Trawler (20 page)

“Jason, hang on, what are you talking about? I thought you’d been here for ever. I thought your great-to-the-nth grandfather swam ashore from the Armada …”

“You know what I think? I think there’s nothing bad in itself about dope. Not in itself. Of course it does less harm than alcohol. Of course it should be legal. It’s a piss-nonsense. But you people, you, my dad, the old UK hippies—you invested that shite with wisdom. Just because it made you feel good. A herbal ga-ga tranquillizer. It’s a
plant,
for Chrissake! Harmless. A couple of dreamy relax-me pills. No more, no less. And you made a fucking religion out of it!”

“Jason, hold on. Please—tell me about your dad,
tell me about your mother.”

“My mother? She’s a Costello. Spanish. She was a great
beauty in her time. Still is. And one of her very first boyfriends was John Lennon.”

“Christ.”

“And my dad—he was
very
clever, Cambridge. He was a rocket engineer, a rocket scientist in your part of the world, right down in the far south—and then he decided he shouldn’t be doing
anything
that might help people make weapons, so he came up here and bought a croft on Sanday. The house—it’s called the Fish-House! It’s right on the sea. And the sea came up and up and into the house once. Slim Schofield, that’s him—and you two’d get on so well! The croft, it’s basic—30 acres and that’s it. He keeps cows. He milks one by hand! You’d like him, Redmond. And his latest girlfriend, she’s just moved out, she lives down the road. Yes, you should go and stay there, with my dad…”

“Yeah, I’d like that… I really would … but Jason, you know, what’s happening now, at this moment, technically speaking?”

“To speak
technically,”
said Jason, obviously trying to control something stronger than amusement (which was good of him, but offensive all the same), “to speak technically, Redmond, we are now
dodging
. All I have to do is keep her head into wind. And for that I trust Dougie …” (The incipient, the imminent burst of outright laughter receded from his face, from his lanky frame, from his taut body—which seemed over-active even when it was double-cross-strapped into a purpose-built withholding chair.) “We all have to trust Dougie with our lives, Redmond, but it’s only for three or four times a year, in January and February. So that’s OK. This just happens to be one of them. That’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean? What do I mean?” (Jason turned to me briefly; he looked concerned.) “You’re
tired,
aren’t you? You’ve lost it! You’d better
sleep
. And here was I, thinking you’d be intelligent!
This
is what I mean, Redmond—if Dougie’s done his job, and he always does, because I’ve picked the best engineer in Orkney,
but don’t you go telling him that,
then the buggered old Blackstone engines in this boat, my boat, maybe they’ll last
one more
stormy night. OK? But if he hasn’t done his job, if he’s not good enough, if I misjudged him, then it’s my fault.”

“What?”

“If the engines fail! If we turn beam-on to this weather!”

“Then what?”

“Then what? Then what! Then, Redmond
—we drown
. It’s so simple. There’s no argument. I like that. I like that a lot. There’s no uncertainty about it. No bullshit. There’s no maybe this and maybe that, and on the other hand, and if you look at it from a different point of view, or perhaps percentage this and percentage that, and you could say it’s his rotten childhood or his bent social fucking worker or his great-fucking-granny, or come on, that Hitler, he only had one ball, so
of course
he had to invade Poland. No! Here there’s no bullshit! That’s not what it’s like here! You make a mistake? Simple.
You drown.”

I was silent, mesmerized by the lines of foam streaking towards the bow window, lit by the bow searchlight, flying seawater whipped into white by winds gone berserk, like snow in a blizzard, except that the snowflakes had got together, coagulated, as if they were whole long lines of detached wave-crests, coming at me in a solid weighted mass—and yes, I thought dimly, hang on, that’s right. Except that you can bunk off the simile. As Sean might say. Or perhaps not. But where was I? Yes, that’s right, these
are
entire detached wave-crests coming at you horizontally, and each onslaught probably weighs half a tonne …

“Anyway,” said Jason, “go on, Redmond! Next time we’re up here alone, I’ll show you something to cheer you up. On the main computer. Davy’s tow! But for now—you’re OK. You’ll do, I suppose. But go on, show me! Because Redmond, I’m going to count to three—and on the count of
three,
no matter what, I don’t care, you’ve no choice, no choice at all,
you are going to unbuckle yourself
and then, steady as a trawlerman,
you are going to go safely to your bunk below
. And sleep. And sleep. OK? So: one … two … three!”

