“And I’ve also caught an Opah, maybe 5 feet long, beautiful,” said Jason, getting up, going with long-limbed ease to refill his plate from the clamped saucepans on the stove. “And that was interesting, Redmond, interesting in itself, so beautiful,” he said, sitting down again, “a dark blue back, gold sides, pink belly—and these deep red fins.” He took a mouthful of haggis. Jason even ate fast. “And they’re also interesting because they’re related to the oarfish—and that’s weird enough even for you, and as far as I know, Luke’ll put me right, we know sod all about the oarfish. You can’t catch them in a trawl, they’re far too fast, they swim, they undulate like a sea-snake” (with his right hand and arm he made a quick sinuous movement across the table), “you only see them when they’re sick at the surface or washed ashore dead—and that must be really something, because they can be a good 20 feet long and their bodies are flattened, really flattened, a foot or so deep and only two inches across! But that’s not all, it’s bright silver all over, and along its entire length there’s an unbroken dorsal fin that’s the brightest scarlet—and right over its head this fin erects into a brilliant scarlet crest, a mane, a huge Indian headdress! So there you are, there’s no bullshit about it—there’s your sea monster, your genuine sea serpent!”
“So have you seen one?”
“No. No, I haven’t,” said Jason, calming down. “But I damn well know people who have, so don’t you go getting the wrong idea!”
Sean laughed.
“Of course it exists!” said Luke. “It’s been filmed. We’ve got specimens in museums.”
“Oh aye,” said Sean. “Museums, is it?”
“And anyway,” said Allan Besant, still looking young, red-cheeked, his finger no longer bandaged, “Redmond, Worzel here, old Worzel Gummidge—he didna ask about monsters!” He leant forward from his place in the far corner of the right-hand table, across Dougie. “No, Worzel asked about sex. Worzel wants to know about sex!”
Even Dougie laughed.
“So tell him about the seabream!”
“You tell him,” said Jason. “Tell him yourself!”
“Nah,” said Bryan, “dinna go asking Allan. He’ll get it all mixed up. The seabream, Redmond, they can be female one minute and male the next. And that’s a fact!”
“Transsexuals!” I said.
“Aye,” said Allan, looking mean. “It’s them that’s all mixed up!”
“Christ, boys,” said Sean, sitting right back in his place, back against the wall. “And you let me eat them! I even took a couple to my nan!”
Luke laughed. Sean’s views on biology, I could see, gave Luke a special, professional pleasure. “It’s OK,” he said, “it’s not like a disease. You can’t catch it. In fact it’s surprisingly common at sea.”
Sean said, flatly: “Is focking not.”
“In the sea!” said Luke. And then with a sudden howl of laughter: “The fish!”
“Dirty bastards,” said Sean, not particularly reassured.
“Aye, take the wrasses, for instance, lots of them are hermaphrodite, and females change into males. Our own Cuckoo wrasse, that’s a lovely fish, a cleaner fish, a barber—I’ll tell you about that too, sometime.”
Sean said, “Keep it ter yerself.”
“It’s like Tiresias,” I said. “He’d been both a woman and a man, and he was able to report that women not just enjoyed sex more—they enjoyed it ten times more!”
There was a silence.
And then, “The sneaky bastards,” said Sean. “So how come they keep saying no?”
“You should wash more,” said Robbie. “You should wash your hair.”
“Ach,” said Sean. “Don’t be such a sissy! What’s a pillow for? Eh? It’s a pillow that cleans your hair. You should see the state of mine!”
IN THE NEXT HAUL there were several hundred blue-backed, white-bellied little fish, a by-catch which excited Luke: “Blue whiting, Redmond! They may look like nothing to you—fair enough—but they could be very important. You see, they’re vastly abundant, as we say, but as yet we know very little about their real life cycle, their true distribution. So that’s part of my job too—maybe we could fish for Blue whiting, sustainably. But as yet no one knows. They’re codlets, in the cod family, and here in our fisheries they’re the main food for hake. So I wouldn’t want to be a Blue whiting, not really, because imagine it—at night you go to sleep in mid-water, peaceful as could be, and that’s when the big hake, who’ve been resting all day on the bottom, that’s when they swim up from the depths and swallow you.”
