Trawler (7 page)

Allan said, “Robbie started a bloody stupid fight. So we had to join in. And the bastard bit my finger!”

“Which bastard?” said Bryan, pulling on his yellow oilskin trousers, as if, as far as he was concerned, the entire population of Kirkwall were bastards.

“Gillespie. The Big Fellah,” said Robbie, still aggrieved. “I come out of the toilet. I go to pick up my pint from the table and Gillespie says, ‘Robbie Mowat,’ he says. You’ve had enough. I forbid you to touch that pint.’ So
—bang!
I smack him in the mouth!”

“Oh aye,” said Bryan, pulling on his boots.

“No!” said Allan, also aggrieved. “That wasn’t it at all—it started long before that! They had this bloody stupid argument. Robbie had a go at Gillespie. And all because the Big Fellah never picked him for the football team
—when they were six years old!”

Robbie, sullen, said, “It was worth the wait. But there again,” he said, brightening, lifting the hair off his forehead to show us the bump to better effect: “one more kick in the head—and I’m dead! And my teeth, Redmond …” With his right hand he pushed up his top lip (no front teeth); and with his left hand he pulled a dental plate from his pocket (buckled to bits, a write-off).

“Aye,” said Bryan, now in his yellow jacket, ready to start work. “There’s precious few trawlermen with their own front teeth!”

Jerry said, “I sat on him too!”

“Who?” said Bryan.

“Gillespie. I sat on his legs.”

“Well done,” said Bryan. “But Allan, your finger—what were
you
doing when the bastard bit your finger?”

“Nothing,” said Allan, who, with his good hand, was attempting to gather up a coil of rope from a side-lashed red plastic basket. “I was sitting on his chest. I was poking his eyes out.”

Bryan laughed, and walked off to work. Allan followed, the rope round his left shoulder.

Robbie Mowat stood where he was, needing to talk; or perhaps he was just concussed, sandbagged by the events of the night. “Redmond, the police came, and they took us and Gillespie to the hospital. In the van. Aye. But this is what I want you to know—Gillespie, he refused to bring charges.”

“He did?”

“Aye. And he said
sorry. He apologized.
For not picking me. For leaving me out of the team. So now it’s OK. We’re friends!”

“Good. I’m glad to hear it.”

“So when I get out of hospital I go straight back to the pub and I hold my glass in both hands to get the beer in—because my
mouth is damaged. And then I go straight to the club. Because—here’s a tip for you—you’ll
always
get a woman if you look beaten up, if you’ve been in a fight. They love it. The men fighting. They can’t help themselves.”

“And you did?”

“I did, too.”

Looking at me hard (his brown eyes appeared to be undamaged), as if, understandably, he had no idea why I was standing in front of him, no idea why this stranger was here at all, or, perhaps, remembering that he was not officially on shore-leave until midday, Robbie walked away, with the odd slight stumble, out on to the trawl-deck, and into the ferocious wind.

Luke, unnoticed, had slipped below. Jerry, sucking on his stubby white Nicorette tube, was sitting on a rope-fast oil-drum.

I said, “So what happened to you?”

“Redmond,” said Jerry, like an old professor in his after-dinner chair. “Let me give you a word of advice about all this. Because you’re new here. Listen—if a fight breaks out ashore—as it surely will
—wait.
That’s the most important thing. And when someone’s flat out on the ground, preferably unconscious—you go and sit on him, just to help out. OK?”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, in the full, black, northern winter night of four o’clock in the afternoon, in a constant, unvarying wind of such violence that I found it almost impossible to stand on deck, the
Norlantean,
spotlights blazing, left Stromness.

From the starboard open-end of the shelter-deck, protected from the wind, Luke and I watched the separate white and orange lights of Stromness coalesce, grow lonely, and disappear.

Luke was dressed in dark-blue overalls, like Jason’s, but they were even more impressively lived-in, action-stained with memories. Luke dressed precisely and without effort for every occasion here—I could see that—he was plainly at home in his own world, the only one that really mattered to him.

