Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “They did it, standard. But the Kirkwall boys were down there for weeks and weeks.”

  “Aye. So bad?”

  Robbie said: “Yep.”

  “Yeah well,” I said, butting in, just to show that I was thoroughly familiar with this Poole business. (And why? Because Luke had told me about his Poole training, but for the moment I’d forgotten that, and so now, in sleepless eagerness, I imagined that I myself knew all about these macho rites of passage, first-hand …) “Yes, I’m well aware that Luke had no problems in Poole, none at all. He seems to enjoy RNLI super-discipline. And he’s never missed a shout, as he calls it. He’s always there. He’s been out every time he could.”

  Robbie said: “Yep.”

  Self-important, I held Robbie in my seen-it-all gaze and said, as if I was on a selection board: “And so you think Luke’s a fine seaman? Eh? Knows his stuff?”

  “Yep. Aye. Bloody fine like.”

  Bryan, his huge frame inflating further with suppressed laughter, a ridiculous grin on his massive face, mimicking my accent, said, “Oh yes! Awfully so in fact, Captain Redmond. And if I was a skipper, sir, and Deckhand Luke Bullough applied to join my crew, I can say, without reservation, old bean: I’d take him. He’s a damn good chap. He’d be a simply splendid addition to the team.”

  And they all laughed outright, the bastards, and I went hot in the face, and turned to my plate, but I’d already cleaned it up, like a dog, so I put my head in my hands, and closed my eyes.

  I heard Allan Besant say: “Worzel!” And I heard his sharp snort of a laugh. (I looked at him.) “The questions you ask! Right out of order! But I know what you’re thinking, and I’ll tell you! You’re right!” He put his elbows on the narrow table, into my space, way over the half-way mark, and he got very close, trying to look into my eyes (I don’t like that, no, I don’t—so I concentrated on him below the neck: he was wearing a dazzling white-clean T-shirt with an inscription, but only the capital letter B was visible in the open-V of his dark-blue, expensive-looking fleece-jacket, complete with toggles). “Worzel—I know you want the truth, anyone can see that, and it’s a pain in the arse, because whose truth? But I’ll tell you, my truth, and it’s this, so listen up, Worzel! Lifeboatmen? They’re all mad. Because who’d want to go out on a lifeboat? For free—for no money? What’s healthy about that? Thank Aunt Fanny they do it, sure, but listen, Worzel” (maybe I’d tried to look away at Luke, 12 inches to my immediate right, for comfort), “it’s like the VC. I’ve read about it. Those guys who won the Victoria Cross—unless they’re from the best men in the British Army, the Gurkhas, men from an entirely different culture, like the Shelties at sea, Shetlanders to you—all those men who go for acts of impossible bravery, the ones we hear about, because 99 per cent of them of course get killed, and there’s no story in that, is there?—there’s just 1 per cent who succeed and really do wipe out a machine-gun nest single-handed—and guess what? They were depressives like your tutor: they wanted to die, that’s why they were brave! They didn’t care if they lived or died. Sure—they got the VC, so that keeps them going a little longer—the adulation in the mess, as it were, even Colonel Jason Schofield respects you for a time … But Worzel, what happens next? They get discharged, they’re back ashore, or rather, they’re back in civilian life—and then? Can you guess? Of course you can: a huge percentage of those men with a VC, I forget the exact figures, but it’s way over half—they failed that one time when they really meant it, when they charged that machine-gun nest or rescued a wounded colleague under intense sniper-fire, whatever, you know… But next time, in civilian life, they slit their own throats so neatly; they jump off a cliff or under a train and no mistake; they put the shotgun barrel right in, right in tightly against the roof of the mouth… And it’s just the same, in my opinion, with lifeboatmen, with heroes, like Luke here … No, I don’t trust heroes, not at all… I don’t believe in them…”

  I looked straight at him, outraged, and with the uncensored angst of a teenager I said: “That’s sick! That is! Sick…”

