I said, my mouth full of treacle and sponge and fluffy cream, “Nosh idea.”
Bryan raised his head and looked straight at me. “Because they beat the shit out of you English! They sailed right up the Thames!”
Dougie, concerned, said, “But he’s Irish!”
“Irish? Of course he’s not Irish! And even if he was, forgive me, Dougie, but all that religion. Ireland, it’s almost as bad as Lewis and Harris—a total bullshit zone. No truth at all! Not anywhere!”
Jason, opposite me, said suddenly: “Redmond, that’s your eating done for now, you’re fat enough already. Go on—it’s your turn. Sean’s on the bridge, and we don’t want him doing a Davy… I’ve got a nasty feeling he’s on to his second forty-hour stretch … And even if he is crazy, and the youngest, we shouldn’t treat him like that, should we?”
“No of course not,” I said, chastened, dropping my spoon, jumping up. And I made my way to the bridge.
AS I REACHED THE FLOOR of the wheelhouse, Sean scrabbled out of his harness, out of the skipper’s chair. He looked manic, wide-eyed, certifiable from lack of sleep. He bolted past me, like a young rabbit breaking from cover, as if the dog of his own terrors was right behind him, all the way back down the stairs.
So I’m on watch, I thought, but for what? Enemy submarines? And what do I do if we hit one? And if there is something out there I won’t see it until it’s in the arc of the searchlight, and the swell, it seems gigantic … and the radar-screen with that wiper-thing that leaves dots and blobs behind it instead of scraping them off… But look here, I’m sure I could handle the wheel and keep her on a compass bearing, any fool can do that, but this brass-and-mahogany wheel, this ancient compass, I think they’re decorations, because real life seems to happen only on all these alien screens, and with these little levers, squat gear-sticks … And anyway I don’t know the compass-bearing, Jason says I can write anything I like, but if I give away the positions of his hauls he’ll push my head in a bucket of water and drown me dead as a Black butt…
And hey, it’s lonely, I’m really lonely; this is the only place you can find loneliness on the entire ship … And please, I don’t like it…
I was thrown (but this time without undue aggression; the tail-end of the baby hurricane seemed to have lost its murderous one-on-one intent)—and I fetched up facing aft: in front of a comforting, a friendly machine. He introduced himself, in plain English, as I clung to the wood surround: “Smith Maritime,” he said, at eye-level (well, perhaps my knees were bent a little). He was an Enlightenment, a reasonable machine, and he clearly expected me to participate in his interests in life: in five neat rectangles, outlined in white on his black fascia, he offered, to anyone who could read, two big buttons apiece, one below the other, in each section, headed, in series (and such an orderly series): MAIN CLUTCH; AUTO CLUTCH; WINCH SPEED; AUTO PUMP; CRANE. So how’s about, just to please him, to honour this new friendship extended in words that even I can understand, how’s about I press one or two? Or maybe all together?
There was a pounding of feet up the stairs, two lots of desperate feet, it seemed to me—and Jason appeared, moving almost as fast into the wheelhouse as Sean had gone out of it: and looking almost as crazed.
Close behind him—so that’s all right!—there came the reassuring Robbie.
“Jesus!” said Jason, grabbing me, one hard hand to each shoulder, pushing me towards the Mate’s chair. “To think I sent you up here! On watch—Jesus! I forgot—I’ve grown used to it, having you around, and you’re not much good, but it’s true you gut your arse off, and you’re getting better, and you haven’t bunked off since the beginning, you haven’t taken to your fucking bunk, not at all, so how was I to remember? How the fuck was I to remember that you’re just an idiot?”
“Ah, thanks …”
“Jesus wept!” said Jason, thrusting me into the high-back chair, buckling me in with a decisive snap; and his own long limbs bent into the skipper’s chair, easy as a curling snake, no harness needed.
“Aye!” said Robbie, standing lightly beside me (Robbie seemed to be able to perch anywhere with dignity, like a bird, a Pictish bird). “Jason forgot!” He put his arm round the back of my child’s high-chair, in which I was strapped, and brought his head forward, level with mine. “Jason forgot!” he said, with a tremendous grin on his bird-alert and beaky face. “We couldna believe it. Bryan was laughing inside like and he winked at me, you know, and he held up his right hand—five fingers up. So we waited, to see what would happen, five minutes like, and that’s a long time—and then boom! We shouted, all together, and Allan joined in, ‘Worzel’s on the bridge! Old Worzel—he’s on watch!’; And Allan shouted, ‘Go it, Gummidge!’; And Jerry shouted, ‘I’m away to ma bed! I’ll die in ma bed!’ And Dougie, you know, he just stared at Jason, and he looked terrible… And Jason here? He was out of his seat like a focking ghost!”
