Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “Worzel!” yelled Luke. “Wake up! The Garfish, remember?” He waved it about, manic. “They swim so fast, shoals of them—skimming, in fact it’s such a surface fish that it almost belongs in the air! They spear their prey. And if you’re a small pelagic fish at the surface you can’t escape, because these guys come after you, their tails whirring side to side in the water, the front of their bodies, their long beaks in the air, they skitter after you, a nightmare! And they can be a yard long! And their relatives—who are their relatives?”

  “No idea!” I yelled, as, with his right hand, Luke dropped the fish lengthwise to the floor and, with his left, detached me from the stanchion.

  “The Flying fish! We’ll get its picture … Aye, Flying fish!”

  And so we took its picture. And a portrait of a saithe (a giant: a yard long), the coalfish or coley, which Luke said had come up from 500 metres, maybe, and it was a member of the cod family and so common and so widely distributed (right into the shallows) and so good to eat, but Jason had no quota, so we couldn’t land it—and out it went, down the scupper-chute, its coal-coloured back, its silver stomach shining in the incoming, the early morning light.

  From his yellow basket (which they filled) Luke slopped two big fish out across the floor. They were long and thick: the first perhaps 6 feet, the head pink, the continuous rear dorsal fin pink, the body the palest brown with a random scatter of large black ink-blots, six to each side. The other was brown-backed, 4 feet long, beautiful… Or was it just the wash of pure Arctic light across their bodies, the horizontal light from the low starboard scupper-chute, light which I had certainly never seen before?

  “Ling!” said Luke, as we began our photographic slide to port. “The big one—plain ling, Molva molva, with a range down to 400 metres—and this one” (he nudged it with the tip of his yellow sea-boot), “Blue ling, deeper, to 1,000 metres; and they’re two more members of the cod family, Gadidae—they’re half-neglected now. But I tell you: when the Emperor Charles V of France visited Henry VIII in London, guess what? The great royal turn-on for the banquet was salted ling! Aye, salted ling cost three times as much as haberdine, salted cod! Ling used to be the best!”

  And yes, I thought, Luke really does like a little perfectly ordinary mainstream local English history with his fish which, for some reason, was a comfort… But why? Because, said that part of my brain that wished it was at home: an interest in the tiny time-span, the gossip of a hundred years in a single country, in a small expanse of land—it excludes the three and a half thousand million years that’s passed since our single-cell ancestors first appeared on earth: our real history. It says up yours to the real geography that surrounds and appals us—the infinite but bounded space of our own universe that Einstein imagined or discovered; and all the parallel universes that perhaps make our own Big Bang no more than the pop of a shotgun on a Saturday afternoon. Yes—national history, that really is such an attractive mind-numbing displacement activity, as precious and necessary as planting a couple of snowdrop bulbs in the cottage-garden patch-let of soil that (in a nanosecond of micro-evolutionary time) really does seem to belong to you …

  Luke, without assistance, I’m afraid, heaved both ling on to the stationary conveyor to the hold. “To remind me,” he said. “I’ll gut them later. And I need their otoliths.” (So Jason had a quota? Or, more likely, they were not quota-fish? In any case, I thought, how stupid, how wasteful, this EU system: why can’t we be rational—why can’t we all be long-term clever, like the Icelanders? And hey! Get that—I’m beginning to be educated, so of course I have strong opinions!)

  Luke, fast and focused, bent sharply over his blue basket. (Does he never give up? How come he got so all-in-one happy?) He extracted a football-sized something, solid, grey-brown. (What was it? A fish egg-ball in a hardish case? A sponge? The curved surface of the almost-football was streaked with thin shards of reflected light, needles of white shine on the dull mud-grey No, I’d no idea. And so, instantly, I felt hopeless, finished inside … no, I was not even beginning to be educated…)

  Luke held the ball (I could see it was surprisingly hard, there was no give in it) in both hands, in front of his chest, as if standing on the touchline, alert for a target, about to throw it to a player on the pitch. He said: “Worzel—what’s this?”

