Allan Besant stepped up to the table, in control position—and he happened to butt his forehead against the end of the wooden handle of the steel, the knife-sharpener, which someone had replaced, not level in its tight slot between the overhead pipes, but at a downward slant. “Fuck you!” he shouted, with eruptive violence. Grabbing the handle in his right hand, he hurled the steel, with a lightning backwards convulsion of his arm, across the fish-room where, like a bolt from a crossbow, it struck the plates to port with a horrible intensity, ricocheted halfway back towards him, bounced, with decreasing energy, almost to his feet, and, coming to rest, a pointer stern-to-bow, began to roll, like every loose and inarticulate thing, port to starboard, starboard to port…
Robbie and Luke, sorting redfish, kept their heads down. No one spoke. An hour or so later, Allan Besant, without a word, stepped off his box, walked across the rolling wet boards, retrieved the steel and replaced it, carefully, level, tucked up straight, in its usual place.
Luke, at once, abandoning his tray, his full section of the gutting table, hopped lightly off his own box, to his left, swung himself over the conveyor—yellow boots in the air, as if vaulting a gate—and, disappearing for a moment (I heard the corrugated-iron scrape of the hopper-door pulled open, and shut), he came back round the corner holding something in his right hand: light-brown, flattish, very wet. (So whatever it was, I thought, Luke, on one of his many private visits—the virgin, rich, ready hopper, it seemed to belong to Luke alone—he’s stored that something in there, cached it.) With no apparent effort, he repeated his circus jump, one-handed, and he was there again, next to me, on his box, with a ridiculous grin on his face—and in the light of such enjoyment all tension in the fish-room burnt off like a morning fog …
Luke leant forward over the gutting table, he held out his prize with both hands, and he tilted it, in the beam of the overhead lights, to each of us in turn, to Allan, to Robbie, to me. And yes, even I knew that this something must be special, because otherwise Allan and Robbie would have looked polite, bored, and got on with their work—but, like me, they stared … It was an intense colony of small animals, I could see that, in shape like the honeycomb in a bee-hive, except that this was manic, the tunnels deep, needful, each exquisite little round hole (what? maybe 4 millimetres across, and so evenly spaced, their perfect circular walls perhaps half a millimetre thick)—every receding tunnel was filled, low down, by a withdrawn purple-white glisten-bright animal…
“What’s this, Worzel?” said Luke, too loud—so that was OK; it was a social-bonding question, one for all of us.
Now, I thought, like a first-former, all of eleven (and biology, then, was already so exciting—in fact, the happiness of such a revelation was almost overwhelming; an instant release into the great testable world: so this is real? This is how the world is? So: pow! And I’ve been trying to regain that feeling ever since …)—I thought, well, so teacher Luke is asking me this question with such over-the-top pleasure, and I got it wrong last time, so yes, sponges are colonial animals, aren’t they?
“It’s a sponge!”
“No!” shouted Luke, with a little jump of joie de vivre; he jumped, on top of his box. “No! Worzel—no! It’s a mast!”
“A mast?” said Allan, eager, leaning forward. “Get away! Of course it’s not a sponge! Worzel! Old Worzel! But shite—the Marine Lab! The Marine Lab, Aberdeen! It’s no a fucking mast!”
“Aye!” shouted Robbie. “Yep! The Marine Lab—they canna take it at sea! They, like, they go to pieces!”
And Luke, far from being affronted, became super-charged with the energy that makes the rest of life worth the effort. “It’s a mast!” he yelled, his weathered face transformed, for a moment, into that of a young boy. “It’s a mast!”
He turned it over—and yes, there was no doubt about it: no holes, just a smooth curved surface, a quarter-cross-section of the outside of a massive mast.
“Aye,” said Robbie, without apology. “Yep! That’s right, sure enough—and imagine them wrecked right up here in a Force 12 like the last one. January—and in a sailing ship. No chance. No chance to keep her head into the lumps. No chance at all. Orkney men, I shouldna wonder. From Stromness. A whaler.”
“Aye, Christ!” said Allan, with excessive passion. “What a shite way of life!”
Luke, ignoring Robbie and Allan (this was biology, not history), said: “Worzel, Redmond!” (So there was more to come, Luke’s interest was not exhausted, he hadn’t finished.) “How would you explain it? Because these”—the glisten-purple-white animals withdrawn into their holes, reflecting the overhead lights—“are not Teredo navalis, the mollusc, the bivalve of shallow waters, the so-called ship-worm. No! Not at all!”
