Trawler (46 page)

“Jeesus!”

“Please, Worzel,
please—
stop saying that, because it’s so
lazy
of you, and
I hate it!
”

“Ah.”

“Aye—and the second thing about squid? Is that what you want?” Luke, perched on the surprisingly rigid rim of his blue basket, a hand on each knee, eyes tight-shut, said: “Is that what you want?”

And “Yes!” I said, standing there, limp, I’m afraid, and: I don’t understand it, I thought, but I
did
. And I wouldn’t put my best friend through this, whatever it is; but there again, I thought, isn’t Luke now one of my best friends? And the inner voice, in Luke’s clear tones, said to me: “Grow up! There you go again—talking like a teenager!”

“So—squid. Number Two
(and that’s your lot
). Aye: the nerve fibres of molluscs—squid are molluscs—they never evolved the myelin-coating, the axon-sheaths, the electrical insulation that we have around our own nerve-fibres, which are from around one-fiftieth to one-thousandth of a millimetre thick: no, but who cares? Because the rate at which nerve fibres conduct impulses increases with their thickness—and guess what? The squids, between their brains and their mantles they’ve evolved nerve fibres that are one half of a millimetre thick! So
pow! They’re fast:
jet-propulsion from their mantle-funnels! Plus an ink-blast to fool their predators! And—it really is almost instant—how’s about their all-in spectacular camouflage colour changes?”

Luke, the lesson over (could teaching
really
be that painful? Yes, I supposed, it could, and, anyway, it obviously
was
), Luke opened his eyes; he got to his feet, and, as if nothing untoward had happened, he gripped my shoulder, hard, in the usual way—the photographic routine, even though the floor was juddering with nothing more than the thump of the engines, and: “Go on!” he said. “Full flash! Two exposures each—f.32 and f.22, bracket them! Witch! Long rough dab!”

Click-flash! Flash-click! Twice.
So satisfying
. Just as if you were actually achieving something …

And “OK!” I said, as he threw the flatfish, one after the other, backwristed, as if he was spinning a couple of Frisbees into flight—and they landed, perfectly, in the exit-chute. “OK! So why was that last squid called a European
flying
squid? Who ever heard
of flying
squid?
Flying
fish
, yes. Flying
squid
, no. So it’s some kind of historical misnomer? Some charming mistake?”

Luke, who, a moment before, had seemed to be back in possession of a peaceful sense of self (perhaps he thought the lesson had gone well? Well, it had, it
really
had)—Luke, disturbed again, chucking, with unnecessary violence, two very strange little fish to the floor in front of my boots, said: “Misnomer? Charm?”

“Well, you know…”

“No! I don’t—flying squid, they fly! It’s only academics like you, marine biologists who never leave the lab—it’s only people like you who sneer at the stories of men who go to sea, the reports of trawlermen way out in mid-ocean: yes, it’s people like you, it’s people like you who make our lives a misery, trawlermen like me; and you treat us like peasants; and you don’t even bother to read my scientific papers or, if you do, you pretend you haven’t!”

“Eh? Luke?” (Well—I was
very
flattered; me: a marine biologist? But the rest of it…)

“Oh Jesus!” said Luke, grabbing my left arm
(quick as a squid
, I thought, pleased with myself). “Aye. Yes. Aye. Don’t you
mind
that… I’m sorry. I warned you, Worzel… But I’m forgetting myself—for a moment there I think I thought you were this terrible bitter senior guy in the university, in the department; you know, you know the type, we all do, he was passed over for promotion …” Luke brightened, he smiled, he let go of my arm. “But there again—don’t you
ever
use words like
misnomer
again or, worst of all,
magisterial
or, even worse than that:
first-class mind!
”

“Aieee! No!”

“Goaaal!” shouted Luke, the real or imagined bitterness of this outer or inner academic temporarily flung out of his mind and overboard. “Aye! Flying squids—they fly!
Pow!
There’re several species—they’ve wide fins and extra-broad membranes on their arms and they leave the water with such power they can fly for sixty yards or more—and we’ve well-documented accounts (yes! from merchant seamen!): these squids have struck ships a good twenty feet above the waterline!”

“And so,” I said, seizing my chance in all this euphoria, but still tentative … “
Giant
squid? Sperm-whales?”

