Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “Luke!” I said, good and loud. “Knock it off! Because you don’t fool me—you’re pretending to sleep!”

  “No!” said Luke (a thrash of legs in the blue tube). “No! I’m not pretending! I want to sleep. I want to sleep so badly. But I can’t, I just can’t!” (His voice faded, he sounded more miserable than I’d ever heard him.) “No, I can’t—because I’ve been lying here, I’m worrying, Redmond, I am so fucked up and not even a big shaggy joke of well-meaning friendship like you can help me. No. Because I am so alone. I’m in a panic. A work-panic. And once it happens and it gets going you can’t stop it—and you, how could you ever understand? It’s horrible, you know, my doctorate—the deadline! It’s out there waiting for me, in the near future, and so of course it poisons the present—and when I feel like this, well, I tell you, each smack of a wave on the hull, you know what it says to me? There goes another batch of seconds, time going away from you, time that you should be spending on your doctorate—and in Fittie, in Aberdeen, you know, in my cottage, it’s worse, far worse, because there I am at my little desk, and the sea’s outside, but I can still hear the traffic on the road, you know, the road along the coast, and I can take that, more or less: no, it’s the high-pitched scream, you know, the wheeeee! The female scream of mopeds flat-out, the 50cc or 100cc motorbikes … The banshee wail! Yes—and every time I hear that female scream I think, Luke, forget it, this doctorate, because you’ll never meet the deadline, there is so much data to process, so give up right now, go on: do the rational thing—kill yourself! Drown yourself.”

  “Come on, Luke—listen to me, I can comfort you, you’re forgetting, I did a doctorate too, and I’m sure I felt worse than you do, but I’ve scrubbed all that from my memory, so it must’ve been bad, because I can remember just about everything else in my life—so, well, hey, Luke, if you’re serious, and if your university can see you’re serious, committed, half mad with the excitement of it all: then, pow! They give you extensions. Yes—up to a maximum of seven years for students who really do seem to be on to something, students like you, Luke, and guess what? My doctorate took me seven years!”

  “Seven years? Worzel? Please! No!”

  “OK, Luke, forget it!” (His curly head was now way out of its protective-casing Caddis-fly-larva pond-safe sleeping-bag—and here it comes! Yes! An arm! He’d propped his head on his left arm. I had his attention: so he was lost to healing sleep.) “There’s something I’ve been thinking about—there’s a bargain I want to strike with you, man to man.”

  “There is?”

  “Yes, Luke, there is. Because your knowledge, you see, it’s already so very precious, so valuable; so, on the whole, I don’t think you ought to drown yourself, or, at least (I don’t want to intrude) not yet. Because you promised—oh yes you did! You really did—you promised to tell me about the Wyville Thomson Ridge, you bastard! And Sperm whales! And copepods! Oh yes you did! You got me all interested—and then you ponced off, and said you’d tell me later, and you went silent!”

  “I didn’t ponce off! We had work to do—and besides, I’m human, you know, I get exhausted… and aye, fuck you! Excuse me … But teaching: that’s the most exhausting thing there is …”

  “OK! Maybe—but I’m old enough to be your fucking legitimate father, well-married, Luke, and I tell you—you promised me! So here, look, here’s the bargain (because I can sense it, you’re not going to tell me for free)—I’ll enlighten you, I’ll let you into the secret of a powerful Congo sex-charm that’s never been known to fail… and in return you’ll tell me about the history of the Wyville Thomson Ridge … And then, if I’m satisfied, I’ll solve your entire sexual-selection problem for you: I’ll tell you exactly who you need to marry, the one woman you must seek out and capture and settle down with, for ever. The one woman who’ll give you children and stay with you, always. And, for that, you’ll fucking well go right ahead and tell me about the deep-sea dives of Sperm whales, as you promised!”

  “Nuts!” said Luke, with doctorate-forgetting enthusiasm. “A sex-charm! Bollocks!”

