Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “You would?”

  “Yes, I really would. Because I’ve thought about this. So I’m serious.”

  “Aye?”

  “Yes, I really am. I’ve been thinking about two of the great classics in modern marine biology, you know, Alister Hardy’s volumes in the New Naturalists series—your intellectual ancestor, in a way… And about W. D. Hamilton. You know about him? Hamilton’s Rule? Kin selection, all that?”

  “Aye! Well—no, not exactly. You know, the mathematics … Fact is, Redmond, you’d have to be a genius to understand the primary source, his actual papers!”

  “Yes! Yes! He even looked like a genius. He came to supper with us once. He came to our house!”

  “W D. Hamilton? To your house?” Luke sounded fully awake. “W. D. Hamilton? To supper? With you?”

  “Yes! He damn well did!” I shouted, offended, sitting up with sharp indignation, banging the top of my head, hard, against the base of the upper bunk and lying down again, more offended than before. “Why the hell shouldn’t he come to supper with me?”

  Luke, shocked, aye-less, said: “Well, you know. W. D. Hamilton—he was a genius!”

  “Of course he was! I told you, didn’t I? He even looked like a genius! Shaggy hair, leonine face, wonderful! Jesus, and so abstracted, distracted, whatever, you know—out of touch, so otherworldly. That story about Einstein, one of so many, but it stuck in my mind—Einstein went to a tea-party with some hostess (and so of course I imagine him in the Vicarage in Calne in which I grew up, the home of all tea-parties, parish tea-parties …): so he talked boring tea-party bullshit for about half an hour (all he could take), and then, sitting in his allotted tea-party chair, he fell into a trance of thought—and no! You’re wrong! It was not about the wife he wanted to leave! Don’t be vulgar, Luke—no: it was certainly a trance in which his spirit had deserted his body and gone on a journey, exactly as the sorcerers in the northern Congo describe it, except that on this particular journey, and thousands like it, his spirit was really travelling into a space-time where no one had been before him (the courage of it! Yes?). Into a universe of his own imagining that also happened to be real, that was finite but unbounded—which Max Born said was one of the greatest ideas about the nature of the world which has ever been conceived. And the sole difference between his journeys and those of every sorcerer (more or less every night) in the Congo jungle? Well, major, really, Luke—because his thought experiments, as he called them, turned out to be true, and, eventually, testable: he brought back a new reality, things as they actually had been since the beginning of time!”

  “Aye! But the tea-party, what happened?”

  “Oh yes, well—the hostess came down the next morning. And he was still sitting there!”

  “He was? Then what?”

  “She clipped him round the ear, whatever, I don’t know-but she brought him back from several squillion light-years away and gave the awkward bugger breakfast and kicked him out!”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “Eh?”

  “W. D. Hamilton!”

  “Oh yes, I’m sorry, well—it was only when I met Bill Hamilton that I realized that all the freaky worship-Einstein stories might not be myths. Not at all. I’m sure that 90 per cent are true. As they are for Newton. Or for Beethoven. And for around one hundred people in written history—no more. Because it’s rare, Luke. Obsession—that’s commonplace, a real pain in the arse. But successful obsession—an apparently mad preoccupation with some laughable private reality that turns out to be the real thing, actual reality, a world that exists of itself and always has, yet a world that no one had even suspected might be all around them—Jesus! Fancy that!”

  “Magic!”

  “Yes! So Bill Hamilton came to supper! But all you had to do was ask him about the lives of the social insects he’d studied in the Amazons—even about his first contact with killer bees—and he was big you know, and he’d turn his great face on you: and zap! He’d light up the room!”

  “Pow!”

  “Yes—he came to supper! The greatest English theoretical biologist since Darwin! The guy who solved Darwin’s second last problem! Because Darwin’s first problem, Luke, as you know, was the one he stated himself: ‘our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.’ Because in some matters, Luke, even a genius like Darwin had to think the thoughts of his time, about the mixing of bloods, Lamarckian inheritance, liquid genetics—all that was solved by Mendel and his intellectual descendants. Because of course, as we now know, the mechanism of inheritance is hard, particulate—it lasts! It’s not a mix of liquids. It’s not at all as it appears on your stained sheets …”

  “Redmond! English?—you think you’re English? Nuts! For starters—apart from your character, you know, your behaviour—you ever copped a look at your own name?”

