Trawler (6 page)

In between periods of inner (eyes fist-tight shut) and outer darkness the coloured cliffs of Hoy passed to starboard, and so did the vertical stack, the Old Man of Hoy. Except that this particular pinnacle of rock would not keep still. It took off every few seconds: the Old Man of Hoy would blast straight up like a rocket from Cape Canaveral, think better of it, and return to its launch-pad. It took me a while to realize that there was nothing wrong with the Old Man of Hoy; he was fine; he’d retired; he was firmly attached to his bedrock. No; it was
us;
we were the ones not attached to bed, or rock, or anything half-way pleasant at all.

We rounded the north end of the island of Hoy; we entered the shelter of Scapa Flow; the
Norlantean
responded to security, at once; she calmed herself. And wasn’t it about here, I thought, that an earlier
Dorothy Gray,
in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, deliberately pursued and rammed a German submarine-even though two Royal Navy destroyers were only 3 miles off? Now what kind of crazy skipper would decide to risk his boat, his earning power, his family, his life and his crew like that? The answer came at once: Jason! And with it came a rising surge of rancid liquid: a solution of double eggs, bacon, sausage, fried bread, black pudding and beans suspended in duodenal hydrochloric acid which, just, I managed to dispatch back down my throat.

I closed my eyes, and perhaps I fell asleep, because when I opened them again Luke and Bryan had gone; Jason had slowed his ship: he was manoeuvring her through the navigation buoys and in towards Stromness. The wheelhouse clock said ten past three in the afternoon; and yet it was almost dark. The
Norlantean’s
lights were on; the navigation buoys flashed red to port, green to starboard; Stromness, like some Arctic frontier-town, glowed a feeble speckled orange against the blackness.

And, at last, Jason said something which I fully understood. His voice was slow and soft, quite unlike his normal over-energetic speech. “This is the best harbour in the world,” he said, gazing at its lights. “Every time I come in here—I feel good. I went to college here. I married here. I live here. I love this place. You know, Redmond, it’s true—when I was four or five, a little child growing up on Sanday, I drew all the time. Pictures. Thousands of them. And every one was a trawler.”

So that’s it, I thought, as the sickness began to pass away out into the calm of the harbour, that’s why he lives as he does, why he could never do otherwise. That’s why Jason is in debt, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, for two million pounds; and that is also why Jason is one of the happiest men I’ve ever met.

“And besides,” he said, recovering his normal fast precision of speech as we approached the quay and a three-storey-high narrow grey shed, “the ice-maker here—he never cheats you. If he says he’s given you twenty-two tonnes of ice, he’s given you twenty-two
tonnes of ice. That’s Orkney for you. Redmond, I’m
sure
you’d never find anywhere like it—not if you searched the world for a hundred years.”

STANDING AT ANOTHER SET
of knobs and levers close against the port-side windows, using the bow-thrusters, Jason nudged the
Norlantean,
a 38.5-metre-long deep draught mass of iron, up to the quay. By the light of her big square spotlights, which threw bursts of white reflection up from the wet grey stones, the puddled tarmac, I watched a fresh-faced young man in sweater and jeans and trainers catch the bow-ropes (thrown by Bryan and Robbie Mowat) and the stern-ropes (thrown, less accurately, by Sean and Jerry). He was obviously a trawlerman—even I was beginning to be able to identify one, generically: big shoulders, a flat stomach and, most apparent of all, massive leg-muscles: muscles so absurdly well developed that trawlermen seemed to have to buy their trousers many waist-sizes too big: their broad leather belts hold the extra cloth puckered tight.

“Allan Besant,” said Jason. “He’s a good worker. He’s on for this trip. And so is Robbie Stanger. They’re both good. In fact, Redmond,
this crew is the very best I’ve ever had.”
Jason was silent for a moment, apparently concentrating hard, looking sharp down through the window. “And now I’ve got a genuine trawlerman’s scientist aboard, which is good. Interesting. Good for everyone. Good for the boys to see!” (I got that warm feeling. I no longer felt seasick—well, we were roped to dry land; I felt useful, by association; I was here to help.)

Jason shut down the engines, or thrusters, or whatever it is you shut down at that moment; he turned to me with a sudden super-signal grin, with a spotlight-dazzle of young teeth white in his dark face. “And now I also have a problem. I have a dangerous liability. I have one mad, seasick writer who’s no use to anyone!” He gave a half-laugh, which was almost convincing; he put his arm briefly across my shoulders and said: “Let’s go! We must get the ice loaded!”

