Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  (So why hadn’t I noticed that? Why hadn’t I even registered that steel slide—big enough to stand in—leading to the steel gate of the scupper, where the light from the sea outside shone so white, where, I supposed, the gannets and the kittiwakes waited, and whence, as the Norlantean took those violent rolls to starboard, the cold fresh manic sea powered in and swept across the deck? It’s OK, I said to myself, stop this nonsense, you’re in another world—you don’t need these self-imposed anxieties; you can’t expect to understand everything at once—relax; because there’s so much time ahead of you, so much genuine, external, comforting real fear—and it’s all coming your way…)

  Robbie switched on the main conveyor: a narrow shoal of gutted Greenland halibut juddered up the incline from the base of the circular gutting table towards the hatch, the inserted open mouth of the tube down to the hold. Luke returned, stepping up on a fish-box to my right, to Sean’s left. He tipped his measured and gutted fish into an empty tray, wedging his red plastic specimen-basket on the floor beside him. Robbie began to start-stop the table again, refilling every section.

  “Hey, Sean,” said Luke, “I’ve been watching. That Robbie-he’s quick. About the fastest gutter I’ve ever seen!”

  “Aye, right enough,” said Sean, leaning confidentially towards us, in a three-man privacy in an outer world of speech-absorbing, body-shaking noise. “He’s a Jack Russell of a fighter. Luke—mind this, whatever you do—if Robbie’s bin drinking, keep out of his way. Leave the bar. Because he’s fast, he’s so fast you wouldna believe it. In fact, Luke, do what I do—leave town. You say goodbye, Stromness, or up yours, Kirkwall—or even forget it, Thurso! Because it’s no safe. He’s so fast you’ll no see it coming. And that’s the truth!”

  “Thanks,” said Luke.

  “Ach,” said Sean, with an apologetic grin as the now-full table came to a halt. “I’m forgetting. I didna mind. Robbie—our Robbie Stanger—he’s na touched a drop in ten months. And what’s more, boys, he says he’s no missed it! And he doesna smoke, if you know what I mean. But there you go, he doesna fool me, because he’s old, mebbe even thirty—and his girlfriend, she’s lovely, she’s sixteen. So he’s clean, he has to be…”

  “Aye,” said Luke, as if he, of all people, would never understand a problem like that, looking away, as it happened, at the lip of the conveyor from the hopper. “Redmond!” he shouted, full volume, pointing with his gutting knife: “A Rabbit fish!”

  Luke grinned, a crackly grin on his lined and weathered face, a face that seemed twenty years older than its owner. “A Rabbit fish! Chimaera monstrosa,” he said, as if he’d conjured it up all by himself. “How’s that?”

  Well of course I’d seen no fish like it. I said, “Woof!”

  The monstrous chimera, the mythical freak, two or three feet long, was on its back, its creamy underside shiny with slime, its pectoral fins like wings, and where its neck should have been was a small oval of a mouth set with teeth like a rabbit’s. It slid down, flop, on to the tray. Its foot-long rat-tail whiplashed after it.

  Luke shouted at Robbie, signed, with a circular sweep of his right hand, to send that table-tray all the way round to us: and there was the Rabbit fish in front of me, entire. Luke turned it over; he held it up, for inspection. The back and sides were mottled grey-brown on a blueish sheen of slime; the eyes were bulbous, huge—and it was looking at me, smiling. The lateral-line canal (as if someone had cut into its flesh with a Stanley knife) swept up in a happy curve from the base of its thick conical snout to the top of its cheek: a false mouth set in a permanent, emphatic grin. “How’s that?” said Luke, proud of his Rabbit fish. “Weird, or what?”

  “Weird! … And what are these?” I said, running a gloved finger over a line of spaced-apart pits (as if someone had drilled into the flesh with an awl), small holes, five above and six below the lateral-line grin.

  “Electroreceptors! They can detect the tiny DC fields set up by the muscles of their prey. The high-frequency waves of mechanical energy, Redmond, the waves that travel really well in water—the fish clocks these with its inner ear. For low-frequency waves, short-range disturbances, you use your lateral-line system, a series of perforated tubes under the skin. That’s how you detect something odd and near you in the current—different waves, different pressures: so is that a presence you can eat? Or will it eat you? Or is it a rock? But you knew that, of course.”