After the haul I stayed behind with Luke in the fish-room, wedged on a box, hard against the side of the conveyor to the hold, beside the small steel ledge on which Luke had set up his weighing-machine. Sean, stepping out of his oilskin trousers and sea-boots, shouted: “That’s it, boys! Go for it! Go for the science, that’s what I say! And boys, you’ve got plenty of time for now and that’s the truth! Because Bryan told me—that focking Force 12 you wankers wanted is almost on us, and Jerry’s made sandwiches. So it’s gotta be bad. It’s gonna be heavy, man. Sandwiches, for Chrissake. So there’ll no be any cooking, that’s for sure, and boys” (he held the steel door to the galley and cabins half open), “if we’re lucky there’ll no be any fishing. So you—you’ll be doing science. And me—I’ll be in ma focking bed! See ya!”
I held Luke’s clipboard, and in the appropriate columns on the Marine Lab stencilled sheets (a dispiriting stack of them caught in the jaws of the rusted bulldog-clip) I pencilled in the letters and numbers he shouted against the rising chaos of sound outside: “GHA!” (Greenland halibut). “Length—!” and “Weight:—!” (so many numbers). And, a quick slish of his short red-handled knife to its underside: “Female!” or “Male!” (a ♂ or a ♀ in the blodgy wet column that wouldn’t stay in focus). And then a quick slit to the head of whatever species of fish it happened to be—and there’d be a tiny otolith in his rough ungloved hand. He’d pick the right size of plastic screw-top bottle from the red biscuit-box held in place against the conveyor-strut by his left boot—and then, most impressive of all, pull a stub of pencil from behind his left ear and, in the gathering violence of the trawler’s movements (which to me now seemed frantic, terminal—how could this man-made thing withstand such an onslaught one moment more?), Luke would write, on the steel shelf, balancing himself without apparent effort, and he’d fill a label (so small) headed DAFS Scientific Investigations under: Haul no…. Net … Depth … Duration … Area… Date… He’d add AT (“Average temperature at that depth!”), and there was a system, I realized. There was a basket, red plastic, for each haul so far. “MBE!” (“Grenadiers! Macrourus berglax!”), “LIN!” (no explanation), “BLI!” (ditto)… We were going to work through them all. I thought: “BED!” and “BED!” and: “Someone should do something nasty to that Sean, pronto.”
And then a handful of small remarks from books I had read surfaced randomly from my subconscious, an inner turmoil that was beginning to be worrying, frightening even—and sleep, I thought, it’s obvious, one of its purposes must be to keep a strong fine-mesh carbon-fibre filter hard down on that part of our mind which is as unrestrained as the sea out there—yes, Alister Hardy, I thought, the religious nutcase, the man who all his life had wanted to prove the existence of God, scientifically, once and for all, and who, in his last years, set up an institute for the study of the paranormal in Cambridge (from which, not surprisingly, we still await results), was none the less a truly great pioneer in the study of the natural history of the sea. Alister Hardy, as my mother might have said, was “not the marrying kind.” (And yes, it’s true, I thought, the unleashed or even one-eighth-unleashed subconscious throws up scum and euphemisms and clichés because it deals not in advanced words, but in the primitive power of images, cave-paintings, pictures, rituals, inner photographs clicked by emotions we want to forget.) “Look Alister,” his perplexed tutor at Oxford had said to him. “Of course you can solve the small matter of the existe
nce of God one day, but that’s for later in your career, dear boy, and you’ve done so well in your finals, and it’s obvious to all of us that you love fish—so how about a doctorate study of plankton, instead? God’s work and all that? OK?” And the result, eventually, had been his two classics in the New Naturalist series: The Open Sea, volume one (1956), The World of Plankton, and volume two (1959), Fish and Fisheries. But the image that presented itself was not of his research. No—somewhere in those two volumes, I remembered, he insists how essential it is to get on, to make friends with those tough trawlermen, those heroic fishermen. And his chosen method (as I’d learnt from the oral tradition): it was simple. After every voyage he stripped naked to the waist on the quay and he offered to fight or, rather (not at all the same thing), he offered to box (Queensberry rules), all his former companions, one by one.
“Hey Redmond!” I heard Luke shouting. “Don’t go off like that! Stay awake! Blue whiting! It’s OK—we only need to measure and weigh and sex them!”
I thought: never, not even in my young student days of coffee and amphetamine, have I gone without sleep for so long.
