Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “I’m sure you are,” I said, collapsing on to a chair at the small wooden table. “That’s great. Well done.” (I know, I thought, come on, you could try a little harder: but then it is four in the morning, the hour when all body systems take a dip, when the body clock gives up, and when, statistically speaking, old people like you decide to roll over and die in their sleep.)

  “No, no, I told you,” said Luke, placing a mug in front of me, taking the seat to my left. “It’s difficult for me. It always has been.” He put his elbows on the table and ran both hands up over his young but weathered face, his black curly hair. “I can’t make up my mind. I want to stop all this. I want to settle down. I want to have children. You know, all that. But I can’t choose. It’s my fault, I’ve hurt so many people, but I don’t know why—that’s the problem—I can’t help it. Ally: she’s different, Redmond, she really is. I didn’t know it was possible to have such, well, good sex. You know. She cares. She’s a top accountant with an oil company. And here she is with me: nothing but a mature student working for his Ph.D. on £7,000 a year. Marine biology. It’s not her thing. And she hates my life, she really does—the call-outs for the lifeboat, the risk, I suppose, even the trawlers, I don’t know.”

  Luke lifted his head. He looked straight at me. He brightened. He smiled. “And she hates you, too, come to that. You see, you must understand, I know you do—for my own research into the deep-sea fisheries, the correlations between temperature and depth and current for these newly commercial species, 1,000 to 1,500 metres down or more—I can go out whenever I want: it does not have to be at the most dangerous time of year. It’s very little to do with surface conditions. It does not have to be in January.”

  “Uh.”

  “Anyway—Ally. She’s different. All this is new for me. I told you, on the Scotia—you won’t remember—but I’ve joined a nightclub, a rock-and-roll dance-club. And now I get in for free: because I’m an instructor. It’s full of girls. That’s where I met her.”

  “Luke—of course I can help you! I have a plan. If we survive this trip—if we’re not swept overboard—then we’ll be pleased, right? So you propose to this Ally of yours—and I’ll give you a party at your favourite pub. An engagement party!”

  Luke fell silent. He faced away. He felt in his pocket and, producing his plastic pouch of Golden Virginia and Rizla papers, he rolled himself, with mind-absent speed, a spindly toothpick of a cigarette. “Redmond, you’re so very …” he said, slowly, concentrating hard, inhaling, “old-fashioned. And as for being swept overboard—well, I don’t quite know how to tell you this—but Dick, at the lab, the guy you met on the Scotia, he got emotional, he really did, he said he felt responsible. And he did something he’s never done before. You see, he has a thing about his survival suit. He’s teased about it. He’s very particular. It’s a joke. He won’t let anyone borrow it. He’s superstitious. But he brought it to me at my desk in our office. Right there. Eleven o’clock. The coffee break. In front of everyone. He said, ‘Look, if you bring this back, and it smells of fish—I’ll kill you. But I’m trusting you, Luke, it’s your job. And if anything happens, it’s your fault. Because that Redmond, unlike most people I’ve met, he’s not a shit. Or, at least, he’s not a complete shit. But it’s obvious,’ he said—and excuse me, but he said it, not me, ‘that Redmond,’ he said, ‘it’s obvious, when it comes to life at sea, he doesn’t know his arse from his tit. And for Chrissake, Luke, in this department we can all see it on the fucking satellite pictures—you’re planning to take this idiot straight into a hurricane.’”

  “I see,” I said, feeling, despite an instant effort, emptied of all confidence in anything whatever. I looked away myself: at the surrounds of student Bohemian life, at haphazard posters and postcards on the wall, at the mess of unwashed everything by the sink, at the many-coloured beer cans in blossom above the bin, and, as I watched, all its young attraction drained away. If that’s what Dick said, I thought, then this is serious, because Dick Adams is no ordinary academic physical oceanographer. No: he’s an ex-Royal Marine diver, an ex-member of the élite SBS, the Special Boat Service, a man who’s seen action in Suez, in the Borneo campaign and, no doubt, in many other impossible places known only to his unit. And if a mere trawler, a commercial trawler, for heaven’s sake—if he thinks that’s not a good idea, then maybe I’m not just lazy-afraid (“why get out of your bed for this?”) but straight-afraid (“will I ever see my delicious stinking pit again?”)…

  “Hey Redmond!” said Luke, getting to his feet with excessive energy, throwing the bug-proboscis stub of his cigarette into the sink. “You can’t just sit there dreaming! We must go. A trawler skipper—he can’t afford to wait. Not for anyone.”

