Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  There was a silence—Bryan and Robbie looked away, and then at their empty plates … Because, I thought, on the instant, Allan Besant was not supposed to be a deep-down emotional softie, a man who could even imagine the feelings of young fish … No, Allan Besant was meant to be tough, tough right down and through, and yet here he was, a grown man who’d sat on a rock, all alone, more than once, and called to fish, and he’d fed them pellets of bread and scraps of food that he’d saved deliberately, and that’s what this tough guy liked to do, on his own, when no one was looking, and it had all come out by mistake. And well, Bryan and Robbie, instinctively, they felt for him, they were embarrassed, for the future, on his behalf…

  Allan Besant came to himself, and reasserted himself, and his body tensed and he raised his voice: “And in eastern fucking Scotland, for Chrissake, the small saithe are called pirrie or poddlie or prinkle which just shows you, doesn’t it? Because that’s where Jerry comes from—and he can’t make up his mind about anything, either, so that makes sense. Whereas in Banff-shire, boys, they at least try to say what they mean, so a saithe in its second year is called a queeth—and in Orkney and Shetland which, by the way, Worzel, and you don’t seem to understand this: they have fuck-all to do with horrible Scotland—in Orkney and Shetland, a no-religion, a no-bullshit zone, as I think you noticed yourself, a place where people know they’ll have to die, and face the fact… Aye, there the fry of the saithe have their own real names, the names they were bloody well born with, and no mistake: sellag or sillack. And in Shetland, where, it’s obvious, isn’t it? because that must be the place where the number-one name really came from: from the crazy Shelties who dinna say anything much: great guys, aye! But Worzel, in your language, or any other, come to that: they don’t speak. Aye? So the fucking delicious fish they send south or chuck overboard or use for bait in the creels, because they willna eat it themselves, they despise it, it’s unfit for a real man, guess what they call it? Guess what they call it—when you can get those big fuckers drunk enough to speak at all? No? No idea? Well, I’ll tell you—they call it a said, a seid. And why? Because that big giant motherfucker Sheltie, who can lift eight sacks of salmon feed on his shoulders, no problem, you know what? Rumour has it that he said something, so he’s not a real man, he’s a poof, he’s almost a woman, you know, because he spoke last month, and everyone got to hear of it and it’s all over Yell, the very worst of their islands, and so now he’s like that fish that’s taboo, the one that no genuine male will eat: the he said, or he seid.”

  (OK—so it took more than a moment to get the point—but then we all clapped, and Robbie yelled: “Goaaal!”)

  Allan Besant turned to Bryan, the only real could-be Sheltie present. “And do you know what they call a Worzel-saithe, in the Firth of Clyde, an overgrown and ancient saithe? No? You don’t? Well—it’s a stenloch, a stone in the loch, whatever, something that gets in everyone’s way … And the Yanks? That’s where we should all go, where we ought to be—right out of all this shite—because they’re sensible, they don’t give a shit, whatever the damn thing is, they call it a pollock! And if you really love it—you call it a clare pollock! And what could be better than that?”

  Allan Besant, exhausted, took his elbows off the table and leant back against the bench-rest. It was obvious that the show was over—and it was such a polished theatrical piece that we clapped again, all four of us, without a thought and with no reserve. Allan Besant beamed transitory happiness at each of us, in turn, as if taking a bow to all four quarters of the theatre. I thought: What a guy! And Luke said: “Aye, magic! So what’s its scientific name?”

  We stopped clapping, and watched.

  “Its scientific fucking name?” said Allan Besant, getting to his feet, reverting instantly to the resentment that seemed to suffuse him. “Who cares?”

  “Ach,” said Luke, affronted, in his turn. “If you don’t know the scientific name, even on this trivial level, excuse me, then you can’t call yourself a scientist, can you? And besides” (he looked at me, for support—which was touching—and so: “Absolutely!” I interjected, and nodded, with vigour), “the scientific names, they’re beautiful, they sound so good, don’t they?” (I nodded further, as if, well, to me, you know, these names were not just musical, but full of meaning, and besides, I knew them all.) “The saithe, Pollachius virens (Linnaeus).”

