Trawler (33 page)

I said: “Oh Jesus!”

“Aye!” said Luke, flopping it back into the basket. “Jesus, right enough!” He thrust both hands deep down in, into the slop of fish—searching for some small treasure, obviously. “Jesus! Do you realize you keep saying that? And you call yourself an atheist …” In the basket, churned over by his hands, big fish sloshed against each other … “And your vicar of a dad (Redmond, you’re such a screw-up!)—your vicar of a dad would say that Jesus’s dad-God, you know—your dad would say that the Wolf-fish was created millions of years before the same guy, God, got around to making a wolf, wouldn’t he?”

“Eh? No. No—of course he wouldn’t! The whole lot, Wolf-fish, wolves, you name it, they were all created, perfect, no changes, within a week. Exactly 4,004 years before Jesus himself
was born. Bishop Ussher’s time-scale. From human generations documented in the Bible.
Boompf!
Although, it’s true, sometimes my dad did think the holy idiot Teilhard de Chardin got it right-that God simply
started
the process of evolution and made sure it was running well, from omega to alpha, from algae to angels: to perfection!”

“Sorry,” said Luke, perhaps hearing the unwanted passion in my voice. He straightened up; with his right hand he hid something behind his back. “Bollocks to all that, I was just making a point! And the point is this—life in the sea is so
very
old … mammals are not the only vertebrates which have several kinds of teeth for different needs!”

“OK, sure,” I said, still hanging on hard to the stanchion, not wanting to slide across the floorboards horizontally and dunk the camera through the slush. “So say life began 3,500 million years ago, with those slimy raised mats of cyanobacteria, blue-green algae, you know, the stromatolites, mounds of gunge in the tidal waters of Australia and Zimbabwe—our bacterial ancestors, yes? And Luke, you’re right, in a way, eternal life, you know, isn’t it odd how we need that idea? Because this is the bit I can’t deal with, Jesus or no Jesus:
in seven and a half billion years our earth will be burnt up by the expanding sun…
And everything we’ve achieved—art, architecture, science, books, music, all the great libraries of the world—all dead!”

Luke laughed. “Bollocks! Worzel! You Old Worzel! By that time we’ll be well gone to other galaxies, parallel universes, whatever—and we’ll take our records with us! How absurd—so you
do
believe in eternal life!”

“Well, yes, I suppose so, put like that, yes I suppose I do … seven and a half billion years, but all the same …”

Luke whipped his right hand out from behind his back. “This’ll cure you!” He held a foot-long dart of a fish in front of my face. The fish and I were nose to nose, but the nose on the fish was a rapier. “Get that! The Garfish! This is
really
fast!” He waggled the straight firm body. It was blue-green above, bright silver below.
“So
unlike our deep-sea fish—and why? Because it’s fast!”
The rapier, I could see, was its jaws, the lower jaw slightly longer than the upper, the two together a dagger, a poniard, as surprising as the projecting jaws of a fast and elegant fish-eating crocodile that I’d hoped to see in Borneo, the gharial; yes, sure, but why had I thought of that? Of course, yes, Old English,
gar,
a spear, one of the few words I remembered from those wasted years of learning Anglo-Saxon: gar, gotcha, garred yer bastard! So much better than the poncy
spear—
except that
spere
was Old English too, wasn’t it? In fact, why had I wasted years smoking so much dope: when I could have
really
learnt Anglo-Saxon and entered the world
of gar
and
spere
and farming and conquest and ship-burials and sex and warfare and
Beowulf?
Jason, Jesus, yes, Jason was right, I’d thrown it all away and now it was too late …

“Worzel!” yelled Luke. “Wake up! The Garfish, remember?” He waved it about, manic. “They swim
so
fast, shoals of them—skimming, in fact it’s
such
a surface fish that it almost belongs in the air! They
spear
their prey. And if you’re a small pelagic fish at the surface you can’t escape, because these guys come after you, their tails whirring side to side in the water, the front of their bodies, their long beaks in the air, they
skitter
after you, a nightmare! And they can be a yard long! And their relatives—who are their relatives?”

“No idea!” I yelled, as, with his right hand, Luke dropped the fish lengthwise to the floor and, with his left, detached me from the stanchion.

“The Flying fish! We’ll get its picture … Aye,
Flying
fish!”

