Trawler (13 page)

“It’s not
really
a sea-bat because” (he pushed his right boot between a pair of tentacles) “there’s no
web.
But it’s your deep-sea octopus right enough—and we know that because we find their mandibles,
beaks
to you, in the stomachs of Sperm whales: and the Sperm whale story, I promise you, Redmond, it’s smashing, it’s extraordinary, I’ll tell you later, I really will, remind me, OK? But for now…” He stepped over the octopus, flipped the four Greenland halibut through the drop-gate on to the conveyor and, grasping my arm as the rolling
Norlantean
pulled me backwards, helped me over the sill. “For now you stay
here.
I’ll get a basket. We’ll keep this, if we can.”

And as if it was the simplest of matters, Luke returned with one of his red plastic baskets, laying it on the steep-angled steel floor in front of the tentacles—and we tried to gather up the octopus, the globular mess, which looked so ghost-like, so insubstantial, and which was yet so very heavy.

“Of course it’s heavy,” he said, as we managed to slop the last thick tentacle into the basket. “It’s mostly water, and that’s the trick, because water is almost incompressible, so you need that, you really do, if you want to live, if you want to make a living 1,500 fathoms down.

“Aye,” he said, as we slung the basket over the sill,
“at least 40
kilos.”
He jumped after the red basket on to the slimy planking and, as the
Norlantean
rolled to port, pushed it hard against the stern bulkhead, lashing its rim to a steel pipe. I clambered out, back round to my post. The gutting table and the conveyor were still; Robbie was uncurling an arm-thick hose from its brackets against the port wall. “Breakfast!” said Sean, peeling off his gloves. Robbie flicked a switch that brought a hidden pump to life, pulled the end of the hose across to the table and sluiced the spatter of fish guts from Sean’s oilskins, back and front. “No idea,” he said to Sean, “aye, that’s your problem.
No idea of cleanliness.”
He turned the hose on me (and the pressure knocked me off my box). “New oilskins, Redmond. The best. So look after them.” Robbie hosed Luke, Luke hosed Robbie. And Sean, the junior, was told to wash down the table and conveyor. “Breakfast!” said Robbie. “Jerry can do breakfast. Dinna touch his soup. But he can do breakfast. I’ll give him that. Come on, boys!”

Luke followed Robbie to the bench by the forward door where they took off their boots and oilskins and where I arrived, a little later. “Dinna worry, Redmond,” said Robbie with a tired smile. “You wait. You’ll get your sea-legs. Dinna worry. They’ll come.”

After the cold and the air and the slosh of sea in the fish-room, the galley was stifling, a closed vat of fry and droplets of batter and heat. My glasses fogged over at once, so I sat down on the bench to the immediate right of the door, took them off and tried to wipe them clear with my handkerchief, a piece of cloth as salty and sodden as the rest of me. Jerry the cook came into blurry focus through the murk, red-faced and sweaty. He paused beside me and squeezed my shoulder, a friendly squeeze that stopped just short of snapping my collar-bone. “Go help yourself. It’s all ready in the pans. I’m away to relieve Jason. Eat as much as you can, you’ll need it. When the weather comes—there’ll be no cooking!”

Luke sat down opposite me. I looked at his plate, appalled. There was a pyramid of food on it. “What did I tell you?” he said, inhaling at the apex. He leant back on his bench and with his fork
tapped the base of the pyramid, a two-inch-high plate-across discus of batter. “Aye—pizza for two, deep fried. Proper chips, made by Jerry” (the next layer up). “Three fried eggs, three sausages, bacon—and Redmond, if you really want it, there’s a battered Mars bar to stick on top! What did I tell you? Eh? Is this even better than the breakfast at Nairn? Or what?”

At the mention of Nairn the nature of the problem became clear. I was going to be sick.

“I’m going to be sick.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve nothing left!”

“I don’t care.”

Jason came in. “What’s wrong?”

“Redmond’s going to be sick.”

Jason gave me a quick, kindly grin. “Oh well,” he said, “at least you’re good for
something—
you’re cheap to feed!”

I pushed myself to my feet and turned to the door. “What’s that?” said Jason. “There—on the back of your shirt?”