  “No, I didn’t! I really didn’t!” I shouted, exasperated by my own ignorance, and conscious, too, that some system, some inner, land-based, sleep-fed system necessary for emotional control was beginning to desert me. “I did not know that!”

  “OK!” said Luke, leaning away from me, towards Sean, holding the Rabbit fish (slack, bendy) in front of him, as if he was about to launch it across the fish-room. “Electroreceptors! Their senses are far more complex than ours—as well as all the usual: smell, taste, sight, hearing, temperature, pressure—they live in a world of electrical stimuli: imagine it, you’re a shark, there’s a long piece of prey down there, a weak electric field, a static, wounded eel, so you attack. And guess what? It’s an underwater electric cable!”

  “Horrible!”

  “But Redmond, here it is, the Rabbit fish. And I love it, I really do, because it’s common, it lives off our own shores, and yet we know sod all about it! Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “The Rabbit fish! Sometimes known as a Rat-tail! But not here, Redmond, not at sea. Because I told you—you must never say rabbit, you must never say rat. So here we call it King of the herrings, because it so happens that it comes up from the depths, it moves into the shallow seas off our coasts to spawn at exactly the same time as the migrating herrings arrive …”

  “Aye!” said Sean. He pressed his forehead, hard, for a fraction of a second, I noticed, against the rusted iron of the stanchion behind him. (Of course, I thought, he can’t touch it with his hands because he’s wearing Jason’s blue rubber gloves …) He turned. He yelled into Luke’s right ear: “Fockin’ stupid superstitions! I don’t believe a word of it! Bullshit! Bullshit!”

  Just in front of the first dorsal fin of the fish there was a spine, sticking up like a marlin spike. “What’s this?” I said, pulling it forward, releasing it: ping!

  “Don’t do that!” said Luke, at once dropping the Rabbit fish into his specimen basket. “It’s dead. Sure. So it’s OK. But don’t do that. That’s poisonous. Really poisonous. There’s a venom gland and a pump beneath that, like a hornet sting, only far worse. Some people say it can kill you. So, Redmond, calm down, go slow, whatever …”

  “Ah. Sorry.”

  “Look here, that’s OK, don’t worry…” Luke held my left arm a moment. “Just don’t worry me. It makes me tense. OK? Please—don’t go falling all about the deck, and try not to fly, and don’t go flicking spines about—you know, calm down, watch me, don’t be so active…”

  “No. Yes,” I said, flattered, as the trawler began one of its excessive long jarring epileptic rolls to port. (Active? I was now too afraid to move at all…)

  “Look—lots of fish species have evolved a venom-delivery system, independently. Rabbit fish, stargazers, dragonets, catfish, toadfish, scorpionfish, weever fish, as you know …”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “OK. But it’s fascinating in itself, don’t you think? How did they adapt their mucus glands like that? How did they do it?”

  “No idea.”

  “OK. That’s OK too. Because no one else has any idea either. Not really, as far as I can see. But Rabbit fish—we think—they swim slowly over the bottom, down to 3,000 feet, and they crunch up crustaceans and molluscs in that weird mouth of theirs, with its opposable bony plates. So they’re a natural target for any passing deep-sea shark—but imagine it! You’re a shark. You try and swallow this slimy nothing of a fish that can’t swim fast—and the pain in the roof of your mouth! The pain! So you spit it out. And you feel ill, so very sick for days and day
s, and you wish you’d never been born, and from then on—one sight of a Rabbit fish and you throw up!”

  “Yeah!”

  “But Redmond, they’re theoretically interesting—that’s the main point.” Luke, as he talked, was gutting Greenland halibuts, almost as fast as Sean, a slit, a scrape, a back-handed upwards chuck, a flap of fish down the central tube. “They evolved when? Two hundred million, three hundred million years ago? We’ll have to check. We must get this right. Because the Rabbit fish is a real missing link, a living intermediate between the cartilaginous fishes—the sharks and rays—and the bony fishes. Its skeleton is made of cartilage, it lays its eggs in horny capsules, the male has paired claspers to hold the female and fertilize her internally, like a shark, and the heart and brain of a shark. Yet it has a gill-cover to protect its gills, like bony fish, and its upper jaw is fused to its skull instead of being joined by a ligament, as in sharks. Aye, and you’ll like this—the anus of the Rabbit fish is distinct from the urinogenital opening.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said, which was a mistake, but most of my brain (or so it felt) was entirely absorbed by the attempt to instruct my blue rubber prongs of hands on the getting of a grip on my sixth Greenland halibut (“You’ll have to gut tonnes”), and my personal mantra sang: “You must join in! You must help! You must gut and gut. You’re a fat slob. You’re old. You’re finished. And no, you can’t go to bed, you can’t get to your bunk. Here people are watching, so it’s not possible: you can’t pretend you’re somewhere else.” And, holding the sharpest little knife I’d ever held, as the trawler rolled and surged and yawed and shook and dervished to starboard, to screams and drumbeats, to high trebles, to deep bass notes, from the wind, the storm, blasting through the open bulkhead door from the stern-ramp: I missed the tiny package of Greenland halibut guts and slit the blue rubber palm of my left-hand glove.

