Trawler (15 page)

By the tail, which was not a fish-tail as you might imagine it, but several inches of raw-hide whip, I hoisted the 2-foot-long, huge-headed, slender-bodied, grey-silver, big-scaled, armour-plated, snub-snouted, underslung-mouthed pre-human fish to eye-level—and eye-to-eye it was truly disturbing, because its eyeball was three times the size of mine.

“Eh? That?” said Luke, roused from his automaton working-trance. “That? I’ve told you, haven’t I?”

“No. You haven’t!” I said, aggrieved at once, but also comforted that Luke, too, was obviously no longer entirely in control of his short-term memory. (But then this thought was also vaguely frightening, as if we were all about to become drunk, semi-clinically mad, angry-about-nothing.) I shouted, “No! You haven’t!”

“No? Well, I meant to,” he said, red-eyed, taking the fish and dropping it down the tube. “We can sell that—in Germany. They like them in Germany. And I like them, too, personally, but not to eat.” (He carried on gutting.) “I like them because they cruise over the bottom of the deep, as
you
might say, Redmond, or as
I
might say, that fish, a Roughhead grenadier,
Macrourus berglax,
is a Rat-tail, a member of the closely related family the
Macrouridae—
and they’re deep-water fishes that live on the continental slopes
and across the abyssal plains of all the oceans on earth.
Their armoured
heads, those heads of theirs, they’re pitted with sense organs, and their
eyes,
I tell you, in 1908 a German biologist, August Brauer—he worked out that the retina of a Rat-tail had around 20 million long slender rods in an area of one-sixteenth of a square-inch. And that, Redmond, is around 225 times more than we have in our own eyes. Now, as you know, the rods are for night-vision, so in dim light a Rat-tail may be able to see over 200 times as well as we can! And that’s not all, because on the underside of most Rat-tails, but not ours, not this particular one, the Roughhead grenadier, there’s an open gland in which they play host to luminous bacteria. Most of the time they leave their bacteria alone, but when they need a torch, a flashlight, they’ve a special muscle waiting round the gland and they
squeeze
their bacteria, they annoy them—and the bacteria light up! And they’ve other special muscles too, like haddock—they’ve got really big swimbladders, the Rat-tails, and in the males, only in the males, they have these bizarre muscles set round the swimbladder. So it’s obvious, isn’t it? Their function must be entirely sexual. So imagine that! The males
drum
in the abyss—in the black night, the perpetual darkness, they drum up their females! And Redmond, it must be noisy down there, and full of the
weirdest
flashing lights, reds and purples and blues, whatever—because I. G. Priede, Monty Priede, a hero of mine, at my own university, Aberdeen: he’s estimated that for just two species of Rat-tails in the abyssal depths,
Cory-phaenoides armatus
and
yaquinae,
at a population density of about 200 fish per square kilometre, you have a global biomass of around 150 × 10
⁶
tonnes. And that, Redmond, is just about the total world commercial fish catch!”

“Wow!”

Robbie shouted, “Hey Luke! Will ye swap places? I’ve something to say to Redmond there! Will ye take charge?”

“Jeesus,” said Sean, as Luke and Robbie changed places. “Jeesus, man, did you hear that?” he said, his brain obviously overloaded, like mine. “You know what I mean? That Luke! His head! That’s no right—it’s no right to have a head like that. It’s stuffed with fish. Fish!”

“Aye,” said Robbie, immediately gutting the Greenland halibut that Luke had left half-finished. “It’s just this—dinna get me wrong. They’ll all tell you—my girl Kate, she’s sixteen like,
but we’re serious,
I’ve just taken my car for its MOT—and I did 22,000 last year, all on Orkney. Canya believe it? I drive her everywhere, everywhere she wants to go! And I’ve a peedie boat. For the lochs like. She loves that! And
I’ve fixed a fish-finder on it.
To get the monster trout. Everyone knows. There’s a monster in one of the lochs. But I’ll no tell you which one!”

“Quite right!”

“And another thing, my engineer’s exams, dinna get me wrong, I passed three papers and failed two. So I’m more nearly there than I’m not—so Kate says, no need to despair like. And anyway, I love her, I really do, so I’m saving up like, for a place of our own. So when Jason gives me leave to study, on a third share, I always do a bit extra—you know, in the roll-mop herring factory in Stromness, filleting and such (that’s boring, believe me!), or roofing, specially in winter, there’s always a demand for trawler-men to repair roofs in winter. You know why?”

Robbie gave me a nudge in the ribs that, again, very nearly knocked me off my box. Hanging on to the stanchion to my right, I said, “No!”