“Eh?” I said, twisting round to look, imagining a sea-bat sucker, or worse.

“Oh I see,” said Jason with a sharp laugh, “it’s your mattress!”

H
ALIPHRON ATLANTICUS
…” said Luke, dreamily, full of batter, rustling down into his sleeping-bag in the dark cabin, getting comfortable. “That was
really
something. Almost as good as Signy Island. But well never manage to keep it. I don’t like to ask the boys to pack it in ice and put it in the hold. Not all 40 kilos. I’ll preserve the beak. That’ll have to do …”

“Signy Island? What’s that?”

“Signy Island? Haven’t I told you? Aye, that was the very happiest time of my life! In the
South
Orkney Islands, as it happens, in the South Atlantic, the same latitude as here, but there’s no warm North Atlantic Drift, so it’s ice. Antarctica. Two and a half years. Straight. Without a break. I was there for two and a half years!”

“And that was
happy?”

“Aye. Smashing! The best job in the world! I was marine assistant to the British Antarctic Survey. There’s nothing like it.”

“I’ll bet there isn’t… The cold …”

“I never wanted to leave. I was counting Fur seals and Wed-dell seals—they pupped in the winter—and Leopard seals and penguins.
It was a magic place.
The base was on the site of an old Norwegian whaling station. I was the base diver.”

“You went
diving?
In those temperatures?”

“Humpback and Minke whales would turn up for your dives
and they’d stay with you… I went diving with Fur seals—well, you couldn’t avoid it—there you’d be, concentrating on your job, diving, diving for some specimen, a mollusc say, and Fur seals, they’re playful, they really are, they can give you one hell of a fright, they’ll rise up behind you and give you a knock on the head, a gentle head-butt when you’re not expecting it! Or there again, when you stick out a hand to collect your mollusc or whatever, some Fur seal will appear out of nowhere and mouth your arm—take your arm in his mouth like a dog and give it a shake. They think that’s funny! Or sometimes they’d rush straight at you with their mouths open. Boo! And then there were the most beautiful birds in the world—Snow petrels. Snowies. Perfect white. Perfect. And Giant petrels. GPs, Geeps. And Cape pigeons…”

“And the people? Two and a half
years
with the same people?”

“Honestly, Redmond, in all that time, I can honestly say, in all that time, in those first two years together—I
never
once heard anyone raise their voice. If there’s an ideal society anywhere, that was it. And when you think that the winter night lasts from March to October or November and that the one ship came in November … That was great—great excitement all round. The ship brought your mail—you’d had no mail for eight months. And a year’s worth of beer, cigs, food and books. Plus one video and one CD a year each. You were allowed two contacts a month towards the end of your contract. Two 150-word messages. So I’d send one to my mum and one to a girlfriend. But lots of messages came the other way—scientists all over the world would send us their requests, they needed two of that species and two of the other. Magic shopping lists! And then I’d go out and try and find whatever it was they wanted. Mostly by diving. There was a lot of interest then in the Icefish. Because it has no haemoglobin—it takes its oxygen directly, in solution. So it leads a
very
slow life, it’s laid back, nuzzling about under the ice, right up against the glacier-face. Or maybe someone would want an animal from our lab—we kept Long worms in the aquarium, gigantic worms, a bit
like hagfish, and like hagfish they’d knot themselves up together, disgusting. And they’d escape! They’d force up the lid of the tank somehow and get out across the floor, they’d slime right down the corridor! And we kept Glyptonotus, the giant isopod—they looked just like one of the trilobites, as if they’d come back from the dead, you know, from the great extinction 245 million years ago when a comet whacked into the earth, big time, and wiped out 96 per cent of all life in the sea. Talk about an ancient environment—tell me, what system of living things is older than the ocean’s? Redmond, just think of the millions and millions of animals waiting to be discovered in the abyss, the hadal depths. And the trillions of different organisms that live in the abyssal ooze … Aye, I had lots of time to dwell on all that, lots and lots of time. And it never got too much. I never got anxious and ill like I do in Aberdeen, trying to write this doctorate … No. Not at all. Down there we had
dingle days.
We called them
dingle days,
I don’t know why—bright sunny days when you could go skiing or mountain-climbing and
take a grip,
take a photograph. It was a day like that when I had to go and find a dead penguin for David Attenborough. He needed a dead penguin for one of his films. A dead penguin! And I went diving for him to collect sea-worms, Nemertean worms, Proboscis worms. He was the very nicest of guys to work for—he actually wrote and thanked me! And those worms you know, Nemertean worms, they come in all the different colours there are. You wouldn’t believe it…”

“So how many of you? How many on the base?”