  “Hey Redmond!” said Luke, six inches to my right, flipping yet another gutted fish up and over and down the tube. “You’re not listening, are you?”

  “I am!”

  “OK—but look, it matters, maybe I didn’t explain it properly. The sharks and rays evolved around 400 million years ago—and Redmond, that is 165 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared—and yet they’re still here, they’re abundant, they’re almost unchanged, they’re everywhere, they got it right, they’re successful. And then there’s the break-out, the next stage, and that’s the mystery, because why bother? Why bother when you got it so very right? Nuts! Nuts! But there you are, there’s the evidence, the Rabbit fish” (with his knife he flicked at his specimen basket), “and from that came—the bony fishes!”

  “Yes! But Luke—is this it? Is this a Force 12? Conrad talks about it—you know, in Narcissus, in Typhoon: I remember, in a real storm, he says, you hear banshee wails, deep drumbeats …”

  “Wails? Drumbeats?” Luke laughed. “Redmond—that’s Fleetwood Mac!”

  From the hold came a tremendous metallic banging, steel-on-steel, a hammer-gong from below.

  Robbie leant right forward over his tray and yelled, full power, at Sean: “Gut! You big girl’s blouse you! Get gutting!” And then to Luke, by way of apology, “They’ve nae fish. They’re short below!”

  And so we gutted Greenland halibut, and Luke showed me how to gut tusk (“Redmond, you spell it t-o-r-s-k”), which was more difficult than you might imagine, because the torsk were three to four feet long, and slimy, and their skin appeared to be made of rubber, and they were grossly distended: they had sicked up their stomachs: their stomachs hung out of their mouths. And that, said Luke, was because torsk had swimbladders. And swim-bladders were interesting. Because the average fish is denser than water, so how, if you’re a fish, do you stop yourself sinking? The sharks and tunas don’t have swimbladders—so they have to keep swimming, angling their paired fins to act as hydrofoils; but they’ve also reduced their overall solidity by storing low-density lipids in their bodies (“Redmond, that’s why you call them ‘oily fish’”)’;and shark-liver oil is five or six times as buoyant as an equal weight of water. And with fish like mackerel, of course, said Luke, it’s obvious, isn’t it? Fish like that, fish that make vertical migrations of many hundreds of feet every day—and as you know that applies to lots of oceanic mesopelagic species—a moment’s thought will tell you that a swimbladder is a bad idea. It’s just not possible to inflate or deflate it fast enough. As we could see from these torsk. There they’d been, maybe a kilometre down, cruising over coarse, rocky ground (the only kind of ground they like), when the net trapped them—and there’d been no time to secrete gas (oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide—although carps only use nitrogen) back into the bloodstream. They’re bony fishes, said Luke, related to the cod, and most bony fishes have evolved an internal gas float, a swimbladder—it’s developed from a primitive lung… (So, I thought, had their ancestors squirmed ashore like the lungfish, thought better of it, and gone back to sea? Had they gulped air at the surface, like newts in a pond? I decided to ask later, should life ever become peaceful again…)

  The slopped piles of fish making their way up the slatted belt towards us dwindled; the fish began to judder up in ones and twos. Luke, stepping off his box, jumped over the base of the conveyor and disappeared round the side of the hopper. With a scrape and clang of corrugated-iron-on-steel, we heard him pull the makeshift door aside. A wild, multiple echo reached us: “Redmond! A sea-bat! A sea-bat! Quick!”

  I fell off my box, I scrambled over the conveyor, I flayed around the hopper-wall—and found myself hanging on to the thigh-high sill of the entrance.