“Ach! All right!” said Luke, with a happy grin, like old times. “But first—take these little beauties, OK?”

The top one, furthest from me, was brown-backed, silvery-stomached, with a long fringe of rear fin top and bottom, a whisker, a barbel, beneath its chin—and two long trailing feathery filaments stretching from its gills to beyond its anus: so what were they for? For feeling about the pitch-black mud?

“The Greater forkbeard—cod family,” said Luke. “But
this one
” (he bent down and stroked it, he ran his right index-finger along its slim flank, tracing its lateral line), “this one I
really
like.”

And by now, with all my training, I told myself, even I can see why: it was a
very
beautiful streamlined little fish, its back mottled light brown, its flanks a light red, its underside—well, its underside
was pink
. So it was a girl-fish, a fish off to its first adult dance, a proper ball…

“You know why?”

“Yeah—it’s a young girl; she’s off to a dance.”

“What? Spare us! No, well maybe—who knows? No, no—this is a rockling, a deep-sea rockling, a Bigeye rockling. And I like them now, Worzel—because I can see they’re
your
kind of fish.”

“They are?”

“Aye!” He picked it up. “See? The front dorsal fin—it’s like a line of hairs, isn’t it?” (It was.) “And the fish lies flat-out half-asleep on the sea-bed, taking it easy, you know?”

“Ah.”

“And the only part of it that moves are these hairs, modified fin-rays, and they vibrate constantly—and they waft a current of water along this groove around and beneath them, see?” (Maybe there
was
a groove there; but you’d need a hand-lens or squid-eyes …) “And you’ve guessed, haven’t you?” (No, I hadn’t.) “Of course—the sides of this groove are lined with exactly the same kind of taste-buds you find on a tongue! So the rockling can lie very still in its bunk day and night, tasting the water around it for a passing prawn or crab or bristleworm—and it need only stir for a meal when it really feels the need!”

“Great!”

“Aye,” said Luke, pushing the two little fish aside with his
boot, turning back to his basket, “I thought you’d like that!” He straightened up, a big, heavy, grey skate, held at the base of the tail, in each hand. “Aye, I know, Sperm whales … and I remember! It was a bargain! In return you—you were going to find me the perfect wife, or some such… aye! You know what? You—you’re crazy, barking!”

“Thanks … But I
do
have the perfect wife for you. In fact, Luke, I can tell you
exactly
where to look for her—the only place you’ll have a chance; and it’s
very
specific: yes, your one possibility
of real
happiness, lasting happiness, happiness for
life
. And, by the way, it’s
not
a joke, I’m serious—and I don’t think you should laugh…”

“I wasn’t laughing,” said Luke, with a laugh, plainly interested, despite himself, laying another pair of skates out on the floor. “Sperm whales, aye! But these skates, they’re Arctic skates, adapted to the furthest north,
Raja hyperborea—
and they’re interesting too. You know their behaviour?
No one has a clue
. And if you don’t believe me, get this, big time! The very last haul, when you were in the hold—around 150 skates came up in the net, but all Arctic skate, and all the same age,
and all male!
So what the hell’s going on?”

“A regiment. A club. An old-boys reunion …”

“Och aye. Your usual bullshit—but where are the females? Are they all together too? And what about the young? The different stages, eh?
Where are they?
”

“No idea!”

“Aye—and neither has anyone else! Now I want a
series
of pictures of these skates, to prove they’re all the same sex and the same age—I took a random sample from the 150: six. And I know that doesn’t sound much, but it was the best I could do. Because Jason has no quota for skate; they were in the way; 150 big skate! The boys had no choice—even though skate-wings are a feast for a king, God, Darwin, whoever,
they’re so good to eat
, and such lovely animals, and yet out they all went, dead of course, because
nothing
survives the sudden decrease in pressure from such depths … Aye … It’s a waste,
a terrible waste
… If only we were
governed by Icelanders! Then we could control and manage the seas that belong to us, for 200 miles offshore: aye, and do away with this quota-nonsense, and we’d conserve our own fish-stocks and find out
everything
about the life-cycle of these skates, and protect the females and young (once we know where their nurseries are)—and gradually our own trawlermen would get as rich as the Icelanders and there’d be
lots
of fish for the rest of us to eat, for always—and everyone would be happy!”