I said, “So what happens now?”

“Nothing or everything,” he said, with a snort of happy laughter. “It depends how you look at it! To reach his secret fishing-grounds Jason is going to steam north-west, flat out, straight into the weather. Right into a Force 8 or 9. Most young skippers
say
they like to behave like that, or they have to, because once you’ve mortgaged your life to a boat you can’t afford to waste a day or a night: but I’ve never heard of anyone actually
doing it.
Except Jason Schofield. And as you saw for yourself—we’re the only boat out! Redmond—this has never happened to me before. Not even in the Falklands.” Luke absent-mindedly pulled
a furl of blue woolly hat from his right-hand pocket and unrolled it, like a condom, down over his head: it sat tight across his forehead; beneath its rim a band of thick curly hair bushed out like a muff. “Yes, Redmond, maybe (just between us) it’s true, what they say: maybe Jason
is
a little crazy… And it’s sad, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Well, really exceptional guys like that—they die young.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. And Jason—do you realize he doesn’t even have a standard fish-detector? A reasonable one costs £6,000. But he told me he didn’t need it! He said he had to save money somewhere—and it was obvious: skippers who were good ten years ago go out now and, in his words, not mine: ‘they never catch a fucking thing!’ Whereas he, Jason, so far, has never failed. He has the gift. But all the same, when you remember that just to replace those warps”—Luke nodded his head, his blue woolly hat, towards the winches—“those steel ropes that tow the net, they’re so simple, and yet they cost £17,000 … So really, despite the net monitors and sounders and so on—it’s old-time fishing here!”

He stared into the darkness astern. “On the other hand, Redmond, cheer up! Because we’re off into that two-thirds of the earth which is covered by the sea—and the real point, the really exciting thing is this:
90 per cent
of that two-thirds lies beyond the shallow margins of the continents, as Gage and Tyler put it, and most of that lies below 2 kilometres of water—or even more! And 99 per cent of
that is
unexplored!”

Luke went to the line of pegs in the shelter-deck, to hang up his overalls.

“Look, Redmond—you know—I don’t want to be offensive, but compared to your rainforests which, forgive me, you really do seem to think are the ultimate biological mystery, the deep sea is
totally
unknown! It’s another planet! Why—hydrothermal vents were only discovered in 1977. Imagine! What an extraordinary shock that was—big style! We had to scrap the most basic concepts in biology! There are
plenty
of animals, big animals, megafauna, which live entirely without oxygen—in disparate but
very large populations at the bottom of the deep sea. They don’t give a damn about photosynthesis!
So what else is down there?
Look, Redmond, I was thinking, before you came—why not forget your rainforests? Because what depth are we talking about here? One hundred, two hundred feet? Pathetic! And anyway-even if we confine ourselves to the plants themselves—if you compare it, the plant biomass, cubic metre by cubic metre, down from the jungle canopy to the jungle floor, against an equivalent section down from the surface of the sea, almost
anywhere
in the oceans, you’ll find that the microscopic plants in the plankton at the surface of the sea outweigh the vegetation in your rainforest. They bulk larger than all your huge trees and creepers! So how’s that?”

“Great!”

“And imagine! In a day or two
—a day or two from now—I’ll
be able to start showing you most of the deep-sea megafauna north of the Wyville Thomson Ridge! And, you know, speaking as me, from the heart, whatever, but not as a scientist, this is what I think about it—if you sat down with a pencil and paper to draw the most bizarre animals you could imagine, if you took every mad drug there is you still wouldn’t come close to reality. You’ll see! You really will! Wait till I show you a rabbit-fish! Or even” (he lowered his voice, seemingly transfixed, his right hand still holding the scruff of his overall, which was already safely in position on its peg), “just maybe … we’ll get a sea-bat… Now that
would
be something. I’ve never seen one, of course, but maybe … Who knows? It’s great, isn’t it? Hunting!”

“Yes!” I said, carried away. “A sea-bat!” (having no idea what such a thing might be). “Let’s catch a sea-bat!”

