ask the boys to pack it in ice and put it in the hold. Not all 40 kilos. I’ll preserve the beak. That’ll have to do …”

  “Signy Island? What’s that?”

  “Signy Island? Haven’t I told you? Aye, that was the very happiest time of my life! In the South Orkney Islands, as it happens, in the South Atlantic, the same latitude as here, but there’s no warm North Atlantic Drift, so it’s ice. Antarctica. Two and a half years. Straight. Without a break. I was there for two and a half years!”

  “And that was happy?”

  “Aye. Smashing! The best job in the world! I was marine assistant to the British Antarctic Survey. There’s nothing like it.”

  “I’ll bet there isn’t… The cold …”

  “I never wanted to leave. I was counting Fur seals and Wed-dell seals—they pupped in the winter—and Leopard seals and penguins. It was a magic place. The base was on the site of an old Norwegian whaling station. I was the base diver.”

  “You went diving? In those temperatures?”

  “Humpback and Minke whales would turn up for your dives and they’d stay with you… I went diving with Fur seals—well, you couldn’t avoid it—there you’d be, concentrating on your job, diving, diving for some specimen, a mollusc say, and Fur seals, they’re playful, they really are, they can give you one hell of a fright, they’ll rise up behind you and give you a knock on the head, a gentle head-butt when you’re not expecting it! Or there again, when you stick out a hand to collect your mollusc or whatever, some Fur seal will appear out of nowhere and mouth your arm—take your arm in his mouth like a dog and give it a shake. They think that’s funny! Or sometimes they’d rush straight at you with their mouths open. Boo! And then there were the most beautiful birds in the world—Snow petrels. Snowies. Perfect white. Perfect. And Giant petrels. GPs, Geeps. And Cape pigeons…”

  “And the people? Two and a half years with the same people?”

  “Honestly, Redmond, in all that time, I can honestly say, in all that time, in those first two years together—I never once heard anyone raise their voice. If there’s an ideal society anywhere, that was it. And when you think that the winter night lasts from March to October or November and that the one ship came in November … That was great—great excitement all round. The ship brought your mail—you’d had no mail for eight months. And a year’s worth of beer, cigs, food and books. Plus one video and one CD a year each. You were allowed two contacts a month towards the end of your contract. Two 150-word messages. So I’d send one to my mum and one to a girlfriend. But lots of messages came the other way—scientists all over the world would send us their requests, they needed two of that species and two of the other. Magic shopping lists! And then I’d go out and try and find whatever it was they wanted. Mostly by diving. There was a lot of interest then in the Icefish. Because it has no haemoglobin—it takes its oxygen directly, in solution. So it leads a very slow life, it’s laid back, nuzzling about under the ice, right up against the glacier-face. Or maybe someone would want an animal from our lab—we kept Long worms in the aquarium, gigantic worms, a bit like hagfish, and like hagfish they’d knot themselves up together, disgusting. And they’d escape! They’d force up the lid of the tank somehow and get out across the floor, they’d slime right down the corridor! And we kept Glyptonotus, the giant isopod—they looked just like one of the trilobites, as if they’d come back from the dead, you know, from the great extinction 245 million years ago when a comet whacked into the earth, big time, and wiped out 96 per cent of all life in the sea. Talk about an ancient environment—tell me, what system of living things is older than the ocean’s? Redmond, just think of the millions and millions of animals waiting to be discovered in the abyss, the hadal depths. And the trillions of different organisms that live in the abyssal ooze … Aye, I had lots of time to dwell on all that, lots and lots of time. And it never got too much. I never got anxious and ill like I do in Aberdeen, trying to write this doctorate … No. Not at all. Down there we had dingle days. We called them dingle days, I don’t know why—bright sunny days when you could go skiing or mountain-climbing and take a grip, take a photograph. It was a day like that when I had to go and find a dead penguin for David Attenborough. He needed a dead penguin for one of his films. A dead penguin! And I went diving for him to collect sea-worms, Nemertean worms, Proboscis worms. He was the very nicest of guys to work for—he actually wrote and thanked me! And those worms you know, Nemertean worms, they come in all the different colours there are. You wouldn’t believe it…”

  “So how many of you? How many on the base?”

