And Allan says: ‘Thank God for that!’ And we all laugh. And Jason says: ‘Besides, he’s not normal, is he? Because he’s already been banned from every bar and hotel in Stromness!’ And Allan says: ‘Thank God for that!’ And then we really laugh—even Dougie laughs!
“And in fact, Redmond, I can tell you, I’m thirty-three, and I’ve been at sea a very long time, and I can tell you, as honest as I sit here, with you aboard, not one of us—and even old Dougie got talking—not one of us, no, we’ve never had such laughs!”
“Oh yes?” I said, very huffy.
“Aye! But Allan—you shouldna let him upset you, because he doesna mean it… And he has problems of his own, you know, and I really like him, and he said, ‘Thank God for that!’” (And Bryan laughed again: Boom! Boom!)
“Yeah—you just told me!”
“So look at it this way—he must like you, or he’d no have given you a nickname, aye! Worzel! Just right! Because you’ll no be giving nicknames to people you don’t think about—and if you don’t believe me, consider this: in Orkney we call the Shetlanders Shelties. But what do the Shetlanders call us? Answer: they don’t, because we’re to the south of them so they’ll no be giving us a thought!”
“So what did you mean? Happy? You said you were happy with life on a trawler …”
“Happy?” said Bryan, and he laughed, a kindly run-of-the-mill laugh, not a caught-out helpless boom like a bittern in a marsh. “Happy? Can’t you see? Of course I’m happy! Because that’s what I was saying. You a writer who knows about these things—emotions—or a dumbo, or what? I’m happy because I have a woman at home that I love and trust. I have three children, two of hers, a gift to me, as it were, and one of ours—and I love her, and I like to think that she loves me, but Redmond, Mister Writer-Man, I’ll tell you for nothing: you take that love for granted, and you, as a whole man, you’re finished! And that’s a fact! Because you’ll get divorced—and after that, Worzel, all your memories, the places in your mind where you used to go, when the weather comes, you understand me, the places that you used to visit to get away and get happy, those safe places—and they never fail you, because they’re only there in your own mind—well, you get divorced, and I’ve talked to lots of my mates, friends, colleagues, whatever you’d say, you know, trawlermen who had to get divorced, because she’d deceived them when they were at the fishing, and that’s right, you think you’re OK, you’ll tough it out, and like as not you have this new young woman, so sexy—but guess what? Next time, next year, January, like this, when the weather comes—you find yourself trying to get back to those places, those memories that made you happy, but you can’t! You can’t get there! No! That’s what they say! And myself—I can imagine it—the worst thing in a man’s life, really: because what could be worse than that? You drown? Simple. You get cancer? Sure. But this—at least half of it: you must have done it to yourself! And aye, you’re away at the fishing, and you’re on your own out here really, and no one cares back home, apart from your new young wife (and who knows what she’s up to?)—aye, so you go where you always used to go to get your comfort and be a man, to your happiest memories, and—guess what? You can’t get there! Not at all! There’s a black knot that you can’t untie, no one could. Because, how can I put it to you, Worzel, an old man who knows sod all? I know! Aye! Of course! Aye—it’s like the trawl-doors, the otter-boards (what did Robbie say you called them? Search me. I’ve forgotten—and anyway, it wasn’t funny, not like the car tyres, the rock-hoppers …); it’s like they’re crossed, they’re locked, they’ve been flipped right across and over each other by the cold deep-sea, the currents up here that flow so fast and cold beneath the warm surface North Atlantic drift that keeps us all alive! So—your old love, it’s gone cold, and your memories have frozen under pressure, with it, and you, you’ll never get them back: they’re miles down, and cold and gone, but you, Worzel, of course, you’re doing your best, but from that moment, really, you know yourself, you’re half-a-man, you’re waiting, that’s all, you’re waiting for death.”
“You hadn’t told me about your wife,” I said, glum, not sure if he had or not. “You never told me!”
