“Go on—take the dorsal surface of this one!” (The next along.) “And then I want two photographs, at different exposures, of all six, ventral and dorsal—OK?” (OK. So we photographed skate number two.) “Got it? Thirty-six exposures for this—it’s very important—as far as I know there’s nothing in the literature about Arctic skate living in all-male or all-female groups: why should they? It’s weird, smashin’; a discovery! Aye: so maybe three exposures per side? f.32, 22–and 16, to make sure, OK?” (OK.)
“And I took the liberty,” said Luke, “when you took so long to come up from the hold—what happened down there? You faint or something? Anyway—I went to our cabin and, excuse me—I liberated another film.” (Luke laughed, he thought that was funny.) “Aye! From your camera-case—and I’ve got it in my pocket! But hey! Worzel—even your camera-case: the mess in there! There are socks, even in there, socks round lenses, or just stuffed in—and the crud, filters, useless ancient films, batteries, bits of paper: Jeesus! I half expected a fucking mouse, excuse me!” And Luke, he went right ahead and did his whole helpless laugh business, both hands across the stomach, a bending forward, a doubling-up, and then, a spin on his own axis, a whirling dervish howl of all-out laughter: “Aye! I half expected a fucking mouse! Aye! A fucking mouse! To jump right out at me!”
“Yeah, yeah!” I said, ruffled, at first, but then I thought: “Young Luke, Uncle Luke—he hasn’t laughed like that since early times on this trawler, long ago, I can’t remember when!”
“It’s weird—magic! A discovery! Your behaviour, you know, it’s as odd as these skates! Socks! Socks everywhere! And the mess—even in your camera case! Why socks, eh? Aye … I know! … Aye! … Socks! Of course! I know—you, Worzel, you think that socks are sexy—all that fucking bullshit, excuse me! All that nonsense about feet and rotten fish and mumbo-jumbo spells in the Congo! You—you really think socks are sexy!”
And Luke, thoroughly offensive, did his all-out-laugh thing, all over again.
And I tried to think of a reply, but I couldn’t, because something spoke to me from the subconscious (no big deal!) except that that’s not right: because the subconscious can’t speak, can it? No-it’s much older than speech, and in fact I heard nothing. No: I saw two images, so very present. Yes: that girl in Boha, a village in the northern Congo, scraping her feet with a small worn-away knife; and an even more powerful picture: Luke, in his trawler clothes, the blue woolly hat, the blue T-shirt, the blue jeans he wore under his oilskins; yes—he was coming ashore anywhere: Lerwick, Strom-ness, Scrabster, Peterhead. And twenty or thirty young women were waiting there to welcome him home. And they stretched out their multiple arms, just like the tentacles on a Giant squid, but the most benign, the most gentle, squid that ever was: a squid desperate for love, for a lifetime of the very deepest happiness.
So I said nothing substantial, nothing that mattered, in reply, just: “Giant squid? Sperm whales?” (And we were still only on skate number three.)
“Aye! Sperm whales!” said Luke, still jovial, happy, enjoying life again. “Well, the fact is, I thought I knew all about it, as you do, before you try and remember the details, but I never wrote it down, I took no notes on this great paper I read, because, really, I shouldn’t have been reading it in the first place, not in the library of the Marine Lab, Aberdeen, where I was supposed to be focused, you know, working on my doctorate—and this had nothing whatever to do with my doctorate. But it was brilliant, an extraordinary piece of work, yet for now I can’t even remember the reference … (Go on! Take that one! Don’t stop! No, no—please! Three exposures—each time!) Aye—but this guy had dissected lots of Sperm whales; and that’s no easy, even when they’re stranded and dead, washed up on some beach (the stench!) and even more difficult on board a Norwegian whaler, whatever, because the boys need to render the great corpse as quick as they can. Still, he did it! He discovered that the right nostril (or was it the left? Sorry—no idea!), aye: he discovered that this nostril loops and curves and folds back on itself for miles, as it were, right through the giant spermaceti organ, the sac in its head full of oil. And somehow or other, I forget exactly how, the whale can close this nostril and really heat up the air in it, and the heat liquefies the oil in the sac, whatever, changes its properties, which regulates the animal’s buoyancy; and equally, it can open the nostril and drop the temperature and solidify the oil… Now that account may not be exactly right… But the point is: the Sperm whale, with its weird swollen head, its spermaceti organ (and it’s a mammal, like us, for Chrissake!), and there’s nothing like it on earth, no, nothing at all—aye, it can control its own buoyancy so efficiently that it can dive down to at least two kilometres: no effort, no sweat. And what does it do down there? And don’t forget—despite the spermaceti organ it still has space in its head for the world’s largest brain—what does it do two kilometres down? Well, we don’t know, of course, but it has an incredibly complex social life, and lots of them go down, all together, and yet they keep in touch and they surface together, as one, in the same place on the surface from which they dived—so how’s that? Aye, but I’m forgetting—when they’re down there we know, from their stomach-contents, from whalers (and all that, by the way, it should fucking well be stopped!), aye, we know that they eat all kinds of squid and fish-but, most exciting of all: they eat Giant squid, Architeuthis. They’ve seen Giant squid! Or, rather, they’ve electronically imaged Giant squid with the acoustic system they also keep in that huge head of theirs, aye, a system so advanced that no one can begin to work it out: so one theory has it that they can deliver a massive pulse, a blast of volts that can stun even a Giant squid. And believe me, that’s quite something, because no Giant squid, you know, and I am sure of this, no Giant squid actually wants to get eaten… And after all, they’re the largest invertebrates ever to have lived on this planet: they can be at least twenty metres long, they can weigh half a tonne, and their eyes! Their eyes—they’re a foot across!”