  Under the dull street-lamp, a cold wind from the sea, a stinging slanted rain, revived me. We filled the hatchback with Luke’s equipment from Her Majesty’s Government’s Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen: boxes of specimen jars, bottles, labels, preservative fluids; a large electronic fish-weighing machine in an aluminium case; deep-sea-net temperature-loggers boxed with two small computers; a large plastic basket of oilskins, survival suits, sea-boots with steel toe-caps; and a mysterious stack of blue and red plastic biscuit-boxes.

  To the north-west of Aberdeen, as the little car, struggling with its load, climbed, very slowly, the eastern foothills of the Grampian mountains, it began to snow: big, unhurried flakes, soft in the headlights, fluffy on the windscreen. In the small town of Nairn, on the Moray Firth, we found an early lighted café and a Scottish breakfast (mugs of tea, buttered toast, two fried eggs, sausages, black pudding, a half-pig pile of bacon—and all for £1.50 each).

  “Luke, I have a question.” In the fug of fry and steam and comfort, there loomed and disappeared an elemental mother of a waitress. (Why can’t we just settle down and live in such places? Why does breakfast ever have to end?) “Luke—what made you say no green, nothing green? For me—that’s a new one. I’ve never heard of it. I know you must never mention pigs or rabbits or foxes or cows or even salmon if you’re at sea, if you’re a trawler-man. Because—I suppose—it’s disabling, it reminds you of life ashore. But green? What’s that? Grass?”

  “Search me,” said Luke, soaking up a leakage of egg yolk with a piece of toast. “It makes no sense. After all—with a phyto-plankton bloom the sea itself turns green; and nowadays the nets are green. All I know is this—there was a Fisheries officer, in some temporary post, from Singapore or somewhere, and they sent him out on a trawler from one of the Northern Isles. Well, he was a man who liked his clothes, you know, his shore clothes. And one evening he went up to the wheelhouse in a green suit. No one said a word. They stopped fishing.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. They went way off course. They took him to Norway. To Bergen. They put him ashore with his bags of kit. They left him there.”

  “They did?” I said feebly, wondering if a green sleeping-bag would be OK. And, “I know about priests, ministers,” I said, trying not to be so ignorant, as we returned to the car. “You must always turn back if you see a minister on your way to the boat. And no woman must set foot on your deck—or even touch the guard rails.”

  “Yes, that’s right—and you can’t leave harbour on a Friday. But nowadays, Redmond, it’s more complicated, not less. Your wife, for instance, whatever happens, she must never use the washing machine on the weekend before you go. Because it’s like the sea, the whirlpool—she’ll be washing your soul away.”

  “Sympathetic magic!” I said, edging the car into the empty street, peering through the still ice-misty screen. “Now I do know about that. It’s like the Congo. Except, of course, that they have no washing machines. At least, not where I was …”

  “Washout!” said Luke, as I mounted the central reservation, and, very cleverly, missed a bollard. “Redmond!”

  “Yes—that really is interesting. It’s exciting—don’t you see? It really is the same as life in the upper Congo. You tell me that trawlermen have the
highest death-rate of any workers in Britain.”

  “Yeah,” said Luke, frantically wiping the windscreen with his handkerchief. “Yesterday—we got the official figures for 1998. Bang up to date. From the Marine Accident Investigation Branch of the Department of the Environment, Transport and Regions. There were 388 accidents involving United Kingdom fishing vessels. There were twenty-six fatalities. There were twenty-six vessels lost.”

  We drove north over the bridge at Inverness, north across the Black Isle, north into the Highlands proper, in silence. The snowflakes no longer seemed so benign: they were smaller, manic, and they flew at us horizontally. “This,” said Luke, “is a blizzard. I think we may now, officially, call this a blizzard.” Up the long, twisting slopes of road, the little car’s wheels spun, but, to my surprise, gained a constant purchase: because, I supposed, it was carrying the heaviest load of its life. There were no tracks of any kind in front of us, and no tracks to our right. Everyone was staying at home.