“Of course I did!” said Bryan, bouncy. “But don’t you worry, Worzel. It’s obvious—you’ve got this thing called Alzheimer’s. It happens to everyone over fifty! But don’t you worry, old Worzel, because that’s great, that is, it means you can ask any old person a question, and it’s private, it really is confidential, because you can be as sure as the Merry Dancers, the Northern Lights, you can be sure that the ancient in question won’t remember a damn thing of the question in the morning… And nowadays, of course, on Orkney, things are different, there’s food and healthcare and such, so we have quite a few old people like you, and we all agree, in the Flattie and the Royal and the bars like—you need to catch them, you must hook them (if you want the real truth that they’ll forget in forty-eight hours) just as Alzheimer’s is beginning like with you: because if you wait too long, and their memory’s now down from forty-eight hours to twenty-four to eight to half an hour, to half a minute, you’ve had it! You might just as well go ask your question late at night of an incoming mermaid on the shore, or one of the little people, like Robbie, squatting on a burial mound—or the other Robbie, Robbie Mowat, beaten to bits, because I was no there to protect him, lying on the cobbles outside the Royal Hotel!”
“So you’re happy—because you’re in love? But, far more important, you’re happy because you somehow know that she’s in love with you?”
“Aye! I told you! And hey, Worzel—there’s this thing called the Mission to Seamen: and they must run Old People’s Homes, and now you’ve been on the Norlantean, K508 (remember your registration number), I’ll bet you’d qualify!”
“Thanks,” I said, glummer still.
“But Redmond, there is something I’d like to ask you, to talk to you about…” And Bryan’s voice lost its volume, it deserted its big hold on life so drastically, in fact, that it became almost a whisper, or as much of a whisper as a voice like that could reach: “Redmond, joking apart, I do have one worry…”
And in order to catch the words I edged myself surreptitiously along the bench-seat, to my right, across Luke’s habitual place, to its end, at the narrow passage-way down the galley, between the tables—and to cross that, the crudest common-sense told me, would be to stop Bryan talking altogether, to disrupt the pathways in his brain, to send him, obscurely outraged, to his bunk.
“You do?”
“Aye—it’s simple, but it’s difficult to deal with, to know what to do—it’s this: I really love my wife, you know, I adore her, or whatever the right word would be, she keeps me going when I’m away at sea, the thought of her, all of her, you know what I mean, it fills my head, so I can do any job: any boring old job that goes on for ever, like stacking in the hold, well, that’s simple, I just take it slow, and I remember every detail, every moment of our life together, all the private moments, and don’t get me wrong—don’t be a male jerk—I don’t just mean the sex, though that’s great, no, it’s odd, isn’t it? It’s not the memories of sex that keep me going, no, I find all that difficult to remember, as it happens, so maybe I’m not normal, perhaps there’s something wrong with me? And maybe, you, you know, as a wise old man, maybe you’d do me the kindness of telling me, if you think that that’s the case …”
Stupefied, unprepared, out of my depth (Big Bryan—he was talking so quietly), I couldn’t think of a thing to say, not for the moment, and the truth is, well, I wanted to cry … But you must not do that, and besides, my mother used to beat me, with the flat of her hairbrush, every time I did …
“No—when I’m down there in the hold (and aye—you’ve got to come down there, too, next haul, or you’ll never be able to tell yourself that you’ve even been a junior apprentice, a baby-trawlerman—oh no!)—when I’m down there, stacking, for hours and hours, and it’s so cold you canna feel your hands, it’s times like that when I sta
rt at the beginning, right at the beginning of our life together, from when I first met her, and of course I think of her body and all the sex, but it’s odd, it’s not really that at all, not at all, no, it’s her face, and her laugh, and the life that’s in her, as you’d say yourself, and the things she says to me and even now, you know, years later, she surprises me, and I laugh!”