“Hey Redmond,” said Luke, breaking up the fantasy. “Why are you hanging about? It’s brass-monkey cold out here! And when we hit the open ocean, there’ll be lumps! Big style! So what’s wrong with you? Now is the time to go below. It’s our last chance. Our last chance to get some sleep!”

…

“
LUKE,” I SAID
, as we got into our sleeping-bags, “what did you mean
—lumps?”

“Lumps? Waves! To a trawlerman a big wave is never a wave, it’s a lump. Cuts it down to size, I suppose.
Wave
is too serious. You don’t want the sea to know you’re frightened, do you?” He was silent for a moment. And it seemed to me that the
Norlantean
began to buck and kick, and, probably, I thought, froth at the mouth out there, and roll her eyes. “Listen Redmond, it’s obvious you know sod all about all this. Don’t worry—no probs. Why should you? That’s OK. But, yes, I now think I
should
warn you. Because it must be better to be prepared, mustn’t it? Even though it catches you by surprise—and it always does catch you by surprise—and there’s nothing you can do about it. After all, how could you shoot the nets and work the haul and do all the hundred other things you have to do if you were wearing a lifeline? Most of them don’t even have a survival suit! And as for hard hats—Marine Lab Government Civil Service safety regulations! I’ve
never
seen a trawlerman in a hard hat—so if the rush of water knocks you over and whacks you head-first into a winch, well, bad luck.”

“Luke—hang on, wait a minute. What are you saying? What is
it?”

“Uh? It? Why—the lump! The lump! Redmond, I forget the exact numbers—but it’s the one thing I really don’t like about life on a trawler. In a Force 9 or 10 and up—with every 100,000 waves, or was it 250,000? I can’t remember, and of course it damn well doesn’t matter when it’s happening—you are, statistically speaking, 100 per cent certain to meet a lump. A giant wave. Which is in fact just two or more waves rolled into one—for whatever reason, in the chaos, a big wave behind has captured the waves in front. And I hate that—because when it comes at you:
you can’t see it coming.
You have to understand, Redmond—in a Force 10, with gusts up to 61 knots or over—you have no horizons. You’re closed in by normal Force 10 waves and their white-out, the spray from their crests, and you’ve got to do something difficult—because it’s always difficult in a 9 or 10—so you’re concentrating as hard as
you can, and you’re trying to stay on your feet, but somehow you feel it, I can’t tell you how—and suddenly there’s this monster, and I hate it, those five or ten seconds as you look up at it, as it looms over you, the terror …”

“Jesus!”

“Yes. Well. Can we be quiet now? Get some sleep? Because this is our last chance … Before the fishing-grounds …”

AND DESPITE
the increasingly violent pitch and toss and yaw and surge of the bows, and despite a new sound which every few seconds overwhelmed even the eardrum-pounding, intestine-shaking vibrations from the engine-room beneath us—the great weighted thump of a wave on the hull, level with our heads: blows, surely, whose kinetic energy would have to be measured in many tons-per-square-inch—Luke fell asleep.

I lay on my back in the dark, my head on my pillow of pants wrapped in a shirt, my arms stretched down my sides, my left hand clamped to the edge of the mattress, to hold myself in the bunk. There was no oxygen left in the deep-fry, fat-saturated air. I could not stop gasping and yawning and swearing. All was confusion, and smelt bad. I pulled my right hand downwards over my face. My forehead was wet, slime-wet, and surprisingly cold. My chin was covered with spittle. I was dribbling like a baby. So yes, I said to myself, this is a cold sweat; and you are hypersalivating; and that’s it, you can’t stop it now, it’s called sea-sickness: how
embarrassing,
how
shaming.
“So let’s get this over,” I said out loud, and, concentrating (the smallest movement was an effort), with my right hand I scrabbled along the outer gap between the mattress and the side of the bunk, found my head-torch, strapped the elastic band over my slippery forehead and turned on the lamp. Exhausted, I lay back on my pillow and stared at my lit-up ceiling, at the plywood board two and a half feet above me, the base of the upper bunk.