  “So that’s it!” I said, as a weak dawn filtered down to us, and the blizzard became less personal. “Trawlermen protect themselves—mentally—because they must; they need it. So it is like the animism of the Congo. And for the same reason—the immediate press of death. So you surround yourself with a hundred little irrational fears, because you have to, because that’s all there is to protect you against the big one. Your friend drowns? Sure. But someone was wearing a green sweater, or someone said pig or rabbit or salmon. So, in large thought, that’s OK. Because it means there really is a force out there that cares about you—it even cares about your speech, your dress-sense! So why worry? We did the wrong thing, we offended, that’s all. So please, don’t even mention the real fear—the ocean that covers two-thirds of the earth and couldn’t possibly give a damn about anyone.”

  “Redmond! Please—try and drive straight. Calm down. We’re in good time. We’re nearly there. We’ll make it.”

  (Drive straight? Well you can’t, can you? Not in a car with an engine no bigger than a decent motorbike, not on fresh snow. And especially not when full dawn has arrived, when there’s so much to look at, when the air is suddenly clear of snow—and those really huge, black-and-purple clouds to the north, with their eerie white underbellies: have I ever seen anything like it? No, excuse me, certainly not. Is that just reflected light from the snow-white landscape? Or a warning that every sailor would recognize? And besides, the fields here are bounded not with hedges or barbed wire, but with wide, thin, upright, interleaved slabs of sandstone. We are now passing through a world of irregular rectangles, of cemetery headstones that mark no grave, of monoliths that stretch away for ever to all the far horizons …)

  “Hey Redmond!” said Luke, doing a quarter-roll in the passenger-seat, pulling out his tobacco pouch. “Hello? Are you there? Look—if you have offended, if you’ve said any of the words that may kill everybody—you simply touch cold iron, pronto. And there’s plenty of cold iron on deck.”

  “But that’s great, too! Late prehistory,” I said, as we drove gently through Thurso, the most northerly resort on the mainland (a town that is part hotels-and-pleasure, part wind-raked desperation). “The early iron age—I’ll have to check—3,000 years ago? And Luke, I know, I really do, it’s not the same—our own history in these islands is so short term, so parochial. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? Ten thousand years of settlement, no more than that; we’ve only been here from the end of the last ice age. Whereas in central or east Africa we first mutated into Homo sapiens sapiens—when? OK—it depends on which timing on the molecular clock you believe—certainly 200,000, maybe 250,000 years ago. But you see, I have a mad hunch: I’m sure that some of us were here right through the last ice age: on St. Kilda. Because if an animal as absurdly fragile as the St. Kilda wren could survive, then so could an isolated group of our robust hunter-gatherer forefathers.”

  “Redmond?”

  “Yes?”

  “What the hell are you trying to say?”

  “Eh? Well—it’s obvious. Your trawlermen with their 1990s belief in the magical curative power of iron—that idea must go back at least 3,000 years. Imagine it—preserved in oral memory, the astonishment, the admiration for the successful experiments of the early scientists, for a handful of intellectuals: for the undeniable, the magic production of iron—the enabler!”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” said Luke, as we left Thurso behind us. “I know you love all that—magic, superstition, whatever. But, unlike you, I’m a genuine atheist. I’m a scientist. A marine biologist. If I thought in those terms, in that world—even for ten minutes a day, Redmond—I’d never be able to answer a lifeboat call-out on time; I wouldn’t join a trawler; I couldn’t function; I couldn’t do my job. I am not a social anthropologist. You see—I like the external world. The deep-sea octopus, for instance, the sea-bat. I’ve never seen one…” And then, “Oh Jesus,” he said, as we turned to the right off the main road and topped the rise down to Scrabster harbour.

  Luke took a hard suck on his catheter tube of a cigarette. “Look, Redmond, OK—it won’t mean anything to you—that’s OK: but, you see, I’ve come here every month for years, I have to—I have to weigh and measure a random sample of set species from all the landings. But hey! Look at them! This is big style! I’ve never seen anything like it. Every single trawler is in. Everyone has run to shelter. It must be bad. It must be very bad out there!”