“I’m sorry,” said Jason, with an eerie change of voice, re-slotted back into his familiar place of calm, of command, of contemplation. “So where, at this time of year, this week in fact—where on the continental slope, the great shelf-edge toward the abyss, where would I want to be if I were a redfish? Above which canyon? Hanging out, yes, but in which current?” He laid his right hand gently on one of the stubby gear-sticks. He glanced at the radar-screen on which the freed windscreen-wiper went round and round and, far from pitching into panic, he seemed to grow further into his alpha-male equilibrium. “I’m sorry, Redmond, forgive me, but you must understand, it’s a terrible thing at sea—it’s the one big sin, it’s a crime really, among sailors, it’s not right, to leave your bridge unmanned. I know, I know, your poncy round-the-world yachtsmen and-women do it! But then that’s who they are, what they’re like, all alone, showing off, and if we run them down we get the blame! But the fact is they’re not the only ones, because sodding great tankers do it too! Can you imagine that? You’re registered in Liberia or whatever, there’s no law out at sea, so you stick it on autopilot, just like a round-the-world-twice yachtswoman, and you go to sleep! Can you imagine that? Can you?”
“Yes, I can,” I said, despite myself. “Sleep …”
“Oh come on,” said Jason, leaning forward, tapping computer keys. “Stop it. Be a man. This’ll cheer you up—like I promised, remember?—Davy’s tow! Now don’t get me wrong-Davy’s a great guy, he really is, tall and blond and fit, you know, the girls love him, but the real point is—well, it’s this: he’s a lifeboatman. So there’s no way round it, however you look at it, you can say they’re mad maybe, but that won’t do, not at all, because consider this: Is a lifeboatman selfish? Thinking of himself, like everybody else? No, he’s not! He’s ready to die, week in, week out, for the rest of us! So yes, Redmond, let’s be honest, that’s one reason why I had to let you on board my Norlantean, because you came with Luke, a lifeboatman. And I’ll tell you this for nothing, he’s a damn fine trawlerman too, believe me, and I’d give him a job tomorrow, whereas you …”
“Davy—Davy’s tow,” said Robbie. “Eh? Jason? And you should be telling Redmond here—aye! Davy—Davy was pinged!”
I said: “Pinged?”
“Aye,” said Robbie, excited. “He was pinged right enough. He was knackered like, he didna mind it was there, he stood on a slack cable, flat on the deck, aye, one of the warps—and ping! they go as they tighten, ping! And Davy—he’s shot 20 feet in the air, Bryan says 30, and bosh! Right over the side! Man overboard! But Davy kept his head, he’s a lifeboatman, they’re trained for it. And we all panicked, but Bryan yells: ‘To the ramp!’ So we all run aft and fall down the ladders and Davy swims to the ramp and Bryan throws a rope and we haul him in—and he’s alive!”
“Great!” I yelled. “Well done!”
“He was sick right enough. Really sick. Sick with the shock of it. But then? Can you guess? What’d Davy do next?”
“No idea!”
“No? You can’t? Well—he went straight back to work. Not a word said. Cold. W
et through and through. Straight back to work.”
“Ah.”
Jason, peering at the screen second to his left, said: “Hey! Here we are—look at this!” The shaftless white arrowhead pricked its point at a red-traced, irregular ellipse on the chart, set over a criss-cross of different-coloured straightish lines, all with attendant numbers stuck on to them like ectoparasites, all equally incomprehensible. “Davy’s tow! He fell asleep, you see, right here in this chair. And the whole lot, the trawler, the miles of cable, the otter-boards, the net—they all went round in a circle! Davy’s dream! Davy’s tow!”
“Redmond,” said Robbie sharply, unbuckling me with his left hand and, with his right at the small of my back, pushing me to my feet. “I almost forgot too. You’re wanted—right now, or before now. In the fish-room! Luke wants you, he’s going through his baskets, through all his specimens like, the ones he’s saved—and you’re to help him measure, the whole ching-bang. And that’s the point of you, aye? To help Luke?”
