Trawler (43 page)

“
I didn’t
ponce off! We had work to do—and besides, I’m human, you know, I get
exhausted
… and aye, fuck you! Excuse me … But
teaching:
that’s the most exhausting thing there is …”

“OK! Maybe—but I’m old enough to be your fucking legitimate father, well-married, Luke, and I tell you—you promised me! So
here
, look, here’s the bargain (because I can sense it, you’re not going to tell me for free)—I’ll enlighten you, I’ll let you into the secret of a powerful Congo sex-charm that’s never been known to fail… and in return you’ll tell me about the history of the Wyville Thomson Ridge … And then,
if I’m satisfied
, I’ll solve your entire sexual-selection problem for you: I’ll tell you
exactly
who you need to marry, the one woman you must seek out and capture and settle down with, for ever. The one woman who’ll give you children and stay with you, always. And, for that, you’ll fucking well go right ahead and tell me about the deep-sea dives of Sperm whales, as you promised!”

“Nuts!” said Luke, with doctorate-forgetting enthusiasm. “
A
sex-charm! Bollocks!”

“No, no—no bollocks. Bollocks don’t come into it,
not until much later
. You see,
imagine
it, you’re a young woman in a northern Congo village (the only bit I really do know a little about), and you’ve fallen (goodbye to good sense), you’ve fallen sleep-wipingly in love with a young man in your village—you know
all
about him, his feats as a warrior, a hunter, his muscles, his sweat, his rhythm as he plays the Great Drum, and besides, he’s so strong he’s cleared almost twice as much of a forest-plot for a five-year plantation as his nearest rival in your affections, and besides, because he’s such an alpha male, and all the other young women are after him (and how!), he’s no time
to settle down
, as you call it, and why should he? Or, at least,
not yet
. But you—you have other ideas—but it takes foresight, patience, determination, real planning (which, biologically speaking, in fact makes you his ideal mate): and so what do you do? Well, it costs. Because there
are
only five iron knives in this village—and to borrow one of them for a night,
in
secret
, that’s three chickens. And
you
, of course not:
you
can’t afford three chickens; so you have to tell your mum and dad, and they think you’re crazy because that young man, well, he’s already a young Big Man, and you’re aiming too high, but all the same—maybe! So they part with three whole chickens (and how that hurts!) and you get your piece of iron, the enabler, the knife, you get it, in secret—for one night! And what do you do? Well—your dad, he takes you, once it’s really dark, to the fetish-house, where you take a scraping of clay from the inside of the upturned skull of your grandad, or great-grandad—or, let’s face it, if you’re of a lower lineage, your ancestral skulls filled with clay (they’ll be hidden in your own family hut)… Anyway, with that magic piece of iron you take a scoop of forefather clay. And you smear it into a tiny pot, kept for the purpose; and then your dad, relieved (he really does not like this kind of thing, and besides, he’s lost three chickens), he goes to his bed, and “Daughters!” he sighs to himself, and turns over on his palm-leaves, and tries to forget everything. And you—feverish (how you love and want that boy!)—very slowly you scrape the hairs on your armpits; and with your fingers you squeeze the sweat off the knife and knead it into the clay; and when you’re satisfied there’s no more moisture to be had you do the same with your pubic hairs. And then Luke—this is the important bit! What next? Can you guess? No? OK—and remember, you
really
want this young man, you want him so
very
badly, so what do you do next? Eh? No idea? Well—I’ll tell you: you scrape the skin, the gunge between your toes and the calluses along the ball and heel of the flat of your feet—very carefully, and you shred the scrape and the peelings into the clay and you hope, fervently, that you haven’t been and gone and washed too thoroughly in the river lately, that you haven’t already washed the magic away…”

Luke said: “So what?
You’re mad
.”