  “No, no—no bollocks. Bollocks don’t come into it, not until much later. You see, imagine it, you’re a young woman in a northern Congo village (the only bit I really do know a little about), and you’ve fallen (goodbye to good sense), you’ve fallen sleep-wipingly in love with a young man in your village—you know all about him, his feats as a warrior, a hunter, his muscles, his sweat, his rhythm as he plays the Great Drum, and besides, he’s so strong he’s cleared almost twice as much of a forest-plot for a five-year plantation as his nearest rival in your affections, and besides, because he’s such an alpha male, and all the other young women are after him (and how!), he’s no time to settle down, as you call it, and why should he? Or, at least, not yet. But you—you have other ideas—but it takes foresight, patience, determination, real planning (which, biologically speaking, in fact makes you his ideal mate): and so what do you do? Well, it costs. Because there are only five iron knives in this village—and to borrow one of them for a night, in secret, that’s three chickens. And you, of course not: you can’t afford three chickens; so you have to tell your mum and dad, and they think you’re crazy because that young man, well, he’s already a young Big Man, and you’re aiming too high, but all the same—maybe! So they part with three whole chickens (and how that hurts!) and you get your piece of iron, the enabler, the knife, you get it, in secret—for one night! And what do you do? Well—your dad, he takes you, once it’s really dark, to the fetish-house, where you take a scraping of clay from the inside of the upturned skull of your grandad, or great-grandad—or, let’s face it, if you’re of a lower lineage, your ancestral skulls filled with clay (they’ll be hidden in your own family hut)… Anyway, with that magic piece of iron you take a scoop of forefather clay. And you smear it into a tiny pot, kept for the purpose; and then your dad, relieved (he really does not like this kind of thing, and besides, he’s lost three chickens), he goes to his bed, and “Daughters!” he sighs to himself, and turns over on his palm-leaves, and tries to forget everything. And you—feverish (how you love and want that boy!)—very slowly you scrape the hairs on your armpits; and with your fingers you squeeze the sweat off the knife and knead it into the clay; and when you’re satisfied there’s no more moisture to be had you do the same with your pubic hairs. And then Luke—this is the important bit! What next? Can you guess? No? OK—and remember, you really want this young man, you want him so very badly, so what do you do next? Eh? No idea? Well—I’ll tell you: you scrape the skin, the gunge between your toes and the calluses along the ball and heel of the flat of your feet—very carefully, and you shred the scrape and the peelings into the clay and you hope, fervently, that you haven’t been and gone and washed too thoroughly in the river lately, that you haven’t already washed the magic away…”

  Luke said: “So what? You’re mad.”

  “Mad? Is that what you think? Well thank you, Uncle Luke, Mr. Bullough—but no, as it happens. And don’t interrupt—because all her intimate pheromones, her sex-smells, chemicals, subconscious molecules of sexual desire, they’re now embedded in that tiny pot of clay… And she leaves it out to dry in the fierce sun on the baked mud away from the forest trees … And then she rubs it away into a fine powder, in batches, folded tight in leaves. And her mother—it’s almost always the mother—she finds a way to drop that powder into the young man’s palm-wine. And if she misses the first time, and some boy nonentity drinks it, and he falls in love, well, bad luck, mistakes happen, but eventually (she’s got at least ten little leaf-packets) the mother (she loves her daughter)—she gets it just right. And the young alpha male drinks his palm-wine, the hooks of passion. And a day or two later the mother tells that young man what she’s done: and then, for her daughter, poompf! There’s such love—such love-making!”

  “Bollocks! Suggestion! That’s all that is—suggestion!”

  “Oh yes? You sure? Then—consider this—why do you think I thought that so very int
eresting in the first place? The moment that Nzé told me about it in the Congo? Eh? Because I remembered a perfectly rational, a Western experiment conducted at Berkeley or some such—the researchers took over a local cinema for a week, and they told their psychology students that they’d all been working too hard, they needed a break—so hey! They were going to watch classic films for a week, to teach them about relationships (and yes, you can be sure of it—the poor suckers had to write essays on these films, but there again—what a privilege!)…Aye, as you’d say, but there was another agenda—the researcher, their teacher, he or she pre-sprayed fifty or so random seats in that cinema with a massive dose of female pheromones (gathered from hundreds of female armpits) when the fifty or so male students were to watch a film—yes, and you know? It worked—100 per cent! Yes, the boys all sat (“Sure—I think I’ll clock it from here, the far left front-seat. Why not?”) in those sprayed seats. They were given half an hour to choose. It worked! 100 per cent! And likewise, two or three days later, with the girls, in the seats sprayed with male pheromones!”

  “So what? You’re off the wall!”

  “Oh no, Luke, not in the least, because it seems I had a sleep at the galley table, so I remember the point of all this!”

  “You do?” Luke sounded anxious.