  “Twelve, twelve of us—a doctor, an electrician, a diving officer, a cook, a radio operator, a diesel mechanic, a terrestrial scientist and his assistant, a marine scientist and his assistant (me), a limnologist—there were these extraordinary lakes under the ice that opened up in summer—and a chippie, my special mate, Steve Wheeler. He was thirty-six, a good bloke, and we gave him the title of boatman, too, because he built his own sailing boat, a beautiful little fourteen-footer. We were all so pleased we held a launch party—we broke a whole bottle of whisky across her bows. He would whistle up fish and sing to the seals and he even thought he could hypnotize girls—you know, just by looking at them. Aye, it was a paradise really, so peaceful and productive, until…”

  “Until?”

  “Well, Redmond, I know it sounds terrible to say this, but the fact is it was a paradise until the women came… Aye, three students—an English girl studying isopods and two Dutch girls working on algae. When they arrived they screamed at each other. You feel bad—you think why? And the answer is you haven’t heard anyone shouting at someone else for two years. Poor Steve fell in love with one of them—but of course she wasn’t going to fancy a chippie, no matter what he did or said. She went for one of the scientists. And I’m afraid it drove him mad. He appeared in the mess one day with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a knife in the other. The doctor calmed him down. But long term we had to radio for help. And at last the navy got to us. They took him off in a helicopter.”

  “Luke?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you ever sleep? Could we get some sleep?”

  “Hey—I’m sorry. I really am. It’s like I said—sleep deprivation: you’ll find at first the boys talk their heads off, then they’ll go silent, and after that they’ll get red eyes and terrible skin and they’ll hardly look human. It’s like rats, there’s a famous experiment when rats were deprived of sleep—eventually their skin split all over and their fur fell off.”

  “Yeah. Well. I really don’t want my fur to fall off.”

  AND IN HALF AN HOUR the siren sounded and woke us up and my body told me it was another day and my brain disagreed; and I realized I had already lost all sense of rational time.

  Luke, without a pause, slid out of his sleeping-bag into his trousers, his sweater, his hat, his socks, in that order, and disappeared in silence as if he was sleep-walking.<
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  I lay in my warm nylon-silky army-green cocoon. With my toes I stroked the end of the bag; I flexed my ankles, my calf muscles; yes, my entire body ached, every set of muscles had had enough, even in my neck. So how had that happened? Head down, tense, hunched over the table, gutting fish for ever … It’s OK, said the inner voice, just a few more moments, in fact why not a few more days? After all, as Luke himself told you, you’re not expected to join in, you’re paying £50 a day for your keep, you’re not a burden to anyone, in fact you’d probably help most by staying exactly where you are—you’re in the way out there, they’re doing serious work, it’s all a bit desperate, in fact they’re manic. And in general, now you’re lying here thinking, so warm and relaxed, why don’t we consider the bigger picture? How about a good long illness? And anyway, isn’t it time you retired? One glance and anyone can see that all your best work is behind you. So why not just lie here and enjoy it? No one will blame you. It’s OK. And anyway, and you know this always works—I have very bad news for you, you don’t know it yet, you’re in shock, in fact you’ve forgotten the entire battle, but the platoon is talking of nothing else: the way you charged that machine-gun nest with such exemplary bravery, such a sight to see, of course it goes without saying that you’ll be mentioned in dispatches and the word is that you may well be recommended for a Victoria Cross … But look here, you must lie still, very still, because you took a bullet in the stomach from a General Purpose Heavy Machine-Gun. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. I know how desperate you are to go straight back into action, old boy, but even if it takes all your great instinctive courage, all your vast reserves of will power, I’m afraid that I must order you to lie absolutely still. The very slightest movement and you’re a dead man …

  From a yard or two beneath me the engines for the hydraulic lifts opened up, shaking the bunk with a new pulse, just faster than the excess adrenalin beat of an impending heart-attack. I struggled out, careful to hang on to the edge of the bunk with one hand as I pulled on my trousers with the other. No, I thought, I really do not want to go flying again. I don’t like flying, not one bit.

