Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “It’s slow!” I yelled, caught out, as delighted as if I was back in the remembered simple days of primary excitement—the release and revelation of biology at school.

  “That’s right!” said Jerry, in front of me, fully attentive, not moving his head.

  “Aye!” shouted Luke. “It’s so slow it stays still! It lies on the bottom like a monkfish, but in very shallow seas. Each spine has two poison sacs near its tip—you tread on one—and a sheath slides back down the erect spine and the venom ejaculates into you along a couple of grooves. You scream with instant agony—terrible!—you scream and collapse and go mad and rave, you make a lot of noise—your legs swell up fit to burst and your fingers and toes turn black and drop off and in six hours you’re dead!”

  “Great!”

  Jerry said: “Shit!”

  “Aye!” said Luke. “But I’m sorry, you’ll only find it from the Red Sea to East Africa—and across the Indian Ocean to the northern coasts of Western Australia. And that’s another thing, Redmond—about marine biology, I mean, you know—the species reach, it can be vast. Not like your jungles!”

  “Yes!”

  “And another weird thing, these redfish” (two more down the tube), “right here in the north-east Atlantic—guess what? Despite all these spines—they’re one of the staple foods of Sperm whales. I like that, I like Sperm whales, they’ve got the biggest brains on earth, they’re intensely social—the females defend and help each other and suckle each other’s calves … And come to that, their range, that really is vast—every ocean in the world, the females around the equator, the immature males in groups to the north and south, the huge old males, up to 60 feet long, spending most of their year feeding around the north or south pole, taking two months off to visit the schools of females in the tropics … They’re extraordinary animals, they really are—but hey! It’s too good a story to waste… I can’t concentrate. Not now. Not in here. But I’ll tell you about it later. I promise I will…”

  Simultaneously, Robbie, responsible, standing across from us, his own section empty—and unable, in the pounding noise, to share in the pleasure of Luke’s deep knowledge—shouted at Jerry: “You big girl’s blouse you! Get gutting! Bryan and Allan! They’re short below!”

  NO ONE SPOKE—for an interminable number of revolutions (it seemed to me) of the constantly reloaded gutting table: and Luke’s two big specimen-baskets filled with fish and crustacea that I could not believe had evolved to be as they were, to look as they did—so improbable, such animals from another world; which they were, of course, but I’d lost the nerve to ask, and besides, out of the dead mouth (below and in front of the manic staring eyes) of around one in twenty of the redfish in my tray, a long white living string of a worm attempted to wind its way to safety, a new home … So I’d take the redfish in my left hand and the worm in my right, and pull. And no matter how hard I pulled, the worm never broke—you couldn’t break the spirit of these worms—no, they just thanked you for your help and emerged intact, 8 inches or so of will-power, of a refusal to despair, and I slid them on to the cold steel lip of the tray, where they pulsed forward, full of hope, searching for a new life. And there again—on about one in a hundred of the redfish in my tray something obscene had attached itself… It was white, this thing, fleshy, intimate, shaming in a medical way, and it obviously hurt horribly, because where it had grown out (or perhaps it had driven itself in), the delicate pink scaly skin of the once-beautiful redfish was purple-black, and the fish itself was thin, wasted, haggard. And from the bruise a short stalk protruded, towing a flat semi-transparent disc with a dark centre, and at the rear of the disc were white frills, and from the white frills there trailed two long thin filaments … And how would you hide something personal and horrible like that, I asked myself, a rooted-in-you extension of you from your genitals or your side that was one-third your own length? What would you do? Because you can’t cut it off. Because you have no hands. And you can’t bite it off—because your neck is armour-plated scaly-rigid. So what do you do? Shove its slimy bulbous and tubular mass down a trouser-leg? Wind it living round your thigh so it doesn’t drop down and spasm beneath your skirt? And at last Luke said, just loud enough for me to hear: “They’re extraordinary animals, Sperm whales.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, agitated. “I’m sure they must be. But what are these things?” And I held up a redfish, its hanging obscenity attached.