  “Oh, is it?” said Allan Besant, immediately turning on Bryan. “So maybe Old Worzel here has a touch of the lifeboatman too—you know, death or glory, all that shite, and he hasn’t got the energy, but all the same, here he is and you have to admit there’s something not quite right about it: because here’s Worzel…” From his elbow-propped hand under his chin, he unfurled his right fist, palm up, fingers and thumb out-stretched towards me: the exhibit. “And what’s he doing here at his age, fifty, or what-the-fuck, and he knows nothing anyone can see that, and he’s come out in this piece of Jason-Schofield-scrap-metal in the worst shit-weather an idiot could imagine—you can all see that—and yet no one says a thing? And why? Bryan—have you ever heard of this happening to any other boat? Why the fuck should we have to look after a Worzel? Is it because he’s paying Jason £50 a day for his keep, and Jason’s sharing it with us, so we’re supposed to look after him? Well, frankly, I’ve other things to do, but there again, Worzel’s hardly spoken to me, so maybe that’s why I’m angry with him, and he’s paying to suffer all this shite! For the privilege! Whereas you, Bryan, I know, there’s no denying it, you yerself, you appear to be a good man, everyone thinks so, but for me, it’s like this, I can’t help it, it’s the truth as I see it: there’s something warped, there’s something wrong with Luke, lifeboatmen, with anyone who’s ever won a medal—and as for Worzel, well, search me, I give up!”

  Big Bryan gave me a quick, kind, fatherly glance … (And hadn’t he strapped me into that First Mate’s chair, his chair, on the bridge, when I couldn’t stand up, when I’d felt worse than at the onset of cerebral malaria? And hadn’t he guided me there with real sympathy, without the faintest trace of the professional derision to which he was fully entitled, without even a smile?)

  Agitated, Bryan said to Allan Besant: “But Redmond’s here to write about you, to tell the truth about our way of life, you understand, Jason told me, and besides, he’s done his apprenticeship, and that’s not easy, at his age, he’s apprenticed to Luke, at the lab in Aberdeen—so he’s not just a writer, he’s a scientist. He’s here to help us.”

  “Is he hell? So how come he asked me, Is this a Force 12? Is this really a hurricane? You sure? You ever been in a Force 14? Is there a Force 14?’ Old Worzel here” (he outspread his right hand, palm up, in my direction, again), “old Worzel—fact is, he’s disappointed with our fuck-horrible see-you-every-January hurricane. Oh yes—he wants that total boring pointless all-out ocean shite that drowns everyone pronto—he wanted to come here and give up and die! Why’s he so interested in manic depressives? Bi-polar disorder, my arse. Why? Because he’s one himself. That’s why! I know what he’s after, you can’t fool me… To write about us? Shite! He might, he might not. Who can tell? And anyway, as it is, he could just as surely have gone overboard and drowned, or banged his head open, or stuck his gutting knife into his wrist” (my friend, my ally, Uncle Luke, he began to laugh; yes, he did, making no noise, shaking the bench beside me, looking away, hard, at Bryan) “—or, Jesus wept!, into his throat! Because, Bryan, you were below, but you should’ve seen him pitching about, trying to gut a Black butt, a Black butt! When we had that weather! Stand clear, boys—because Worzel’s knife, there’s no telling where it’s going next! So I ask you, Bryan, First Mate, and you, Robbie Stanger, one of Jason’s favourites, as we all know, why do we have a Worzel on board who could go get himself killed so easily and stop the fishing and halve our earnings? And why did we all have to go to nautical college for so long? I’ll tell you—to stop us dying at sea the first week out, that’s why! And Worzel—not that I’ve anything against him personally, even though he’s hardly fucking bothered to speak to me (‘Besant?’ he says. ‘So are you related to Annie Besant, the playwright?’ Well yes, as it happens, probably, but fuck that for a laugh!)—and Bryan, you know what I mean, innocents at sea, on a trawler of all things. Jesus wept! It shouldn’t be allowed!”

  Luk
e, I felt, was no longer so amused… And as for Robbie-he turned sharp right on his bench to confront Allan Besant across the alley-way between the tables. Robbie’s biceps, his triceps, his pectorals were so taut, and his singlet, I was sure, stretched further with other groups of muscles whose names I couldn’t raise from my dimming memory of the illustrations in Gray’s Anatomy (those extracted cardboard plates we used to place alongside the corpse in question): but pow! I thought, comforting myself, maybe they weren’t illustrated: because only trawlermen develop them—and who’s ever got lucky enough to dissect a trawlerman in his prime? No, that’s right—you can’t just drop in to your local hospital: you’d have to search the bottom of the sea…

  Robbie, so intense, said to Allan: “It’s no allowed—and you, you mind that right enough!” (And Jesus, I thought, this Robbie, my new friend, my Jason-appointed protector, it seems he’s biologically ready to fight for me, my inconsequence, our friendship; I’m sure that’s not required, as it were, not right at all…) “Redmond here—he’s a scientist! He’s from the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen. He’s Assistant to Luke Bullough! And Luke’s here to help us oot, whatever you may think, and Luke gave Jason a copy of one of his papers in Fisheries Research, and Jason says its really bloody interesting like, and he’s lent it to me.” (Luke looked startled, and, a second or two later, as proud as he should.) “And it’s on commercial deep-water trawling at sub-zero temperatures in the Faeroe-Shetland Channel. Yep! Something like that—and you should read it. And anyway, Jason told me to look after Worzel, Redmond rather: so he’s my responsibility, my job. He’s not your worry. So what’s it to do with you? Eh? He’s a scientist. So you, Allan, well: you can go fock your auntie!”

