Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “Of course. Yes please,” I said, both hands clamped on the wooden lip of the console-top, beside the fax machine. My legs, I realized, were having a breakdown; they were sending absurd signals to the brain; they’d lost their moral fibre; just when I actually needed them—they’d ceased to function. “So what’s this, Jason? A storm?”

  “This? A storm!” When Jason laughed, his entire lanky body joined in: all the visible outlying bits twitched, for fun, in different directions. “Bryan! What do you think? Force 7? 8?” Bryan shrugged. “Yes—you see, Redmond, we have almost everything here. More or less all we need. But there’s nothing to measure wind-speed. Because that’s a waste of money. We don’t need it. Pointless. Either you fish or you don’t.”

  “And when do you don’t?” I said, vaguely conscious that I had lost not only the power of standing-on-two-legs, but also of speech.

  “You only stop fishing when the wind ahead is more powerful than the engines below. Simple. You stop when you can’t keep the net open. But Redmond—always remember: you make no money when you’re hove-to. And you make no money when you’re asleep!”

  Jason waved his right arm, so flexible it seemed double-jointed, towards his far left of the console (to which I was attached, like a limpet) and swept back round to the right, coming to rest again on a small black lever at his side, from which, I assumed, he was somehow directing the ship. (A conventional wood-and-polished-brass spoked wheel waited unused, like an ornament in a pub, in the centre of the U.) Various screens, side by side, faced threateningly out of the backward-angled, maroon-coloured surround of wood. On the broad ledge directly beneath them were ordered papers, incomprehensible-looking manuals, detached flexible controls—and something that I recognized from my previous life: a perfectly ordinary comforting yellow mug full of coffee; but even this yellow mug seemed exotic because it sat six inches out from the ledge, in its own projecting wooden nest…

  “Most of this comes from Woodsons in Aberdeen,” said Jason. “As you would expect. That’s a JRC model 2254 4Kw 48-mile radar. I’m taking a course with them next month, when I get ashore.” He spoke, and the hand moved, so very fast that all the screens blurred into one. (And anyway, I reminded myself, you can’t even use a computer. You’ve never tried but you can’t, and that’s that, everyone’s allowed a phobia or two, or five …)

  “That’s the original JRC R73 radar,” he said, keeping his brown eyes forward, on the sea ahead. “And I’ve got two DGPS receivers—marvellous! There, see? A Valsat 2008 Mk2 and a Trimble NT 200D. Now—look—these interface with the plotters here. And there. That’s a Raccal Decca CVP 3500 unit. And that’s a brand-new Quodfish plotter from Woodsons. And these are for back-up. It’s worth it—”

  (Almost all my conscious effort began to go on suppressing the upwelling thought of the morning’s breakfast—so long ago but now so very present. That earth-mother in the cauldron of a café; if only we’d known; she was obviously a most distinguished poisoner: a woman of experience, one of the élite. She had made me eat that stuff. But it’s OK, I said to myself, all you have to do is boa-constrict, python your oesophagus, keep it all down. And I could see the ooze on the black pudding, the grease-sweat beneath the bacon, the globular wobble and glisten of eggs …)

  “You’ve used these, Luke?” I heard Jason say. “Of course, you have! But Redmond needs to know. See? Redmond? This is a Magnavox MX 200 GPS; and that’s a new Furunco LC90.”

  “Hey Redmond!” said Luke, à propos of nothing in particular. (Or had he picked up something subliminal? An early ancestral-mammal tree-shrew shriek of distress…) “Bev’s Kitchen,” he said, wandering about the room. He is unconcerned, I thought; Luke is pecking at grains of information like a young cockerel in a chickenhouse and yet he is so unobservant: he is apparently unaware that this hutch has somehow got itself airborne, that it is strung up in place on a big dipper … “A mistake, don’t you think?”

  “Bev’s Kitchen?”

  “Yeah. You know. That place in Nairn.”

  “OK, Redmond,” said Jason. “Now look at these. The fish-finders. You must get the hang of these, and fast. Here’s the main one—an Atlas Electronic model 382 colour-sounder …”

  (Fish fingers? Please, no. In any case, I whispered to myself: I must not be sick in here. That really is obvious. This is not the place to throw up. Really, really not… Not at all…)

  “That’s original, reliable. But this is better—a new 28/200 KHz model JFV 250 3Kw—”

  “You know,” said Luke, preoccupied, punching up some diagram on a screen or a laying box in the centre of the airborne henhouse, which was full of feather-dust, and mites, as you might expect, and the air was super-saturated with droplets of Bev’s eggs, and you couldn’t breathe … “That place where we had the best breakfast on earth. And all for £1.50—and now you’re going to waste your money!”