“Yes! Yes!”

“So you—what the hell are
you
doing?”

“Eh?”

“Why aren’t you taking their pictures?”

“Luke—lay off!” I said, peeved, swinging the heavy camera-kit into position, stooping down. “I’m a man—
I’m a bloke—so
hasn’t your biology taught you anything? I really
cannot
concentrate on two equally interesting things at once! No—if I’m listening to you talking so well about skates, how the hell am I supposed to photograph them?”

“But you
wanted
me to tell you everything!”

“Yes—of course I did. So fuck off! It’s so complicated, isn’t it? Except no, so
don’t
fuck off, it’s actually simple, so
very
simple…”

Luke, nonplussed, as he well might be, stood beside me, silent. And through the lens which always, so completely, excludes the rest of the external world: Luke, the
Norlantean
, the nearby galaxies, empty space … (Hey! So no wonder so many cameras are sold! And yes! No wonder people like me then forget to use them—so the average number of exposures taken per camera per year is twelve.) But oh Jeesus, and Luke says I must
not say that
, this skate, this skate that fills the frame: it’s on its back, yes, but it’s so fleshy, flabby, thick, glistening, spotted with brown, and the underside of this individual skate here is covered with green spots that look like mould, and angry red spots that look like terrible on-coming acne; and at the base, the start of its tail, just behind the thick globular head, there’s a puffed-out couple of swellings (its guts?) and then, again, to either side, two thin
sticky-out things like a bat’s ears, which protrude beyond two more fleshy elliptical sacs, which give way, yes, still on either side, to two semi-or fully erect (who could tell—except a womanly skate?) to
two
penises, their stems smooth and thick, the glands of each protuberant, eager, and, apparently, circumcised.

“Luke!” (Yes—I may have yelled at him, a foot away.) “Luke! They’re like me—they’re circumcised! … Well—
very
young middle-class vicars’ sons in the 1940s, you know, they lined you up on the wooden vicarage-kitchen table, you and the cocker-spaniel puppies—and they docked the tails of the puppies and
(much
less important) the foreskin of the baby… And it was
always
done by a spinster-aunt…” And: “Sorry—so sorry!” I said, not to Luke, but to the Arctic skate, because I really did feel that, man to man, I’d intruded, unforgivably, on its deep-sea privacy.

“Oh Jesus,” said Luke, standing there, unmoving (yes—he
said Jesus
). “If we ever
do
get home, you know what? Aye—I’ll sleep, as always, more or less without a break for three days and nights, to recover from this trip—and then? You know what? Aye! I’ll sleep for
another
four days and nights to recover—can you guess? From what? Aye!
From you!
”

“Ah, sure, why not?” Which, I thought, was macho-nonchalant of me, because, I’m afraid, I
really
wanted to tell him about a visit to the new London Aquarium with my family where all was all it should be in an ordered world (the sharks! the sea-horses—so small, so intricate!). Yes—until we got to the big shallow pool full of skates or rays (OK—so they were
very
shallow-water species, but all the same …) And this is where everyone gathered: and they bent over the low side of the big pool—and why? Well, it hurts to say this, Luke, but the rays or skates, they swam up to every visitor, as desperate for friendship as any pussycat, and they had a good look at you—and then they raised their heads right out of the water, and you know what they wanted? Bizarre but true; as instructed by the multiple official notices: you were to wet your fingers in the pool and, very gently, stroke them at the back of their heads. And oh, Luke, shite, they went all trembly, all wibbly-wobbly down their tails, and they hung there in the
water, wanting
more of it
. And of course I didn’t say anything to my wife or young daughter or young son: no, you don’t, do you? Not after a shock like that… (To fall in love with a skate?) But as we left there was a young man beside us with his girlfriend; and he was obviously a soldier on leave (the cropped hair, the non-gym-fit, slim body, the way he moved, packed with assault-course, marathon-energy); and he said to her: “So what the fuck do we eat now? Because I promise
you—I’m never touching fish again!
” And
she
said, because women are so much tougher than men, she said: “They weren’t fish, asshole—they were skates!” But I didn’t say anything to Luke because for a thought as awful, as disruptive as that, the internal censor, in and out of fever and coma as it still was—it said: “Redmond! Fatso!
Silence!
”