Trawler

by Redmond O'Hanlon

  “No!”

  “I thought not! Because hey! It’s still going on… Even as we speak… And I’ll bet you don’t know that England and Scotland really are different, do you?”

  “What? Well…”

  “No—because they both came north from round about the present-day Antarctic, but by different routes, because they were parts of different plates. And England nudged up against Scotland—and the buffer-zone, that, the soft rolling hills of the borders, that’s the uplifted mud of the ancient floor of a shallow sea!”

  “Great!”

  “So the land and the people—they really are different!”

  “The people? Come on, Luke—bullshit! The people? You romantic! People? There were no people—they hadn’t yet evolved!”

  “Aye,” said Luke, ignoring me, “and do you remember all that bullshit nineteenth-century geology we were taught at school? The Old Red Sandstone rocks for example? So Great Britain (as we used to call it) must once have been a hot desert? And how it made no sense? So any schoolmaster, every geography schoolmaster might and should have had the simple idea: Great Britain has moved. But they didn’t of course—but imagine! As you’d say—if they had: wouldn’t that have made boring old geology interesting? OK, so it wasn’t that boring, because it gave us time—thousands of millions of years. But imagine! If only it had also given us movement in geographical space! Then it would have been exciting, and made sense, and Ernst Mayr’s so right: even to understand the emergence, the diversity of life, you need geographical change, spatial change, don’t you? Because the Old Red Sandstone—that was laid down when England was where the Sahara is now!”

  “Ernst Mayr?”

  “Aye! And guess what? We’re still moving, us, the UK—we’re still going north: the land, you and me, the whole ching-bang as Robbie would say! Aye—so one day the Arctic really will be land, a continent, and Edinburgh will be at the North Pole … And Shetland, aye—Shetland will be well on the way towards New Zealand… But by then, of course, New Zealand will have moved…”

  “Ernst Mayr? Hey Luke—he stayed with us too, you know (and yeah, yeah, only because of the TLS) but I think the old boy came because he knew he’d need a rest somewhere: he was over here from Harvard to be fêted by the Royal Society and given its gold medal for lifetime achievement in zoology, something like that, and he realized from my letters (he wrote such wonderful reviews for me at the TLS); he must have realized that I knew sod all about anything, but I sounded a friendly sort of a guy, so he thought that he could hide out with us, to recover from the flight, I suppose, and to take it easy before all the official prize-giving … So I went to Blackwell’s bookshop and I bought all his books—and jeeez, Luke, like you with your UNESCO fish volumes, that was one hell of a sacrifice, because they’re big books, and I’ve never been rich, you know, in fact I spend my life in debt, but I don’t want to think about that: but yes, again like you, those books, like your UNESCO volumes, they’re now so precious … Because he signed them all for me, he inscribed them, each one, and guess what? As we collectors say—I’ve tipped in his letters to me in all five volumes, I’ve stuck in his amazing long letters!”

  I looked across at Luke (well of course I did), because in the normal or abnormal routine of things in this new life of mine on board this trawler, a way of life that had gone on for ever and would never cease, one of the constant pleasures had been Luke’s sudden never-failing young-boy interest in the pioneering books of biology—and the heroes who had managed to write them… But now, no, now I wasn’t even sure if Luke was listening … He was lying on his back staring at his plywood-ceiling, the base of the bunk above his head… And please, I thought, please don’t let him start tinkering with that imaginary drawing of his, not again …

  So with added emphasis I said to myself: this is Ernst Mayr, for Chrissake: this is Ernst Mayr I’m talking about—the guy who’s given us so much pleasure, so much new ordered insight into the natural world… And if you don’t believe me, Luke, I wanted to say, consider the concepts, the words that you use in your professional life every working day: they’re all his: sympatric, allopatric, peripatric, founder population, sibling species … But that was it, that was all I could remember… The rest was a blank: a dark space of forgetfulness, with just a faint echo of the distant laugh of a hyena about to start the night-time hunt of the pack, a female, an alpha female, because all hyena-packs, as Hans Kruuk had told me long ago in Oxford (and he discovered it, and that’s a fact, as Big Bryan would say), all hyena-packs are led by a dominant female, which is perhaps why they’re so successful, so deadly at night: and in the morning the altogether more stupid lions arrive to finish off the remains of the hyena-kills, and the annoyed hyenas hang around the edges (lions are big) and make a lot of noise, and insult the lions, and trade gossip (yack! yack!)—so that’s why all the previous male naturalists assumed that it was the hyenas who were always the scavengers … But Jeesus, where was I? Ernst Mayr! Yes—so I said out loud:

  “Luke, Ernst Mayr! I didn’t know it fully at the time, of course, and yeah, you’re right, I had not read his books, but I did know about his Number One Contribution to the history of mid-twentieth-century biology… a genius like W. D. Hamilton, but in a very different way… as you knew yourself, of course … But the point is that the old boy, then in his eighties, I suppose, now in his nineties and still producing magnificent insights (see? Luke? If you want to live long, it’s simple—get consumed with an interest …)—well, it was winter, and maybe our cottage isn’t that warm, so he sat in the armchair of honour, in the big room, and instinctively (and this has not happened before or since) Belinda and I sat at his feet, like small kids, and Belinda had made this risotto (so advanced, then), and we ate it from plates on our knees, and we drank lots of wine, and she’d made a Queen’s pudding, too—and we sat at the feet of a truly great man (as I now know), but there he was in a ragged old green sweater (“I always relax in this”) with huge holes at the elbows; and on his feet (he said his feet were cold) he wore the last pair of Belinda’s hippy calf-length heavy-wool Afghan socks (and I was never allowed even to try them on); and they had these lovely goatskin soles … And you know what? He talked and talked! Such stories! And we listened entranced, spellbound, whatever, and I was thinking at the time: “You, Ernst, you are the loveliest old grandad that anyone could ever wish for”—and I wanted to put my arms round him and give him such a hug and say straight out: “You—you’re the fucking most wonderful old man I’ve ever met!” But I didn’t, of course, but I should have: and you know? Even now I regret that I didn’t have a recorder, a tape-machine, yes? But Belinda says, don’t be silly, and besides, that’s so unworthy, so tacky, and how could you think of using a thing like that? But all the same—imagine—he talked about the entire course of his extraordinary life, as if it really was to his grandchildren, and the intellectual value of it, pow!

  “But I do remember most of it—OK, a tiny part of it—how he was fourteen or so, and he’d seen this extraordinary rare duck on his local lake, and no one believed him (least of all his family), so he wrote to the greatest field-biologist in the Germany of his day. And guess what? I warn you Luke, this is hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck time, or a funny feeling at the back-of-the-knees, or a tingling on the underside of the first joints on all your toes … Yes: the Grand Old Man replied, pronto! Because he was obviously a grand teacher, too, and he was old enough to recognize really great talent when he read it, once in a lifetime, even in a fourteen-year-old… Yes—Ernst, at fourteen, he was already recognized. And the duck, sure, it was there (which old Ernst obviously still thought was the point, seventy years on): but of course the duck didn’t really matter—no, it was the knowledge, the conversation, the reading, the conviction, the focus of this fourteen-year-old: that’s what beguiled the great professor. So he says to this provincial boy: ‘Look here, Ernst, you won’t understand, but I’m very busy, and I have to get the train back to Berlin (or was it Heidelberg?) tonig
ht… So please, tell your parents (and of course his parents didn’t believe a word of it) I think you taking your A levels (as it were), that really is a waste of your time … No, I want you to come and study seriously, as you do already, of course, but in my department, my research unit, in two months’ time, October first, OK?’ And so the young Ernst was on his way… to a continued, seamless, deep-interest happiness … And then what? Can you guess? What happened next? Rothschild? You know that great story?”