  “So this great genius comes to supper in a battered Ford Fiesta or some such—and once he’s inside and talking I fall under his spell, of course, because I can’t believe that anyone can talk with such intensity and knowledge and tenderness about the lives of bees and wasps and hornets!”

  “Great!”

  “Yeah, well, he’s talking away, and the whole story of the evolution of the social insects is becoming so simple and unexpected and filled with light… And then his wife, who’s been talking to my wife Belinda (and Luke, she’s the best! You’d really like her! She can be bored stupid, you know, even by me, something you wouldn’t understand, would you? And yet she still smiles this I-forgive-you, tolerant female smile!”)—

  “Aaaaah! Please …”

  “So Hamilton’s wife, as I say, she’s around one hundred miles away down the table, or so it seems, until she says, in a sudden, loud, parade-ground voice: ‘Bill! I’ve fixed it all! I’ve got a job as a dental assistant, on Rousay’ (I think it was Rousay), ‘and that’s in Orkney’”

  “Eh?”

  “Yes! Well, Luke—I’ve asked a couple of psychiatrists, you know, and I now realize that this is a common strategy when you have something worrying, OK, devastating to say to your husband or wife or partner. You pick a safe, neutral place. And what could be safer than a supper for four in a cottage where there’s a fat old guy who’s been married for thirty-two years to the same woman who’s right there and still alive? Two people you’ve never met before and who, most certainly, you do not intend to see again?”

  “Aye, but Redmond, why the hell, excuse me, why did W. D. Hamilton want to go and see you in the first place?”

  “Because Luke, I told you, I’m sure I did, it was only a hobby, but Jesus I was passionate about it, you know? I was running the natural history pages (yeah, yeah, right, with a great deal of professional help) at the TLS, the Times Literary Supplement—and it was only the one day a fortnight, for years, but Luke, what a privilege! And the vast amount I learnt—and you won’t believe this, but they paid me for it, ninety whole pounds a fortnight (which seemed ridiculous in those days, an absurd amount of money for something you would have done for free, several times over!). And it was great, you know, the intellectual companionship, the intense sharing of interests—Jesus, Luke, I’d be driving home to Oxford mega-happy after a day at the TLS, and I’d forget, I’d forget, that I’d just spent a working day in this very highly selected manic hunting-group of people who loved books, who were constantly trying to stimulate old talent and hunt the new and young: and as I attempted to drive home (and unlike you, Luke, I’m a country boy, I’m afraid, and so no, I do not know my way round London), I’d be stuck in a traffic jam (but so much to look at! And the great buildings, you know, the architecture, it’s all been cleaned, and it shines in the light! Even in midwinter, you know, fuck the weather—it shines!)—anyway, so, I’d see some guy running from the Tube station, and I’d catch myself thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s great-he’s running home to read his book!’”

  “Aye! But Jesus, Redmond! You’re fucked! You’ve got it bad! W. D. Hamilton? You remember?”

  “Of course
I do! And Luke—stop interrupting! Because you confuse me, you really do—and I almost forgot the most interesting point, which is this: the pleasure of a literary editor is intense, but entirely without egotism: it’s weird, it’s pure and personal, because your own name appears nowhere, and only one or maybe two people in the office know what you’ve done: and yet you’re so pleased with yourself (to yourself) that you’re in danger: you could short-circuit! You could blow up! Eh? Jesus, please, Luke, stop groaning like that, stop sighing—because I find it offensive, I really do! So yes—Bill Hamilton, your hero and mine: at the TLS we cleaned up on Bill Hamilton, we really did, way way ahead of any other paper! And why? OK—sod it, I know, Luke, we’ve sworn to be 100 per cent honest with each other, haven’t we? So yes, yeah! So you’re right, yes, OK, I hear you, you’re right, you tough sceptical scientific shit-bag you, it all came via my old friend Richard Dawkins (I knew him when we were alive and young)—and because of Handsome Dawk we cleaned up on Bill Hamilton! We really did!”

  “Magic!”

