Trawler (31 page)

“A pneumatocyst—a
floating capsule of brown algae—perfect camouflage! And now—for the third and last of our little fish, don’t move, wait here!”

Luke, his blue woolly hat stuck on top of his curly black hair, his now substantial black stubble shading his prematurely lined, lived-in face, making him look more decisive, obsessed, craggier than ever, disappeared into the laundry cubby-hole … And reemerged, three brown-paper parcels under his right arm.

He laid them in a line, one, two, three, on the empty steel shelf to my right. They were books … “Now, whatever you do,” he said, picking up volume three, “don’t laugh, because these books
really
mean something to me.” He was searching for a reference, turning the pages, in front of me, showing this treasure of his as if, in itself, it was the rarest of fishes: before my tired eyes passed black-and-white drawings of fish, one or two a page, diagrams of heads and fins, short texts full of numbers, maps … “You’ll think I’ve borrowed them from the library at the lab, but consider it-would any librarian in the world let a student take books like this
to sea?
At £123 the set? No way! Redmond, this is the greatest, the great co-operative work of scholarship,
Fishes of the North-eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean—only
UNESCO has the resources you need! No commercial publisher could even
think
of an effort
like this. First—it took
eight years
of cataloguing the available knowledge, you know, reports, specimens in museums, eight years from 1965 to 1973. So you understand the point, don’t you?” Holding the precious volume with his left hand under its back, his right across its open insides, Luke turned his scrutiny from the book to me. “You’ve got it, yes? Because it’s all so new, this science of the seas! And sure, I know you now, and you’re thinking it’s just like the nineteenth century, all this mere cataloguing, but that makes it even more impressive! Big time! The
grind
of it—no glamour like molecular biology—no praise from anyone but yourself, and that’s the secret, self-motivation, and a love of these animals simply for themselves, for how weird they are! Aye—and after the catalogue, we call it Clofnam, short for
Check-list of the fishes of the north-eastern Atlantic and of the Mediterranean—only then
could the real thing start… And these volumes came out from 1984 to 1986,
that
recent!” (Luke’s eyes: so bright, so happy.) “So how do you think I made them mine, on £7,000 a year? Eh?” His hands quick, jerky, he slid the open book flat to the steel shelf, pulled off his hat, marked the place with it, shut the book as far as it would go (two-thirds) and he said, “Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? This was no luxury, I had to have these books to take to sea with me, so I thought, OK, I’ll work it out, the money, if I don’t go to the Moorings, you know, the dockside pub the marine-lab people use, in the evenings, or at lunch-time, or at all, if I drink no beer for eight weeks and limit myself to one proper meal a day, a big breakfast, then I could save £125. And I did! I bought them! They’re mine!”

“Goaal!”

“Ayeeeee! And look—I protected them” (he held up volume three, the blue hat deep-fill-sandwiched inside); “that very same day, at once, I cut up Manila envelopes from the lab, petty thieving, you’ll say, but I thought that was OK, you know, justified, and several layers too, because I didn’t want them stained with fish-guts and blood and engine-oil, so that was OK, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was!”

“Because Redmond, you understand, you must—when I’m
old, older than you, very old, if I’m lucky, if I make it through, when I can’t go to sea any more, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll have a cottage by then, like I told you, with a fire, so
warm,
and a family, and we’ll all gather round, and with my gutting knife I’ll slit the Manila envelopes right off these three volumes, and underneath, you know what? The covers—they’ll be as new, like the day I first had them! They’ll be perfect, the covers, and somehow I know they’ll remind me of everything, all my life—well, they’re not covers technically, of course, there are no covers, no nonsense like that, no, they’re the boards of the books themselves—and the
colours,
the only colours in the whole big deal are on the boards, and volume one, it’s the delicate surface blue of the calmest of days in high summer, shading down to that dark blue when light gives up and you can’t see in any more and the vast world of all those miles to go gets secret. Aye—and over it all is an ace, a really accurate line-drawing of a Common skate. And vol. two: the same idea, but in the sea-green of an algal bloom, with a drawing of a John Dory, the
Saint-Pierre
in French,
Pez de San Pedro
in Spanish—you
always
get given the French and Spanish names and, now and then, the common names in German or Russian, and I can tell you, as a fisheries inspector, that’s marvellous, bloody marvellous, invaluable, as you’d say—but the John Dory, everyone knows it, but it’s freaky in itself, the dorsal fin, the crazy long filaments on the finrays, what are they for? Defence? Antennae to detect the subtlest vibrations in the water around them? Who knows? Aye—we’re still in the Middle Ages. The
Saint Peter fish,
can you get that? Just because it has this big black spot with a yellow surround on its flank, and aye—what’s
that
for?—but it comforts all the Christian fishermen, because they’re sure, all those Christian fishermen are
certain,
whether they admit it or not, they’re certain that the black marks on each flank are the sacred thumb and forefinger prints of St. Peter, burned into the species for ever, from that very moment when Peter the Fisherman lifted them from his nets!”