  In the lighted companionway a man with dark shaggy hair, wearing a white singlet, blue overalls like a crofter, and with a pair of bright orange ear-protectors slung round his neck, stepped slowly, with deliberation, over the sill of the open door to my left. From the engine room. So he was Dougie, the engineer.

  I introduced myself. “Aye,” he said with a slow, gentle smile, removing his ear-protectors and hanging them on a hook to the left of the galley entrance. “I know all about you. You’ve been ill. You’ve no eaten. So come in here a moment. We’ll have a little chat.

  “Dougie,” he said, shaking my hand. “Dougie Twatt. So—sit here a while. I’ll get you something. No hurry. You and I—we’ll have a chat.” He ambled down the pitching galley to the storeroom off to the left. He was older than any of the crew, maybe even over forty. And calm. He’s probably calm anyway, I thought, but it must help—to be on a fixed salary…

  He returned, equally slowly, and in front of me he set a mug of water and six thick dry biscuits, on a white plate. “Now,” he said, taking the place opposite, folding his arms on the table, staring straight into my eyes (I thought: hypnosis). “This never fails. It never has. It never will. I’m going to watch you—until you’ve eaten every last crumb.”

  I took a bite—a mouthful of gravel. And a gulp of water. “You must love engines,” I spluttered, for something to say.

  “Aye,” he said, not taking his eyes off my face. “Aye, I was brought up on Eday I worked on the croft till I was twenty-one. Fifty acres. All sheep. But there was no enough work for us all—so I went to sea. I knew all there was to know about tractors. You have to—there’s no a crofter in Orkney who’s no his own mechanic. You mind the engines—they were good and simple then. You knew where you were. I still love tractors. I collect old tractors. That’s what I live for, really. Don’t get me wrong, I like the engines here, they’re old, Blackstones. They’re always interesting, always a surprise.”

  “A surprise?” (Biscuit number two.)

  “Aye, because you never know which bit will fail you next. I’m a nurse down there, I nurse them along. But the truth is—it’s no very nice down there.”

  “How did you learn?” (Only four biscuits to go.)

  “Marine engines? I learnt the best way, I taught myself, I learnt at sea.”

  “And what do you do at home? When you get home?”

  “Aye, I love to be at home. At home I look after my tractors. You’ll no find better. I’ve four tractors. A Ferguson …”

  “A grey Fergy? The little grey Fergy? My father-in-law had one! My wife learnt to drive on it!”

  “Aye. They made them from 1947 to 1956. And then I’ve three Fordsons. 1929. That’s my best one. That’s special, that was my father’s. Made in Cork. The Ford Motor Company. And I’ve a 1939 and a 1940 model. They’re all in working order. I could start them up for you …”

  “And what about a car? Do you have an old car?”

  “A car? No. No—that’s a real waste of money. No. I’ve a motorbike. A Matchless. A 1953 Matchless 350 …”

  WHEN I REGAINED my place at the gutting table the trays were already full—and in his arms Sean was holding a different kind of flatfish. It was around 4 feet long, thick-bodied, black on top, pearly white underneath. Sean, his eyes askew and shining, was shouting at Luke: “So Jason says to me, ‘Look Sean,’ he says, ‘if it’s for your nan, that’s OK, that’s OK by me—if it’s for her,’ he says, ‘then nothing but the best will do.’ One time I took her a halibut like this one—a real whole White halibut! Aye—mebbe eighty pounds’ worth! That’s the kind of skipper he is …”

  “Aye!” shouted Robbie, from across the table, at his senior position beside the waist-high entry and knee-low exit conveyors, in front of the drop-gate lever for discards down the steel chute to the starboard scupper, beneath the overhead stop-start table-controlling levers. “Luke! Fock all that. That’s his nan in Caithness like. She brought him up! But that halibut there, I’m telling you, that’s for the galley!”