  “Yes, I really do! And it’s this—good and strong!”

  “Aye?”

  “Aye—really rotten fish, you know yourself, it smells exactly like very old, very old, much used socks, socks that, through no fault of their own, you’ve walked in every day, for hundreds of miles … They smell of rotten fish. And our noses, even mine (which hardly works), they’re so good, so primitive, so sensitive at detecting the tiniest amounts of pre-conscious or conscious molecules of interesting smells in the air … But they can’t tell the difference between rotten fish and rotting feet. So there you go, Luke, when you get ashore, you can’t help it, you’re carrying a mimic of the human sex-pheromone in your skin and in your hair, in your clothes, all over you, the rotten-fish pong, the unwashed-foot-pong, and you, like every trawlerman—you’re a nasal sex-bomb delivered direct to the most primitive part of her brain!”

  Luke was silent for a moment—and that was very gratifying, because his head was still propped on his left arm, and he was attentive, yes, he was certainly not asleep. And when that happened, when young Uncle Luke was silent for a time after something that I’d said, OK—so this took place, I flattered myself, around one occasion in a hundred: it meant that I’d thrown him: that it was me who’d made him think.

  “Aye, mebbe,” said Luke, reflective and slow (delicious!). “Mebbe, just mebbe, you’re right—because I forgot to tell you, about a recent so-called superstition I’ve come across. It’s this: it’s bad luck to wash before you come ashore … So how’s that?”

  “Gooaaal!”

  And Luke shouted: “Gooaaal!”

  And that’s called male friendship…

  “OK—so you liked that, Luke, you costive arsehole. So you—now you tell me about the Wyville Thomson Ridge?”

  “The Wyville Thomson Ridge?” said Luke, suddenly grudging, resentful. “What’s sexy about the Wyville Thomson Ridge?”

  “Everything, Luke! Because when you reach my age you’ve done it all, or you think you have, and sometimes, just sometimes, there’s nothing sexy even about the thought of sex, and in a way that’s a gift to you; because knowledge, that stays sexy, learning things, about the way the great world really is: that’s sexy! In fact, as D. H. Lawrence said (and I know, that does not seem likely, but all the same, I’m sure it was him)—he said that there comes a point in a man’s life when he loses his obsessive interest in sex: and pow! What a release! You are unshackled from a madman. You can think! You can enjoy the life of the mind, unfettered. Yes—you can wallow in the discovery of the vast and complex history of our species, our genes, since life began, three-and-a-half-thousand million years ago!”

  “Eh?”

  “OK, Luke, I hear you, maybe he did not say that, but if he’d known, he would have done! So come on Luke, and, by the way, you must stop this intellectual prick-teasing, you really must! So—the Wyville Thomson Ridge? Yes? Now?”

  Luke, bolshy, said: “Well, I’m a little disappointed with you, Redmond” (Luke said that? Luke, I thought, he must become a professor), “because I’ve already told you about the Wyville Thomson Ridge. The great mountain range just off our northern coast, beneath the surface of the sea—the one and only barrier in the continuity of the deep oceans of the planet!”

  “Yes, yes—but how was it discovered? You said that was one hell of a story and you promised, you promised to tell me!”

  “OK, then, I will—but I warn you, Redmond, I warned you, I really did, I warned you: your question-time is almost over, because I can feel it coming on right enough … I’ve had a lot less sleep than you … Less sleep, in fact, than anyone except Jason … And my brain, for sure, big time! It’s about to shut down, you know: and then I won’t want to speak, I won’t be able to speak…”

  “But—Wyville Thomson?”

  “Aye—he was a great man (even though he didn’t believe in Darwin, in evolution by natural selection), Chief Scientist aboard the pioneering research ship Challenger, on her three-year marine biology voyage around the globe—1873 to 1876; 68,000 miles; around 4,500 new species discovered… All that’s really famous … But very few people know, or even care, they don’t bother to find out—they don’t know that the whole future science of oceanography began right here, in UK waters! Just as geology began with UK rocks! And modern biology began with the voyage of the Beagle and Darwin writing his multiple doctorates about it, forgive me! In his house in Kent, in the UK!”