  “Yes! First of all I got his memoir—a really beautiful emotional piece that took us from the thirteen-year-old butterfly-collector, via a birthday present of E. B. Ford’s Butterflies, to the great evolutionary theorist; to the way he wanted to die … But the main point was obvious, as he himself said, the most important thing of all for a scientist (if you want to be any good at all) was to preserve, conserve, protect that childhood passion, to carry the interest safe within you, the sense of freshness and excitement, as he called it, that astonishment, the rush of unwilled, unexpected pleasure at the extraordinary way the natural world really works …”

  “Aye! But his death?”

  “Yeah, Luke, that was really something, that was special, and forgive me, please, I’m sure you’ll understand, but maybe my account right now will not be 100 per cent accurate, because I’m not 100 per cent sure of anything at the moment, you know, I’m not quite sure who I am, for example, I’m not at all sure any longer that I have consistency, that I have a past which informs my present, it’s so strange, Luke, I don’t like it, and everything’s slipping away from me …”

  “Oh come on, W. D. Hamilton! Aye? The death he wanted?”

  “OK, yes, he was studying these dramatic golf-ball-size scavenger beetles in the Amazon jungle. He’d staked out whole dead chickens in cages (to keep off the possums and vultures)—and as he watched by torchlight these beetle-monsters, their cuticles gold, yellow and green, with a huge back-swept horn, would bust-up around the corpses (their eruption-mounds as big as molehills) and they’d bite off a pink ball of chicken flesh half their own size and carry it in their arms—where? Yes! To the female of course! But Luke! Jesus! She’s so scary. She’s bigger than the male, her colours just as brilliant! And her horn, hang on! It’s bigger than his! So what’s going on? How can this be? How’s that for sexual selection? (Do the females fight? And the males watch? And choose the victor? Of course they do, but Luke, that’s my idea, and you can have it, gratis!)”

  “Aye! Nuts! Thanks!” And then, inspired, Luke said: “Stop this poncy gratis business, OK? And, by the way, stop saying I hear you because that’s a pain, it really is.” And he laughed, he really did, like a hyena, just like the alpha-dominant leader of the nighttime pack who is always, without exception, female. “So then?” (hyena howls) “His death?”

  “His death? Jesus! In the Congo. My patch. As he told me—he thought it must be true: he’d been sent a paper by an epidemiologist in Australia who’d exactly correlated the spread of AIDS with the Salk II polio vaccine in Africa. Yes, a big League of Nations anti-polio effort. For us in the West the vaccine was cultured on the livers of cows, but in central Africa, in the small savannahs and vast jungles along the equator, there are no cows—the tsetse fly carrying the sleeping-sickness trypanosome sees to that—so the polio vaccine, a huge developed-world aid-project, you understand, self-interested, yes, but self-interested for Homo sapiens as a whole, the entire species, to zap this parasite of ours—it was grown on the kidneys of Green monkeys apparently, and chimpanzees (and Green monkeys, certainly, they’re carriers of Simian HIV virus, they’ve learnt to live with it, for millions of years, probably—so it no longer bothers them). Anyway—so Bill goes out to check this story, and all he needs is a chimpanzee turd from the area of jungle where the original chimps were killed, to check the DNA against the actual vaccine, samples of which are still stored in Sweden. So he equipped himself with a big umbrella to open, downside-up, at the right moment! Anyway, the story goes that he died of cerebral malaria, but when they got him back to Oxford, still in a coma, the Tropical Diseases Department couldn’t find a single trypanosome in his body… so he was probably poisoned… No one knows. He never recovered…”

  “Och aye! I heard about all that! No, no, tell me—his fantasy death? Eh? And I’m sorry, but you know, not everyone in Her Majesty’s Marine Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, reads the TLS—at least, not every week, not all the way through …”

  “Oh yes they will—because if I ever get out of this big doomed piece of complicated metal, Luke, I can promise you, we’re going to move into marine biology in every way we can—because, guess what? Who do you remind me of, young as you are? W. D. Hamilton! That’s who! Because he turned me on to dung-beetles—and that’s easy, insects, butterflies, for Chrissake! Whereas you, you’ve made fish fascinating! Sean’s right—fish! Why didn’t you tell me years ago you—you bastard!”

