Trawler (42 page)

“No—when I’m down there in the hold (and aye—you’ve
got
to come down there, too, next haul, or you’ll never be able to tell yourself that you’ve even been a junior apprentice, a baby-trawlerman—oh no!)—when I’m down there, stacking, for hours and hours, and it’s so cold you canna feel your hands, it’s times like that when I start at the beginning, right at the beginning of our life together, from when I first met her, and
of course
I think of her body and all the sex, but it’s odd, it’s not really that at all, not at all, no, it’s her
face,
and her laugh, and the life that’s in her, as you’d say yourself, and the things she says to me and even now, you know, years later, she
surprises
me, and I laugh!”

“Aye!” I said, my face in my hands. “Bryan, you …”

“Yes!” said Bryan. “I knew you’d understand, but you
don’t,
really,
not at all.
No—you see, whenever I get home—and I go straight home, I can’t be doing with all this drinking the boys do first:
I tell her,
it all comes out, I can’t help it, I know I shouldn’t,
but I can’t help it:
I make a right fool of myself, every time, and first,
I’m so glad she’s still alive,
and second, aye, and it
is
second, but it’s the kind of second that anywhere else would be a first, if you catch my meaning, well, I let her know, and no mistake, and that’s a fact, and I can’t help it: every time I tell her, and every time I think I
mustna
do this ever again because it’s no manly and she canna like it, and I tell her how much I fucking love her, and how I’ve been thinking of her at the power-block or at the net at the stern-ramp or bored shitless at night-watch in the wheelhouse or stacking, like I say, in the hold … And then I take the kids in my arms, and I stink of fish, of course I do,
I really smell,
but they dinna seem to mind, and mebbe they really love me,
mebbe they do…
but who can tell? How do you know when you’re away all the time? And my wife, and I’m her
second
husband, you know, so maybe she really
did
choose me and mean it, what do you think? She says, every time, ‘Bryan,’ she says, ‘you big soft stupid love-bag,
go to sleep.
Bryan,
stop it:
you’re going to your bed,
right now,
and you’re to sleep for a day and a night and a day—and I’ll be there, too, for some of the time, but you’ll be none the wiser, but Bryan: when you wake up, after a day and a night and a day’
(that’s
what she says! Every time), ‘then it’ll be
our
bed again, and we’ll have fun, and we’ll get up and go out and
we’ll do things together…
’”

“Jesus! But isn’t that happiness,
real happiness,
the most any man could
ever
expect?”

“No! It’s not! At least—it might be. But how do you make sure it goes on
for ever? As a man—how
the hell do you do that? And it was Allan Besant, or someone, no, mebbe it wasn’t him, but someone told me, around six months ago, to look up a word, in a dictionary
from your
town, as it happens, yes—in the focking Oxford dictionary, and the word was
uxorious,
and whoever it was, he told me to look it up, in passing like,
because that word was me—
and this
horrible
word, a really nasty little bit of stinking dogshit, this word, it means: to be
excessively fond of your wife.
So my question to you, from Oxford, my question to you is this: is it possible? What if I love her too much, or rather, what if I let her know I love her too much? And it’s a fact, but I can’t help it, I told you,
when I’m at sea, I’ll go anywhere, do anything, it doesn’t bother me, however bad it gets—and I’m sorry Worzel, I know how you feel, and I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the truth is it
can
get a very little worse, OK, let’s be honest, a fuck-sight worse than the Force 12 we’ve had this January—and all the time, in a hurricane, aye, sure, a junior hurricane, I’ll be going through, in my mind, the beginning of our life together. And you know what? I’ve done no more than the first three months—and it comes to me, I realize, the hurricane’s gone, the storm’s over, and everyone’s panicked, and I’ve hardly noticed—and now it’s calm. So how do I tell
her
that? Or should I? Is that
uxorious?
This word, Worzel, you, as a writer, uxorious, this
foul word:
do you think, you as a writer, do you think that when I get home and like the rest of us I’ve had no sleep and so
I say things:
and I tell her (every time, and it’s got
worse
over the years), I tell her how much I love her, and I really mean it, so I’m almost in tears, OK, I tell a lie,
I’m always in tears.
I’m so pleased to see her, and the
babies,
well, the children, they’re getting big now
—uxorious:
so do you think they secretly hate it? Eh? Now you know the truth—do
you
think I’m uxorious? Do you? Is that why they send me to bed straight away and no mistake?”