LUKE HAD SET UP his scales in the usual place, on the steel shelf beside the main conveyor to the hold.
“Just in time!” he said, as I got into my oilskins. “Right on time!”
There was an ominously long line of yellow, red and blue plastic baskets to his left. Noticing, I suppose, the hang-dog look which I could feel on my face, Luke, offensively happy, said, “That’s for the last three hauls! I waited—just for your sake—until the Force 12 had gone. What’s it now? Force 8? 7? So you won’t fly! Not even you could fly in a Force 7! But don’t worry, it’s OK, I’ve numbered my hauls and they’re sorted by the colour of the baskets. That really pleases me, you know, big time, like my biscuit boxes. My red one …”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry.” I pulled on my sea-boots. “Don’t let’s go through that again.”
“Redmond—cheer up!” (I pulled on my half-shredded blue gloves.) “I’m going to show you the most extraordinary things, real things, not like the shit we talked the other night…”
“Ah.” I took the clipboard with its stack of Marine Lab record sheets, so many headings, so many columns …
“Aye—and did you know, the boys, they call you Worzel, Old Worzel? That’s great! You’ve got a nickname. You know—after that scarecrow on the telly with white hair and whiskers and all crumpled up and he comes alive and moves about a bit. That’s great! Magic! A nickname! So they like you!”
“Right…”
“Oh come on, just because Jason sent you up on watch. That really shocked Bryan, I can tell you, he held up his hand, gave you five fingers, five minutes. And then we all shouted, “Old Worzel’s on the bridge!” or some such. Christ, Jason moved. So fast. And when he’d gone—God how we laughed!”
I sat on the up-ended fish-box, gripping the clipboard in my right hand, the stub of a pencil in my left, like an angry schoolboy, and I felt mean, but I couldn’t express it, because the cold had got to my facial muscles. You’re just like your cat Bertie, I thought (and had a moment of schoolboy homesickness)—because when he’s stroppy, with his ears laid back, if I push them forward and hold them forward, he forgets how annoyed he ought to be, and he starts to purr, and eventually, overcome with ear-signal pleasure, he chirrups.
“Aye. Sorry. So look—this is great—dingle days!” chirruped Luke. “Well, almost—I’ve sorted the main groups in each basket. So let’s start with my favourites from the Polar basin, Polar sculpin, they can live up to 3 kilometres down, the cute wee things with horns on their heads that we always seemed to catch in pairs! Remember?”
“Eh?”
“Here—look!” (In his right hand he held out a couple of little fish.) “But hey! You can’t wear gloves for this! I’ll need you to take measurements, do intricate things, and if we’re very lucky we’ll be here for hours, I hope so, this is our one big chance—science at last! Because Jason—he told me he’s going flat out, due north, yes! To one day’s steaming from the ice cap!”
“Oh, Jesus …” I took off my gloves, dropped them to the floor. And I looked at my hands, for more than a moment, holding them this way and that in the harsh overhead electric light, and I regarded them with deep satisfaction, and felt better, because they weren’t girl’s hands any more, or, at least, if they were female, they were the hands of the most frightening of sod-you fishwives—even on their backs they were so covered in puncture wounds from the redfish spines that they were almost young again; you couldn’t see a single one of those age-spots … And the feeling was even good physically, too, because I couldn’t feel the punctures one by one any more, my hands just burned, they felt very hot, the only part of me that felt warm …
“Redmond!” shouted Luke, right beside me. “What the hell are you doing? Flapping your hands about? Please—look—please don’t do that, you know, go off like that, it’s spooky, your trances, whatever, you know.” (The two small fish, maybe 8 inches long, were, I was surprised to see, still in his right palm, in front of my nose.) “I had a relative once, and I went to visit her, in an old people’s home—and she went off just like you do! So sometimes I think—sometimes I think you really are Old Worzel!”
“Shit. Thanks …”
The two dead Polar sculpin nestled in my left hand. Their skin felt rough, their big heads had these knobs on top, not really horns, but tubercules, the buds of horns; they were brown, blotched with darker brown bands and yes, there was no doubt about it—they could have been the Miller’s Thumbs I used to try to catch with my net in the childhood stream at the bottom of the Vicarage garden … I felt I was ten years old again, in shorts and black welly boots: you lifted a stone and a Miller’s Thumb shot out, a rocket-trail of sediment behind it. And the little net on the end of its bamboo pole? Well, it was always in the wrong place … But I must not go off—what did he say? Go off! Jesus …
I laid one Polar sculpin on the scales, and the other, its husband or its wife, I placed gently beside it on the steel shelf.
