Trawler (23 page)

“Aye! But Jesus, Redmond! You’re fucked! You’ve got it bad! W. D. Hamilton? You remember?”

“Of course I do! And Luke—stop interrupting! Because you confuse me, you really do—and I almost forgot the most interesting point, which is this: the
pleasure
of a literary editor is intense, but entirely without egotism: it’s weird, it’s pure and personal, because your own name appears nowhere, and only one or maybe two people in the office know what you’ve done: and yet you’re so pleased with yourself (to yourself) that you’re in danger: you could short-circuit! You could blow up! Eh? Jesus, please, Luke, stop
groaning
like that, stop
sighing—because
I find it offensive, I really do! So yes—Bill Hamilton, your hero and mine: at the
TLS
we
cleaned up
on Bill Hamilton,
we really did,
way way ahead of any other paper! And why? OK—sod it, I know, Luke, we’ve sworn to be 100 per cent
honest
with each other, haven’t we? So yes, yeah! So you’re right, yes, OK, I hear you, you’re
right,
you tough sceptical scientific shit-bag you, it
all
came via my old friend Richard Dawkins (I knew him when we were alive and young)—and because of Handsome Dawk we
cleaned up
on Bill Hamilton! We really did!”

“Magic!”

“Yes! First of all I got his memoir—a really beautiful emotional piece that took us from the thirteen-year-old butterfly-collector, via a birthday present of E. B. Ford’s
Butterflies,
to the great evolutionary theorist; to the way he wanted to die … But the main point was obvious, as he himself said, the most important thing of all for a scientist (if you want to be any good at all) was to preserve,
conserve, protect
that childhood passion, to carry the interest safe within you, the sense of freshness and excitement,
as he called it, that astonishment, the rush of unwilled, unexpected pleasure at the extraordinary way the natural world really works …”

“Aye! But his
death?”

“Yeah, Luke, that was really something, that was
special,
and forgive me, please, I’m sure you’ll understand, but maybe my account right now will not be 100 per cent accurate, because I’m not 100 per cent sure of anything at the moment, you know, I’m not quite sure who I am, for example, I’m not at all sure any longer that I have
consistency,
that I have a past which informs my present, it’s so strange, Luke, I don’t like it, and
everything’s
slipping away from me …”

“Oh
come on,
W. D. Hamilton! Aye? The death he wanted?”

“OK,
yes,
he was studying these dramatic golf-ball-size scavenger beetles in the Amazon jungle. He’d staked out whole dead chickens in cages (to keep off the possums and vultures)—and as he watched by torchlight these beetle-monsters, their cuticles gold, yellow and green, with a huge
back-swept
horn, would bust-up around the corpses (their eruption-mounds as big as molehills) and they’d bite off a pink ball of chicken flesh
half their own size
and carry it in their arms—where? Yes! To the female of course! But Luke! Jesus! She’s so scary. She’s bigger than the male, her colours just as brilliant! And her
horn,
hang on! It’s
bigger
than his! So what’s going on? How can this be? How’s that for sexual selection? (Do
the females
fight? And the males watch? And choose the victor? Of course they do, but Luke, that’s my idea, and
you
can have it,
gratis!)”

“Aye! Nuts!
Thanks!”
And then, inspired, Luke said: “Stop this poncy
gratis
business, OK? And, by the way, stop saying I
hear you
because that’s a
pain,
it really is.” And he laughed, he really did, like a hyena,
just
like the alpha-dominant leader of the nighttime pack who is always, without exception, female. “So then?” (hyena howls) “His
death?”