“No! You’ve got it all wrong—uxorious, my arse!” And then, deeply disturbed, all the same, I said: “You big fucking furry Viking!” which helped me, but not him, to get things in perspective. “No, no—with your job, you can’t be uxorious, that’s a word that describes bust-up depressive frightened little husbands who’ve enclosed themselves in the home, just like the males attached to female deep-sea angler-fish—and believe me, baby” (I’d called Big Bryan
baby?),
“I know all about that: but you,
you’re not a case in point,
far from it. As far as you’re concerned, with this one love of yours, I can tell you, there’s no such thing as
excessive
love: as far as I can remember, which is not very far, no, there’s no case in the entire literary history of the world—the history of the emotions—there’s not a single case in which a woman, faced with a genuine, outsize hero, a real alpha male, thinks: ‘This man loves me too much!’ Excessive love—for them—there’s no such thing… She sends you off to sleep because she loves you, she
really loves you, and so she can imagine this hell, let’s be honest, this hard and sleepless hell you go through every time you’re at sea—and in what other job could you find routine conditions like this? Eh? Not even in the SAS!”

Bryan got to his feet, jerky, like an automaton, a robot—as if he’d received a signal, a small electric shock. It was obvious that I’d been no help at all—and that this deep problem, this male problem of his, which had at first seemed so laughable: no, it was real, and he’d probably carry it with him, secretly, for the rest of his life; a jagged spiky fragment of ice from the hold—in a domesticity that should have been as warm and constant as happiness can get… And the little piece of ice-spikes, refusing to melt, would say to him: “If you think of your wife for the greater part of each working day and night at sea; if you adore her like you do; and, worst of all: if you can’t help but
tell her so
every time you get back ashore sleepless, half-mad, semi-hysterical, like a woman in distress—then you’ll lose her. She can’t love that kind of a man … Nobody could… And you realize what that means, don’t you? Oh yes! You’ll lose your children too! And all because you’re a trawlerman …”

B
ACK IN THE CABIN
, making my slow, delicious way to the bunk (hang on to every upright: take it easy: you’ll get there: paradise awaits), I realized that Luke’s blue sleeping-bag, dim in the light from the door, the passage-way, was occupied: there was a small and thin, a most insubstantial something slotted into three-quarters of the length of that blue tube—it could only be Luke himself. For once—Luke had gone to his bunk before me!

So, of course, forgetting that Luke, like Sean, and unlike me, had probably had no rest for forty hours, I felt superior, so superior—and a thoroughly irritating and untrue saying of my childhood came back to me: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!” Yes, that’s right, Rosie-bud used to say that to me when I was little, and I’d watched
The Lone Ranger
on the very first of televisions, and she couldn’t get me to
bed—I didn’t want to sleep?
Could I ever recapture
that piece
of childhood? No! Never! That bit, well, that really had gone, and here, right here, was my snuggly green nylon parachute-silk soft womb-lining sleeping-bag… So I got into it, in at the lips, an effort, because the base of the top bunk, with its felt-tip portrait of the leering trawlerman, it was
so
tight-down on my space, but eventually I worked myself in and down to a line, a dead-line of that flat-out unconscious which the Bantu of the Congo call dead-for-a-time, as opposed to that worst of states, dead-for-ever.

