“So the meal carries on, and he talks to me brilliantly—you know, the kind of man who makes you feel intelligent as you never felt before and, as he talks, you understand all the reality behind the predictive mathematics of kin-selection, of the new altruism, of the biological necessity of this altruism that has nothing to do with Wynne-Edwards!”
“Aye!”
“And in the morning,” I shouted, in triumph, “you can’t remember a thing!”
“Aye! Aye!” shouted Luke. “That’s right! You can’t!”
“So get this!” I yelled. “Keep calm! We got through the Tesco pavlova and cream, the cheese and coffee, and I’d been telling him about my pond—I love my pond—and in those days it was only a few years old and OK, Luke, I hear you, so let’s be honest, perhaps it is just a few square yards of water in a big black sunken rubber condom—but to me, you understand, it’s a lake! And I go out every night with this huge long non-compensatory black Maglite torch and I stare into it, and the things you see in there! So, just between us, I’ll tell you the secret: you think yourself down to a pinhead in the water, Daphnia-size, OK, to you and me, waterflea size—and then you get the real terrors! Delicious! Here comes Dytiscus, the Great water beetle larva, two inches long, dislodged (by the end of my stick) from its ambush position—the Water Tiger, the most ravenous killer in the pond, flicking its rear end, its front-end injection-mandibles so obscene and long … Anyway, OK? So eventually Bill says, ‘Let’s go and look at this pond of yours.’ So I hand him the mega-Maglite torch, and we step out the few yards from the back door across the little lawn, and we stare into the pond, together. And Bill says, ‘Redmond, you have two discrete populations of Daphnia, associating solely with their con-specifics.’
“And meanwhile, his wife and my wife, Belinda, are walking to the car in the drive (OK, the drive-in), so we amble over, and as we go Bill stops and turns to me and he says: ‘You know, Redmond, this is the first I’ve heard of it, but I think that perhaps my wife is leaving me because I don’t earn enough money. I think that must be it. Yes! Because, you know—I only have an ad hominem Royal Society Research Professorship at Oxford. Nothing else!’
“And he drives off in his little car (nothing as grand as mine, Luke, you understand, not a patch on a Renault Clio 1.4 super-limo) and it backfires (OK, so it didn’t backfire). I think: yes! Yes he’s right! Those Daphnia, waterfleas to you and me, those beautiful little waterfleas that under the microscope hold their arms up and forward over their heads: I bought one watery plastic bag of them from the Burford Garden Company and the other from Waterperry!”
“Great! I love that! Christ, Redmond, you got lucky, big time!”
“Yes, yes! But I haven’t finished! Get this! You know what? At the end of the very next month, when she’d left for good, when she’d gone to Rousay for ever, he won the Crafoord and the Kyoto Prize for biology! Worth much more than the Nobel!”
Luke yelled, “Goal!”
I yelled, “Goal!”
And then, together, we yelled: “Go-aaaal!”
AFTER A SILENCE BETWEEN US, from the darkness that threw itself about, Luke said: “Redmond, your thought, you know, it’s all broken up—it’s fractured. What is this? Why do you want my opinion?”
“Fractured?” I shouted, stung (but I resisted the impulse to sit up with outrage, with instant aggression, because the top of my head still hurt from the last time, and how civilized you’ve become, I thought, as I lay there, rigid). “Fractured! Come on—it’s obvious: Bill Hamilton, like you, was an alpha male. But in his case he was mentally, not physically, absent. You see, Luke—it comes to the same thing. Because he was never 100 per cent available to the person he loved most in normal life. Because of the constant presence, the unremitting pressure of a possible shout, as you call it, from his very own personal pager, like yours, the essence of his life, the whole purpose—but in his case it wasn’t from the lifeboat station, it was from the subconscious on-call of his own ideas. Imagine it: Quick! Drop everything! Get out to this one! Save it! Before it disappears for ever!”
“So no woman could stay with him?”
