Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “Magic! Nuts!”

  “Yes! But Morris got it all so very wrong (not that we can really blame him, because the Origin wasn’t published till 1859) and in particular he fucked up with the Hedge sparrow! Big time, as you’d say. Because Nick Davies in Cambridge, not so many years ago, he took a length of hedge and he DNA-fingerprinted every Hedge sparrow in it. (You know those nests, you must do—you must have sought them out as a kid—the dull brown little birds, Dunnocks, in the dull ordinary hedge: and then you find a nest—pow! The miracle of it! The perfect sky-blue eggs!) No? Well anyway, he got these extraordinary results—in the middle of the hedge, you know, the dominant male, the one with sex appeal as defined by Hedge sparrows, the famous guy, the great scientist, the President, the rock-star, he had his nest. And how do we know he was the alpha male? Simple! Because all the females for hundreds of yards to either side fancy him like crazy. And how do we know that? Is this a Just So Kipling story as jealous molecular biologists stuck in their airless labs like to say? Are they wrong? Is Dawkins right? You bet he is! Because all the females for hundreds of yards to either side fancy the top guy like crazy. And how do we know that? Because in his nest, every single one of those sky-blue eggs belongs to him—he’s the undisputed dad. And in the nests immediately to either side of his down the hedgerow, half the eggs are his—and so it goes on, until in the far outer reaches of his line of influence only one of the eggs in the distant nests will be his. Now, at the time, the mathematics of all this in the current computer models made no sense at all—why was he so profligate with his energies? So much so that he died at the end of the breeding season? The mathematics made no sense—until two young female doctoral students arrived in the lab. They knew what was wrong! Pronto. They solved the mathematics in a couple of weeks. And how? Because they instinctively considered the problem from a female point of view. The alpha male, the Luke in the hedge, he had sex appeal. Right? He’d got it. Whatever it was. So every female wanted him. The mere thought of him made them weak about their tiny knees. Yeah? Got it? So they didn’t give a damn about him as a person, you understand, and why should they? Only his regular mate could be expected to care if he died of clinical conkers at the end of the month. And Luke, you may have forgotten, terrestrial biology, you know, so boring for you, but in House sparrows the direct stimulus of spring sunshine—rays straight through the top of the skull—it tickles their dormant testicles, the hormone-release swells their internal balls to fourteen times their winter size. Now, I know, don’t bother-Hedge sparrows are not related to sparrows at all—but I’ll bet they get that very same feeling in their boxer shorts. Yes? Anyway, the women don’t care what he’s thinking—all they know is that they have to collect at least some of his sperm, even if it’s only the one time. So they wait and watch—and when their own low-ranking husband is out foraging for insects to feed the family, working his third-class arse off, and when the rock-star’s high-ranking wife is off doing likewise (because an alpha male has no time at all to devote to domestic life), then this low-ranking female whips up the hedge, just ahead of her low-ranking rivals, and she flutters her wings like a begging fledgling; and she lowers her head and she raises her vent—and she lures him off, fast, behind a bush. And it has to be fast, because if her low-ranking terminal yawn of a jerk of a hard-working husband sees them together—he’ll desert her, the nest—finish. And she can’t afford that, not at all. But it’s still worth the risk, because she’s had this great excitement, this massive orgasm, and all her internal sexual cilia have been beating fit to bust—and she’s got the alpha male sperm stored right up there in a special pouch, waiting for her next egg to slot down the tube. And so, however many times she couples with her low-ranking jerk of a shaming husband, she can rest easy—at least one of her eggs will meld her genes (deliciously) with those of the highest achieving, super-sexiest man in town. As judged solely by her fellow females. Because that’s the point. You see, Luke, when I was young, when I was alive, biologists of my generation (not that I was a biologist)—they didn’t bother to read Darwin, they didn’t know that The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex was really a two-volume brilliant treatise on the importance of sexual selection by female choice. They thought that the study of animal behaviour had begun with Von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen!”

  Luke, in a high voice I didn’t know he possessed, as if he was being strangled, said: “Redmond?”

  “Yes?”

  “I am not a Hedge sparrow…”

  “Of course you are! That’s exactly what you are! Look—I forget the precise figure, but let’s say it’s 30 per cent: 30 per cent of the eggs in that hedgerow were actually fertilized by the local alpha male. They were nothing to do with the lower-ranking husbands who’d been duped, who sweated away to bring up the resulting chicks. It’s now called the sexy-son-syndrome (isn’t that great?)—the female unconsciously wants, needs, to mesh her own genes with some guy that all the other females have decided is irresistible, pouting-gorgeous, centre-spread fit, because that’s her one big chance to spread her own genes, the essential her, throughout the next generation. Via an alpha male like you. And if you don’t believe me, consider this (as you might say): you upend a hedgerow (and I think, Luke, that this is my very own contribution, entirely original, but consider this—I’m giving it to you, Luke, gratis)—and what do you get? A tower block! And guess what? A DNA study was mounted on a tower block in Leeds, under the guise of an HIV survey, and yes! Thirty per cent of the children in that tower block were entirely unrelated to the poor sods who thought they were the fathers! So it’s not surprising, is it, that every mother-in-law, when face to face with her daughter’s new baby, whose red globby crumpled features might very well belong to a Martian, for all she knows, turns to her son-in-law and she goo-goo croons: ‘He/she/it’ (if it’s a hermaphrodite) looks exactly like you!’ Because she can be sure, she knows her own wizened born-again genes are in there OK, and she knows damn well that those genes need feeding, supporting.”