But the dead-for-a-time would not come: although the
Norlantean
out there (even I could tell), she’d relaxed, she knew she could cope with this Force 8 gusting 9 or thereabouts, her rhythms were regular, predictable. Yes, I thought, I feel secure at last, as if I was wrapped about in the amniotic fluid of a
reasonable
uterus, safe in the womb of some prehistoric mother who was doing nothing more unusual than, say, run for her life from a sabre-tooth tiger: swing/slosh/swing/port to starboard, starboard to port… Or, more accurate, perhaps she was in the Congo forest and climbing up, with deliberation, but as fast as she could, to get to those thin, those topmost branches, swing, dip, rise, reach and lurch, left, right, up, quick—with nothing worse than an ordinary leopard clawing at the bark behind her …

I felt inexplicably energized and chirpy and so, yes, I thought, I really must have had an instant sleep head-down on the galley table, but no, there was no doubt about it, I really had
not
had enough sleep to reach that most advanced stage in our emotional evolution, that moment when we become fully social, fully sympathetic to the needs of other people … And Luke, it was obvious, he was
pretending
to be asleep, his exaggerated, regular breathing, his pathetic attempt at a snore—it was insulting, he was an amateur actor …

“Luke!” I said, good and loud. “Knock it off! Because you don’t fool me—you’re pretending to sleep!”

“No!” said Luke (a thrash of legs in the blue tube). “No! I’m
not
pretending! I want to sleep.
I want to sleep so badly
. But I can’t, I just can’t!” (His voice faded, he sounded more miserable than I’d ever heard him.) “No, I can’t—because I’ve been lying here, I’m worrying, Redmond, I am so
fucked up
and not even a big shaggy joke of well-meaning friendship like you can help me. No. Because I am so alone. I’m in a panic. A work-panic. And once it happens and it gets going you can’t stop it—and you, how could
you
ever understand? It’s horrible, you know, my doctorate—
the deadline!
It’s out there waiting for me, in the near future, and so of course it poisons the present—and when I feel like this, well, I tell you, each smack of a wave on the hull, you know what it says to
me? There goes another batch of seconds, time going away from you, time that you should be spending on your doctorate—and in Fittie, in Aberdeen, you know, in my cottage, it’s worse, far worse, because there I am at my little desk, and the sea’s outside, but I can still hear the traffic on the road, you know, the road along the coast, and I can take
that
, more or less: no, it’s the high-pitched scream, you know, the
wheeeee!
The female scream of mopeds flat-out, the 50cc or 100cc motorbikes … The banshee wail! Yes—and every time I hear that female scream I think, Luke,
forget it
, this doctorate, because
you’ll never meet the deadline
, there is
so much
data to process, so give up right now, go on: do the rational thing—kill yourself!
Drown yourself.”

“Come on, Luke—listen to me, I
can
comfort you, you’re forgetting, I did a doctorate too, and I’m sure I felt worse than you do, but I’ve scrubbed all that from my memory, so it must’ve been bad, because I can remember just about
everything
else in my life—so, well, hey, Luke, if you’re
serious
, and if your university can
see
you’re serious,
committed
, half mad with the excitement of it all: then,
pow!
They give you
extensions
. Yes—up to a maximum of seven years for students who really
do
seem to be on to something, students like you, Luke, and guess what?
My doctorate took me seven years!
”

“
Seven years?
Worzel? Please!
No!
”

“OK, Luke, forget it!” (His curly head was now way out of its protective-casing Caddis-fly-larva pond-safe sleeping-bag—and here it comes! Yes! An arm! He’d propped his head on his left arm.
I
had his attention: so he was lost to healing sleep.) “There’s something I’ve been thinking about—there’s a bargain I want to strike with you, man to man.”

“There is?”

“Yes, Luke,
there is
. Because your knowledge, you see, it’s
already
so very precious, so valuable; so, on the whole, I
don’t
think you ought to drown yourself, or, at least (I don’t want to intrude)
not yet
. Because you promised—oh yes you did!
You really did—
you promised to tell me about the Wyville Thomson Ridge, you bastard! And Sperm whales! And copepods! Oh yes you did!
You got
me all interested—and
then you ponced off, and said you’d tell me later, and you went silent!”