“Right! She decided, unconsciously, once she’d had her alpha-male children (and Luke—look here—I never met Bill’s children but I’ll bet they’re brilliant), she thought—Jesus, if I want to be happy, if I want to feel totally noticed, if I want to be full-time no-distractions 100 per cent valued by a male whose life will be centred on me, then, while there’s still time, I’d better go grab a decent, hard-working, useful, indispensable dentist! And who the hell could argue with that? Jesus, Luke, when you reach my age, the toothaches: our inherited fish-ancestor sensitive long-snout nerves all squashed-up in our pug-dog faces—and to our teeth, for Chrissake! And if there’s a God, that’s another big mistake he’s got to answer for, you bet, and come to think of it, my dentist from always, Bob Farrant, it’s a damn good thing he doesn’t know how much I really value him!” (And Jesus, I thought, the whole left side of my face—it hurts, and has it gone puffy? Do I have an abscess? Yes, I think I do, but “Bad luck, babies!” I said to them. “You several billion parasitic bacteria breeding like Irish rabbits in my back upper-left dead molar’s root-canals, where you and I know there’s no blood supply, so no phagocytes of mine, no antibiotics of Bob Farrant can penetrate. Bad luck, babies! Bad choice! Because you and me, all of you, we’re going to drown together!” So how’s about that, you filthy little shitbags?”)
“Och aye! Aye! So what? Your teeth is it? Jesus! You sad old freak! But what about W. D. Hamilton? Eh? Aye—that was really interesting! So why? Why do you want my opinion? Here I am Redmond—I’m ready for it, right now…”
“You are? Well it’s—homosexuality!”
Luke behaved badly. He snorted. He probably, I thought, judging by the muffled, snuffly sounds, was laughing outright, his face, his waggly ears, stuffed into his pillow.
“No! No! You stupid scientist! You marine biologist you—and what could be better than that? Eh? You’re a bozo like the rest of us! You’ve got it all wrong! You don’t understand what Hamilton’s most famous work, that great paper on kin-selection—you don’t realize what it means! Of course you don’t! Because you’re a heterosexual like me—and heterosexuals have made this stupid myth, to protect their dignity, their macho sense of themselves for—probably two hundred thousand years! Okay-so we had an inkling of it in recent popular biology with Lorenz’s geese—you know, that threesome, the two bonded bisexual males and the one female. And how she bred! Of course she did—two guys to forage for her, two guys to beat the shit out of all the other geese and any passing fox! But you’re right, I hear you, Lorenz had been a real Nazi, so quite rightly no one took any notice. Still, he almost redeemed himself, and he did get that Nobel… But yes, yes, you’re right—even that’s not the real point, I’m wandering. The point is Hamilton’s work. So elegant. Worker-bees, they share half the Queen’s genes, but they don’t breed, they work, they defend, they fight, and that’s the best way, statistically speaking, to pass on their own genes to the next generation.”
“Aye, we know all that…”
“Okay? You do? So let’s skip the intervening stages! And we come to my point, at least I think it’s mine, but you know how things are in science, you’re all so paranoid, so bitter-competitive, but yes, I’m sure this is entirely original, in its general implications, but Luke, you can have it, of course, gratis.”
“Oh, thanks. Gratis! Thank you, Redmond. Aye! Nuts!”
“The army of Sparta. You know how it was organized?”
Luke snuffled into his pillow. He blew. I heard it. Distinctly. He surfaced, presumably, and he blew again: “No!” And he re-snuffled. And Luke’s hilarity, I thought, it is so unfunny. How can he possibly laugh at a time like this? And laugh fit to bust—just when things are so very serious.
“Good!” I said, or rather I shouted, because, to be heard at all, to overcome the noise of the fear out there we had to shout across the f
our-foot gap between our bunks … “So just remember Luke—every one of those warriors certainly had a mother, yes? And a heterosexual father? And he probably had several heterosexual brothers and non-lesbian sisters, right?”
Another, highly offensive, pillow-whoosh: “Right!”
“So his gene-bank was at home? Yeah? Like a worker-bee?”
“Aye!” And then, in the dark, an oxygenated, unimpeded laugh, right out in the open …
“Luke! Stop it! Because I tell you—listen!—we’ve got homosexuals all wrong! They’re not effeminate. As heterosexuals males, especially in science, like to think. So how’s about the guy who made the synthesis that formed the early basis of your own new science? Eh? Alister Hardy. Or E. B. Ford, one of Hamilton’s own heroes, a misogynist poofter if ever there was one! Butterflies, yes? The Number One in the Collins New Naturalist Series, and he wrote Number Thirty, Moths, beautiful books! His friend Kettlewell (you know: Ford and Kettlewell—the famous natural-selection experiment with the Peppered moth) tells a great story about Ford: they were in the Canadian forest, studying their moths and butterflies, and base-camp was a log-cabin. Kettlewell came back from collecting one day; Ford was in the cabin at the work-bench; and in the doorway between them was a whacking great Grizzly. From inside the hut came Ford’s irritated little voice, ‘Go away bear! I’m very busy! Go away! You’re in my light!’ Well, of course, the perfectly normal, respectable—and, at that moment, upright bear, had never seen anything quite like Ford, so it ambled off, disgusted, shaking its head…”
“Redmond, you’re so bookish …”
“Luke, that’s a compliment, yes? Or you think that’s not macho or something?”