Luke sat down again, on the edge of his blue basket.
“Great!” I said (but I was still only on skate number four). “That’s ace! Yes—that pays off all your intellectual debts!”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes—it does. So now, in return, as promised, I’m going to tell you exactly how you can be happy for life!”
“Sure.”
“Yes! I’m serious! Only—there’s just one thing. You see, Luke, you don’t know this, why should you? But I really am the sole inventor of an entirely new photographic technique.”
“You are?” Luke, almost immediately, lost his look of pleased exhaustion, the gratified yet resentful look of all good teachers who’ve had enough. “You are?”
“Yes—I really am. I’m its father, its originator, and it’s been extraordinarily successful.”
“It has?” Luke’s face regained all its young energy. He raised both eyebrows in enquiry: the three-and-a-half transverse furrows reappeared on his forehead (and perhaps there was another one, higher up, but it was lost beneath the flop-over fringe of annoyingly abundant, black, tousled hair). Luke (his body always seemed to respond directly to an idea): Luke stood up. “It has?”
“Yes—a discovery!”
“Aye?”
“Yes!”
With both hands I eased the weight of the camera-and-flash off my neck; I lifted the strap over my head, and I placed it, a close-up lasso, perfectly, over the potent black curly dense kitchen-mop of hair which belonged to Luke.
“Whassup?”
Luke’s sticky-out ears stuck out a little further, twitched, and pointed forward—a dangerous sign, which I recognized, all too well, from Bertie, my cat. Luke, at any moment, might strike.
“Now—don’t you be silly. It’s true, it’s simple, there’s no point getting all iffy about it—it is a new method, an unheard-of technique among great photographers, as yet. And it’s this: you give the horrible camera to whoever’s nearest you: you get someone else to take the fucking pictures!”
And I assumed Luke’s place, on the edge of his blue basket, and it was surprisingly comfortable, like a shooting-stick.
“You—you bastard!”
“No, no—no need for that—and besides, how can I repay you for the story of the Sperm whale if I have to take pictures? Eh? How can I tell you about this woman you’re going to find? The perfect, the ideal, the dreamt-of woman! The only one who’ll make you happy! The love of your life who, as yet, you have not even imagined—or, rather, not specifically, not practically, not in real life…”
Luke, I’m afraid, said: “Shite!”
“No, not at all.”
And then: “So how the fuck do you take a picture with this thing? Why won’t it work?”
“No really, Luke—please don’t fret. How could you know? Only real professionals are familiar with these things …”
“Aar fuck.”
“Yes, quite … So all you have to do is remember it’s the incomparable Nikon system. You have to half-wind the wind-on lever: you cock it!”
“So it gets you in the eye?”
“Yes. It pokes you in the eye; to speak technically.”
“Ach,” said Luke, getting the hang of such trivia at once. “Aye! But this lens, Redmond—it’s great! As you’d say; aye, it’s smashin’, magic, sweet as a nut! Hey, yes!” (Flash!) “Big style! The clarity of it! Jeesus—and it costs! I’ll bet!”
“Yes—the lens, it ruined me, big style! But Luke—this woman of yours …” The slightly springy edge of this blue basket was so comfortable. (Flash! Flash!) And then it occurred to me, in a minor way, that of course Luke was a man too, albeit a young one: so perhaps he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on two equally important tasks at once, either? (Flash!) Still—too bad—if he really thought that these skates, his doctorate, his interests, his research—if he really thought that that was more important than finding the perfect woman and happiness for life then: sod him. “But hang on!” said an inner voice. (So this was not the subconscious—maybe it was reason?) “What would the ideal woman—who adores him—what would she think of it? Yes, of course, she’d want her Luke to get his doctorate, to be a successful alpha male, rated highly by his male peers, in whatever life he chose (the choice itself wouldn’t matter to her)…” Still, I’d got to tell him, hadn’t I? Even if he wasn’t listening …
“So, Luke,” I said, “I’ve thought about it, long and hard!” (And then I ruined the ex cathedra effect, because, without meaning to, I said: “Woof-woof!”) “This perfect woman, this lovely voluptuous creature of yours … It’s obvious! She has to be special, and I don’t mean romantically special, no banality, no, I mean specialized: a particular background, a special childhood, a specific career. A lifeboatwoman. No—because you tell me there are only two in the entire service.”