“Mad? Is that what you think? Well thank you, Uncle Luke, Mr. Bullough—but no, as it happens. And don’t interrupt—because all her intimate pheromones, her sex-smells, chemicals, subconscious molecules of sexual desire, they’re now embedded in that tiny pot of clay… And she leaves it out to dry in the fierce
sun on the baked mud away from the forest trees … And then she rubs it away into a fine powder, in batches, folded tight in leaves. And her mother—it’s almost always the mother—she finds a way to drop that powder into the young man’s palm-wine. And if she misses the first time, and some boy nonentity drinks it, and
he
falls in love, well, bad luck, mistakes happen, but eventually (she’s got at least ten little leaf-packets) the mother (she loves her daughter)—she gets
it just right
. And the young alpha male drinks his palm-wine, the hooks of passion. And a day or two later the mother
tells
that young man what she’s done: and then, for her daughter,
poompf!
There’s such love—such
love-making!
”

“Bollocks! Suggestion! That’s all that is—suggestion!”

“Oh yes? You sure? Then—consider this—
why
do you think I thought that so very interesting in the first place? The moment that Nzé told me about it in the Congo? Eh? Because I remembered a perfectly rational, a
Western
experiment conducted at Berkeley or some such—the researchers took over a local cinema for a week, and they told their psychology students that they’d all been working too hard, they needed a break—so hey! They were going to watch classic films for a week, to teach them about relationships (and yes, you can be sure of it—the poor suckers had to write
essays
on these films, but there again—what a privilege!)…Aye, as you’d say, but there was another agenda—the researcher, their teacher, he or she pre-sprayed fifty or so random seats in that cinema with a massive dose of female pheromones (gathered from hundreds of female armpits) when the fifty or so male students were to watch a film—yes, and you know? It worked—100 per cent! Yes, the boys all sat (“Sure—I think I’ll clock it from here, the far left front-seat. Why not?”)
in those sprayed seats
. They were given half an hour to choose. It worked! 100 per cent! And likewise, two or three days later, with the girls, in the seats sprayed with male pheromones!”

“So what? You’re off the wall!”

“Oh no, Luke, not in the least, because it seems I had a sleep at the galley table, so I
remember
the point of all this!”

“You do?” Luke sounded anxious.

“Yes, I really do! And it’s this—good and strong!”

“Aye?”

“Aye—
really rotten fish
, you know yourself, it smells
exactly
like very old,
very old
, much used socks, socks that, through no fault of their own, you’ve walked in every day, for hundreds of miles
… They smell of rotten fish
. And our noses, even mine (which hardly works), they’re so good, so primitive,
so sensitive
at detecting the tiniest amounts of pre-conscious or conscious molecules of interesting smells in the air … But they
can’t
tell the difference between rotten fish and rotting feet. So there you go, Luke, when you get ashore, you can’t help it, you’re carrying a mimic of the human sex-pheromone in your skin and in your hair, in your clothes, all over you, the rotten-fish pong, the unwashed-foot-pong, and you, like every trawlerman—you’re a nasal sex-bomb delivered direct to the most primitive part of her brain!”

Luke was silent for a moment—and that was
very
gratifying, because his head was still propped on his left arm, and he was attentive, yes,
he was certainly not asleep
. And when
that
happened, when young Uncle Luke was silent for a time after something that
I’d
said, OK—so this took place, I flattered myself, around one occasion in a hundred: it meant that
I’d
thrown
him:
that it was
me
who’d made
him
think.

“Aye, mebbe,” said Luke, reflective and slow (delicious!). “Mebbe, just mebbe, you’re
right—
because I forgot to tell you, about a recent so-called superstition I’ve come across. It’s this: it’s bad luck to wash before you come ashore … So how’s that?”

“Gooaaal!”

And Luke shouted: “Gooaaal!”

And that’s called
male friendship
…

“OK—so you liked that, Luke, you costive arsehole. So you—now you
tell me
about the Wyville Thomson Ridge?”

“The Wyville Thomson Ridge?” said Luke, suddenly grudging, resentful. “What’s sexy about the Wyville Thomson Ridge?”

“Everything, Luke! Because when you reach my age you’ve done it all, or you think you have, and sometimes, just sometimes, there’s nothing sexy even about the
thought
of sex, and in a way
that’s a gift to you; because knowledge, that
stays
sexy, learning things, about the way the great world really is: that’s sexy! In fact, as D. H. Lawrence said (and I know, that does
not
seem likely, but all the same, I’m sure it was him)—he said that there comes a point in a man’s life when he loses his
obsessive
interest in sex: and
pow!
What a release! You are
unshackled from a madman
. You can think! You can
enjoy
the life of the mind, unfettered. Yes—you can
wallow
in the discovery of the vast and complex history of our species, our genes, since life began, three-and-a-half-thousand million years ago!”