“Not macho?” Luke woofed with laughter. “What’s that got to do with it? With anything? You’re such a kink, Redmond! Such a screw-up! Jesus, how old are you? Fifty-plus! And to think I used to be sure that people like you, writers, whatever—I used to be certain that people like you, at least, as they grew older they became wiser! What a laugh! What a horrible joke! But then I knew, I knew we’d have fun, you and I! You’re so bookish. And of course that’s a compliment! Even though it is a bit kinky, as you’d say, because the content of those books, it’s not the whole story, is it? Redmond, I’ll bet you, ten to one, you’re the kind of freak, I’ll bet you—you’re the kind of freak that opens a book you fancy, when you think no one is looking: you open it right in the middle, don’t you? And you place your big nose—and hey!—you’ve got a nose just like Mister Punch! Anyone tell you that? It almost meets your chin! Aye! You place your nose right at the bottom of the gulley between the two pages and you push it up to the top, inhaling, taking a deep breath. Aye, you’re the kind of kink that smells books!”
“Yes! You bastard! Yes. I do. I do!”
“And so do I!”
“You do? So we’re friends, Luke! Eh? We’re real friends! For life!”
“Aye. Jesus. Spare us…”
“Uh?”
“Well, aye, it’s not really funny, because there’s something else I’d really really like to do, as a pure pleasure, in my life, as you call it. Imagine! I get a job at this new outlier of the brand-new idea of the University of the Highlands and Islands (can you imagine anything more romantic?) and in this great new reborn country, Scotland!”
“You do?”
“Aye! At the North Atlantic Fisheries College at Scalloway, in Shetland. Wild, Redmond! Wild in every sense! And Scalloway—so beautiful! So that’s my impossible fantasy. So listen! As you’d say (and by the way, Redmond, it’s such a pain, the way you say that)—so listen! Here’s the constant dream—I’ve already won a job at the college! Nuts! Right?”
“Right!”
“So somehow or other I’m already teaching (aye, I know, impossible!) and I have my research (anyone can do that!)—and the Boss, the President, whatever he’s called, he takes me aside in a corridor one day. And it’s January, you know, and there’s a Force 11 storm outside, and yet inside the college itself, it’s so warm, and the lights are on, and my halibut-breeding programme is going so well and by now I have a little cottage all of my own down the road, one of those beautiful little cottages, aye? You know? Those cottages that look so right they might have grown where they stand?”
“Yes! Yes! But come on, Luke! I’m not the only one whose mind is fucked! You’re wandering! Yes! Yes! You are! So what’s your point? Indeed, Luke, it occurs to me, your thought is so fractured! Yes! Yes, it is! So perhaps you can’t remember?”
“Aye! Well, Redmond! Know what I mean? Stop being so aggressive! Aye. Stop interrupting!”
“Och aye! Nuts!” I said, pleased with myself, and then, unbidden, the nuts tumbled out, and to me, they all seemed so very funny: “Pea-nuts! Hazel-nuts! Brazil-nuts! Testicle-nuts!”
“Jeesus! Stop it, Redmond! Be your age, right? And listen! Because I’ve got a long-term mortgage on it, because I have a regular, secure job, right? Aye? So I have this beautiful, this really old Scalloway cottage …”
“The Vikings!”
“No! But yes—it’s old this cottage, of course it is! And snug! And so good to look at, from every angle, and it’s built long ago by real masters of the art: it’s built to withstand a Category Five hurricane, winds at 200 mph-plus, and it has a little walled-in garden at the back—and there in the Highlands and Islands University, in this warm corridor of the college, the Boss, the President, he says to me, he says: ‘Dr. Bullough’ (because by then I’ve got my doctorate from Aberdeen), ‘Dr. Bullough,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to pressure you in any way, but as you know we’re a very young institution and we’re trying to build up a library in marine biology, a library of international standing and it so happens that every member of the Committee decided—and so I think we may call it a unanimous decision, don’t you?—we decided, every one of us, without exception, that you, Dr. Bullough, you are the only man capable of building up our new collection. I’m sorry, I truly am—but there’ll be no increase in your Lecturer Grade One salary to cover the extra work—we have no provision for that—but it so happens that we’ve just received a very generous bequest for the buying of books. From the widow of a famous Whalsay trawler-captain! It’s OK, Dr. Bullough, nothing said and so on… and I fully expect you to refuse, and no one will think any the worse of you, but…’
“And I say, Aye! Aye! I’m your man!’”