  “So what are you trying to say? Barking, Redmond! Nuts! Nuts! So what’s this to do with me?”

  “Everything! I’ve been thinking about it. And by the way, Luke, I don’t think your problem’s funny. It’s so interesting! It’s real. In contemporary society, it’s as if you’re a Yanomami warrior in the Amazons. Napoleon Chagnon lived with them off and on for years and his statistics are irrefutable. If you’re manically brave, if you’ve killed people in the constant low-level group-to-group warfare in the jungle, even if you die at twenty-five, when your reactions aren’t quite as fast as they used to be, when you’re coming of age and losing your ruthless edge, when you’ll probably be picked up by someone else’s 6-foot-long arrow and pinned back-to-trunk against a tree—even so you’ll leave six times more offspring than an ordinary husband. Because the women in the shabono, the oval, communal, stockaded, open-centred dwelling place, like a theatre—they listen very carefully to the returning hunter-warriors’ tales around the home fires. And then guess what? For the next warrior-resting week they whip the current alpha male off behind a bush and collect his sperm, fast, when no one’s looking!”

  “Nuts!”

  “Nuts yourself! Of course it’s not nuts! And anyway, stop saying nuts, and just a friendly word—you know—stop staying you know all the time, OK?”

  “Oh come on, Redmond, let’s sleep!”

  “Certainly not! Luke—just you stay awake and listen! Because this will change your life! All men should know this. Biology—it’s such a wonderful, relaxing study. And you, you’re supposed to be a biologist. Jesus, you’re so privileged!”

  Luke groaned, an anxious kind of mid-pitched groan …

  “So there you go—your top Yanomami warrior will reproduce like crazy, in his brave brief life he’ll spread his genes. He’ll pass on his alertness, his aggression. Whereas you—you won’t—because I’m sure that all your many serial girlfriends in Aberdeen (and each time you think it’s love, you p
oor sod), I’m sure that every last one of them is on the pill—so despite your great efforts, your real wish to settle down, your genes stay right there with you. In your bunk, as it happens.”

  “Eh?”

  “Yes! And you don’t know why! Well I’ll tell you! It’s really sad—because in all the societies that are vivid to me, the Iban, the Kenyah, the Kayan, the Ukit in Borneo; the Curipaco and Yanomami in the Amazons; the Bantu groups, the pygmies in the northern central Congo—in all those places, Luke, you’d be the Number One! By now you’d have twenty or thirty children …”

  “But please, please, Redmond, I don’t want twenty or thirty children …” (And this was said with such unexpected force, such emphatic pleading, that it silenced me. I could almost hear him thinking. And then, into this pleasing, mental, thoroughly human world of a one-to-one exchange of ideas—a local, comforting, feel-good conversation, one of life’s perpetual pleasures, a pleasure which, if you had a residue of health and energy, you could rely on, no matter what—into this world-for-two there came the sound which we had managed to outwit, to exclude for at least half an hour: the sickening onslaught of an outer world that intended to kill us. And I thought: Jesus, Redmond, it’s such a luxury to have someone else here with you as you prepare to die, just before that rusted inward-bulging section of bow four yards from our heads finally bursts—if we can’t sleep we must talk, we really must, because that sound out there is the source of all fear. The spur for all religions. Yeah, yeah, and I know, dickhead, how often have you said that external fear is comforting? That the real fear is nameless, internal, the panic, the generalized paranoia, the rocking-back-and-forth anxiety of (say) clinical depression? Yeah, yeah, but that particular outer fear was a human, personal one, just for you, the fear of an arrow in the guts, of a Kalashnikov burst, of a swipe from a machete! And how romantic it was! And how quickly it passed! And how pleased you were, how proud you were afterwards! Whereas this, this massively weighted indifferent murderous pounding all about us—there’s no romance about it, nothing personal, it’s such an easily forgotten, such a commonplace and truly foul way to die, and it doesn’t stop, it goes on and on…)

  I yelled: “For Chrissake, Luke, please, say something! Shout at me!”

  “No! Really not!” (A shout.) “Twenty or thirty? How would I be a good father—and I mean really good—how would I be able to really really love twenty or thirty children? No! You’re barking! Redmond—if I have children, just the one or two, and yes, you’re right, as it happens I really want children, then I’ll be their own dad, and no mistake, and to me they’ll be the most special people in all the world! And I’ll want to be with them all the time. You know? But of course that’ll be impossible. Because I’ll have to work. Work my arse off. To support them. But when I get home they’ll be the whole point of my entire life! The centre! The anchor! The chain that never gives way!”