“Because we dinna care about the weather, we’re used to it, we’ve seen it all! Aye, we dinna stop for hail, let alone the rain, and we dinna care about heights—and a roof, Redmond, it stays still, it’s piss-easy like, even in a Force 10! Aye, there’s lots of money to be made in winter, in emergencies, when the slates of those new houses come right off—houses built by Scotsmen, southerners, Scotsmen who canna believe it when the Orkney wind comes in!”

“Robbie,” I said, suddenly feeling paternal, even towards Robbie, the toughest little wiry Pict you might ever expect to see (and he was sprouting, I noticed, a black start of a beard which grew well on his chin and upper throat but had not yet appeared anywhere else). “Robbie—maybe it’s not a good idea to go out working all day when you’re meant to be studying? Don’t you think? Eh? Studying for exams is
serious,
it’s a full-time business,
something you’re meant to devote all your energies to, you know, when…”

“Studying? Sitting indoors at a desk all alone all day—when there’s real weather and people and money to be had outside? You’re crazy! You really
are
mad! Just like they say! Studying! That’s
reading
Redmond, that’s for when it’s
dark,
when you canna do anything else!”

“Ah.”

We were silent.

Then, “Robbie,” I said, my physical self, such as it was, thoroughly agreeing with him, with his sharp fast movements (the speed of his knife!), the tight abundant energy of a man who was super-fit, and happy. (And anyway, wasn’t Orkney dark for half the year—and wasn’t that why one of its main exports was scholars?) “Robbie,” I said, for something to say, in an inner silence in all this noise that was beginning to make me inward-shaking anxious: the sea out there, the connected oceans that excited Luke, the mindless terrible explosions of those waves against the man-made hull, double or not, so fragile, the insane ferocity… “Robbie, how did you get into this? This way of life, for Chrissake? You know
—being a trawlerman?”

“Aye,” said Robbie, with an enormous smile (his teeth were all his own—no one had ever been quick or accurate enough to smack the fighting-terrier Robbie in the mouth). “I left school fifteen years ago,” he said in a matter-of-fact, a calming tone of voice. (Robbie, I thought, paranoid, is being kind. He’s seen all this before. He
knows
how greenhorns feel in a storm like this. He’s probably
heard
my inner voice that won’t stop talking, the one that says: “I’m not sure I can hack this even for the one trip-that vast unshaped unrelenting violence that’s out there, and out to get you, and that goes on for ever—so maybe I’ll just wind myself up into a fat-ball; and I’ll try and roost it out well away from everyone in some locker or other …”)

Robbie said, “I worked in a crab-factory in Stromness, and then in a smoked-salmon factory in Kirkwall, for a peedie bit more money. And after that, for a lot more money, even as a
junior deckie, I went to sea in pelagic boats. Aye. I went to the herring. Just at the wrong time.
After
the gold rush, the herring rush. Aye, Redmond, it’s no funny, what your politicians in England have done to us, at the fishing like. It’s no all their fault, right enough, but most of it is. In the sixties and seventies there was a gold rush for the herring. At that time—think of it!—we had only a 3- or 6-mile territorial limit. It was a free-for-all, in Scottish, but much more important—in Orkney and Shetland waters. We let them all in, the bastards and bastards, taking our fish, taking our jobs! And down in London nobody cared. All they cared about is the farming. And why not, right enough? Because they’re so far away, you know? So very far away. And anyway, the fact is, Redmond, we look to Norway, or even Denmark—forget Edinburgh, up here we dinna like Edinburgh and as for London: forget it. That’s another country, that is—Shetland’s as far away from London as Milan, and Milan’s in Italy! Anyway, as every trawlerman will tell you, in the sixties the Norwegians moved in with purse seiners, deep circular nets like, which tightened when they finished the sweep. Now that was bad, but no so very bad, because we can’t help it, we know them, we can’t help it, we like the Norwegians. And the Icelanders were here, too, right up close, everyone forgets that—the Cod War later, you know? Brave little Icelanders! And then the Russians arrived,
6 miles
off. Cold War? What Cold War? No one put up a fight for us. Not for trawlermen. The Russians came with ninety purse seiners, ninety! And they offloaded on to these new factory ships of theirs. Bulgarians, Poles, East Germans, you name it, they all came. The factory ships processed the herring and dumped everything else they caught. Dead fish everywhere. No wonder your birds liked it—no wonder your fulmars spread all round the coasts! Christmas for them, every day! Aye—and then your English Prime Minister sold us out to the Common Market. 1973. It looked good to start with—a 200-mile territorial limit from Europe’s coastline. But the coastline, the fish
—they’re all up here.
So in come the Spaniards! Imagine it! What if it was farming? Hey, you poor Spaniards, you who’ve exhausted your own soils by lousy farming practices—come and
have ours like, go ahead, take two-thirds of our land! Eh? I dinna think so. Nah—that Heath, we all signed up to pay, each of us, £5 for every man woman and child every week, to the farmers, for the Common Agricultural Policy. And the fishermen? Forget it. You see, it’s like this—we can vote and vote till we drop down dead. But it doesna matter. Because compared to you, the south, Oxford, London, wherever—Orkney and Shetland, there’s no a person here, our islands—they’re uninhabited! Aye … I’m sorry,” he said, laying a blue-gloved hand on my oilskin arm. “I’m carried away, I’m out of order like …”