“Eh?”

“OK, Luke, I hear you, maybe he did not say that, but if he’d known, he
would
have done! So come on Luke, and, by the way, you must
stop
this intellectual prick-teasing, you really must! So—the Wyville Thomson Ridge? Yes? Now?”

Luke, bolshy, said: “Well, I’m a little disappointed with you, Redmond” (Luke said that? Luke, I thought, he
must
become a professor), “because I’ve already told you about the Wyville Thomson Ridge. The great mountain range just off our northern coast, beneath the surface of the sea—the one and only barrier in the continuity of the deep oceans of the planet!”

“Yes, yes—but how was it discovered? You said that was one hell of a story and you promised, you promised to tell me!”

“OK, then, I will—but I warn you, Redmond, I warned you, I really did, I warned you: your question-time is almost over, because I can feel it coming on right enough … I’ve had a lot less sleep than you … Less sleep, in fact, than anyone except Jason … And my brain, for sure, big time! It’s about to shut down, you know: and then I won’t
want
to speak,
I won’t be able to speak
…”

“But—Wyville Thomson?”

“Aye—he was a great man (even though he didn’t believe in Darwin, in evolution by natural selection), Chief Scientist aboard the pioneering research ship
Challenger
, on her three-year marine biology voyage around the globe—1873 to 1876; 68,000 miles; around 4,500 new species discovered… All that’s
really
famous … But very few people know, or even care, they don’t
bother to find out—they don’t know that the whole future science of oceanography began right here, in UK waters! Just as geology began with UK rocks! And modern biology began with the voyage of the
Beagle
and Darwin writing his multiple doctorates about it, forgive me! In his house in Kent, in the UK!”

“Goaaal!” I yelled, but Luke did not respond. Crestfallen (Oarfish-flame-crest-flattened), I realized, horribly, that our days and nights of insane and wonderful play, a play of thoughts, perhaps … perhaps they really were almost over …

“Aye—Wyville Thomson. Well, there he was, in the research ship
Lightning
or
Porcupine
, I forget which, but on one of those summer expeditions, probably around 1868, and he took a series of temperatures
(not soundings
, you understand,
you must remember that
) right down from the surface to as far as they could reach in different stations in the Faeroe—Shetland channel. And guess what? As you’d say or I’d say, I forget which, and it doesn’t matter, because I’m used to it—but you, you’ll
panic
, tomorrow or the next day… Aye, at around 200 fathoms, as they said then, the temperatures were roughly equal at the south-west and north-east ends of the channel; but from 250 fathoms to 640 fathoms, in the north-east, they got readings of 34 degrees down to 30; whereas to the south-west, and so very close, the corresponding temperatures were 47 and 42 degrees Fahrenheit. But hang on—there were sod all, excuse me, other temperature readings from the oceans to compare those with in 1868—no, nay, no, it was only after all his experience of checking thousands of thermometer readings across the oceans of the world, as Chief Scientific Officer (or whatever they called it then), as the Number One Oceanographer on
Challenger
that Wyville Thomson, re-checking those UK temperatures,
so near to home
(it had obviously
nagged
at him, even in the distant tropics, or my Antarctic, come to that), it was only
then
that he had the balls to predict that there was a real physical underwater mountain-range across the Faeroe-Shetland Channel…

“But it’s great, it really is—one of those scientific stories where the right credit was given, almost at once, to the right person …
The Hydrographer of the Admiralty (the things we owe the navy—remember the
Beagle?
), he sent the survey-ship HMS
Knight Errant
to check it out. And Thomson himself, who was paralysed from a stroke, was yet allowed to believe that he was directing operations, from Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides … And he lived just long enough to know that the soundings proved the weirdest thing: he was right! Here—and only here—a real break occurred in the deep sea. And he died, knowing that this vast unseen mountain would be called the Wyville Thomson Ridge!”