  No—it was no use; and something had already told me: an absence of grunts, and snorts of outrage, and repressed snuffles of laughter, friendly or derisive: no, it had all gone away—there was nothing now but the usual deep thump of the engines (and even they seemed thoroughly at peace: no rising roar, no scream as the screws lifted almost clear of the hurricane-sea: no, they were doing their job, calm, content, day-to-day… the engines, the Blackstones, seventy-years-old-and-more, way-past-retirement, they themselves were happy, planting winter broadbeans in their allotment, pottering on with life …

  But no—it was pointless—there was nothing I could do—because at last I looked across again at Luke (and come on—that was a great story, wasn’t it?), and it was precisely as I’d feared: Luke was asleep. Luke was so asleep, in fact, so still, so lost, so gone—Luke might well be dead…

  FOR THE NEXT HAUL I followed Big Bryan and Allan Besant down through the trap-door to the fish-room, down the unexpectedly long and steep ladder, way down into the forward hold, as agreed—because Dougie, in the galley, he’d said, in front of everyone: “If you’ve no worked in the hold, Redmond, you’re no a trawlerman—because that’s hard, that is. Aye—it’s a peedie thing compared to the work of an engineer in the engine-room, right enough, but I tell ye: it’s hard in the hold …”

  But my first impression, as I reached the last rung of the ladder (the base was frozen into a mound of ice-pebbles), my first thought, as I stumbled across the pile of ice, was: “It’s so cold in here!” Which I must have said out loud, because Allan Besant laughed and Big Bryan replied: “Cold? Ach no! Just you wait—it’s hot in here, it’s roastin’ hot!”

  And so it proved to be—once the redfish began to tumble remorselessly down the wide-diameter tube from above, way above, from the end of the forward conveyor: and you lobbed them into the white-plastic fish-boxes (which you took from a ten-foot-high stack to starboard of the mound of ice, which, surely, had once been a mountain). And Allan shovelled in the ice, and I carried the box (so heavy) to Bryan who, without a word, took it (as if it was a box of feathers) and stacked it—a hard shove, right in, at the top of the line of boxes, his big arms outstretched, two and a half feet above his head; or, with less effort, as he built up the next wall of boxes, he’d bend easily, his back still flexible, intact, despite the weight he carried in front of him—whereas I, doing no more than carry a full fish-box from the packer Allan to the stacker Bryan: I felt it, that terrible warning at the vertebrae at the base of the spine, that dull nasty something at the pelvis, the sacroiliac joint. (“No, we do not like this,” said the muscles and the vertebrae: “No, you really are a jerk—and we, we’re going to sort you out! Because—before you went to Congo, you prepared, as you should, as the SAS told you, and you really did go to the gym three times a week for two years to prepare your back to carry those 70 lb loads … But for this, you wanker—what did you do? Did you train us? No! Did you hell! Because you, you pitiful bozo, no: you’d decided that there were no wild places in the UK! So what did you do to prepare? Nothing! You drank and you slept… you couldn’t even get your fat self to run round your local wood! Yes … we’ll get you for this: four months or so flat out to rest us, on your back, unable to walk; yes—that’s about right as a prison sentence goes …”)

  Bryan said nothing, Allan said nothing, and me? Well, I was far too hot and exhausted and sweat-slimed even to think of the effort of speech … So was this the final stage of sleep-deprivation as observed by Luke (probably backed up by hundreds of studies in what’s-the-point-of-sleep labs)? No, I thought, really not, this is called simple all-out pressurized physical labour when no one can speak… That’s all. And, oh god, my old back, how it hurts… So I repeated the mantra that I’d found a great help in jungles (but when I was more or less fit, and when I was young too), the incantation (on-and-on) that eventually saw you through those eight-or ten-hour so-called walks, those demi-runs that went on way beyond your idea of time, with the Iban or the Yanomami or the northern Congo pygmies: “This will all be over one day… This will all be over one day…”

