Trawler by Redmond O'Hanlon Page B

Robbie and Jason along the gunwhale where the extension hung from the power-block; the cod-end, bulbous, floated in the swell below, small fish hanging trapped and silver from its green mesh. From the gunwhale Robbie and Allan plucked out the fish they could reach in the extension, dropping them into a big plastic openwork basket at their feet. Sean, in front of me, climbed into the A-frame and lifted back the hatch of the hopper.
    Jason threw the grapnel—and everyone seemed to move at once, a confusion of ropes, net, red and yellow oilskins, a swinging power-block. Somehow the cod-end pursued a rope up towards me over the side—and it came to rest, rounded and swinging and full, in the middle of the A-frame, right above the hopper. “The jilson winch,” said Luke, from behind, in my right ear.
    No one else spoke. They stared in silence—that meat-stare from the cave-mouth round the fire; except that this, I thought, as I tried to rub a little feeling back into my face, this is a fish-stare; and here and now it’s so cold it hurts, right through, and there’s no fire anywhere …
    Robbie, without a word, took off his blue rubber gloves, laid them beside him on the deck, reached in under the big mesh bag and pulled a knot undone. Fish cascaded, out of sight, down into the hopper.
    “Come on, Redmond!” yelled Luke, already several yards away. “To the fish-room!”
    I followed him at once without a thought, and I fetched up against the roped-back door to the bridge (stairs up) and the cabins (down). “Better take off your boots and jacket,” said Luke, with an expert shake and twist. “Carry them down with you.” Surprised that I no longer felt sick, that I seemed to be able to balance well enough to get where I wanted to go, within a couple of yards, or even less, and that, on the very small scale, the micro-scale, personally, life suddenly seemed to have a future back in its familiar place, I followed Luke down the companionway
    “Did you see that business with the cod-end knot?” he said, over his shoulder, as we slid on the cardboard squares of discardable carpet, along the passage past the galley. “Did you see that?”
    “Yes, I did. I’d no idea what happened, exactly… But yes, I did.”
    “Good, because that’s
important.”
He dropped his jacket and sea-boots to the floor, and paused to pull down the levers on a white-painted bulkhead-door. “There are several types of cod-end knot. The boys here use a chain knot. Usually only one man in a crew ties it—I suppose it will have come about somehow” (he swung open the door) “that if there was a big shot once, whoever tied the knot that time always ties it from then on.”
    “A big shot?”
    “Aye,” said Luke, picking up his yellow boots and red jacket, stepping over the high steel sill in his blue socks. “Come on—you know. I don’t have to repeat
everything,
do I? A shot. To shoot the net. A big shot, a
really
successful catch.”
    “Ah, yes, I’m sorry,” I said, pitching awkwardly over the shin-high steel plate, barking my shin. “Shit.”
    “No. No shit,” said Luke, sitting down on a small bench to the immediate left, pulling on his boots, “if that time he tied thirteen loops, then from then on there must always be thirteen and so on …”
    “Yes, of course. Great!” I sat down beside him and tried to get my own boots on—in short bursts, because it was obviousthat you must not lean forward, as the bare washed shiny dark wooden floorboards sloped down and away and your buttocks lifted clear off the tilt of bench… Wait. Here we go. Backwards. Lift a foot.
Pull.
    “Some say you shouldn’t go out to the fishing-grounds with the knot tied, only at the last minute should you tie the knot… others the opposite … and so on.” Luke stood up and swung himself round into a small room to our left.
    I stood up too, holding on to the steel door-jamb, and looked in: it was a changing-room of sorts, full of shelves and hooks,