“Twelve, twelve of us—a doctor, an electrician, a diving officer, a cook, a radio operator, a diesel mechanic, a terrestrial scientist and his assistant, a marine scientist and his assistant (me), a limnologist—there were these extraordinary lakes under the ice that opened up in summer—and a chippie, my special mate, Steve Wheeler. He was thirty-six, a good bloke, and we gave him the title of boatman, too, because he built his own sailing boat, a beautiful little fourteen-footer. We were all so pleased we held a launch party—we broke a whole bottle of whisky across her bows. He would whistle up fish and sing to the seals and he even thought
he could hypnotize girls—you know, just by looking at them. Aye, it was a paradise really, so peaceful and productive, until…”

“Until?”

“Well, Redmond, I know it sounds terrible to say this, but the fact is it was a paradise
until the women came…
Aye, three students—an English girl studying isopods and two Dutch girls working on algae. When they arrived they
screamed
at each other. You feel bad—you think why? And the answer is you haven’t heard anyone shouting at someone else for two years. Poor Steve fell in love with one of them—but of course she wasn’t going to fancy a chippie, no matter what he did or said. She went for one of the scientists. And I’m afraid it drove him mad. He appeared in the mess one day with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a knife in the other. The doctor calmed him down. But long term we had to radio for help. And at last the navy got to us. They took him off in a helicopter.”

“Luke?”

“Yes?”

“Do you ever sleep? Could we get some sleep?”

“Hey—I’m sorry. I really am. It’s like I said—sleep deprivation: you’ll find at first the boys talk their heads off, then they’ll go silent, and after that they’ll get red eyes and terrible skin and they’ll hardly look human. It’s like rats, there’s a famous experiment when rats were deprived of sleep—eventually their skin split all over and their fur fell off.”

“Yeah. Well. I really don’t want my fur to fall off.”

AND IN HALF AN HOUR
the siren sounded and woke us up and my body told me it was another day and my brain disagreed; and I realized I had already lost all sense of rational time.

Luke, without a pause, slid out of his sleeping-bag into his trousers, his sweater, his hat, his socks, in that order, and disappeared in silence as if he was sleep-walking.

I lay in my warm nylon-silky army-green cocoon. With my toes I stroked the end of the bag; I flexed my ankles, my calf muscles;
yes, my entire body ached, every set of muscles had had enough, even in my neck. So how had that happened? Head down, tense, hunched over the table, gutting fish for ever … It’s OK, said the inner voice, just a few more moments, in fact why not a few more days? After all, as Luke himself told you, you’re not expected to join in, you’re paying £50 a day for your keep, you’re not a burden to anyone, in fact you’d probably help most by staying exactly where you are—you’re in the way out there, they’re doing serious work, it’s all a bit desperate, in fact they’re
manic.
And in general, now you’re lying here thinking, so warm and relaxed, why don’t we consider the bigger picture? How about a good long illness? And anyway, isn’t it time you retired? One glance and anyone can see that all your best work is behind you. So why not just lie here and
enjoy
it? No one will blame you. It’s OK. And anyway, and you know this always works—I have
very
bad news for you, you don’t know it yet, you’re in shock, in fact you’ve forgotten the entire battle, but the platoon is talking of nothing else: the way you charged that machine-gun nest with such exemplary bravery, such a sight to see, of course it goes without saying that you’ll be mentioned in dispatches and the word is that you may well be recommended for a Victoria Cross … But look here, you must lie still, very still, because you took a bullet in the stomach from a General Purpose Heavy Machine-Gun. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. I know how desperate you are to go straight back into action, old boy, but even if it takes all your great instinctive courage, all your vast reserves of will power, I’m afraid that I must order you to lie
absolutely still.
The very slightest movement and you’re a dead man …