Flash! “Redmond—I can’t believe this lens! Leica—aye, no one can match those optics; but there again, they’ve a pitiful choice of specialist lenses; so perhaps it’s true what they say: Leica, a rich man’s toy! Whereas this …”
“So you—you really do love the extreme north, or extreme south, come to that, but there again, there are no indigenous peoples of the Antarctic continent—so: the far north? An Eskimo girl perhaps, an Inuit? But I don’t know, because I’ve never met one. So let’s be rational; and no, Luke, no Aberdeen oil-company accountants, no lazy-bullshit picking up anything that happens to come to your spider-web, your dance-club, no! Luke—you’ve got to get out there in the big world and hunt for her, because she’s rare! She’s special! Yes—so she has to be a woman born and raised in the far north, within sight of the sea, that rarest of women who will never ask you to take her to London, even for a weekend. And she has to be able to understand your altruism, your very odd compulsion to risk your own life at four in the morning to save the lives of people you don’t even know and will never meet again! Yes—so what’s the nearest profession to that?”
Flash! Click. No flash. Luke said, as if it was my fault: “The flash—it keeps missing. I’m losing film here!”
“You have to wait after the flash! That is one powerful emission of light you’ve got there! So you wait—until it’s ready again; when the little button on the back of the head of that big black prong lights up—and you can try once more, give it another go. You know the feeling?”
“Ach, Worzel. You’re so crude.”
“And accurate.”
“Aye, well—but I’m not listening to you. I want you to know that.” Flash!
“See—it worked! And this will work too, Luke—because this woman will have her own bleeper under the bed, right beside yours. And there’ll be times when she has to leave you in the middle of love-making. So that’s fair, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not,” said Luke, who was not supposed to be listening, head-down over the grey dorsal surface of Arctic skate number five. “Not at all! And anyway—grow up! Stop trying to be funny!”
Stung, I said, a little louder perhaps: “I am not trying to be funny… And if I was, well, fuck you, Luke: I’d be funny! No—I’m serious … So this delicious warm soft fantasy woman of yours, she’s so loving and forgiving, and she lives in Shetland, right?”
“Right!” A pause. Flash! “Got it!”
“But what does she do? That’s the point. What is her work?”
Luke pretended to be focused on his work, on the ventral surface of skate number five. No flash. No reply. He was listening.
“What work would give her a bleeper and call her out in the middle of the night—perhaps to some offshore island, some out-skerry, to save someone’s life? Eh?”
Flash! No reply. Not even a grunt of recognition that this great central question of his life had finally been formulated … A discovery!
“OK, Luke—so if you’re not going to talk to me, if you think it’s fine to indulge in self-satisfying passive aggression at a time like this: fair enough! But I won’t forget your refusal to engage in sexual reality at this point. No! But I’ll tell you anyway! Yes! She’ll be a district nurse!”
“Eh?” Luke stood up straight. He left skate number six unattended. “A district nurse?”
“Yes—on Shetland. You’ll never catch a female doctor, a GP. No, the odds are absurd, the statistics are all against it—but a district nurse? There must be a statistically significant number of district nurses of breeding age who might fall in love with you…Yes, Luke! You’ll have to go to Shetland—hunting: a focused, committed, single-minded ruthless hunt for a district nurse…”
Luke, photography forgotten, came and sat beside me, perched on the rim of the adjacent red plastic basket (the triumph of it!). And we sat there, on our baskets, hands on knees, like two old men on a park bench.
“Yes, Luke—imagine it! Just imagine—peeling off that blue-and-white stiff starched uniform! And underneath it’s all so soft and warm!”
“No! No!” Luke tensed up: he took his hands off his knees and straightened his spine and put both hands to the back of his neck. “No! How wrong you are! How crude! No—it’s not a uniform or a type of girl, a blonde or a brunette or a black-haired woman with small breasts or big breasts or with this or that and whatever! No! No! No!”
Taken aback, I edged away from this onslaught and, very nearly, fell off my basket, to starboard.
“No! It’s none of that superficial yuck that you and your kind seem to like. No! I really want a woman to live with for ever, aye, just the one. And, as you say, Ally won’t do.” (Had I said that? No. Certainly not. At least—I don’t think I had…) “No, sure she’ll leave me; aye, you’re right, I’ll give you that: because, just like you said, well, she did tell me that in two months’ time she’s leaving Aberdeen (no more dances!) for a great promotion in the company; she’s got a new job in the London offices. But you, Redmond, you seem to think it’s all a joke…”
“Of course it’s not a joke! For Chrissake, Luke …”
“Aye, well, I really want this woman, as you seem to have guessed, perhaps b
ecause you’re so old; and I’m getting desperate, it’s true, but I want a woman whose personality I can fall in love with, I want to be in love with who she is, the real her … Aye—all this crap of yours: nurses in uniform, blondes, whatever, where does that come from? Eh? Can you imagine how offensive that is to a woman?”
“Yes—now you mention it, Luke, yes, I can. I’m sorry. Whatever it was—I take it all back,” I said, feeling, rightly, rebuked; and just, very slightly, ashamed.
“Ach—no: I want to fall in love with the whole, the real her” (at this happy thought Luke’s hands returned to his knees and he leant a few degrees forward, relaxed). “And in return, if I’m very lucky, she’ll love me, for myself, as it were—and she won’t tell me lies and, above all, she won’t wear lies on her face: make-up!”
Trawler Page 35