“His death? Jesus! In the
Congo.
My patch. As he told me—he thought it must be true: he’d been sent a paper by an epidemiologist in Australia who’d exactly correlated the spread of AIDS with
the Salk II polio vaccine in Africa. Yes, a big League of Nations anti-polio effort. For us in the West the vaccine was cultured on the livers of cows, but in central Africa, in the small savannahs and vast jungles along the equator, there
are
no cows—the tsetse fly carrying the sleeping-sickness trypanosome sees to that—so the polio vaccine, a huge developed-world aid-project, you understand, self-interested, yes, but self-interested for
Homo sapiens
as a whole, the entire
species,
to
zap
this parasite of ours—it was grown on the kidneys of Green monkeys apparently, and chimpanzees (and Green monkeys, certainly, they’re carriers of Simian HIV virus, they’ve learnt to live with it, for millions of years, probably—so it no longer bothers them). Anyway—so Bill goes out to check this story, and all he needs is a chimpanzee turd from the area of jungle where the original chimps were killed, to check the DNA against the actual vaccine, samples of which are still stored in Sweden. So he equipped himself with a big umbrella to open, downside-up, at the right moment! Anyway, the story goes that he died of cerebral malaria, but when they got him back to Oxford, still in a coma, the Tropical Diseases Department couldn’t find a single trypanosome in his body… so he was probably poisoned… No one knows. He never recovered…”

“Och aye! I heard about all
that!
No, no, tell me—his fantasy death? Eh? And I’m sorry, but you know, not
everyone
in Her Majesty’s Marine Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, reads the
TLS—
at least, not every week, not all the way through …”

“Oh yes they will—because
if I ever get out of this big doomed piece of complicated metal, Luke, I
can promise you,
we’re going to move into marine biology in every way we can—because, guess what? Who do you remind me of, young as you are? W. D. Hamilton! That’s who! Because
he
turned me on to dung-beetles—and that’s easy, insects,
butterflies,
for Chrissake! Whereas you, you’ve made
fish
fascinating! Sean’s right—fish! Why didn’t you tell me years ago you—you
bastard!”

“Bastard yourself! And get this, Redmond, you’re forgetting, you’re right, your grip on your own past is going—and I warned you, I really did, that’s what happens when you have no
sleep for a week or more: you’re
misremembering:
it’s obvious: I didn’t know you years ago!”

“Well,
where were you
then? The whole thing
—it’s all your fault.
But anyway, your hero—Bill Hamilton—I got him to review the whole of the Collins New Naturalist series to celebrate their fifty years of publishing and Alan Jenkins, he’s a pro all right, like you, he’s a poet—but in the office, literary journalism, his
job,
you should see him in action: intense concentration, ignoring newspaper-life all around him, reading some article—and then, with his poncy brown shoes, it’s one-two, three-four, he’ll scuff the carpet,
so hard,
his under-desk News International office carpet-tiles have to be changed each year, and
bang!
Every time! There’s a heading—this particular one: ‘On first looking into a British treasure,’ and you may laugh, Luke, but that really summed it up, and I
promise
you, very, very few people can do that with ten minutes to go … And his heading for Bill’s
Memoir:
‘No stone unturned, A bug-hunter’s life and death’—and if you don’t think that’s brilliant,
with ten minutes to go,
then let’s give up! And the fantasy death Bill wanted? He wanted to be laid out like those chickens in his cages; he wanted to be buried, pink chunk by pink chunk, by those male monster dung-beetles, as food for their larvae, their children, and then, himself, his self-rearranged, he’d buzz from the soil, he said, like bees from a nest, only
much
louder than any of his own social insects, no, he’d buzz
louder than a swarm of motorbikes
(you see, Bill only ever owned a bicycle)—into the Brazilian wilderness, at night, beetle by flying beetle, so that
finally
he would ‘shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.’”

“Magic! Magic!”

“Yes! Yes! But that’s not all—that’s one half of one per cent of it! So how’s this, say, for two stray ideas of his I happen to remember? One: when trees in autumn turn their leaves yellow and gold and red (and this chemical change
costs
them energy), they’re
signalling,
like poisonous wasps and hornets and caterpillars. They’re saying:
‘hang on, baby,
you moths and butterflies that are even
thinking
of laying your disgusting little eggs on my skin, to hatch next spring and try and eat me:
get this—
I’m producing
the latest toxins I can, and I reproduce sexually, you know, so my genetic ability to manufacture poisons that make your tits and your balls drop right off may well be ahead of your defences—so
go away!
Lay your worst on someone else!’ So there’s autumn for you! And isn’t that as good as Keats? Of course, we want them both, Keats
and
Hamilton! But isn’t that great? And Luke, number two is even
better,
freakier!
Clouds!
Yeah? Clouds—so obvious, but
why
do we have clouds? Water molecules only condense if they have a particle to condense around.
Dust—
that’s the usual explanation. Dust! Yes, sure, but most of that dust, said Hamilton, will turn out to be
bacteria:
clouds are
biological.
Clouds are the servant-agents, sustained, created, if you like, by bacteria to distribute themselves—just as the Great apes are the distribution servant-agents of the hard seeds in the succulent fruits of rainforest trees. Yeah? And as far as I know, and you’re right, I
don’t
know very far—only one experiment has been done on this. And guess what? Clouds are
pullulating
with bacteria! Every time it rains, down they all come! Biology!
Life!
Winter bacterial pneumonia … TB … but good ones, too, bacteria from all over the world!
Poompf!
Down they come!”

