Trawler (49 page)

“Yes?” I said, easing forward slightly, trying to move the pain in my back without standing up from the rim of my blue plastic basket—because, it was obvious, I must
not
move, I must
not
disrupt things in any way, no, not at all…“But Shetland?”

“Aye! I took the
St. Clair
, the ferry (a
big
ship!), from the pier
in Aberdeen—right out of the harbour-mouth, past Fittie, and you can
see my place
as you leave the coast…”

“So what was wrong—why wasn’t it a good story?”

“Eh? Because I wasn’t paying, of course! All my life, until this fucking doctorate, excuse me,
I’ve paid my way, and more
. But now, it’s so shaming, I
can’t:
and the lifeboats, you see, I’m a volunteer, and I wouldn’t change that for anything—but
I don’t get paid
.”

“Luke—come off it—no graduate students get paid! But you’re going to
finish
your doctorate: and
everyone
will want to employ you! And, in a year or two, you can pay your mum back, all of it, with interest!”

“Aye. If she lives long enough.”

“Ah. Well. Sorry. Forgive me …”

“Aye. It’s
bad
. But look—now I’ve told you … I’ll tell you
all
about it: because the place I stayed, the place she paid for, well, it was
bound
to make me feel guilty
… Because it was the most beautiful cottage in the whole world!
”

“It was?”

“Aye! It was! It really was!” Luke looked at me, full on, such a grin,
such
a set of perfect frontal-upper-jaw white teeth. (So how old was he? Really? Thirty? Thirty-five?) No—
come on—
but all the same—how’d he managed that? Yes, of course, I thought, all his active working life,
of course—
Luke had eaten nothing but the very freshest fish …) “Aye! But there again, right enough,” he said, “I don’t
bullshit
like you! No, nay, never—so maybe it was only
the most magical cottage in the whole of Europe:
aye! And
everything about it:
sweet as a nut!”

“Yes?
Really?
So for Chrissake—
where is it?
”

“OK, OK—I hear you—so I haven’t seen cottages in Europe, so I don’t know; but I’m
sure
of it, OK? Because you couldn’t imagine a better place, however hard you tried! But maybe, Worzel, just maybe, you’re so old, and you’ve been around and you’re worn out, old as the Blackstones, the engines, as the boys say, excuse me—so maybe you have seen better cottages in Europe: but I don’t believe it! So, I tell you what: how’s about this? It is
absolutely the most smashing cottage in the whole of the UK
, the
entire
British Isles! So how’s that?”

“Luke, for Chrissake—where the fuck is it?”

Luke—so fired up by the thought of this
cottage
, a mere place (and no, it really did seem that no woman was involved in the memory)—Luke, all black-topped and curly and looking so young said: “Hannigarth, Uyeasound, Unst, Shetland. Aye—that’s all you need to remember: and
anyone
, even you, can go there! You can
hire
this place, rent it! And you
should
, Worzel—because it will change your life!”

“But,” I said, immediately sullen at the thought, despite all the excitement, “I don’t want to change my life! No! Not in the very smallest, not in the tiniest—not in one single fucking harvest-mouse of any particular!
No—I don’t
.”

“Worzel!” said Luke, still horribly buoyant and revitalized by the thought of this
dot on a map
. “Worzel!” And then, from nowhere, with an all-over, genuine, right-through-body laugh (which was almost as wounding as Jason’s, and less explicable) he spluttered, through those perfect teeth which, in my opinion, he had no right to own: “Mr. McGregor! His wheelbarrow! A watering-can! Peter Rabbit!”

“What the fuck?”

“Eh?
That—
that is” (he imitated my accent) “to say things like that, old chap,
that is not nice—
”

“Up yours!”

“Aye—but joking apart, and
smashing
jokes too” (Luke was still rocking slightly) “you
should
go there… To Hannigarth. Everyone should … Just once in a lifetime … And it’s easy, so easy… The Shetland Tourist Board—
they
know all about it! Although no one else does … Mary Ouroussoff, she lives near Gloucester somewhere … That’s it! Weird, isn’t it? Magic—whatever? Something that happens just the once in a man’s life … Is that right? You’d know! Ach—the point is,
as you’d say
, it was only a cottage, a converted croft: no woman, no romance; no, just a
place—but what a place!
Aye: it’s the nearest that you or I will ever get to paradise … You know—the bullshit that you
pretend
you don’t believe in; and which I
really
don’t!”