The heavy steel door to our right slammed back and Robbie stepped over the sill. He was dressed, I was envious to see, in his equivalent of a dressing-gown: a white singlet, a pair of dark-blue tracksuit-bottoms, and white trainers. I thought: even Robbie’s away to his bed; but there again, he deserves it, and come to that—how lucky you are that no one here expects you to wear a singlet … Because Robbie has an absurdly muscled chest, and biceps. There’s no flab and shame on him anywhere. In fact—to dissect Robbie: that would be a gift for any medical student: you would not have to cut through those thick layers of yellow fat. No, little Robbie is without price, an example of male structures at their very best, a rare reality, a one-to-one match for those diagrams of perfection in Gray’s Anatomy.
Robbie up-ended another fish-box and perched between us.
“Luke,” said Robbie, clearly fascinated by the electronic scales, the Polar sculpins, the baskets of junk transformed into treasures, “I just remembered, Luke—I heard you tell Redmond, you said you didn’t know anything about Black butts, you mind that? Greenland halibut like, you didn’t know where they went to breed. Well, I remembered, just now—and I think I do—I’ve been on the Hatton Bank, on a different boat like, no with Jason. We call it Manhattan—we tell the girls we’re off to Manhattan! But Redmond, it’s nae New York, it’s west of the North Feni Ridge, north-west of the George Bligh Bank, north of the Rockall Plateau, aye—and I tell you, Luke, that whole area should be closed to the new deep-sea fishery! Aye, they should license the new fishery before it’s too late. Make it like the Icelanders do, or the Faeroese, they’ve got it right, you know, they really have: I’ve been at the fishing in the Faeroe Box, too, that skipper had a licence—£120,000 a year and worth every penny! And you know why? Because it’s strict. Strictly controlled. No messing. No free-for-all. No fockin Spanish fish-paedophiles with their illegal fine-mesh nets! Aye—and the cod, Luke, you shoulda seen them—bigger than me, and the heads on them! And the haddock—huge!—not one of the boys knew they could grow so big… And lots of Blac
k scabbard fish, Black scabbards, rough brown skins, bristly all over, you know, and even more big Grenadiers—and we sold them all to France, pronto. And Luke, there was a different kind of Rabbit fish, even odder than the ones here, the kind that Sean would say were freaky, man. You shoulda seen their noses…”
“Aye!” shouted Luke, startling me. (Luke, I thought, may well blow up with excitement: Boompf!) “But what about the Black butts?”
“Aye, I’m forgetting, they’re nae like here, in the Nor Nor East Atlantic—nae, here they’ve very small eggs as you can see for yourself, and guess what? Over Hatton Bank they’re huge fish, the Black butts, and their eggs are big, really big, as big as grapes. Aye—if I do one good thing in my life, this is it. Luke, this is what I came to tell you, you must say to your boss in the lab in Aberdeen, whatever, the Government—Hatton Bank will be closed to Greenland halibut fishing, because that is where they breed, that’s where the whole lot come from!”
And Robbie, suddenly shy, overcome (what was it? too much emotion? sudden plain speaking? had he offended against his personal code? I’d no idea)—Robbie, awkward, turned and went, as fast, as he might have said, as a fockin’ ghost.
“Christ!” said Luke, shocked. “Do you realize the significance of that? Have you any idea? Why is it only me? Why don’t more Scottish Office marine scientists get off their arses—excuse me—and go out on trawlers and listen to these boys?”
“That’s obvious!” I said at once (trying to forget how sick and ill and abject-frightened I’d been… and if I was a government scientist would I come on a trawler in January again, or all-year-round as you’d have to? Or would I change my job? What if, say, there was a vacant post as a bed-tester and salesman in Aberdeen?). “It’s obvious … well, it’s obvious … because there are only 6 million people in all of Scotland—so how could you afford more people than you? How many Scottish marine scientists do you think there are? Fifty? One hundred? And they have so many other things to do!” (So: why couldn’t I be a test-pilot for Dunlopillow?) “Besides, get this country in perspective, Luke—do you realize that down in England, in my own county, unbelievably beautiful Oxfordshire, and Luke, so full of trees and so far away, yes, in Oxfordshire alone, there are 632,000 people!
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