“Magic!”

“Yes! Yes!
And so I went to Bill’s memorial event (no
Christian nonsense) in New College—and I did this
Mirror-
journalist thing—straight afterwards I grabbed Richard Dawkins half-way round the quad, the quadrangle of beautiful buildings dedicated to scholarship (what a triumphant idea, uh? How special is
that!)
and I made him promise to give me his marvellous script…”

“Aye, well, I guess you got lucky!”

“Yes, I really did. You’re right. You’re always right! So then-remember? Bill’s wife has just announced that she’s off to Rousay? In Orkney? To be a
dental assistant?
So then we get out my copy of the
Times Atlas
and I turn the plates of the UK—and Bill says, mildly interested (she’s the mother of his brilliant children, after all, and he loves his children,
so he remembers who she is),
Bill says, ‘But it’s rather far away, isn’t it? Will I see you at weekends?’

“And she says: ‘No, Bill, you won’t—I’m leaving you.’

“So the meal carries on, and he talks to me
brilliantly—
you know, the kind of man who makes you feel
intelligent as you never felt before
and, as he talks, you
understand
all the reality behind the predictive mathematics of kin-selection, of the new altruism, of the biological necessity of this altruism that has nothing to do with Wynne-Edwards!”

“Aye!”

“And in the morning,” I shouted, in triumph, “you can’t remember a thing!”

“Aye! Aye!” shouted Luke. “That’s right! You can’t!”

“So get this!” I yelled. “Keep calm! We got through the Tesco pavlova and cream, the cheese and coffee, and I’d been telling him about my pond—I love my pond—and in those days it was only a few years old and OK, Luke, I hear you, so let’s be honest, perhaps it
is
just a few square yards of water in a big black sunken rubber condom—but to me, you understand, it’s a
lake!
And I go out every night with this huge long non-compensatory black Maglite torch and I
stare
into it, and the things you see in there! So, just between us, I’ll tell you the secret: you think yourself down to a pinhead in the water, Daphnia-size, OK, to you and me,
waterflea
size—and then you get the real terrors! Delicious! Here comes
Dytiscus,
the Great water beetle larva, two inches long, dislodged (by the end of my stick) from its ambush position—the Water Tiger, the most ravenous killer in the pond, flicking its rear end, its front-end injection-mandibles so obscene and long … Anyway, OK? So eventually Bill says, ‘Let’s go and look at this pond of yours.’ So I hand him the mega-Maglite torch, and we step out the few yards from the back door across the little lawn, and we stare into the pond,
together.
And Bill says, ‘Redmond, you have two discrete populations of
Daphnia,
associating solely with their con-specifics.’

“And meanwhile, his wife and my wife, Belinda, are walking to the car in the drive (OK, the drive-in), so we amble over, and as we go Bill stops and turns to me and he says: ‘You know, Redmond, this is the first I’ve heard of it, but I think that
perhaps
my wife is leaving me because I don’t earn enough money. I think
that must be it. Yes! Because, you know—I only have an
ad hominem
Royal Society Research Professorship at Oxford. Nothing else!’

“And he drives off in his little car (nothing
as grand
as mine, Luke, you understand, not a
patch
on a Renault Clio 1.4 super-limo) and it backfires (OK, so it didn’t backfire). I think: yes! Yes he’s right! Those
Daphnia,
waterfleas to you and me, those
beautiful
little waterfleas that under the microscope hold their arms up and forward over their heads: I bought one watery plastic bag of them from the Burford Garden Company and the other from Waterperry!”