Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “And Luke—all those certifiably brave, manic hairy Scottish warriors, the Scotii, Luke, the invaders from northern Ireland, they were from Orior, the O’Hanlon lands—and if you don’t believe me, Luke, go check out Dunadd, the crowning place of the first Scottish kings: and there you’ll find a trotting boar incised in the rock, and that trotting boar, Luke, that’s the O’Hanlon coat of arms!”

  “Aye. Big time, my arse—excuse me—but what the hell’s that to do with anything, and anyway, didn’t you tell me that every second sweet-shop round Lough Neagh is called Redmond O’Hanlon’s sweet-shop? And that there are far more Redmond O’Hanlons in the New York Police Force than copepods in the North Atlantic?”

  “Well no, not quite, but OK, yes, so what? Fuck you!”

  “Aye,” said Luke, “and here you are coming over all grand, all of a sudden, have you any idea how pathetic that is? Eh? Laying claim to Scotland? Jesus! And you probably think that one or two of the boys are off the wall!”

  “OK, yes, it was a joke, sort of—but the wild pig, you know… Yes, you’re right, Luke, please, forget that, Jesus, the crud that comes to the surface on this boat… yeah, no sleep, that wasn’t me, you know…”

  “Of course it was!” said Luke, happily, recovering from his rage at all the other Scottish Office marine scientists, wherever they might be. He tilted the (blue) basket immediately to his left. “And here you are—my second extraordinary exhibit! Lump-suckers!”

  A layer of glisten-slimy grey-brown little fish looked up at me with their open black eyes, their big heads sparsely dotted with small black shiny growths (parasites? Sea-lice?)… And as far as a fish can be cuddly, I thought… They look so down-turned-mouth sad, so big-eye worried… Yes, certainly, you’d want these little fish to be your friends … You’d want to comfort the lot of them …

  “Hey Redmond! I can see—you like them! And quite right too, so do I, cute, eh? But also, much more important—they’re fascinating, you know, biologically. How did they evolve like this?” He held one up and, cavalier with its dignity, squashed it towards me, belly-up: slightly aft of its throat was a ribbed and grooved roundel, a crater in its flesh. “The sucker! Even C. M. Yonge in his New Naturalist volume in the late forties, you know, The Sea Shore, you must have read that—even he said the Lumpsucker or Sea-hen was the most remarkable fish you’d be likely to meet on the coast—partly because of its sucker. Everyone quotes Thomas Pennant—you know, a friend of yours probably, because he’s eighteenth century, the guy Gilbert White wrote his letters to—anyway, I think that’s right, but the point is Pennant bunged a Lumpsucker he’d just caught into a bucket of seawater, and later, when he took the fish by the tail to lift it out, the whole bucket full of water came too! The sucker’s that strong!”

  “Great! We should tell Sean! Freeeeky!”

  “Aye! And guess what? The female makes her way up and ashore in April and lays up to 300,000 pink eggs between the mid-tide and low-water level, spread over a rock. And then? She fins it back out to sea, gone, buggered off, excuse me, she deserts and saves herself! And guess who stays and aerates the eggs? Who takes no food from April to November, his stomach distended with nothing but water? The male! Poor sod. So who’s in guard position when the tide is out and here come the gulls and crows and rats? Who’s not left his post (if he hasn’t been pecked or gnawed to death) when the tide comes in and he does his main job, aerating the eggs with his fins, bringing home that critical extra oxygen? Eh? The male! He stays there when the tide sweeps in with those hungry big, big fish! That’s the kind of father I’d like to be!”

  “Jesus, Luke, calm down, it’s OK—I’m sure you will be, if you get the chance … I mean of course you will… You’ve got years and years to go …”

  “But Pennant and Yonge—they didn’t know the half of it! Even your Alister Hardy got a surprise when he caught Lumpfish way out in the North Sea. And the North Sea—it’s a shallow pond! No, here’s your evidence—look at them all—and from 700 to 1,000 metres down! They’re almost deep-sea fish. They must be. Unless, and I hate this, unless the net caught them as it was coming up, and that’s always a possibility, and you and I must admit that, because we’re honest, and scientists, but it’s no good for my figures, you know, no good at all, there’s no accurate depth-reading for the capture of each individual fish, that’s the trouble with commercial trawlers… But hey! Don’t be so miserable, don’t take things so personally, eh? Because there’s one more great fact about them! The way they look—their camouflage—does that remind you of anything?”