  “Fuck that!” said Allan, half out of the door. “Who cares? And get this—people like you, full of shite, and they all live in Angus, you know what they call it there?”

  “No,” said Luke simply, taken aback.

  “Rock halibut! Lies—fucking lies!”

  “Wait! Wait!” boomed Big Bryan. “Allan—what’s up? That was star-turn stuff! And no mistake!” His bass voice, not even raised much—with no effort it filled the galley, and, in its mesh of deep waves, it seemed to hold Allan in the doorway. “So—halibut? What’s the scientific name for White halibut in Shetland?”

  Allan swung right round. He put his large muscled hands, one to each top corner of the door jamb, above his head, and he leant in towards us. “Fuck you, Bryan! Mister Blameless-Silence! You think I can do that with anything else? You think that was easy? You mad as Worzel all of a sudden? Jeesus—I learnt that. Took me weeks! The women love it! But that’s it—finish-that kind of thing, science, it hurts you know, it hurts the brain! So fuck off!”

  “Hey no! Wait!” said Bryan, with extra volume, throwing some internal switch to mega-bass. “You’ve got me wrong!”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Aye! The scientific name for White halibut in Shetland? In the only no-bullshit zone on earth? The name? It’s DA FISH, that’s what, DA FISH! And that’s a fact!”

  We laughed. Allan laughed, and his hands unclenched off the door jambs, and he said, formulaic, happy, in the full Orkney lilt: “I’m away to ma bed.”

  LUKE MOVED SIDEWAYS and up, as if something had gripped him at the back of the neck, as you might pick up a cat, and, stumbling slightly, in the space between the tables, he steadied himself with his left hand against the back of our bench and said, in a voice not quite his own: “I’m sorry. So sorry! I must go. I have to work!” And—but the echo or the joke or whatever his brave self meant it to be, it wilted and died in the warm fug, by the door, as he said, so obviously racked with guilt: “I’m away to ma fish-room!”

  Poor Luke, I thought, it must have hit him in that instant—yes, because he’d forgotten himself, listening to Allan Besant, he’d begun to live out of himself, free of anxiety, out of time, in real pleasure, the clamps off the head, such a relief, just as if he was in a theatre … free of his doctorate. And what is it about doctorates? Why such suffering? Even for a Luke? The otherwise most courageous man you might ever hope to meet? Well, obviously, for a start, it’s an absurd privilege, a great (and expensive, so expensive—other people’s taxes), a great gift to you (which you know, which makes the pressure worse): a real chance to discover something entirely unexpected about the way the world works—and the examples of doctoral students’ work changing the way we see ourselves and the universe, they’re too very many to mention: so how’s about Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of pulsars, pulsating radio stars, in 1967? An impoverished doctoral student, analysing signals from a new radio telescope, a Cambridge effort, a telescope four-plus acres in area, but that’s not the point, no, only she was intense and engaged enough to notice an extraordinary radio source: and she was young enough not to dismiss it as local interference (because it was too freaky to fit any then-current theoretical model); and for a time the jokey explanation of her elders, who plainly thought it was a technical fault of some kind in this new telescope—it was this: the signal was a message sent by the other life out there that we lonely people so yearn to find. And the older establishment-astronomers named this regular pulse, this signal every one-point-something seconds, LGM—Little Green Men. But yes—like so many fresh-thinking, young, committed doctoral students before and since, she was rig
ht: she went ahead, unfazed, and found other sources, and pow! It was a new type of star. A tiny star, a neutron star, and they’re no more than 10 miles across, but so massive, and they and their magnetic field spin like crazy, and don’t ask me how, but they produce this signal … Yes. See? So why shouldn’t Luke discover something equally remarkable about life in the unknown deep-sea? Why not?