I rose like a ghost. I went aft like a sleepwalker. And that’s exactly what you are, I thought, except that you’re walking
towards
your bed, falling towards a sleep that even you have never wanted so badly, never, not in fifty years—and yet I’m feeling so
peaceful
. Hypnosis, yes, they can all do it. They’ve seen too much, these people.

And, as I went (very slowly), half-way down the wheelhouse stairs I heard a spectral laugh that rose above the drumbeats, the banshee wails of the outside world (a world, it has to be said, that was almost half-stilled in the quiet, double-insulated, wholly enclosed braincase of the ship’s bridge). But yes, there was no doubt about it, it was a
laugh,
the overwhelming, energy-packed, unrestrained laugh of a focused and happy young man at the height of his physical powers, a laugh to which there was no possible reply, the kind of laugh that, once heard, you know you will never be able to expunge from your head. And, as I pinned this sound to its source above me, I thought: could there possibly be a laugh that’s worse, right now, you know, from a personal, from a selfish point of view?

“Armada!” it yelled, full-throated, into the storm. “Fuck that for a laugh!” And, with a howl of appalling happiness: “Save us!” And then, on a rising note of all-out hilarity: “Armada-Dada! And he’s a writer! Get that! The Armada-Dada!”

I fled.

I
SLOTTED MYSELF
into my sleeping-bag with no difficulty—and why? Because, I told myself, your conscious mind is now entirely occupied with that laugh and its implications, and so it’s not particularly surprising that your involuntary, sympathetic autonomic nervous system can get on with its vital simple life unhindered. But that’s not soothing in itself, is it? No, of course not. So what? So what’s so funny? The Armada, the Picts, the Vikings, the genetic history of the Orkneys—why is that so funny? OK, so maybe this country, which is supposed to be your country politically—and Jesus, it’s not as if it’s
big—
maybe, just maybe (and this thought gave me a great rush of unexpected happiness), just maybe, despite the depressingly short time-span, the all-modern, the as-it-were-yesterday mere 12,000 years maximum since the end of the last Ice Age, maybe this place is not quite so very boring as compared to the 200,000-year-old mutation (which is, after all, still so very recent), the mutation or series of mutations that gave birth to
Homo sapiens sapiens
in Central or East Africa.
Because you have to think of this place differently.
OK! So it wasn’t the Armada! And yes, Jason’s right, because this is a different kind of place altogether—this is not a place that belongs to origins, to the autonomic nervous system, to the preconscious lungfish coming ashore, to hominids, to our 5-or-3-million-years-ago pre-articulate immediate ancestors, or even to our 200,000-year-old forebears,
the us-as-we-are-now-in-our-present minds. No, this is a place, Orkney, a magical place if ever there was one, somewhere that belongs to Skara Brae, a village built so well, so recognizable, so snug and right with its stone furniture, its safe
beds,
its beds that are 5,400 years old; an intellectual place, too, somewhere that was so alive and thinking so hard—whose people built the Ring of Brodgar and made exquisite architecture at Midhowe long before Stonehenge or the Pyramids were even imagined… yes, that’s right, Jason’s right, this is a place, Orkney, to which people
wanted
to come. This place is
desirable.
This is
at the end
of the process to date. This is somewhere to which people
chose
to come. And still do. And that’s great, I thought, that’s OK, so I don’t need to feel quite so catastrophically diminished by that laughter. But, all the same, the inner voice said, you’d better forget this, and you’re not going to tell anyone, and personal dignity, you know, it needs a constant vigil to preserve it—so, above all,
you certainly will not tell Luke…

“Luke,” I said, just short of a shout which, against the shockwaves that, second on second, hit the hull, was no more than a whisper. “Are you awake?”