  “Yeah. One of my aunts.”

  “Oh Jesus! Don’t be ridiculous! It’s obvious, isn’t it? We all know they sometimes drift about in the open ocean feeding on comb jellies and jellyfish under floating mats of seaweed—so what protects them from their predators?”

  “Give up!”

  “Don’t be an idiot—look at them!” He held the lumpfish, now right side up, six inches from my nose. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? They look exactly like a pneumatocyst!”

  “A what?”

  “A pneumatocyst—a floating capsule of brown algae—perfect camouflage! And now—for the third and last of our little fish, don’t move, wait here!”

  Luke, his blue woolly hat stuck on top of his curly black hair, his now substantial black stubble shading his prematurely lined, lived-in face, making him look more decisive, obsessed, craggier than ever, disappeared into the laundry cubby-hole … And reemerged, three brown-paper parcels under his right arm.

  He laid them in a line, one, two, three, on the empty steel shelf to my right. They were books … “Now, whatever you do,” he said, picking up volume three, “don’t laugh, because these books really mean something to me.” He was searching for a reference, turning the pages, in front of me, showing this treasure of his as if, in itself, it was the rarest of fishes: before my tired eyes passed black-and-white drawings of fish, one or two a page, diagrams of heads and fins, short texts full of numbers, maps … “You’ll think I’ve borrowed them from the library at the lab, but consider it-would any librarian in the world let a student take books like this to sea? At £123 the set? No way! Redmond, this is the greatest, the great co-operative work of scholarship, Fishes of the North-eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean—only UNESCO has the resources you need! No commercial publisher could even think of an effort like this. First—it took eight years of cataloguing the available knowledge, you know, reports, specimens in museums, eight years from 1965 to 1973. So you understand the point, don’t you?” Holding the precious volume with his left hand under its back, his right across its open insides, Luke turned his scrutiny from the book to me. “You’ve got it, yes? Because it’s all so new, this science of the seas! And sure, I know you now, and you’re thinking it’s just like the nineteenth century, all this mere cataloguing, but that makes it even more impressive! Big time! The grind of it—no glamour like molecular biology—no praise from anyone but yourself, and that’s the secret, self-motivation, and a love of these animals simply for themselves, for how weird they are! Aye—and after the catalogue, we call it Clofnam, short for Check-list of the fishes of the north-eastern Atlantic and of the Mediterranean—only then could the real thing start… And these volumes came out from 1984 to 1986, that recent!” (Luke’s eyes: so bright, so happy.) “So how do you think I made them mine, on £7,000 a year? Eh?” His hands quick, jerky, he slid the open book flat to the steel shelf, pulled off his hat, marked the place with it, shut the book as far as it would go (two-thirds) and he said, “Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? This was no luxury, I had to have these books to take to sea with me, so I thought, OK, I’ll work it out, the money, if I don’t go to the Moorings, you know, the dockside pub the marine-lab people use, in the evenings, or at lunch-time, or at all, if I drink no beer for eight weeks and limit myself to one proper meal a day, a big breakfast, then I could save £125. And I did! I bought them! They’re mine!”

  “Goaal!”

  “Ayee
eee! And look—I protected them” (he held up volume three, the blue hat deep-fill-sandwiched inside); “that very same day, at once, I cut up Manila envelopes from the lab, petty thieving, you’ll say, but I thought that was OK, you know, justified, and several layers too, because I didn’t want them stained with fish-guts and blood and engine-oil, so that was OK, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course it was!”