  But the golden chance, the great opportunity to spend three or more years pursuing some obsessive interest, the intensity of it, you don’t know it at the time, of course, because you’re all of twenty-two years old, but here it is, your real life, and it gives you the foundation for the whole of the rest of your intellectual life… So there you go, you must make your own real choice of interest for a doctorate as deeply as you possibly can—something that connects at once with the half-forgotten entrancements of your childhood, something that really excites you, the more secret the better, because this is your last chance to play. For instance: take your very first sight of a smooth newt in a pond; you, the child, captivated by the mysteries of this life before you, so unlike your own; the smooth or common newt, suspended in this pond, so unexpected, its delicate hands and feet so out-stretched; and it swims, its paddling hands and feet, its zig-zag tail, so ancient, so like the tiniest of dinosaurs straight up to the surface; and it takes a breath of air, and you see its orange underside and it flits back to safety, and it regains its floating composure, a steady control over its emotions … But hang on a minute—its sex life, like us, there’s no composure about it, oh no: my friend, Tim Halliday now so old, like me, but when he was a doctoral student some thirty years ago, well, his doctoral thesis was on The Sex Life of the Newt: and you may laugh—but he discovered that the sequence went: whip, fan, flash and sniff I remember that, because no one could forget such a thing—and he was a tidy boy, so in the mating season he’d go out with his net and capture a male and a female smooth newt from some farm-pond near Oxford, and he’d bring them back in his collecting jar and release them into newt-sex heaven: his newt-club in his lab, a gravel-bottomed, well-aerated, just-the-right temperature, pond-planted designer-tank-for-newts: a red-light, after-dinner prairie bed, a secluded Masters-and-Johnson, a Kinsey all-permitted sex-club for newts …

  I HEARD, from a very long way away, from far out, from the wildly anxious surface of the deep sea, way out beyond the snug little illusory comfort of the Norlantean’s double-hull—I heard a shout, as Luke would call it… “Redmond!” It was Robbie’s voice… a shout! But I hadn’t been trained, and training, again and again, as Luke said, that was everything; but this was an emergency, and it was Robbie out there, asking me, of all people, to rescue him … And he was right of course, because only Robbie knew me well enough to realize that I was the fattest old fuck ever to go to sea, so I was insulated, I had my own survival suit, an excessive covering of subcutaneous all-over yellow fat, like all mammals in the sea, so, sure, I must jump in, and I must fat-swim, and I must rescue that little Robbie, so thin as he was, who for some reason had decided to become a close friend of mine … So I jumped off the gunwale of the Norlantean, from the stern-deck, and my legs kicked out like a frog and my hands paddled as hard as they could, like a newt, rising for air to the surface, and when I got there, a hero already, I yelled: “Robbie! It’s OK! Your troubles are over! It’s me! Redmond! So don’t worry! Because it’s me! And I’m here! And I’m coming! I’m coming as fast as I can! I’m coming to rescue you!”

  And I got there (such a flailing of limbs—and the sea was so salty and my mouth went dry), and Robbie, drowning, desperate, he grabbed me with both hands, so hard, on the ridges of my shoulders; and he transferred his right hand to the hair on the back of my head and he pulled my face out of the water… or, as it now seemed, out of my shallow bowl of soup … “Redmond!” he said, right into my left ear. “So you’d rescue me like? Aye—I’m sure you would! Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate that! I really do!”

  And Big Bryan, way out in his corner, he was convulsed with laughter: Boom! Boom! “So here comes Worzel!” he yelled, delighted. “Here comes Worzel! Gurgle gurgle! So don’t you worry about a thing, Robbie! Because here comes Gurgle Worzel, gurgle gurgle!”

  Jesus—how very bad: so I must have been shouting in my sleep … But how come I’d been asleep at all? Because it didn’t feel at all like waking—and anyway, how dare they play a trick like that on me? Because I’d been talking, so rationally, hadn’t I? I’d been talking, I’d been giving my all to Luke and Robbie and Bryan and they’d been spellbound, as they should be, and they’d said nothing, as they ought… Yes: I’d been talking: and they were playing some trawler-game with me … Or were they? Hadn’t I been swimming, and so well, in the sea?

  Robbie said, as if Allan Besant had but left that second (perhaps he had): “Redmond, you mustna mind Allan. He’s not like us, he’s not like you and me—because he came into a lot of money like, a lot, from some relative he’d never met, I shouldna wonder.”