  “Bastard yourself! And get this, Redmond, you’re forgetting, you’re right, your grip on your own past is going—and I warned you, I really did, that’s what happens when you have no sleep for a week or more: you’re misremembering: it’s obvious: I didn’t know you years ago!”

  “Well, where were you then? The whole thing—it’s all your fault. But anyway, your hero—Bill Hamilton—I got him to review the whole of the Collins New Naturalist series to celebrate their fifty years of publishing and Alan Jenkins, he’s a pro all right, like you, he’s a poet—but in the office, literary journalism, his job, you should see him in action: intense concentration, ignoring newspaper-life all around him, reading some article—and then, with his poncy brown shoes, it’s one-two, three-four, he’ll scuff the carpet, so hard, his under-desk News International office carpet-tiles have to be changed each year, and bang! Every time! There’s a heading—this particular one: ‘On first looking into a British treasure,’ and you may laugh, Luke, but that really summed it up, and I promise you, very, very few people can do that with ten minutes to go … And his heading for Bill’s Memoir: ‘No stone unturned, A bug-hunter’s life and death’—and if you don’t think that’s brilliant, with ten minutes to go, then let’s give up! And the fantasy death Bill wanted? He wanted to be laid out like those chickens in his cages; he wanted to be buried, pink chunk by pink chunk, by those male monster dung-beetles, as food for their larvae, their children, and then, himself, his self-rearranged, he’d buzz from the soil, he said, like bees from a nest, only much louder than any of his own social insects, no, he’d buzz louder than a swarm of motorbikes (you see, Bill only ever owned a bicycle)—into the Brazilian wilderness, at night, beetle by flying beetle, so that finally he would ‘shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.’”

  “Magic! Magic!”

  “Yes! Yes! But that’s not all—that’s one half of one per cent of it! So how’s this, say, for two stray ideas of his I happen to remember? One: when trees in autumn turn their leaves yellow and gold and red (and this chemical change costs them energy), they’re signalling, like poisonous wasps and hornets and caterpillars. They’re saying: ‘hang on, baby, you moths and butterflies that are even thinking of laying your disgusting little eggs on my skin, to hatch next spring and try and eat me: get this—I’m producing the latest toxins I can, and I reproduce sexually, you know, so my genetic ability to manufacture poisons that make your tits and your balls drop right off may well be ahead of your defences—so go away! Lay your worst on someone else!�
�� So there’s autumn for you! And isn’t that as good as Keats? Of course, we want them both, Keats and Hamilton! But isn’t that great? And Luke, number two is even better, freakier! Clouds! Yeah? Clouds—so obvious, but why do we have clouds? Water molecules only condense if they have a particle to condense around. Dust—that’s the usual explanation. Dust! Yes, sure, but most of that dust, said Hamilton, will turn out to be bacteria: clouds are biological. Clouds are the servant-agents, sustained, created, if you like, by bacteria to distribute themselves—just as the Great apes are the distribution servant-agents of the hard seeds in the succulent fruits of rainforest trees. Yeah? And as far as I know, and you’re right, I don’t know very far—only one experiment has been done on this. And guess what? Clouds are pullulating with bacteria! Every time it rains, down they all come! Biology! Life! Winter bacterial pneumonia … TB … but good ones, too, bacteria from all over the world! Poompf! Down they come!”

  “Magic!”

  “Yes! Yes! And so I went to Bill’s memorial event (no Christian nonsense) in New College—and I did this Mirror-journalist thing—straight afterwards I grabbed Richard Dawkins half-way round the quad, the quadrangle of beautiful buildings dedicated to scholarship (what a triumphant idea, uh? How special is that!) and I made him promise to give me his marvellous script…”

  “Aye, well, I guess you got lucky!”

  “Yes, I really did. You’re right. You’re always right! So then-remember? Bill’s wife has just announced that she’s off to Rousay? In Orkney? To be a dental assistant? So then we get out my copy of the Times Atlas and I turn the plates of the UK—and Bill says, mildly interested (she’s the mother of his brilliant children, after all, and he loves his children, so he remembers who she is), Bill says, ‘But it’s rather far away, isn’t it? Will I see you at weekends?’

  “And she says: ‘No, Bill, you won’t—I’m leaving you.’