Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  Sean, getting back to work, said softly, almost to himself, “Robbie, Robbie, you did yer best. We all know that. You always do yer best. You didna let him down …”

  Luke, a native in this world of high emotion which I didn’t understand, said, “Och aye, Redmond. But what did Dougie say?”

  “Biscuits. He made me eat these biscuits … He said if I looked him in the eye and ate these biscuits, every crumb, I’d be cured. He said that on this trip I’d never feel seasick again, not for a moment. It was weird, odd, whatever, so what…” And then a different part of me said, or rather shouted, in a tone and volume devoid of the charm, the friendliness, the social control that I liked to imagine I possessed at all times (and particularly in times of stress, be they merely internal or obvious and real) “And I fucking well don’t want to talk about it!”

  “Aye!” said Robbie, relaxing at once, picking up a Greenland halibut. “Dougie, the treatment. That’s all it was. Aye, hypnosis. He must’ve decided he liked you. Dougie’s treatment—that never fails.” He laughed. Sean laughed. “Aye,” said Robbie, “Dougie’s got the gift. But there was a mate of mine once—he was seasick every time he went out. For the first two days like. He’d be gutting—right there where Sean is. He’d be talking to you, standing on his box, gutting away and bang! He’d lean over and throw up—into the scupper chute. Then carry on gutting and talking, talking and gutting—that’s courage, that is. Dougie didna like him. He’d said something bad to Dougie, called him old or an oddball, something like that. So Dougie wouldna help. So my mate just carried on, working, chucking up, all over the place. Aye, that was a man, right enough.”

  “So what happened to him?” I said, chastened.

  “Och aye. He saved every penny. He was no a drinker like. He had a wife at home. And believe me, Redmond, that really helps. Up here that’s the most important thing. Orkney, Shetland, darkness half the year. So when you meet someone at sea, when there’s a new man in the crew, you ask yourself, does he have a wife at home? Because 90 per cent of the time, if he does, you’ll know, that’s OK—you can trust him with your life. He’ll no let you down. Look at Bryan. Aye, if you dinna believe me—look at Bryan!”

  To my right, Sean muttered, again almost to himself, “Robbie, Robbie. Aye—you’re a dirty old bastard. Jesus, you’ve done things.” (And this was said with an obvious and deep admiration, as he picked up a fish that was the weirdest fish I’d seen since the Rabbit fish, a week or so ago, was it? And he threw it up and over and down the central tube, ungutted.) “But you’ve got a girl right enough.” (At this point I realized, flattered, that Sean, who never even glanced at me, to his left, close-cramped beside him on my adjacent box, was, sotto voce, talking to me.) “Aye, and she’s all of sixteen. She’s at school, for Chrissake. And you’ve given up the drink for her. And you’re no a smoker, if you know what I mean.” (Sean gave his current Greenland halibut, his Black butt, a squashy wink of his right eye.) “Aye, you dirty old bastard you. You give her everything, focking everything. And if she doesn’t focking well watch herself, you’ll marry her!”

  “Robbie!” I shouted across the table, “What happened to him, your mate, the one who was sick?”

  “Eh? What’s that? My mate?” shouted Robbie, his thoughts already somewhere else. “I told you! I just told you—the minute he got the price, he bought a shop, a grocer’s shop. A peedie bit of local meat like. That too. His wife planned it. He gave her all the money he got, as he got it. She planned it all! And I tell you, they’re happy. Really happy. They got a baby! No fish for the baby! No fish for him! No fish for her! If you want to upset him—give him a fish!”

  “Aye!” shouted Sean, joining in. “Sling a fish on his counter—he’s well unchuffed!”

  “Tell me, Sean,” I said in his ear, “what did he mean, Robbie, what he did mean about Bryan? What’s special about Bryan?”

  “Aye,” said Sean, not looking at me. “Bryan—you’ve no sussed him? Everything’s special about Bryan. You go overboard? You think you’re going to die? Give it five minutes max, right? Who do you want to see at the rail? Want like fock? Bryan! And why? Because he’s calm and he knows it all and he’ll no panic and he’ll do something. Aye. Robbie’s right. You can trust your life to Bryan. He’s a real man right enough. He got married—and he took on the woman and her two kids. Aye. Now he’s one of his own. But he treats them all the same. The whole family. You’d never mind they weren’t all his. Aye. Focking marvellous, really. Like my nan. A focking marvel. And no a drinker …”

  “And he’s no a smoker,” I said, getting into the roll and pitch and swing of things, beginning to think I was myself again.