“Just stay awake, Redmond, because all this is very important for you, for us, for all of us, in evolutionary terms, and you like that, I know you do. Because the most basic biochemistry of our brains” (the loudspeakers, Fleetwood Mac, the Corrs, they’d ceased their singing; Jason up there on the bridge had obviously switched them off, because as far as he was concerned the haul was in and gutted and stowed in ice, down in the hold—and yet a deeper mega-bass of wilder drumbeats continued, far louder, drumbeats whose rhythms didn’t give a damn about artifice or restraint, and wails, yes, those really were inhuman banshee wails out there …), “our chemical inheritance—it means we must have been eating fish fats, and you can’t find those on the savannah … (Blue whiting! Here we go—just start a separate line, that’s right, and label it BW)… Aye, it’s obvious, the human brain could never have developed as it did if we hadn’t moved out of Africa along the shorelines, eating seafood. DHA, one of the fish fats. It’s part of the make-up of our nerve-cell membranes! And fish oils are vital for the health of the cardiovascular system—there’s no argument about that—and so it stands to reason” (he began on the hundreds of Blue whiting), “if you have a problem with your heart, your brain is the next to go. As Crawford says, ‘where cardiovascular disease leads, mental health follows.’ The UK consumption of fish, Redmond, it’s dropped by half since the 1950s. And that’s not all, because now we eat mostly white fish. Whereas it’s herring, mackerel, sardines, pilchards, anchovies, salmon—the oily fish—that’s what we really need. And Crawford thinks that’s why there’s so many depressives like you and me, so many schizophrenics, so many minor nutcases all about the place. And why not? It makes sense. In the developing foetus, 70 per cent of the energy that crosses the placenta is devoted to brain growth—and for that you need a really good blood supply. And the brain is 60 per cent fat and needs specific fats, especially the Omega-3 fats, the very long-chained, unsaturated fats, the three main fish oils. And if you don’t believe me, consider this: to convert vegetable oil—from walnuts and soya, rape seed, pumpkin, hemp seeds, whatever—to those fish oils is a slow and costly business for the body. And when’s the only time that Homo sapiens actually does that? Eh? Can you guess? No? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s in human breast-milk! So it’s obvious, isn’t it? If I ran the country I’d find a way to manage our herring and mackerel stocks exactly as the Icelanders husband their cod—and I’d stuff all our pregnant women with oily fish every moment of their waking days, and everyone else, too, and I’d single-handedly make this country the most intelligent place in the world! And I’d save our fisheries!”
Sean pushed open the steel door and, in his socks, stepped over the sill. In his right hand he held a couple of inch-thick ham sandwiches. “Hey boys! Get these down you!” he said, handing one to me (which I started in on at once). Getting close up to Luke (Sean obviously had something he wanted to say), he gave him the other (which Luke dropped into the empty fish-slimy Greenland halibut basket, for safe-keeping). “Aye Luke, I really rate you, man, know what I mean? I didna mind what science was. At school, you know? We bunked off that, in Caithness like. But Luke, you’re cool, so why bother with all these measurements? Eh? Who cares? Who’ll know? Luke—you look terrible. I’ve never seen anyone look so focking knackered. And I like you, you know. You’re cool, man, you really are. So why not be sensible? Listen to me, to me—Sean. Chill out. Make it up. Later. Speed kills, know what I mean? No one, nae a soul, should work like you do. Even Bryan, for Chrissake, he does his grafting right enough—and then he says fock it and knocks off. But you, Luke, you’re a cool guy, and you do all the gutting, same as us, but then you do this shit. You dinna sleep! So get this—Redmond here, Old Worzel, you give him half an hour and he’s chilled right out, in his bunk, like a dead man. And look at him, so old, and he’s finished his sandwich, and yet here he is with us, and he’s still alive. See what I mean? For me, look—fock it all, all of it, I dinna care, but to me and Jerry, that’s what we said, Luke—you’re a hero. Know what I mean? You’re no doing it for the money. And that’s great, man. That makes me feel good. Far out. It’s just, you know, I wish I’d tried harder at school. But I’m worried about you, Luke. And it’s no just me. It’s Jerry, too. So get this, Luke” (Sean grabbed Luke’s right arm and shook it), “you’re a freak! A real freak! For Chrissake, man, go to bed! Or you’ll kill yourself! You’ll die! Get some sleep!”
And Sean, suddenly overcome by all this deep emotion, turned without a backward glance, fumbled with the lever of the door, and was gone.
“Hey Luke,” I said, and again I was ashamed even as I heard myself saying it, “do you know? Can you guess? What else does the brain need to operate smoothly? Eh?”