“Aye!” I said, my face in my hands. “Bryan, you …”
“Yes!” said Bryan. “I knew you’d understand, but you don’t, really, not at all. No—you see, whenever I get home—and I go straight home, I can’t be doing with all this drinking the boys do first: I tell her, it all comes out, I can’t help it, I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it: I make a right fool of myself, every time, and first, I’m so glad she’s still alive, and second, aye, and it is second, but it’s the kind of second that anywhere else would be a first, if you catch my meaning, well, I let her know, and no mistake, and that’s a fact, and I can’t help it: every time I tell her, and every time I think I mustna do this ever again because it’s no manly and she canna like it, and I tell her how much I fucking love her, and how I’ve been thinking of her at the power-block or at the net at the stern-ramp or bored shitless at night-watch in the wheelhouse or stacking, like I say, in the hold … And then I take the kids in my arms, and I stink of fish, of course I do, I really smell, but they dinna seem to mind, and mebbe they really love me, mebbe they do… but who can tell? How do you know when you’re away all the time? And my wife, and I’m her second husband, you know, so maybe she really did choose me and mean it, what do you think? She says, every time, ‘Bryan,’ she says, ‘you big soft stupid love-bag, go to sleep. Bryan, stop it: you’re going to your bed, right now, and you’re to sleep for a day and a night and a day—and I’ll be there, too, for some of the time, but you’ll be none the wiser, but Bryan: when you wake up, after a day and a night and a day’ (that’s what she says! Every time), ‘then it’ll be our bed again, and we’ll have fun, and we’ll get up and go out and we’ll do things together…’”
“Jesus! But isn’t that happiness, real happiness, the most any man could ever expect?”
“No! It’s not! At least—it might be. But how do you make sure it goes on for ever? As a man—how the hell do you do that? And it was Allan Besant, or someone, no, mebbe it wasn’t him, but someone told me, around six months ago, to look up a word, in a dictionary from your town, as it happens, yes—in the focking Oxford dictionary, and the word was uxorious, and whoever it was, he told me to look it up, in passing like, because that word was me—and this horrible word, a really nasty little bit of stinking dogshit, this word, it means: to be excessively fond of your wife. So my question to you, from Oxford, my question to you is this: is it possible? What if I love her too much, or rather, what if I let her know I love her too much? And it’s a fact, but I can’t help it, I told you, when I’m at sea, I’ll go anywhere, do anything, it doesn’t bother me, however bad it gets—and I’m sorry Worzel, I know how you feel, and I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the truth is it can get a very little worse, OK, let’s be honest, a fuck-sight worse than the Force 12 we’ve had this January—and all the time, in a hurricane, aye, sure, a junior hurricane, I’ll be going through, in my mind, the beginning of our life together. And you know what? I’ve done no more than the first three months—and it comes to me, I realize, the hurricane’s gone, the storm’s over, and everyone’s panicked, and I’ve hardly noticed—and now it’s calm. So how do I tell her that? Or should I? Is that uxorious? This word, Worzel, you, as a writer, uxorious, this foul word: do you think, you as a writer, do you think that when I get home and like the rest of us I’ve had no sleep and so I say things: and I tell her (every time, and it’s got worse over the years), I tell her how much I love her, and I really mean it, so I’m almost in tears, OK, I tell a lie, I’m always in tears. I’m so pleased to see her, and the babies, well, the children, they’re getting big now—uxorious: so do you think they secretly hate it? Eh? Now you know the truth—do you think I’m uxorious? Do you? Is that why they send me to bed straight away and no mistake?”