  Luke stuck his gutting knife, blade first, behind his right ear. And I thought: why do they all do that? Why that insane nonchalant gesture? Because each time I see it—and all their knives are slit-sharp and would take off an ear like the stalk on a lettuce—I get a weak and trembly feeling right across those creases of skin at the backs of the knees …

  With his freed right hand Luke leant across and plucked the swinging length of twin tails and glob and filament out of the belly of the fish: it came away—shiek—as the purple wound split open and two white, linked lobes, covered in blood, slid into the palm of his blue glove.

  “A copepod, a parasitic copepod,” he said, directly into my left ear, as softly as anyone could speak on a trawler and still be heard. “The head, the holdfast, the anchor” (with his left index-finger he poked the hard white lobes in his right palm); “the body, the gut” (the circular glob with the dark centre); “the ovaries” (the frills); “and the egg sacs” (the twin tails); “and these copepods, they’re so efficient, big time, if you like parasites, and it’s one hell of a story, right enough, but now—now’s not the time … Because it’s tense here, Redmond, there’s real pressure, you know, pressure to get this haul done, sometimes it happens like that… for no particular reason … so we’ll talk later, OK?”

  AND EVENTUALLY EVEN THIS massive catch was sorted and sent along the conveyor to the chute down to the hold (or out on the discard chute to the starboard scupper for the kittiwakes), and Allan and Bryan had all the full-sized redfish packed in ice in the hold… and it was time to eat.

  And this was no ordinary supper, or breakfast, or whatever it was—this was fish and chips as I’d never tasted it—Sean’s chips were special (Sean was good on chips, even Jerry said so) and Sean’s batter had all come right (“At last!” said Jerry, next to me): and the fish? The fish was halibut, white halibut, as fresh as fish can be, and the steaks so big they overhung even the outsize trawler plates …

  “Oh shit,” said Jason, stepping into the fug, looking very tired, red-eyed, his stubble, now almost a beard, jet-black, his movements less lanky, less loose-limbed, his shoulders almost stooped. “Fish and chips is it? Fish and chips?”

  Jerry, sitting beside me, dug me in the ribs. “Good, eh? That Sean, he’s learnt. At last! But don’t forget—I taught him!”

  Jason, his plate piled, sat down next to Luke, opposite me: “And Redmond, I’ve been thinking about it. You remember, you asked me what was the oddest thing I’d caught in the nets? Aye, well, now I know you: I don’t think that’s what you meant. No. Not at all.” He looked straight at me, his eyes without expression, his face sour, ragged—and so close. (Jason, I thought, you’re the skipper, for Chrissake, so why don’t you sleep when you need to? Just an hour or two? And inside my head Luke’s voice answered at once: this Jason is the only man in the whole trawler fleet who can feel his way towards the fish. He’s got it. He’s blessed. So of course he can’t trust anyone else to shoot the net…)

  Jason repeated, “No,” aggressive, “you meant to ask me: ‘Jason, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever trawled up?’ Well, it didn’t happen to the Norlantean, not to us, it was the River Dee. They brought up forty bodies from a Chinook helicopter crash and the bodies—they were in a bad state, believe me. The amphipods and hagfish had had a go, but the clothes were still there, and the skeletons, bits and pieces. And the whole lot was hidden in the fish in the cod-end and fell into the hopper—and the horror of it, you know, call it what you like, but thank god they had some bright spark like Luke in the crew, always sticking his nos
e in the hopper, as he does, I’ve noticed, looking for rarities or fucking wonders of the deep … Search me … And that guy saved the crew, they’re all still at the fishing, so they were lucky—because if those half-chewed heads and feet and bits had come up the band and on to the gutting table, do you think those boys would ever have gone to sea again? Never! Of course not! Not one of them! And there again, the bodies were lucky too, a chance in a million—a real freak of a chance. Because I told you, no flower grows on a sailor’s grave—but this one time they did, the flowers grew… Not that those bodies were sailors … but thanks to the River Dee those men had a place in the land itself, in dry land, and that’s it, that’s the point—so the people who loved them when they were alive, and I’m talking real love here, so that means their mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, and wives, if they’re lucky, very lucky; and two or three friends, if they were exceptional men, good men, and those friends, three at most, you can’t handle more than three real friendships, they’ll be male friends—because no good man can have a really close female friend who’s not his wife, it can’t be done … Anyway… here’s the point: because of that haul on the River Dee each one of those men—clothes, dental records, they got the pieces identified—each one of those men had a patch of real earth to himself. The people who loved them could go somewhere to think in quiet, and bring back all those memories one after another and sit down in a place set apart from ordinary life and bring it all back … So those men lived again for a time, in other people’s heads, for a little while, and that’s the only immortality there is … And each one of us needs it, deserves it, when we’re dead… But trawlermen?” he said, faltering. The anger and dominance, the mastery left his face. “Drowned at sea? Forget it… You’re gone … Forgotten.” He appeared not to be able to raise his head; he stared at his still-full plate of halibut and chips, not sure, I thought, where he was, and he said, in a hollow voice, which seemed, by itself, to make a tunnel of cold emptiness right through the communal comforting fug, a something without weight or form that was waiting for us, between the two familiar tables, in the narrow passageway, in the otherwise thick, hot, fat-saturated, enveloping air. “Because your people have no place,” he said, to his untouched golden-battered halibut and his pile of hand-cut, irregular genuine potato-chips. “Nowhere visual to go … And which one of us can set time aside in a day, real time—without that effort, a release, a physical journey, a place to visit… to really remember someone? It’s not possible … Lost at sea… Aye! You bet! Too right! Lost at sea? Lost for ever!”