  “Ugh,” I said, from somewhere in the large intestine, yawning for air, mouth open, like a hippo.

  “And the JFV 250 complements this,” said Jason, raising his quick, lilting, intelligent voice, warning off all further interruptions. “The JFV 120 50 KHz—so there you are, Redmond! But you also need these receivers, of course—if you’re going to compete, if you’re going to give yourself a chance. So this is from Scanmar in Aberdeen—an RX 400 with a colour monitor for data from the actual trawl and the doors, the otter-boards. And I think, on balance, that you’ll find this is the most interesting piece of kit for you, for you as a writer—so go and have a look!” The hand waved towards the stern, at a short collection of screens positioned almost flat on a waist-high ledge at the aft-end of the wheelhouse: five impossible paces away. “That’s from Smith Maritime at PD—with that you can shoot and haul on automatic or manual. But the really clever thing is this, Redmond—go on! Go and look! It works with the data from the Scanmar sensors. It adjusts the trim of the net during towing. So what do you think of that? Eh? Is that clever? Or what? It can haul in or pay out one of the warps—until you’ve got optimum alignment!”

  “Aye,” said Bryan, unexpectedly, full of admiration, from the far corner.

  “Well, go on!” said Jason, looking round, swift as a falcon. “It’s interesting. Take a note. Do something. Do whatever you writers do.”

  “Can’t.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t move.”

  “Redmond,” said Jason, in a flat voice, not bothering to look round again. “You’d better go below.”

  “Can’t.”

  “That bad?”

  “Ik.”

  “What?”

  “Nutting.”

  “Jesus!” said Jason, closing his eyes, throwing his head back, pulling his right hand across the top of his face. And then, “Bryan!” he said, recovering. “Could you clear that chair?”

  Bryan, despite his muscles, nimble as an otter, piled the papers and books neatly in a trough on the console, took me by the arm and, kindly, without a laugh or even a smile, inserted me in the second helmsman’s chair.

  “Sit down!” said Jason. “Hang on! Look at the horizon. They say that helps—concentrate on it. A stable line. The only thing that doesn’t move.”

  (Except that this one did—the far-too-close horizon was not a line at all, but a series of chaotic serrations, the bright edge of an upturned saw that, against the whirl of grey sky, cut without plan or rhythm …)

  “Oh well,” said Jason. “Cheer up! It won’t last. It’ll soon be over—won’t it, Luke?” (Luke, absorbed in some task of his own, rearranging wires or computer feeds or detonators on the far side of the console, faced away.) “Or maybe it will—because of course some people never adjust. They can’t. People like that—they just keep throwing up, they get dehydrated, and if you don’t put them ashore in a week or so they damn well die on you! People like that—they really wreck your fishing.” He looked straight ahead. “But you’re not like that, are you?”

  “Ugh. Nik.”

  “It’s called marasmus,
I think,” he said, picking up and replacing the Cellnet phone at his side. “Death from seasickness, some silly fancy word like that. Anyway, you’d know…”

  “Uck.”

  “And of course we’ve got the usual boring things.” He took a fast gulp of cold coffee. “Mini-M Boatfone Units for voice, e-mail and fax by satellite. A Motorola 7400 x mobile. And there’s Philips CCTV all over the vessel…”

  I closed my eyes. The three of them talked and talked, Bryan and Jason in their Orkney lilt, and Luke, now, in his spare, unemotional, flat trawlerman-and-lifeboat-crew English. And I held on to the arms of the safe enclosing chair as the Norlantean moved back and forth and sideways, and up and down—through (in words I’d read somewhere, and cherished): “The six degrees of freedom—pitch, roll, sway, heave, surge and yaw.” This mantra was, somehow, a deep comfort. So the Norlantean’s response to that indivisible chaos out there, which Jason said was a mere Force 8, nothing at all—it could be broken into parts? It could be named? Which meant that someone else had felt like this—and maybe even in a lousy nothing, a Force 8. Which meant that I was not alone. So I felt better. And I repeated the mantra to myself, sometimes with eyes open and sometimes with eyes shut—and every time I got to yaw I went ahead and yawned, gasping like a fish.