“Luke—you’ve begun to swear, I’m certain of it!”
“I do? I did? Well—I’m sorry. But who cares? Because it’s just a silly fantasy, and I’m never going to be able to lecture. So that’s it. Finish… When all this is done, Redmond, I’ll have to be off back to the Falklands, as a fisheries inspector, and there’s nothing wrong with that—because those guys do a great job: know what I mean? The fish stocks in the South Atlantic are still so rich—and without those inspectors you can say goodbye to the whole lot! The Japanese … But on the other hand of course I may as well slit my throat with a gutting knife!”
“Yeah! Well! Listen! As I was saying before you interrupted—don’t do that!—homosexuals are not effeminate. As heterosexual males like to think. No, not at all. In early and later post-pastoral small-city-societies they were the warriors, the fighters! And they died so that their heterosexual brothers and sisters could find mates and breed and farm and garden and found cities and get on with their lives in peace. But of course they didn’t think of it like that. No. They went off to join this club. Heaven! The Army!”
“Aye. They did? Please Redmond, try and concentrate, you know, on the one thing. Because, well, this is actually interesting…”
“It is? Luke, you really think so? Then that’s great! You’re my friend! Yes! The Army of Sparta? Front rank in the assault? The youngest boy-soldiers. Second rank? Older boys, in their early twenties, who had no relationship with the late-teenagers in the first rank. Third-rank? Hand-picked, as it were, Luke, men whose position in the line-of-battle was very carefully arranged, with much intelligence-gathering
(gossip to you!). They were set in place with the very latest information—because this was the only secret, the only key to spectacular victories! The homosexual General gave it lots of quiet thought, the plan of attack, because he knew that exactly behind the young men in the very first rank, but one indifferent rank back, he must put the mature soldier who was in love with that young man. And in the fourth rank he must place the soldier whose lover was directly in front of him, but in the second rank, one rank away. And so on. Shock-troops. Elite soldiers. Line-on-line. And if he got it wrong? Just one or two bondings that didn’t match? Then he knew his army would be ineffective, chaos, because his men would run diagonally to their lovers in moments of crisis, out of line, and bash into each other, and the battle would be lost, and—even if he survived—he’d be disgraced! But if he got it right—did that army advance? Jesus yes! And how! Because it was powered not by aggression, but by love. It ran into battle! It sprinted! It came on so fast and manic that it kicked the shit out of heterosexual armies five times its size. And of course it did, when you think about it, because what were those heterosexual soldiers thinking as this thoroughly focused, two-selves-contained, apparently mad, ferocious army ran flat-out, yelling, towards them? Yes—each soldier in a heterosexual army is isolated, he has another world of his own elsewhere, way behind him; he’s fond of his army mates, of course, but he’s not in love with one of them—no! He’s thinking disabling thoughts, and he can’t help it! At the worst possible moment for such thoughts he thinks: ‘So what’s my wife doing right now? And why am I putting up with all this? And are my children okay?’ Yeah. So there you have it. The Spartan Army zapped, but zapped, forces five times its size. And it could have done so every day of the week. It was the most successful army the world has ever seen!”
“Magic!” said Luke, as I sank back, muscle-less, exhausted, a meatless assemblage of disconnected aching bones in my sleeping-bag. “Magic! Great!” And then, in a different voice, one I recognized instantly because it seemed to come straight from my own three-quarters-forgotten world, from an inner secret memory of a very small circle (as we have to tell ourselves, if we still have the vitamins and hormones and relict health that means we even want to survive): it came straight from a so-called peer-thought-world of scepticism, outright corrective hostility—and that’s okay, and it can be beneficial, and besides, it’s flattering that people who think so differently are taking the slightest interest, and, eventually, you’re grateful… “So tell me,” he said, “those friends of yours in the SAS. Are they gay?”
Trawler Page 18