He tossed the piece of wood over the hopper-conveyor, in a faultless curve—straight into his stanchion-lashed blue basket. (How does he do that? I thought, my mind relaxing back into its usual wish-wash of trivia—why isn’t he a professional bunger, lobber, whatever? There must be a post-prehistoric-hunting game that values Lukes who chuck things with their hands as well as the one that makes heroes of people who kick things with their feet? Hey—yes! Basketball!)
“No really, Redmond, attend, it’s extraordinary—because these molluscs have come up from the deep sea!” And Luke, intent, was leaning forward over the gutting table as if the piece of mast was still in his hands—and his hands, with a life of their own, began to mime his words. Robbie and Allan, all work forgotten, leant forward, too, watching. “And we now know,” said Luke, “since the 1970s—that recent!—we now know that all across the ocean floors of the world there are wood-boring bivalves, waiting.” Luke’s hands, as flat as could be, spread forward across the gutting table, laying out the great plains of the abyss of the watery earth and its population of specialized molluscs, waiting. “Can you think of a less likely source of food? Wood—the deep ocean? It’s as far from a source of wood as you can get! Of course, they’ll attack masts like that” (he gave a violent nod towards his blue basket), “the hulls of wooden shipwrecks—but come on—they evolved millions of years before we even stood upright, let alone made boats. So come on, Worzel! No one knows how or when—as yet—but what kept them going before men built ships and drowned themselves?”
Robbie and Allan, eyes bright, looked thoroughly entertained: after all, here was something unexpected: a tutorial given by a trawlerman, a fisheries inspector from the South Atlantic, now at their own fisheries lab, the Marine Lab, Aberdeen, where so many new techniques had been invented that had eased their lives and improved their catches and incomes—and for Chrissake he was a lifeboatman, too—and with him was this white-haired old Worzel, older than their fathers …
“Well, I can answer that,” I said, delighted—because I had this instant, a multiple image of the great brown powerful river (the opposite shore a blur on the low horizon): the Orinoco, the Congo, the Amazon (and the island in the mouth of the Amazon, not that I’d seen it myself—it was the size of Switzerland): and all day long, mesmerizing, without a break (wherever you were), the remorseless brown river carried whole tree-trunks, branches, smashed-up rafts of white-weathered wood dislodged in a freak flood from the inner meander of some stream in the far interior—always, for ever, towards the ocean… “Rivers!”
“Rivers?” said Luke.
Robbie smiled.
Allan Besant, for some reason, put his right hand up above his head on to the stop-start lever of the conveyor and, without activating anything, himself leant forward, to hear better … And I realized that we were having a four-man conversation… So it was not the deep-pounding rhythm of the engines, the mind-emptying thump of the diesels that had enclosed us. No, of course not, across all registers, it had been the appallingly more powerful sound-waves from the sea, the insane wind …
Luke, with a half-smile, repeated: “Rivers?”
“Yes—I’ve seen it, an endless succession of broken trees, branches, mats of vegetation, on their way to the sea, above all in the
Amazons and the Congo—but also from the fierce little rivers of Borneo!”
“Aye! Yes—that must be right!” Luke shouted. (And so gratified, I thought, yes: what a good teacher you’d make …) He lowered his voice to mere loud speech, became scholarship-serious: “But the text-book explanation given, for example, in Tony Rice’s grand little summary of it all in the official Natural History Museum booklet, Deep Ocean, it’s this—he says that trees from coastal forests—unlikely as it seems, he admits, he says that these trees must fall into the sea, sufficiently often to make it worthwhile to be an abyssal wood-boring bivalve!”
“Aye!” yelled Robbie, so happy, cheering me on (and I thought: friendships, this is friendship, the most precious long-term emotional pleasure we can ever hope to experience…). “Rivers! There you go, Worzel—the whole ching-bang!”
And Allan, newly friendly, pulled down the large overhead lever, which started the hopper-conveyor, and the small lever next to it, which set the gutting table in motion; and then, realizing that all our trays were still full, he pushed both levers back up, hard.