  In between periods of inner (eyes fist-tight shut) and outer darkness the coloured cliffs of Hoy passed to starboard, and so did the vertical stack, the Old Man of Hoy. Except that this particular pinnacle of rock would not keep still. It took off every few seconds: the Old Man of Hoy would blast straight up like a rocket from Cape Canaveral, think better of it, and return to its launch-pad. It took me a while to realize that there was nothing wrong with the Old Man of Hoy; he was fine; he’d retired; he was firmly attached to his bedrock. No; it was us; we were the ones not attached to bed, or rock, or anything half-way pleasant at all.

  We rounded the north end of the island of Hoy; we entered the shelter of Scapa Flow; the Norlantean responded to security, at once; she calmed herself. And wasn’t it about here, I thought, that an earlier Dorothy Gray, in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, deliberately pursued and rammed a German submarine-even though two Royal Navy destroyers were only 3 miles off? Now what kind of crazy skipper would decide to risk his boat, his earning power, his family, his life and his crew like that? The answer came at once: Jason! And with it came a rising surge of rancid liquid: a solution of double eggs, bacon, sausage, fried bread, black pudding and beans suspended in duodenal hydrochloric acid which, just, I managed to dispatch back down my throat.

  I closed my eyes, and perhaps I fell asleep, because when I opened them again Luke and Bryan had gone; Jason had slowed his ship: he was manoeuvring her through the navigation buoys and in towards Stromness. The wheelhouse clock said ten past three in the afternoon; and yet it was almost dark. The Norlantean’s lights were on; the navigation buoys flashed red to port, green to starboard; Stromness, like some Arctic frontier-town, glowed a feeble speckled orange against the blackness.

  And, at last, Jason said something which I fully understood. His voice was slow and soft, quite unlike his normal over-energetic speech. “This is the best harbour in the world,” he said, gazing at its lights. “Every time I come in here—I feel good. I went to college here. I married here. I live here. I love this place. You know, Redmond, it’s true—when I was four or five, a little child growing up on Sanday, I drew all the time. Pictures. Thousands of them. And every one was a trawler.”

  So that’s it, I thought, as the sickness began to pass away out into the calm of the harbour, that’s why he lives as he does, why he could never do otherwise. That’s why Jason is in debt, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, for two million pounds; and that is also why Jason is one of the happiest men I’ve ever met.

  “And besides,” he said, recovering his normal fast precision of speech as we approached the quay and a three-storey-high narrow grey shed, “the ice-maker here—he never cheats you. If he says he’s given you twenty-two tonnes of ice, he’s given you twenty-two tonnes of ice. That’s Orkney for you. Redmond, I’m sure you’d never find anywhere like it—not if you searched the world for a hundred years.”

  STANDING AT ANOTHER SET of knobs and levers close against the port-side windows, using the bow-thrusters, Jason nudged the Norlantean, a 38.5-metre-long deep draught mass of iron, up to the quay. By the light of her big square spotlights, which threw bursts of white reflection up from the wet grey stones, the puddled tarmac, I watched a fresh-faced young man in sweater and jeans and trainers catch the bow-ropes (thrown by Bryan and Robbie Mowat) and the stern-ropes (thrown, less accurately, by Sean and Jerry). He was obviously a trawlerman—even I was beginning to be able to identify one, generically: big shoulders, a flat stomach and, most apparent of all, massive leg-muscles: muscles so absurdly well developed that trawlermen seemed to have to buy their trousers many waist-sizes too big: their broad leather belts hold the extra cloth puckered tight.

  “Allan Besant,” said Jason. “He’s a good worker. He’s on for this trip. And so is Robbie Stanger. They’re both good. In fact, Redmond, this crew is the very best I’ve ever had.” Jason was silent for a moment, apparently concentrating hard, looking sharp down through the window. “And now I’ve got a genuine trawlerman’s scientist aboard, which is good. Interesting. Good for everyone. Good for the boys to see!” (I got that warm feeling. I no longer felt seasick—well, we were roped to dry land; I felt useful, by association; I was here to help.)

  Jason shut down the engines, or thrusters, or whatever it is you shut down at that moment; he turned to me with a sudden super-signal grin, with a spotlight-dazzle of young teeth white in his dark face. “And now I also have a problem. I have a dangerous liability. I have one mad, seasick writer who’s no use to anyone!” He gave a half-laugh, which was almost convincing; he put his arm briefly across my shoulders and said: “Let’s go! We must get the ice loaded!”