And so we took its picture. And a portrait of a saithe (a giant: a yard long), the coalfish or coley, which Luke said had come up from 500 metres, maybe, and it was a member of the cod family and so common and so widely distributed (right into the shallows) and
so
good to eat, but Jason had no quota, so we couldn’t land it—and out it went, down the scupper-chute, its coal-coloured back, its silver stomach shining in the incoming, the early morning light.

From his yellow basket (which they filled) Luke slopped two big fish out across the floor. They were long and thick: the first
perhaps 6 feet, the head pink, the continuous rear dorsal fin pink, the body the palest brown with a random scatter of large black ink-blots, six to each side. The other was brown-backed, 4 feet long, beautiful… Or was it just the wash of pure Arctic light across their bodies, the horizontal light from the low starboard scupper-chute, light which I had certainly never seen before?

“Ling!” said Luke, as we began our photographic slide to port. “The big one—plain ling,
Molva molva,
with a range down to 400 metres—and this one” (he nudged it with the tip of his yellow sea-boot), “Blue ling, deeper, to 1,000 metres; and they’re two more members of the cod family,
Gadidae—
they’re half-neglected now. But I tell you: when the Emperor Charles V of France visited Henry VIII in London, guess what? The great royal turn-on for the banquet was salted ling! Aye, salted ling cost three times as much as haberdine, salted cod! Ling used to be
the best!”

And yes, I thought, Luke really does like a little perfectly ordinary mainstream local English history with his fish which, for some reason, was a comfort… But why? Because, said that part of my brain that wished it was at home: an interest in the tiny time-span, the gossip of a hundred years in a single country, in a small expanse of land—it
excludes
the three and a half thousand million years that’s passed since our single-cell ancestors first appeared on earth: our real history. It says
up yours
to the real geography that surrounds and appals us—the infinite but bounded space of our own universe that Einstein imagined or discovered; and all the parallel universes that perhaps make our own Big Bang no more than the pop of a shotgun on a Saturday afternoon. Yes—national history, that really is
such
an attractive mind-numbing displacement activity, as precious and necessary as planting a couple of snowdrop bulbs in the cottage-garden patch-let of soil that (in a nanosecond of micro-evolutionary time) really does seem to belong to you …

Luke, without assistance, I’m afraid, heaved both ling on to the stationary conveyor to the hold. “To remind me,” he said. “I’ll gut them later. And I need their otoliths.” (So Jason had a quota? Or, more likely, they were not quota-fish? In any case, I thought,
how stupid, how wasteful, this EU system: why can’t we be rational—why can’t we
all
be long-term clever, like the Icelanders? And hey! Get that—I’m
beginning
to be educated, so of course I have strong opinions!)

Luke, fast and focused, bent sharply over his blue basket. (Does he never give up? How come he got so all-in-one happy?) He extracted a football-sized something, solid, grey-brown. (What was it? A fish egg-ball in a hardish case? A sponge? The curved surface of the almost-football was streaked with thin shards of reflected light, needles of white shine on the dull mud-grey No, I’d no idea. And so, instantly, I felt hopeless, finished inside … no, I was not even beginning to be educated…)

Luke held the ball (I could see it was surprisingly hard, there was no give in it) in both hands, in front of his chest, as if standing on the touchline, alert for a target, about to throw it to a player on the pitch. He said: “Worzel—what’s this?”

“I don’t know.
And Luke—sometimes, well—sometimes I think it’s
all
pointless …”

“Aye, Worzel! You’re sure this is a
sponge,
aren’t you?”

“Well, yes. But…”

“It’s not!” said Luke, triumphant. “It’s
duff!
And you know what—I looked it up once, in the Aberdeen University Library, the big Oxford English Dictionary, volumes for ever, you know, the so-called definitive dictionary—and guess what? You Oxford people—maybe just one of you wankers,
excuse me,
maybe just one of you dictionary people should’ve been sent to sea where so many of our words were made!” Luke, the football now held (no-throw) against his chest, stood (quite rightly) transfixed with outrage at these dictionary people. “Yes! Duff! This is
it—
duff.” He looked at it, with affection. “And no, it’s
not
some nineteenth-century word for pudding as the Oxford wankers will tell you—dough, Yorkshire duff, as in
enough.
Spare us! Let’s get out of the kitchen, right?
This is it,
duff. So ancient, in terms of our fishermen
—duff.
Something you really don’t want in your catch. Duff. As in duff, a duffer, a duff catch, useless! Aye—it’s coral.”