“Jesus!”

“Aye!
Jesus!
And volume three—guess what? All in shades of purple, the sea before a storm, certainly, but at other times, too, it
goes purple and I’ve no idea why… but the point is … listen … the illustrator,
a woman,
Monika Jost, it’s obvious, she’s been building up to this, the finale, her third and last drawing, and she chooses—guess what? A deep-sea anglerfish! One of the very same deep-sea anglerfish that seem to obsess
you,
remember? But hey—she could have chosen to copy the drawing of
Halophryne mollis,
a female with
three
parasitic males attached, but no, she went for
Lynophryne brevibarbata.
And it’s true, that’s a female with barbels—you know, growths under the chin—that can be 15 per cent longer than her own body, downward extensions of her throat, thick and branched and twisted like the roots on a tree, and yes, she’s tiny, 100 millimetres long, but if you saw her full size, I promise you, you’d throw up! Aye … I’m forgetting—the point is that this ace female artist, Monika Jost, she went for the one diagram where a deep-sea anglerfish is shown with only
one
parasitic male … so maybe you’re right, I’ve been thinking about it, and I know, you’ll deny everything, because for you that was your first time with no sleep for days and nights on end, but I remember what you said, because I’ve been through it, so often, with every trip on a trawler, so maybe you’re right, maybe every woman really does want to settle down with just the one man …”

“Eh?”

“Aye! She loved it, like you say, the one male captured for ever, his head’s absorbed inside her, only the rest of him hangs loose from her crotch, as it were, he’s just a sperm bank, she’s got him, he’s hers, no doubt about it! And guess what? She’s so excited about it, this Monika Jost, that for the first time she uses
colour,
she paints the attached headless male, his tissue and blood-vessels already fused with hers—she paints him in bright green!”

“Wow!”

“Aye, it’s great, isn’t it? And I’ll tell my children all about it, one day, because she’s right, of course, in biological terms, because our deep past is hermaphrodite, the penis is simply an enlarged clitoris, so the female is the basic, the ancient sex, and we’re latecomers, parasites, if you like … And hey, do you remember saying that?”

“… Luke, please, lay off, it’s so ghastly all this, you know, the terrible feeling that I’m losing my mind… OK, so what? Yes … But it’s never happened to me before, or, at least, not so obviously, you know, bright-light obvious, right out there, in the open, for all to see …”

“Aye, that’s it! That’s the wipe-out shock of your first week or more of days and nights with no sleep. So you can’t remember? Any of it? Can you?”

“No, that’s right… No, I can’t.” And I suddenly felt absurdly anxious (where had the fear come from?)… “No, I can’t. And I don’t want to—it was like being drunk, you know, the worst kind, when you drink because you’re unhappy, because something is stopping you doing the one thing you need and want to do, so the point and the value goes out of your life, and you keep drinking, to make it better, and then you say all kinds of violent things to anyone who loves you, awful hurtful things that the normal you is not even aware you could
think,
let alone say… But Luke, hang on, because I want you to know that I don’t agree that alcohol reveals the subconscious, no, absolutely not, I think it’s just the surface you, lashing out,
trying
to solve some problem, messing up, getting it all wrong… But Luke, it’s not
that
bad normally, you know, I
have
been happy and fulfilled like you, sometimes, now and then, doing work I
really
want to do—and I can tell you, it’s odd, isn’t it? If you get drunk
then,
why! you
stay
happy and fulfilled, because you’re all of a piece, all the way, all the way down to the depths! The abyssal depths!” And then something surfaced, and I tried to stop talking, but couldn’t: “You know the lines?” I said (not knowing them myself): “‘Mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall, sheer, frightful, no-man-fathomed’ … So who the hell said that?”