“No! You’ve got it all wrong—uxorious, my arse!” And then, deeply disturbed, all the same, I said: “You big fucking furry Viking!” which helped me, but not him, to get things in perspective. “No, no—with your job, you can’t be uxorious, that’s a word that describes bust-up depressive frightened little husbands who’ve enclosed themselves in the home, just like the males attached to female deep-sea angler-fish—and believe me, baby” (I’d called Big Bryan baby?), “I know all about that: but you, you’re not a case in point, far from it. As far as you’re concerned, with this one love of yours, I can tell you, there’s no such thing as excessive love: as far as I can remember, which is not very far, no, there’s no case in the entire literary history of the world—the history of the emotions—there’s not a single case in which a woman, faced with a genuine, outsize hero, a real alpha male, thinks: ‘This man loves me too much!’ Excessive love—for them—there’s no such thing… She sends you off to sleep because she loves you, she really loves you, and so she can imagine this hell, let’s be honest, this hard and sleepless hell you go through every time you’re at sea—and in what other job could you find routine conditions like this? Eh? Not even in the SAS!”
Bryan got to his feet, jerky, like an automaton, a robot—as if he’d received a signal, a small electric shock. It was obvious that I’d been no help at all—and that this deep problem, this male problem of his, which had at first seemed so laughable: no, it was real, and he’d probably carry it with him, secretly, for the rest of his life; a jagged spiky fragment of ice from the hold—in a domesticity that should have been as warm and constant as happiness can get… And the little piece of ice-spikes, refusing to melt, would say to him: “If you think of your wife for the greater part of each working day and night at sea; if you adore her like you do; and, worst of all: if you can’t help but tell her so every time you get back ashore sleepless, half-mad, semi-hysterical, like a woman in distress—then you’ll lose her. She can’t love that kind of a man … Nobody could… And you realize what that means, don’t you? Oh yes! You’ll lose your children too! And all because you’re a trawlerman …”
BACK IN THE CABIN, making my slow, delicious way to the bunk (hang on to every upright: take it easy: you’ll get there: paradise awaits), I realized that Luke’s blue sleeping-bag, dim in the light from the door, the passage-way, was occupied: there was a small and thin, a most insubstantial something slotted into three-quarters of the length of that blue tube—it could only be Luke himself. For once—Luke had gone to his bunk before me!
So, of course, forgetting that Luke, like Sean, and unlike me, had probably had no rest for forty hours, I felt superior, so superior—and a thoroughly irritating and untrue saying of my childhood came back to me: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!” Yes, that’s right, Rosie-bud used to say that to me when I was little, and I’d watched The Lone Ranger on the very first of televisions, and she couldn’t get me to bed—I didn’t want to sleep? Could I ever recapture that piece of childhood? No! Never! That bit, well, that really had gone, and here, right here, was my snuggly green nylon parachute-silk soft womb-lining sleeping-bag… So I got into it, in at the lips, an effort, because the base of the top bunk, with its felt-tip portrait of the leering trawlerman, it was so tight-down on my space, but eventually I worked myself in and down to a line, a dead-line of that flat-out unconscious which the Bantu of the Congo call dead-for-a-time, as opposed to that worst of states, dead-for-ever.
But the dead-for-a-time would not come: although the Norlantean out there (even I could tell), she’d relaxed, she knew she could cope with this Force 8 gusting 9 or thereabouts, her rhythms were regular, predictable. Yes, I thought, I feel secure at last, as if I was wrapped about in the amniotic fluid of a reasonable uterus, safe in the womb of some prehistoric mother who was doing nothing more unusual than, say, run
for her life from a sabre-tooth tiger: swing/slosh/swing/port to starboard, starboard to port… Or, more accurate, perhaps she was in the Congo forest and climbing up, with deliberation, but as fast as she could, to get to those thin, those topmost branches, swing, dip, rise, reach and lurch, left, right, up, quick—with nothing worse than an ordinary leopard clawing at the bark behind her …
I felt inexplicably energized and chirpy and so, yes, I thought, I really must have had an instant sleep head-down on the galley table, but no, there was no doubt about it, I really had not had enough sleep to reach that most advanced stage in our emotional evolution, that moment when we become fully social, fully sympathetic to the needs of other people … And Luke, it was obvious, he was pretending to be asleep, his exaggerated, regular breathing, his pathetic attempt at a snore—it was insulting, he was an amateur actor …
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