Whereupon, from the hold, as if they knew that up here in the partial light we’d been enjoying the life of the mind, knowledge—those other things beyond mere labour—and excluding them, down below, from the hard-won contents of Luke’s brain: Bryan or Jerry or Sean sent the hammer-blow signal, steel-on-steel: Bang! Bang! Bang!—You lazy bastards! We’re out of fish!
So we went back to work, in earnest, sorting redfish, and the world shrank once more to a blur between the hands, of red and silver and painful spines and the occasional other fish (Luke, from my left: “Gut that one!”) and steel edges and tubes and clanging drop-gates… And at last, for us, the haul was over … When Luke—so thin, young, wiry, so manic and committed—bent down, quick as a cat-strike, and came up with a yard-long fish of sorts (so where had he stored that? Aye, as he might have said, of course, under his stand-on fish-box …): a fish that, in its bulk, was all head, with a short and rounded snout tipped with horny plates, a large, underslung mouth—and a thin following body which tapered down to a real look-alike rat-tail, which was all the more convincing because its muscly last few inches were young-rat pink …
I thought: it’s a rat-tail, a fish of the black depths, a grenadier—and hey, even I can now recognize a grenadier when I see one!—but this was different, it was elegant, in its way, yes, it was even graceful… “It’s a rat-tail! It’s a grenadier!”
“Well done, Worzel!”
And Robbie yelled: “Goaaal!”
And Allan Besant, less generous, said: “Goal.”
“Aye,” said Luke, laying the fish gently in his tray on the empty and stationary gutting table. “It’s a Roundnose grenadier, Coryphaenoides rupestris (and don’t they sound great, the scientific names?—and one day we’ll find out what they mean, I promise we will), but right now, Worzel, would you mind? Could we photograph it, please, alongside the Roughhead, Macrourus berglax, you know, to compare the two? Would you mind?”
Robbie hosed down Allan—the power of that pump: an aureole of water droplets, an all-round overhead-neon-lit halo for Saint Allan Besant; and then, likewise, as Allan hosed Robbie in his oilskins, the water-cannon blasting, the neon-corona: the beatification of Saint Robbie. And they, I thought, the swine, the blessed, they’re off to eat in the galley… what will it be? Haggis? Yes, God, please let it be haggis and clapshot. And (the rhythm of a solemn chant of the Wee-Free Fundamentalist Christians began to swell in my head, in the Gaelic, of course, but well translated: “Oh Holy Mavis and the Tiny Tot/Let it be clapshot and haggis/Haggis and clapshot.”) Jesus, I thought, yes, I’ve earned my haggis and my clapshot. Neeps and tatties. The best. Please. But now I have to photograph these fish … So I went straight (in full sea-dress, a protest) to the cabin (the smells from the galley) and got the Micro-Nikkor lens, and, from the camera-and-flash hanging on its strap from its hook in the laundry-room (“Hey, I’ve arrived—this is my hook: I belong here”), repeating the little Nikon-mantra (on at 5.6, off at f.11), turned free the 200 zoom, transferred the Nikon base-cap (the precision of it, even in plastic, or whatever it was) from the micro to the zoom, stuck the zoom, for safe-keeping, into the right foot of Luke’s pair of reserve sea-boots, labelled, at calf level, in heavy black marker-pen, LUKAS (so they were a special relic—from his time as a fisheries inspector on board Antarctic Spanish trawlers?) and clicked on the Micro-Nikkor, and why, I wondered vaguely, was such kit so comforting? So pleasing? Yes, it was a deep feeling, certainly, nothing at all to do with the actual object—so it was probably genetic, prehistoric. Yes, those males who didn’t delight in the perfection of their kit, the delicious arc of the bow, the acme of balance in the arrow: well, they got naturally de-selected before they could breed, they got killed. And the female, she has other things to think about, mere kit is of no interest to her, she cares only for the end result, the successful male itself, so no wonder the girls don’t read bow-and-arrow mags, or gun mags, or camera or Ferrari mags, or trawler mags—no, no, they’ve no time for that primary male testing-stage. (“Boys stuff!” they think. The insult of it! No—all they care about, rightly, is the end result: with the best kit or the worst kit, who cares? Can you bring home … the what? The haggis and the clapshot…)
I found myself standing (easily, at last) on the fish-room floor, to port of the hopper, and Luke, next to me, two fish in photo-position at his feet, was shouting at me. Why’d he do that?
“Redmond! This is special! You know why?”
“Eh?”