“Aye,” said Luke, entirely in control of himself. “Sleep! So that’s OK. Look, I’m almost finished here. So that’s OK. So go on—go get some sleep.”
“Aye,” I said for the very first time in my life. “Maybe I will.”
LUKE WOKE ME, an hour later. “Come on! Jason wants you in the wheelhouse!” (The nylon-silky enclosing body-stocking bliss, the stilled aches in every joint in my skeleton—and I had to get out and up?) “I told Jason you were asleep, I really did.” (I focused on Luke’s skin-flaky blotched red-eyed face—so, I thought, you, you bastard, you haven’t had any sleep at all.) “And Jason said to me, ‘Luke,’ he said, ‘I don’t care—for all I care, Redmond’s dead. But even if he is I want him up here now. I want him to see this. Because I had to stop fishing. You understand?’ So that’s the skipper. So you’ve no choice. And it’s true, it’s what you told me you wanted—a hurricane. At least, Redmond, I’m sorry, but it’s probably a Force 11 gusting 12. So it’s the tail-end, I’m afraid. A Force 12, a Category One Hurricane, you know, a baby, the lowest category—not as bad as you hoped. I’m sorry. I really am. But Jason says it’s the best he can do. And you must see it, right? Because in six hours or so it’ll be gone, dispersed. It’ll probably hit the far north of Norway as a mere storm. So up you get!”
As I climbed the stairs of the companionway to the bridge, the hurricane (why did Luke have to say baby?) took the use of my legs away, and it seemed it might also rip my arms right off (my hands clamped one after the other, left, right, hang on, up the rails).
I stared out of the curved-around stern-window of the bridge; Luke held me hard, steady, by the shoulders (how come little Luke has got so tall? I asked myself, and the answer, pronto, was vaguely shaming: because you’re almost on your knees…). It was black night, but the Norlantean’s main stern searchlight was on, and the black night was a white-out of spray, a chaos of whirling streaks of foam—in patches so thick that at first the lines and spirals seemed almost stationary in the inverted cone of the fierce rays of light. And then, as I withdrew my mesmerized gaze from the furthest penetration of the beam (which was not far—just enough to give me a glimpse o
f the Norlantean’s starboard gun-whale, now rolling down, down, digging in to the waves I couldn’t see, and would she come up? How could she come up? And why did she have to move her whole stern like that, a fast side-to-side rear-end waggle like a cat about to pounce, and then wallow deep down in, and slew obscenely left-to-right in a movement I’d certainly not felt before …), as I focused on the very brightest patch of spray and bunched foam a yard or two out from the searchlight, I realized that all this torn-up water was moving so very shockingly fast, and I felt sick, but it was not seasickness—no, it was far worse, it was entirely personal, hidden, the steely stomach-squeeze of genuine all-out fear, that sharp warning you get before you panic and disgrace yourself to yourself for ever …
I turned my head sharply away—and there was Jason behind me in his harness, in his skipper’s chair, turning to us himself, and he said: “Good evening, gentlemen.”
I thought: Jesus, how can he joke like that? When we’re all about to die? What’s funny about that?
“Here!” said Luke, changing his grip from my shoulders to the backs of my arms just above the elbows, pinioning me forward to the second chair, the First Mate’s chair, buckling me into the harness and himself standing easily, at ease, beside me. And I thought: that’s not right either, how come this thin small Luke has gone and got himself such muscles? Nothing, nothing at all is as it should be…
Jason said, “Good evening, Redmond. Welcome to my bridge.”
Luke said, “I’m sorry, Redmond, you know, don’t get me wrong, thank you for all your help, the companionship, you know, I really appreciate it. I want you to know that. But I’ve got to go—you know, I want to sleep.”
Luke, I realized, as he disappeared from my immediate-left field of vision (I had my head thrust back rigid against the high curving rest of the chair, which seemed a comfort of sorts, and I was not going to move my neck for anyone), Luke (and this was, obscurely, an even greater reassurance), Luke, I thought: he is no longer in control of his own thoughts. And better still, I thought, Luke has lost his powers of speech—he keeps saying you know, doesn’t he? Hundreds and hundreds of times, over and over. So it’s obvious, he’s had it, he’s finished. Clapped out. So at once I forgave him for being such a hero, for being so alien-competent, for saving me, for fixing everything so that I could almost function in this world of his. Luke, after all, despite appearances, Luke was human. So that was OK, wasn’t it?
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