  “Aye! You’re right! Bryan ashore? Forget it! Bryan ashore? Now that’s a turn-off! He’s no a raver. Know what I mean?”

  …

  THE ROUTINE SEEMED INTERMINABLE, the sudden absence of the human voice (or so it seemed to me) in the chaos of overwhelming inhuman sound began to be intolerable. (“Don’t talk,” I told myself. “You’ve no staying power. At least stick at it like Luke. Don’t be a wimp. Please, be as silent and committed as Luke …”) But I couldn’t take it, stand it, hack it, and my extraneous thoughts came in threes of emphasis, like that, like the onset of a fever. So I picked up one of the increasingly common strange new species of fish in my tray (a tray which I managed, now, most times, to half-clear, before Robbie revolved the table, dealt with my leavings and everyone else’s mere guts and discards, and turned on the hopper-conveyor for another delivery). And I held it up for Luke’s inspection. “So what’s this?” I said.

  By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long, huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level—and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine.

  “Eh? That?” said Luke, roused from his automaton working-trance. “That? I’ve told you, haven’t I?”

  “No. You haven’t!” I said, aggrieved at once, but also comforted that Luke, too, was obviously no longer entirely in control of his short-term memory. (But then this thought was also vaguely frightening, as if we were all about to become drunk, semi-clinically mad, angry-about-nothing.) I shouted, “No! You haven’t!”

  “No? Well, I meant to,” he said, red-eyed, taking the fish and dropping it down the tube. “We can sell that—in Germany. They like them in Germany. And I like them, too, personally, but not to eat.” (He carried on gutting.) “I like them because they cruise over the bottom of the deep, as you might say, Redmond, or as I might say, that fish, a Roughhead grenadier, Macrourus berglax, is a Rat-tail, a member of the closely related family the Macrouridae—and they’re deep-water fishes that live on the continental slopes and across the abyssal plains of all the oceans on earth. Their armoured heads, those heads of theirs, they’re pitted with sense organs, and their eyes, I tell you, in 1908 a German biologist, August Brauer—he worked out that the retina of a Rat-tail had around 20 million long slender rods in an area of one-sixteenth of a square-inch. And that, Redmond, is around 225 times more than we have in our own eyes. Now, as you know, the rods are for night-vision, so in dim light a Rat-tail may be able to see over 200 times as well as we can! And that’s not all, because on the underside of most Rat-tails, but not ours, not this particular one, the Roughhead grenadier, there’s an open gland in which they play host to luminous bacteria. Most of the time they leave their bacteria alone, but when they need a torch, a flashlight, they’ve a special muscle waiting round the gland and they squeeze their bacteria, they annoy them—and the bacteria light up! And they’ve other special muscles too, like haddock—they’ve got really big swimbladders, the Rat-tails, and in the males, only in the males, they have these bizarre muscles set round the swimbladder. So it’s obvious, isn’t it? Their function must be entirely sexual. So imagine that! The males drum in the abyss—in the black nigh
t, the perpetual darkness, they drum up their females! And Redmond, it must be noisy down there, and full of the weirdest flashing lights, reds and purples and blues, whatever—because I. G. Priede, Monty Priede, a hero of mine, at my own university, Aberdeen: he’s estimated that for just two species of Rat-tails in the abyssal depths, Cory-phaenoides armatus and yaquinae, at a population density of about 200 fish per square kilometre, you have a global biomass of around 150 × 106 tonnes. And that, Redmond, is just about the total world commercial fish catch!”

  “Wow!”

  Robbie shouted, “Hey Luke! Will ye swap places? I’ve something to say to Redmond there! Will ye take charge?”

  “Jeesus,” said Sean, as Luke and Robbie changed places. “Jeesus, man, did you hear that?” he said, his brain obviously overloaded, like mine. “You know what I mean? That Luke! His head! That’s no right—it’s no right to have a head like that. It’s stuffed with fish. Fish!”

  “Aye,” said Robbie, immediately gutting the Greenland halibut that Luke had left half-finished. “It’s just this—dinna get me wrong. They’ll all tell you—my girl Kate, she’s sixteen like, but we’re serious, I’ve just taken my car for its MOT—and I did 22,000 last year, all on Orkney. Canya believe it? I drive her everywhere, everywhere she wants to go! And I’ve a peedie boat. For the lochs like. She loves that! And I’ve fixed a fish-finder on it. To get the monster trout. Everyone knows. There’s a monster in one of the lochs. But I’ll no tell you which one!”