“Oh, Luke: for Chrissake!”

“There you go! Aye—but it’s true.” Luke looked away again,
to port, a quick little convulsive movement of the head. “I’ve been thinking what I could give you—to thank you, you know, for your companionship on this trip, one of my many trawlers:
but the truth is, I’ve never had a time quite like this one
, because, I’ll be honest, normally it’s just a routine number of stations, hauls, whatever you’d call it: a record of depths, of everything that comes aboard, the temperatures from my mini-log on the net… all that… but I’ve never had someone else with me before, you know, someone from the outside world, as it were, a companion who’s made it all so different and
completely fucked up my head
…Jesus! I’ll need
to sleep!
But I thought, all the same—maybe, one day, we could have a joint venture to search for
the females
of the Arctic skate; or the
very young
Greenland halibut, the Black butts—and Robbie: I’ll bet he’s right! Aye—or better still, I thought, we could explore the Rockall Trough—lots of trawlers work there; or the Porcupine Seabight or, best of all, the
Porcupine Abyssal Plain—and those
areas, seabed and waters that are only a few hundred metres deeper than here (although, aye! the Porcupine Abyssal Plain
is
a little different, because there, I think, if I remember correctly, the seabed is around four and a half kilometres down): but the point is
this:
those areas, on our doorstep, so to speak, just off our coasts—
those areas are almost totally unknown
… So is that
wild—or
what?”

“Wild!”

“Aye, but I can’t guarantee any of that, not until
I’ve finished
my doctorate: if I ever can, or do! So instead I thought I’d tell you about this secret place, Hannigarth! Because you
can
go there, anytime; and you can take your family; your wife; and your children, too! So, you see, I have to pay you in
knowledge;
because I can’t
do presents;
because I have no money!”

“Luke! Luke! Don’t be silly! Of course you’ll find a wife—you really
will
marry a
district nurse
… And
yes
, sure as hell you’ll have children!” Which didn’t sound exactly right; and anyway, I thought—Luke is still facing away; but if he says just
one
more kind word to me like that: well, I’ve had no sleep, have I? (Or
rather
, said the inner voice—yes, you’ve had some good sleeps
lately;
but not, of course, the ten-hours-plus you’re used to …) Luke, I said to myself,
stop it
, please, Luke,
stop it:
because I’ve had
no sleep; and that’s
not
my thing; and if you thank me for anything ever again: I’ll burst into tears … And how would you handle that?

Luke, coming to himself, I supposed, was now staring straight ahead, at the long conveyor whose stainless-steel sides led from the gutting table to the hold (and the top two inches of its port side shone in the horizontal light from the scupper to starboard)… “Hannigarth looks out across sheep-grazings down to the sea, to the great bay in front of you, and there’s a
real
Viking cottage down there on the upper shore of the beach: you can still see the walls, and the cow-shaped (it’s wide in the middle) entrance to the beast-house. And—I can’t describe it, but I tell you, it’s all in my head, even now—the headlands, the cliffs away to the right (where there’s a
huge
deep raven’s nest at the side of a gulley—aye: the ravens have been there for thousands of years, too, it’s not just us). And under a grass-overhang on the foreshore you’ll find the nest of a Shetland wren; and there’s Arctic terns and
their
children on the beach; and as you walk north to the little cemetery where so many drowned seamen have their memorial stones, the adult terns, the parents, they dive-bomb you—
tirrick-tirrick!
And there’s a pair of Arctic skuas that breed there, too, and you should see the way
they
fly! Bastards—because they wait sitting on the beach and they watch until they see a plunge-diving tern come up with a sand-eel, you know, and then
pow!
They’re off up into the wind—and you should see them! The swept-back wings, the wedge-tails with a pair of feathery pincers out the back… So what are
they
for? Aerodynamics, I’ll bet. That little extra something that helps you as you come curling down and get right on the tail of an Arctic tern… An Arctic tern—the best long-distance flyers in the world… The one bird that migrates each year from the Arctic to the Antarctic; and yet those two Arctic skuas, nine times out of ten, as I watched, they outflew the Arctic terns, and the tern dropped its sand-eel into the water and the skua picked it up and glided back to its nest, to feed
its
children!”