  “Oh boys, Jesus, excuse me, but it’s so frightening, this life of yours …”

  “Aye. Anyway, he was no prepared for it, if you know what I mean, and mebbe we’d all do the same, how can you tell? So he stopped work at the fishing, aye, and he was a joiner, too, you know—one of the best in all Orkney, but there again, there’s no much work for a joiner in Orkney!”

  “No—you don’t understand, it’s so very frightening, you know, because I thought I was talking to you, to you, Robbie,” and I looked to my right at Bryan, who’d stopped laughing, I could hear, and who came blearily into focus, “and to you, Bryan; and to Luke…” But Luke had atomized, he was no longer there … And I felt that deep fear that can take possession of you without warning; that fear that seems to arrive in the back of your skull like the talons of a Monkey eagle—and OK, if you haven’t been unfortunate enough to have seen one of them in action, then the sudden cold intrusion of acute anxiety into your mind at three o’clock on an ordinary grey afternoon—and just in case you think you can ignore that, well, your stomach starts to hurt, and then it burns, and it’s playing host to a Forest cobra—and no, you realize pronto, this one is different, because this one, no, you can’t sleep it off… But, even so, it was some seconds before it occurred to me that I might be going mad … And then I said, too desperate, too loud: “Robbie! Bryan! It’s so frightening—because I thought I was talking to you!”

  “Oh that,” said Bryan, at once looking bored, “we all get that.”

  “Aye!” said Robbie. “Dinna you worry. You’re no different.”

  Bryan, relaxing, settling back into his corner said: “Aye, near midway on a trip, we all get that: we all think we’ve said things to each other and, you know, such good things, sometimes, because as you speak you’ll no be getting any interruptions so you can concentrate, and say what you really mean, but no, you ask around and no, you were asleep like you, Redmond, just now, your head on your plate, at the galley table, that’s normal that is, that’s the usual—but I’ve known people fall asleep standing up, or drop their heads on the gutting table, for Chrissake, or keel over quietly into the ice in the hold—and when you shake them awake they’ll deny it and say they were talking to you! Aye, but I’ve noticed, once in your bunk, somehow you know it’s dreams, and that’s a fact, so it’s important, it’s important to get to your bed and to lie down, even if you’ve only got the fifteen minutes, and then, once you’re in ya bed, there again, they’re dreams—-but when you’re knackered right out and you fall asleep at your job or in the galley here: after a week or two of no-sleep, that’s right: you think you’re talking… So don’t you worry… You think we weren’t frightened? The first time it happened? When you haven’t the nerve to tell anyone? Because they’re all older than you and serious men and you’ll be thinking: If I tell them about this they’ll know I’m a nutter and they’ll kick me off the boat when we land in Stromness and I’ll never get another job for the rest of my life.’ Aye—but one time you do tell them, right here in th
e galley, like as not, because you can’t stand it a moment longer, and you’ve become afraid of everything—and they laugh, all of them, and you realize there’s nothing special about you, you’ve no need to worry, and that’s great, that is, and so you become a trawlerman …

  “But I tell you, Redmond, you’re weird, you really are, because you’ll talk to anyone about anything, I’ve watched it happen: you’ve no sense of measure, what’s the word? Restraint, that’s it: you’ve no sense of restraint. So it’s important, this, if you want the truth of things, because it’s way under half of would-be trawlermen who last more than the first few trips—even, as I say, even if they’ve been trained in Captain Sutherland’s nautical school in Stromness—and why? The sea? The weather in January? No, that can’t be it, because they sign on at all times of year, no: it’s the no-sleep, it’s the fright, it’s the terror, even, if you will (and who can tell how scared another man really is?), the way they can’t adjust to live with madness, even mild madness, for a week or two, three weeks at the most. That’s why they’ll do anything to try and find a job ashore … They don’t like that Viking place, you know, open ships, no shelter, no sleep—the place that made Viking culture and myths and the world-tree, Yggdrasill! The witchcraft and trolls and the little Orkney and Shetland people in their burial mounds, like Robbie, the only bullshit that I really like…”

  Robbie said: “But Redmond, listen to me, your friend, Robbie…”