  Bryan, I noticed, in his turn, like Luke, began to laugh, internally, as it were, obviously trying so hard to control it, as if he were in church, and failing … What was it? I hadn’t seen all this since school… and yes, maybe that was it, on a trawler, so very close to everyone, the fire-hose shut-tight pressure not to offend, the need to get along, to control yourself… But Big Bryan, the alpha male, he began to shake in earnest with silent laughter: he turned his head away to inspect the imitation-wood plastic panels to his right, a foot from his eyes … and his back, the back of his massively muscled upper body in its supposed-to-be-loose, outsize, black woolly sweater—it stretched tight, it earthquaked with deep tremors of a soundless hilarity…

  Allan Besant, stung in some way, snapped at Robbie: “Aunties? It’s you who’s got aunties!”

  Robbie, on his seat, edging towards Allan Besant, said: “You! You lay off me aunties!”

  Big Bryan broke up; he came apart; and his mega-bass full-out laugh was deep-down reassuring: it was something so elemental, so powerful that, had it come at the right time, it might have removed, for half a second or more, all fear of the wind and waves and the depths out there… “Aunties!” (A deep seizure, a phlegm-block in the foghorn.) “Aunties!”

  Big Bryan, facing forward, his big head in his big hands, massaged his eyes with his palms, as if he was very tired, and with his fingers he was wiping away—what? Yes: tears! … Big Bryan had been crying with laughter… “Redmond!” he choked, and tried again: “Redmond! … Robbie here … you won’t know, but our Robbie …” Bryan mastered himself; he turned to address me, his big hands, bizarrely, still pressed to either side of his bearded face: “Our Robbie… he’s got ten uncles: Ronnie! Tony! Jeremy! Bobby! Billy! Colin! And oh shite, forgive me, I’ve forgotten, and I’m only telling you their names, the names of his uncles, because they dinna matter, because he’s also got six aunties, and I’ll no be telling you their names, because they do matter, that’s for sure, because his aunties…” Big Bryan’s hands released his head; it was all too much to hold in; and his infrasound of a happy laugh, an all-in laugh—it travelled, on that longest of wave-lengths, leisurely through the rusty double-hull of the Norlantean, and it fanned out across the surface-to-upper depths of the ocean: where it lifted the spirits of several bored and lonely Minke whales; and a group of friendly Pilot whales; and one whole iffy pod of Killer whales … “No! I’ll no be telling you the names of his aunties! Because his aunties, I’ve seen them all—and they’re goers, they’re real lookers, believe me! You’d never know” (another pulse of the very happiest infra-sound). “Aye! Yes! You’d never know—not one of them—you’d never know they were aunties! And I can tell you straight, Redmond, because I’m married, and I tell you, Redmond, I’m happy with it, I’m very happy, and that’s a fact—so I can say, without offence, I can say without offence to anyone, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t come right out and say it: because Robbie here, he has six slim sexy aunties, believe me! And he could start a strip-club!”

  There was a short, shocked silence. And then Robbie, delighted, said: “You big dirty bastard!”

  Allan Besant, still aggrieved, immune to aunties, said, “Scientist? Worzel a scientist? Scientist, my arse! You should hear him talking to Luke! He knows no more science than I do. In fact, Worzel” (from 18 inches away across the table—he gave me a big, kind, friendly, condescending grin: and I thought: am I really this old?), “what are the different regional names of the saithe?”

  Now, I said to myself, hang on, calm down, even you know that the various dialect names of the saithe have nothing whatever to do with science, but all the same, I’ve got the answers, so up yours, Allan Besant…

  Bryan (who’d stopped shaking) and Luke (mild again, his relaxed self) and Robbie (no longer quite so protectively murderous) looked at me, too, exactly as anyone in any classroom in the world (if they’re lucky enough to have a classroom) always looks at Teacher’s potential victim …

  I said: “Coalfish! Coley!” And, naturally enough, I expected tumultuous applause …

  “Is that all? Worzel—is that the best you can do?”