“Please—don’t do this—you know, sometimes, excuse me, sometimes I think you’ve got Alzheimer’s, excuse me, I’m sorry” (he touched my left arm), “you know, a real Worzel, because sometimes I talk to you and you don’t respond at all!”
“I don’t?”
“No, I say something—and it’s OK, I know you’ve had no sleep, but I’m used to trawlermen who’ve had no sleep, and they always react when you say something!”
“Ah.”
“Yes—so forget it—but this is special.” With his right yellow sea-boot (its inner steel toe-cap) he pushed the two lined-up fish closer together. “You know why?”
“No, of course not.” And, even more testy: “Of course not!”
“Well you should,” he said, fired up with this deep fascination in a world beyond himself. “Because, remember? Two-thirds of the earth’s surface is the surface of the sea—and 80 per cent of that sea is over a mile deep. And the deep-sea areas of the world are continuous—the deep basins of the Atlantic, the Pacific and Indian oceans, as the text books say, they all connect, connect! Imagine it! The vast power of those unimpeded currents—and there’s no barrier between them and the great Southern ocean deeps either” (as we began our now slow slide to port, the fish at our feet, Luke’s hand tightened manically on my left shoulder—ow! The strength of little Luke), “and I know about them—at least, I’ve gone diving for specimens on their very edge, did I tell you?”
“Ow! Yes. Great! You did!”
“Yes? But of course within all those basins there are ocean holes and deep valleys and canyons that descend and descend—you know—unknown depths, and well, those are as cut off from one another as the tops of different mountains on land, but such places, they’re local really, they’re rare…”
“So how, how does speciation, Ernst Mayr’s …”
“Come on, Worzel! For Chrissake—take the picture!”
“Can’t.”
“Eh?”
“Can’t. Can’t move. You’ve got my shoulder!”
“Och aye! Ach—sorry!”
Luke released me: I stumbled to my right, recovered and bent forward until I had the two grenadiers in focus: the Rough-head (top) bigger, chunkier and, in comparison with the smooth pink-tailed projectile, the Roundhead, so scaly he looked dinosaur-armour-plated. Flash!
“Aye! But you were shaking!”
“Of course I’m shaking!” (And my other inner vo
ice, an unwelcome, new, querulous, testy, old-man’s voice, that, I’d noticed, seemed to have joined me out of Stromness and had tried to speak to me once or twice before, said: “You’ll be bruised, you know. All your joints ache, but your shoulder will hurt. So why don’t you give up, retire? Yes, yes—you must find new interests before your family send you to the very comforting It’s-All-Over-Sunset-Totally-Fucked-Alzheimer’s-Goodbye-Home—of course you must, so how about gardening? Ambitions? Yes, yes, dear—and how are we today? Ambitions? Why—you could get an allotment, and even without poisoning cats, maybe, just maybe, you could grow the perfect Brussels sprout… And why not? That’s difficult! There’s nothing wrong with that!”)
“Well, don’t just stand there! Take another exposure. And then one more. Come on! Bracket the exposures.”
“Eh! Yes, yes, of course. Ambitions! The future!”
“What? Hey, Worzel! Aye. That’s it. Well done! But there is one great barrier!”
We slid, slowly, back to starboard (even the sea was becoming friendly…).
“There is, across the deep seas of all the world’s oceans, just the one great divide—and where, Worzel, where do you think that is?”
“No idea!”
“Right here! That’s where—right off the UK! And no one in Britain knows or cares!” Luke, deeply offended by our ignorance, grasped the two precious grenadiers by their rat-tails and slung them into his yellow basket. “The Roundnose, you see, technically he shouldn’t be here—and why? Because this is Roughhead country! And why? Because between the two species-distributions, there’s the one great barrier, a bloody great mountain-range, excuse me, a submerged mountain-range that links the continental shelf to the west of us, you know, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, to the entirely different continental shelf that’s us and Europe and the shallow North Sea—a pond!”
The camera kit re-hung on its laundry-room hook, Luke hosed the fish-scales and fish-guts from my oilskins; I hosed Luke, from his chest-apron down to his boots: and from the scatter of water he yelled: “Aye! It runs from south of the Faeroes towards Shetland and Orkney—slap across the Faeroe—Shetland Channel! The Wyville Thomson Ridge! But now—we must eat! Calm down! Whatever! But I’ll tell you about it later, I promise I will…”
Trawler Page 26