  I looked away, anywhere, but, as it happened, at the top corner of the galley, to the left, at the big television on its bracket, which was playing some violent film on video as always, and the soundtrack, as always, hit by the thump of the engines, was inaudible. And besides, the cars and guns, the knives—it was all so safe and easy, it was all from a so desirable and previous life, it was all, all of it, set on dry and stable land, and concrete.

  Robbie, brave little Robbie, terrier Robbie—he broke the silence. Sitting at the other table, in the corner, beneath the television, he leant forward across Dougie. He looked at me and raised a grin. “Do you mind Malky Moar? Malky and the lightning?”

  “I do!”

  “Aye well, Malky’s got a rabbit he’s fond of like. An ordinary rabbit—but it flops about his place, you know. A wild rabbit, but a wild rabbit that no fears Malky. And Malky respects the rabbit. ‘Robbie,’ he says to me one night in the bar—and now I go to hear Malky, not to drink, you understand? I drink a Coke or two, and that’s it. And you know what? I’ve surprised myself, right enough. I’ve no missed it for a moment. And I’ll no touch it again, ever. So Malky’s rabbit, as I was telling you, ‘You mind my rabbit?’ he says. ‘Aye’, I say. And I’m forgetting, you should know that Malky has an old sheepdog. And Malky, he loves that old sheepdog. But he also loves his rabbit. Because the rabbit chose Malky, if you know what I mean, whereas Malky, for his dog, he paid money. His rabbit, I’ve seen it, you know, it eats Malky’s cabbages and he doesna mind! It’s just a fockin ordinary wild rabbit, it’s just a rabbit, but it’s big, of course, really big, a fockin great buck rabbit fed on Malky’s cabbages! Anyway, as I say, Malky says to me, ‘Robbie, you mind my rabbit?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘You mind I made good that fence of mine? All those rotten posts?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Well, Robbie, you’ll be wanting to hear this—I forgot myself one day and I left my hammer behind. You mind the one I used to knock in the staples?’ ‘Aye.’ (And I did, because I’d helped him with the fencing.) ‘Well, there I am sitting by the stove and having a wee dram because it’s dark—and in comes the dog. The dog, noo, he’s crying. He’s got blood on his nose. So I think no more about it and I’m away to ma bed. And when I wake up, the dog, he’s got that size of a bump on his nose he canna see out. And I go to the fencing. And there’s nae a hammer in sight! So I put two and two together like, and Malky, I say, there’s no three ways aboot it. That rabbit, he picked up that hammer, and he stood up on his back legs and he brought that hammer down—bong!—right on my old dog’s nose.

  “And from that day to this, when my dog sees my rabbit, there’s nae bother, nae bother at all. And that rabbit, I just know that rabbit, he’s got my hammer, right down his hole, just in case—and who’d be blaming him?’”