  And, at last, it was: and Allan Besant, without a word, but so kindly now, so caring, so gentle (and no, Redmond, do not say anything—and above all: get a grip, be a man, do not burst into even silent tears of gratitude or exhaustion or any other fucking thing: yes, your muscles are shaking, you’re shaking-weak all over) and Allan, well, he’s coming up the ladder right behind you, and somehow or other he has his right hand at the base of your spine, so you can’t pitch back way down into the ice: and jeeez, that’s right, even the muscles in my legs are shaking, and they won’t do what I say, but what’s that? Yes. Allan Besant must have his left hand on the ankle of my left sea-boot, and now my right—one, two, yes, the next rungs up … So why’s he being so kind to me?… OK—so maybe, as Matt Ridley thinks, there is no mystery about it: maybe, most of the time, most of us, we’re not selfish, we’re altruistic, we can’t help it…

  And, at the top of the ladder, at first on all-fours in the fish-room, and then (the sea out there—it must be flat-calm), when I managed to stand up … Allan Besant (dressed in his yellow oilskin trousers and waistcoat, a one-piece with braces over a thick, red-cloth fleece-jacket), his hands still in their blue gloves … he took my own right blue-gloved hand and shook it, and smiled, and gave me a wink, and raised his blue-gloved right index-finger to his lips (not a word!) and, without bothering to change on the bench, he swung open the heavy bulwark-door to the galley, stepped over the sill, and disappeared.

  “Hey Redmond!” came a familiar shout—and yes, it was Luke, and he was standing way over there by his baskets, to port of the corrugated-iron door to the hopper, and oh no, he looked so eager… “Come on! Just in time! What took you so long? Bryan—he was out and gone: way before you and Allan!”

  “Oh god!”

  “No—come on: get your camera: it’s on its hook in the laundry there—I took the liberty of changing the film and slotting on your Micro-Nikkor!”

  “You did? So why the fuck didn’t you go ahead and take the pictures?”

  “Eh? What? How do you mean?” said Luke, looking, even at that distance, I could see, semi-poleaxed with some kind of shock-to-the-head… “Do that? I could never do that: the grip, the photographer, he’s the man who owns the cameras—that’s his job! You must never, you must never take another man’s job!”

  Oh Jesus, I thought, all this really is beyond me; but at least my legs seem to have stopped shaking. (But my back, how it hurts all over, but that’s a good sign isn’t it? No specific injury, the kind that no one else can see, no injury that you know has split you in half; and this huge thing that you take for granted, your back—so very boring, so very physical to your GP, your doctor—but when that goes you’re not even half-a-man, you’re a nobody, no work, no pleasure, no walkies, and, certainly, no sex.)

  “Redmond! For Chrissakes!” yelled Luke, agitated, both hands clamped on the rim of a blue basket, way over there. “Get the fucking camera! Excuse me! But please—please! No trances! I can’t take it any more! Come on! Now! The camera! We’ve all the left-overs to photograph—and the Esmark’s eel-pout that you forgot to photograph. And why? Because you were in a fucking trance! And Jason—Jason’s shot the net again already! So we’ve no much time—because this, you, you—Worzel, this is the Arctic Circle, a great rich fishing-ground that’s so expensive to get to! And there you are—in a Worzel-trance!”

  Stung, well, buffalo-kicked, I suppose, I grabbed the big camera-
and-flash from its hook among the oilskins and, in no time at all, like a real trawlerman (OK—so it was calm out there—and yet so very far north—yes, the fish-room floor of the Norlantean, the beautiful shiny wooden floorboards of the fish-room were almost as stable as the floorboards of the bedroom of a terraced granite house in Fittie, in Aberdeen, where the best sex in the world took place … Woof-woof! All that lovely together-sweating … Until, that is, you got a call from that bleeper-under-the-bed…).

  “Redmond! Worzel! What’s up? Stop it! Whatever it is—stop it! Because you’re still doing it! And you know what? If you were a dog, if you were Malky Moar’s dog—I’d think you’d got rabbits on the brain!”

  “Woof-woof! You know?”

  “No—I don’t. So now, please, and we have to be fast, because this is great redfish country, and the net’ll be full before we know it: look—all these odds and sods, the important ones, you’re lucky, because I’ve already measured and weighed and sexed them: so all I need is your pictures, OK?”

  “OK!”

  And it really was easy, at last—no slipping, no sliding, no panic at the impossibility of everything …