  “Because Redmond, you understand, you must—when I’m old, older than you, very old, if I’m lucky, if I make it through, when I can’t go to sea any more, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll have a cottage by then, like I told you, with a fire, so warm, and a family, and we’ll all gather round, and with my gutting knife I’ll slit the Manila envelopes right off these three volumes, and underneath, you know what? The covers—they’ll be as new, like the day I first had them! They’ll be perfect, the covers, and somehow I know they’ll remind me of everything, all my life—well, they’re not covers technically, of course, there are no covers, no nonsense like that, no, they’re the boards of the books themselves—and the colours, the only colours in the whole big deal are on the boards, and volume one, it’s the delicate surface blue of the calmest of days in high summer, shading down to that dark blue when light gives up and you can’t see in any more and the vast world of all those miles to go gets secret. Aye—and over it all is an ace, a really accurate line-drawing of a Common skate. And vol. two: the same idea, but in the sea-green of an algal bloom, with a drawing of a John Dory, the Saint-Pierre in French, Pez de San Pedro in Spanish—you always get given the French and Spanish names and, now and then, the common names in German or Russian, and I can tell you, as a fisheries inspector, that’s marvellous, bloody marvellous, invaluable, as you’d say—but the John Dory, everyone knows it, but it’s freaky in itself, the dorsal fin, the crazy long filaments on the finrays, what are they for? Defence? Antennae to detect the subtlest vibrations in the water around them? Who knows? Aye—we’re still in the Middle Ages. The Saint Peter fish, can you get that? Just because it has this big black spot with a yellow surround on its flank, and aye—what’s that for?—but it comforts all the Christian fishermen, because they’re sure, all those Christian fishermen are certain, whether they admit it or not, they’re certain that the black marks on each flank are the sacred thumb and forefinger prints of St. Peter, burned into the species for ever, from that very moment when Peter the Fisherman lifted them from his nets!”

  “Jesus!”

  “Aye! Jesus! And volume three—guess what? All in shades of purple, the sea before a storm, certainly, but at other times, too, it goes purple and I’ve no idea why… but the point is … listen … the illustrator, a woman, Monika Jost, it’s obvious, she’s been building up to this, the finale, her third and last drawing, and she chooses—guess what? A deep-sea anglerfish! One of the very same deep-sea anglerfish that seem to obsess you, remember? But hey—she could have chosen to copy the drawing of Halophryne mollis, a female with three parasitic males attached, but no, she went for Lynophryne brevibarbata. And it’s true, that’s a female with barbels—you know, growths under the chin—that can be 15 per cent longer than her own body, downward extensions of her throat, thick and branched and twisted like the roots on a tree, and yes, she’s tiny, 100 millimetres long, but if you saw her full size, I promise you, you’d throw up! Aye … I’m forgetting—the point is that this ace female artist, Monika Jost, she went for the one diagram where a deep-sea anglerfish is shown with only one parasitic male … so maybe you’re right, I’ve been thinking about it, and I know, you’ll deny everything, because for you that was your first time with no sleep for days and nights on end, but I remember what you said, because I’ve been through it, so often, with every trip on a trawler, so maybe you’re right, maybe every woman really does want to settle down with just the one man …”

  “Eh?”

  “Aye! She loved it, like you say, the one male captured for ever, his head’s absorbed inside her, only the rest of him hangs loose from her crotch, as it were, he’s just a sperm bank, she’s got him, he’s hers, no doubt about it! And guess what? She’s so excited about it, this Monika Jost, that for the first time she uses colour, she paints the attached headless male, his tissue and blood-vessels already fused with hers—she paints him in bright green!”

  “Wow!”

  “Aye, it’s great, isn’t it? And I’ll tell my children all about it, one day, because she’s right, of course, in biological terms, because our deep past is hermaphrodite, the penis is simply an enlarged clitoris, so the female is the basic, the ancient sex, and we’re latecomers, parasites, if you like … And hey, do you remember saying that?”

  “… Luke, please, lay off, it’s so ghastly all this, you know, the terrible feeling that I’m losing my mind… OK, so what? Yes … But it’s never happened to me before, or, at least, not so obviously, you know, bright-light obvious, right out there, in the open, for all to see …”

  “Aye, that’s it! That’s the wipe-out shock of your first week or more of days and nights with no sleep. So you can’t remember? Any of it? Can you?”