And at the bottom of the wheelhouse stairs, quick as Houdini, Jason was in his blue overalls and his yellow sea-boots.

THE MEN
in the grey ice-shed tower swung their large-diameter augur over the open hatch to the
Norlantean’s
fish hold, amidships. Luke and I, standing on the hatch-rim, peered down at Bryan (First Mate), Robbie Mowat (due for shore-leave: midday tomorrow) and Allan Besant (the athlete—a wrestler? a shot-putter? one of those Scotsmen who takes a malt or two and then bungs up-ended trees about?—we’d no idea, because as yet we’d only exchanged nods at a distance). Staggering in and out of view, they positioned a wide-mouthed, reinforced-plastic, steel-ring-ribbed tube beneath the spew-end of the augur. Almost at once it filled with a violent cascade of jagged ice-pebbles. Down below us we heard the sound of frantic shovelling. “That,” said Luke, reflectively rolling a cigarette, “is a really
rotten
job.”

A red Toyota truck pulled up on the quay. Emerging from the shadows, Sean pushed past us. He gave a happy shout into the increasingly powerful wind, a wind from the west, already broken by the cliffs and hills of the main island’s peninsula, which yet held the
Norlantean
out from the quay, taut on her ropes. “Stores!” yelled Sean, his wide nostrils flared, as if he had just caught their scent. “Stores!”

Luke called after him, “Want help?”

“Aye! Down by the galley!” And Sean appeared to vault right over the side.

Down by the galley, we looked about us. The walls were clad with the same brown imitation-wood panels as the passage and cabins; at right-angles to the left and right of the entrance were two fixed brown tables, each with benches for four; a video-recorder sat on a bracket high in the corner to the left; also to the left, a refrigerated milk-dispenser waited half-way down the galley; there was a sink with dish-racks, and the mugs were stacked in wall-fixed wooden tubes with a slit for the handles. Off to the left, a heavy metal door led to a store room containing ranked
shelves and a big fridge. And, in the galley, above the sink, there was a genuine porthole.

“Hey boys!” Sean’s voice, disembodied, appeared to be shouting at us from the empty passageway. “Where the fuck you gone?”

Sean’s head grinned down from an open hatch above the galley entrance. It was an escape-hatch: small rungs led up to it: it was your last chance to save yourself from a chip-pan fire in the galley. Sean’s head disappeared: “Haggis, pork chops, fifty beef sausages, six dozen eggs,” it intoned up there, with excessive pomp, obviously checking some list. A lowered box dangled in front of us. “The boxes, boys—pile them in the galley! And I’ll sort them myself!”

The invisible Sean shouted: “Fancies, bridies, Arctic rolls, shell pies, bere bannocks!” as if he was taking parade, and expected each one to answer to its name.

I said, “Bridies? Bere bannocks?”

“Search me,” said Luke, passing me a box. “But you can be sure of one thing—we won’t be eating any fish. And after a bit you won’t want to, either. Beef, haggis, pork chops. Grand!”

The galley and passage full of cardboard boxes, Sean released us. “Opening time! See ya in the Flattie—down the pier, left, across the street. You can’t miss it!”

SO LUKE AND I
had a pint of Guinness each in the Flattie—a small bar named after a type of flat-bottomed Orkney rowing-boat which was good for fishing on the lochs, so the barmaid told us. And, just as we were about to leave, Sean and Jerry arrived, so I bought another round and, when that was gone, Allan Besant and Robbie Mowat walked in. So I bought another; and Allan and Robbie and Jerry and Sean decided that they were off to a party in the capital, Kirkwall, a few miles down the road. So, as instructed, Luke and I walked up the gently curving stone-paved street to the Royal Hotel, where you could get good things to eat. And, so very pleased to be ashore, and forgetting that I was not going to stay that way, I decided to celebrate.

In the lounge bar, hung with pictures of the Hudson Bay Company’s ships which had put into Stromness from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries to get their crews, to sign on the toughest, least-complaining sailors in the country, we took a table, and two more pints of Guinness, beneath a portrait of Sir John Franklin’s vessels
Erebus
and
Terror,
which, as we were to do, I remembered, had sailed out of Stromness—never to be seen again.

