Trawler: A Journey Through the North Atlantic by Redmond O'Hanlon

Author:Redmond O'Hanlon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel
ISBN: 9781400078103
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2003-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

SOMEONE TURNED the light on; Sean had turned the light on: “Up ye get, boys! Ye’ve had a whole eight hours! And the storm’s gone—there’s yer heavy swell up there right enough, but it’s bright! Ye can see the sun! Sunlight! It’s cool! It’s great! We’re alive! Ye can see the sun!”

Sean came up close between the bunks, level with our heads, confidential. Sean, it was obvious, had had no sleep: his wide red eyes, the peeling skin on his nose, his red-blotched face. He was the youngest, I remembered, so perhaps he had had to stay on watch in the wheelhouse—it was possible that Sean had had no sleep for forty hours or more …

Luke’s frizzy, dark-haired head was turned away to port, faceless on its pillow, dead, or asleep—and Sean, intending to whisper, it seemed, in the strictest man-to-man privacy, bent down low over Luke’s left ear; but, pressed by his immediate need or, perhaps, released from all inhibition by forty hours of no sleep, he shouted (loud enough for me to hear, loud enough for Jason on the bridge to hear): “It’s Bryan! He’s a big eater! It canna be helped … He’s blocked ours! He’s blocked it again! It canna be helped! That’s Bryan for yer! So … please! … Luke? Canna use yer toilet?”

In their blue sleeping-bag, Luke’s legs thrashed. They propelled him—and the blue sleeping-bag—off the bunk and out of view to port.

Sean, permission sought, honour satisfied, scrabbled with the rope behind the open door, released the knot, slammed the bent sheet of metal as almost-shut as it would go, and, with unexpected modesty, tied it tight.

From somewhere on the floor to my right, Luke said, with clarity: “Redmond, that’s another thing … what happened to my red Jacobs biscuit-box? They’re rare, red ones … they’re a different size … and that was my very best box!”

BUT I WAS ALREADY DRESSED and half out of the cabin. And, yet again, I was thrown through the steel doorway. I took a sprawl to the right—along the passage to the galley; I recovered; I made a spider-climb up the stairs to the shelter-deck. Standing, for a moment, bemused, in front of the pegs to the left of the companionway, I remembered that the day or the night before I had left my sea-boots and oilskins in the fish-room: yes, it was all coming back to me, how bad, how shaming: I had talked too much, I had talked, I had burbled more in one go than I had ever done before, anywhere. Perhaps I had gone mad? Or was that being kind to myself? What the hell had I said to Luke? I’d no idea—but it was bad, very bad, I was sure of that, and, losing concentration, I stood level with, rather than at right angles to, a slow, gigantic roll. I took a helpless running lurch aft—and there I was: in my socks, frightened, right back in my very own place of inner humiliation.

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