  “I don’t know. And Luke—sometimes, well—sometimes I think it’s all pointless …”

  “Aye, Worzel! You’re sure this is a sponge, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes. But…”

  “It’s not!” said Luke, triumphant. “It’s duff! And you know what—I looked it up once, in the Aberdeen University Library, the big Oxford English Dictionary, volumes for ever, you know, the so-called definitive dictionary—and guess what? You Oxford people—maybe just one of you wankers, excuse me, maybe just one of you dictionary people should’ve been sent to sea where so many of our words were made!” Luke, the football now held (no-throw) against his chest, stood (quite rightly) transfixed with outrage at these dictionary people. “Yes! Duff! This is it—duff.” He looked at it, with affection. “And no, it’s not some nineteenth-century word for pudding as the Oxford wankers will tell you—dough, Yorkshire duff, as in enough. Spare us! Let’s get out of the kitchen, right? This is it, duff. So ancient, in terms of our fishermen—duff. Something you really don’t want in your catch. Duff. As in duff, a duffer, a duff catch, useless! Aye—it’s coral.”

  “Coral? Don’t be silly!”

  “Silly?” Luke looked me straight in the eye, mean as a good man can be. “North Atlantic coral—they don’t form reefs or atolls, no, the polyps make mounds on the continental shelves. They feed at night—their stinging tentacles unfold, their mouths open at night. Magic, eh?”

  And Luke, with a teenager grin, as the Norlantean rolled to starboard, raised his arms above his head and pitched the duff-ball up and over the gutting table, between the starboard stanchions, and bop! No argument! Zap! Straight into the scupper-chute.

  I yelled: “Goaal!”

  “Magic,” said Luke, pleased. “But don’t try that yourself.” He turned back to scrummage in his blue basket. “Because those corals are full of silica, glass spikes that can damage your skin. It’s their defence against grazing fish.” (Oh yeah? I thought, but it’s true, which is another reason I don’t like it—so you, Luke, you have hands like a leather-back turtle—whereas I… I probably still have hands like a girl… yes … one glance at them by the Khmer Rouge and I’d be taken away behind a bush and suffocated, with a knot-tight plastic bag…) Luke found the prize he was looking for and arranged it on the boards, dorsal side up: a starfish, but dark-red, swollen, chunky, a mega-muscled outsize disembodied hand of a starfish that, in your dreams, would grip you by the throat…

  Luke said: “It’s a starfish. A deep-sea starfish. But I’ve not seen this one before, I don’t know the species, so we need a photograph, a detailed photograph—so down you get”—he gave me a shove—“that’s it, on your knees.” (So we slid to port, on our knees.) “As I was saying, there was an ex-trawlerman, you know, on the Scotia, the research ship, a lovely guy, one of the contract crew—all from Hull—and he used to collect the duff that came up in our beam-trawls.” (Flash! f.32—so I changed the aperture to 22, for the return run… close-up photography: why were the rules all different?) “And one day I asked him what it was for, why he wanted it—and he said he was old now and he hated life at sea and he couldn’t wait to retire and all he thought about was his allotment. He’d got three. But that bit of Hull was overrun with feral cats and they dug up his seeds. You know—the way cats sniff the ground and dig a hole with their right-front paw and then squat all rigid at forty-five degrees, and they hold their faces in the air and they think so hard they look like philosophers—and they do their business. And then one sniff later they cover it over—and rocket off as if none of that was anything to do with them!”

  “Yeah! Luke! That’s right!”

  We slid back to the blue
basket: he gathered up his starfish (gently he liked this starfish) and, replacing it on the pile, he withdrew the fish that had mesmerized me some time ago—a day? A week? I’d no idea… but the image was as potent as an image gets, and here it was again, laid out right in front of me: thick and eely and all blotched black with white rings around its muscly slime of a body… it was hooped with rings of white … “Esmark’s eelpout!” said Luke, from above me. “And no, Worzel—for this one you stand up!” (The effort of it, my knees, all my joints, they ached, they hurt, and Jesus, I thought, your only hope, if you survive this—your only hope is to take that cod liver oil and Omega-3 fish-fats, every day, bottles of it.) “Anyway, as I was telling you, the cats dug up his beans, whatever, back in Hull, and he couldn’t take it, the mess. So he’d mash up the duff with cat-food and he’d leave it out in bowls, on his allotments—and the cats ate it, and died. The spicules punctured their stomachs. So, like I said, apart from that he was a lovely guy, and we had this great argument—I told him it was cruel and he shouldn’t do it. And you know what he said to me? ‘Eh, lad,’ he said, ‘thou’s naught but a focking whipper-snapper!’”