  “Quite right!”

  “And another thing, my engineer’s exams, dinna get me wrong, I passed three papers and failed two. So I’m more nearly there than I’m not—so Kate says, no need to despair like. And anyway, I love her, I really do, so I’m saving up like, for a place of our own. So when Jason gives me leave to study, on a third share, I always do a bit extra—you know, in the roll-mop herring factory in Stromness, filleting and such (that’s boring, believe me!), or roofing, specially in winter, there’s always a demand for trawler-men to repair roofs in winter. You know why?”

  Robbie gave me a nudge in the ribs that, again, very nearly knocked me off my box. Hanging on to the stanchion to my right, I said, “No!”

  “Because we dinna care about the weather, we’re used to it, we’ve seen it all! Aye, we dinna stop for hail, let alone the rain, and we dinna care about heights—and a roof, Redmond, it stays still, it’s piss-easy like, even in a Force 10! Aye, there’s lots of money to be made in winter, in emergencies, when the slates of those new houses come right off—houses built by Scotsmen, southerners, Scotsmen who canna believe it when the Orkney wind comes in!”

  “Robbie,” I said, suddenly feeling paternal, even towards Robbie, the toughest little wiry Pict you might ever expect to see (and he was sprouting, I noticed, a black start of a beard which grew well on his chin and upper throat but had not yet appeared anywhere else). “Robbie—maybe it’s not a good idea to go out working all day when you’re meant to be studying? Don’t you think? Eh? Studying for exams is serious, it’s a full-time business, something you’re meant to devote all your energies to, you know, when…”

  “Studying? Sitting indoors at a desk all alone all day—when there’s real weather and people and money to be had outside? You’re crazy! You really are mad! Just like they say! Studying! That’s reading Redmond, that’s for when it’s dark, when you canna do anything else!”

  “Ah.”

  We were silent.

  Then, “Robbie,” I said, my physical self, such as it was, thoroughly agreeing with him, with his sharp fast movements (the speed of his knife!), the tight abundant energy of a man who was super-fit, and happy. (And anyway, wasn’t Orkney dark for half the year—and wasn’t that why one of its main exports was scholars?) “Robbie,” I said, for something to say, in an inner silence in all this noise that was beginning to make me inward-shaking anxious: the sea out there, the connected oceans that excited Luke, the mindless terrible explosions of those waves against the man-made hull, double or not, so fragile, the insane ferocity… “Robbie, how did you get into this? This way of life, for Chrissake? You know—being a trawlerman?”

  “Aye,” said Robbie, with an enormous smile (his teeth were all his own—no one had ever been quick or accurate enough to smack the fighting-terrier Robbie in the mouth). “I left school fifteen years ago,” he said in a matter-of-fact, a calming tone of voice. (Robbie, I thought, paranoid, is being kind. He’s seen all this before. He knows how greenhorns feel in a storm like this. He’s probably heard my inner voice that won’t stop talking, the one that says: “I’m not sure I can hack this even for the one trip-that vast unshaped unrelenting violence that’s out there, and out to get you, and that goes on for ever—so maybe I’ll just wind myself up into a fat-ball; and I’ll try and roost it out well away from everyone in some locker or other …”)