  “Of course they will! But don’t be silly. The point is this: all those women are attracted to you like hover-flies to a sunflower. And Luke, you’d be a 16-foot sunflower! Because you’re an alpha male! And why? Because you’re prepared to leave the warm comfortable lab or the relaxing pub or the snuggly paradise of your bed in your little cottage—you’re prepared to leave all that pronto, instantly, day or night, at the cold-call of your emergency bleeper! And you go straight out, half awake and, I suppose, at this time of year, as often as not you go straight out into a fucking hurricane like this! But in that ridiculously small boat, that lifeboat you showed me! A cockleshell! So that’s why they want your sperm! But that’s also why they don’t want you. Or not for more than a month or three. Because from the female point of view, to live with someone, to settle down and breed long-term—for that, you want a good, quiet, ordinary, kind, reliable down-the-hedge male. And in your world, I suppose, that would be a university lecturer on a permanent contract…”

  “But I can’t lecture! I can’t do it!”

  “And yes, it’s great, isn’t it? The vast explanatory power of Darwin’s second idea—evolution by sexual selection, by female choice!”

  “Aye! Whatever! But I can’t do it! I am not going to lecture … to stand up on a stage!”

  “So Luke—have you even tried to imagine what it must be like to live with you? There you are, a young woman in love, in the prime of life, and you know you’re beautiful, desirable in every way, and you’ve won this guy that all your friends fancy like crazy: and yet there you are, unable to sleep, so anxious, and the wind’s coming in screaming from the sea a few hundred yards away—fit to take the roof off the whole fucking Fittie terrace! Yes, and your man, your lover—such amazing sex—and yet he’s just abandoned you, right in the middle of such out-and-out happiness. And you run through it in your mind, over and over. Where did you go wrong? Why—he just left you—and why? For a shout, as he calls it, a call on that ghastly little bleeper that he keeps on his body, clipped to his belt, or on the floor by the bed, at all times. Yes, there’s no doubt about it, he abandoned you, in the middle of such love-making; and in that so well-trained but still desperate and personal hurry! And why? Just to save the lives of other people, people that you don’t know, people that he doesn’t know, strangers, strangers that, once rescued, he’ll never see again! That’s right, he’s abandoned you for foreign sailors, Russians probably, or Muslims, Laskars, whoever the hell they are, people who can’t even speak English, people who’ve put to sea in those illegal rusting hulks you can see tied up in Aberdeen harbour every day of the week! And then you have to get up all alone and go to work, and the cottage is so dead and there’s this howling wind and rain—and sometimes there’s no word for sixteen hours! And of course you forget that that’s exactly why you fell in love with this absurdly brave alpha male in the first place! The alpha male you and all your friends fancied like crazy! Because now you know—all that wickedly good love-making later—you know there’ll never be a single evening, not one candle-lit just-the-two-of-you evening when he’ll be entirely 100 per cent yours!”

  “Aye! Aye! Maybe there is something in what you say! Maybe! Because it’s true, Redmond, when I was doing part of my lifeboat training you know—sorry!—down in Poole, where the RNLI has its headquarters, when we were picking up a new Trent Class boat to take back up round the coast to Aberdeen—the RNLI museum curator took me and Julia, my girlfriend, round the museum, the archives. He took us, the real climax as far as he was concerned, to see the Ornate Book of Remembrance, some such title, and he took it out of its case for us to look at, for us to handle—as if it was the most precious thing in the world, which, I suppose, for him, it was. You see, Redmond—it’s the book where crewmen who’ve lost their lives in the service are recorded. Their names, in gold script, one to a page. And then there are their service dates and the dates of their main actions, all their major successful rescues at sea. And then there are secondary pages, you know—aye, the odd poem from friends, and the saddest brave remarks from their mothers and fathers and wives and children. All that—that was terrible to read, to look at—there’d even be a drawing or two, you know, there was a drawing from someone’s six-year-old daughter; and drawings and words meant to capture their character, you know, from their colleagues, the ones who hadn’t got to that particular shout on time. Aye, and how guilty those guys feel! For no reason, but you can’t help it. Anyway, this museum curator, he turns to me and Julia, and he says, all emotional: ‘Mr. Bullough, Luke,’ he says, ‘if you really dedicate yourself to the service, do you realize that you, you yourself, you could be in here one day?”

  “Jesus!”

  “Aye!”

  “So what happened to Julia?”

  “She left me that weekend. I’ve not seen her since!”

  WE WERE SILENT. Surely, surely sleep would come? That unreachable deep healing state … way beneath the surface of all these terrors … and how I hate life on the surface of the sea—and why won’t my brain take orders and abandon this bullshit? Why? Obvious! Because it’s t
rue, the things your children say, yeah, yeah, I know, they say it with a laugh, but it’s true all the same, because nowadays they say, “Daddy, it’s terrible. You’ve become such a sad old fuck.” Please … so … “Luke!” I yelled. “Are you awake?”

  “Aye! But steady, Redmond. Go easy. Get a grip …”

  “Well, that’s good. Because there’s one thing about evolution by sexual selection—or by natural selection, come to that—one thing that really worries me. And I’d like your opinion!”