  At the centre of my field of view, at the bottom of the steep, inward-angled, stainless-steel panels of the tall container, to the right of four Greenland halibut which lay where they’d slid (just below the lower lip of the open drop-gate to the conveyor), there spread across the slopes of floor, there swirled round Luke’s yellow sea-boots, a semi-transparent globular mass of brown and purple, a gelatinous colourless shine which you could see right through, a something from another world, a dead creature which, as I stared, resolved itself into far too many long viscid arms studded with white boils, eruptions, suckers to hold you fast…

  “Haliphron atlanticus!” yelled Luke. “Redmond, this—this is only the second specimen recorded in Scottish waters!”

  Between the jellied hump of the body and the base of the tentacles, two enormous brown eyes stared up at him.

  “It’s not really a sea-bat because” (he pushed his right boot between a pair of tentacles) “there’s no web. But it’s your deep-sea octopus right enough—and we know that because we find their mandibles, beaks to you, in the stomachs of Sperm whales: and the Sperm whale story, I promise you, Redmond, it’s smashing, it’s extraordinary, I’ll tell you later, I really will, remind me, OK? But for now…” He stepped over the octopus, flipped the four Greenland halibut through the drop-gate on to the conveyor and, grasping my arm as the rolling Norlantean pulled me backwards, helped me over the sill. “For now you stay here. I’ll get a basket. We’ll keep this, if we can.”

  And as if it was the simplest of matters, Luke returned with one of his red plastic baskets, laying it on the steep-angled steel floor in front of the tentacles—and we tried to gather up the octopus, the globular mess, which looked so ghost-like, so insubstantial, and which was yet so very heavy.

  “Of course it’s heavy,” he said, as we managed to slop the last thick tentacle into the basket. “It’s mostly water, and that’s the trick, because water is almost incompressible, so you need that, you really do, if you want to live, if you want to make a living 1,500 fathoms down.

  “Aye,” he said, as we slung the basket over the sill, “at least 40 kilos.” He jumped after the red basket on to the slimy planking and, as the Norlantean rolled to port, pushed it hard against the stern bulkhead, lashing its rim to a steel pipe. I clambered out, back round to my post. The gutting table and the conveyor were still; Robbie was uncurling an arm-thick hose f
rom its brackets against the port wall. “Breakfast!” said Sean, peeling off his gloves. Robbie flicked a switch that brought a hidden pump to life, pulled the end of the hose across to the table and sluiced the spatter of fish guts from Sean’s oilskins, back and front. “No idea,” he said to Sean, “aye, that’s your problem. No idea of cleanliness.” He turned the hose on me (and the pressure knocked me off my box). “New oilskins, Redmond. The best. So look after them.” Robbie hosed Luke, Luke hosed Robbie. And Sean, the junior, was told to wash down the table and conveyor. “Breakfast!” said Robbie. “Jerry can do breakfast. Dinna touch his soup. But he can do breakfast. I’ll give him that. Come on, boys!”

  Luke followed Robbie to the bench by the forward door where they took off their boots and oilskins and where I arrived, a little later. “Dinna worry, Redmond,” said Robbie with a tired smile. “You wait. You’ll get your sea-legs. Dinna worry. They’ll come.”

  After the cold and the air and the slosh of sea in the fish-room, the galley was stifling, a closed vat of fry and droplets of batter and heat. My glasses fogged over at once, so I sat down on the bench to the immediate right of the door, took them off and tried to wipe them clear with my handkerchief, a piece of cloth as salty and sodden as the rest of me. Jerry the cook came into blurry focus through the murk, red-faced and sweaty. He paused beside me and squeezed my shoulder, a friendly squeeze that stopped just short of snapping my collar-bone. “Go help yourself. It’s all ready in the pans. I’m away to relieve Jason. Eat as much as you can, you’ll need it. When the weather comes—there’ll be no cooking!”

  Luke sat down opposite me. I looked at his plate, appalled. There was a pyramid of food on it. “What did I tell you?” he said, inhaling at the apex. He leant back on his bench and with his fork tapped the base of the pyramid, a two-inch-high plate-across discus of batter. “Aye—pizza for two, deep fried. Proper chips, made by Jerry” (the next layer up). “Three fried eggs, three sausages, bacon—and Redmond, if you really want it, there’s a battered Mars bar to stick on top! What did I tell you? Eh? Is this even better than the breakfast at Nairn? Or what?”