  “Yes!” I was pleased with myself, very pleased. Here was an absurd question—and I’d got it right. “Those are the names. What an easy, what a silly question! Go on—try me again, ask me something difficult.”

  Allan Besant, acerbic, said: “Coalfish, coley?” And then, like Bryan, only with a bitter-teacher edge, he mimicked my English accent: “How awfully unimpressive, old chap. No, Worzel, no …” And he gave me, this time, a genuine big grin, his young eyes alight: he was enjoying himself. And the two deep vertical furrows which ran upwards from the bridge of his nose between his eyebrows, for an inch or so (converging) into his otherwise flawless forehead (and which told you, without the trace of a conscious thought: “This young man—he’s suffered”)—these furrows, for a moment, they disappeared, as if they didn’t live there at all. Allan Besant, for this here and this now, he was happy.

  “No, Worzel! You’ve failed! In fact—coalfish, coley—that won’t even get you an honourable discharge, old chap! No—you see, I too, I know some science, Worzel, and OK, so it’s my party piece, as you’d say, and Bryan and Robbie have heard it all before, but they like me really, you know, so they won’t interrupt and fuck me up and put me off—because they know, science, knowledge, it takes concentration.” And he gave me another grin, a last kind of a goodbye smile, and he looked up at the low ceiling, and, with the index finger of his right hand, he checked off the outspread fingers of his left—and the index pointer-finger itself, so close to my nose, was almost hypnotic as it touched and flicked—partly because, as yet, just above the main joint, ringed with the raised red workings of cells intent on healing a communal wound: it was marked with the clear imprint of Homo sapiens sapiens’ front teeth: it had got itself bitten when Allan Besant, reasonably enough, was sitting on the prone chest of Gillespie, the Big Fellah, and bravely attempting, with that very finger, to poke out Gillespie’s eyes …

  “Saithe, coalfish, coley Poor old ignorant Mr. Worzel…” he intoned, face up, staring at the asbestos ceiling-tiles and pretending to be, what? A magician? No—of course, he was a quiz-show host on the telly, or a megawinner, yes, Allan Besant was taking the grand
-slam title … “Baddock! bannock—no, sorry, I withdraw that: blackjack! Names from eastern Scotland.”

  Allan Besant glowed, full of youth in its twenties, packed with unbidden energy and delight: “And then we have” (a flick of opposing index fingers) “the coalmie, a name for the full-grown fish, from the Moray Firth. And the comb—and that’s a fish in its fifth year, in Banffshire, and if it’s made it to fifty, it’s called a Worzel!” (Big Bryan clapped.) “And then there’s real names, the names the young fish were born with, and they’d tell you so, too, they’d answer to those names, because that’s right, those are their actual names, their Orkney names: cuth or cooth. But our local village idiot, Sean Taylor, of Castletown, Thurso—well, he comes from Caithness so no one can understand a fucking word he says, whatever it is, but if you ring up the Thurso public librarian and you ask him, politely, what the fuck the horrible prehistoric natives of Caithness call a saithe, he’ll grunt at you and he’ll say: “CUDDIE.” So there you go—and in Angus, the small fish, it’s called a dargie. And yes, on the Moray Firth, and I’m not making this up, I promise you—the young stages, the small fish just like Robbie and Luke: they’re geeks!” Big Bryan clapped again, caught out (because he should’ve known not to join in)—and he looked so pleased with everything, and he clapped with such force (the trapped-air explosions, the shotgun blasts between his cupped outsize palms), and he laughed, and he carried on clapping, letting off his personal hand-to-hand firecrackers for, well, for more than several seconds too long…

  “But decent fish in their second year, in the real language, the Orkney language, the names they were born with—they’re called peltag or piltack—and Worzel, if you don’t believe me, you try it, OK? Promise me? When you’re next fucking about, fatman, in a rowing boat, or sitting on a fat rock: you try it! OK? Promise me? You raise your voice—in an inviting sort of way—and you cup your hands round your mouth, and you call, straight into the water: “Peltag! Piltack!” And they know their own names when they hear them called correctly—and they’ll come to you, they’ll swim straight towards you … And then, unless you’re a right little shite, a real peltag-or piltack-teaser, you’ll bung in, pellet by pellet, one half of a stale loaf of bread—just to show that we’re friends really, you know, all the fish and all of us, we understand each other!”