So, to counter such thoughts, we ordered Scotch broth, and the most expensive food on the menu, halibut, and ice-cream, and Guinness. When we could eat no more I left a tip; at which point Bryan and Sean (who had somehow failed to leave for Kirkwall), pushed through the swing door, so I bought another round at the bar; and I told Bryan, straight, that he should join the nearest opera company, without delay; and Bryan said that was the most stupid thing anyone had told him in all his life; and so Luke and I set off home, towards the
Norlantean.
But before we reached her, there in the hotel lobby, Luke held my arm and took me aside, as if he was my father. “It’s all right, Redmond,” he said in my ear. “You don’t have to buy
everyone
a drink. The boys—you can’t buy their friendship, you know. In our terms, they’re rich. And in any case, they’ll decide for themselves. Later. They’ll judge what you
do.
How you are when things get bad. That’s when they’ll decide.”

The jump from the quay to the distant rungs of the high, short, inbuilt steel ladder, flush with the gentle upward concave curve of the hull of the
Norlantean,
looked impossible. I peered straight down into the gap between the wall of the quay and the deep black side of the
Norlantean:
a mistake. Floating way down below on the narrow oily slop of water were two empty plastic Coke bottles, several tins, a broken fish-box, assorted potato-crisp wrappings—and one white face of a dead fisherman—which resolved itself, eventually, into one drowned water-logged Herring gull, breast-up.

“Jump!” said Luke, giving me a shove.

Up on deck he said, “You know—one or two trawlermen die like that every year. They get back blind drunk; they miss their
footing; they fall down the gap. The ship moves in. Their skulls are crushed.”

“Redmond! Redmond!” It was Bryan’s voice, a big bass boom behind us. “You’re a crook!”

“You did a runner!” yelled Sean, following him on board.

“You’re a crook,” said Bryan, coming up to me, waving a small piece of paper. “A crook!”

“Eh?”

“And a pig!” He waved the small piece of paper before my eyes. It was a bill. “Twenty-eight pounds for two!”

“A runner!” said Sean, much excited, punching my upper arm, for emphasis. “You did a runner!”

“And from the Royal,” said Bryan. “Now that really does take balls! No one—but no one—does a runner from the Royal!”

“Oh God,” I said, mortified, reaching in my pocket, paying up. “I’ve
never
done that before. God, I’m sorry. I forgot…”

“He forgot!” chanted Bryan, on the bass line, going below. “He forgot!”

“He forgot!” sang Sean, tenor, following him.

And they kept up the duet, all the way down the stairs.

“It’s OK,” said Luke, with a tremendous grin.
“I
know you forgot. You were distracted. But they love all that—and it is remarkable. You have to admit. Because, well, look at it this way: you’ve only been here ten minutes, and
already
you’re banned from every hotel and pub in Stromness!”

For the second time in our friendship, Luke held his stomach with both hands, bent forward, and, obviously trying not to do it (which made things worse), he laughed like a hyena. Luke’s ears went bright red. Luke, I thought, comforting myself, Luke has sticky-out ears.

Safe in our sleeping-bags, the cabin lights off, Luke, sounding sleepy, said: “Yes, word gets round, you know.” There was a snuffle of laughter. “In fact, you’d better hole up here—on board. Might be wiser.” There came a small series of nasal plosives, like the sounds that hedgehogs make, after dark, in the mating season. “But that was great. Well done! Now the boys won’t think
you’re a phoney stuck-up southerner with hands like a girl. You’re a
crook!”

“Hands like a girl?” I said, instantly awake, outraged.

“Yes…” said Luke, drifting off. “Don’t you even dig your garden?”

“No,” I said, resolving instantly that if I ever saw that little garden again I’d dig it all over, every day. “Certainly not. I told you—I sleep.”

And I fell asleep.

AT FIRST LIGHT
, at nine in the morning, when Luke and I were putting on our oilskins on the shelter-deck, Jerry, Robbie Mowat and Allan Besant joined us, back from their Kirkwall party.

Robbie Mowat had kept his tartan cap, but not his looks. There was a red bump growing on half his forehead; his lips were swollen; his right hand was bandaged, his arm in a sling. Allan Besant, still young and powerful and red-cheeked, was no longer quite so fresh. His right index-finger was heavily dressed and bandaged, as if it had turned septic in the night, the white cloth secured with a double wrap around his wrist and the base of his thumb.

Bryan, First Mate, stepped out of the companionway. “Hey—you’re late! What happened?” He was interested, but only just enough to be polite. It was obvious that if you wished to claim his whole attention, you must, at least, climb over the rail with your severed head in a fish-box.