“Aye, of course I am,” came his oddly testy voice from the darkness to my right. “Look, I told you Redmond, I warned you, I really did—I told you, plain as could be, upfront, I said: ‘Redmond, as yet you don’t know your arse from your tit here,’ at least, that’s what Dick said in the lab. I was honest with you, I said, ‘Look, Redmond, you’ll get so tired you won’t know what to do with yourself—and then you’ll find you’re so tired you can’t sleep. Your brain—it’s all fucked up, it’s like a fever—and I know you’ve had plenty of those in your jungles, but in a way this is
worse,
because you’re fully aware that you have
not been
invaded by a bacterium or a virus and yet there’s nothing you can do to help yourself. Your body thinks there’s a battle on, and so it’s packed you full of adrenalin—and as you try to sleep you know your brain’s all fucked up, because it feels like a fever, and all it does is give you short snatches of nonsense that keep changing, and
you can’t stop it.
So you realize, don’t you? Give it five or six days and
nights of no more than half a sleep-cycle a time—forty-five minutes max every twelve hours—and you hit the manic phase of sleep deprivation. And the boys go through this every time they go out! It’s something chemical in our brains, Redmond. No sleep. So the brain tries to order itself for survival, to sort its memories, to clear itself for action by
talking
instead of dreaming. You tell people things you shouldn’t, your subconscious is out there for other people to see—but at least it’s the same for all of us here, you know, everyone’s the same, and perhaps that’s why you make such
intense
friendships or hatreds on a trawler, at sea; and you know, Redmond, I can honestly say: I remember
every
man I’ve been to sea with, at the fishing. There’s
nothing
like that on land is there? What do you think? One or two, maybe three close male friends—and one woman, max, at a time. And even then it’s
messy,
isn’t it? Really messy—all over the place, your emotions.
There’s nothing clean on land.
Anyway, there you go, I’m drifting, like I said. All I meant to tell you is
this:
the next stage, you know, give it a day and a night, no more, it’s
this:
the brain, memories, pictures, they shut down, they go all dead and dark, they don’t care any more. You’ll see! We’ll be unable to speak. Zombies! But then of course you will be too—if you keep on like this, trying to join in… Gutting fish and gutting your own gloves! I’ve seen you! And flying—how you flew! It’s dangerous, you know, I thought you’d sleep eight hours a night, like a sensible old fuck, and just be an
observer.
Isn’t that what writers are meant to do? Eh? How can you possibly have a sensible thought when you’re as fucked up as the rest of us? And besides, I can’t look after you
all the time.
God knows what you’ll do next—and as Dick said, you’re
my
responsibility. If you disappear overboard it’ll be
my
fault. Right? And the effort you put in just to get up the stairs to the bridge! I can’t look after you all the time. Jeesus. I have a doctorate to do, to write, to finish. You know, I’m
desperate.
And there again, you think you ought to keep smiling. To show you’re OK. And Redmond, that’s when you have this smile like something out of a fuck-bad film. You know—some Hammer-Horror stake-in-the-heart fuck-bad Dracula-film!
Eeee,
grizzly, yuck, that OK
smile of yours—you know, it makes the flesh creep! Horrible! Really horrible!”

“For Chrissake, Luke, just be quiet for a moment, will you? You talk so much, you’re such a
talker.
Jeesus, Luke, I can’t get a word in. So how’s about we have a
conversation?
Could you handle that? No? Well, you
should,
because I’ve been thinking about you, Luke. And I’ve solved your problem.”

“You have?”

“Of course I have.
I really have. You should be grateful. And instead of that you attack me! About Jason’s gloves! Luke, I want you to know—I only put one or two slits in the palm of my left… OK, OK, I hear you, so yes, let’s be really honest with each other because you’re right, we’re really not alive much longer than a dragonfly—yes? So OK, so may be it was seven slits, or eight. But that’s not the point, Luke. Not at all! You remember? Your problem? Your real bar to happiness? And no, Luke—no, as it happens, I must tell you right now: I
don’t
think it’s funny. You know? Right? The way women waggle their rear ends at you and flutter their wings and fly off with that special lead-on flight of theirs and knock you off behind a bush?”