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Authors: Redmond O'Hanlon
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irregular turbulent fall—down through me, the engine-room, the hull, and into the deep circular rotating waves below us. With a double sideways lash, a violent flip-flap, they rose …
“Out!” I managed to say aloud. “Out!” Go on, said the sequence of disjointed, feverish images, get this slimy head, get this long fat nematode worm of a body out of this burrow of a sleeping-bag and extrude the whole lot into the lavatory…
Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward-bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD . I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guinness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps, to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.
Congratulating myself, assuming it was all over, I pushed down the lever and, hoping that I had not woken Luke, I wiped up the splash-zone with my face-flannel and managed, tottering, to squeeze out the goo in the basin.
I crawled on all fours back to the edge of my pitching bunk, hauled myself up, and slithered back inside the safe, army-green, Arctic-warfare, nylon-silky, sweat-soaked, tapering tube ofa sleeping-bag. I wiggled my toes, I flexed my ankles. And this, I decided, is here and now the highest available of physical pleasures. A shiver of anus-tightening happiness spread up from the base of my spinal cord to the back of my skull. So that’s it, I whispered to myself, now you’ll be fine.
And no one will know.
And in half an hour my intestines ejected me again, to repeat the process. And then once more. And again, until there was nothing left to throw up. Not even bile. And still I crawled out to retch into the bowl, my new, my only, my porcelain world. But it’s obvious, I tried to tell myself, it’s OK—we have
not
evolved to do this thing. Tens of thousands of years of minor fishing and gathering mussels and cockles along the shorelines: yes; our ancestral flat-worms wriggling along the seabed in search of food for several million years: yes; even our life as jawed fishes, an adventure which began 425 million years ago: certainly; but
at no stage
were we stupid enough to allow ourselves to be bunged about on the
surface
of the open ocean. No—to do that you have to be mad like Jason or Bryan or Sean or a Robbie, or even (and this thought was oddly worrying) Luke. Because Luke, why, he’s doing this not for money, but for an interest, for
scholarship.
Luke is bonkers, Luke is barking. And, with this resolving thought, gasping for air like a lungfish, I fell asleep.
In my dream a giant flatworm, one of the
Platyhelminthes,
each of its mucus-slimy segments as big as a mattress, fastened on my shoulder. It had a bill like a duck. It was a Duck-billed-platypus platyhelminthes, and shaking me. Luke’s young weather-beaten face, a foot away, filled my entire field of vision. “Wake up!” it said, manic.
“Luke—the
platyhelminthes,
the flatworms, do they have segments?”
“Eh? No. Of course not… Wake up! Come on! Wake up! We’re at the fishing-grounds. It’s first light up there. There’s a lull in the storm. It’s Force 8. It’s OK. There’s a heavy swell, but it’s OK. Jason’s about to haul! Your first haul! Up! Now!”
“Ugh. Please …”
“Look—I know, I know, we’ve all been through it—seasickness,terrible, but so what? It’s not like your malaria or hepatitis or TB or whatever—it won’t
kill
you, so who cares? You’ve been asleep. You slept for
eight hours.
Up! Up you get! Yeah, yeah, everyone knows—it begins with you thinking you’re going to die,
“Out!” I managed to say aloud. “Out!” Go on, said the sequence of disjointed, feverish images, get this slimy head, get this long fat nematode worm of a body out of this burrow of a sleeping-bag and extrude the whole lot into the lavatory…
Smacked left, hard, against the steel plates of the inward-bulging port-bow and right, hard, against the steel partition of the rusty shower, I pitched to my knees in front of the seatless bowl and held on to the rim with both hands, hard. On the floor to either side were two big circular iron valves, each stamped SCUPPER DISCHARGE O/BOARD . I lowered my face into the bowl. The head-torch lit up every ancient and modern shit-splatter: one, particularly old and black, in front of my nostrils, was shaped like a heart. And then I said goodbye to all that Guinness, to the pig’s supper at the Royal Hotel (£28 for two) and even, perhaps, to a day-old bolus of breakfast at Bev’s Kitchen, Nairn.
Congratulating myself, assuming it was all over, I pushed down the lever and, hoping that I had not woken Luke, I wiped up the splash-zone with my face-flannel and managed, tottering, to squeeze out the goo in the basin.
I crawled on all fours back to the edge of my pitching bunk, hauled myself up, and slithered back inside the safe, army-green, Arctic-warfare, nylon-silky, sweat-soaked, tapering tube ofa sleeping-bag. I wiggled my toes, I flexed my ankles. And this, I decided, is here and now the highest available of physical pleasures. A shiver of anus-tightening happiness spread up from the base of my spinal cord to the back of my skull. So that’s it, I whispered to myself, now you’ll be fine.
And no one will know.
And in half an hour my intestines ejected me again, to repeat the process. And then once more. And again, until there was nothing left to throw up. Not even bile. And still I crawled out to retch into the bowl, my new, my only, my porcelain world. But it’s obvious, I tried to tell myself, it’s OK—we have
not
evolved to do this thing. Tens of thousands of years of minor fishing and gathering mussels and cockles along the shorelines: yes; our ancestral flat-worms wriggling along the seabed in search of food for several million years: yes; even our life as jawed fishes, an adventure which began 425 million years ago: certainly; but
at no stage
were we stupid enough to allow ourselves to be bunged about on the
surface
of the open ocean. No—to do that you have to be mad like Jason or Bryan or Sean or a Robbie, or even (and this thought was oddly worrying) Luke. Because Luke, why, he’s doing this not for money, but for an interest, for
scholarship.
Luke is bonkers, Luke is barking. And, with this resolving thought, gasping for air like a lungfish, I fell asleep.
In my dream a giant flatworm, one of the
Platyhelminthes,
each of its mucus-slimy segments as big as a mattress, fastened on my shoulder. It had a bill like a duck. It was a Duck-billed-platypus platyhelminthes, and shaking me. Luke’s young weather-beaten face, a foot away, filled my entire field of vision. “Wake up!” it said, manic.
“Luke—the
platyhelminthes,
the flatworms, do they have segments?”
“Eh? No. Of course not… Wake up! Come on! Wake up! We’re at the fishing-grounds. It’s first light up there. There’s a lull in the storm. It’s Force 8. It’s OK. There’s a heavy swell, but it’s OK. Jason’s about to haul! Your first haul! Up! Now!”
“Ugh. Please …”
“Look—I know, I know, we’ve all been through it—seasickness,terrible, but so what? It’s not like your malaria or hepatitis or TB or whatever—it won’t
kill
you, so who cares? You’ve been asleep. You slept for
eight hours.
Up! Up you get! Yeah, yeah, everyone knows—it begins with you thinking you’re going to die,
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