Luke, in control of himself, as always, it seemed to me, reopened his volume three, regained his blue woolly hat, re-rolled it on to his head and, still in absurd slow-motion, said, “You’re asking
me?
”

“Well…”

“No, come on, don’t make such a big deal of it—you can
train yourself to cope, just a little, and that’s why I can remember
almost
all you said, and anyway, the boys go through this
every time,
it’s their job, and they don’t faff on about the subconscious! No—the only sign they give of the mental pain of all this is to get dead drunk the minute they go ashore. And, of course, no one,
no one
ashore understands or forgives them. And then they need at least thirty-six hours of graduated sleep—but their wives are already uptight, because they feel neglected, because for two or three weeks they’ve been without a husband, and they’ve been left all alone, and they’ve had to look after the children all by themselves, and not a day off, and their man’s been out there enjoying himself, so they tell him all about the problems he’s caused because he’s been away, and then they damn well insist on taking him shopping… So, just occasionally, the trawlerman gets violent. And then
everyone
calls the police.”

“Uh … it’s all so grim.”

“Of course it’s not! Don’t get me wrong—no one’s to blame … How’s the wife to know about sleep-deprivation? And come to that, I’ve got real mates in the police, there are two
grand
guys in my own lifeboat station at Aberdeen: and hey, Worzel, Redmond, I mean—excuse me—you know, well, imagine it: I’m walking back from the Moorings with a new girlfriend and she’s tender, you know, so we’re holding hands, and then
pow!
(or whatever you’d say, you know—drama, a
shock!)
this patrol-car mounts the pavement right in front of us and the policeman in the passenger-seat yells out the window: ‘You! Yes! You, sir! You’re under arrest for your shit-bad dress-sense! We’ve had complaints! You upset the law-abiding public! So take that
horrible
hat off! Right now!’ So I take my hat off, and my new girl does a runner, and the policeman jumps out of the patrol-car and pinions me and pushes me into the back seat and muscles in beside me and the police driver central-locks the doors and on goes the siren and the flashers and all the traffic down the docks road pulls aside and we swing into the lifeboat station at this
terrible
speed—and only then do I see it’s Brian and Rob, the bastards! And they say: ‘Luke, why the hell didn’t you get the shout?’ And I say: ‘Boys, I
switched my bleeper off—because
that was my first time with a new girl’
And Rob says (and Brian says, ‘Exactly!,’ all the time, because that’s what he does whenever Rob gives you an opinion), ‘Oh Luke,’ says Rob, ‘why the fuck don’t you get married like us and have kids? Eh? You’re older than us, and yet here you are—you’re
still pissing about after girls and missing shouts!’”

“Great! But…”

“The point? Och aye, yes, that’s right, how are they to know? Who could know? Even Rob and Brian—on that shout we got to a weekend yachtsman who’d capsized and got caught in the current and drifted way out, way out, and he was clinging to the upturned hull of his 14-foot dinghy, and he was lucky, because she was clinker-built, so he could hang on with his fingers, and you know what? You know what I remember from that one? The end-joints of all his fingers, and his thumbs, they were red and wrecked and bleeding—you could almost see the finger bones!” Luke paused, he laughed as some pleasurable new thought struck him. “So hey—let’s hope he wasn’t an old-fashioned writer like you—a Worzel who had to use a pen!”

“Yeah, yeah, but Luke—your lifeboatmen,
what can’t they know?”

“Aye! About no sleep of course! You’ve lost it—you’ve lost the point! How are they to know, even Rob and Brian, how could they know? How are you to understand unless you’ve been through it? Does the judge in court allow for it? Of course not! He or she has no idea! And you can’t blame them for that, because it’s not something you can just
imagine—the
mind won’t have it! You can’t
imagine
it, because it’s a physical and chemical disruption in the working of the brain itself! It’s like real madness, schizophrenia, deep depression, whatever, and the whole point about that kind of change in the brain is that it
can’t
be imagined. And no judge, OK, no one in their right mind, wants to go mad, even for two or three weeks!”