  “No, that’s right… No, I can’t.” And I suddenly felt absurdly anxious (where had the fear come from?)… “No, I can’t. And I don’t want to—it was like being drunk, you know, the worst kind, when you drink because you’re unhappy, because something is stopping you doing the one thing you need and want to do, so the point and the value goes out of your life, and you keep drinking, to make it better, and then you say all kinds of violent things to anyone who loves you, awful hurtful things that the normal you is not even aware you could think, let alone say… But Luke, hang on, because I want you to know that I don’t agree that alcohol reveals the subconscious, no, absolutely not, I think it’s just the surface you, lashing out, trying to solve some problem, messing up, getting it all wrong… But Luke, it’s not that bad normally, you know, I have been happy and fulfilled like you, sometimes, now and then, doing work I really want to do—and I can tell you, it’s odd, isn’t it? If you get drunk then, why! you stay happy and fulfilled, because you’re all of a piece, all the way, all the way down to the depths! The abyssal depths!” And then something surfaced, and I tried to stop talking, but couldn’t: “You know the lines?” I said (not knowing them myself): “‘Mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall, sheer, frightful, no-man-fathomed’ … So who the hell said that?”

  Luke, in control of himself, as always, it seemed to me, reopened his volume three, regained his blue woolly hat, re-rolled it on to his head and, still in absurd slow-motion, said, “You’re asking me?”

  “Well…”

  “No, come on, don’t make such a big deal of it—you can train yourself to cope, just a little, and that’s why I can remember almost all you said, and anyway, the boys go through this every time, it’s their job, and they don’t faff on about the subconscious! No—the only sign they give of the mental pain of all this is to get dead drunk the minute they go ashore. And, of course, no one, no one ashore understands or forgives them. And then they need at least thirty-six hours of graduated sleep—but their wives are already uptight, because they feel neglected, because for two or three weeks they’ve been without a husband, and they’ve been left all alone, and they’ve had to look after the children all by themselves, and not a day off, and their man’s been out there enjoying himself, so they tell him all about the problems he’s caused because he’s been away, and then they damn well insist on taking him shopping… So, just occasionally, the trawlerman gets violent. And then everyone calls the police.”

  “Uh … it’s all so grim.”

  “Of course it’s not! Don’t get me wrong—no one’s to blame … How’s the wife to know about sleep-deprivation? And come to that, I’ve got real mates in the police, there are two grand guys in my own lifeboat station at Aberdeen: and hey, Worzel, Redmond, I mean—excuse me—you know, well, imagine it: I’m walking back from the Moorings with a new girlfriend and she’s tender, you know, so we’re hold
ing hands, and then pow! (or whatever you’d say, you know—drama, a shock!) this patrol-car mounts the pavement right in front of us and the policeman in the passenger-seat yells out the window: ‘You! Yes! You, sir! You’re under arrest for your shit-bad dress-sense! We’ve had complaints! You upset the law-abiding public! So take that horrible hat off! Right now!’ So I take my hat off, and my new girl does a runner, and the policeman jumps out of the patrol-car and pinions me and pushes me into the back seat and muscles in beside me and the police driver central-locks the doors and on goes the siren and the flashers and all the traffic down the docks road pulls aside and we swing into the lifeboat station at this terrible speed—and only then do I see it’s Brian and Rob, the bastards! And they say: ‘Luke, why the hell didn’t you get the shout?’ And I say: ‘Boys, I switched my bleeper off—because that was my first time with a new girl’ And Rob says (and Brian says, ‘Exactly!,’ all the time, because that’s what he does whenever Rob gives you an opinion), ‘Oh Luke,’ says Rob, ‘why the fuck don’t you get married like us and have kids? Eh? You’re older than us, and yet here you are—you’re still pissing about after girls and missing shouts!’”

  “Great! But…”

  “The point? Och aye, yes, that’s right, how are they to know? Who could know? Even Rob and Brian—on that shout we got to a weekend yachtsman who’d capsized and got caught in the current and drifted way out, way out, and he was clinging to the upturned hull of his 14-foot dinghy, and he was lucky, because she was clinker-built, so he could hang on with his fingers, and you know what? You know what I remember from that one? The end-joints of all his fingers, and his thumbs, they were red and wrecked and bleeding—you could almost see the finger bones!” Luke paused, he laughed as some pleasurable new thought struck him. “So hey—let’s hope he wasn’t an old-fashioned writer like you—a Worzel who had to use a pen!”