  And at the bottom of the wheelhouse stairs, quick as Houdini, Jason was in his blue overalls and his yellow sea-boots.

  THE MEN in the grey ice-shed tower swung their large-diameter augur over the open hatch to the Norlantean’s fish hold, amidships. Luke and I, standing on the hatch-rim, peered down at Bryan (First Mate), Robbie Mowat (due for shore-leave: midday tomorrow) and Allan Besant (the athlete—a wrestler? a shot-putter? one of those Scotsmen who takes a malt or two and then bungs up-ended trees about?—we’d no idea, because as yet we’d only exchanged nods at a distance). Staggering in and out of view, they positioned a wide-mouthed, reinforced-plastic, steel-ring-ribbed tube beneath the spew-end of the augur. Almost at once it filled with a violent cascade of jagged ice-pebbles. Down below us we heard the sound of frantic shovelling. “That,” said Luke, reflectively rolling a cigarette, “is a really rotten job.”

  A red Toyota truck pulled up on the quay. Emerging from the shadows, Sean pushed past us. He gave a happy shout into the increasingly powerful wind, a wind from the west, already broken by the cliffs and hills of the main island’s peninsula, which yet held the Norlantean out from the quay, taut on her ropes. “Stores!” yelled Sean, his wide nostrils flared, as if he had just caught their scent. “Stores!”

  Luke called after him, “Want help?”

  “Aye! Down by the galley!” And Sean appeared to vault right over the side.

  Down by the galley, we looked about us. The walls were clad with the same brown imitation-wood panels as the passage and cabins; at right-angles to the left and right of the entrance were two fixed brown tables, each with benches for four; a video-recorder sat on a bracket high in the corner to the left; also to the left, a refrigerated milk-dispenser waited half-way down the galley; there was a sink with dish-racks, and the mugs were stacked in wall-fixed wooden tubes with a slit for the handles. Off to the left, a heavy metal door led to a store room containing ranked shelves and a big fridge. And, in the galley, above the sink, there was a genuine porthole.

  “Hey boys!” Sean’s voice, d
isembodied, appeared to be shouting at us from the empty passageway. “Where the fuck you gone?”

  Sean’s head grinned down from an open hatch above the galley entrance. It was an escape-hatch: small rungs led up to it: it was your last chance to save yourself from a chip-pan fire in the galley. Sean’s head disappeared: “Haggis, pork chops, fifty beef sausages, six dozen eggs,” it intoned up there, with excessive pomp, obviously checking some list. A lowered box dangled in front of us. “The boxes, boys—pile them in the galley! And I’ll sort them myself!”

  The invisible Sean shouted: “Fancies, bridies, Arctic rolls, shell pies, bere bannocks!” as if he was taking parade, and expected each one to answer to its name.

  I said, “Bridies? Bere bannocks?”

  “Search me,” said Luke, passing me a box. “But you can be sure of one thing—we won’t be eating any fish. And after a bit you won’t want to, either. Beef, haggis, pork chops. Grand!”

  The galley and passage full of cardboard boxes, Sean released us. “Opening time! See ya in the Flattie—down the pier, left, across the street. You can’t miss it!”

  SO LUKE AND I had a pint of Guinness each in the Flattie—a small bar named after a type of flat-bottomed Orkney rowing-boat which was good for fishing on the lochs, so the barmaid told us. And, just as we were about to leave, Sean and Jerry arrived, so I bought another round and, when that was gone, Allan Besant and Robbie Mowat walked in. So I bought another; and Allan and Robbie and Jerry and Sean decided that they were off to a party in the capital, Kirkwall, a few miles down the road. So, as instructed, Luke and I walked up the gently curving stone-paved street to the Royal Hotel, where you could get good things to eat. And, so very pleased to be ashore, and forgetting that I was not going to stay that way, I decided to celebrate.

  In the lounge bar, hung with pictures of the Hudson Bay Company’s ships which had put into Stromness from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries to get their crews, to sign on the toughest, least-complaining sailors in the country, we took a table, and two more pints of Guinness, beneath a portrait of Sir John Franklin’s vessels Erebus and Terror, which, as we were to do, I remembered, had sailed out of Stromness—never to be seen again.