“Luke, I’m sorry, but I can see: it’s time you started breeding…”

“And there are otters down there too of course, and minke
and pilot and killer whales—they all come into the bay. But I tell you what worried me: birds, as you know, they’re not my thing—I like fish, I really do! But all the same, I got
really
fond of these Red-throated divers—which they call the Rain-goose in Shetland, because they make this cry that sends shivers down your spine—wild! Really wild! And just before it rains! But there again: it’s always just-before-it-rains up there—unless it’s raining … Anyway—you’d know—so
why
, when they’ve been feeding in the bay down there, why, when they fly back in the evening right over Hannigarth to their children in a nest beside a lochan, why do they call
wack!
on every down-beat of their wings, and
wack!
on every upbeat? Isn’t that an insane waste of energy—big time?”

“Search me, Luke—because I’ve never heard it. But look—are you
sure
that anyone can go to this special place of yours? Eh?”

“Of course! You just
book
it. My mum did it for me—because really, she thought, Unst is almost off the end of the earth … So it was obvious: that
had
to be the perfect place for me to start on my doctorate, my thesis—so far from any social life, distractions, dances—because even then
the first
deadline was getting close!”

“So who owns it?”

“I told you—Mary Ourousoff; and they say she’s one hell of a character: she’s an interior designer, you know, and that’s another reason I felt so guilty up there—furthest north,
and yet you’re so comfortable;
well, aye: it’s
fucking luxury
, excuse me … A converted croft, but so well done. Preserved, somehow… And her husband, well, I never met either of them, of course; he’s a White Russian, I suppose, but he’s a
real
inventor, unlike you, you wanker …” (Luke, reminded of the offence of it, the
camera
, business, took the big black apparatus off his neck and laid it gently, it has to be said, on the floor in front of him—which was OK, because the floor was now only a little wet and salty and besides, young Luke was my friend… And there again: he was offering me this place, Hannigarth—and that was in Shetland, for Chris-sake …) “Aye, Mr. Ourousoff, they say he’s a
real
inventor, not like you; no, he’s designed all kinds of things: real
agricultural bits of kit
, apple-pickers, all kinds of new machines …”

“Great!”

“Anyway, Hannigarth—it’s magic! Pure magic! So
that’s
what I’m giving you: the chance to go to this paradise! Aye—and when you get there, you’ll meet Dougal, who crofts the land; you’ll see his sheep and his collie, of course, she’s called Meg, but also his chickens, and the movable hen-house that he made himself; and I only mention the hen-house-on-wheels, you know, because he’s
very
proud of it; and, in my opinion, as you’d say, he has every right to be: because, believe me, it’s one hell of a piece of carpentry, sweet as a nut!”

“So what happened, Luke? Did you do any work? Any
writing
, I mean?”

“And you’ll also meet his wife, Angela, who grew up in Hannigarth when it really
was
a croft… She’s come back to Unst; and she brought Dougal with her, from the south, from Scotland. And they’ve two lovely perky little girls … And that’s how it goes. I tell you: Unst is
something else
, smashing! So everyone born there tries to get back home, eventually… Angela, she teaches physics in the island school… But OK—the real point, it’s
this:
they’re musicians!
Grand musicians!
Dougal plays the guitar; and Angela—she plays the fiddle, the
real
Shetland fiddle, a technique, you know, passed down from generation to generation—and you’ll no hear better, and they play together in a band, a group aye, they play at all the dances in the community halls, and they’re
so
good: magic! And you wouldn’t believe it: the dances! So many nights of dances! The drinking! The friendship! The social life! Right up there on Unst! I tell you,
it wears you out
… Smashing! Wild! Aye—so much better than Aberdeen!
And when I got home to Fittie I passed out for a week
…”