  And then the siren sounded.

  “Bollocks!” said Luke, rigid. “Esmark’s eelpout! You haven’t taken it!”

  “I was listening to you!”

  “Bollocks! OK—we’ll have to do it later…” (He laid Esmark’s eelpout in prime position, curled inside the top of the blue basket.) “But this Jason—I’ve never known anything like it—the speed between hauls, the way he keeps it coming, the way he never sleeps! But we’ll try for some science after the next haul… OK? Esmark’s eelpout, the Blackmouth catshark! My doctorate!—And something I’ve saved up, right from the very first haul, I’ve kept it for you, it’s still alive! A hagfish! Aye. The hagfish! The oldest and weirdest fish in the sea! What a story—aye, the hagfish, that really is the story of stories…”

  “So come on, scumbag! Sperm whales! Copepods! Hagfish!”

  “Hagfish? Tell me about it!”

  “What? Now? With the siren sounded? You crazy? On deck—bring your camera! On deck!”

  OUT ON DECK, everything was transformed, etched, washed in the early morning Arctic light: and my own small world had changed: there was a swell, yes, but I could stand; in fact, I could walk. There seemed to be no wind: or maybe, I thought, my internal measuring standards of such things have altered for ever … The light was thin and white and pure and, somehow, directed upwards—and there, right above us, in this light I had never seen before, hung three gulls I had only half-imagined, Glaucous gulls, nonchalant gulls from the Arctic ice-cliffs, but their heavy barrel-bodies, their broad wings, their butch heads (they were looking down, straight at me, mildly interested, suspended in this extreme northern world of theirs, a hundred feet above us), seemed to be pink, a dull pink. So OK, I thought, they’re teenagers, so what? It’s just that the pure-white adults have more macho things to do, I expect, like hunt polar-bears.

  “Luke! Glaucous gulls!”

  “Ach,” said Luke, not even bothering to turn his head. “Gulls. I’ve a minilog on the net.” And, preoccupied, unreachable, he made his way aft to join Bryan and Robbie and Allan Besant gathered at the stern.

  Shocked, I said to a kittiwake, hanging in the air 6 feet above my head, “That Luke—I’m sorry, he’s just not in love with you, he doesn’t care like I do, see? He didn’t even notice the Glaucous gulls (those scary thugs up there, yes?) let alone you, you prettiest little gull, jeez, that Luke, I’m sorry, it’s just that you’re not his thing, it’s OK, it’s not your fault, it’s him, you won’t believe it, but Luke’s love-in-life, his passion: it’s fish.”

  The kittiwake tilted her head down and right; she regarded me intensely with her soft, dark right eye: her bill was fresh yellow, her black legs and folded feet were suspended, dangling beneath her, so delicate; her pure white-feather wind-fluffed tummy looked so warm—“And hey!” I said to her. “You’re my number-one beauty of the open sea, you tough little oceanic gull, you, I know all about you—you shear and hang and soar and play in those Force 12 winds that terrify us so …”

  And the kittiwake, I swear, moved in closer and said: “Luke? A passion for fish? Me too!”

  “Hang on!” I said, emphatic. “Stay there! Don’t move! This lens, you see, it’s useless, it’s for close-ups of fish. So I must go below and change it—to your lens, the 200 zoom. But I won’t change my oilskins or my boots. No. This is too important. And Jason won’t know—he’s on the bridge, as we call it. So stay there, because I really want your picture, for me, OK? To keep for ever…”

  I went to the cabin (no problems) and changed the lens (the pleasure of it: the outer world had lost its hatred, its violence: I could think again).