  We laughed. We cheered. And Jerry, beside me, said, “That’s no much of a story. A right bubbly jock! And I’ve heard it all before!” and he clapped, and so did I, because perhaps, just perhaps, life was not so brutal or so pointless after all, and Robbie, triumphant, raised his voice and his right fist, punching the sweaty used-up fat-fried air: “So that’s why I go to the bar, even though I dinna touch a drop—I go to hear Malky, the stories of Malky Moar!”

  Jason did a manic loose-wristed knife-and-fork drumroll on his cleaned-out plate. We cheered. It was true—we still had a few fully functional tomorrows owed to us. Somehow or other, we were in credit—maybe something, somewhere, owed us a tomorrow.

  “Aye,” said Jerry, getting up, holding his plate, knife and fork in his right hand, and pushing me with his left thigh (which felt more like the trunk of an oak) out into the passageway, out into the emptiness that had almost, but not quite, vanished. “So now, boys—it’s sticky-treacle spongy-brain pudding! With absolutely safe artificial plastic cream! And I made it! I cut the clingfilm shite right off—all by myself!”

  “Well done, Jerry! Good on ya!” said Allan Besant, without the trace of a smile.

  Half happy that I still existed, even in this cold and receding emptiness, in the fug, I stood at a loss between the two bolted-down tables and their screwed-tight benches: with Dougie and Robbie, Allan and Bryan to my left; with Jason and Luke, at my own table, to my right. And then I remembered that I had a genuine dog-bouncy, an all-four-feet prancing throw-me-a-ball Labrador question to ask Robbie, so I sat down.

  “Hey Robbie! You’ve said it twice now—and each time it gave me this moment of happiness, you know? But what does it mean? Exactly? What does it mean—when you’re annoyed with someone—why do you shout: ‘You big girl’s blouse you?’”

  “Aye!” shouted Robbie. He looked interested, almost happy himself. He elbowed Dougie backwards into the bench-rest, he took possession of his side of the table. “Aye—that’s for us, on the Norlantean, so what d’ye call it, friendship? Ach! Comradeship! That’s it, among the boys. Because we love it, it’s our latest saying. So it’s no an insult like. Except that mebbe it is—because it’s no a compliment.”

  “Ah come on,” said Jerry, reappearing through the wraparound steam and stale fat-fried air, “what you talking about?” And—full of enthusiasm for the mere thoughts of such an image, he forgot his manners, by-passed Jason, and brought Robbie the first giant castle of treacle sponge in a moat of cream. “It’s obvious!” he shouted. “Tight round—stuck fast on the big nipples! There you are” (he set the big bowl down, decisively, in front of Robbie), “you’re clinging! You’re clinging tight all o
ver! You’re clinging tight to the big breasts!”

  Dougie, moving his upper body slightly forward away from the back-rest, down towards the table, said, slow and mournful, “Aye, that’s right enough…” (Jerry stood still for a moment, because Dougie—Dougie was talking…) Dougie stared at the table-top. “And it’s no a bad idea… Not at all… No when you come to think of it…”

  “But Redmond, Old Worzel,” said Jerry, returning with two more steaming gold-and-white castles of pleasure, “take a tip from Jerry. If you want to pick up a really big girl—or any kind of girl for that matter—never say you work on a trawler! They dinna like it, they hate it, too wild, dangerous, whatever, I dunno, but they dinna like it—so say you’re away at the oil-rigs. Steady money. A job for life. That works—every time!”

  “Aye,” said Bryan, in his big bass voice, shifting in his seat, looking at his huge wack of treacle pudding as if he’d been shortchanged, “but suppose it’s a Norwegian girl, or a Dutch girl—then tell them the truth. Because the only thing they canna stand is a lie. And that’s obvious too, isn’t it?” Big Bryan, First Mate, held his spoon poised in his right hand, but he’d yet to touch his treacle mountain; Big Bryan was becoming passionate, carried away: “Because the Norwegians, they’re our people, seafarers! No just sailors or seamen, they’re seafarers. And the Dutch? Why do we like the Dutch? Up here in Orkney and Shetland?”