  Robbie said, “I worked in a crab-factory in Stromness, and then in a smoked-salmon factory in Kirkwall, for a peedie bit more money. And after that, for a lot more money, even as a junior deckie, I went to sea in pelagic boats. Aye. I went to the herring. Just at the wrong time. After the gold rush, the herring rush. Aye, Redmond, it’s no funny, what your politicians in England have done to us, at the fishing like. It’s no all their fault, right enough, but most of it is. In the sixties and seventies there was a gold rush for the herring. At that time—think of it!—we had only a 3- or 6-mile territorial limit. It was a free-for-all, in Scottish, but much more important—in Orkney and Shetland waters. We let them all in, the bastards and bastards, taking our fish, taking our jobs! And down in London nobody cared. All they cared about is the farming. And why not, right enough? Because they’re so far away, you know? So very far away. And anyway, the fact is, Redmond, we look to Norway, or even Denmark—forget Edinburgh, up here we dinna like Edinburgh and as for London: forget it. That’s another country, that is—Shetland’s as far away from London as Milan, and Milan’s in Italy! Anyway, as every trawlerman will tell you, in the sixties the Norwegians moved in with purse seiners, deep circular nets like, which tightened when they finished the sweep. Now that was bad, but no so very bad, because we can’t help it, we know them, we can’t help it, we like the Norwegians. And the Icelanders were here, too, right up close, everyone forgets that—the Cod War later, you know? Brave little Icelanders! And then the Russians arrived, 6 miles off. Cold War? What Cold War? No one put up a fight for us. Not for trawlermen. The Russians came with ninety purse seiners, ninety! And they offloaded on to these new factory ships of theirs. Bulgarians, Poles, East Germans, you name it, they all came. The factory ships processed the herring and dumped everything else they caught. Dead fish everywhere. No wonder your birds liked it—no wonder your fulmars spread all round the coasts! Christmas for them, every day! Aye—and then your English Prime Minister sold us out to the Common Market. 1973. It looked good to start with—a 200-mile territorial limit from Europe’s coastline. But the coastline, the fish—they’re all up here. So in come the Spaniards! Imagine it! What if it was farming? Hey, you poor Spaniards, you who’ve exhausted your own soils by lousy farming practices—come and have ours like, go ahead, take two-thirds of our land! Eh? I dinna think so. Nah—that Heath, we all signed up to pay, each of us, £5 for every man woman and child every week, to the farmers, for the Common Agricultural Policy. And the fishermen? Forget it. You see, it’s like this—we can vote and vote till we drop down dead. But it doesna matter. Because compared to you, the south, Oxford, London, wherever—Orkney and Shetland, there’s no a person here, our islands—they’re uninhabited! Aye … I’m sorry,” he said, laying a blue-gloved hand on my oilskin arm. “I’m carried away, I’m out of order like …”

  “No you’re not, really not. You see—I should know these things, I damn well should. But I don’t. So then what happened? To you, I mean. To you, Robbie.”

  “To me?” Robbie looked surprised. “To me? Aye, well, it was a nightmare right enough, failing catches, terrible skippers, I worked for several skipp
ers, you know, in different pelagic boats … They were a nightmare, all of them. Their tempers, failure I suppose, you couldna blame them, being in debt like, but all the same—it’s not as if we were doing well, there was nothing left at the surface out there—and some of them, I’ll no name names, some of them drank at sea, a nightmare, you wouldna believe the rages! Terrible, the swearing, the insults, your family, everything—hell, really. In some ways you never recover, aye, you wouldna believe it, but even now I sometimes dream I’m back on one particular boat and I wake up sweating, thrashing about, and Kate says: ‘What’s up, Robbie? What’s wrong?’ And I say, ‘I dreamt I was back on the—’ And she says: ‘Well, forget it, you’re not. It’s different now—because you’re a skipper and I’m your first mate. And you and me, we’re going to be happy!’”

  “Oh shit, Robbie …”

  “Aye, so like I said: Jason. He’s not ordinary, you know. I want you to get that right. Because I’ve suffered more skippers than anyone else on this boat. And because I can see you know fock all—and so Jason, well, you’ll think he’s ordinary.”

  “Aye,” said Sean. “Right on, Robbie! Jason knows my nan. He likes us, the whole family!”

  “You’ll not know,” said Robbie, ignoring him. “You’ll think Jason’s the norm. Because you canna know any different unless I tell you. Well—he’s not. It’s true, maybe he doesna shout at us as much as usual, because you’re on board. But he’s a focking miracle, really. That’s what he is. The real exception. I know you, Redmond, your type, first-timers, people who want to be trawlermen, you know, straight out of college in Stromness, aye, and if not even their fathers were at the fishing, they’re starry-eyed, they talk about love-of-the-sea. Jeesus! So I’m telling you, being on a trawler, Redmond, you probably think the only problem is the weather. The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don’t—and you die all together. No, no—it’s the skipper. Because most of them are madder than the weather. More violent, you could say, more unpredictable. Now dinna get me wrong. I’m sure I’d be the same. Millions of pounds in debt. Like Jason. And then Jason has a wife and child at home to look after, and another on the way, I shouldn’t wonder. And there again, his father-in-law, the greatest Orkney trawlerman of the last generation—skipper of the Viking, the Viking, for Chrissake! And we all know what he says to himself every waking minute of every focking day—‘my daughter, the loveliest daughter in all the world’ (along with her sisters, of course, if she has any sisters) ‘—that Jason she married, is he a real man or just a no-good slack-arsed focking southerner?’ Aye. The strain of it. Being a skipper—that’s not for me. I’d go mad too, I know I would. But here’s the thing, Redmond. Jason, he’s quick as a focking ghost, one problem and he’s out the brown door of that wheelhouse quick as a focking ghost—and I’m telling you now, he’s sane.”