  “So why—so why are we going out?” I said (or, rather, I sang, like a castrato, as my gubernacula retracted and my testes shot back to their safe, pre-pubescent hiding-places). “Who is Jason Schofield? Luke—is this normal?”

  “Normal?” said Luke, as he directed me, right (RESTRICTED ACCESS) away from the scrag of cliffs, the desultory row of houses, and into the small working-area of the harbour proper. “Normal?” he said, affronted. “Normal? Certainly not!” (“Turn left—no, here!”) “You don’t understand, Redmond, I can see that—it took me months to find this guy!” (“Up that ramp, for Chrissake! No, here!”) “And look—I only did all this because you made such a fuss on the Scotia. The worst time of year—all that bullshit.” (“Stop! Over there—slow down. Park—over there; there! Against the market shed!”) “Well, Redmond, here we are—and get this: I have never met Jason Schofield; I have never set eyes on the Norlantean. I did this for you—I asked around, I read the Fishing News, and everyone agreed: Jason would be perfect. He was a brilliant student at the Nautical College, in Stromness—Captain Sutherland’s place; Jason really was and is exceptional, apparently; but, Redmond, the real point is this: he married into a big tough Orkney trawler dynasty and his father-in-law gave him a post-marriage test: he gave him a second-hand trawler right enough, but Jason had no white-fish quota—so he had to convert his trawler for the new deep-sea fishery. And the conversion cost him upwards of two million pounds. Jason, at thirty, has a two million pound overdraft. Imagine that! (As you would say.) So it goes like this: simple mathematics: he must bring in around £50,000 every ten days. And the bank? Do you think they know or care about the weather? Does a Force 11, or a Force 12, a junior hurricane—does that appear on your statement? Of course not! And that’s the point—that’s why he’s perfect for you! He has to go out in the January storms. But he’s exceptional, he’s very successful, he’s driven—he can think his way towards the fish. He’s opened new fishing-grounds: and that’s not surprising, so they say, because when he came into the world, when he was a baby, his cot—it was a regular plastic fish-box!”

  “Well, Luke, er—thank you,” I said, as we got out of the warm protective cot of the car. And into the shock of a cold that was almost painful.

  “Another layer,” said Luke, opening the hatchback. “And oilskins.” So we pulled on our second sweaters (naval blue), took off our shoes in the slush, clambered into our oilskin trousers (his: yellow; mine: bright orange; and Luke showed me that it was possible not to strangle yourself in the curl of rubberized braces), put on our yellow sea-boots.
To our left, the sixteen-wheeler articulated trucks, the giant refrigerated transports, waited in their loading bays. To our right, on the edge of the quay, a line of Herring gulls stood, at strict gull-personal-space intervals, between the big mooring-bollards, disconsolate, not in talking mode, staring out to sea, their feathers puffed up against the cold. Along to our left one of those derelict trawlers was berthed: her upper hull had once been painted orange, her wheelhouse and decking white; but she was now so streaked and stained and patterned with rust, her steel plates so bobbled with layers of paint and rust, that she seemed alive, to be herself and no one else, to have grown old and used and wrinkled, and was now, where she lay, close to death. To my surprise, I saw that the diesel-tanker truck parked on the quay beside her actually had its fuel hose extended over her stern; that men in the back of a container lorry were lobbing empty white plastic fish-boxes on to her deck …

  “The Norlantean!” said Luke, quickening his pace. “Isn’t she beautiful? What a conversion! Look at that! Wow! Redmond! You’d never guess she was the old Dorothy Gray!”

  A young man with short dark hair and a prematurely ragged face, dressed in a red oilskin jacket, yellow oilskin trousers and blue rubber gloves, was chucking the white plastic boxes down through a hatch.

  “Hi,” said Luke, and introduced us. “We’re from the Marine Lab. Can we stow our kit somewhere?”

  “Aye,” said the young man, with a lopsided grin. “I’m Sean, like the film-star. Dump it up on the bow.” He had a strong harsh Caithness accent. “When you’re ready I’ll show you the cabin. And boys!” he called after us. “Welcome aboard! And the forecast—it’s for a Force 12!” He gave an explosive little laugh.