Free Trawler by Redmond O'Hanlon

and eight hours later it ends, just as you’re wishing you could. But you can’t and you won’t! Redmond, look, remember, they made you an Honorary Member of the lab, my lab, the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen. One of the very best there is! So you’re
my
guest. And these boys—the crew—we’re here to serve them, not just with better nets and fish-finders and gadgets, but to make sure they have a future, that their fishery is
sustainable—and
that, that’s
difficult.
For that we need their respect, if you like, their good will. So, I’m sorry, but
you can’t just lie here.
You’ve been out for eight hours. Eight hours! So up you get—and you’ve got to be quick. The alarm’s about to go. Here. Drink this. All of it.” Luke jerked my right arm out of its warm, sweaty, tubular-snuggle of a home in the sleeping-bag—and in my comatose hand he stuck a bottle of Lucozade. “The trawlerman’s secret weapon! Plus one day of ship’s biscuits, dry biscuits. That’s all you need! Quick! I’ve got a minilog on the net. I must go. See ya!”
    “Luko’s Aid,” I said (absurdly pleased).
    “Well done!” said Luke, springing to the door like a sand-hopper. “Lousy jokes! You’re back to normal!”
    AND HE WENT .
    Slowly as a hermit crab, reluctantly as a caddis-fly larva, I worked my way out of my safely enclosing exoskeleton of a sleeping-bag and, lying back again on the bunk, I pulled on my pants, my trousers. I found my black socks (three to each foot, against the cold) and, bundling forward like a curled foetus, I lodged into my woolly carapace of a sweater. The effort of it: there was no rest anywhere, nothing would stay still… The mind-emptying noise of the engines faltered, throttled back, dipped like a Lancaster bomber coming in to land, and at that moment the siren sounded, a piercingly high BEEP-BEEP-BEEP . Other,smaller, straining engines came into life directly beneath me, and the sound lifted my body, as though I lay helpless on a tray in a morgue, gently, very slowly, prone, through the hanging curtains of Luke’s bunk, over his flat blue sleeping-bag, out the other side—and it tipped me off and down on to his linear collection of red, blue and yellow plastic biscuit-boxes. My buttocks, I’m sorry to say, must have landed on his favourite box, his red Jacobs biscuit-box, because under me its top and sides blew up, releasing a tight stash of small, empty, plastic screw-lid Marine Lab specimen-bottles all over the floor.
    Too surprised to think, or even mutter, let alone swear, I held on to everything that offered a moving handhold and waited, until the tilting floor projected me out of the cabin to the base of the stairwell. Hunched, half-spreadeagled, I pressed myself up the narrow steps and, sitting on the floor of the shelter-deck, an elbow clamped over the steel sill of the door, I thrust my legs into my oilskin trousers and, eventually, my feet into my sea-boots. Standing up, I was thrown against the lashed oil-drums to starboard, but in one or three moves I slotted into my oilskin jacket. Rolling aft, I thought, like a seaman, I emerged from the cowl of the shelter-deck—and was at once thrown face-first into the circular steel side of a 7-foot-high winch. I held on to a pair of protruding bolts, my fingers as committed as the suckers on a squid. A rush of sea guttered in and out of a scupper to my left—and that’s a generous scupper, I thought, because if you fell on this slippery deck that scupper would wave you through with no questions asked—so maybe not, maybe you can’t roll like a seaman if your thighs are merely average for the species and its relatives: round here you need thighs not like a chimpanzee or even a gorilla, round here you need thighs of another order altogether, like
Tyrannosaurus rex.
    At the starboard side of the stern I could see Bryan, the breaking spray blown across his yellow oilskins, one gloved hand on a lever at the base of the crane, waiting. To his