  And when I came back, yes, she was still there, but less responsive: “Quick!” she seemed to say. “Hurry up! You men, you’re so slow, so indecisive! Because—look! It’s not that I’m indifferent to you, it’s just that, well, I have other concerns in my life, you understand, and I’m so hungry—and there’s the cod-end, way back, just appeared…”

  So I took her portrait—and one of a gannet waiting on the water, so very bright and white, lit by the low rays of the Arctic sun. And those pictures, I thought, with an absurd rush of pleasure, are the first and second best photographs I’ve ever taken (and oh yes? said the inner voice that countermands all our best emotions, and deserts us when we despair—so what makes you think you can take a good picture of anything at full aperture and one-sixtieth of a second on a rolling ship?). So (to prove I wasn’t listening) I focused on Big Bryan at the stern: in his yellow oilskins, hood up over his red balaclava, his left hand on the lever that operated the power-block. And he was grinning, he thought it was funny, me trying to take his picture in this swell: even as he concentrated so hard, he’d noticed; it was true—Big Bryan noticed everything, which was another reason, I supposed, why he was the man you wanted on deck, should you decide to fall overboard … And then I turned the long lens on Robbie, beaky-faced, a Pict, in his worn red survival suit, but wearing a jaunty black baseball-cap which told me: OK, he knows about these things, so the Force 12 baby hurricane, the wee storm (as he’d probably call it)—it really is over, it’s passed, we’re safe. And next I took a photograph of Allan Besant, in his equally stained red survival suit, its black cowl up around his full cheeks, hatless, his hair cut short but for a bunch over the centre of his forehead, someone slightly apart from the rest of the crew (but why? … I’d no idea).

  The cod-end swung round and up and over the hopper-Robbie untied the knot. A cascade of redfish dull-thundered down into the hidden steel cavern. Luke gave me a push (where’d he come from? Why couldn’t I notice things?): “Action! To the fish-room!”

  AND AS WE MADE our way below, we observed the purely symbolic psychological rules: Luke and I, like every trawlerman (and no, there was nothing practical about it)—we clambered out of our oilskins and we forced off our sea-boots on the shelter-deck and we carried them with us the short distance down the companionway stairs, left along the thoroughly dirty corridor past the galley (it was nothing to do with cleanliness), through the bulkhead door of the fish-room—and put them on again at the bench to the left. And I was about to ask: Why the hell did we waste time doing that? When the answer came to me: of course: to maintain his sanity, to preserve the precious other-world of his domestic and sleeping time, a hunting male must make a barrier, even if it is invisible, a barrier between his two lives, his work and his rest, and he’ll do so in some sharp symbolic way, especially if, physically, the two worlds are only yards apart.

  Yes—and I got to the gutting table first (anxious) in order to take possession of the one and only wooden-handled gutting-knife (so comforting), and another question came to me from nowhere (which was in itself a pleasure, a reassurance—so maybe, one day, my brain really would be alive again?): why are all those seabirds up there, the Glaucous gulls (if only they were adult), the
kittiwakes, the gannets, the terns (not that we’d seen any)—why are they all so white, so very white? And the nature of this little question was also a deep pleasure, because it was innocent, and external, and nothing whatever to do with the self, and, therefore, healthy, a matter of healing. And the answer came too—from something I’d read somewhere (but no, I couldn’t remember the reference, so yes, my memory was still a partial spray-white-out, closed in with fear, confused)… Terns and gulls and, presumably, gannets (such social birds, all of them)—they have a very high percentage of orange and red oil-droplets in their eyes: they can see for miles right through the atmospheric haze that hangs over the ocean: from a vast distance they can detect a feeding frenzy of soaring and plunging white birds who’ve found a shoal of fish…

  It’s become a routine, I thought, it’s almost a way of life, I’m sure I’ve done this for ever, this gutting-table business, I know what to do (oh yeah, said the inner voice, so how come you’re so useless at it?). Robbie stood to my right, Luke to my left; Bryan, Jerry and Sean made their way down the ladder to the hold (yes, I thought, I must do that next—what happens down there?).