“No you’re not, really not. You see—I should know these things, I damn well should. But I don’t. So then what happened? To you, I mean. To you,
Robbie.”

“To me?” Robbie looked surprised. “To me? Aye, well, it was a nightmare right enough, failing catches, terrible skippers, I worked for several skippers, you know, in different pelagic boats … They were a nightmare, all of them. Their tempers, failure I suppose, you couldna blame them, being in debt like, but all the same—it’s not as if
we
were doing well, there was nothing left at the surface out there—and some of them, I’ll no name names, some of them drank at sea, a nightmare, you wouldna believe the rages! Terrible, the swearing, the insults, your family, everything—hell, really. In some ways you never recover, aye, you wouldna believe it, but even now I sometimes dream I’m back on one particular boat and I wake up sweating, thrashing about, and Kate says: ‘What’s up, Robbie? What’s wrong?’ And I say,
‘I
dreamt I was back on the—’ And she says: ‘Well, forget it, you’re not. It’s different now—because you’re a skipper and I’m your first mate. And you and me,
we’re going to be happy!’
”

“Oh shit, Robbie …”

“Aye, so like I said: Jason. He’s not ordinary, you know. I want you to get that right. Because I’ve suffered more skippers than anyone else on this boat. And because I can see you know fock all—and so Jason, well, you’ll think he’s ordinary.”

“Aye,” said Sean. “Right on, Robbie! Jason knows my nan. He likes us, the whole family!”

“You’ll not know,” said Robbie, ignoring him. “You’ll think Jason’s the norm. Because you canna know any different unless I tell you. Well—he’s not. It’s true, maybe he doesna shout at us as much as usual, because you’re on board. But he’s a focking miracle, really. That’s what he is. The real exception. I know you, Redmond, your type, first-timers, people who want to be trawlermen, you know, straight out of college in Stromness, aye, and if not even their fathers were at the fishing, they’re starry-eyed, they talk about
love-of-the-sea.
Jeesus! So I’m telling you, being on a trawler, Redmond, you probably think the only problem is the weather. The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don’t
—and you die all together.
No, no—it’s the skipper. Because most of them are madder than the weather. More violent, you could say, more unpredictable. Now dinna get me wrong. I’m sure I’d be the same. Millions of pounds in debt. Like Jason. And then Jason has a wife and child at home to look after, and another on the way, I shouldn’t wonder. And there again, his father-in-law, the greatest Orkney trawlerman of the last generation—skipper of the
Viking,
the
Viking,
for Chrissake! And we all know what
he
says to himself every waking minute of every focking day—‘my daughter, the
loveliest daughter in all the world’
(along with her sisters, of course, if she has any sisters) ‘—that Jason she married, is he a real man or just a no-good slack-arsed focking southerner?’ Aye. The strain of it. Being a skipper—that’s not for me. I’d go mad too, I know I would. But here’s the thing, Redmond. Jason, he’s quick as a focking ghost, one problem and he’s out the brown door of that wheelhouse quick as a focking ghost—and I’m telling you now, he’s
sane.”

“And he doesna drink?” (Sean, to my right, snorted. I liked Sean.) “But you, same as me, you had a problem?”

“Aye. Some problem! Redmond, you canna keep a secret on a boat. That’s another thing for you. You should learn that.
And some more”
(Robbie was mildly annoyed, annoyed with Sean, he’d fingered Sean …) “because if a bird taps on the wheelhouse window, it’s a sign of death! And if the ship’s bell tolls of its own accord, you’re all goners like … Because the bell is the soul of the
ship.” Robbie raised his voice. “And if you forget and say
R-A-T!
instead of Long-tail, or
P-I-G!
instead of shit-shifter, or
R-A-M!
instead of Hurdle-bunter, or
E-G-G!
instead of I’ve forgotten what the fock, you say
COLD IRON!
—just like that, at once, and every-thing’ll be OK.” (Sean, I couldn’t help noticing, in the rising tension, had his forehead pressed hard against the iron stanchion—as if he was taking a rest, cooling his aching head …)