  “Goaaal!” I yelled, but Luke did not respond. Crestfallen (Oarfish-flame-crest-flattened), I realized, horribly, that our days and nights of insane and wonderful play, a play of thoughts, perhaps … perhaps they really were almost over …

  “Aye—Wyville Thomson. Well, there he was, in the research ship Lightning or Porcupine, I forget which, but on one of those summer expeditions, probably around 1868, and he took a series of temperatures (not soundings, you understand, you must remember that) right down from the surface to as far as they could reach in different stations in the Faeroe—Shetland channel. And guess what? As you’d say or I’d say, I forget which, and it doesn’t matter, because I’m used to it—but you, you’ll panic, tomorrow or the next day… Aye, at around 200 fathoms, as they said then, the temperatures were roughly equal at the south-west and north-east ends of the channel; but from 250 fathoms to 640 fathoms, in the north-east, they got readings of 34 degrees down to 30; whereas to the south-west, and so very close, the corresponding temperatures were 47 and 42 degrees Fahrenheit. But hang on—there were sod all, excuse me, other temperature readings from the oceans to compare those with in 1868—no, nay, no, it was only after all his experience of checking thousands of thermometer readings across the oceans of the world, as Chief Scientific Officer (or whatever they called it then), as the Number One Oceanographer on Challenger that Wyville Thomson, re-checking those UK temperatures, so near to home (it had obviously nagged at him, even in the distant tropics, or my Antarctic, come to that), it was only then that he had the balls to predict that there was a real physical underwater mountain-range across the Faeroe-Shetland Channel…

  “But it’s great, it really is—one of those scientific stories where the right credit was given, almost at once, to the right person … The Hydrographer of the Admiralty (the things we owe the navy—remember the Beagle?), he sent the survey-ship HMS Knight Errant to check it out. And Thomson himself, who was paralysed from a stroke, was yet allowed to believe that he was directing operations, from Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides … And he lived just long enough to know that the soundings proved the weirdest thing: he was right! Here—and only here—a real break occurred in the deep sea. And he died, knowing that this vast unseen mountain would be called the Wyville Thomson Ridge!”
/>
  “Goaaal!” I yelled; but again, Luke did not respond.

  “Aye—but he was dead before HMS Triton came back in 1882. And that’s a small pity, because what the hell? He’d done it, hadn’t he? A great life, despite being an anti-Darwinian twit? Don’t you think? Anyway, the boys on board Triton, even with their primitive collecting gear, they caught around 220 species and varieties from the cold area, the deep, unsalty current from the Arctic ice-melt to the north; and around the same number from the warm North Atlantic Drift to the south—and only fifty or so were common to both! So there you are: Ernst Mayr, as always, is right, and he’s the man who reminded everyone in the twentieth century, stuck in their genetic labs, bean-bag genetics, genetic drift, bullshit! No-out there in the real world, for one species to break into several, you needed a physical break: geographical, spatial isolation: a climate change: a new desert, a new forest, a lowered lake-level that split into a thousand ponds before it rose again; a new rift valley opening up; a new great river course that divided populations of, say, chimpanzees … Or, here we go…” (Luke was now lying on his back in the semi-dark, as the Norlantean continued, but so gently, to go through her six degrees of freedom: a pitch, a roll, a sway, a heave, a surge, a yaw: and yes, that should be happiness, I thought, but I’d blown it, hadn’t I? Luke, it was obvious, he was now in his last manic phase, and so were the rest of the crew, and from tomorrow or whenever, yes, he was right, I thought, yes, he’s right, this Luke, because he’s been through it all his working life, and so, from tomorrow, no one will talk to me. The talking phase of no-sleep is over—and you, you, Redmond, how come you wasted, how come you blew away such an opportunity by talking so much yourself? So many questions unasked? And all because you couldn’t stop talking yourself? Yes, I thought, well, I’ve learnt, for the rest of my life I’ll keep my mouth shut: I’ll be a strong silent idiot male …) “Aye … here we go … Craaak! A terrible cracking—as the block of land divides and the islands and continents are forced across the surface of the earth as new sea-floor is made at mid-ocean ridges and swallowed again in the deep ocean trenches. Even real geology only happens at sea! And that—that was only formulated by Dan McKenzie at Cambridge (and independently by Jason Morgan at Princeton) in 1967! But hey! Sorry! It wasn’t really a craaak! Plate tectonics—and we know about it in such detail, we’ve got it mapped—ach, it happened as slowly as your fingernails grow… And aye, no one man or woman would have known about it, even if Homo sapiens sapiens, as you say, had been around at the time. But there again, Redmond! I’ll bet—you still don’t know about it, do you?”