  Sean, with uncharacteristic gentleness, even reverence, lowered the White halibut, the prize, the prince of North Atlantic fishes, into Luke’s red plastic specimen-basket.

  Luke, over-excited, it seemed to me, even at the thought of this best of fishy dinners, said (half-way to a shout), “That’s rare right enough. It’s rare to catch one in a trawl—they’re fast, too fast for a trawl, great predators, you get them on long lines, they hunt about the bottom, they feed on fish, especially redfish—and I promise you, Redmond, you and I will see lots of redfish with Jason as skipper, because he knows, the boys say he never fails … Aye,” he said, chucking yet another Greenland halibut up and over and down the tube (nothing stops him working once he’s started, I thought, whereas here am I gawping about a mere White halibut, doing sod all) “the White halibut, they’re the number-one fast hunters down to a kilometre and a half—and in cold water, too, around 2.5-8 degrees C. But if we ever get the chance in the UK I’m sure we could breed them, farm them. In the far north—Shetland. Magic! They’re not like your average pussy-soft flatfish, there’s no lacy undulations of the fringing fins for them—no, they’re rock-and-rollers, they’ve got muscles, their whole bodies, their zap-thrust tails. And they’ve a great trick, Redmond, because when they’re on the bottom on the upper slope where the light penetrates, when they’re young, their topside, the dorsal surface—it’s coloured like the seabed. If a White halibut’s taking a rest on mud its back’ll be black. And if it whops over to a patch of sand—it’ll grow pale. And if (yes it’s OK, I hear you, these are observations from an aquarium)—if it has its head on sand and its body on mud, it’ll have a pale head and a black body!”

  “Hey Redmond!” said Sean, focusing on me for the first time. “Where you bin?”

  “I’ve been talking,” I said, as I tried to concentrate, pronto, on the
gutting of my first Greenland halibut of the day (if it was a new day). “I’ve been talking—or rather listening, I’ve been listening to Dougie.”

  “Dougie! Dougie?” Sean dropped his Greenland halibut back into the tray. “Dougie? Dougie’s a grand old guy. But talking? Talking’s not his bag, man. Dougie’s no a talker! Hey Robbie! Redmond here—he’s been listening to Dougie!”

  Robbie, his responsibilities forgotten, stopped work and leant across the table. “Dougie? Talking? Look, Redmond, like: Dougie doesna talk. He’s an engineer. He’s different. Know what I mean? Engineers—it’s difficult, all that. And fock it, I should know. You see Jason—and I want you to hear this—Jason has paid, twice, for me to take my engineer’s exams in Aberdeen. Because it’s the law—you canna go to sea in a trawler without a qualified engineer on board. Now I really want that ticket, dinna get me wrong, I tried, I really did, I owe it to Jason, because he has faith in me, he has the faith, and I want it for me, for Robbie—because if you’re an engineer you have a salary. And if you have a salary you can go to a bank. You’re respectable. People respect you. You can get a flat. You can marry! But in Aberdeen they’re bastards, real bastards, they failed me both times. It’s difficult, to be an engineer—and then when you are, it’s difficult, your head’s full of engines, systems. Like here—the Norlantean, she’s packed with ancient metal. She’s great, she’s old, but if truth be told, Redmond—she’s a focking death-trap. And Dougie? He’s old too—and Jason asks himself, especially at this time of year, what the fock is Dougie doing putting up with all this? He does not have to face a Force 12 every year of his life! Why should he? He could get a safe job just like that” (Robbie clicked his blue-gloved fingers with a report like a pistol-shot) “in a garage, parts and services, farm machinery, an oil-rig, anything. That’s why Jason needs me. And I keep failing him! Christ, fock it, Redmond, you know what I mean? If Dougie’s talking we’re in real trouble …”