“Coral? Don’t be silly!”

“Silly?” Luke looked me straight in the eye, mean as a good man can be. “North Atlantic coral—they don’t form reefs or atolls, no, the polyps make mounds on the continental shelves. They feed at night—their stinging tentacles unfold, their mouths open at night. Magic, eh?”

And Luke, with a teenager grin, as the
Norlantean
rolled to starboard, raised his arms above his head and pitched the duff-ball up and over the gutting table, between the starboard stanchions, and
bop!
No argument!
Zap!
Straight into the scupper-chute.

I yelled: “Goaal!”

“Magic,” said Luke, pleased. “But don’t try that yourself.” He turned back to scrummage in his blue basket. “Because those corals are full of
silica,
glass spikes that can damage your skin. It’s their defence against grazing fish.” (Oh yeah? I thought, but it’s true, which is another reason I don’t like it—so you, Luke, you have hands like a leather-back turtle—whereas I… I probably
still
have hands like a girl… yes … one glance at them by the Khmer Rouge and I’d be taken away behind a bush and suffocated, with a knot-tight plastic bag…) Luke found the prize he was looking for and arranged it on the boards, dorsal side up: a starfish, but dark-red, swollen, chunky, a mega-muscled outsize disembodied hand of a starfish that, in your dreams, would grip you by the throat…

Luke said: “It’s a starfish. A deep-sea starfish. But I’ve not seen this one before, I don’t know the species, so we need a photograph, a
detailed
photograph—so down you get”—he gave me a shove—“that’s it, on your knees.” (So we slid to port, on our knees.) “As I was saying, there was an ex-trawlerman, you know, on the
Scotia,
the research ship, a lovely guy, one of the contract crew—all from Hull—and he used to collect the duff that came up in our beam-trawls.” (Flash! f.32—so I changed the aperture to 22, for the return run… close-up photography: why were the rules all different?) “And one day I asked him what it was for, why he wanted it—and he said he was old now and he hated life at sea and he couldn’t wait to retire and all he thought about was his allotment.
He’d got
three.
But that bit of Hull was overrun with feral cats and they dug up his seeds. You know—the way cats sniff the ground and dig a hole with their right-front paw and then squat all rigid at forty-five degrees, and they hold their faces in the air and they think so hard they look like philosophers—and they do their business. And then one sniff later they cover it over—and rocket off as
if none of that was anything to do with them!”

“Yeah! Luke! That’s right!”

We slid back to the blue basket: he gathered up his starfish (gently he liked this starfish) and, replacing it on the pile, he withdrew the fish that had mesmerized me some time ago—a day? A week? I’d no idea… but the image was as potent as an image gets, and here it was again, laid out right in front of me: thick and eely and all blotched black with white rings around its muscly slime of a body… it was hooped with rings of white … “Esmark’s eelpout!” said Luke, from above me. “And no, Worzel—for this one you stand up!” (The effort of it, my knees, all my joints, they ached, they hurt, and Jesus, I thought, your only hope, if you survive this—your only hope is to take that cod liver oil and Omega-3 fish-fats, every day, bottles of it.) “Anyway, as I was telling you, the cats dug up his beans, whatever, back in Hull, and he couldn’t take it, the mess. So he’d mash up the duff with cat-food and he’d leave it out in bowls, on his allotments—and the cats ate it, and died. The spicules punctured their stomachs. So, like I said, apart from that he was a lovely guy, and we had this great argument—I told him it was cruel and he shouldn’t do it. And you know what he said to me? ‘Eh, lad,’ he said, ‘thou’s naught but a focking whipper-snapper!’”

And then the siren sounded.

“Bollocks!” said Luke, rigid. “Esmark’s eelpout! You haven’t taken it!”

“I was listening to you!”

“Bollocks! OK—we’ll have to do it later…” (He laid Esmark’s eelpout in prime position, curled inside the top of the blue basket.) “But this Jason
—I’ve never known anything like it—
the speed between hauls, the way he keeps it coming, the way he never
sleeps! But we’ll try for some science after the next haul… OK? Esmark’s eelpout, the Blackmouth catshark! My doctorate!—And something I’ve saved up,
right from the very first haul,
I’ve kept it for you, it’s still alive! A hagfish! Aye. The hagfish! The oldest and weirdest fish in the sea!
What a story—aye,
the hagfish,
that really is the story of stories…
”